My take on the changes in 4e:

1. Core mechanic (set TN, larger dice pools, no combat/hacking/spell pools, counting "hits")
2. Magic is unified - shamans and hermetics are largely identical now, with the only real difference being the drain stat, and one different spirit type. Shamanic spirit domains are gone, and totems are a lot less emphasized.
3. Magicians are more robust, with a lot fewer ways to get their magic stat reduced - no disruption risk, etc.
4. Magicians have more varied power levels. You don't just start out with a magic score of 6.
5. Deckers are now hackers. Decks are gone, and it no longer takes millions of nuyen to equip a decker.
6. The matrix has been, in general, greatly simplified and designed to integrate more closely into the game via AR and PANs. Hacker-types now work much better, and doing hacking no longer means e rest of the players go get pizza.
7. Vehicle combat and systems have been greatly simplified as well, and better integrated with the general hacking stuff (no more meaconing!). I think they went a little too far in reducing vehicle stats, but it still works pretty well overall.
8. Introduced weapon modification rules in Arsenal, which don't really have a direct 3e equivalent that I can think of.
9. No more karma pool, it's now edge and a attribute.

Those are the major differences that I can think of.

Gyargh. Double post.

Actually, I've run into the Pizza Problem far more often in SR4.5 than I have in SR3. Multi-role deckers were much more viable in SR3: the combat decker in the main book looks suspiciously like a middleweight sam. Decker/Riggers were also a more viable combination, and decker adepts could be very frightening. By having everybody and their brother keep their secure files in offline storage (something that doesn't seem to exist in SR4.5), you could easily get the decker to come on the run.

In my Sr4.0 game, right now I've got a Submerged otaku with Resonance 9. Between Info Sortilage and Resonance Realm searches, there's no information the character cannot find, unless it never ever was on an electronic device. Since there's no team face, she does all the legwork. Except for character-specific information or magical recon, there's simply no point in anyone else doing intel gathering-- deckers and otaku are simply better at it. So, the legwork section turns into a one-on-one set of rolls, while everyone else goes to the corner market for pizza pockets.

I played on sunday and spent 45 minutes chatting with our gunslinger while we waited for the hacker to do his stuff and then another 15 for the mage to do his before we even entered the facility. Also yes character creation is a pain - they should stick a cd with chummer on it to the inside cover of the core book.

Then we have different opinions. Which is, of course, perfectly fine.
Because if i am armored thicker than the average car i do not faint from being hit with some pebbles . .
I may fall over because of the force of impact and physics, but if i can unturtle myself i will get up and kill the person responsible for making me look and feel silly!
edit: actually, no, mythbusters proved that even hit with a shotgun people do not fly back . .

Nah, they'd rather get you to buy the 'official' tool that costs money, and doesn't even support anything beyond the core book yet - which will cost you more money each time they add support for another book. It is a very nice tool though. I'll stick with Chummer though.

Indeed... And fixed that for you above.

Alright, I'll throw my hat in. I will also echo the subjectiveness of this; It's a highly YMMV zone, and sometimes, what some folks favor, others don't. But I'll go down the list here of some of my own personal likes and dislikes from the changes. For a bit of background, I started Shadowrun in about 1994, with Second Edition, and have played almost every character type. I'll be comparing 3 and 4.5.

Personal Pros of 3e:

*I liked the power level of starting characters. (See Con of 4e section for a better explanation.)

*I loved the pools. Combat, spell, and the like-I liked the extra layer of strategy they involved.

*I like how high skills actually strongly meant something, but at the same time you didn't want to neglect your attributes-but Skills still held a lot more weight.

*Rules were spelled out very clearly(see Cons of 3e, however.)

*Variable TN's. I loved these, and I felt they just generally made things a bit more meaty somehow.

*Magical flavor overall. I loved how mages and shamans worked, the additions that Magic in the Shadows brought, and the whole nine.


Personal Cons of 3e:

*Some of the rules, while tightly written, could be tough to find. They were well spelled out, like I said, but sometimes we could waste a lot of time trying to find a particular rule.

*Vehicle combat drove me bonkers and actually drove me off of playing riggers.

*Matrix combat drove me almost as bonkers, though it didn't quite scare me off of hackers.

*Didn't like the martial arts rules too much that came later.

*Variable TN's had a darkside-as mentioned, some things could take forever if people ended up with horribly high TN modifiers.

*Cyberlimbs were extremely, IMO, badly designed. It's a 'man meets magic and machine' but cyberlimbs were just horribly priced and underpowered for what you had to pay for them.

Personal Pros of 4e:

*In a direct opposite of a 3e Con, Cybelimbs in 4e are just *so much better* in every which way. They're actually affordable(for a game that was about crazy chrome stuff to start-you should have seen some of the old artwork-cyberlimbs were insanely expensive to tweak out and you could only really do one if you went that route.) I cannot praise what they did with cyberlimbs enough.

*Easy to teach, that's for sure. I think partially the writing and partially Skill + Attribute rolls, I find it quite easy to show new players.

*Book is generally, IMO, well laid out and stuff is easy to find. Very nice looking, as well. Has some excellent support books as well(I love Augmentation and Arsenal.)

*I much prefer 4e Martial Arts than 3e. I have a lot of fun with these.

*Vehicle rules made me want to play Riggers again.

Personal Cons of 4e:

*I may be a bit basted for this, but here goes. I preferred the general higher character power in 3e. I LIKE playing my 'higher than average' badass. I like a low to moderate power game now and again, but 3e characters seemed like they've been around the block a few times. Now, with Karmagen you can bring that back-and I'm not talking even about uberpower munchkin land. I'm no fan of a munchkin who can do it all and never fails. I personally just prefer a character who can be a little heavier out of the gate, and I find 400 BP rather restrictive in that. This also goes into my second note. You CAN make some pretty powerful builds with 400 but it requires metagaming and often stretching out your concept; that's another thing-while I like a power level a cut or two above average, I don't like to metagame heavily to get there. Now, this is fixed with a houserule-but I actually find sometimes tacking on or taking away BP can cause some pretty weird balance issues that I didn't get using the 120 Build Points or Priority of SR3.

*The BP Chargen system is just...sloppy, IMO. First off, it brings in metagaming even more than I like to. I love a good bit of number tweaking, but I don't like sinking my concept. With this, people have actually run into ''Damnit, I need 20 more BP. Well, I guess i can play an Ork!'' I just think 4.5 would be stronger overall if it just defaulted to the Karmagen system(using the German eratta-5x Attribute, racial cost.) Karmagen has it's flaws, many of which have been discussed(the two big ones are the near necessary houseruling for Awakened Human to even be able to have them get the same stat spread as 400 BP, and the fact that races with high stats need to pay a lot to actually focus on them.) It's not perfect, but I feel it just works *so* much better than the BP system.

*Not a big AR fan. Gimme an old fashioned cyberdeck. Pure flavor here.

*High Attributes hold much more weight than high skills. I also don't like the artificial skill caps.

*Magic flavor change. Mostly fluff, I did prefer the Hermetic=Elementals Shamans=Nature spirits, and then there were other versions of that. Shamans having to purchase their Mentor Spirit.

And that breaks it down for me. Even though I seem a bit hard on 4e, I still play it a lot these days-I just use Karmagen for character gen and sometimes still have cyberdecks make their appearance.

except 4e Magic attribute != 3e Magic attribute. It more is a combination of the old Magic attribute + Spell Pool. Other than overcasting the old Magic attribute didn't do much.

My reason for thinking so is that I've been around when people are shot while wearing armor. Yep, bullet does not penetrate. It does, on the other hand, tend to leave a serious mark. When it hits the chest it sometimes breaks ribs and always causes an involuntary chest compression.

So you suffer, and if beat enough suffer more, but at the same time still have all your "base health points". Unless, of course, it hammers the armor enough to break some ribs and such.

A car's armor is rather thin, once you get down to it. If you don't think so, take a bat or a pistol to the car door and see for yourself.

Dude. THAT ain't armor . . . That's STRUCTURE/BODY.
ARMOR is the 1 finger thick plate of steel/kevlar welded to the outside or the inside of the chassis, depending on wether or not people should know it's there.
Furthermore, if you have Kevlar over plates, you usually won't feel much aside from a shove, depending on the round used on your body i think.
If you ONLY use kevlar? Yes, then you get bruises/cracked ribs, but Kevlar over Plates or plates over kevlar? Soft and hard armor both? Sometimes sandwiched?
Yes, you are basically the michelin-man, but damn it, if somebody wants to hurt you, they have to basically pierce three layers of armor, one of which is rigid!
This means one layer of Kevlar or Steel-Weave or what ever is going to slow the bullet down enough so it does not break the plates behind that layer.
Then the plates in the layer behind that are going to catch the deformation of the first layer and spread out the physical force over more surface than before.
And then the THIRD layer of Armor, which is probably kevlar again, because, honestly, form fitting full body suit is just kevlar underoos, will take the impact
of the plate against your body and cushion that a bit more while catching splinters that may have broken lose from the plate in the second layer of armor . . .

With the less than armor damage=stun it simply means that no matter how armored you are, you usually can be simply killed by being shot twice.
Once to send you off into la la land because of the huge stun damage you just ate, and then somebody simply calmly walks up to your prone body and puts one into your nose, eye, ear or mouth to off you . .

And Your Point?

My point being, that stun damage from physical is dumb. ._.

If you're complaining about the way armor converts to stun, my group recently instituted a house rule: If armor is higher than the DV, rather than converting wholly to stun, it converts half the damage to stun. This actually lets the high armored person function longer, and makes it so that the guy with high armor isn't tempted mid fight to start taking armor off because another shot will knock him unconcious, but he could still take 2-3 more hits if it was physical, and even more if he's able to get first aid or a heal spell.

Yes, this is a bit better. Not much, but it at least gives a reason to have more than enough armor . .

It's again one of the rules that doesn't (can't?) mirror reality.

Getting shot with a vest on hurts, but then you have guys like the north hollywood shootout guys wearing full military armor suits taking dozens (or more) of rounds and they remain up and fighting until someone brings some bigger bullets.

Well, it kind of can mirror reality (at least given the description you gave), but it all depends on what you think their Body scores were like, what kind of die pools the cops shooting at them had, etc, etc. It's certainly possible for Shadowrun characters to take "dozens of rounds" and remain up and fighting, after all. It's also possible for them to get one-shotted.

That's kind of the beauty of the game, to me.

You'd have to have soft and hard armor. Either in addition to, or instead of, the B/I split.

I find it interesting that no one has commented on the Skill cap. In Shadowrun 3 there was no skill cap. Ya pay yer Karma, ya get yer skill.

In Shadowrun 4, there's a skill cap at 6. Ref Core book page 270.

That's what breaks SR4 for me. That cap causes everyone to top out the same primary skills for the Archetype. That leaves the Archetypes looking the same as they advance. The skills I used in SR3 varied widely from the norm. I just haven't seen how I can do that in SR4.

There should be a Cap. I like it at 6/7, personally, as that provides a range of 9 Skill levels. Whether you raise it to 9 or 12 due to preference, though, I think that it should still be capped out. There should be NO unlimited improvement. Human capabilities do have a functional limit.

Humans have no theoretical limit, but there is a functional/practical limit. After a certain point, the improvements you see take so much more time to learn, you need to be a genius to reach them.

However, that is modeled in SR3, with the escalating karma costs. After a certain point, the diminishing returns means it's better to invest elsewhere. SR4.5 does keep escalating karma costs, but since raising skills are so cheap and there's no linked attribute, it's easier to hyperinflate a skill pool with karma, especially if there was no cap. I think they could have kept the no-cap system if they kept the linked attribute mechanic.

Though in SR1 the 4L1 Light pistol was pretty easy to stage up!

And also Down...

And seeing how each armor point was an automatic success on the resistance roll.....