I have looked around several sites and have heard alot about the differences between the old and new versions, but I am wondering which one is better for the noob?

I know a bit about roleplaying games but I have never gamed in SR. I played the Genesis game as a kid and loved it. I have read a few novels (Fade to Black, Shadowplay and Born to Run) so that make me more familiar with the world as it is in the 50s and 60s but i heard the SR4 was easier to pick up and learn.

What do you think? What are the pros and cons of each? Any good novel recommendations? When are they coming out with SR4 novels anyway?

Help a Noob out.

I love SR3 and prefer it. Having said that, I've read SR4 and it is (sadly) easier than SR3 to just pick up and learn to play.
SR4 is a lot like the World of Darkness (if you've ever played that), with the stat + ability roll. It also has skill caps like WoD also.

SR3 has books with advanced rules for all the major subsystems of the game. As of this moment, SR4 only has a book with advanced rules for magic; other advanced rules sets are still being written.

SR4 is getting active support from the publisher in the form of adventure modules (both the published kind and the freely downloadable online variety), answers to questions (either by direct email response or via their FAQ page), and updated errata sheets. FAQs and errata for SR3 will continue to be available for download from the publisher's website, but these will no longer be updated. Any questions about SR3 still unanswered, and any errors that have not yet been corrected by errata will not be addressed.

So, it boils down to: Do you go with the system that's complete but no longer supported, or do you go with the system that's still being built, but is also getting active support?

SR4 is too generic for my taste. You make a character and it feels like any other character in any other game. In SR3 the characters feel so much more diverse and 3-dimensional that it's not comparable. So, for a noob I guess I'd start with SR4, and advance to SR3 later when you're ready for a more complex game.

WizKids has not announced further plans for publishing Shadowrun novels; FanPro, the publisher of the RPG, does not have the rights to publish them.

To sum it up briefly:

SR4 is easier to play and requires less background understanding to be up to date with (if you're worried about being in a game where all or some of the players know far more than you).

SR3 has more complexity, more background, and has been praised as being a more flexible (but math intensive) system than SR4.

If you are brand new out of the starting gate, I'd recommend SR4. You can get the background information for the system without struggling so much with the mechanics. Then, when you've established yourself, you can decide if you'd like to try the SR3 mechanics or not.

Maybe, but characters were better in SR3 than SR4 with just the corebook, Street Magic vs Magic in the Shadows was a waste of reading time in my opinion. I can't see how the Hacker Book could be better than the Rigger3+Matrix combo. The only good thing for me in SR4 was a more realistic network, something we're working on incorporating into an SR3 system. Once we get all the kinks Ironed out I may have to 'produce' a Hacker Book for SR3 so we can all be Wireless.

Thanks for all the responses. I think we are going to go with SR4 because fo the simplicity. I also hear that it is really hard to bring your decker along on runs in the old system.

Anyother thoughts would be appreciated!

Lindt, there aren't riggers anymore? I'm playing one, is it all a hallucination?

Distinction between an awesome driver and the riggers who used to also do tons of remote electronic warfare.

Deckard: Fair enough going with SR4, I think you're missing out on some flavour and a damn fine game, but the SR4 rules are easier.

Honestly I think I would rather try SR3 I am just not sure how much my Players are going to be willing to put into it. If SR3 is as math intensive as i am hearing they will head for the hills.

What is everyones beef with AR? I have read alot of negative stuff about it. I have no history with the game (just the fiction) so I was wondering what is up?

Another question: Out of the box which book has the most history/flavor in it, the SR3 or SR4 book?

SR3 has the most flavor, quite a hit of which was integrated into the rules. When the rules were streamlined for SR4 a great deal of this flavor was excised.

SR3 isn't math intensive at all—nothing more complex than exponents and square roots. Calculating probabilities involves a bit more math, but is very easily approximated (expected number of successes requires almost no thinking to compute).

~J

Good choice for simplicity. However, SR3 isn't math intensive unless you choose it to be as a player. (Ie: min-maxxing your 6 points of essence out to get the maximum usage)

Augmented Reality? I got no beef with it, it's the only thing I actually like about SR4 vs SR3

SR3 'out of the box book' has the better flavor/history by far.

Rules wise, SR4 is much much better than SR3. And the Core book is very complete.

If you play SR3, you have to live with abominations like the MIJI rules, Rigging rules and other stuff, that is just not usable at all.

Serbitar for the lose.

~J, who uses the rigging rules at least once a week with little pain

(MIJI is unusable, but that's because encryption makes it totally useless, not because the rules themselves are particularly complex)

(More in response to Synners closing comments)

I think that good Roleplaying and the mechnical style put together made the Magic special in SR3. Given that as the mechanics were they tended to reward people who put the thought into their characters and played accordingly. It's nice to see the system on some level reward the player for putting that effort in.

(more generally)

I`m still a huge SR3. I`ve never played SR4 and since i`m the sole SR GM in my area I doubt i ever shall anytime in the near future. I have read through a copy of the book(briefly) and seen the system. It is very tight and alot easier under basic scrutiny than SR3 it is very true and congrats to the developers on achieving that. So for those wishing simplicity SR4 is the way to go. The thing that brought me to SR3 however was indeed both the Setting and Style of the game (it was new compared to everything else we were currently playing) and the mechanical medley that somehow inspire by the fact that everything differant was handled differant.

Both have their virtues, both their flaws. But for me at least it is SR3 that will always feel Unqiue in my RPG collection.

I will say this about SR4. When SR2 came out, talk about sticking to SR1 was unheard. Everyone loved the changes, things made more sense, weapon damage while completely re-vamped, worked tons better. When SR3 came out, I heard a few people talk about wanting their Spell Locks instead of Sustaining spell Foci, and still wanting to see 'Grounding' in their games, but never talk about sticking with SR2 vs SR3. Since I returned to the forums after almost a year of playing SR4, to find others who are sticking with SR3, it seems nearly half the people went back to SR3. I think that alone, without my throwing any flames at anything or anyone, says enough.

Much like HackMaster picked up the old AD&D system when D&D went D20, I hope someone buys rights to SR3 and continues it, even if it's under a different name. Don't get me wrong, SR4 is cool, I'd play it in a heartbeat if that's the game someone was running, but it doesn't compare to SR3. When our group, through random conversation, found out that all 9 of us prefered SR3 to SR4, and we all thought we were sticking to SR4 because everyone else in the group liked it better, well... that ended SR4 for good for us.

Most people I know that still stick to SR3 have said that they will change to SR4 when all the basic rulesbook are available (or the second printing of them ).

A very reasonable approach, in my opinion.

Heh, caught. Due to bad habits, you're right, we don't use maneuver score. However, the more I review the maneuver score (and play without it), the more I regret having excised it early on—the big way in which it makes things harder is that it forces you to know things that you should know anyway (speeds of vehicles, specifically), and it serves a purpose that is, in my opinion from years of trying to find a replacement for it, very important and difficult to avoid.

If we hadn't cut it without using it, I don't think it'd be any more hassle than, say, a Matrix host's security roll.

I guess to salvage what shreds of my counterpoint remain, I should say that we use everything else. While I still claim that the rules aren't difficult (they've got their other problems, like the way high-acceleration vehicles in the hands of Riggers rape physics, but that's not a problem with difficulty), I guess I can't claim our group to be a valid demonstration of that. Point temporarily ceded.

~J

New players will probably be happy in SR4 for no other reason than there is NOT a plethora of supplements. It was a trick to get new people involved in any mature edition of SR simply because of the pile of homework you handed them. "Oh, as a mage you need to read the BBB, paying strict attention to the magic rules as well as all the stuff everyone else needs to know, AND you need to study the spirits at different force levels AND you will be nerfing yourself if you don't study Grimoire/Magic. " Sams sifted through catalogs of toys, riggers needed special rules as well as gear, and deckers had their own mechanic system.

Personally, my two favorite editions are SR2 and SR4. SR1 was just so....raw. Roll for each bullet, magic was almost incomprehensible, and the matrix was so close to the metal it wasn't funny ("start in the SPU, then link to the CPU, write a driver on the fly to access the storage volume, be sure not to have a buffer overrun or declare too many global variables......"). SR3 felt sterilized after SR2's almost gleeful excesses. SR2 was entertainingly over the top with SR4 being a bit more accessible.

I started Shadowrun with SR4 and have recently gotten my hands on an SR3 core rulebook. I like what I read of SR3; in fact, I tend to get excited everytime I read something new and different, so when I first read SR3, I thought I might like it better than SR4. Now, I'm not experienced enough in either system to accurately say which is "better," but they are certainly different games - different mechanics and different settings - and for now, I've decided to stick to SR4 chiefly for the setting:

I like SR3's setting. I like it's stronger cyberpunk look and feel, and I can see why people would prefer it. I, however, prefer SR4's setting; I like the wireless technology, the commlinks, the PANs, etc. I don't mind that it abandons traditional cyberpunk and traditional Shadowrun conventions; I don't mind that they're called "hackers" instead of "deckers" (though I do think "decker" is a cooler name.) I don't mind if VR becomes obsolete next to AR. I don't mind if it uses the World of Darkness rollling system. I do mind that cyberlimbs are described as "crude and outdated, if not outright medieval," but that's something I'm willing to deal with. I must admit that if I had grown up on older versions of SR, or if I was more interested in playing a cyberpunk game, I probably wouldn't have accepted these changes so readily.

I won't call one setting more "generic" than the other. I will say that SR4 feels, to me, more like a strange version of the future while SR3 seems like a completely alternate world.

EDIT: Kigmatzomat touched on a point I was going to bring up: part of what attracted me to SR4 was the lack of supplements, not because I'm not willing to put time or effort into reading them, but because I'm not willing to put money into buying them. I got the impression, based on the few SR3 communities I observed, that the supplements are extremely widely used, so I felt like I was missing out on a lot of information. With SR4, I felt more like I was on the same page as everyone else. Of course, that will change in time just as it did with the earlier editions.

Actually, I find the dichotomy of SR3 vs SR4 indicates that SR4 was done right. It was a new approach, not just a patch on SR3 to fix some broken things. SR1 was broken. That's why people didn't want to go back. SR3 was SR2 as it should have been. SR3 was a mature and well done system.

Then SR4 came out with a new take on things. So you can play SR3 quite happily, or you can play SR4 quite happily.

To me, that's game design done right.

That's why I think they should have called it "Shadowrun: 2070," or something along those lines. Calling it SR4 suggests it's another refinement of a previous edition, but it's really a brand new game.

SR4 did oversimply a number of things, but it did other things well. The new damage system is smoother and easier to work with. The new dice rolling convention is ok, though I did find the older system of target numbers to be easier to understand and work with, in terms of relating ow difficult a task would be.

In the opening pages of SR4, they did say that they were going for more simplification and abstraction to place the emphasis on role playing and having fun. That probably put off a lot of the old gamers who liked the extra complexity. Street Magic helped explain the magic rules better, but not quite as well as the SR3 version did. Maybe the more rulebooks that come out, the more SR4 will be fleshed out as SR3 was over time.

I'm not fond of AR and everything being wireless. You would think that with all the problems with hackers and Dues and all the rest that there would be more emphasis on everything being wired and heavy security. My personal characters always either have their personal systems on the lowest settings or off altogether. Not only are there a lot of interuptions with the AR, but you also leave a trail everywhere you go. We do seem to be heading that way though. Cellphones are everywhere and more and more goodies are being offered for them. It is possible that is AR became available that many people would indeed use it all the time. Still, I don't care for it.

We've had no lack of tactical challenges in our SR4 game.

Ironically games generally sell better when people know there are a few supplements already released for it (and more comming) Than either a game Core Book new on a shelf or a game with hundreds of `essential supplements.` Which does mean SR4 sales are likely to rise a fair bit when they get another four solid supplements out. SR3 granted can look very overwhlming for some (for me it was nice to see a game that had so much written for it).

As SR4 was released "they" said that all the 4 core supplementals would be out within one year . . . I really wonder what the bottleneck is. Its not that hard to write rulebooks. Other developers do it, too.

Usually printing cost and shipping cost for one factor. Other things are RPG writers tend to be a little.. ahem... flexible when it comes to deadlines and editing is a bitch too. Not to mention alot of writers also lead normal lives alot of the time (I know WOTC and White Wolf have an actual core writing team, not sure how solid a day to day job it is for the folks at Fan Pro, but for some companies we have normal day jobs too)

Fanpro LLC has only one full time employee (I think), thats Rob. The rest is freelancers. But still, thats also true for other RPG developers, and they manage to do it.

Two, actually -- Randall is a full-time employee working on Classic BattleTech.

Both WotC and White Wolf have staff that are many times FanPro's size, in addition to using freelancers.

A lot of the SR4 slowdown has been getting Robyn and Peter up to speed on being Developers as opposed to writers, dealing with all sorts of 'backstage' stuff -- writing art notes, handling other writers, that sort of stuff. Plus, they got dropped right into some fairly killer projects like Arsenal and Augmentation.

Is there an updated timeline of estimated release dates for the books? Coming Soon just doesnt have the same kick as an estimated date...

*points to Adams post*

See. Wearing lots and / or differant hats always comes in as a problem for time consumption too (been there done that, still technically there and doing that) Though thankfully no one has dropped me in a developer vat yet.

I found SR4 to be a poorly executed abstract bastardisation of a good system. SR3 had its faults - but what RPG system doesnt.

I for one stopped at the shadowrun 4 main rule book and shall not be purchasing any more, unless some good setting material pops up.

That being said - SR4 offers some nice things that can be homebrewed back into SR3 (or GURPS, Fudge, Hero, Phoenix Command if that is your partictular flavour)

I was impressed that attributes are balanced back down toward the average and I like the combination of the decker/rigger - which i would have home-brewed anyway.

Attribute + Skill dice rolls are Very bad games design though, it makes Attributes too important and focus on skills less so. The shadowrun 3 method of attributes only affecting the cost of improving skills made a lot of sense.

It seems that SR4 was a dumb-down aimed at the D&D/WOD crowd and no those who want to tactically want to storm a Corporate headquaters..

Both systems Suffer from Buckets of Dice, SR4 a little less so.

Me I'm going to Play SR, with Fudge and a little Phoenix Command thrown in.