I've never actually owned a Shadowrun basic rules book (I do own a second
hand Rigger), but I've played 2nd and 3rd edition. My feeble memory tells
me 2d and 3rd edition were mostly the same in how skills, rolls, stats
and damage worked, and 3rd edition mainly just fixed a lot of serious
bugs (high initiative killing everybody before anyone else gets a
chance to react, spell locks making rich shamans too powerful, are the
two I remember best). So opening my newly purchased 4th edition, I was
pretty surprised when I found two new basic stats, a totally different
task resolution system, and a completely point-based character creation
system.
So, what's the opinion here? Is it any good?
Here's my first impression after reading only a few bits:
The old task resolution system where you roll a number of dice equal
to your skill, difficulty of the task determines how high you need to
roll for a success, and the number of successes determined your level
of success, was one of the coolest systems I know, and unique to
Shadowrun. Ofcourse in reality it was kind of weird: difficulty 3 was
twice as easy as 5, which was twice as easy as 6, which was twice as
easy as 10. The new system isn't nearly as special or unique, but
probably a lot more balanced.
The point-based character creation system probably gives more flexibility
to fine tune exactly what you want, but also seems to invite min-maxing.
Particularly: raising a stat costs 10 points, but becoming Adept is only
5, for which you get a free point of Magic, which you can use to increase
a stat, if you like.
The old systems (or at least 2nd edition) didn't have this.
Haven't looked into the details of magic and cyberware yet, have noticed
that the damage boxes look a bit different now (not sure yet if that's
good or bad), and it seems like the number of initiative passes has
been seperated from Initiative itself, although I haven't read the
details of those rules yet. Not sure how I feel about that.
Anyway, what do you all think? Major improvement over SR3? Killed the
spirit of the game? Somewhere in between?
mcv.
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