Shadowrun deserves better

[Ralif Redhammer]

Shadowrun Anarchy is a more lightweight and a bit more narrative version made by CatalystLabs so official.
This is the character sheet in whole and as you can see, considerably less crunchy.
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Otherscape is Son of Oak's mythical cyberpunk game which is a refinement on their City of Mist. Has nothing to do with Shadowrun except that it can be used to play it (and do so really good).

Shadowrun Anarchy's slimmer design makes me a fan of it. I do hope that 2e makes character creation a bit less crunchy. It was still more work than I want in a game to put together a new character. Once you get up and running, at the least, it's pretty smooth.

When looking at things from the past, I think it's best to try to place them within the cultural context of when they were produced. That certainly doesn't mean we should excuse bigotry nor does it make the work immune from criticism. They tried, they got some things right, and they stumbled over other things.

I think that their hearts were in the right place, but there was still a lot of learning and unlearning that needed to happen. When you look at the depictions of non-Western cultures in D&D at the time, for example, things were a lot worse. Likewise, I'm not a fan of people saying "It was the 80s/90s/00s" as shield against discussion and criticism. It's important to discuss those failures, because that's how we grow.

 

[500 Toads]

SRA2.0 character generation isn't super crunchy, but the core rules do expect that players will want to be a bit creative and use the provided framework to create "Shadow Amps" as their important gear ( whether literally gear, or cyberware, or spells, vehicles, etc) that reflects different mechanical effects and narrative effects. There's guidelines about all sorts of properties and how much they affect the amp's "rating" and thus cost. Attributes, skills, specializations, spells. all sorts of amps... all boil down to a nuyen cost.

It doesn't come with a huge "gear porn" section with a gazillion specific examples for you -- there's are examples, but it's not on the order of the old catalog-ish supplements. There's a fan-made "Shadow Amps Expanded List" freely available on DTRPG with a bunch of suggested ones, for those who want to choose from a list rather than make their own.

The core rulebook isn't yet available to a general audience (non-backers) yet AFAICT -- that's up to Catalyst -- but people who did back it have created some online tools, spreadsheets etc. which get discussed at Reddit - Please wait for verification -- so if you're curious, you can find threads on character creation tools and what-not.