Ask The Readers: Shall I Give Shadowrun 5th Edition Another Chance?

Recently I had the chance to play in a Shadowrun 3rd Edition game. We initially planned to play something else, but one of the players couldn’t make it, so we decided to play a one-shot using another system. The other two players and I quickly decided that Shadowrun could be fun.

I always loved to play the game, even though I am no fan of the rules. With the help of the GM I quickly built a pretty cool character: a Japanese-American adept who primarily fights with his two heavy pistols and wears expensive armored clothing looking like an executive’s suit. I’m not sure how viable this character will be in the long run, but for a one-shot he was fun to play.

The adventure the GM ran for us was one of the introductory adventures either from the core rulebook or the free quickstart booklet – I can’t remember. But the important part was, that we all had a blast and decided that we would love to play Shadowrun more often. Sure, the rules are a bit crunchy, but if you get used to them, they work pretty well. Of course it helped a lot that the GM knew the rules by heart (or just improvised pretty well).

For the last months I’ve thought that the Shadowrun rules weren’t my thing and that using a different ruleset like Savage Worlds would be more to my liking, but I realized that for the full Shadowrun experience you need the Shadowrun rules as clunky as they might be. Since I actually bought a copy of the SR5 rules a while back, I am now considering giving it another chance. Yes, just reading the rules gave a headache last time, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood last time. So what do you think? Shall I give Shadowrun 5th Edition another chance?

And what about the recently released Shadowrun: Digital Tools Box? It contains everything from the Beginner Box and the Runner’s Toolkit: Alphaware and it’s supposed to help newbies and veterans alike to get into Shadowrun 5. Do you think it could help me get into the game more easily? Please share your thoughts below.