>>97917057
The one you actually play.

I liked 2e best, but the system sucks in most editions. Grade A setting though

>>97917057
Most say 4e.
I prefer 5e.
Everyone can agree 6e should be nuked from orbit.

>>97917057
I run 3e with 1e's matrix rules.

>>97917057
Never the current one. No matter when you ask.

>>97917057
The one you like the least, fight me.

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>>97917057
3e, and it's not even close. 2e was a very good game but it was kind of the "early access" release for the system (compared to 1e's primitive alpha version).
3e took everything 2e had, polished it up, added extra detail and had an overall magnificent simulation system for literally everything yet still keeping it abstract enough to handle everything mind's eye and without being forced to use (((grid/hex maps))).
>absolutely über-kino setting development with the Threats books, Arcology Shutdown, Dunkie's election fallout, Lovecraftian shit like insect & toxic shamans, H̷͇̽ó̵̹r̶̝͒r̴̞̔o̷̡ŗ̴̈ṡ̷ and Shedim.
I only wish every game out there used it, it'd be great for Eclipse Phase, Deadlands'/HoE's modern fantast or having a fantasy variant for whatever wizards and dragons shit you want to run. Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Shadow of the Demon Lord or Symbaroum: They'd all be much better with SR3e's ruleset.

>>97917057
2e setting, and then some generic system, probably. Gurps, Genesys, and savage worlds all have fan hacks.

Anarchy 2.0 also looks promising, but I feel as though everyone is waiting to see how CGL is going to fuck up the North American release.

>>97917057
I've only played 4e.

>>97918634
>without being forced to use (((grid/hex maps)))
"Sorry your street samurai with augmented legs isn't fast enough to get to the your target but the non-augmented fatass with a knife stabs him in the face and kills him fuck you roll a new character."

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>>97918840
My condolences.

>>97917057
The games I ran and played were 4e20 (20th anniversary edition of 4e, with all the errata included). It was pretty solid, even if I acknowledge that they were a major change of pace from previous editions, most notably with the introduction of the wireless Matrix. I recognize that the system tries to retroactively acknowledge the march of technology in the real world, and the original 4e released in 2005, well into the rise of wireless connections but shortly before the iPhone.

>>97918667
>Anarchy 2.0

I hate to hand it to the French for that one...

>>97921121
Black Book did a hell of a job, it's everything that I wanted the original Anarchy to be.

>>97921121
Is it in the folder?

>>97917057
They're all bad, and in different ways.
How often do we have this thread?

>>97921343
It speaks to the enduring quality of Shadowrun as a setting that, all these years later, people still want to play it, even though most versions of the game are mid to bad

>>97922524
I credit it to Shadowrun being strangely prophetic. It corrected predicted the wireless world, smartphones, and a few irl company mergers.

Not to mention recent events are getting eerily similar;
>Companies like Blackrock trying to push extratotalitality
>Government trying to install "eco" measures to directly control your car and driving patterns, like the Grid.
>Companies treating AI like a magic 8ball to decide anything at all, like Horizon
The setting is somehow becoming extremely relevant to modern life and I'm not sure I like that, moreso than Cyberpunk 2020.

>>97923454
Yeah, I think that shadowrun is weirdly a better version of cyberpunk, even though I love cyberpunk as well. Cyberpunk 2020/Red ends up reading much more like a Flanderized version of the concept, whereas Shadowrun is more... Believable isn't the right word, but it's easier for me to take it on its own terms, I guess.

>>97922524
>>97923454
>>97923607
At the end of the day, wizards and cybernetics or trolls and guns are a cool combination and people want to try it.
Personally I was ok with 4e but it felt cumbersome to run. And that's saying something considering I've played GURPS a lot.

>>97922524
Jordan Weisman once told me that people love Shadowrun in spite of its rules, not because of its rules, which struck me as observant and pretty funny coming from one of its creators.

>>97923713
We just tried to start up a 2e game and it was just fucking awful. There are some excellent concepts in there (I really like the way damage, health, and armor work and are linked together) but taken as a whole it's just a mess. Hacking was bad in a way I didn't even expect, and the pixel bitching over what seemed like a dozen tiny modifiers at any one time just was not fun. It breaks my heart, because 2e lore *is* shadowrun to me, but we all walked away from that one.

>>97917057
5e is the edition I played the most but I'd like to try out 2e one day since I've had good experience with Mechwarrior 2e the company released in those times.

>>97917057
2nd by a longshot. 3rd is also good though, and I actually used to play with a lot of houserules that mixed elements of 2e and 3e.

Anything after that isn't even Shadowrun, it's fanfiction by a new company that completely murdered the original soul.

>>97917057
SR4 has probably the best rules.

I have mixed feelings about SR3. In some ways it compiles a lot of the SR2 stuff into one place; but at the same time that can make it a bit overcomplicated and harder to get into or get people into.

>>97917057
tips for making a aztech pit fighter who is a huge fan of Aztechnology?

>>97923454
>It corrected predicted the wireless world, smartphones
Pre-4e hilariously didn't. And business smartphones were a thing when it was developed, just not common among normies. I distinctly remember making fun of a guy whipping out his Pocket PC Phone Edition running Windows Mobile with Pocket Internet Explorer. Dad had a Nokia Series 90 smartphone for work.

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>>97926379
>Anything after that
Very much agree, even though I prefer the 3rd over the 2nd.
>>97926776
That's unironically the ONLY thing that "needs fixing" in 3rd edition: 3-6 pages of house rules/errata for a matrix built upon upon wireless connections and rules for it.

>2nd
>3rd
>4th
Can we narrow it down further? What are the main differences?
Hard mode: Corebook only, getting splats for these gets harder by the day.

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>>97927433
3rd ed is just 2nd ed, with more stuff. There were some minor attribute changes iirc, the systems are identical apart from that.

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>>97917569
>>97918667
>>97921343
>>97922524
Everyone always say “oh the system sucks and is bad and only the setting is good” but I’ve recently been collecting Shadowrun books and I think the system works perfectly fine and is easy to learn for 1st to 3rd edition. The skill lists are stripped down, the rules aren’t nearly as crunchy as people pretend they are (especially before 3rd edition) and the character building is easy to get your head around but still freeform enough to let you make your character truly yours. At this point I’m starting to think the whole “the system sucks” shit is either the later Shadowrun books being badly edited trickling down for the old stuff or people just not being able to read and wrap their head around an RPG that isn’t rules light “lol the system barely matters” shit anymore. 4th edition definitely ups the complexity but even that is very playable and enjoyable, Shadowrun starts shitting the bed with 5th edition when they stop having editors.
>>97927767
The biggest differences are that 3rd switches to using the Virtual Realities alternate matrix system as its default, lowers the requirements for playing as some metahumans and changes the initiative system so that every character is guaranteed to get at least one turn of before the chromed up cyber samurai gets to do their five additional turns.

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>>97927901
Oh yeah! The initative order in 3e was in "turns of tens" rather than just a countdown from the 47(+) rolled by the group's autistic cyberzombie minmaxxer and the Kyle Morgan GMPC: That was actually a good rule change and yet another reason for 3e>2e.
The matrix rules were also an improvement over 2e, since the old system was a MASSIVE singleplayer dungeon crawl that regularly took 1+ hour with the rest of the group sitting in another room. 3e's decking wasn't perfect but it at least sped things up to 10-15 minutes, rather than ~75.
Iirc. the vehicle- and driving systems were hugely overhauled as well?

>>97927767
>>97927901
>>97928148
So it's just a case of preferring 2e for fluff rather than crunch?

>>97927901
Have you actually played 2e? Because, in practice, it's fucking awful.

>>97928227
It's not that bad except maybe the matrix. Compared to other games of the era it plays fine.

>>97927901
The biggest complaint I hear about 1e-3e are the variable target numbers and how shit they are to adjudicate. Not knowing what the odds of a roll are without checking a table is a general problem of dice pool system, but not having fixed targets makes it even worse.

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>>97928164
I mean, why not have both? You can play 3e in the early-mid '50s (2e's timeline) rather than the latter half of the decade-early '60s (3e's timeline, up until the Winternight matrix crash 2.0).
>>97928293
It was mostly that there were a lot of mechanics and small modifiers to keep track of. If you just made a nice collection of all of that on 1-2 A4 sheets, or had a group actually capable of remembering the rules for the role they were playing, this was a non-issue.

>>97928269
This was not my experience with it. I don't find pixel bitching for a half dozen +/-1's every single roll to be enjoyable. Maybe if I was a player and the GM had been running it since the 90s? I could see that being fun. But learning to run it with a group also learning to play it? Deeply unenjoyable. And the book's editing is complete fucking ass. If it's a game you love and play, more power to you, but for probably 90%of people who roll dice, it's an inelegant, abstruse poorly edited mess.

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>>97928609
>we want the D&D Modern audience

>>97928634
>Ughn if you don't like my clunky-as-fuck game obviously you just want 5e!

>>97917569
>I liked 2e best, but the system sucks in most editions.
Really? Everyone I played with seemed to agree that it had the best combat by far out of any system we ran. That was back in the 90's though and I'm pretty sure catalyst has shit the bed many times since then.

>>97928293
>>97928609
You guys are just GMing this shit wrong. The players don't need to know what the TNs are, only the GM. If your players are going "b-but I should have this modifier and that modifier!" it's because you are a fucking cuck who doesn't know your rules and lets your players walk all over you.

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>>97928726, and also >>97929228

>>97929228
Are you retarded? Whether it's the player of the GM SOMEONE has to deal with the hunting for the modifiers, making the GM have to calculate literally everything instead of teaching the rules to the players just makes the game even worse.

If you are advocating to just ignore the rules and make up TNs and modifiers at random you are just proving that the system is shit.

>>97929290
>SOMEONE has to deal with the hunting for the modifiers
Yeah you, the GM. So there's no complaining from the players. You or one of the anons I replied to sperged out with the term "pixel bitching" twice (as if everyone is just supposed to know what that means) so apparently your issue is players complaining about which mods they think should apply. It means you likely just suck as a GM and your players don't trust you.

The way it actually is supposed to work:
>Player: "I shoot at the guard"
>GM: "Okay - "
>runs through checklist of range, cover, visibility, movement (after doing this every shot during every combat for several sessions it should be completely second nature you've memorized without even needing to look at a chart unless you're a low IQ subhuman)
>GM comes up with target number
>GM: "Take the shot"
>Player rolls dice
>GM tells how well he succeeded and rolls Body check for target
It's not that fucking hard, your player never even needs to know exactly what number they were looking for.

>>97929315
>Yeah you, the GM.
The GM is also there to have fun, not to be a meat computer for the players.
>runs through checklist of range, cover, visibility, movement
Congrats on succinctly showing why no one likes shadowrun. Not even gurps is that annoying. You'd have to go to something like Twilight:2000 to find something worse.

>>97929331
Anon if you are too fucking stupid to do simple arithmetic within a consistent system that applies the same modifiers to the same situations every time, the problem is you. Complaining you can't have fun because you can't do elementary school math is a pathetic self-own.

>>97929349
Congrats on succinctly showing why no one likes shadowrun players too

>>97929354
I'm a GM retard. I am telling you from experience how easy it is. You are genuinely fucking stupid.

Basically this anon >>97927901 had it completely right - all the bitching is clearly from illiterate zoomer cucks who can't read or do basic math and handle a normal game system outside of rules-lite slop for turbo normies and little kids.

>>97929371
Congrats on succinctly showing why no one likes shadowrun GMs too

>>97929390
Your repeated (and autistic) appeals to popularity are effeminate faggotry anon. I don't care if dumbfuck whiny sissy retards like you do not like me or the game that I play. It does not actually reflect on me at all, because I'm correct. It therefore reflects on you.

>>97929432
>autistic
ironic

>>97929228
>Actually, idiot, the game should be played in an even clunkier, worse way! You should actively have a *more* terrible time running the game!

Nah, though.

>>97917057
Probably the easiest to pick up is 4e20th. But honestly. Shadowrun is a game I kind of want to run again, but I don't want to deal with the system. The worst thing about 3rd specifically is that the core rules are broken in that some archetypes are missing core features, while others are missing core drawbacks, while the splats fully fleah out the archetypes for good and bad at the cost of massive complexity bloat.
BitD has potential as a base system for a game that emulates the novels and fluff, but it absolutely doesn't match the feel of the rules. So depending on which part of SR you're interested in the various fanmade BitD variants are an option.

>>97929432
Meds