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Shadowrun: Which edition?
Esh
Tending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered User regular
Tending bar. FFXIV. Motorcycles.Portland, ORRegistered User regular
I played Shadowrun years ago (first and second editions) and I've been thinking about getting back into it. I know they're up to 4th edition now which appears to be an entirely redesigned system. Can anyone recommend a particular edition with the pros and cons?
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After playing 4th edition fairly extensively,. and having played a bit of 3rd as well, I can tell you that the system is very VERY well redesigned, streamlined, etc. 4th edition is spectacular in my opinion, with a lot of the excess rules simply removed and their existence covered up by nicer, smoother rulings.
Also, I like the later setting better (another 10 years, add technomancers, etc) but that's a matter of opinion.
Shadowrun 3 is your best bet if you still like the idea of hackers staying in the apartment during the run, and some guards standing around him to make sure nobody breaks in. In Shadowrun 4 you need to be close-ish to the node to get over to it, and with the addition of AR hacking, the hacker can actually take part in the meat mission while doing hacky stuff, so it doesn't bog down nearly as much as the decker thing.
Technomancers can hack in from anywhere? Yeah, that's just dumb. 3rd or 2nd are what I'm looking at now I guess.
Deckers (3) had the ability to surf nodes as long as they wanted, so you could hack someplace across town from your apartment or whatever, unless there was no access to it at all.
Technomancers and hackers (4) don't have that ability since you can only access a node if you are in range of it, but since the matrix is all made up of wireless nodes, they don't need to "jack in" to anything. They still can (they call it hotsimming), and it makes them better at what they do, but they can hack in augmented reality while still interacting with meatspace,
That's what I meant. I like the idea of "jacking in".
Is 3rd better than 2nd?
I never played second edition, so I couldn't help you there.
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If you go to third or before you will quickly be asked by your players why their iPhones can do things the deckers can't. More to the point you will quickly run into the "Break Time!" for the majority of the group anytime the hacker tries to do anything at all. Totally in 2nd and earlier which even has a time dilation effect for hackers.
I'll have to get ahold of the books.
In 3rd and before, we always made decking an npc job, just cause if a PC played a decker the rest of the group got to take a good 2 hour nap in the middle of the session.
It was just as bad with Cyberpunk 2020....god I loved that game though.
Also, I mean if you don't like technomancers, you can just not have them in there. It's a flavor of hacking some people don't quite enjoy, but the advantages in the whole rest of the party having any fun during hacking are critical, and most hackers aren't technomancers anyway.
That said, I totally understand the desire to go back to the old rules and play the crap out of them, because they did sacrifice some really fun content. But if you're going to do that, I'd suggest an all or nothing approach to decking. Everybody's a decker and you use the full ruleset, or anyone with decking ability gets a much reduced and simplified ruleset with game focus on real world content (or no deckers at all). I've never seen a situation that mixed real world characters with full decking rules that didn't bore the crap out of all players, depending on which part of the game they were waiting for. YMMV.
If it's something involved you can always do cutting back and forth, like they would do it in the movies, because that's more entertaining.
Shadowrun 4th edition as a whole breaks down at low-end dice pools (less than 4) and high end dice pools (more than 18), but if you manage to calibrate your game to be in the middle, it's pretty good. My current 4th edition campaign is skirting the high end of the extreme (the combat monsters roll 18 to 20 dice regularly without Edge), and we are definitely seeing things break down. My character managed to stab a Spirit with Immunity to Normal Weapons and rip it apart (you shouldn't be able to do this). Another character killed a person outright with a single taser dart (which normally only does 6 stun damage).
As a side note, I highly suggest running cover as a positive defensive dice pool rather than a penalty to offensive dice pool, like the default Anniversary Edition rules state. In fact, I would run anything that is under the player's control as a modification to their own dice pool instead of the random assortment given in the rules (like wearing a Chameleon suit should give +4 to Stealth, not -4 to Perception). They are statistically equivalent anyway, and it makes life easier. The whole point of running with static target numbers with dice pools is to streamline the interaction between the GM and player in terms of "What do I roll?", but SR4A does a poor job of doing this.
By the way, in Shadowrun 4th edition, pretty much everyone can be a hacker. You just have to buy a high end commlink and high end programs, and boosh, you are a decent hacker. You won't be cutting into Zurich Orbital, but you'll get past most Device Rating 3 and 4 systems (which pretty much everything is in the Shadowrun universe).
If you go old school with variable target numbers (still my favorite), go with 3rd edition rather than 2nd edition. 3rd edition is a refinement of 2nd edition, and not a massive leap like 3rd to 4th. The rules in 3rd edition are more solid and have fewer exceptions.
This is false, at least the last part. You just have to be able to "connect the dots" to the node you want to jack into. You can still hack across the town if you want, as long as there are sufficient signal devices between you and your target. One trick is to take a bunch of disposable commlinks and litter them around a target so that you can snake around their wireless blocking physical security. You can also still put an optical tap into the wires going into a house, if you want to do a hard hack. It's a simple Hardware skill check to do that.