If I have 4th Edition 5th printing corrected should I pick up the 20th Anniversary addition? Regardless of which of those two books I have what 5 other books should I pick up?

The Anniversary edition is beautiful. But you could just get the list of changes from the Shadowrun site and print it.

Augmentation, Arsenal, and street magic are the ones that pop into my mind.

Do remember that the Change File doesn't *quite* match up with the actual changes, ha.

If you are looking at exactly 5 books, I would recommend the 5 rulebooks, which will give you a complete rules set.

SR4A (yes, it is useful to get this, even if you already have SR4; there are quite some changes... and the book is really nice ).

Street Magic
Augmentation
Arsenal
Unwired
Runner's Companion

In addition to those (if you can get beyond those 5 books), I would further recommend:

Sixth World Almanac (maybe wait for a new printing of this one, if one comes along, as there are some fairly big editing issues)
Seattle 2072

Bye
Thanee

If you need to drop one, make it Runner's Companion. It's less vital and more broken than the other 'core' books.

6th World Almanac should be in house by the time I get off work.

I was going to question "Runners Companion" What is it exactly? The others are pretty obvious.

It has several new qualities (those are quite useful), lots of new metatype variants and rules for all the weird stuff (SURGE (basically "mutated"), vampires, shapeshifters, drakes, etc), advanced lifestyle rules, advanced contacts rules, some alternate character generation systems (one has to be changed a bit for SR4A, though), and some general information for shadowrunners (team roles and such).

Note, that you can buy the main books for a fair price in PDF format (SR4A $15, the other five $12 each).

If budget is an issue, that might be a good alternative.

I have both the printed and the electronic books, and since I bought the latter, I am pretty much exclusively using those.

Bye
Thanee

Edit: Ninja'd. Good advice there.

I would buy it for the index alone.

I feel the same way. I can't count the number of times I've had "Shit, I can't remember the stats for giant SURGEd wombats! Quick! To the Index!" moments. You can find some ridiculously specific entries in there.




~R~

AE also allows you the rare enjoyment of not being able to find the core rule book page referenced in any of the splats, except for the most recent.
Also, some of the changes in it are uber-ridiculous (like new scatter ranges) or just wrong (like the removal of the paragraph on how technomancers reboot their living node, and how long it takes them to reestablish Matrix connection after disconnecting).

*Shrug* I never said that it was perfect. Every book has it's errors, but I think that 4A more than makes up for them in overall quality. You do have a good point about the scatter rules though, they are pretty balls.

~R~

I still maintain that buying Runner's Companion instead of AE, and just downloading the changes list is more optimal, if only for the lifestyle rules.

So now we're optimizing not only our runners, but our tables too?

I understand where you're coming from. I'm fond of RC too, despite the ocassional craziness. I actually have a player right now who has Latent Dracomorphosis. That should be fun.




~R~

In Shadowrun, you should be optimizing teams to begin with.

Meanwhile in Essen: just as planned.

I'll also vouch for Runner's Companion. I had thought I'd be able to get away with just a digital copy of this one. Big mistake.

It's now printed out and taking up a very large binder.

Arsenal, Augmentation, and Street Magic are also very good books to have, as they flesh out things nicely.

Bleh. RC is obviously essential if you want crap like drakes, pixies, and nosferatu PCs in your game, all SURGEd, and each of whom has some super-munchkinned custom lifestyle + roommates. Otherwise, meh. Don't even start us on AI PCs and Free Spirits.

I like the custom lifestyles, gives a bit of flavor to a character's life.

Home isn't just a place to squat. Unless you have the Street Lifestyle, then, well, it actually is.

I'm not a huge fan of SURGE and those crazy metatypes either, but find plenty uses for "normal" characters in RC for me (custom lifestyles are great for the detail what lifestyle includes alone, and the new qualities are also very useful).

Unlike CanRay, though, I never really look into my RC book, only using the ebook to look things up.

Bye
Thanee

I agree. That's why I rated it as useful, but the lowest priority of the 5 'core' mentioned.

Actually, I've seen a fair number of players willing to play an AI in a cyberpunk setting; and SURGEd make for nice NPCs, ones whose appearance you can interlink with their personality.
RC is of course in no way necessary, but... for the third time now... between Core+CoreAE and Core+Errata+RC the latter is highly preferable, for all I know.

I don't really agree, but is that even the choice here? It wasn't the question I was answering, anyway. I only meant that RC is the last 'core' book I'd get, after of SR4A, Arsenal, Augmentation, Unwired, and Street Magic. *shrug*.

I think at this point, it's all really a matter of taste. And we all know that there's no accounting for taste. Players who come from the Other Game (like myself, sadly) are used to having truly ridiculous ammounts of options. It was a big change for me going from 50ish splat books to just 5ish, not to mention the fact that there are only 5 races (5, really?) and only a dozen or so standard archetypes.

So, I personally enjoy the extra options that RC has to offer, even if it may seem a bit out there for those who have played since first edition.


Edit: Not to sound argumentative, since my whole point is that there is no 'right' answer. It all boils down to preference.

~R~

Uh, do you mean certain Dungeons and Dragons by that Other Game?
If such, there's only a dozen of playable archetypes you can really optimize, and even less races that aren't suboptimal.
Shadowrun, with its classless system, leaves much more space for creativity; it has both more working archetypes and more diversity among the representatives of each.

Yeah, I was referring to D&D. And with a little creativity, most of the classes in D&D can be optimized. Hell, I've even seen a monk build that was viable until about 13th level.

Not that I'm defending the system; I also greatly prefer point based, dice pool systems to class systems. Once I finally got a SR group together, I pretty much stopped running the Other Game. All I was saying is that it has a much more diverse pool of crunch to build characters out of. Considering the disparity in the amount of published material (for 3.5 [which is what I played even after 4 came out] and SR4) this is really just a matter of volume.

And as for the very few archetypes being viable, that's not entirely true. With prestige classing and what have you, even 2 (or 20) characters with the same base class can be remarkably different by game's end.

Just my two anyway.



~R~

Going to second the vote for RC.

The metavariants, build-a-furry surge rules, and vampires are kinda situationally useful. This is somewhat intentionally unfair statement - they CAN be good, and used properly, but some people hate them. It all boils down to what kind of game you're playing, and the group you're playing with.

The advanced/detailed lifestyle rules, Group Contact rules, and, most importantly, the qualities section are what makes the book for me. the main book just seemed light on stuff - like qualities - you could use to build flavor into a character. RC handily fixes this, and has tons of stuff that's just interesting for all archetypes.
Its also worth noting that they made a second printing a while back - Adam and Hardy said that some rules updates/errata made it into print. Get the latest printing if you can, its always a good idea. (this is especially annoying, because they haven't bothered to put the changes on the website).

I'd also recommend Arsenal. Even if you just use the guns from it, its a solid buy for all archetypes.