I have been planning on getting back into SR for some time now, but after I read all the bad reviews of the 5e copy editing, book organization, and balancing issues I keep making a pass. This might be over-exaggerated, as I also hear that 5e is the best edition to date by far, but I just can't really justify spending the cash on such a poorly conceived book. Are there any concrete plans by Catalyst to actually fix these issues? Do they understand that it is keeping long-time players away? I've search for other topics like this on the DP forums, and it seems like there hasn't been much progress. Maybe we can get a petition going if there isn't one already?

SR was pretty much my RPG bread and butter growing up. I played the hell out of third and fourth edition. But one thing I definitely remember (and I am sure many of you do as well) is the pages upon pages of errata I kept in all of my books. I think in retrospect, I was so in love with the SR setting that I didn't even really notice the numerous issues within the books and the complexity of the game system itself. So folks could imagine my surprise/not surprise when I read the reviews of 5e which gives me a feeling of deja vu. I've also seen a number of articles that have come out about how a decent number of gamers love the setting but can't stand the rules. As i've gotten older I have tended to agree more and more with that sentiment, and I think there is nothing worse than a complex game system with a crappy print delivery. Every time I pass by the SR 5e section at my local game store I think about jumping back in again, but then I stop due to everything I described above.

Really sorry for the rant guys, what do you think? Is there any hope? Are there alternatives?

You can still play 3e or 4 e nothing stopping you there and I really like 3e. That said I did buy the book and picked up the PDFs of the source books and while there are a few issues there's nothing as completely breaking as some would have you believe if you just apply whatever makes sense to you in your game. I'm currently running a mostly new group an SR5 game at the moment and we are having great fun with it and while I certainly made up 3 pages of Houserules (for a whole bunch of stuff) most of it was just references to things I liked better in 3E for handling the same thing and I certainly haven't had to reference them yet in 5 sessions.

Thanks for your reply. Is there anyone you could send me your house rules or direct me to any threads on here that deal with issues? Maybe asking the community for help where the system is lacking would be a good alternative.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...;hl=house+rules

These are the ones I came up with, however most of the Wireless Cyberware stuff is sorted out by the Internal Router in Chrome Flesh as a RAW option.

Yeah, 5e isn't unplayable bad. The core book pdf has errata already worked in, and the vast majority of the rest of the crap that made it into print you can houserule very easily into whatever suits your table.

Yeah, if you ignore the pedantic stupidity in some of the fluff, and house rule the bad, unbalanced, or unclear rules, then it's a pretty good system.

To be fair, it is relatively easy to house rule some of the problem areas and ignore some of the more constraining aspects of the fluff, and it does have some good ideas/improvements.

I'm just not sure it's worth the expense and the time investment, though, if you already have 3rd/4th Edition books. I reluctantly made the switch, because most of my Shadowrun-related interactions are online, and I didn't want to be left behind by the inevitable shift to the new edition. If it's just you and your friends, though, I don't know if you should bother.

The books aren't any really any worse edditing wise than the early stages of 4th.

Thanks guys for the feedback. I'm glad people actually took my concerns seriously and that it didn't come off as just hopeless complains. I've done research on the 5e reviews and listened to a few podcasts, Bd the reception seems to be fairly ambivalent, which still leaves me on the fence.

Just to clarify: I'm looking to get into SR completely from scratch. It's a long story, but a POS former friend of mine sold all of my books. I had stuff I collected from nearly every edition. I've heard that 5e is the best edition thus far, but I've also heard the opposite. It seems like people are evenly split between 4eA and 5e. Any thoughts?

I would definitely say that 5e is objectively worse than 4.
Peter Taylor was a much better line developer than Jason Hardy and it shows in the quality, or the lack thereof, of the 5e books.

Furthermore, lots of the good freelancers left after 4th edition because of some, lets say, dubious affairs. This also shows.

If you compare 4th and 5th edition book (the main magic, gear, ware and matrix books), 4th editions are always much better.
Of course 4th has a couple of issues, but 5 has much more.

Sadly 5th is the edition most people play because its the current edition.

Fluff wise 5th does not bring much tot he table, but 4th wasnt much better in this respect. Sadly its hard to come up with new ideas after X years of Shadowrun.

I came back to ShadowRun in fifth edition, having last touched it in second. So not comparing to fourth, but I will say this much: Fifth has a decent rule set to it, certainly much more robust than 1st/2nd -- but I find the main rule book painful to use.

Eventually I figured out how the rules were supposed to work, and only have a few house rules (two out of three concern movement speeds, because someone didn't spend enough time looking at the math, the third is for the ambiguity in the rules on how counterspelling interacts with AOE spells). Which as games go is pretty good, that speaks to the fundamental strengths of the rules. But the main rule book must have at least twice as many words as the 2nd edition rules, without being half as evocative of the setting, and yet there are many items that you have to play hide and seek through multiple sections to figure out how something works. I didn't find Street Grimoire to really be any better.

To be clear: I have played games where the rules just didn't work in places, or where so scaling was so terribly broken that house rules were required all over the place. That is emphatically not my experience with SR5. I'm not saying that they are perfect, but I'd say they are very playable.

3rd and 4th Edition are versions of the game that are most complete, have lots of errata and corrections, and have lots of discussion and game resources available for them. The only question is whether you have a good place to get used books (and there is always Amazon.com).

5th Edition has a lot of problems, and not just on the editing side. Some of the fluff was written by people who have little understanding of the Shadowrun setting, and a lot of horribly skewed game balance issues arise from rules being written by people with an obvious axe to grind. Plus, there is the philosophy of "everything has a price", which is a stupid way to balance a game. You balance a game with limited resources and opportunity costs, not by giving everything an unfun drawback.

For my 2 cents, 5th Ed is a far superior system to 4th ed. It's been discussed to death here but here's basically my position:

1) 5th ed gets negative press for editting issues. While those issues are real, it seems that the majority of 4th ed fans forget the state of the game/books prior to the aniversary edition (which to be honest still wasn't that great).

2) 4th Ed players seem ok with the state of 4th eds matrix and rigging rules which were total basket cases. I conclude that the reason for this is that people just hand-waved/houseruled it and we happy with the other more robust rules of magic and cyberware driving their games. 5th Ed has cleaned a lot of this up.

3) 5th Ed makes you make tough choices that 4th ed didn't. For me this is a plus, you can no longer make technomancer troll faces with 0.1 essence. Lots of people hate this but I think it brings the edition back to earth.

On the negative side I think the fluff is seriously lacking. The insidious nature of the megacorps really hasn't been teased out for new players and you could be forgiven for thinking that Seattle in 2075 is just Seattle now with magic. In this respect the older editions faired far better but to be fair this has been sliding since about 3rd ed.

I'm not sure what you mean by forcing "tough choices". Do you mean Priority (before the introduction of Point Buy or Sum-to-Ten)? It's not really that constraining, especially with that bit of starting Karma to smooth out the rough edges. Character creation overall is similar to SR3 and SR4 in scope - in that you can create an ordinary Joe caught up in the shadows, or a skilled, savvy pro. But it isn't any more difficult to create the latter.

5th edition matrix "rules" are one of the worst parts of 5th edition.
They are unbalanced, inconsistent, counter-intuitive, full of gamy "just because" rules, full of "all or nothing" mechanics, incomplete and leave most cases up for speculation.

I wont even waste my time with examples. If somebody does not see how bad they are on first sight there is really no common ground for discussion.

Other bad parts:
Gamy wireless boni.
Stupid full defense mechanics (defense is much better than offense, does anybody ever get hit?).
Totally and extremely overpowered Spirits (has always been the case, but is still the case).
0 drain for spells. Totally unbalanced drain values (again, no examples, just look at them. have always been bad, though, but still the case).
Balancing through all or nothing mechanics (Control Thoughts, Decryption, Marks...)
No time mechanics (instead: all or nothing).
Nerfed direct combat spells into oblivion.
Hacking is an "have edge or not have edge" game.
Hacking is only for the rich. No Street Level hackers.
Cyberware too expensive again.
Bioware is better than Cyberware (was the case in 4th, but now its worse, its Cyberpunk not Biopunk).

I cant think of one thing out of my head that 5th improves on 4th.
Everything that is bad in 4th is also bad in 5th plus more.

My not so humble opinion. Thats also why I am just finishing my own Shadowrun total rules conversion (but thats another story).

Edit: yeah you can play with 5th edition rules. Shadowrun was never a totally crappy rule system. But Shadowrun is very simulationistic and gamistic in nature and not very narrativistic at all with 3 planes (physical, astral, matrix) to be simulated and balanced, to make the "runner vs the environment" setting of Shadowrun viable . Thus Shadowrun needs an almost perfect rule system to be playable, in contrast to any generic fantasy setting.

There is a gorgeous first printing with much less errors. Do you read German and have about 25 dollars to spend ? *ducks*

Edition comparison won´t help much since you are starting fresh and securing enough SR4A books would be hard. So it´s either that or a different RPG, and in that case SR5 might still get the prize.

Just try to avoid characters that will always hit their limits, technomancers by people who do not know well what they are doing, and the trap of thinking that having a ton of dice makes the game better. Watch the combat level, if the group balances for the high end they are immune to damage on the low end and kill even faster than before. Actual fights against equal opponents will take MUCH longer if handled with tactics. Find the happy medium.

Power level is a bit wonkier in SR5. As with previous editions, starting characters can go all up and down the power spectrum. That hasn't changed. But SR5 presents more difficulties for lower-powered characters. Characters tend to be more potentially powerful if you make a flat comparison to SR4, but they are actually weaker in comparison to the rest of the world. Even the lowliest mouth-breathing grunts have 6 dice for attacking and passive defense, and contacts like fixers and Mr. Johnsons have 8's and 9's for some of their skills. There are also flat penalties (foregoing a wireless "bonus", background count, etc.) which hit low dice pools more severely than high dice pools (if you have 20 dice and lose 5 dice, you still have 15 dice. If you have 12 dice and lose 5 dice, you only have 7 dice).

It´s much like SR4 regarding high dicepools, except that you now will have them around no matter what, and with limits sometimes creating a certain level of success outside the use of edge.

Try the changed combat mechanics, see what adding Int to the defense test does for the street samurai to ganger comparison. Next try high-end security and see how long your fights last. IMO: It´s overall much less lethal, even if the damage increase suggests otherwise. What does happen is that the results are more binary. Adding a usually high attribute to defense and a potential 6 dice to skill favours the defender build for REA/INT. See initiative system.

SR5 has its good sides, but mostly it feels like someone who did not know his job very well tried to create a creepy child from SR3 and SR4 dna...

It is true that every SR had issue (man let's not talk about SR1) but while the corebook makes a lot of wrong choices, wastes quite some potential and is implicit, when it should be explicit, and sometimes is a nightmare to understand (especially without errata) it still is not all bad. Be careful though if you want to include any books beyond the core book. Those books do have good material, but the bad gets worse. Also SR5 in the US Version is highly overpriced if you take into account how low the content quality often is, aside from the facr, that there is much copy and paste going on from SR4. The latter would be OK if it would be properly adjusted to the needs of SR5.

Infact if you know WAR from late SR4 you do know quite a bit about SR5. There is a review that Frank Trollman wrote about WAR, that is kind of prophetic once you see SR5.

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15090.phtml

So I offered a lot of bad about SR5 and I do think you may be better off with SR4, but SR5 can be houseruled if you want to spend the money.

No lie, we'd probably come out ahead running the German printing through Google translate.

I have been debating getting a decent scanner to run my Shadowrun France book through it so I can try running a translator program on it, or at least copy past to google translate.

while nowhere near as useful for source info, is still funny like a train wreck.

Thanks again everyone for all the feedback!


I ended up going with SR 4th Anniversary Edition, which seems to me is the lesser evil. But then again, that's going to be a up hill battle because I know the gravity is always towards the newest edition, but Jesus guys... the feedback not only for 5e but Catalyst in general is ambivalent to outright negative. Chances are i'll be running most of the games, but I am going to give that battle a shot anyway. At the very least most people have either a laptop or a tablet these days, and the PDF's are readily available.

Truth be told, I found a cheap copy of the "third printing - corrected" 5e book at a used book shop. I might be using it if I can find a group locally to join, but otherwise i'm fairly apprehensive about it. Apart from Lovecraft/mythos games, SR has always been my favorite setting. It really pisses me off that the same dicey stuff keeps coming up with each publisher and each printed edition. I would be most happy with a edition of SR that not only has clear mechanics, but a healthy balance of mechanics vs. flavor.

I think my pitch is going to be more narrative and atmosphere-driven campaigns, or at least a game that emphasizes the gritty-ness of the setting over power gaming and crunch. I might even look into the SR 2050 book just to keep it down to earth and old school at least in feel.

You can always go and play SR using the Fate system or what ever suits you.

As for Catalyst... in my book we would be better off if the german publisher Pegasus had the rights to manage the line. Pegasus is not without flaw, but they sure could do it in german and in english and it would still be more comprehensive than CGLs work.

They just released the rules as a softcover book for just 10€: http://www.amazon.de/Shadowrun-Regelbuch-5...r/dp/3957890314

Funnily, the PDF ist still 19,95€: http://www.pegasusdigital.de/product/12326...k?filters=45176

@Isath: Well, Fanpro had the english license for a few years so I wouldn't be without precedent.