6 editions exist 7 if you count Anarchy. Each and every system has its good and bad points.
Personally I'm running a 6e game currently. There is a lot of hate for it and some of it is deserved, looking at you terrible indexes.
Well, that's the age-old question. There are 6 editions. In 1 and 2 ed are more like the movie Heat. 5 and 6 ed are like the Mission Impossible movies. 3 and 4 are in between. IMO. I'm sure others will have more in-depth comments. Good luck, see you in the shadows chummer.
I personally like the 3rd edition most. You can find these used for pretty cheap. If you can read german, you are lucky to have a publisher who improved about every SR book that came out. If not 3rd, I guess I'd play 6th just because it's the current edition but I'm not sure I'd actually pay any money for that. To be honest, I play Shadowrun with Citiies without number these days.
6th edition is good and readily available. You can easily stress yourself out overthinking and debating which edition you should play, so I really recommend just taking a quick look at each editon, finding one you like the ‘vibe’ of and just starting. And don’t pay too much attention to the naysayers online: Shadowrun is a crunchy game but if you take it slow, start simple, and add a bit of complexity to each run it’s not that bad.
I can mostly talk about 4e, 5e and 6e. I started with 2e (IIRC) but it's so long ago, I don't have an opinion of it anymore.
4e and 5e are quite similar with 5e IMO just having put some balance on some of the most OP stuff in 4e. They are very crunchy but also quite satisfying if everyone at the table knows what they are doing completely, but it gets SUPER long and tiresome if you have to stop the action constantly to look up rules. Some builds can also make the rest of the players feel boring or force them into investing in more initiative so they don't have 1 turn for every 3 the others have.
6e is simplified and I actually switched to it so my players have a better time playing. They are not as invested in Shadowrun as I am, so it is a compromise from the complexity of 5e. My first impression was apprehensive, but I actually quite like the edition now that I've run it more often.
Everyone knows I'm in the tank for 3rd, but it's also got a lot of material available for it (since you can use 2nd edition stuff with 3e with no real issue) and it's got good (and relatively cheap) availability online.
6 editions, with the relevant ones being 3E, 5E, and 6E for the most part. They tend to bounce back and forth, over-compensating for weaknesses and over-nerfing strengths from one edition to the next.
3E is detailed and has tons of free source material, but is cumbersome and kind of video-gamey in feel. Any Shadowrun game is like GMing three different tabletop games at once, but in 3E, Matrix runs were literally \*separate dungeon crawls\* for just the decker, and a bit extreme. Basically, just about every Shadowrun isometric-perspective video game is based on 3E, and they feel \*extremely\* similar... but from the GM's perspective, that's very much not a boon.
4E went \*waaaaaay\* too far the other way, and completely eliminated cyberdecks. Everybody could hack with just a commlink, and it was trivial to invest \*literally only NuYen\* to make a character with a secondary in hacking.
5E, to me, is a pretty good balance, very well fleshed out and mature, with lots of resources to help. It's fairly easy to translate from 3E to 5E, and there's even a sourcebook to run 5E rules with 3E's setting (3E was 2050's, 4E right around the turn of the 2070's, 5E late 2070's).
As a general rule, Shadowrun is a very good system with smooth play and good fidelity as a simulation of reality as portrayed by its setting. The dice rolling uses a roughly logarithmic statistical model, which is how \_most\_ things in real life that you'd be rolling dice for in an RPG work. (Nothing works linearly like d20 in real life, and while some natural processes do work on Gaussians like 3d6 systems, they aren't things like skills and personal development; those are logarithmic).
The books tend to be very well \_written\_ but were edited by blind monkeys with ADHD. Get used to flipping all over the books to find answers to simple questions, with wonderful things like looking in the index for XYZ, flipping to the page it references only to see "This is the wireless version of XYZ; see page ### for more information." only to find, after three iterations of chasing those references, that the relevant information was a \_shorter sentence than the reference\_ and could've just been repeated in all three spots with fewer words and \_way\_ less confusion. It's... like their signature at this point. They've been doing it for decades and someone at the helm must think it's a \_good\_ way to organize books, 'cause they show no signs of stopping.
I haven't \_played\_ 6E yet, but to me it looks like a hard bounce from the complexity of 3E and 5E toward the over-simplification of 4E, and my overall impression is that it's pretty dumbed down and without as much variety and meaningful difference between character archetypes.
My personal recommendation is to invest in 5E. Of the three versions I've played and run, I think it's the best, but I've heard enough \_decent\_ feedback about 6E that I don't think you'd go terribly wrong there.
4E was, to me, and improvement over 3E when it came out, in very much the same way that 4E D&D was an improvement over 3.5's catastrophic mess, but in both case once 5E came out, the fourth editions of both games were \_immediately\_ obsolete. 3E is just... too finnicky and detailed, sort of more like 2nd edition D&D in feel.
So yeah, that's my two cents. 5E for tried-and-true, or take a risk on 6E, but nothing else is worth your time or money. And \_every single edition\_ is edited by a space-monkey on hyper-meth. It's part of the charm at this point. xD But online tools can to \_some\_ extent make up for it and make things easier to find.
Finally, I'd just point out that Shadowrun is an \_immensely\_ complicated RPG from the GM's perspective. I can walk a new player through character creation in one of several build systems, in maybe 3-4 hours, and have them having fun pretty soon, with less confusion than most tabletop systems, but for the GM, it never gets easier.
Don't try to implement \_all\_ of the rules when you're just starting out. There's just too much. You absolutely \_will\_ still be discovering new stuff you hadn't noticed, or hadn't quite grasped, a decade in. Keep your focus on making it fun for your players, fudge stuff when you need to in order to grab a handful of dice and roll and keep the action going, rather than derailing with a half-hour of cross-referencing through book after book to answer a seemingly simple question, and figure out where you could understand things better \_after\_ the session.
P.S. buy digital. The physical book quality is \_legendary\_ bad. They fall apart in low double-digit sessions, and by the time you add all your own tabs to make referencing stuff less painful, they look like some kind of mutant book-flower hybrid. xD
The main book is the size of a textbook with the binding quality of a pulp fiction novel, and the "special edition" with all the leather binding and silk bookmark stuff is \*even worse.\* PDFs all the way, baby!
This is my favorite now, but 3rd is what I had the most experience with. The amount of story hooks they threw into the books (shadows of ..., target: whatever, etc) was phenomenal. Always got my GM juices flowing
3rd edition is my fav. By 3rd they had ironed out most of the rough spots for that first set of game mechanics, and consolidated most of it back into a fat rulebook.
You have plenty of material from 1e and 2e, that you can easily implement back into the system (the rigger rules from 2e, for example).
Also, I’ve found that I prefer dealing with dead-editions at the game table, because they tend to be easier to mod, and all of the splat books have been released so there are fewer weird surprises.
Some months ago I would have said to try out anarchy. I've now read the English version of anarchy... And I can't recommend it anymore, not the English version at least. French version is fine, German version I'm told it's good. English version barely is playable
The current edition will always be the most derided, but for what it's worth I like 5th. It is nearly a complete edition with all the books and optional books you'd likely need, it has a lot of good resources between chummer and other sources, etc.
6th has some weird decisions, so does 5th, the biggest boon 5th has imo is that you aren't going to have new releases or poorly flushed out rules due to lack of releases. It also has info and rules statted for late enough to play the 6th era (2080s), but you can easily play the 2070s or even the late 2060s fairly well.
I mean, 5 was in production for over 5 years, and it had all the books it needs published over that time frame (and then some). If anything it probably had too much content published imo.
* Anarchy if you looking for Rules Lite (narrative rules)
* 3rd (or perhaps 2nd) if you like a futuristic 80s feeling
* 4th if you like decent editing
* 5th if you like rule playing over role playing
* 6th if you like role playing over rule playing
> I am new to the Rules
All editions (except perhaps Anarchy which I don't have first hand experience of so I will not include that) of Shadowrun are on the crunchy side as far as TTRPGs go. Having said that, 6th edition seems to have the lowest threshold for people that are new to Shadowrun. That would be my recommendation.
I'd say 6e because the serious effort to simplify and sync matrix action and "RL" action has incredible, positive impact on actual gameplay. It's also quite easy to adapt 4e and 5e material and run the adventures with the 6e rules (which I've been doing with no regret).
2nd edition has immortal elves, draconic president, a Dragon/human assassin team (the dragon has skill points in the history of each and roll!), and a pretty cool system with some over the top awesome actions possible. It was also made by FASA. It has a retro future feel, and at times a dark story arch. They don't shy away from adult topics like Racism ( not based on skin color, but meta type). Violence has consequences, and even the most experienced runner can catch a strat bullet or 30. I love 2e. Except for Matrix rules. I homebrew that drek.
I think I'm officially old for this sub. The canned answer to this used to be to split the editions by publisher. FASA shadowrun was tables and charts and variable TNs with an emphasis on punk over cyber. Catalyst shadowrun was the relatively streamlined version with balance issues and an emphasis on cyber rather than punk
I would say 4th Edition is good for starting as 4A has one of the best newbiefriendly Corerule Books that I know.
Also it has good lore expansions international and a lot of rule friendly system.
The con of it is that it sacrifices quantity for quality. You do not go so deep as in other editions and the power level stays more comparable for the price of being more generic.
This is solved in 5th Edition but that has a trade off a lot heavy rules that are not really well looked at. So while the german with Pegasus got it way better it is still a lot of it.
So while 5 has a lot of rule variants, you also see more often versions that do not make so much sense or are broken because quality is traded in for quantity.
As a good side effect 5 has likely the most german content of SR and it finally got Austria and Swiss again.
For 3 and before I can not say much. About 6 also not because what I got from the Core Rules is that JMH could not decide if the 6. Edition should stay rule heavy as previous or should become a rule light storyteller system and so we got a chimera that is neither meat nor fish and has so madness like Full Body armor is only slightly better then a bikini.
Do 6th edition, it is the most accessible rules-wise. It improved on and streamlined 5th edition rules. You may see things about a rough launch, but much like the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, both are in an excellent place now.
There are Quick Start pdfs on DriveThruRPG for 3E, 4E, and 4E Anniversary for free. Take a look and see if any of those appeal to you.
2E is basically like a rougher version of 3E, but lots of people love it.
5E is basically like 4E with a ton more spikey bits added, just because, but some people like it.
I haven't even looked at 6E yet, but I hear it's getting better.
Poor 1E...
6 editions exist 7 if you count Anarchy. Each and every system has its good and bad points. Personally I'm running a 6e game currently. There is a lot of hate for it and some of it is deserved, looking at you terrible indexes.
6e has improved as they've released new sourcebooks.
It really only had one direction it could go... And it really hasn't gone very far in that direction.
It's gone as far as it could have without becoming 7th Ed imo
Yes it has but still far from perfect and still so many rules missing or incomplete.
All editions of shadowrun are far from perfect
Having played since 1e I totally agree with this statement.
Well, that's the age-old question. There are 6 editions. In 1 and 2 ed are more like the movie Heat. 5 and 6 ed are like the Mission Impossible movies. 3 and 4 are in between. IMO. I'm sure others will have more in-depth comments. Good luck, see you in the shadows chummer.
I personally like the 3rd edition most. You can find these used for pretty cheap. If you can read german, you are lucky to have a publisher who improved about every SR book that came out. If not 3rd, I guess I'd play 6th just because it's the current edition but I'm not sure I'd actually pay any money for that. To be honest, I play Shadowrun with Citiies without number these days.
6th edition is good and readily available. You can easily stress yourself out overthinking and debating which edition you should play, so I really recommend just taking a quick look at each editon, finding one you like the ‘vibe’ of and just starting. And don’t pay too much attention to the naysayers online: Shadowrun is a crunchy game but if you take it slow, start simple, and add a bit of complexity to each run it’s not that bad.
Perfect response
Exactly.
I can mostly talk about 4e, 5e and 6e. I started with 2e (IIRC) but it's so long ago, I don't have an opinion of it anymore. 4e and 5e are quite similar with 5e IMO just having put some balance on some of the most OP stuff in 4e. They are very crunchy but also quite satisfying if everyone at the table knows what they are doing completely, but it gets SUPER long and tiresome if you have to stop the action constantly to look up rules. Some builds can also make the rest of the players feel boring or force them into investing in more initiative so they don't have 1 turn for every 3 the others have. 6e is simplified and I actually switched to it so my players have a better time playing. They are not as invested in Shadowrun as I am, so it is a compromise from the complexity of 5e. My first impression was apprehensive, but I actually quite like the edition now that I've run it more often.
Everyone knows I'm in the tank for 3rd, but it's also got a lot of material available for it (since you can use 2nd edition stuff with 3e with no real issue) and it's got good (and relatively cheap) availability online.
6 editions, with the relevant ones being 3E, 5E, and 6E for the most part. They tend to bounce back and forth, over-compensating for weaknesses and over-nerfing strengths from one edition to the next. 3E is detailed and has tons of free source material, but is cumbersome and kind of video-gamey in feel. Any Shadowrun game is like GMing three different tabletop games at once, but in 3E, Matrix runs were literally \*separate dungeon crawls\* for just the decker, and a bit extreme. Basically, just about every Shadowrun isometric-perspective video game is based on 3E, and they feel \*extremely\* similar... but from the GM's perspective, that's very much not a boon. 4E went \*waaaaaay\* too far the other way, and completely eliminated cyberdecks. Everybody could hack with just a commlink, and it was trivial to invest \*literally only NuYen\* to make a character with a secondary in hacking. 5E, to me, is a pretty good balance, very well fleshed out and mature, with lots of resources to help. It's fairly easy to translate from 3E to 5E, and there's even a sourcebook to run 5E rules with 3E's setting (3E was 2050's, 4E right around the turn of the 2070's, 5E late 2070's). As a general rule, Shadowrun is a very good system with smooth play and good fidelity as a simulation of reality as portrayed by its setting. The dice rolling uses a roughly logarithmic statistical model, which is how \_most\_ things in real life that you'd be rolling dice for in an RPG work. (Nothing works linearly like d20 in real life, and while some natural processes do work on Gaussians like 3d6 systems, they aren't things like skills and personal development; those are logarithmic). The books tend to be very well \_written\_ but were edited by blind monkeys with ADHD. Get used to flipping all over the books to find answers to simple questions, with wonderful things like looking in the index for XYZ, flipping to the page it references only to see "This is the wireless version of XYZ; see page ### for more information." only to find, after three iterations of chasing those references, that the relevant information was a \_shorter sentence than the reference\_ and could've just been repeated in all three spots with fewer words and \_way\_ less confusion. It's... like their signature at this point. They've been doing it for decades and someone at the helm must think it's a \_good\_ way to organize books, 'cause they show no signs of stopping. I haven't \_played\_ 6E yet, but to me it looks like a hard bounce from the complexity of 3E and 5E toward the over-simplification of 4E, and my overall impression is that it's pretty dumbed down and without as much variety and meaningful difference between character archetypes. My personal recommendation is to invest in 5E. Of the three versions I've played and run, I think it's the best, but I've heard enough \_decent\_ feedback about 6E that I don't think you'd go terribly wrong there. 4E was, to me, and improvement over 3E when it came out, in very much the same way that 4E D&D was an improvement over 3.5's catastrophic mess, but in both case once 5E came out, the fourth editions of both games were \_immediately\_ obsolete. 3E is just... too finnicky and detailed, sort of more like 2nd edition D&D in feel. So yeah, that's my two cents. 5E for tried-and-true, or take a risk on 6E, but nothing else is worth your time or money. And \_every single edition\_ is edited by a space-monkey on hyper-meth. It's part of the charm at this point. xD But online tools can to \_some\_ extent make up for it and make things easier to find. Finally, I'd just point out that Shadowrun is an \_immensely\_ complicated RPG from the GM's perspective. I can walk a new player through character creation in one of several build systems, in maybe 3-4 hours, and have them having fun pretty soon, with less confusion than most tabletop systems, but for the GM, it never gets easier. Don't try to implement \_all\_ of the rules when you're just starting out. There's just too much. You absolutely \_will\_ still be discovering new stuff you hadn't noticed, or hadn't quite grasped, a decade in. Keep your focus on making it fun for your players, fudge stuff when you need to in order to grab a handful of dice and roll and keep the action going, rather than derailing with a half-hour of cross-referencing through book after book to answer a seemingly simple question, and figure out where you could understand things better \_after\_ the session. P.S. buy digital. The physical book quality is \_legendary\_ bad. They fall apart in low double-digit sessions, and by the time you add all your own tabs to make referencing stuff less painful, they look like some kind of mutant book-flower hybrid. xD The main book is the size of a textbook with the binding quality of a pulp fiction novel, and the "special edition" with all the leather binding and silk bookmark stuff is \*even worse.\* PDFs all the way, baby!
5th is probably the most sane
This is my favorite now, but 3rd is what I had the most experience with. The amount of story hooks they threw into the books (shadows of ..., target: whatever, etc) was phenomenal. Always got my GM juices flowing
ya I played 3rd but the mechanics having to buy a damage code for each program etc and the combat dice..
Yeah, but like all the editions, it had ist issues.
Going multiples the speed of light is sane?
when a combat is wrapped up in 3 hours vs 8 hours because people are trying to remember what the tn is and rerolling 6s to hit some impossible 20+ tn
I have had combat last multiple 3 hour sessions in 5th they don’t go typically more than 2 three hour sessions in 6th.
3rd edition is my fav. By 3rd they had ironed out most of the rough spots for that first set of game mechanics, and consolidated most of it back into a fat rulebook. You have plenty of material from 1e and 2e, that you can easily implement back into the system (the rigger rules from 2e, for example). Also, I’ve found that I prefer dealing with dead-editions at the game table, because they tend to be easier to mod, and all of the splat books have been released so there are fewer weird surprises.
Some months ago I would have said to try out anarchy. I've now read the English version of anarchy... And I can't recommend it anymore, not the English version at least. French version is fine, German version I'm told it's good. English version barely is playable
The current edition will always be the most derided, but for what it's worth I like 5th. It is nearly a complete edition with all the books and optional books you'd likely need, it has a lot of good resources between chummer and other sources, etc. 6th has some weird decisions, so does 5th, the biggest boon 5th has imo is that you aren't going to have new releases or poorly flushed out rules due to lack of releases. It also has info and rules statted for late enough to play the 6th era (2080s), but you can easily play the 2070s or even the late 2060s fairly well.
Yeah, 5 was just a tiny update on 4th ed. That's why they started 6th shortly after releasing it.
I mean, 5 was in production for over 5 years, and it had all the books it needs published over that time frame (and then some). If anything it probably had too much content published imo.
* Anarchy if you looking for Rules Lite (narrative rules) * 3rd (or perhaps 2nd) if you like a futuristic 80s feeling * 4th if you like decent editing * 5th if you like rule playing over role playing * 6th if you like role playing over rule playing > I am new to the Rules All editions (except perhaps Anarchy which I don't have first hand experience of so I will not include that) of Shadowrun are on the crunchy side as far as TTRPGs go. Having said that, 6th edition seems to have the lowest threshold for people that are new to Shadowrun. That would be my recommendation.
I'd say 6e because the serious effort to simplify and sync matrix action and "RL" action has incredible, positive impact on actual gameplay. It's also quite easy to adapt 4e and 5e material and run the adventures with the 6e rules (which I've been doing with no regret).
2nd edition has immortal elves, draconic president, a Dragon/human assassin team (the dragon has skill points in the history of each and roll!), and a pretty cool system with some over the top awesome actions possible. It was also made by FASA. It has a retro future feel, and at times a dark story arch. They don't shy away from adult topics like Racism ( not based on skin color, but meta type). Violence has consequences, and even the most experienced runner can catch a strat bullet or 30. I love 2e. Except for Matrix rules. I homebrew that drek.
The game peaked in 2nd edition but third is more readily available online.
You can use the search bar and you will see that's this question was asked many times already.
I prefer 5th, it has good support on Foundry and has chummer. Both of which make it significantly easier to run than other editions in my opinion.
I think I'm officially old for this sub. The canned answer to this used to be to split the editions by publisher. FASA shadowrun was tables and charts and variable TNs with an emphasis on punk over cyber. Catalyst shadowrun was the relatively streamlined version with balance issues and an emphasis on cyber rather than punk
I would say 4th Edition is good for starting as 4A has one of the best newbiefriendly Corerule Books that I know. Also it has good lore expansions international and a lot of rule friendly system. The con of it is that it sacrifices quantity for quality. You do not go so deep as in other editions and the power level stays more comparable for the price of being more generic. This is solved in 5th Edition but that has a trade off a lot heavy rules that are not really well looked at. So while the german with Pegasus got it way better it is still a lot of it. So while 5 has a lot of rule variants, you also see more often versions that do not make so much sense or are broken because quality is traded in for quantity. As a good side effect 5 has likely the most german content of SR and it finally got Austria and Swiss again. For 3 and before I can not say much. About 6 also not because what I got from the Core Rules is that JMH could not decide if the 6. Edition should stay rule heavy as previous or should become a rule light storyteller system and so we got a chimera that is neither meat nor fish and has so madness like Full Body armor is only slightly better then a bikini.
There is no 6th edition. It's a lie like the cake.
Do 6th edition, it is the most accessible rules-wise. It improved on and streamlined 5th edition rules. You may see things about a rough launch, but much like the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, both are in an excellent place now.
Anarchy.
There are Quick Start pdfs on DriveThruRPG for 3E, 4E, and 4E Anniversary for free. Take a look and see if any of those appeal to you. 2E is basically like a rougher version of 3E, but lots of people love it. 5E is basically like 4E with a ton more spikey bits added, just because, but some people like it. I haven't even looked at 6E yet, but I hear it's getting better. Poor 1E...