My 3 person SR group fizzled out almost a year ago now and there is no indication that it will ever start up. I am sick of AD&D it's so vanilla and I"ve been playing that for almost 10 years and I'm bored with it. I'm driven to play SR and I work hard at creating atmosphere and preserving the flavor (reading all the pb's helps). All the people in my AD&D group are totally against the "whacked out" SR system and they don't like the astronomic amount of complex rules systems governing everything. Only one person is into getting started. They are all drawn to the setting but they don't want to deal with the rules. How can I convince them to give it a try? One person said "i didn't like cyberpunk so I don't wanna play it". Heh.

Methadone?

Get them to agree to a con-style one-shot. Give them pre-made characters, and put them through one run. A fairly easy run. Try to get them to do a little sneaky-sneak to get the SR feel, but make sure the D&D junkies get to throw down with some guards, as well.
From there, they either like the game or they don't.

Present it as something you would like to try for a little while, not something they have to "switch" or "convert" to permanently. I like the one-shot idea.

If you can't get them interested in a one-shot you probably can't get them interested in anything longer term. Try getting them interested in Spycraft instead.

Give them simple PCs to start. Either adepts or skill-freak mundanes. Then put them through a gunfight and a few uses of some secondary skills to show them the basics of a success test. After they accept that, indroduce the open test or the opposed test (stealth infiltration or bar-room brawl) then show the other last. Once they can accept the three basic types of rolls, let them look at the chargen rules and help each one through creating a character. Any one that wants to invoke rules not in your demos should practise with you in 1 on 1 settings until they either change their minds or you both know the rules well enough.

If that doesn't work, I'm sure you can find a nice blunt object and declare it "The +8 Club of D&D Smacking" and invoke it any time they talk about D&D.

Give them some archetypes and then run Food Fight!

I've never found SR rules to be that complex... really you can run on the fly simply by using the basic success test format for everything except combat.... and I somehow doubt that combat is the part your munchie-mates are worried over. The rest is just a set of formulas for calculating TNs, really when you get down to it. Even the magic system can be simplified into a few very concise rules... The only part I've had consistent issues with is decking and maybe rigging.

You might want to try introducing them to the basics using the pared-down rules in the Shadowrun Quickstart Rules book which also contains a short simple adventure.

After they get the hang of the basics they'll want to go into the more complex stuff themselves.

I always try to bring SR in through gateway drugs, I mean, media. Show then Johnny Mnemonic, or Blade Runner, or Wild Zero. Then, in the flickering half light of the credits, ask them, "So, cool, huh?" They respond, "Yeah." Discretely remove the SR3 rules from where you've been hiding them, as you say "It is cool. Want to play it? Here's how."

Oh come on! It wasn't a GREAT movie by any means, but it wasn't THAT bad. And it happens to fit SR almost perfectly...

With the exception of magic.

Another suggestion if they're worrying about "complex rules" and such. Give them NPCs for rigging and decking if they need/want it. Keep the number of books to a minimum. Start them out with the BBB, then slowly mix in the rest. Yes, they may be D&D players used to all sorts of supplements, but SR is still a little more complex than "roll d20, add modifier. Is it higher or lower than *foo*". Give 'em something simple. I personally like Food Fight. If they like it and want to continue, then you can slowly start phasing in other things.

I would like to second L.D's idea of running Food Fight. It worked great on converting 3 D&D players to Shadowrun. Now they can't get enough. It also served as a great way for people to learn the combat system.

I was going to recommend a really good movie for SR feel, but the bloody name escapes me. Come on, fellow media junkies, help me out! It's the one where the "hero" is a skuzzy BTL dealer who comes into possession of a chip depicting the murder of a prominent black musician. Juliette Lewis plays the singer our hero used to shag.

Oh wait, I remember, it's Strange Days. Definitely a good movie for the underworld movers and shakers of SR.

Get new players. Seriously. This shouldn't a hard transition, especially if they've been gaming since 2nd Edition (SR too complex? What are they smoking?). I got into D&D in high school, and played it through college (we never did any other games, I think mostly because our GMs were genius storytellers), where I met more gamers, and when one of them said, "Hey, there's this great game called SR, how I about I run a couple sessions in that?" Only one of my group objected, saying he didn't want to play a game that was nothing but dice rolling (his older brother had run an SR campaign when he'd been younger, and it had been nothing but combat; we were able to get him to give it a try, and playing with a good GM, he quickly changed his mind).

If for various reasons you can't ditch these guys, mention that it's got guns. After so long with D&D, the thought that you could engage in combat without almost having to be in melee was novelly appealing on its own. If they're too close minded to y'know, even consider playing a different _game_... well, I've got no help for you.

No kidding, let's hear it for Strange Days. That movie has just the right level of disgustingness, too.

I can't believe you guys are saying the rules aren't complex. I understand them just fine but there is a seperate book of nothing but rules for each type of combat and alot of them are amorphous.

Now I'm not saying that 3.5 ed. can't have complex situations but most of these can be resolved from memory, rather than picking up one of 4 200+ page books and sifting through to find the explanation (or lack thereof) of a certain rule/modifier for SR3.

Most of these guys don't like rules lawyering or arguing and SR3 is just one giant open sore for a rules lawyer to dump salt in. I think that is what is keeping a couple of them wary.

I thought the explicit point of D20 was to rules-lawyer and blatantly power game.

No, that's the explicit point of Munchkin D20. It's an implicit point of regular D20.

I would create a dark and gritty city (something like Greyhawk) where they PCs are pawns of the higher powers, caught in a battle between the church, city council, king, and thieves guild. They must walk the thin line of the pious, play the councilors off one another, dodge the queen and her seductions, all while keeping the guild master at bay. In other words, play Shadowrun using AD&D rules.

Kanada brings up a good idea. Try something set in either Tir country, although I'm thinking Tir na Nog might work best. A land full of critters, er monsters, that could attack randomly (as D&Ders like) while still serving a roaming adventure in which the merry little band of techno-elves serve their Tir lords and ladies. Throw in the rumblings of a dragon without tipping your hand or revealing said dragon and maybe have the teams goal something akin to a minor relic of some type. D&Ders love that kind of drek.

It would probably help to tailor your descriptions of their setting to something that they're used to with their traditional D&D fair. For instance, rather than describe the low hum the neon lights make under the black laquer bar, describe the musty smell the common room of the bar gives off as the step into the threshold. Might not hurt to have an underground portion of the run either. Doesn't have to be a dungeon, in fact that would be pretty lame, IMO. Rather, give them the end of the run in a sewer system in old England. Creepy locale and it'll have that old-school brickwork and table map that they're after.

Be interested to hear if you can sway them. Oh, and I don't really think that SR is any harder to learn than the D20 system. There's more detail to it, sure. But the basics are fairly easy to grasp. I think the hard thing is "relearning" something once ones' minds are polluted with D20itis.

Your problem here isn't the D20 system, and it probably won't be solved by making a fantasy slanted adventure. You're problem is close minded players (defintly not exclusive to D20; I've seen people around these boards who"d sooner give up their liver than their dice pool). Maybe forget about PC deckers to start with, and just try running an adventure that doesn't need anything beyond the BBB. One book worth of rules shouldn't be too much for them, and if they decide they like it, you can expand out from there.

decker, rigger, anything can be played with the BBB alone. sure the details are not there but there is enough info for it to be playable...