RPGPundit's Review of Shadowrun 4e

[RPGPundit]

At long last I have finished reading my complementary PDF of Shadowrun 4th edition.  This was a PDF given to me by Fanpro for services rendered, before any of you get to thinking I was doing any piracy. Yar har har...
 
Anyways, I'll get right to the point and start out with my conclusion, then give some more details. The conclusion is this: The game as it stands is still way to complex for my tastes, but it is now, for the first time ever, a coherent and unified RPG system.
That in and of itself speaks volume and means that on at least one level the Fanpro people can declare their efforts a success.  Whether or not its rules-light enough for me to like it is kind of academic, since I'm by default a rules-lite kind of guy.  However, now I can safely say with no hesitation that if you do like rules-heavy games (along the lines of something like GURPS on the scale of heaviness) then you can purchase Shadowrun 4th edition and will enjoy it.
 
Now, as for the particulars.
 
The Good (system-wise): Again, the fact that they are using a single unified system. Another company that is not D20 but has learnt the lessons of D20. The system is relatively smooth and appears relatively functional. The rules-heavy comes into play in the modifiers for situations and especially in the "add-on" rules for specific types of characters/actions (ie. magic, hacking, cyberwear).
 
The Bad (system-wise): well, its still very complex. Rules-lite players won't dig it. Also, the point-buy character creations rule is a munchkin's candyland waiting to happen.
 
The UGLY (system-wise): Again, the character creation rules, more specifically the fact that they could have made everyone's lives easier if they'd had, say, 14 pre-made archetypes that you could pick from and then modify to your liking, with guidelines as to how to modify them in a balanced way. This could have been presented as an alternative to the point-buy system.
Instead, what we got is 14 or so sample characters that are basically USELESS unless you go to the trouble of figuring out the math of modifying them yourself, at which point you might as well just ignore them and make your characters from scratch. So the 14 nice full-colour plates are a waste of space, that could have been so very useful if they'd followed the Feng-Shui style of character-archetypes-with-build-options instead of just sample characters.
As it stands, what you're left with is the point-buy system. Where I can see a couple of things happening.  First, a newbie to Shadowrun would take something like 4 hours to make a character, and would still end up making a mediocre or sub-standard character that didn't really reflect what he wants. There's just too many options, not enough guidance.
On the other hand, the munchkin who's good at crunching numbers and has read the book thuroughly will create an off-balance uber-powered god that will waste all the newbie's characters, or in any case make them quite irrelevant.
This is probably the most unfortunate part of the game.
 
The Good (setting-wise): The chapter on "living in the world of shadowrun".  This was a brilliant bit of fluff, detailing exactly what daily life in the shadowrun world would be like. Its extremely well written and gives you a direct flavour as to what the world is really supposed to be like, how it is different from our own.
 
The Bad (setting-wise): The timeline. It bored the hell out of me. I know they had to do the past-five-years thing for the regular players, and that's fine, but in fact they did very little of that and a whole lot of going into far too much detail about things that happened 30 or 40 years ago in the timeline. I think this was a misguided effort to help readers understand really profoundly the state of the Shadowrun world "today", but they did it exactly backwards. See below for more detail.
 
The UGLY (setting wise): The lack of a sufficiently thurough gazeteer.  Instead of having made us suffer through the massive timeline, fanpro could have dedicated some pages to each area of the world and explain in very brief detail what that part of the world is like in the "present" of the shadowrun world. I think we are meant to extrapolate all our information from the timeline and deduce from that just what Brazil or South Africa or (for that matter) New York is like in the shadowrun world, but it would have been FAR more effective to have given us a gazeteer that writes three or four lines about what Brazil or South Africa or New York are like "today" and let us deduce the history from that.

I know that experienced Shadowrun players have a metric ton of setting sourcebooks to reference to know what these places are exactly like, but the idea with the new edition was that it was going to be self-sufficient. If that was the plan, there should be enough in the basic sourcebook that one can play the setting right off the bat, and there just isn't.  Whether fanpro did this out of wrongheaded-ness (perhaps a disturbing obsession with timelines) or out of a desire to force would-be players to subsequently buy the Brazil, South Africa or New York sourcebook, I don't know.
What I do know that as it stands, someone who had never ever read or played Shadowrun before, if he were to pick up the new edition, would probably be forced to set his brand-new campaign of Shadowrun not in any real place in the Shadowrun setting but just in a kind of generic "sprawl", a "seacouver" style megacity with no name, because he sure as hell wouldn't be able to set it anywhere in the Shadowrun world.
That is, if he actually survived bleeding out from cutting his balls off in absolute boredom from reading the fucking timeline.
 
Conclusion, Redux: For me personally, I can't see myself playing Shadowrun, or at least not in the Shadowrun world. For one, the rules are still not light-enough to my liking. For another, there isn't enough setting material in the book for me to run Shadowrun in the Shadowrun world even if I wanted to.
But I can see people who enjoy a rules-heavy game making good use of this book, especially if they were either willing to buy future "setting" books or if they wanted a set of rules-heavy near-future sci-fi or sci-fantasy mechanics for their own setting.
 
Hell, if I ever do put Shadowrun to use it might be in that way: stripping down some of the more complex aspects of the mechanics to run some other sci-fi game with it. Shadowrun-based Continuum, perhaps?
 
RPGPundit October 6 2005

[HKRebel]

If your not gonna use it send it to me PLEASE!
akkelly_rebel@hotmail.com

[James McMurray]

"Serices rendered"?

[HKRebel]

Like what?

[HKRebel]

Like What?

[JongWK]

"Serices rendered"?

I guess you mean "services rendered"? What Pundit means is that he was part of the group of playtesters.

[James McMurray]

Ah. Did those guys get the leather bound version like GenCon GMs did? I was lucky enough to have my GenCon experience happen that year and the special edition of the book is a beauty. Of course, it's pre-erratta, so we usually use my friend's more recent copy, but it's still a beauty.

[JongWK]

No, they got the PDF version. Harcopy for everyone would have been nice, if extremely expensive for a small company like FanPro.

The Limited Edition was only for sale. I have one, and mentally worship it every time I look at my bookshelf.

[James McMurray]

Yeah, it's the most well put together RPG book I've ever seen. Pity it didn't come with programmable paper so I could download the erratta.

[Dominus Nox]

I have a freind into shadowrun and I got him a copy of the street samurai catalogue. I looked thru it and was rather amazed at how they priced things.

You could get a heavy calibue pistol with a laser sight that wa ssupposedly designed by a famous bounty hunter for 425Y, but a basic marine knife with one of those little kits in the handle (Compass, lighter, minilight and trauma patch) cost like 500Y and a basic hand axe with a spring loaded spike in the hilt cost 750Y.

Meanwhile you could get a decentl submachine gun with laser sight for 500 or so.

I found their prices rather odd, to say the least....:confused:

[James McMurray]

That book is over 15 years old. The prices in 4th edition make a lot more sense.

[JongWK]

Yep, especially electronics.

The survival knife was an absolute bargain in SR2 and SR3, considering the cost of a single trauma patch.

[Dominus Nox]

Yep, especially electronics.

The survival knife was an absolute bargain in SR2 and SR3, considering the cost of a single trauma patch.

Hmm, so it was the 'trauma patch' that made it cost more than a good, heavy pistol with a laser site?

[JongWK]

Survival Knife: 450 Nuyen, Street Index 1, Availability 3/6 hours (roll vs TN#3 every six hours to see if you can get one).

Trauma Patch: 500 Nuyen, Street Index 4 (read: street price 2000), Availability 4/48 hours.

You could argue that the SK does more damage [(Str+2) L] than a standard Knife [(Str) L] that costs 30 Nuyen, but the above is what makes it a bargain to me.

[Spike]

In the real world you can get knives that run two or three hundred bucks fairly easily now days. You can also find pistols that run for under a hundred (though... I would not recommend firing them if you value your hand...)

BUt I gave up long ago attempting to reconcile Shadowrun's pricing with anything rational.

Shadowrun is a game where prices reflect 'balance' almost as much as anything else, and yet your pimped out million nuyen motherfucker can get assraped by a broke ass street troll who happens to be an adept.

Go figure.