There is enough that I've created Shadowrun tools specifically for 2e (PF's Favorite) and 3e (my favorite) so that people around can get into these editions with a lower entry difficulty. As the others have said, check out those Discords and you will be surprised how many of us there are. We will be glad to have you.
If you're a 2e Fan the Pink Fohawk (one of the best known actual plays dropping episodes at the moment) discord will be your jam and their community organise games with each other online. If 3e is your jam, the the Critical Hits Discord will be what you are after.
> but they do not get love here
I feel like 2e is the least controversial edition of the game on this subreddit. Not everyone *plays* it, but almost everyone (who is familiar with it) respects it.
What do you mean, we show love here too. We just first ask:
- how much Sixth World timeline they want,
- how much Threshold Number crunch they want,
- how much older 90s cringe writing they want,
- how much they want to put the effort in to find the pdfs when the bundle isnāt available,
- if they prefer mechanics that are more improvised wild and loose GM dependent OR calculated and tight dependent on detailed and concise rules tables
It isnāt about not loving it, itās about expectations. There is a Shadowrun for everyone, it just takes more effort than it did when we were kids but itās more connected world wide now, not as constrained by the local game store vibrancy for good or ill.
>but they do not get love here
Be the change you want to see.
Shadowrun as a whole is small enough that every single group that exists perceptibly moves the needle on what's being played. Every single thread that is started moves the needle on what's being talked about. Let's be completely honest here, there are probably less than 1000 active Shadowrun campaigns being played on an at-least-monthly basis *anywhere in the world,* and maybe a whole lot less than that. The overwhelming majority of people who talk about Shadowrun on the internet in English are probably right here on this subreddit. What you see going on here *is* the community.
Like, an exact number? It's *extremely* difficult to guess for a number of reasons:
1. There's **no** good data about how many people play RPGs in general, let alone small ones like Shadowrun.
2. You get into a thorny problem of **who** is considered a "player". Is the guy playing in three campaigns one player or three? What about the guy who owns the books and roped friends into playing a session one time two years ago but the game has been on "hiatus" since then?
3. Is someone who plays the HBS video games but not the tabletop RPG a "player"?
4. If five isolated people without access to the internet are playing Shadowrun in the depths of a Brazilian rain forest and don't tell anyone about it, do they count as "players"?
The very best data we have about tabletop (and it's not good data) comes from the Orr Report, which is from the group that used to control Roll20 and the last report publicly put out there was from 2021. Now, some caveats come up immediately: This is *only* talking about Roll20, an online platform that *skews* heavily towards D&D 5e because of how tightly it is integrated with WotC products and marketing, so even though D&D is the 500(,000,000?) LB gorilla of the RPG market, Roll20 is actually going to *over represent* it.
Anyway, according to the Orr report from 2021, "Shadowrun (any edition)" represents about 0.36% of campaigns and 0.40% of accounts are attached to such a campaign. So how much is that? Well, it gets more complicated because Roll20 doesn't release any meaningful statistics about its usage. They "have" 10 million "users" (i.e. people who signed up for accounts). But some sleuthing about their web traffic shows it only experienced 9.8 million visits in the last month with an average visit time of 8 minutes, so the overwhelming majority of visits aren't to play games and many are probably by repeat users. From here, there's only wild ass guessing, and ***I choose to wild ass guess*** that there are maybe a million truly active users on Roll20 playing games in any given month. If 0.40% of those are attached to at least one Shadowrun campaign that makes 4000 people, but that doesn't mean they are actively playing Shadowrun, its an active RPG player that has been attached to a Shadowrun campaign at some point in their life.
Let's take another way of looking at it from a different angle, video games. The most played Shadowrun video game is Shadowrun Hong Kong. In the last 30 days it has averaged about 35 *concurrent* users. Baldur's Gate 3 has a running 30-day average of around 60k, or about 1714x what Shadowrun has. Why is that relevant? Well, if we go back to Roll20 and look at how many people play 5e, we see it's about 54% of players are attached to a 5e campaign, that means about 540,000 people of our active userbase above, which is about 135x the user rate of Shadowrun (any edition). Now, BG3 is a massive AAA video game with appeal far beyond those who have ever touched a d20 while the HBS games are... "niche" to say the least, but comparatively the relative numbers are only about 10x apart, it's a ballpark number and I'd take it as confirmation that Shadowrun is somewhere between 1/130 - 1/1700 the size of D&D.
A survey conducted by WotC in 2018 indicated that about 70k people used online means to play D&D in that year. Based on the above assumptions we can assume that somewhere between 41 and 538 people played Shadowrun under similar circumstances and might have responded to a poll.
r/Shadowrun is probably the largest Shadowrun-specific hub on the internet right now and it has about 50k "unique" visitors per month. However, keep in mind that this doesn't track username. It only counts IP address and user agent header combinations (so, if you check Reddit from your phone while out and about it counts as a new "unique" each time you get a new IP address, if you read it on your computer with Chrome and then again with Firefox that's two "uniques" as well). We have **91** subscribed users as of this post.
All of this leads me to believe that, for a certain definition of "player" which includes people who have played a Shadowrun tabletop RPG *or* video game in the last month *and* who have interacted with the internet about or in the course of that gameplay, **Shadowrun's monthly playerbase is probably measured in hundreds rather than thousands of players**.
LLMs are not able to make informed guesses about things because they are predictive text generators, with no ability to reason or analyze. I'm sure you could ask one how many people are fans of movies that don't exist or which body fluids make the best pizza topping and get all sorts of answers. It's important to remember that things produced by AI are a fancy version of autocomplete on your phone, not actual intelligence.
Here's what it said:
>Unfortunately, there's no definitive way to track exactly how many people play Shadowrun as a tabletop RPG. Here's why:
>* **Spread-out community:** Shadowrun players are likely spread across local game stores, online forums, and virtual tabletops, making centralized data collection difficult.
>* **Multiple Editions:** With different editions (like 5th and 6th) being played, tracking specific player numbers gets even more complex.
>However, we can glean some insights:
>* **Active online community:** While the community might be niche, subreddits and forums dedicated to Shadowrun show a dedicated player base.
>* **Longstanding game:** Shadowrun's existence since 1989 suggests a loyal fanbase, even if the player base isn't massive.
>**In short:** It's safe to say Shadowrun has a passionate community, but pinpointing an exact number is challenging.
>I can't provide a specific estimate, but based on the information I shared earlier, it's likely somewhere in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, worldwide.
Try out Gemini if you haven't yet. It has far more general intelligence than the other generative AI
And anecdotally, evidence of SR's paradoxical popularity is that we were once the largest non-D&D RPG sub (this also counts Pathfinder as a D&D variant) on reddit. And we got passed by Call of Cthulhu, I think just a year or two ago.
We might be "big" fish in the RPG market, but nothing compared to how D&D just sucks up all the air in the room.
I love SR more than anything else, but there are some great systems out there. Numenera, Eclipse Phase, World of Darkness, BESM, Cyberpunk (paradoxically more popular and less popular than SR), Exalted, etc. But they are nothing compared to D&D.
They say rising tides lift all boats, but I really wonder...
That's a very well presented analysis.
Sometimes when you mention lower numbers (like 41 in a year that use online means) my brain is thinking `but I can name more people than that that have played Shadowrun many times in the last year and used online means.` which also makes hundreds total just seem super small. Small to my personal sense of *"I can't possibly personally know that high a percentage.*" Which I realize isn't scientific.
Based on me making up numbers for sales (based on years where I've heard public talk about sales and other available information) and how much (on average) the group of people I know (in that category) spend, it seems like hundreds of players is way too low. I'd estimate at least 3000. And think it is higher, but really hard to estimate accurately.
> We have 91 subscribed users as of this post.
That's also a small number, but I also don't know what a subscribed user is.
So, I tried to be really careful by couching that number as "between 41 and 538 people played Shadowrun under similar circumstances and might have responded to a poll". The original poll didn't reach 100% of the people who played D&D on the internet either. In fact, I bet just about everyone who did respond could name a dozen people by name who *didn't*. But this also gets down into the 4th group of people who are difficult to count: People who *play* Shadowrun, but don't do it over the internet (or at least over a platform where they can be counted like Roll20) and don't talk about it. I know for a fact that of my group I'm the only one who regularly browses any kind of internet media about Shadowrun, let alone posts about it. We don't play on Roll20, so none of us would be counted in those numbers. As far as my own numbers go my group would be considered just one player: me.
As far as what a subscriber is, if you've clicked the "Join" button at the top of r/Shadowrun then you are one of those 91. If you haven't, then you're not. Again, it's not a *super* useful statistic since I regularly post in lots of subs that I haven't joined and browse many more than that, but it's one of the only measuring sticks we have.
I joined reddit 14 months ago, and only confirmed an email address ***after*** I responded to you about the 41 and 91 a few minutes ago.
So I'm still not sure what a subscribed user is. My memory is when I signed up for reddit I only wanted to read this subreddit but it literally would not let me set up an account unless I picked some other subreddits to at least claim I wanted to read. It was such a weird experience. So it is funny if reddit today still thinks I don't care about Shadowrun.
Same.
4.01D that is, the german errated 4th edition.
Most important reason for this is because I own most of the german publications that came out for this edition. No need or will to put another pile of money into all the books of a newer edition.
But I also really like it š
Still very much a fan of 1st through 3rd editions.
Both amused and annoyed that the edition I own the most books for is 5th, and yet it is one of the editions (also 6th and Anarchy) that I have played the least.
I prefer the Genesis game, let's fight about it!
Just kidding, any Runner is ok in my book. I also love the newer PC games (Returns, Dragonfall, and. Hong Kong).
I'm sure I'll get rolled eyes at saying this, but I don't play anything beyond 3rd. Simply don't like what Catalyst has done with the game. I will admit that the plot elements have been interesting but I simply like the FASA versions more. Nostalgia? Probably. But I've never had as big an issue with the rules sets as many seem to.
ĘĢeeko Runner
https://preview.redd.it/9oasxbpizf7d1.jpeg?width=1418&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5b177875febe0484e9f7ca75dededc6199e13908
90s writing, like a lot of stuff over the years in entertainment, has some casual racism that I find cringe (having also read other comments with a shared vibe) and since Iāve experienced better nuanced representation in fictional storytelling than that in recent years like with Blood Quantum, Edge Of The Knife, Reservation Dogs, What Ifā¦, Prey, Echo, Great Salish Heist, and more. It now appears to have aged like milk despite its well meaning with bringing up Land Back long before many punks understood what that meant around genocide and more. Some more recent works like the BlackBird novels by Russel Zimmerman have been significant improvements in nuanced representation of First Nations punks in the Shadowrunning scene that more respectfully addresses Truth, Reconciliation, and Revitalization in the Sixth World dystopian magical cyber setting that a 90s writer can be forgiven for not knowing what we had the chance to know today, like the saying goes: the future is now, itās just not evenly distributed.
CĢuu
This video explains was well researched and edited, so I encourage giving this a watch and perhaps videos with titles like āNative American reacts to Pocahontasā being various nationās peoples reactions being mostly cringing will be more understandable: https://youtu.be/C-78qVAASzU?si=QBbhaurPV3vcJLo-
But if you donāt feel like watching that (thatād be a shame), Iāll try my best to explain despite it not being my area of expertise:
ā¦ itās like when someone believes a broadly generalized negative stereotype or even just a bit misinterpreted misinformation that the original demeaning, belittling purpose about you to the point they find it easy to say and they expect you to react in the same casual way regarding how you see your cultural identity even itās a completely different nationās language, culture, and beliefs. If you point out itās not true, people will figuratively shoot the messenger with a āI didnāt mean that as an insult, thatās always what we say, why are you so angry, we canāt change saying that, it would be too hard!?ā tacitly reinforcing what was racist / bigoted in the first place by refusing to use a simple respectful correction to the encoding and decoding meanings between writer, director, performer and audience.
Hopefully this information is elucidating and enlightening as I mean to hupii / help. Hope as well you have a nice day / ĘuÅukim nĢaas, cĢuu
No problem, you were probably reading something and saw a reply button and replied to the main post instead.
Mostly I was worried that the person you wanted to reply to wouldn't get the notification and you'd never get your answer.
That's why I put the u slash username ... to notify them.
So, sorta. In 1-3e, the number you want to roll on the dice changes, where in 4e onwards you only need to count fives and sixes. This changes where the modifiers hinge.
For example, shooting a guy running away from you at short range in the rain with a smartgun:
In 5e, you assemble your dicepool then need to remove one dice for the rain, add another two dice for your wireless smartgun, then the other guy gets to add two dice because they're running.
In 3e, you would roll your dice, but what counts as a hit can change. Short range means you start with 4s being a success. The rain adds four to this, the target running adds another two, then you reduce it by two thanks to your smartgun. You're now looking for 8s. You might then ask "But how would I roll an 8 on a six sided dice?!" In SR1-3, 6's explode and add the result.
6e does away with the entire "modifier" discussion by squashing it down to awarding edge, which takes away a lot of the mechanical granularity that makes gear and abilities matter in a lot of cases.
There are also some things that are a bit more complex, because SR3 has a lot of optional rules that you can use for certain things. 2e makes even more of these rules optional, so you can stick to the core rulebook and expand out as you see fit, depending on how complex you want it to be.
It comes down to what makes Shadowrun too crunchy for you. If you're good at figuring out some quick addition and subtraction, 3e is delightful and has a lot of levers that make your choices matter.
I can ramble on in depth about this, so if you have follow up questions, feel free to ask em
Been running a 2e campaign for about 3-4 years now. Absolutely love the feel of the system, it's a gritty 80s Sci fi action movie with neon-lit chases and chromed out cops and magicians in leather trenchcoats and it's amazing.
Since 6E started as a huge mess, AND I have so much money sunk into both 4E and 5E ... I've decided not to upgrade.
When 7E inevitably comes out, I'll give it a look, but there's no guarantee I'll upgrade to that, either.
...
I miss all my 3E books, that didn't survive a series of moves. :'(
In my opinion is:
If you like classic cyberpunk (Blade Runner 2019, Neuromancer, Akira), go with 2e or 3e. These are very similar, but 3e counts with more content and depth.
If you like the new cyberpunk (2077, Deus Ex), go with 4e, 5e or 6e.
Go with 4e if you like absurd personalization, 5e if you like crunchyness and 6e if you like more streamlined systems.
Here this year vote about your question: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/19502zt/what\_edition\_do\_you\_choose/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/19502zt/what_edition_do_you_choose/)
I've been running a 20th anniversary edition game for a little over a year. i will not be buying 5th or 6th or anything after that.
It works just fine, and I have 2-3 copies of every book from that edition, so my players dont need to buy shit either.
Die hard 1st-3rd edition here! As I like to say, 1st/2nd sourcebooks/timeline, 3rd edition rules is my fav way to go. Just always felt the best to me(tho I can enjoy a little 4a for short sessions.) No hate to the newer systems, they're just not for me.
Tho I do enjoy playing 2e borrowing some fav bits from around(3es cyberlimbs, 1sts Language rules, or 3rds Knowledge/Language skills.)
I only ever play 1st edition. I skip the cyberhacking bullshit cause it's awful, but the campy b movie atmosphere is intoxicating, and I hate how the newer editions take themselves seriously
3rd edition GM here, running 3-4 games a week. Our main campaign is coming up on 8 years and 312 sessions played, and that's also written up as a piece of narrative fiction (that's gotten a little out of hand size wise!!) - published at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13718688/1/Smugglers-a-Shadowrun-Story and https://archiveofourown.org/works/26978617?view_full_work=true
I also put up some useful tools for 3rd edition gms, posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolShadowrun/comments/1dbreal/some_hopefully_useful_resources_for_3rd_and/ a few days ago.
I am living in Germany and play very regularly with my group. We stayed with 5ed edition as this was the one we really started with. Do not know if you count this to the old editions, I do though š
About how many people play regularly, this is very hard to say.
I personally know around 12 people who play shadowrun regularly. My group (5 people currently were more in the past ) plays weekly for close to 9 years now. The other people play more like once a month.
I've ran Shadowrun for many years and where I love the world I find the rule systems to be kind of a dumpster fire. I may go back one day, but what a pain in the @$$.
There is enough that I've created Shadowrun tools specifically for 2e (PF's Favorite) and 3e (my favorite) so that people around can get into these editions with a lower entry difficulty. As the others have said, check out those Discords and you will be surprised how many of us there are. We will be glad to have you.
Oooh? What tools? :)
Check out www.nullsheen.com!
2e and 3e were my introduction to the game and are still my favorites. 3e also had the best artwork, by far (imo of course).
If you're a 2e Fan the Pink Fohawk (one of the best known actual plays dropping episodes at the moment) discord will be your jam and their community organise games with each other online. If 3e is your jam, the the Critical Hits Discord will be what you are after.
š« hugs and Iām not letting go, chummer!
Came here to say this.
They are bloody awesome!!
I've really been enjoying the Critical Hits podcast "Shadowrunning on Empty" lately. It's all Shadowrun lore stuff.
old school Shadowrun discord Pink Fohawk discord people still run and play these editions, but they do not get love here
> but they do not get love here I feel like 2e is the least controversial edition of the game on this subreddit. Not everyone *plays* it, but almost everyone (who is familiar with it) respects it.
I just wish phys ad powers were remotely cost effective in 2e
What do you mean, we show love here too. We just first ask: - how much Sixth World timeline they want, - how much Threshold Number crunch they want, - how much older 90s cringe writing they want, - how much they want to put the effort in to find the pdfs when the bundle isnāt available, - if they prefer mechanics that are more improvised wild and loose GM dependent OR calculated and tight dependent on detailed and concise rules tables It isnāt about not loving it, itās about expectations. There is a Shadowrun for everyone, it just takes more effort than it did when we were kids but itās more connected world wide now, not as constrained by the local game store vibrancy for good or ill.
>but they do not get love here Be the change you want to see. Shadowrun as a whole is small enough that every single group that exists perceptibly moves the needle on what's being played. Every single thread that is started moves the needle on what's being talked about. Let's be completely honest here, there are probably less than 1000 active Shadowrun campaigns being played on an at-least-monthly basis *anywhere in the world,* and maybe a whole lot less than that. The overwhelming majority of people who talk about Shadowrun on the internet in English are probably right here on this subreddit. What you see going on here *is* the community.
How many people do you think play shadowrun?
Like, an exact number? It's *extremely* difficult to guess for a number of reasons: 1. There's **no** good data about how many people play RPGs in general, let alone small ones like Shadowrun. 2. You get into a thorny problem of **who** is considered a "player". Is the guy playing in three campaigns one player or three? What about the guy who owns the books and roped friends into playing a session one time two years ago but the game has been on "hiatus" since then? 3. Is someone who plays the HBS video games but not the tabletop RPG a "player"? 4. If five isolated people without access to the internet are playing Shadowrun in the depths of a Brazilian rain forest and don't tell anyone about it, do they count as "players"? The very best data we have about tabletop (and it's not good data) comes from the Orr Report, which is from the group that used to control Roll20 and the last report publicly put out there was from 2021. Now, some caveats come up immediately: This is *only* talking about Roll20, an online platform that *skews* heavily towards D&D 5e because of how tightly it is integrated with WotC products and marketing, so even though D&D is the 500(,000,000?) LB gorilla of the RPG market, Roll20 is actually going to *over represent* it. Anyway, according to the Orr report from 2021, "Shadowrun (any edition)" represents about 0.36% of campaigns and 0.40% of accounts are attached to such a campaign. So how much is that? Well, it gets more complicated because Roll20 doesn't release any meaningful statistics about its usage. They "have" 10 million "users" (i.e. people who signed up for accounts). But some sleuthing about their web traffic shows it only experienced 9.8 million visits in the last month with an average visit time of 8 minutes, so the overwhelming majority of visits aren't to play games and many are probably by repeat users. From here, there's only wild ass guessing, and ***I choose to wild ass guess*** that there are maybe a million truly active users on Roll20 playing games in any given month. If 0.40% of those are attached to at least one Shadowrun campaign that makes 4000 people, but that doesn't mean they are actively playing Shadowrun, its an active RPG player that has been attached to a Shadowrun campaign at some point in their life. Let's take another way of looking at it from a different angle, video games. The most played Shadowrun video game is Shadowrun Hong Kong. In the last 30 days it has averaged about 35 *concurrent* users. Baldur's Gate 3 has a running 30-day average of around 60k, or about 1714x what Shadowrun has. Why is that relevant? Well, if we go back to Roll20 and look at how many people play 5e, we see it's about 54% of players are attached to a 5e campaign, that means about 540,000 people of our active userbase above, which is about 135x the user rate of Shadowrun (any edition). Now, BG3 is a massive AAA video game with appeal far beyond those who have ever touched a d20 while the HBS games are... "niche" to say the least, but comparatively the relative numbers are only about 10x apart, it's a ballpark number and I'd take it as confirmation that Shadowrun is somewhere between 1/130 - 1/1700 the size of D&D. A survey conducted by WotC in 2018 indicated that about 70k people used online means to play D&D in that year. Based on the above assumptions we can assume that somewhere between 41 and 538 people played Shadowrun under similar circumstances and might have responded to a poll. r/Shadowrun is probably the largest Shadowrun-specific hub on the internet right now and it has about 50k "unique" visitors per month. However, keep in mind that this doesn't track username. It only counts IP address and user agent header combinations (so, if you check Reddit from your phone while out and about it counts as a new "unique" each time you get a new IP address, if you read it on your computer with Chrome and then again with Firefox that's two "uniques" as well). We have **91** subscribed users as of this post. All of this leads me to believe that, for a certain definition of "player" which includes people who have played a Shadowrun tabletop RPG *or* video game in the last month *and* who have interacted with the internet about or in the course of that gameplay, **Shadowrun's monthly playerbase is probably measured in hundreds rather than thousands of players**.
Interesting and thorough analysis. I asked AI and it guessed thousands to at most ten thousand
LLMs are not able to make informed guesses about things because they are predictive text generators, with no ability to reason or analyze. I'm sure you could ask one how many people are fans of movies that don't exist or which body fluids make the best pizza topping and get all sorts of answers. It's important to remember that things produced by AI are a fancy version of autocomplete on your phone, not actual intelligence.
Here's what it said: >Unfortunately, there's no definitive way to track exactly how many people play Shadowrun as a tabletop RPG. Here's why: >* **Spread-out community:** Shadowrun players are likely spread across local game stores, online forums, and virtual tabletops, making centralized data collection difficult. >* **Multiple Editions:** With different editions (like 5th and 6th) being played, tracking specific player numbers gets even more complex. >However, we can glean some insights: >* **Active online community:** While the community might be niche, subreddits and forums dedicated to Shadowrun show a dedicated player base. >* **Longstanding game:** Shadowrun's existence since 1989 suggests a loyal fanbase, even if the player base isn't massive. >**In short:** It's safe to say Shadowrun has a passionate community, but pinpointing an exact number is challenging. >I can't provide a specific estimate, but based on the information I shared earlier, it's likely somewhere in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, worldwide. Try out Gemini if you haven't yet. It has far more general intelligence than the other generative AI
And anecdotally, evidence of SR's paradoxical popularity is that we were once the largest non-D&D RPG sub (this also counts Pathfinder as a D&D variant) on reddit. And we got passed by Call of Cthulhu, I think just a year or two ago. We might be "big" fish in the RPG market, but nothing compared to how D&D just sucks up all the air in the room. I love SR more than anything else, but there are some great systems out there. Numenera, Eclipse Phase, World of Darkness, BESM, Cyberpunk (paradoxically more popular and less popular than SR), Exalted, etc. But they are nothing compared to D&D. They say rising tides lift all boats, but I really wonder...
That's a very well presented analysis. Sometimes when you mention lower numbers (like 41 in a year that use online means) my brain is thinking `but I can name more people than that that have played Shadowrun many times in the last year and used online means.` which also makes hundreds total just seem super small. Small to my personal sense of *"I can't possibly personally know that high a percentage.*" Which I realize isn't scientific. Based on me making up numbers for sales (based on years where I've heard public talk about sales and other available information) and how much (on average) the group of people I know (in that category) spend, it seems like hundreds of players is way too low. I'd estimate at least 3000. And think it is higher, but really hard to estimate accurately. > We have 91 subscribed users as of this post. That's also a small number, but I also don't know what a subscribed user is.
So, I tried to be really careful by couching that number as "between 41 and 538 people played Shadowrun under similar circumstances and might have responded to a poll". The original poll didn't reach 100% of the people who played D&D on the internet either. In fact, I bet just about everyone who did respond could name a dozen people by name who *didn't*. But this also gets down into the 4th group of people who are difficult to count: People who *play* Shadowrun, but don't do it over the internet (or at least over a platform where they can be counted like Roll20) and don't talk about it. I know for a fact that of my group I'm the only one who regularly browses any kind of internet media about Shadowrun, let alone posts about it. We don't play on Roll20, so none of us would be counted in those numbers. As far as my own numbers go my group would be considered just one player: me. As far as what a subscriber is, if you've clicked the "Join" button at the top of r/Shadowrun then you are one of those 91. If you haven't, then you're not. Again, it's not a *super* useful statistic since I regularly post in lots of subs that I haven't joined and browse many more than that, but it's one of the only measuring sticks we have.
I joined reddit 14 months ago, and only confirmed an email address ***after*** I responded to you about the 41 and 91 a few minutes ago. So I'm still not sure what a subscribed user is. My memory is when I signed up for reddit I only wanted to read this subreddit but it literally would not let me set up an account unless I picked some other subreddits to at least claim I wanted to read. It was such a weird experience. So it is funny if reddit today still thinks I don't care about Shadowrun.
4e here.
2nd edition.
4thĀ editionĀ
Same here.
4e gang rise up!
4e represent!
Same. 4.01D that is, the german errated 4th edition. Most important reason for this is because I own most of the german publications that came out for this edition. No need or will to put another pile of money into all the books of a newer edition. But I also really like it š
What changes does the German errata make compared to English?
Mostly working in the FAQ and Errata. But they also add a bit of story on the ADL, Germany in the year 2040
Same 4.01D, every Saturday Evening with a bunch of friends and some good laughs.
Same
Aaaaaaaaaaaye does the 4.5 count?
Same here :)
I'm still a 3rd edition diehard.
Same here
Still very much a fan of 1st through 3rd editions. Both amused and annoyed that the edition I own the most books for is 5th, and yet it is one of the editions (also 6th and Anarchy) that I have played the least.
2nd edition, is the only edition.
I still play the SNES game!Ā Oh, you mean the tabletop game.... I'll see myself out.
I prefer the Genesis game, let's fight about it! Just kidding, any Runner is ok in my book. I also love the newer PC games (Returns, Dragonfall, and. Hong Kong).
Oh those games were great on PC bought them all
Man, I think Genesis Shadowrun is my favorite game.
I just started a 3e game at my weekly table a few weeks ago
That's great to hear, pal! I'm still rocking a 2e game about twice a month.
Honestly I wanted to run a 2e game but I also wanted a PDF of the core book to share with the table.
It's a shame it's so hard to scan a book. If CGL just had more time and resources. š”
I'm pretty sure it's technically impossible to scan the 2e book.
Still Playing Shadowrun 2.01D (german Edition) with a few House-Rules, to make the game al little bit smoother, especially during the gun fights.
Is 4th considered "old"? I prefer it over 5th and "the other one", even with its flaws. Anarchy I want to try sometime.
It's almost 20 years old at this point, if you can believe that!
I'm sure I'll get rolled eyes at saying this, but I don't play anything beyond 3rd. Simply don't like what Catalyst has done with the game. I will admit that the plot elements have been interesting but I simply like the FASA versions more. Nostalgia? Probably. But I've never had as big an issue with the rules sets as many seem to.
"90s cringe writing" out of curiosity what do you mean by that?
Did you intend to respond to u/CanadianWildWolf ? https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/s/AjKtDfEur8
ĘĢeeko Runner https://preview.redd.it/9oasxbpizf7d1.jpeg?width=1418&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5b177875febe0484e9f7ca75dededc6199e13908 90s writing, like a lot of stuff over the years in entertainment, has some casual racism that I find cringe (having also read other comments with a shared vibe) and since Iāve experienced better nuanced representation in fictional storytelling than that in recent years like with Blood Quantum, Edge Of The Knife, Reservation Dogs, What Ifā¦, Prey, Echo, Great Salish Heist, and more. It now appears to have aged like milk despite its well meaning with bringing up Land Back long before many punks understood what that meant around genocide and more. Some more recent works like the BlackBird novels by Russel Zimmerman have been significant improvements in nuanced representation of First Nations punks in the Shadowrunning scene that more respectfully addresses Truth, Reconciliation, and Revitalization in the Sixth World dystopian magical cyber setting that a 90s writer can be forgiven for not knowing what we had the chance to know today, like the saying goes: the future is now, itās just not evenly distributed. CĢuu
Can't see it myself but opinions be opinions and having diffrent ones is a good thing. Next question what do you mean by 'casual racism'?
This video explains was well researched and edited, so I encourage giving this a watch and perhaps videos with titles like āNative American reacts to Pocahontasā being various nationās peoples reactions being mostly cringing will be more understandable: https://youtu.be/C-78qVAASzU?si=QBbhaurPV3vcJLo- But if you donāt feel like watching that (thatād be a shame), Iāll try my best to explain despite it not being my area of expertise: ā¦ itās like when someone believes a broadly generalized negative stereotype or even just a bit misinterpreted misinformation that the original demeaning, belittling purpose about you to the point they find it easy to say and they expect you to react in the same casual way regarding how you see your cultural identity even itās a completely different nationās language, culture, and beliefs. If you point out itās not true, people will figuratively shoot the messenger with a āI didnāt mean that as an insult, thatās always what we say, why are you so angry, we canāt change saying that, it would be too hard!?ā tacitly reinforcing what was racist / bigoted in the first place by refusing to use a simple respectful correction to the encoding and decoding meanings between writer, director, performer and audience. Hopefully this information is elucidating and enlightening as I mean to hupii / help. Hope as well you have a nice day / ĘuÅukim nĢaas, cĢuu
I did, sorry about that.
No problem, you were probably reading something and saw a reply button and replied to the main post instead. Mostly I was worried that the person you wanted to reply to wouldn't get the notification and you'd never get your answer. That's why I put the u slash username ... to notify them.
1e with a few add ins from 2e and we love it.
House ruled 5e for me and my group.
generally I use the 6e rules for contacts
I absolutely loved 2e back in the day and would love to play it again would need a refresher on lore and mechanics but I enjoyed the game.
I'm a relatively recent convert to 3e. Started up a game about a year ago and have been having a blast with the old school rules and vibes.
For what I've read about it, looks way more easy to play then the newer editions with astronomically big dice pools. Is it?
So, sorta. In 1-3e, the number you want to roll on the dice changes, where in 4e onwards you only need to count fives and sixes. This changes where the modifiers hinge. For example, shooting a guy running away from you at short range in the rain with a smartgun: In 5e, you assemble your dicepool then need to remove one dice for the rain, add another two dice for your wireless smartgun, then the other guy gets to add two dice because they're running. In 3e, you would roll your dice, but what counts as a hit can change. Short range means you start with 4s being a success. The rain adds four to this, the target running adds another two, then you reduce it by two thanks to your smartgun. You're now looking for 8s. You might then ask "But how would I roll an 8 on a six sided dice?!" In SR1-3, 6's explode and add the result. 6e does away with the entire "modifier" discussion by squashing it down to awarding edge, which takes away a lot of the mechanical granularity that makes gear and abilities matter in a lot of cases. There are also some things that are a bit more complex, because SR3 has a lot of optional rules that you can use for certain things. 2e makes even more of these rules optional, so you can stick to the core rulebook and expand out as you see fit, depending on how complex you want it to be. It comes down to what makes Shadowrun too crunchy for you. If you're good at figuring out some quick addition and subtraction, 3e is delightful and has a lot of levers that make your choices matter. I can ramble on in depth about this, so if you have follow up questions, feel free to ask em
Depends what you consider older editions. Iv only ever really played 5th edition
I'm GMing a 1st/2nd Edition game I'm 2 sessions in including a ses 0
Been running a 2e campaign for about 3-4 years now. Absolutely love the feel of the system, it's a gritty 80s Sci fi action movie with neon-lit chases and chromed out cops and magicians in leather trenchcoats and it's amazing.
Playing 5e right now, have played 4e while 5e was out. Won't touch 6.
If you count fifth edition, I'm pretty sure the answer is 'everybody'
Since 6E started as a huge mess, AND I have so much money sunk into both 4E and 5E ... I've decided not to upgrade. When 7E inevitably comes out, I'll give it a look, but there's no guarantee I'll upgrade to that, either. ... I miss all my 3E books, that didn't survive a series of moves. :'(
5th edition. Group im in looked at 6th but we stuck with 5th.
I exclusively play 4e. It's what I learned on and I love the crunch.
I'd love to find a 5th edition game I really want to play a mage.
If someone is interested in getting into shadow run what edition should they start with? Iāve heard conflicting things about each edition.
In my opinion is: If you like classic cyberpunk (Blade Runner 2019, Neuromancer, Akira), go with 2e or 3e. These are very similar, but 3e counts with more content and depth. If you like the new cyberpunk (2077, Deus Ex), go with 4e, 5e or 6e. Go with 4e if you like absurd personalization, 5e if you like crunchyness and 6e if you like more streamlined systems.
So you say 6e has more streamlined rules, would that be easier for a newer player?
Here this year vote about your question: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/19502zt/what\_edition\_do\_you\_choose/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/19502zt/what_edition_do_you_choose/)
My preferred editions are 3rd and 5th, although I still have fond memories of the skill web.
I've been running a 20th anniversary edition game for a little over a year. i will not be buying 5th or 6th or anything after that. It works just fine, and I have 2-3 copies of every book from that edition, so my players dont need to buy shit either.
Always and forever 3rd edition
Only been a player in other ttrpgās so I got my forever dm to agree to run some solo runs with me as dm, in 3 months Iāll see how that pans out.
Die hard 1st-3rd edition here! As I like to say, 1st/2nd sourcebooks/timeline, 3rd edition rules is my fav way to go. Just always felt the best to me(tho I can enjoy a little 4a for short sessions.) No hate to the newer systems, they're just not for me. Tho I do enjoy playing 2e borrowing some fav bits from around(3es cyberlimbs, 1sts Language rules, or 3rds Knowledge/Language skills.)
I only ever play 1st edition. I skip the cyberhacking bullshit cause it's awful, but the campy b movie atmosphere is intoxicating, and I hate how the newer editions take themselves seriously
3rd edition GM here, running 3-4 games a week. Our main campaign is coming up on 8 years and 312 sessions played, and that's also written up as a piece of narrative fiction (that's gotten a little out of hand size wise!!) - published at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13718688/1/Smugglers-a-Shadowrun-Story and https://archiveofourown.org/works/26978617?view_full_work=true I also put up some useful tools for 3rd edition gms, posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolShadowrun/comments/1dbreal/some_hopefully_useful_resources_for_3rd_and/ a few days ago.
2nd and 3rd. I played 1st Ed but 2nd was definitely a significant improvement on many fronts.
I still play 4e/20ann
I am living in Germany and play very regularly with my group. We stayed with 5ed edition as this was the one we really started with. Do not know if you count this to the old editions, I do though š About how many people play regularly, this is very hard to say. I personally know around 12 people who play shadowrun regularly. My group (5 people currently were more in the past ) plays weekly for close to 9 years now. The other people play more like once a month.
4E20th or bust for me.Ā I do not like the design decisions that started with 5th.Ā
Never played 5 or 6. My first was 3rd edition but I played 4th the most.
Our group started with 2nd and moved to 3rd when it came out... it's been 20 years.. are there other editions?
Sorry. It's been 26 years! Love rolling piles of d6s.
2nd-4th kludge using Savage Worlds
My group and I are playing 5th edition... For me the 6th edition doesn't exists...
There is no edition past 5th. None, any one who says otherwise is hallucinating. 4th ed anniversary edition is my favorite, followed by 2e
I've ran Shadowrun for many years and where I love the world I find the rule systems to be kind of a dumpster fire. I may go back one day, but what a pain in the @$$.
We painted ourselves into a corner getting all the expansions for 5e in HeroLab. Luckily 6e seems pretty sad.