Shadowrun Pub
General => Reviews => Topic started by: kv on September 08, 2008, 03:23:24 PM
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Hey, now that this version has been around for awhile, I was curious what everyone's take on it was.
Like it? Love it? Hate it?
My brothers and I (the core of our shadowrun experience) ran a couple of times with the 4th edition rules, even though I was kind of a butthead and dragged my feet on changing over to the new system. We liked it, but didn't really have enough "oomph" to run it as a regular thing- my brother Ruski, who really likes 4th edition, was busy with this whole 'becoming a cop thing,' and 'the wife thing,' and 'new kid thing,' but now he's a little more settled in, and I'd like to try running it again.
My major complaints about 4th edition Shadowrun are about the same- new characters are severely underpowered (whereas in 3rd edition, runners were able to be pretty bad-ass; now they're at the far bottom of a very tall totem pole), and it doesn't hold continuity with a lot of the 3rd edition storylines. Plus, they got rid of all the Shadowrun lingo, and replaced it with meme and lolcats (aka "more current" lingo), including replacing shadowrun slang and profanity with our slang and profanity- which in the SR universe, would mean that suddenly, eighty-year-old swear words became popular again. That bugs me.
I was working with the team that does the free monthly "Shadowrun Missions," and that's a good group of people- men and women who love Shadowrun. I wasn't with the program long enough to get the free swag, but they do quality work.
What does everyone else think? Are the new update books any good?
-kv
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I ran a game for about a year and everyone seemed to adapt to it pretty well. It was a lot easier to bring someone new to SR (but not new to role playing) into the fold as the system was pretty streamlined. All-in-all I like it but it's almost a completely different game than SR3. The setting is the same, but some of the history has changed, the culture has changed, pretty much all that remains is that it's set in the future with cyberware and magic.
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I'd love to give you my opinion but I haven't picked up a shadowrun book in years. My group and I have been playing warhammer fantasy roleplay.
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Haven't opened one.
Still not ready to leave the old system.
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I like how powerful characters are in 3rd edition, and I like how streamlined 4th edition is, but I want more of the culture and history of the old game in 4th edition, and less rules (and maybe a little wireless hacking on the fly) in my 3rd edition.
I almost wish there were a 3.5 edition that incorporated the best of both worlds.
-kv
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I like 4th Edition.
first and formost: you can actually play a hacker and do something other than pick maglocks.
in 3rd edition the hacker was mostly an NPC. anyone who tried to play them at the table spent most of the time hiding under things and waiting to bore the rest of the group with slow calculations and efforts to get some paper or schematics to do a run.
in 4th edition they can actually be helpfull in a fire-fight. ejecting a clip from the other teams street sam or turning off a smart link, even rigging a blender on the nearby counter to explode as a distraction are all very do-able in combat now. with 4th edition hackers (who are near and dear to my heart) are cool again.
as for the power level, it's not terribly difficult to up the antie if you feel so inclined. just give everyone 800 build points instead of 400 and you'll get some SR3~isq runners.
I actually like the option of starting out somewhere below ultra-uber-death-squad.
but that's just me. LOL
-RuskiFace the Pirate