Shadowrun: Help the newbie, which game to start with

[Hyperversum]

Ehi there guys! The title says it all, I guess.

As soon as my first campaign as a GM for a group of new player (on my revised mix of D&D 3.5 and PF) is coming to an end, we are already discussing what to play next.

Being one of the two with an experience out of this campaign, I was asked to keep GMing (the other guy isn't a big fan of doing so, he is mostly a player) and decide by myself what to play next.
Obviously by title, I decided to take the chance to play Shadowrun. I am a player of the videogames who loves the setting, but who never could bring it into his tables to play.

Now: I am completely ignorant of the system itself and how the various edition are different I wanted to ask you to help out of this.
As a group, they have no problem with deep and complicated mechanics, if they add things to the table. D&D 3.5 has the fame of being extremely complicated, but I and the players both find that complexity adds a lot of control to the player.

So, deep mechanics aren't a problem, I don't ask which edition is the most easy to play, but which is "the best" making the player feel in control of those mechanics, no matter how complicated they are.

P.S: i have easy access to both 3, 4 and 5e. They are possessed by a person I know which would without a problem sell 'em to me for like 5 bucks

P.P.S. Speaking with other people at random, they encouraged me with playing 4e if I am unsure, because the fluff is a good mix of old fluff but modernized compared to older editions, and the rules are similar to WoD, so since I was also interested in that system.

[GrayDeath]

Depends.


Easiest: 5th Edition. Cheap, has books to "go back to the roots" and is oveall a well done iteration of the Shadowrun System.

Most Stuff: 3rd. Hands down. Its however rather....slow (as one could expect when well built characters roll 30+ exploding D6 vs variable Target numbers^^).

I have not really played 4th more than for a few one shots, but it seems to be more focussed on the High Tech aspect, augmented reality and such, which simply is at odds with my understanding of Shadowruns "Feel".

On a sidenot, I started in 2nd and played 3rd a lot back in the day. Its a chore, but has a lot more depth and style than later editions. Kind of similar to D&D really ^^

[Koo Rehtorb]

Earlier editions of Shadowrun are less bad.

[Satinavian]

It is not really as big a difference as with D&D editions. 4E and 5E are particularly close. (As 2E and 3E are)

3E has higher power level than the others, especially with progressing experience and ever higher numbers of rerolls. It also is the one edition where shots by professionals tend to actually hit, making combats faster as the number of rounds go and making ammunition less of an issue.

5E has special limits for the maximum number of successes you can count. Those are usually high enough that they don't matter, but severely limit those nearly superhuman performances shadowrunners could sometimes show in earlier additions.

All of them have reworked the matrix part of the rules. And none has managed to produce something really good. That is kind of a tradition that will probably go on until in the far future someone makes good matrix rules.

4E tried pushing the "hacking your gear during combat" idea to make hackers/deckers into combatants to solve the perceived problem of too much seperation between hacking adventure parts and other parts. But so far i have not seen a group really doing that. 5E still has this option but is less obnoxious about it.

[Lord Torath]

1E/2E have the best tone/feel. Regardless of which edition you play, the 1E/2E location source-books (Native American Nations 1&2, Seattle, Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America, Germany, Denver, London, etc.) are excellent and useful. 1E introduced a lot of fun slang (Chummers, Frag, Drek, etc.) that 2E expanded on, and 3E and later editions pretty much dropped.

Second Edition is may favorite, but I must confess my opinions of 4E & 5E are based solely on what I've read on these forums.

We've got a General Shadowrun Questions (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?512983-General-Shadowrun-Questions-III-Ya-like-that-Chummer) thread in the Older D&D/AD&D and Other Systems (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?60-Older-D-amp-D-AD-amp-D-and-Other-Systems) sub-forum.

[Satinavian]

As for tone/feel, starting from 3E it moves a bit from Cyperpunk to Postcyberpunk genre.

Also Editions 1-3... well, it shows that they were produced long before smartphones became a thing. They are visibly a future vision that is 30 years old.

[John Campbell]

If you're not afraid of complexity, and you want control over the mechanics... 3E, hands down.

They made major changes in the core mechanic between 3E and 4E, and those changes were directly aimed at reducing control over the mechanic in order to simplify it. They completely removed an axis of variability and lumped all of the stuff that affected it into the remaining axis, and because that completely broke it, they slapped a bunch of hard limits on things that previously had only soft limits or just the natural limitation of diminishing returns, in an effort to keep them within the range where the dumbed-down mechanic kind of works.

Among other things, this means that it's not unusual for starting characters to be the best they are ever allowed to be at the thing they do, with the only way to advance being to add a new thing to do.

I haven't actually played 5E, but from what I've heard, it does some things to address that last problem, making some of those hard limits more flexible, but it doesn't revert the change that actually caused the problem.

2E might fit your needs, too. 2E and 3E are pretty similar, and the differences are largely a matter of taste. Don't play 1E. It's... well, there's a lot of stuff in it that might have looked good on paper but doesn't actually play in any kind of reasonable fashion. At the very least, don't ever use an automatic weapon in 1E.

[Delta]

The problem with 3E is that it's incredibly easy to escalate to ridiculous levels, some spells, powers, a lot of stuff is simply ridiculously powerful, if you combine that with a pretty massive amount of rerolls characters will have at their disposal once you play a while and that karma pool keeps adding up, it can be a nightmare to run if you have a group that likes playing powerful characters (I know, I've run such games for way over a decade in 2E/3E)

Rules-wise, I'd recommend going with 5E. I'm not saying it doesn't has its flaws (because it does) or that it's a truly great system, but from what I gathered so far in my admittedly limited time, it works well enough.

Setting-wise, it's not quite that easy, from 2E, the setting has evolved constantly, from the 80s-based "japanese chrome and native american magic"-look of 1E/2E to the more colorful kitchen sink of 3E which then evolved into the wireless sleeker 4E, from a cyberpunk perspective, it was the step between the "godlike Super-AIs" of Neuromancer to the "ghosts in the machine" matrix of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. In general, most people will recommend to you what for them was the "good old days", so I'll try and refrain from that and just tell you that I honestly think 4E/5E is a superior rules system (of course, other people will disagree with me here), but no one here can tell you which style of SR you prefer. SR1/2 was a child of the 80s, SR3 of the 90s, SR4 came in the mid-2000s and all of them show the zeitgeist of their respective decade.

[Florian]

Oi, chummsky, that's a rather difficult question.

SR 1E/2E provide solid rules and have great fluff, but the fluff is pretty much dated by now and things will be a little bit absurd when you haven't started with those editions back in the day.

SR 3 somehow shares the same problems with D&D 3E, namely allowing too strong builds and drowning in a flood of splash books.

SR 4 is a solid revamp of the setting and rules, bringing both forward to the modern day and age. Prob is, they focussed too much on the tech, so both the "punk" issues as well as magic are pretty much on the sideline.

SR 5 has rock solid rules and manages, so far, to really support all possible archetypes pretty well. The big "but..." here is the fluff, with an extreme focus on the ongoing meta-plot. Jumping straight into 30 years of ongoing development can be a bit bewildering.

Personally, I´d use 5E for the rules and grab some of the Deep Shadows and Plot books of 4E, especially Atlas of the Sixth World and maybe the Seattle sourcebook.