Is shadowrun a good game?

Been kinda interested in it for a while, but I've heard some negative things about it here

As a relative newbie to SR, I enjoy it. The system is janky as fuck across all the various iterations, and takes a lot of work to handle, but as long as your GM and a decent amount of the group understand the rules it works fine.

It's about the same as 3.5/Pathfinder. There are easier systems to learn and use, but if you get everything down and play with reasonable people with common sense and over the age of 15, it's not nearly as bad as the haters make it out to be.

I have yet to find another system that handles firearms as competently.

It's a system that lets your roll lots of dice and isn't hard to make fun. Plus you can basically skip whole features (magic, metahumans, matrix) if you don't want to put them in your games.

Play your favourite version of DnD.

Make the setting 'modern'.
Rename 'ranged weapons' to 'guns'.
Rename 'thieves tools/disable device' to 'decking'.
Replace 50% of 'magic' with 'cyber'.

You are now playing Shadowrun with more comprehensible rules!

I find the system pretty obnoxious if you don't have an EXCELLENT DM and a competent group. The big issue is that at any point, your party is engaged in 3 almost completely separate systems:

- your street samurais and riggers are fighting enemies in the physical world, or sneaking around conventional space.

- your magic duders are doing astral plane shenanigans against enemy magic duders

- your decker/hacker duder is doing a bunch of nonsense in cyberspace, using a system totally independent from physical and astral space.

This leads to a session where you spend a lot of time on a run waiting around as the DM and someone in another system talk about a bunch of bullshit you don't give a fuck about. Here I am, waiting to ambush some squishies with my shotgun, and my DM and decker have been talking about hot-sim and cold-sim for 3 minutes. Your DM has to work really hard to keep all the different parts relevant to all the different character types.

I would recommend everyone running a physical char, and a DMPC for cyber stuff. Remove magic. It's almost completely ancillary to the good parts of Shadowrun: the setting and the punchy, meaty gunz and combat augmentations.

I DM SR 5th ed and it's a pretty fun system worth it both as a campaign and as a one-shot, I guess.

No, no you are not. You are playing a fucked up version of DnD that makes sense. Go home.

It's pretty good, for specific types of games. It's pretty lethal, the action moves fast, I like it. Be aware that you're infinitely better off just handwaving decking entirely.

Just play PF, it already shitty guns and stole most of the augments from SR.

This man speaks truth. It's also worth noting that each of those sub-systems has a plethora of sub-sub systems, often with terribly written or in some cases entirely unusable rule sets. I mean, this is a game where the example characters in the nook aren't legal rule-wise. If you have a GM that hates his life go for it, but I would advise staying away.

>competently
>antimatter rifle has the same recoil as small handgun

More like anti material, bro. And they're firing very few shots, so it's pretty much irrelevant.

Also, he said AS competently. There's not a lot of alternatives that don't fuck up worse.

>haveyoutriednotplaying3rded.jpg
Still works for Shadowrun. Most of your post can be easily fixed by doing that.

>remove magic
remove ASTRAL, keep magic. Shadowrun has an excellent core magic system.

As for hacking, the simple solution is to play 4e. Hacking was pretty OP in 4e, but it was also a lot simpler than 5e's hacking. Besides, if you have new players, they probably won't know how to abuse it as well, and if push comes to shove, you can just remove Agents from the game.

I don't like the system that much, but it's far from the worst. But the setting is really fun if you don't take it too seriously. I think Savage Worlds is the perfect system for it, to be honest. Gotta love that pulp.

Shadowrun is a good game, but very complex and plagued by issues involving the parent company's embezzlement.
These issues include cut content, writers not being paid, and absolutely no editorial control, so the books are awful to read.

A thing to understand is that shadowrun is not an adventure game.
It's a heist game.
And a proper heist is WAY FUCKING MORE COMPLICATED than a proper dungeon run or a proper adventure.
Legwork suddenly becomes a thing you have to do, and actual planning is the responsibility of all players. Failure to plan properly can and often does lead to spectacular failures and permanent death or removal of stats.

It's great fun, I play 4th edition and enjoy myself every time.

Setting's fairly deep and complex, the character creation and ruleset is a bit on the heavy side but there's a program to make the whole thing easier.

All in all, good fun and suitable for a variety of moods of cyberpunk. Hell, you could even remove magic if you wanted, although at that point you should play Cyberpunk2077, although I've never played it so don't take me at my word.

It has problems that mostly arise from the company that currently prints it has no concept of how to actually make rules written in a manageable format and doesnt do a whole lot to ensure all their freelance writters are always on the same page. If Shadowrun had more competent Editors it would be a much easier experience to learn.

Overall its a great game once you finally understand how the system is supposed to work and your group knows what parts of the system it wants to ignore.

My persnonal rul is that no one is allowed to play a decker/Techno until they proove they understand the ideas behind playing the role at least halfway decent. A bad Mage will throw Fireballs and maybee hurt himself, A bad Decker will make the game come to a full stop.

This, and also .

is wrong when he says that mages are doing astral plane shenanigans that have no impact on the rest of the party. Unless you're playing a fairly high-level game with someone who specializes in astral combat, magic and mundane go hand in hand 99% of the time. You need the mage to do stuff like spot spirits and cast Heal and other important spells, and you need the sammies and riggers to actually kill everything, including other mages. Magic is a force multiplier, not something totally separate and abstract.