not always true, though probably more often true than not in the XBox Age of pen-and-paper gaming. still, i'd like to believe there are some new gamers out there who appreciate interesting complexity and diversity over simplicity and blandness.

Considering the investment you have in SR2, unless money and time are no object, I'd stick with SR2. It's as simple (or complicated) as D&D3 and ready to go, modules and all.

However, the original poster knows SR2. The changes from SR2 to SR3 are minimal, and sometimes unnoticed (such as grounding).

The changes with magic, rigging, decking, and the wireless environment in SR4 make any previous module pretty much obsolete. Most PCs are suggested to be rebuilt using the new chargen system and then spending the karma they earned over their career. The conversion guide is for NPCs, which the GM was always free to adjust as they saw fit anyway.

I was one of the first people to get SR4, and after a couple days of letting it sink in after looking up all the answers to questions folks felt like asking, I have decided I don't care for it. Maybe a year from now when some more SR4 books are out, or if no one is playing SR3 I'll try it, but for now I am avoiding its sickly embrace.

It has also prompted me to actively buy discounted SR3 books and give them to friends and family to promote SR3.

That can make it tougher having old crap floating in your head that's close, but not quite. It probably isn't too much of a factor though since....

The years of D&D will have rotted his mind...and given him cancer to boot.

EDIT: Besides if he has the SR2 books i'm not sure why he'd bother dropping cash on SR3 books? Paying cash to stay behind "the curve"? The one possible reason is knowledge base for SR3 here. But there are a few current SR2 players here too. So the options he originally gave for sticking to SR2 or moving to SR4 seem fairly logical. Now SR2 vs. SR4 is a lot like SR3 vs. SR4, only he isn't really a currently playing SR2 (less knowledge investment, easier to learn SR4 because there is less unlearning of SR2). Also who will be playing with him, and if he has enough SR2 books in good enough shape to keep them going for a year or two, and if he and the players are ok with having the mulitple separate game systems for Matrix, Vehicles, Magic, and Combat within SR2.

Er. The wireles environment of SR4 is missing from those modules, yes. But SR4 VRs old-school matrix style too. Just drop the SR4 wireless except for direct communication with drones, direct communication with another commlink, and Matrix communication through a satelite/cell phone....which is pretty much keeping the wireless rules except for AR, Technomancers not needing a DJ or trodes, and the part about hacking park benches.

Magic might be a bit dicey for non-Hermitic/non-Shamanic traditions till sometime around springish next year. You'd have to mock up some of their abilities like Possesion and the toxic stuff (the SR4 forum is drowned with temporary stopgap suggestions). But since that's mostly NPC the sketchness of specifics can hind safely behind the GM screen.

The rest you list are not so much an issue. Oddly the SR3-SR4 NPC conversion should actually work reasonably well with SR2 characters...if he was to go that route. The weapon skills are actually a closer fit than with SR3.

"Boy, when you pick a lost cause, you really commit." - Tim, Robots

Personally i can take days to create a character....in any system. I don't quite get the "mess" part about chargen? I found it not that bad at all to code it into a spread sheet (with no macros, formulas only).

If you are focused on what PC you want, or like to tweak here and there, there is help. I kinda wished that computer chargen programs and a computer to run it on could have been assumed for SR4. Then they could have just put a bit of effort into karma costs equivalents for....well cash and metahuman types i guess. Then the character generation would be even shorter because PC advancement would be creation.

are you reading the same book I am reading?

I actually find the charcter gen about the same. I took a player from unaware of the Shadowrun background too a complete character in about 3 hours, most of which was background discussion and deciding on concept. once concept is done it takes about 1 hour plus or minus a bit for equipment buying. I consider up to 2 hours reasonable fot character gen. I can only ask if the people taking 4-5 hours where trying to optimise their character, which if your learning a new system would take a while. A nice list of all the qualities would be nice, oh there it is is the table at the end of the chapter listing all the character design costs...

oh and to the OP. If your group is familiar with SR2 (not just you) I'd go with that but maybe use char gen from SR3. Otherwise go for SR4 as it is easier for players with out the book to learn.

Think you misspelled "20" there Frank.

And I agree, chargen in SR4 is pretty conceptually simple, especially since you have to little to work with and end up with so little in the end. My only gripe is that it would have taken about half a dozen words in the chargen section plus a little layout change, and they could have unified the chargen and advancement systems quickly and easily, and made the whole thing easier to swallow to boot. They could have even taken out most of the idiotic and nonsensical limiters on skills and attributes at chargen, too; it would simply be too costly to have a guy with three skills at 6 right oug the door, etc etc.

I'm counting the starting 1. Yu can think of it as adding 20 points to eight 1s or as putting 28 points in 8 piles. It doesn't end up mattering.

Agreed. Now that the Karma pool has been done away with, there's no need Karma and Build points to both exist. Some people I know like to play with giving out a fat stack of Karma at character creation to make their characters with, and other people I know give out Build Points at the conclusion of adventures. I don't know anyone who actually plays with both the build point and the karma system in the same game. And the reason for that is because they don't actually work well together and the game does not benefit from the inclusion of both.

-Frank

Well the greatest benefit of SR4 is that you don't have to stop gameplay for deckers/hackers. It flows quite easily right along with normal play.
In early editions I had done the same thing (NPC'ing riggers and deckers), but it fits so well within SR4 its been working out wonderfully to have a player hacker.

I don't think so. Templated character systems are always faster and easier to use than point-based. Although you're right about some parts of it-- including otaku and initiation in the main book is a good step in the right direction for nSR to take, and in that way it's better than SR3. But when compared to other good games out there, including detailed advancement rules is just par for the course-- not anything special at all.

Sorry, but in over a dozen characters, I can't pull one off in less than four hours or so. For one thing, your point split for attributes only works if you're human-- if you're a dwarf or troll, with lowered maxes, the points get very complicated very quickly. Also, if you want to max out a single stat, your point basis doesn't work yet again-- and to make matters worse, since normal stats are 10 points a pop, and the max is 25, you effectively lose three attribute points for one. You're also assuming that someone wants to spend the max 200 points on attributes, which may or may not be the case-- and if someone takes an Exceptional Attribute edge, he has to go back and refigure everything.

Skills take nearly forever, especially if you want your character to actually be capable. Skill groups are a losing proposition unless you're tightly focused on just one-- and even then, you can't be better than mediocre at it, level 4 is the max for a group. What you end up with are a lot of level 3-4 skills, with almost no 1-2s and hardcapped 5's and 6's. So, you can't have someone who's really good in more than one or two areas, encouraging generic shadowrunners with one-trick pony abuses.

Exlcuding equipment and background, it's impossible to even read through the list of qualities in less than thirty minutes-- and having that huge long section plopped down smack dab in the middle of the chapter really disrupts smooth character generation. Once you've got everything memorized, you might be able to pull it off faster, using only the build point costs table-- but you still need to remember, off the top of your head, all the racial limits, attribute and skill caps, effects of edges/flaws, and so on and so forth. That's a pretty steep learning curve.

Character generation could have gone much faster if they had included a sidebar or a one-page step-by-step overview, that goes something like this: "Step one, select race and adjust attributes. Step two, assign qualities, there's a short list on page XX and a full listing at the end of the chapter. Step three, assign points..." etc, etc.

Savage Worlds, my new game of choice, manages to recap every single character creation rule in three pages, including one page each for short descriptions of every last edge and flaw. nWoD gives you a decently complete overview in just two pages. nSR says this-- "Here's 400 points, now play nice." Any way you cut it, nSr has serious layout and presentation issues in the character creation chapter.

And yes, I can write an Excel spreadsheet to cover most of the complexities-- but why should I? Not everyone can do that, and not every gamer has a computer. If you need computer technology to pull off a character in less than four hours, the system is just too complicated. I have the exact same problem with GURPS and HERO system-- they're all just a mess to deal with. I know people who have the GURPS and HERO systems memorized so well, they can create characters without looking at a single page. However, if that's the standard needed for fast character creation, then the game is still too complicated-- you shouldn't be forced to memorize everything in order to create a character in a reasonable amount of time. And you still lose out-- you've spent days and days memorizing rules, so you can save an hour or two. Over the short term, it's definitely a losing proposition-- and over the long term, it's still an awful lot of effort for very little gain.

Well you could just an program/Excel sheet someone else made....on someone else's computer. I mentioned that because to be able to put it into formulas (not using Macros) suggests a fairly uncomplicated process.

Yes, it could be smoother. Layout of the chapter could use some improvement. (EDIT: But i'm mostly fine with the Qualities being where they are.) I guess just putting it in relation to SR3, the standard chargen which i found absolutely brutal for doing any tweaking of the PC crossing priority boundries, while being rather inflexible to boot. The BP system wasn't a whole lot different than SR4, i certainly wouldn't call it better. Flipping multiple books didn't help though. Never used sum to 10. Looked though BeCKs, never had the need to do that and it covered so much ground i don't think i'd want to without NSRCG.

Now if you head outside the SR realm then yes you'll likely find some layouts to your preference (and of course worse as well). You are going to find briefer chargens too. Such is partly the nature of SR. *shrug* D&D is like that too in some ways. I could rip off a 1st level character quickly in pencil right on the sheet, but say 5th level even now that i wanted anywhere near optimal for a particular vision (which ends up changing slightly in the process)? Hours just limiting myself to the core 3 books (including MM for druids), and that's with computer aid.

SR starting characters in the options they have and their power level are very roughly somewhere on the D&D 5th+ level.

So again, over 4 hours after multiple characters? Are you using character sheets to help guide you what you need? That works as sort of a step by step guide if that's where you are having problems.

I'm not going to speak to how long it takes to read the description of all the Qualities. But there is a short list of the Qualities. Rereading serveral times seems....curious. *shrug* It also suggests some tweaking/optimizing, which when you are given lots of options (that you don't need to use), is going to really chew up the time. For me that puts character generation time in most any system into days. Are you going to include rereading all the spells, spirits and such for creating a character too? That's tweaking, and you are looking at hours. I mean you could reread the other rules too to understand the implications of what your character is going to do right off....because you are given a lot of options and fully understanding all the options takes time.

I guess that might cause someone problems if they wanted to create a character quick and did not want to or were not able to impose boundries on themselves.

If you don't remember the metahuman attribute modifiers and are finding it "complicated" you are at the wrong page . Also a quick hint to avoid the max attribute cost, don't do it. You probably shouldn't even be that close to the 50% line for a 400 BP character.

I that with a basic starting level character, templated character seems are most definetly faster and are almost always less complex.
It is also my opinion that templated beginning characters are frequently nearly identical.

I actually see this as an attempt (albeit not a very successful one) to limit one-trick ponies, the idea behind it being you get 3 skills you're particularly good at and decent number of skills you're "trained" in.
It's been my experience that players who make highly specialized characters do so because in their experience that's the only way to make a survivable character. In my opinion, this is largely due to the fact that most NPC's are one trick ponies. But that's a completely different subject.

I don't think they're that hard to remember, personally. A good way to remember them is with a "Notes" section on a character sheet, or a scratch piece of paper. With the exception of your edges and flaws, the other things only need to be remembered when you're spending karma/bp after a session.
Another good option is to not mess with edges and flaws. This means all you need is a scratch piece of paper with your maximum attributes and other advancement things that are otherwise a pain to look up.

It sounds like you've got it figured out to me. Type one up and print it out. It's an easy way to stay on track.

I completely agree with you on that.

If you think it's a waste of time, then it is. I think that comment was directed more to specifically help you than to help other gamers, however.

You're absolutely correct. Memorization should not be necessary for quick chargen. I don't think it is necessary, but I haven't had problems with very many chargens after my 3rd or 4th character.
Really though, if you think the amount of time and effort it takes to make an SR4 character is too much, then either have someone make one for you based on a concept or don't play. It's no fun if you're not having fun.