What's the best Shadowrun edition to get started in?

[Ignimortis]

To be fair 3k nuyen is about the profit you should be making per (early game) run. Of course if you've gone Street Sam you almost certainly took the ~250k or ~450k gear priority, so you'll only have to worry about it if you have to replace a gun. You can start with a dozen modded weapons without seriously cutting into your cyberware budget.

We are clearly not playing the same Shadowrun. If you're making 3k of profit (I assume you mean "after upkeep", i.e. lifestyle+bullets+etc are paid for), you will never advance. Any substantial upgrade is going to cost you at least 10-15k, and that's for something extremely cheap, like getting a couple points of standard-grade Orthoskin or a small-ish drone with a couple basic mods. That's still taking your profit from several runs. Even the 5e default payouts, which are remarkably bad at doing anything above "high street level", are more lenient, since it's pretty easy to get a 12-15k per head from most standard situations which did not go FUBAR. Since you almost do not advance, you do not get to graduate from "early game", either.

And, well, some upgrades cost 25k+ for quite basic things. You want an extra point of AGI? That's 32k. You'd have to save for 10 runs, and since a run is rarely if ever a single sesssion, this can go on for quite a while IRL. I'm not even gonna say anything about 100k+ upgrades, like a better vehicle or a better deck or a set of Wired/Synaptic above what you started with.

Our 5e standard was something like "5-7k per milk run that can be done in a day or two (and a single session), 15-20k per normal run that would take 2-3 sessions and some trouble, 30k+ (uncapped) for anything actually involving megacorps". Otherwise the only people who ever advance were Awakened. If you want to get anywhere meaningfully different in a year or two of play, mundanes need to make at least 500-600k pure profit. That does not include going grades of augs higher than Alpha outside of sheer necessity or any notable "spur of the moment" purchases - a single tricked-out Alphaware cyberarm would run you 80k at chargen and another 60k post-chargen, and getting your Wires/Synaptics to max will be 200k post-chargen (either due to Essence costs forcing you to improve grade of Wires, or the sheer price of Synaptics).

At the end of the day it's probably easier to just keep dice pools smaller. With Edge to reroll missed hits or add extra dice 10-12 in your speciality should be plenty.

The math doesn't work out with TN5 and 10-12 dice. If you roll 12 dice to sneak, the 8-dice Perception rentacop is going to notice you far more often than you would want to.

What I think is the most viable decision for dicepools, long-term, is:
1) Set TN to 4.
2) Cut all dicepools by a third. What used to be 18 dice is now 12 dice, what used to be 10 dice is now 6 dice, etc. This is achieved through making stats and skills scale at reduced rates (i.e. max human stat is 4 (6), troll STR is 6 (8), max skill is 6), plus...
3) Reduce all upward scaling factors massively. Your standard runners start out at perhaps 9-10 dice (stat 4-5, skill 4, major boost like Smartlink or adept power or focus +1). There are no stacking minor bonuses - you get a bonus to one task from one source and that's it. Smartlink interferes with your subconscious adept superhuman targeting power. Foci of the same type do not stack.

Your only advancement numerically will be getting your stat to 6 (aug metatype max), skill to 6, and your major boosts to +2. The very best of the best roll 14-16 dice, but those are not chargen characters. They'd have a limit of 10 anyway, so no point actually instituting limits. The chargen runners roll 10 dice and thus cannot possibly roll more than 10 hits, which is incredibly unlikely and would happen more often if they rolled 15-16 dice at TN5.

[Anonymouswizard]

We are clearly not playing the same Shadowrun. If you're making 3k of profit (I assume you mean "after upkeep", i.e. lifestyle+bullets+etc are paid for), you will never advance. Any substantial upgrade is going to cost you at least 10-15k, and that's for something extremely cheap, like getting a couple points of standard-grade Orthoskin or a small-ish drone with a couple basic mods. That's still taking your profit from several runs. Even the 5e default payouts, which are remarkably bad at doing anything above "high street level", are more lenient, since it's pretty easy to get a 12-15k per head from most standard situations which did not go FUBAR. Since you almost do not advance, you do not get to graduate from "early game", either.

My assumptions worked under the idea of ~25k split between five runners, with a few thousand going towards run related expenses (bribes, specialist tools, repairing the van...) and ~500 having to go on Lifestyle. But then again we are clearly playing different games.

And, well, some upgrades cost 25k+ for quite basic things. You want an extra point of AGI? That's 32k. You'd have to save for 10 runs, and since a run is rarely if ever a single sesssion, this can go on for quite a while IRL. I'm not even gonna say anything about 100k+ upgrades, like a better vehicle or a better deck or a set of Wired/Synaptic above what you started with.

Your players do legwork? I've yet to see a group not default to Pink Mohican play, when I'd prefer something in between it and Mirrorshades*. Plus considering how much decks and reflex boosts cost I'd be surprised if you upgrade without setting aside a year's worth of pay.

* Which is apparently now known as Black Trenchcoat?

Our 5e standard was something like "5-7k per milk run that can be done in a day or two (and a single session), 15-20k per normal run that would take 2-3 sessions and some trouble, 30k+ (uncapped) for anything actually involving megacorps". Otherwise the only people who ever advance were Awakened. If you want to get anywhere meaningfully different in a year or two of play, mundanes need to make at least 500-600k pure profit. That does not include going grades of augs higher than Alpha outside of sheer necessity or any notable "spur of the moment" purchases - a single tricked-out Alphaware cyberarm would run you 80k at chargen and another 60k post-chargen, and getting your Wires/Synaptics to max will be 200k post-chargen (either due to Essence costs forcing you to improve grade of Wires, or the sheer price of Synaptics).

I mean, I start them on milk runs for gangers or the like before throwing them at a major corp or something. That's why I specified an early game run, after a couple of months of play 5-10 for a single days work is reasonable.

Honestly considering the price of augs many Street Sam should probably begin the game in debt to somebody powerful or have a Molly Millions style indentured servitude backstory. Wired Reflexes alone should be a year's work for an experienced Sam, at least in my view.

(Honestly what mostly killed my groups' income was probably not looking for additional paydata.)

The math doesn't work out with TN5 and 10-12 dice. If you roll 12 dice to sneak, the 8-dice Perception rentacop is going to notice you far more often than you would want to.

What I think is the most viable decision for dicepools, long-term, is:
1) Set TN to 4.
2) Cut all dicepools by a third. What used to be 18 dice is now 12 dice, what used to be 10 dice is now 6 dice, etc. This is achieved through making stats and skills scale at reduced rates (i.e. max human stat is 4 (6), troll STR is 6 (8), max skill is 6), plus...
3) Reduce all upward scaling factors massively. Your standard runners start out at perhaps 9-10 dice (stat 4-5, skill 4, major boost like Smartlink or adept power or focus +1). There are no stacking minor bonuses - you get a bonus to one task from one source and that's it. Smartlink interferes with your subconscious adept superhuman targeting power. Foci of the same type do not stack.

Your only advancement numerically will be getting your stat to 6 (aug metatype max), skill to 6, and your major boosts to +2. The very best of the best roll 14-16 dice, but those are not chargen characters. They'd have a limit of 10 anyway, so no point actually instituting limits. The chargen runners roll 10 dice and thus cannot possibly roll more than 10 hits, which is incredibly unlikely and would happen more often if they rolled 15-16 dice at TN5.

Different people will consider different amounts of failure acceptable. But I choose 10-13 because it's roughly what 4e expected (5-6 stat, 4-6 skill, 0-2 powers/augmentations).

[Ignimortis]

My assumptions worked under the idea of ~25k split between five runners, with a few thousand going towards run related expenses (bribes, specialist tools, repairing the van...) and ~500 having to go on Lifestyle. But then again we are clearly playing different games.

I tend to work with "per head" amounts and assume that no player is actually living a Street/Squatter lifestyle for long. Most of them end up with Low or Middle depending on character.

Your players do legwork? I've yet to see a group not default to Pink Mohican play, when I'd prefer something in between it and Mirrorshades*. Plus considering how much decks and reflex boosts cost I'd be surprised if you upgrade without setting aside a year's worth of pay.

* Which is apparently now known as Black Trenchcoat?

All games that I've either GM'd or played in did extensive legwork, with it potentially constituting its' own session or several days of forum-post-style exchanges of requests and rolls and information on off-session days.

I mean, I start them on milk runs for gangers or the like before throwing them at a major corp or something. That's why I specified an early game run, after a couple of months of play 5-10 for a single days work is reasonable.

Honestly considering the price of augs many Street Sam should probably begin the game in debt to somebody powerful or have a Molly Millions style indentured servitude backstory. Wired Reflexes alone should be a year's work for an experienced Sam, at least in my view.

(Honestly what mostly killed my groups' income was probably not looking for additional paydata.)

Well, my general issue is that a couple months IC can take half a year OOC, unless you stick to the "one run per month" schema. One particular game even took an OOC year to resolve a month and a half, because we played it, basically, day-to-day with timeskips being measured in hours and maybe days, but never weeks/months. Due to that, we ran practically every week and sometimes twice per week IC.

[LibraryOgre]

Part of why I like my Savage Worlds hack is that cyberware and similar upgrades are taken off the money track, and become part of edges. Save your advances and get more cyberware; use your nuyen for upkeep and weaponry.

[Anonymouswizard]

I tend to work with "per head" amounts and assume that no player is actually living a Street/Squatter lifestyle for long. Most of them end up with Low or Middle depending on character.

Oh, I work out rewards on a per-character basis. But I find if you just give the group a lump sum nine times out of ten they'll split it evenly.

6e recommends one run should bring in enough for a month of Middle lifestyle (5,000 nuyen per head). Which to mean seems reasonable, most teams probably run two to four times a month, giving a yearly profit of 180,000 nuyen. Not enough to afford multiple big upgrades, but still significant (in modern money that's like having $300,000 disposable income after rent and food).

All games that I've either GM'd or played in did extensive legwork, with it potentially constituting its' own session or several days of forum-post-style exchanges of requests and rolls and information on off-session days.

I was lucky if they thought to look up blueprints.

Well, my general issue is that a couple months IC can take half a year OOC, unless you stick to the "one run per month" schema. One particular game even took an OOC year to resolve a month and a half, because we played it, basically, day-to-day with timeskips being measured in hours and maybe days, but never weeks/months. Due to that, we ran practically every week and sometimes twice per week IC.

At that speed surely nobody got any meaningful advancement at all? Going by 6e because it's what I have to hand with a bit of luck you could recover from cybersurgery (so street sams are happy), but spells and complex forms take a week to learn, and attributes and skills take months. Maybe pre-6e skills take weeks instead of months, but that still means you could have raised your key skill once.

If you ignore the training time rules then year, I guess you need to be pulling in enough nuyen to buy a house per week just to keep up.


On the topic of 6e, I picked it up, I've had a short look, and it's fine. It makes it clear that Anarchy was partially a test run of ideas, and I actually like the idea of swapping from 'favourable circumstances give dice' to 'favourable circumstances grant Edge'. I honestly think it's probably easier for people new to Shadowrun than people used to the old editions. There is weirdness, like the new special hacker datajacks that allow you to do an okay job at hacking with a bad deck (and decks just straight up losing Data Processing and Firewall),
but it'll probably work in play.

Also metahumans have to actually pay for their high attributes now. That's fine, and I'm sure that Body/Strength 1 trolls will still be extremely rare, plus it's slashed the cost of being a meta rather significantly. Overall it's not terrible, but compared to earlier editions it's mostly a sidestep