Alright, I'll admit it - I haven't read any of the SR4 books. But I heard a few things back when it was coming out. So I'm hoping someone here can clear a few things up:

1. I heard that the distinction between shamanic and hermetic magic has largely disappeared in SR4. Is that true? How did they reconcile this in-universe?
2. I heard that shamans no longer all have totem spirits. Is that the case? If so, how did they reconcile that in-universe? Did the totems withdraw their favor to all but a select few, or what?

If I think of anything else, I'll post it.

1. Yes and no. They removed the standard hermetic/shamanic difference in favor of a build-your-own-tradition mechanic. Shamanism and Hermeticism get short shrift as a result, although they are mechanically somewhat different.

2. Totem spirits (now pointlessly renamed into Mentor spirits) are optional for shamans, and availiable to hermetics, or any other type of magician. They didn't bother reconciling it at all.

So people just woke up in 2070 and magic was somehow different than it was in 2064? That's disappointing.

1. Yes.

2. Yes, totem spirits are now renamed as Mentors. Since Mentors can be bought with BP at chargen, "totem spirits" are still accessible to anyone that "buys" their favor.

I'm thinking of buying this game simply because this game seems to be the direction everyone is going.

My question: would you recommend SR4? Does it keep the basic Shadowrun feel alive, and if not, how does it change it?

Well, Rule-wise I like it, its easilier to run then Third, although I have a growing list of House Rules to cover some holes and other RAW Stupidness here and there.

However Flavor-wise it lacks something that Third had, although I haven't quite been able to put my finger on exactly what it is yet.

"Is it worth getting?" is such a loaded question. Some will say, "No! It sucks! You can kill the driver of an armored car by throwing a banana up its tailpipe!". Others will say "It's great! Don't use anything else!". I say, it plays fairly fluidly, and most of the rules are logical and follow unified mechanics. That said, I have house-ruled quite a bit, to fix what I see as gaps, imbalance, or simply un-fun rules (the car chase rules fall into that last category). It's not quite as crunchy as some games, but it is by no means rules-light. That's the best assessment I can give.

My question about the SR feel still stands, but I just remembered another question: does the game still have a veritable catalog of equipment, like guns?

I'm warming up to SR4. At first I didn't like the simplification of the mechanics. I got a little to close to D20 and a lot too close to World of Darkness mechanics wise.

On the other hand getting new players started is a lot easier.

And hacking in SR4 is a vast vast improvement over decking in SR3. Actually I think decking is the one area that's always seen large improvements from core book to core book.

What SR4 lacks, for now, is the real flavor stuff. But it's new so maybe it's too early to judge. Though again flavor has taken a hit in every edition, and it's hardly a step down from SR3. Plus they do say that a whole slew of the old books "still apply" or something like that. So maybe get the SR4 core books and see about getting some of the old classic flavor books like Shadowbeat.

I would buy SR4 if only because the line is only going to be developed further using the 4th edition rules. Those who want to shoehorn the books, settings, and adventures that are released for SR4 into the SR3 mechanic can still do so, but because the relative emphasis placed on attributes and skills are so massively different between 3rd and 4th edition, such shoehorning is problematic at best.

As others have said, I've had a much easier time helping new players learn SR4. Character generation, too, has gone far faster for me in 4th edition than in 3rd regardless of the current lack of a full-featured NSRCG-like program. Hell, the best character generators out there (with apologies to the Deagann system, I've not used it) are often simply Excel files.

Hacking is far better than Decking/Rigging in the past, though it's probably the area of the game which causes the most problem. The developers seemed to have taken the stance that the GM of the game is (usually) a moderately intelligent person and can determine how to solve many of the things that are left open as they work best in their game. While that does allow freedom for the GM (which I like) a lot of things were left too open (which I don't like). But, to be fair, I think the developers did extremely well in merging the 3rd Ed. concepts of decking/rigging into one set of rules that are accessible to new players, easy to understand, and don't take 45 minutes of solitary dice rolling by the decker. They can take 45 minutes, mind you, but they no longer have to.

The magic system is rather different but it's not as radically changed other than that which has been mentioned above. The nicest thing is that you can start with a Magic attribute less than 6 allowing for weaker "starting" mages. Spells are now learned without a Force attached to them. Instead, you learn a spell -- say stunbolt -- and you can cast it from Force 1 to Force (Magic x 2). If the Force of the spell is greater than your Magic attribute, then the drain from the spell is Phsyical damage, otherwise it's stun. Conjuring works similarly, allowing you to summon nigh unstoppable spirits at Force 8+ from character generation, but the drain on those bad boys usually makes the savvy summoner think twice before doing so.

All in all, I think the feel of Shadowrun has remained the same for my gamse. I never ran a gritty, cyber-punky style of Shadowrun and instead tended to run campaigns in the Shadowrun world with earth shattering or company destroying outcomes starring the players. I get the sense that most GMs don't run those sorts of games in the setting, though I could be wrong. SR4 still allows me to run games like that and for many reasons is actually better, though mostly because my gaming group relies on students at the local university so I quite frequently have players leaving and new players joining. Thus, the simplified/streamlined rules make my life much better.

Your experience with character generation is fairly unique, then. I personally cannot create a character in less than three hours, and the worst took me three days. (The three days includes gear, but the three hours doesn't.) Quite a bit of that is with Daegann's. People on Dumpshock have been a mixed bag, some offering 20 min characters that almost always miss something, the rest taking a minimum of 2 hrs or so.

It usually only takes me a few hours to create a character and flesh it out.

I've spent a good 10 hours helping 5 people create characters all at the same time using one book. Though by the end of the 10 hours they were all done geared and ready to run. Of course there was only 1 mage, and no one really went deep into hacking, though one did pick up a few programs and a decent comm, no real customization though.

Either which way. I've found the SR4 character creation to be a lot smoother than previous editions.

I've found that most of the time the most time consuming part of PC creation is in the accounting - the adding up of all the gear costs takes up the most of the time. Personally, I have not found SR4 Chargen any faster than SR3 Chargen, but my players tend to turn in their PCs faster than in SR3.