[Poindexter]

OK, i dont know how many of you are familiar with RIFTS from palladium, but thats where this all starts. Back in the day, i really loved the world and setting laid out for me, but there was simply too much info on the world, culture, history, tech level, etc for me to expect 5 other grown men with jobs and schedules and stuff to study up on before they'd understand the bare essentials of the world they lived in. I tried several times to approach it from a tiny angle from one perspective of the world to another to try and show them the world, but they still never really grasped it.
Finally, one day i just decided to make them all hatchling dragons and dropped them right into the world on their own. "Fuck it" thought i. "if i can't tell them about the world enough for them to understand it, i shuold just make them play something that is new to the world, so they can learn as they go, and it not be out of character for them to do so." It worked like a charm and within 5-6 sessions everyone "got it". to this day, its remembered as one of the better games our group has ever run.

Now lets bring this pon round to shadowrun, shall we?
I've long been in love with the game, the world, the funk if you will, but could never get my players into it. Now im starting to wonder if the same approach i used with rifts could be used here. It doesn't, of course, have to have anything to do with dragons, but if YOU were going to use that sort of approach in a shadowrun setting, how would YOU do it?

[MortimerBane]

First of all Rifts was awesome.  But... like all Palladium games, the rules/math was atrocious and unusable.  I used the Shadowrun rules for Rifts and TMNT, and just used those rulebooks for the setting.  But to your question...

1)  I would make a 'fun' game.  Design the game loosely so they have lots of room to screw around and just have a good time.  They will get serious about SR once they have invested some time making a great character... they will never get serious until this happens.
2)  Keep the scope of the game very limited, i.e. the party should NOT have street sams AND riggers AND deckers AND mages all in the same group.  This forces you to teach ALL the rules in the same game session.  Try a Merc campaign where the team is all gun guys with NO magic users.  Use a NPC decker and rigger.  Keep the characters similar with subtle differences, i.e one guy is the demo guy, another is the B&E guy, one is the medic etc.  This will make for a 'clean' game with little paperwork or chance of the game bogging down while trying to look up rules for too many things.
3)  Or just do what I did.  Re-write their Rifts chars as SR chars, and run them through a short mission.  Make them fall in love with the SR rules first, then they will begin to fall in love with the Shadowrun world in general.

[emsquared]

I don't know that this is what I'd do, but it's similar to your baby-dragons thing so I figured I'd mention it... anyway, I played in a (D&D) campaign where we made characters based on ourselves, the setting was Ravenloft and it started with us being taken by the Mists as we sat there at our regular weekly session. It was oddly challenging RPing yourself, as stupid as that sounds. Or maybe it was just that you didn't want to be "you" too closely (if you're risk averse) because then things might get boring

Anyway, you could do that pretty easy with SR (building caricatures of the players, really). So of course they were jumped-up versions of ourselves, just as you'd have to do with SR unless you game with a bunch of army vets or LEOs or something... But if you started with low power builds (GM builds the PCs for the non-interested players), maybe loosely base the PCs skill-set on the players interests or actual skill-sets, and then give heavy karma rewards for the first few sessions to get them up to actual Runner standards quickly, it might be able to work.

Thrust them into some extraordinary situation ("You come upon a single upright brief case...") where it just builds from there. Make it epic and cinematic. They take it, great - easy peasy hook, they leave it, well they were the last individuals spotted near it, by the owners drone, so the owners hunt them down and want to know what they did with it's contents, as they weren't in there anymore when it was recovered. They won't believe the PCs don't know, so they have to find out or else... or whatever, you get the idea...

Keeping it simple rules-wise might be a good idea, but if they're experienced table-top RPers in general, I also wouldn't hesitate to let them see the breadth of possibilities as that is IMO a big selling point too. You can always do the NPC decker thing and just largely leave out magic if it concerns you.

[Poindexter]

The other big advantage that the baby dragons had going for them from a plot standpoint is that, even though they were completely wet behind the ears and needed to have evrything explained to them about the world, they were still INSANELY powerful, so their early mistakes (mistakes which would have gotten most groups TPK'ed) really only resulted in minor setbacks and funny stories for later.

[Michael Chandra]

You could grab a High Life Amnesia-1 campaign, so the characters know how to do stuff but they, like the players, haven't got the foggiest what's going on. It'd be a campaign to try to figure out what's going on, what happened to them, only to discover they're clones with their originals having been turned into e-ghosts, downloaded to cloned bodies as part of an experiment to see how well doppelgangers or a clone-army could work.