[Moonrunner]

What is the best/your fave edition of Shadowrun? 1e? 2e? 3e? 4e? 5e? Anarchy? 6e (for those lucky few getting to try it out so far)?

[The Tekwych]

I have every edition but 1st still in my position and have played them all. We most often play 3rd edition and pre Corp War but have characters and can also play 5th. Can’t wait to get my hands on 6th to see how it is.

[Stainless Steel Devil Rat]

1e: I started playing SR when SR started.  TBH though 1e was replaced by 2e in such short order, all I tend to remember are the wacky things that 2e fixed.  Like, when using burst fire you used to make an entire attack roll for every bullet!

2e: Played this the longest and it's my sentimental favorite.  Perhaps because it's my favorite, I don't think it has any flaws!  Or because I haven't played it in about 20 years by this point, all I remember are the good parts

3e: I never really adopted 3e. I felt it fixed things in 2e that didn't need to be fixed.

4e: Where editions 2 and 3 were more or less newer iterations of 1st edition, 4e killed a lot of sacred cows.  Limitations on the rule of 6? Dispensing with TNs? Is this even Shadowrun anymore?  Yeah, I overreacted.  But grognards gonna grognard.  Plus 2005 coincided with a PCS for me, so at a new base I just fell into playing other games for a while with new gaming buddies.

20th Anniversary edition: missed out on it entirely during my Shadowrun hiatus.

5e: 2013, like 2005, coincided with a life change for me.  In this case, retiring from the military and going back to school. Got back into Shadowrun just in time for 5e to be a thing.  5e definitely feels like a 4e MkII in the same way 2e was an organic evolution of 1e.The sacred cows that 4e killed have stayed dead, but so many people are used to that now they don't seem to miss them. In the grand scheme of editions, I'm not particularly a fan of 5e and really won't miss it once we move on to 6th world edition.  I especially won't miss taking an hour to resolve a combat turn. But I have had a lot of fun with it, and if I were to pick a 2nd favorite edition this is probably it simply because I've played it so much over the past few years.

Anarachy: Never tried it, but am intrigued by the notion of a cooperative narrative style game in the Shadowrun universe. I wonder though how the setting is supposed to be oppressive and dystopian when the players are telling the GM what happens rather than the other way around

6th World Edition:  It's shaping up to be a truly new edition rather than a successor edition in the way 4th was a break from 1-2-3e.  Killing sacred cows has a way of turning people off.  But I've been through that shock once already, and can absorb that kind of blow easier a 2nd time around   I'm excited for 6e.  Particularly the streamlined rules... 5e does have a big problem in that arena.

[Beta]

I've only really played with 1st and 5th, and dabbled in 2nd and Anarchy. 

2nd is more playable than 1st, and my understanding is that 3rd made a more complete system than 2nd.  But all of those used the variable target number system (you start off with 4 or higher counting as a success on each die you roll, and modifiers increase or decrease that modifier.)  Because a d6 is such a small range, every modifier had a huge impact.  Which was a pretty big structural flaw.

4th and 5th (and upcoming: 6th) went to the fixed target number of 5, with modifiers changing how many dice you roll.  This allows much finer granularity on bonuses and penalties.  I think they are stronger systems at a fundamental level for that reason.  Not having played 4th I can't compare it to 5th.  I can say that I think 5th has a pretty robust rule set, sadly it suffers from rather poor structuring of the core rule book, making the game quite slow when working in any realm that you haven't memorized (or built your own summary, or house ruled just for simplicity's sake).  There are a couple of boneheaded errors (the speed table for vehicles, a matrix that wouldn't work for your average corp drone), but they are pretty easy to house rule or ignore.

Anarchy, to me, just didn't bring the crunch that I like ShadowRun for.  I've played rules light systems and loved them, and seriously thought about running my home game using one -- but to me it isn't fully shadowrun without fussing about Essence or working out the best set of Adept powers for your purposes.  To me Anarchy is not such a good rule set that I'd prefer it over other rules light systems, once I choose to give up some of that fine textured crunch.

[ORTEGA76]

For nostalgia and favorite storylines, I really loved 2E. The gameplay was a little tricky to learn but it went well once you got the hang of it it was pretty coherent system. I loathed 4E. It turned me off Shadowrun for years.

[Michael Chandra]

Obviously the only good edition to play the sixth world is Sixth World.

Anyway, it really depends on what you're looking for. Want crunch? Want easy start? Want 'excessive damage due to a bad roll will permanent cripple your players'? Want a mechanic you can't just easily houserule into an edition that lacks it?

I like 5e for fixing 4e flaws, I like 6e for daring to be different, I like 4e for removing some stuff that people tell me stories about from 3e that makes me hate it, but that's all personal preference.

[Shinobi Killfist]

2e. All the systems mechanically have issues. 2e is the best setting by far. 4e and on, most the setting changes have been a detriment imo. Though I really like alchemy in concept so for me that is a value add. Too bad the math for it was so damn bad in 5e.

[Jack_Spade]

I missed 1st and 2nd, but cut my teeth with 3rd, which I liked a lot.
4th overhauled the rules significantly and imho improved the rules (except for ini slots), but also added hugely customizable elements (gear, spells, matrix) which I love.
5th was overall an improvement over 4th if you ignore the unsatisfying quality management and less than stellar fluff-crunch mixing. 5th is also the edition that hit late enough in my life that I could affort to heavily invest in all the rule books (Thanks in no small part to Pegasus' excellent pricing scheme).
Anarchy never clicked with me. If you want simple mechanics for a game just use original nWoD.
There is not enough info about 6th yet for me to have an opinion.

So all in all, it's a toss up between 4th and 5th with 5th being marginally ahead in overall mechanics while 4th had a slightly crunchier taste and wasn't afraid to go full SciFi.

 

[Sphinx]

I've been both gamemaster and player in every edition, first through fifth (ignoring Anarchy). They all made progress at fixing the broken stuff, but they also tried new things that didn't always work. Still, I think every edition so far has been a net improvement on the one before. Looking forward to six.

[Marcus]

Old gaming system usually come with a heavy dose of nostalgia, and that has it's problem in the sense that we do ignore many of it's flaws. I do think 2nd was ready to go anywhere and do anything. Even things like fields of fire really stuck with me like none of the new source books did. So I guess i have to vote 2nd story wise, but it's not like it was better system in fact mostly the opposite.

[PiXeL01]

I started just with the release of 2nd so that’s the one dear, though I probably have played 3rd the most. It felt like a natural change so I stuck with it and persuaded my group to jump ship too. We survived the tormoil of 3rd with the shock of Fasa folding, Fanpro taking over, and Wizzkid games. The setting ensures though I never really liked the art side of third.

Then 4th hit and it hurt. I felt betrayed, stabbed in the back, dragged under a bus, and trampled upon by the system change that turned my beloved game into a WoD clone, a system I hated with a passion. So I turned my back to it all and left for Japan...

After a couple of years of being completely disconnected from tabletop RPGs (or REAL Roleplaying games, because LARP is for “weirdos” and taking the game too far!) mainly because I couldn’t or hadn’t really attempted to establish a friend base here (Tokyo is a cesspool btw) I started looking back at RPGs as a way of making new connections. An old friend of mine had just made me aware of the release of the SR5 core pdf and I invested in it just to see what horrors could be found within.

My years of absence had abstinence had changed my outlook a bit, and my old disdain could overcome my burning desire to play again. Using the game as a medium I reached out to the board gaming community of foreigner here in Osaka and struck  gold. That lead me to buy 4th books simply to catch up with the lore.

Now sixth looms on the horizon and I’m definitely going to look into it ...
2nd above all!

[CanRay]

The best edition?  The one you play with your group.

[Singularity]

The best edition?  The one you play with your group.

That'll be 6th for me! I've already convinced my group to give it a try, and I'll be running the adventure in the starter box when it comes out.

[mcv]

The best edition?  The one you play with your group.

That is the best answer.

I played mostly 2, some 3, one or two sessions of 4, and am currently starting a campaign in 5. I never fully mastered the rules of any of the previous editions, but I'm really making an effort to mastering 5 now.

My experience:

2 is incredibly cool, fantastic style and atmosphere, and has all these game mechanics that are weird, unusual and cool, but break when you look at them too closely. My first character was totally useless, my second character broke the game (a shaman flying invisible above the battlefield with boosted reflexes shooting her AR at full auto with recoil comp and smartlink; took Resources A and spend it all on a big power focus and lots of spell locks).

3 was still cool and fixed most of the problems with 2. The only problem it didn't fix: those target numbers. Cool idea, but behaves really weird when you look at it closely. Sometimes a 1 point penalty halves your chance of success, sometimes a 1 point penalty has no impact at all.

4 fixed the remaining problem in 3, and then fixed a few more things that didn't need fixing, like variable initiative passes. At the time I felt like it lost a bit too much of the feeling of Shadowrun, though I liked the Edge mechanic.

5 restored some of the cooler bits that 4 "fixed". I like the basics except for limits, but the rules are poorly organised and badly written, so when I finally do find where a particular rule is, I read it and still don't understand it.

Ideally, to me, 6 should have been a thorough rewrite of 5 that explained the rules better, threw limits out, and made clearer how the Matrix works. 6 turns out not to be that. Instead, it seems to fix some other things that I don't think needed fixing.

[FastJack]

Having played through them all (as well as dabbling in creating my own d20 version back in the late 90s), I can say that I do like them in order of 4E/5E/3E/1E/2E for playability.