Shadowrun editions

So the only edition of Shadowrun I have ever gotten to play was 4th edition. What makes each edition unique? What is your favorite edition and why?

That's a pretty personal question and you'll get a wide range of answers. ;) I personally never played 3rd, so I can't comment on that specifically, but I will say that 4th was a huge change for me from 1/2e, whereas the changes from 1st and 2nd could be summed up in my mind as "Set all staging to 2." That's not a phrase that someone without experience in both editions would get, and it'd take forever to explain. Mostly it was a significant mechanical change, and little else. The next big thing was the addition of adepts, something I think people (our group included) had already house-ruled. Some gear and magic tweaks, (removed Program Carriers for example, and something ammo-related from Street Samurai's Catalog, for example), but little else comes to mind. The changes from 2nd to 4th on the other hand...tons of things, including the loss/changing of certain cultural aspects like hackers/deckers. I haven't touched 5th yet, but I'm interested in the return to 2nd edition style initiative and decker's stats being important again. I don't have a favorite edition. My perspective is that the rules are rules, not the world. Each edition has strengths and weaknesses, but the world is what I love.

I like the first 3 editions... I still have all the 3rd edition books, but didn't care for 4th or 5th edition, at least from what I have seen from looking through the new books. I get what they were trying to do, they were trying to weaken characters in later editions, but that takes away a lot of the flavor of being a shadowrunner. So... I stick with my 3rd edition and will let the newcomers to the game enjoy the 4th and 5th editions since they never had the chance to play the earlier and in my opinion better versions.

Er...weaken characters? I don't get it. The only way the characters are watered down in 4th is if the GM sets the point total low.

I've played 3rd, 4th, and recently found about 5th. In my opinion they all had god awful Matrix rules, in fact I think in 3rd it actually suggested just making the Decker a NPC. As for uniqueness, I'd argue that 3rd and prior had the best setting, there were things to do, people to fight or flee from, and overall the immersion was easy to dive into. 4th lost that when essentially everything sort of mellowed out: Deus was "gone", I haven't even heard anything about Mr. Black, and the Bugs had already hit Chicago...oh and the Japanese were gone from SanFran. So it had to make due with essentially nothing to give in terms of setting or mood. It did give a plethora of new stuff, otakus weren't as hated, and magic seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. Overall I can't see what Daniel means about watering down, yeah the magic rules are limited but not ruined, I also like to add that nothing seem to occur outside of North America it seemed, which was what I loved about 3rd I wanted to know more about the UK and India.

Right time to get down to it. For me Shadowrun 1,2,3 are more or less the same, there are a few variations but the editions are so similar that you can use the books from the first or second edition with the third so I usually do not make a distinction between them, I have played a lot of 3rd edition and it was my favorite, I loved it since it was deadly and had some nice rules even if they were overly complex. The game was hard and it was tricky to get around too. But I preferred it over the 4:th. I did like matrix in 3rd since you were very free to do what you wanted but it was extremely complex. 4:th edition, I did not like it at all, I bought the books and read it over and I just hated what they had done to the system. They added technomancers, made everything wireless and kinda just frakked everything up, they removed decks and just destroyed everything. I did not enjoy it at all and I did not play it either, I have read the books over a few times but I will not play it. The good thing I can say about 4th is that it added some very cool source books that I like. 5th edition. This is the edition I play now, I think they learned a lot from the 4th and went back a bit more to 3rd and made it deadly again. They brought back my beloved priority system and made deckers, deckers again. It have flaws, no doubt about it. I can mention many of them right now but that will not serve my point. Those flaws are for me easily overlooked to the good things in the game. They have made matrix easier to use and far nicer. I have a totally new player running as a decker and she have no issues at all. But to list some flaws, very limited right now with just the base book, we are missing a lot of customization, I do not like that bioware and cyberware both reduce essence, I liked how 3rd handled that better. The book is very poorly written, its extremely confusing at parts and could be much clearer on what they mean, its hard for a new player to come and pick up the book and just play. But I still prefer 5th over the others these days.