RPG Review: Shadowrun 20th Edition

[Cynical Cat]

Shadowrun is an RPG set in the latter half of the twenty-first century where magic has returned in a profoundly dystopian cyberpunk and sorcery milieu. The quick in dirty version is that magic comes and goes in long cycles and that the new cycle of magic has begun. Elves, orks and so forth a people (or critters) who have genes that are dormant when the magic is low and are now born with pointy ears and good night vision now that the magic flows. There's balkanization and splintering of countries, powerful megacorporations, tainted and wild magic zones, and the wonderful nastiness of a troubled future. The players are shadowrunners, quasi-legal mercenaries who do all sorts of deniable dirty work for governments, corporations, foundations, organized crime, the rich and powerful, and what is demanded by their own consciences.

This is the 20th Anniversary Edition, which is a tweeked version of Shadowrun Fourth Edition.

Artwork and Presentation: Good. Shiny full colour art in the interiors as well as black and white drawings that generally succeed at conveying the mood and atmosphere as well as the subject matter that's being depicted.

Organization: Superb. There is an index in the back that is not only comprehensive, but also includes the relevant page numbers in major supplements that also deal with the subject.

Game Mechanics: Generally quite good. The basic mechanic is adding the relevant attribute to the relevant skill and rolling that number of six sided dice. Every five or six counts as a success and you add the number of successes up. Tests are frequently opposed with the defenders successes being subtracted from the attacker's. This allows a fair amount of variety in modifier effects as one can add or remove dice from both the attacker's and defender's pool. Combat remains, as has always been the case, highly lethal.

Character Creation: A character point buy system that allows for some fairly potent starting characters. Orks, elves, dwarves, and trolls are possible as well as humans. A variety of magical talents can be acquired as well as badass cybertech and gear and a number of well developed skills.

Comprehensiveness: The books is huge and it is packed with stuff. There are huge sections on magic, cybernetics, weapons, hacking, and so forth. While the specialized supplements like Street Magic and Augmentation have even more material all subjects are well covered.

Background Fluff: The game is more than twenty years old. The background is very well developed and fleshed out.

Complaints: There is an example given in the magic section that assumes an optional rule is being used, without mentioning that rule. That rule isn't posted in sidebar or boldface and only applies to one type of spell so it was more than a little confusing. There's also the issue with the armour encumbrance rules and the exceptions to the armour not stacking rule (mostly found in other supplements) that can be problematic.

Answering Nitpicks: The Fourth Edition has a lot of negative baggage in the minds of players of previous editions of Shadowrun, which aren't really justified when examined in context. Magic is slightly weaker, but still a strong option. Cybernetics are cheaper, but available starting cash is reduced so its not much of an advantage. As for deckers now being called hackers, that's annoying but since they aren't using cyberdecks anymore its kind of fair. The Anniversary edition makes integrating hackers and technomancers into the action (instead of doing their own thing cyberspace, de facto splitting up the party) not only more likely, but easier to handle.

Overall: Recommended if you like cyberpunk and sorcery. Overall, mechanically superior and easier to use than previous editions of Shadowrun and the game itself is well supported.

[LadyTevar]

That was always the big drawback of Deckers: their forays into Cyberspace took as much time as normal combat, but left the rest of the party twiddling their thumbs while the GM dealt with him. It lead to some GMs I ran with getting together with the Decker pre-game. One GM banned PC Deckers, sticking us with his NPC and only the most basic rolls to determine what the NPC got for us (although I imagine he did tilt the odds to give us some chance).

I may get this for the nostalgia, but I don't know if anyone would want to play locally. However, I could be wrong....

[frigidmagi]

Just about every GM I ever ran with banned PC Deckers. I tried it once because I was new and damn sure I could make it wrong.

Oh Man was I wrong. The time thing isn't even the first part of it. You practically had to learn a whole another game and plot out a 2nd adventure. That convinced me to put a bullet in the idea's head and dump it in a shallow grave.

[Hotfoot]

Even Cyberpunk, the competing game of the time, had absolutely horrendous hacking, possibly worse than Shadowrun's, if you can believe that. You actually had to have separate maps for hacking there.

Thankfully, hacking in Shadowrun 4th and Cyberpunk 3rd are much, MUCH more sane. SR4E's hacking isn't as straightforward as, say, Eclipse Phase, but then they wanted to have Deckers and Riggers (yes, they share the same skillset now) to have some fun things to do in combat.

I'll get into the details of it another time though. Figuring out what they meant with half of it was a pain due to placement and phrasing, but I've pretty much got it down now.