Shadowrun v4 - Your Experience

[Arkhandus]

Dang. I had been rather put off by SR4 before. Now I'm dead certain I won't be picking it up. Thanks for the bit more info on some of the changed mechanics and flavor.

Far as I'm concerned they killed Shadowrun, hooked it up to an ungodly amount of cyberware, and worked up the mother of all cybermancy rituals. And made a horrific monster.

 

[Imperialus]

I've played 2nd 3rd and 4th ed SR and actually just wrapped up a year long campaign for SR4. It's a lot of fun, the game flows much more quickly than it did in 3rd edition and though I agree with mmu1 that SR4 characters can come up against skill/attribute caps really fast it does still allow more room for growth than previous editions did. Of course I was playing a mage who doubled as a face and mages are still karma pigs so the caps wern't as much of an issue for me.

As other posters have mentioned SR4 did do away with the arms race that was previlant in earlier editions where the only way for a GM to cope with PC's with bigger guns was to start throwing opponents at them wearing mil-spec armour. I'm GMing a PBP campaign now with some very high powered characters who have access to military equipment as a matter of routine and it hasn't broken the system.

Mages can be very powerful under the new rules and some house ruleing is probably an order. My character for example could put an end to almost any fight by simply casting Mob Mind and having opponants eat their gun or pull the pin on a gernade attached to their belt or something. While that was amusing for the first few times after I found it out it quickly became boring and my GM and I houseruled the spell to tone it down. Spirits are also very powerful especially if the mage has some money to throw at binding rituals and is willing to take a couple days of downtime between summons and overcast the binding ritual. My force 9 earth spirit was literally a tank on legs, a body of 19 with immunity to normal weapons will soak a lot of bullets.

That said though the caps do give the game a more "realistic" flavor, this isn't nessesarally good or bad, just different. Our 3rd ed campaigns had some pretty crazy wire-fu moments with elven street sams rappelling down buildings while engaged in a gunfight with Ares choppers while the Phys-Ad took advantage of the distraction to jump over a 15 foot electric fence and the sniper got a perfect headshot in on the security rigger sitting at his desk on the 80th floor. 4th ed won't see so much of that, at least not all at once and it wouldn't be routine.

Final comment is that wireless hacking is much nicer than decking. That was my biggest issue with former editions since it was essentially a completely separate game tacked on to the rest of the system. Hacking integrates the computer geeks with the rest of the team and lets the game flow much more smoothly.

 

[Felon]

I just have the SR4 rulebook, no supplements. I gotta say, stuff is streamlined, but it's at the cost of a lot of flavor. The spells presented are boring and bland. Adept powers aren't anything interesting, just generic self-buffs. They just didn't try very hard at all to suck gamers in with the presentation. Sounds like a minor gripe, but blandisement has bigger reprecussions than you miight think. They really should have sprung for color pics. I'm sure longtime gamers can recall that Shadowrun was one of the innovators (alongside RIFTS) of marketing books with high-quality presentation. Could be just me, but it feels ike something has died inside the game.

I do like wireless hacking. I'm not sure what the big gripe about it is. In the future, expect everything to incorporate wireless computers. Guns, clothing, books, coffee mugs...everything new willl be chipped for some purpose or other.

 

[phindar]

This is one of those issues that I can never be truly rational on, because no matter how great v4 might be, I just completely and instinctively grokked SR2 and 3. Every rough spot in the system was either something I had houseruled to work (vehicle combat), didn't use (decking), or didn't mind (TN calculations). The system did what I wanted it to and I liked how it did it.

I've played SR4 a few times, and from what I've seen its not a bad system. But I have years upon years of history with SR's middle editions (I really don't separate 2 and 3 in my head; 3 fixed a couple of things and changed some things I liked better in 2nd, but in the end it felt like the same game to me). Some of the best games of my life were in that system as well as some of my all time favorite characters. There'll always be a place in my heart for SR3, and there'll always be a big box of d6's on my shelf.

 

[Imperialus]

I gotta say, stuff is streamlined, but it's at the cost of a lot of flavor.

Come to think of it, that's a good point. I guess I probably didn't notice it because I have every single 2nd 3rd and most 1st ed books. As far as the artwork goes the BW doesn't bother me. the art itself is really well done, the hacker playing with his drones on 207 is praticularly cool.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I just have the SR4 rulebook, no supplements. I gotta say, stuff is streamlined, but it's at the cost of a lot of flavor. The spells presented are boring and bland. Adept powers aren't anything interesting, just generic self-buffs.

My recollection of SR2 and 3 is a bit hazy, as I haven't looked at the books in ages, but *in general* the same things apply to the core books for previous editions, with the same spells and roughly the same adept powers.

The spells and powers in the supplements are somewhat more flavorful.

Brad

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

We have played it once, and it went quite well. Unfortunately, we're still "stuck" (though in an ejoyable way) with several D&D campaigns, so we're not actively playing Shadowrun.

What I liked:
[i[The improved dice resolution mechanic. [/i]
The new system plainly doesn't fail down in extreme situations. It has a lot more consequences then one might expect in the beginning - suddenly you're character isn't effectively disabled just because he has taken some stun and lethal damage. Smartguns are suddenly just nice to have, not the requirement to be a decent shooter. (Which means a lot for Ki Adepts).

Loss of pools
Characters can now attempt to dodge every attack, meaning that people without combat pool remaining are not automatically hit and killed by any decent shadowrunner or guard (whichever side you're on)

Skill Groups
Finally, a sensible approach to an old problem. In SR 2, characters learned "Firearms" and were capable of using all weapons. In SR 3, characters had to decide for a single weapon group (Rifles, Pistols, Shotguns and so on). Now you can create a firearms specialist and the guy only caring for his pistol, without making one of the two archetypes to expensive.

Cleaning up the magic system
Yes, I liked the old distinction between shamanistic and hermetic magic. But a lot more I love a sensibly stream-lined game system. Let's face it, the additional rules Magic in the Shadows already did blur the lines between shamans and hermeticians anyway, and the new solution makes this in a open way. I am still in favour of keeping most characters in the old reigns, but the new mechanics are fine with me.

New Hacking rules
Oh, I will probably miss the term decker, but integrating the flow of the Matrix combat into the regular combat - great idea. Now we just have to get rid of the astral space (but that was never as bad as Matrix, because at least the combat resolution mechanic stayed similar)


But there is also one glaring error in the rule system:
Initiative
Multiple actions per round simply doesn't work. It sucked in SR2, where slower characters didn't get to act before the extra actions from the others were resolved , and it sucked in SR 3, because slow characters still had to wait eternities till the cybered-up where done.
Multiple Initiative passes simply create to much imbalances.
My "hotfix": Instead of getting extra passes, people get extra (automatic) hits on their Initiative/Reaction checks. The second step would be reducing the cost of Reflex Boosting cyberware, powers and spells. Maybe 1 point of Essence/Power Point per pass/hit)
Still powerful, but not as extreme as before.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Here are the things I'm not especially crazy about:

1. The TN is always 5+ and penalties/bonuses subtract/add to the number of dice, not the
TN.

This changes the resolution mechanics drastically - in SR3, high enough TN mods would make certain tasks damn near impossible for both the starting runner and a veteran with 200 karma.

Under the SR4 model, a high-powered character (or in some cases, a specialized starting runner) can have so many dice even huge penalties like for shooting in complete darkness without any vision-enhancing cyber can be overcome.

I would call that a feature.

In early editions (long time since I played SR), the difference between TN 5 and TN 6 was way too large. A small additional penalty turned a sure thing into an extremely iffy test. In play, I once created a Decker who was literally waltzed through Red-5 systems, but sometimes broke a sweat against Orange-6.

Tests that vary in both the TN and the number of successes is too cumbersome for 99% of the players and GMs out there IMNSHO. TN mods are just too coarse.

It would be like playing D&D where the DM never gave a +1 or +2 or +4 circumstance modifier, but only gave out a +8 or +16 modifiers. While a DM might choose to be stingy with applying such mods at all, ShadowRun mechanics have always applied modifiers rather liberally.

I am willing to accept that PCs can simply succeed at seemingly impossible things. Even a starting runner is dangerous enough to not feel out of place standing next to James Bond. SR has always started its PCs at the D&D equivalent of 9th level IMHO.

 

[mmu1]

I would call that a feature.

I wouldn't.

For me, the whole point of SR is that the PCs - short of having the right cyber or magic - are not James Bond, Batman, or a high-level D&D character. I like the fact that the SR equivalent to a 20th level D&D character can't just blithely face down a couple of starting runners armed with pistols because he knows his stats completely protect him from any real danger, or take on a platoon of soldiers knowing he'll walk away with a few scratches.

As you gain Karma, you get much better at what you do, but you don't get the ability to routinely pull off superhuman stunts purely because of your modifiers, and that's a nice change of pace from the D&D I usually play.

SR4 doesn't entirely abandon these concepts, but it does make it harder for me to play SR the way I like it. (if I wanted to start using old WoD mechanics to run a SR game, I probably could have done that without paying for a new book) That if does away with some annoying rule quirks SR3 had is irrelevant, when for me, it doesn't deliver on a fundamental level. (and introduces as many if not more problematic rules of its own - buggy rulesets are a proud SR tradition, and SR4 really embraces it...)

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

buggy rulesets are a proud SR tradition, and SR4 really embraces it...)

That can't be all bad then, can it?

I agree with your sentiment. IMHO SR rules have always been overengineered given their amazing wonkiness.

The designers took concepts that work well enough as a fast and loose game for real human scale characters...then added supersteroids to make the characters beyond human. The rules often fell apart.

The best SR GM I played under pretty much ignored the detailed rules. He kept one sharp eye on the story pacing and the other on the level of challenge, and just rolled with the punches that the cyberfreaked out PCs could deliever.