Howdy, I have an opportunity to run Shadowrun for an entire group that has never played shadowrun before.

I would love to run the classics Mercurial, Dream Chipper, Bottled Demon, Queen Euphoria, Universal Brotherhood, Elvin Fire, Dragon Hunt, Renraku Archeology Shutdown, Harlequin etc.

With that said would this be easy to do using The 20th anniversary edition + the 2050 setting book?

Or am I just setting myself up for failure and Heartbreak?

Thanks

If I remember correctly, the 2050 book had some editing issues. But if you're familiar enough with the SR4 rules it should be fine.

I've done it... But then I mostly wing the rules, and just try to make sure the players have fun.

It is pretty doable. The names of gear and weapons and spells hasn't changed much through editions so it's easy to convert. Dreamchipper has the the big bads using early versions of BTL chips with skills encoded on them which is actually something you can buy in 4th ed (see Unwired) but since you have fresh players they likely won't know that so the surprise can remain intact.
New players are unlikely to know about bug spirits either so Queen Euphoria and Universal Brotherhood should be fun too though the end of Euphoria might lead to a party wipe as the number of bugs in there is pretty high and the bugs are stronger in 4th ed than previous editions. Of course that scene is supposed to play a bit like Aliens so maybe that's OK.
Overall, I'd say go for it. It should be fun with a new group of Shadowrun players.

You might consider 5e unless you prefer the 4e rules.
My reasoning is with new players they may if nothing else get curious about later editions, then the jump to later editions is just being delayed.
But again, I suggest that if you were middle of the road on the issue.

Should be entirely doable, and I'm sticking with SR4 myself (though I buy select higher edition books to mine for ideas/gear/magic).

I liked the Program Creation Table in SR4's Unwired. I sure wished they used something like it in the later edition.

What in SR4 do you find better than SR5? I loved magic in SR5 myself.

Yes.


Do yourself a favor and get all the core expansions too; PDFs should suffice. You'll need some of their general rules. Other than that, you're probably good enough with that combo; some special NPC or events might need handwaiving but they effectively did in 1E/2E, too (they had special rules in these books).

Lots of things, it would take a while to list; ridiculous equipment costs would be one of them. There were just a bunch of instances where I remember reading the new rules and laughing my head off while saying "Um...no, we won't be doing that." At this point, we know SR4, and we've got house rules for it, so that's what we're sticking with.

One of the few things I did not like about 4e was the high character build costs being just enough to make hybrid archtypes difficult.

I'm a magical supremacist, so I never noticed that. But I note that in SR4 deckers didn't need to spend so much money on a good cyberdeck that if they had that much money in the first place, they could have just retired from running the shadows.

What define us as civilized is what we create, if we create, and how useful what we create is, and it gets expensive all that creation.

Ummm, no.


How you treat your people and other defines a civilisation, as this is a people's social and cultural development.

Hell the Nazis led the way in tech in many ways, first major use of rockets and early jet planes as well as well on their way to cracking the nuclear bomb. The US only got wind of the latter thanks to a letter from Albert Einstein himself warning FDR of the potential menace, jumpstarting their own research with the Manhattan project.
I wouldn't necessarily call them more civilised.

But we get what you are probably trying to say though, that tech and research costs money.

BUT, cyberdecks are sort of part and parcel to the game setting. The Tech is already there, the cost of components should not be too bad, Deckers were not having to rebuild the wheel here.
Yes programs were constantly evolving and you had to devote some effort and funds to keeping SOTA, but the PRICE of decks was kept ludicrously inflated to act as a brake on Deckers in game, which always seemed kind of odd.
Like JanessaVR said, by the time you could afford a decent deck, why wouldn't you just retire?

And the net contribution of the Natzi's by civilized standards? Zero.
Japan had a program too and was even credited with some of the earliest breakthroughs. But people were afraid of them using it first due to their savagery in the Pacific. So we dropped two on them first. No one talks about anything before the start of the War and civilization wins and moves foward. The reason? It could have been alot worse.
Now on the surface, most saw those two countries as uncivilized and not deserving any favors. But the World Governments, especially the ones who were not a huge material factor in the War had a plan. The US will rebuild the Nations, creating the strongest nations in their respective regions. Civilization moves foward more.

Now I can say, concerning the price of Cyberdecks. If you can afford it and have the choice why bother to make such a sacrifice? The same can be said about someone going to an expensive university then continuing on to graduate studies, and beyond.

Yeah, you could've gone with Patton's brilliant "nuke beaches and then land a million troops on them because nobody would see that coming, SNEAK ATTACK!" plan.


This reminds me of that scene in Idiocracy where they show the protagonist "history".

And who treated who in a civil way then? If that is civilization? Or was is the promise of what was comming and the value of it compared to the alternative? Did we treat the Axis powers with civility? Or was it our way of world building compared to theirs that judged the Allies more civilized?

THIS! Exactly This!
Considering that in SR 4, you can buy a permanent Middle Life Style with some extra bonuses (safe neighborhood, hard to find, good matrix connection) for around 1 mil nuyen. A bleeding edge cyberdeck costs... about 1 million nuyen!
So if you had the choice of a PERMANENT middle class lifestyle in a safe neighborhood, or hacking the Matrix and getting shot at, which would YOU choose? I know which one I would and it does NOT involve bullets!

So how would you play a character like that? Or how woulde you GM a group like that? Considering the inherent dangers of the Shadowrun game world?

First, go with what SR4 did and make decking tools CHEAP! A hacker with a Hermes Ikon (Cost 3000 ) had enough horsepower for the beginning hacker.

I think the prices were increased as a "fix" to the starting decker also being able to buy the top-of-the-line comlink in SR4, which reduced the space for character improvement. The also could have increased the availability rating, or required a B/R skill test to get above a certain power, or dozen of other things. A creative solution it was not.

So trade the fewer Big runs for more smaller runs? If that's the case an option could be a lower lifestyle with the same hardware, and just loose remaining starting credits.

But they kinda fixed that with WAR and its statted, named commlinks up to 10. They forgot respective OS', but hey ... honestly, I think that was just some misfiring nostalgia with one of the authors. It made no sense.

SR4's four-digit links were too cheap (though with programs and modules and mods, you were firmly in five-digit territory). Granted. But SR5'S six-to-seven-digit prices were too high. Now, what number is between four and six ... someone who's good at the economy, please help me budget this ...

Honestly, to be a bleeding edge decker/hacker you needed 'ware. THAT is how you can balance out the disparity. Beginning hackers don't have the 'ware to make them great.

So the chaper cyberdeck and better lifesstyle or bleeding edge decker are more of a potential character's philosophies? Just trying to clarify sinse it is hard to tell if you are not just being critical of that particular mechanic given all the other comments.

Yup, but there's hardly any left. Math SPU? Castrated into uselessness (hurr it helps you like do math durr hurr who needs math hurr i can rule design). Encephalon? gone. All the little subprocessors, headware memory, ect, that helped deckers in 2nd and 3rd? streamlined away. 5E had two (2) advanced implants that made sense for hackers to have, the cerebral and cerebrellum boosters. And they cost as much as a deck each. Other than that, it's all drugs and the cheap-ass, mandatory must-have of the DJ plus.

As awakened, you can use the spells Analyze Device and Increase Limits. I like custom versions that allow assured success test to have a net hit effect since Decks have such high resist thresholds, like at least 15.....

Never saw the issue with Decker costs in 3rd. If you're building a Decker or a Rigger or a Street Samurai most often you will be taking higher Priority money anyway. The BEST deck you can start with in 3rd is 250K meaning you can easily build a Decker with priority B in resources and still have plenty of nuyen left over after programs for other gear, the second best deck you can get is half that much.

Giving an option to cybered out characters seemed to be the goal. Implants or not? Awakened or not? With lower equipment costs you were less inclined to choose an alternative dedicated path therefore most characters were more likely to have the same build.

In 3e there are 2 clear options for Characters who want to run Cyber and that's Resources A and Resources B, what that nuyen is spent on is a massive variety of options, seriously the list in the back of Man and Machine is impressive. yeah there is sometimes consistency in what you see people cybering up with but that is a theme common to, well, everything when you follow a concept. Street samurai is almost guaranteed to want Initiative increase in some form, a SmartLink (heck anyone who uses a gun and can afford it in nuyen and essence wants a SmartLink) and probably some other augments too, it is after all the thesis of the Street Samurai concept.

I think other than deckers being cheap big issue you might run into is Magic being harder to resist than expected by the adventure. Either you PCs magicians or the NPC magicians. IDK that this is a deal breaker or needs fixing but its something to be aware of. You should probably drive home "geek the mage first". The 2050 book is a good place to start. Id just do it handwavy and learn as you go. As long as the players understand we may need to make some adjustments I think it will be fine.

i believe what was being implied is that the low cost of entry into the world of hacking in SR4 makes things much more believable than in editions that make hacking insanely expensive. as in, if you can *start* hacking with just 5,000 nuyen worth of stuff, even if that doesn't mean you're going to be able to hack a major AAA's systems, it is much more believable that you'd have a hacker coming up from a street gang or similar and they wouldn't have to explain in their backstory why they decided to be a professional hacker instead of living a life of comfort. and then when you consider that high end hacking gear (not the bleeding-edge stuff, but stuff that's good enough that you *could* run against a megacorp and at least have a chance of not getting splattered like a bug against a windscreen) can be had for less than 50,000 nuyen, it's much more believable that you would have acquired your own tools a bit at a time.

generally speaking, the same is true with the other types of 'ware as well; certainly, there were things that were hard to explain for someone on the streets, but there were often very low-cost options that were... well, certainly not as good, but good enough to make you better than the average corpsec squad. a ganger punk could believably have wired reflexes and an autoinjector, maybe some basic durability mods, and potentially earn enough money from the advantages those give to buy some other stuff... you probably would have to explain where you got 400,000 nuyen worth of stuff from if you went all in, but you could get a pretty decent amount of 'ware with a budget of 50-100k nuyen.

personally, i found that for the most part having characters with a split focus wasn't that hard in SR4. you wouldn't be quite as good in either area as if you specialized, but it could be done and you could have respectable dice pools in both areas. the major exception would be technomancers (in SR4 you're either all-in on being a technomancer or you're terrible in the matrix... which, to be fair, is better than SR5 where you can go all-in on being a technomancer and *still* be terrible in the matrix), and to a lesser extent a drone rigger (which required a lot of resources to be good at... i mean, you could be a good drone rigger and do something else reasonably well, so long as that something else didn't eat into your drone budget very much).

Agreed 100%! It also allows other characters to kinda keep up with anti-hacker defense. The big problem is that came about was the Agent Smith Bot-net. This can be avoided by making it so that each device has to have it's own individualized Agent and that an Agent can be bought as cracked software. This is so that a Hacker can't copy/paste Agents. If players have a problem with this then the GM should say this is how the world works... deal with it.



Remember some of the expensive items are expensive if you buy them on the black market. If, say, your character worked at Doc Wagon as an Combat EMT and he got that Synaptic Accelerator as a sign on bonus, then Doc Wagon is paying a fraction of that cost.

oh, absolutely.

i'm just saying that 4th edition was imo the most believable to have someone come up from the streets, rather than being former military, former HTR team, former corp security, former whatever that someone put half a million nuyen (or more) market value worth of 'ware into and then didn't worry too hard about it when that investment disappeared for some reason.

because whether or not docwagon payed 300k nuyen for that synaptic accelerator (or whatever) or a fraction of that, you can be pretty sure they didn't put that into you without planning to get their investment back out of it, and that plan doesn't call for their asset (ie you) disappearing to pursue a career as a hired criminal.

i'm just saying that when everything costs half a million nuyen or more to make a half- decent cybered up killing machine, your options for plausible backgrounds tend to be limited, but when you can pick up bits and pieces here and there for 10-20 thousand nuyen (possibly less with used 'ware) and potentially put together a decent character for 60 grand or similar, well, that's like a person who lives in a trailer and owns a ridiculously expensive car that's been modified with even more expensive parts for street racing; much more believable that this guy came up from the bottom than someone who's driving the comparative equivalent of a pristine formula-1 racecar around the barrens for some reason.

and that really fits the theme a lot better to me. i think it shows in the fiction too. maybe it was never just mentioned, but when i think of the shadowruners in the novels i remember, street samurai were more likely to be former (or current 'emeritus') gang members than former military, most of them probably come from the barrens and are SINless, and hate the corporations because they're outsiders that have been stuck living in the squalor and filth the corporations leave in their wake.

cheap gear just does that better, whether we're talking street samurai or decker. the million dollar man needs one heck of an explanation for how he wound up working for comparative peanuts constantly risking his life on behalf of people who not only wouldn't care if he died, but in some cases are literally planning on killing him the moment his usefulness to them is over, and how he got away from the organization that footed the bill. the 50,000 dollar man can be some nobody that nobody ever heard of, a completely disposable resource that the corps can use up and throw away when they're done, and nobody cares about.

An "easy" way of explaining it is that a hacker was able to go in and erase that data entry. My Combat medic mage had the positive quality of "Erased" and so that can get rid of uncomfortable records.
With what I just wrote above, you are absolutely correct. Cheap gear does make for a self made man a lot easier.

eh, having a super-talented hacker that wants to spend their entire life deleting everything about you every time someone talks to the people who will still remember performing surgery, training you, being your friends/coworkers/boss/etc and records that information, doesn't exactly feel too plausible. i mean, they may not be able to keep records of you on computer, but there are people who still know about you, and they should still be wondering where you are

but again, i'm not saying it's impossible to have a former-whatever that has managed to cut all ties, i'm just observing that from a setting perspective it's much more believable to have most shadowrunners come up from the streets without extremely large, powerful, well-funded organizations just writing them off for some reason, and it feels more like cyberpunk to me as well for most of them to be from the streets

Hence the reason I put easy in quotes.

My character's background is that he was a mage and his sister was a Technomancer. I used that as a reason he has the computer skills that he has. The "Erased" positive quality is a free sprite that liked him and his sister. The reason he is a 'Runner is because he's trying to find his sister (she's gone missing... Technomancer, megacorps, 'nuff said).