So I have the opportunity to run some Shadowrun fairly soon and I'm torn between 2e or 3e. I'm setting it in 2050 and starting from the beginning as it were as they are all noobs to shadowrun. I have a few concerns with 3e, the players are all veteran white wolf (mostly oWOD vampire) players. One is that the magic system seams to make it way easier for magicians to dominate given the force != dice pool. Another is the shear number of skills and rules compared to the systems they are used to SR is very crunchy. The advantage of 2e is there are less rules in the main book so we could introduce rules slowly. The last issue is the race balance. Humans arent so awesome if your not having to pay A for the Elf and Dwarves & Trolls have all the weird % increase to lifestyle and stuff that doesnt fit etc adding more complications. Then you add variable karma pool increases and knowledge skills.... it will make your head spin...

3e wins for rigging and matrix, though matrix 2.0 fixes that problem in 2e. 3e I also feel is more fun in combat for everyone rather than wait for the sammy to finish.

Thanks!

I never played 2nd, so i can't really tell you the difference between 2e and 3e, but 3e is pretty frigging detailed, when it comes to rules. s you have mentioned, there'S pretty much a rule for most everything. Wanna start easy on the rules? keep out riggers and deckers. Magic can be complicated enough for beginners. Do a little run down style or some one shots first to see if you actually like to play with the system. Something easy, taking out a smaller gang, blowing up something from a smaller corporation, robbing a drug lab somewhere or something . . Something that will most likely involve street smarts and a bit strong man stuff instead of sneaky and high maintenance social/technical skill. It's a good start. When you tire of this and have the basics of the system in your head, THEN take a look at the real magic, matrix and rigging rules. Don't make not mistake, you will feel the need to leave out stuff or house rule it something fierce in certain cases ^^
3e is very much fun in combat in my personal opinion. but that might stem from the fact that you can make troll combat monsters which are NOT dumb as a brick . . i don't know about 2e, but to me it allways seemed that 3e lends itself better to the whole cyberPUNK style than the black trench-coat stuff. even if ware is frigging expansive.

try and attract attention from some of the few players in here that can actually still tell the difference between 2nd/3rd ^^
I think Kyoto Kid would be a good one for startets.

There's no big difference between SR2 with all rule books and SR3. Small details like Ini and dice pools. (AFAIR)

But why don't you go for SR4? I've heard more than once it's very similar to WoD. That would help your old WoD players.

I was introduced on 2E but GM now on 3E. My advice as all my players were new to SR until I introduced them. Stick to the core book, especially with 2050's as your setting timestamp, until they are familliar with the game style, universe and rules systems. Comming from an oWoD background I don't think will hinder the party too much.

I would also advise staying away from the Matrix and Rigging if you're all just finding your feet. However. If your group handles new systems well, and you feel upto the challenge of variety, I wouldn't stop them completely. Again stick to the core book to begin with, get yourself familliar with the way the rules handle, write up cheatsheets to help with any planned (or suspected) encounters of this type and (heres the clever bit) Get the player of the Rigger or Decker to learn their rules, at least the basics. I've had 2 successful new to SR Deckers out of 2 by getting them to learn the rules for the characters they thought were cool. I also (via PDF access) Gave them a few sheet printout of the basic rules from the Matrix core section to help with this. They had their own cheat sheets in effect right there with everything laid out. The same worked for the only Rigger player I've had so far. Yes it's more effort intensive and tricky at times, but it can be worth it. Also for the way everyone's actions fit together on timescales and so forth (as has often been a big complaint about Matrix vs Realtime) fluff it to whatever works.

Now, for your other concerns.

Magicians really don't dominate (at least in the short term) as a chunk of their priorities will end up in Attributes and Skills and most of the other 'Runner Archetypes' are often more dangerous in other ways. High karma and Initiation is where mages begin to really up the ante on the powerlevels and you won't be worrying about that for a while. What magicians will do is give the players additional flexibility in what they can do and you will have to think a little more about what they may encounyter in their runs. As with the Decker and Rigger suggestions above, learn the magic rules yourself enough to have a general idea on what you're doing (or better if you can) and let the magic types learn their rules properly. Also provide a few cheat sheets again if you can.

Ultimately if you start your players with just the things in the core book and work out from their SR3 is fairly easy to come to grips with and a hell of alot of fun. When everyone is grounded in that then you can play more with the extra books like Man and Machine, Magic in the Shadows, Rigger 3 (which is good for general vehicle stats anyway, without any riggers). Cannon Companion you may want to use from the outset as it doesnt do anything particularly odd with the rules and gives some options for gun selection and armoured clothings.

The worste thing about SR3 is also the best thing about SR3 and that is the Depth it contains in its fluff and rules (and the fact that one often works very much as the other). Which is entirely why I love it.

Just as Matrix 2.0 exists in both 2nd and 3rd eds, so are Rigger 2 & 3 much the same. The SR3 core rules are basically VR2 and Rigger 2 condensed so the difference here would be if you want to play SR2 without these expansions or not. Otherwise the differences between the editions are roughly pool refresh rates, initiative order, magic (sorcery for casting, no grounding thru foci et al.) and the PC generation variations you noted.
My advice (& how I do it) is SR3 with liberal doses of SR2 and a touch of SR1 (particularly Shadowtech). Maybe even bits of SR4 if I find some conversions.

Go with the version you like best you can't go wrong with either. SR2 had some great rules, init passes were generally geared towards a faster paced game, but in SR3 it allowed people to spread the love and make combats often more tactical than jump in and shoot before we get shot at. Rigger rules in SR3 are rewarding once you've learned them. The skills change in SR2 to SR3 wasn't really all that big of a change after looking back. In the end you had to spread the points out and it opened up more unique characters. I do miss grounding in SR2, as well as hellfire, but turn to goo can stay back in its old edition.
The only other thing you might consider is that SR3 has a great character generator to help you make characters quickly.

I really enjoyed the custom vehicle and weapon creation rules in Rigger 3 and Cannon Companion for SR3. One guy in my group played a rigger and he had tons of fun making a custom drone. He didn't end up with the most effective combat drone, which was kind of what our games were skewed towards, but we all had tons of fun with it, and it was one of the more unique things in our group.

The two games are quite similar, as others have noted. SR3 is much like SR2 with all the expansions added in by default. SR3 is probably a bit heavier on crunch, but it's easy enough to ignore and handwave for the sake of story.

SR4's core mechanic, roling attribute + skill, will be more familiar to WoD players. Otherwise, there's no particular reason to go for it other than taste. SR3 is my personal favorite edition of the game. It has just a bit of spit and polish layered on SR2 rules that make it play nicely.

If you have to choose betwen SR2 and 3 (I'd prefer SR4A ! )
Go for 3 .The Initiative is better and you'll get more Sourcebooks

HougH!
Medicineman

I'll answer some questions about myself. I have been playing shadowrun since 1993ish, started with SR1 but quickly moved to 2 and stayed there for the most part even after 3 had been out awhile. For about 4 years I played SR2 weekly. For a little over a year I ran a weekly SR2 game and for about 6 months we tried SR3 and our rigger was happy and our mage was overpowered (compared to SR2 anyway). Everyone else didn't really care for SR3. Its been about 8 years since I ran more than a one shot of SR but SR2 I could still pretty much run in my sleep. I had one of the players look at the SR4 rule book just because its the current thing and easy to get but they took a look at character creation and ran screaming. Things like its too much like GURPS and too many skills were said. That said he said it looked a lot like WOD after that but he wanted me to make his character. That said I've toyed with 4A idea of just pick a template and add 30 BP to customize it, I think they can handle that but I would still have to learn 4e. With 3e there would be a slight learning curve for me but most of it is like 2e. 2e I can just pick up and go. The 3e skill lists however are more like 4e where as 2e I can have them ignore concentrations and specializations so they can just take things like Firearms.

I also pretty much own every SR1&2 book and most of 3

:edit: these guys are also used to a combat light or non existent game. Mostly politicing and dialog with little to no dice rolling, so any shadowrun combat will seam combat heavy to them.

I'm curious on the Mage overpowered thing. Could you clarify? (we didnt really do anything much magicy in our 2nd ed game...and that finished....about 12 years ago).

Many of the spells didn't need as high of force so he could gain several more spells sooner that he would have been able to before. He also was able to start with more force points I think, I could remember that wrong though. It became evident that as he approached 100 karma (near the end of our 6 months) he was much more powerful than he was with 100 karma in 2e. Partly because he had been playing shadowrun for 3 years now and partly because of rule changes with chances of some of it just because we did something wrong (we tried to do it all by the book though for that 6 months).

Okay, yep I follow that.

However (as discussed elsewhere) Low force spells often have their own downsides. I expect to see a starting mage (full) with 5 force 4 spells and one force five or a three and a two. If the mage has money add in another two spells. So a starting grimoire of 6-9 spells forces 3-5 on average.

Not sure how that compares to 2E.

100 Karma....*thinks without book to hand* Okay thats a few new spells, around Grade 3 initiation, bound a foci or two and some skill upgrades. Yep, that's fairly nasty. I hope he had the nuyen too to get the things (okay compared to Cyber costs magic can be 'cheap'). But I dont think it's any worse than what can be achieved with a starting 1mil nuyen and 100 Karma Cyberbeast (for generic 'power levels').

From my hazy 2E memories thats alot more powerful for sure. But the answer to that has always been adversaries and anything the players can do so can NPC's....and Dragons.

The problem was not with GMing the uber mage. At the end of our 2e some people had 500+ karma (yeah with 50 dice karma pools). We chose for that reason to start clean with 3e and noticed that the mage tended to get more powerful quicker than in 2e. Everyone else seamed about the same though we all agreed the 3e characters were more powerful from the start or at leased it seamed that way to us. So around 100 karma or so we went back to 2e because the mage was becoming more powerful comparatively to the other characters than what we were used to. The key being what we were used to...

These guys (for the most part, one played for 2e for a summer but they used it for cyberpunk and threw out most of the rules so it was simpler) have not played shadowrun so they would have nothing to compare it to.

*Nods* Well, at just over 100 Karma the Mages do tend to pull away a little in the powercurve. The key in 3rd is that the right build of Combat monkey starts nails and stays on a par (untill they upgrade cyberware, get custom or bigger guns, ect) throughout much of their career. Of course their skills leap up and become more varied too. Mages are fairly good to begin with but really do benefit from some solid meat and chrome support on the outset and then zip up in power. Not without dangers though.

From what i recall as playing I also think that SR3 chars start out on a higher power level than in SR2. I've always seen that as a slight shift for a less "street" feel for everyone and more "pro-runner" feel. Not Prime Runners yet by a longshot but not just SINless folks with some talent doing odd jobs

You could just take what you want from both. That what i do in my games. I call it version 2.5. Though 2.87 might be more accurate. I use 3rd edition, and then keep what rules I wanted from 2nd. Like living things blocking the astral. (I love that). But it works remarkably well. Just pick what you want "Force" to do and choose what you want from Column A and Column B. I'm working on a way of incorporating aspects of 4th into 3rd right now. Guess it will be version 4.2 or something.

Have you got any converted 4th at this point?

So far some magic rules. The complete elimination of force from spellcasting. I like the flexibility of choosing whatever force you want for a spell. For character creation you get 5 spell points. You can buy more for 25,000 . Haven't decided yet if I will take any spirit rules from 4th yet. I like the flexibility, but I also like the clearer different between traditions.

Currently reading Unwired. Trying to wrap my head around the new Matrix. 4th Ed. BBB was really unclear on some points.

If the group likes combat, I'd say go with 3rd Ed. for the initiative system. All the players will have a better chance of joining in the carnage. The last game of 2nd Ed. I played, I grabbed the Merc archetype for a quick character and pretty much ran to the sound of gunfire to find a lot of mangled bodies and the smell of cordite. In other words, my combat character couldn't even get into combat before the fight was over.

I also think every new edition has further limited and tried to power down magic characters. I forget if 2nd edition initiates get all the metamagics upon first intiation, or if that change was 1st to 2nd, but the changes usually made things cost more Karma, increased drain, or necessitated higher force spells. As a GM and having to run a bunch of NPCs, I still incorporate Threat ratings. If nothing else, I'd let the group decide if they wanted to increase the Threat point for point with karma rewards. Threat were dice NPCs got to add to every dice roll instead of allocating and keeping track of dice pools.

I find the two editions similar. and I think it depends on what type characters players want to play. If you are using decking, 3rd is the way to go. Rigging - I'd have to give the nod to 3rd. Combat in 2nd edition is ruled by initiative and it becomes a priority. Magic - Grounding put some fear into magicians, but 3rd has my favorite metamagic of Channeling. There are a lot of published adventures for 2nd edition and I think they are more detailed than many of the 3rd edition ones which might just give a framework or hooks. So some depends on what books you have access to.

By "elimination of force from spellcasting" I gather you mean eliminating force from learning spells, hence the low spell points (equivalent to 30 old spell points). Didn't know that about 4th, not a bad idea.
I await your matrix musings, I've pondered such things as how to implement AR with regard to the matrix and expanded decking targets such as cyberware.

If I was to use 3e and incorporate some 4e rules I would probably nab the new specialization rules and possibly make perception a skill.

I'd take 2ed any day over 3 ed. Its a simplier game and better trade offs.

There's always a lot of romanticizing when you talk about older editions of a game. But the simple truth is SR3 fixed a lot more about SR2 than it made worse.

That said, it all comes down to personal taste. If you have all the rules for SR2, know it inside and out, and just flat out love it, there's no reason at all to switch to SR3. You'll force yourself to find flaws in it and learn to hate it, simply because it wasn't your true intent. That's why there were strong haters of SR3 when it was new, and its why there was/is a lot of haters of SR4 now (myself included; I prefer SR3 but appreciate the simplicity of SR4).

Stick with SR2. The only real problem you'll have is finding players for it, especially online. But if you already have a solid group of players who enjoy it, there's absolutely no reason to change.