sorry, But I've played the game a since it was published. And yeah, it took a few tries to wrap myself around the mechanics - but after that, I've not had any problems. Nor seen any 'Screwiness' witht he system.

Is it perfect? No (But No system is)

Could it uses some streamlining? Hell Yeah! The books definetly needed some reorganization.

Did some of the rules need fixing? Maybe - Decking and rigging didn't really need fixing as much as toned down and a way to integrate them fully with the team. It seems they are doing that with the 'wireless wizard' thing.

Does the game need new players? Yeah - Then Advertise. And I don't mean a blurb in a mag or three. Or just the Internet. I mean put the damn game in front of everyones face. Display stands. The Quickstart rules in pamphlet form at the regieter of every gaming shop. Cool poster. Contests. The works.

Did the rules need a conmplete rework? No. (Yeah, My opinion - and many others.)

I'm still not saying that the new rule system won't kick ass. I just don't see it as neccessary. See above posts.

What's wrong with the magic system? It's got a lot of conceptual details that are part of SR fiction, so whatever is wrong may not be fixable. Mechanically, I thought most of it worked pretty well. (With a few glitches, but everything has glitches.)

Sometimes they work differently because they do different things. Some of that is just inherent in the diversity of what can be accomplished with magic.

It would be nice to make them more consistent--knowing when the TN is 4 vs. 6 vs. ORT vs. something else is a bit tricky. But that's a pretty minor change. And they need to fix up the problems with some Force 1 spells being as good as Force 6 (which they introduced with SR3, in large part). Again, that's a pretty small change.

A few edits, a little playtesting, done. The basic structure of the magic system doesn't need to change to accommodate that.

So you actually want a different selection of spells than exist now, not just spells with cleaned-up mechanics? Or do you doubt that this set of spells can be cleaned up?

I'd prefer to have them at the very least all brought to the same standard. But I'm voting for a slash-and-burn approach, personally.

Some of the SR2 relics are just painful.

So, after reading all the posts here, I decided to jander over to the RPG.net forums, and take a look at what they were saying.

I waded through 30+ pages on SR4, and decided to run a little count. I counted 40 posts that were mostly pro-changes, 45 that were mostly con, 185 posts that were either neutral or had nothing to do with SR4, 32 posts of pure snark, 3 posts saying that Shadowrun should convert to D20, and 5 moderator warnings.

While I know this isn't a representative sample, I wouldn't say that the RPG world is much more enthusiastic about SR4 than we are.

Here, here, and here are three of them.

Thanks. Okay, went over them. Here's what I caught:

Current SR fans posting there are pretty much saying what we her at DS are sayin - Yay/Nay/Will See...

Old players are saying that they gave up becuase they thought the game was to complex, and that they would look at the new edition


Never played before are saying that they would look at it.

Okay, the people that gave up - So? They gave up becuase the ruleset was too complex?? Okkayyy - but for every one of those there were dozens that stuck with it, liked it, and continued to play it. They probably gave up on lots of other gams that they thought were too complex.

The 'never played' crowd? They'll try anything new. They probably would have tried SR4 No matter what - new rules, revised, or d20.

Oh, and there were several that posted to convert to d20.

Just what I persued, there was pretty much an equal amount of the fans/old fans/potential new players.