Catalyst Game Labs Shadowrun First Ed. 35th Anniversary –...

Most Helpful Review

"Overall, this book is well binded and put together. However, it does feel like cheap material. The paper isn't glossey, and the hardcover looks like a print on demand. The pictures also look faded, not like its intentional, but like it was just taken from a photocopy, rather than an original print. Regardless, its still way better than the original paperback. That being said, its still not worth the $50 admission. The 6th edition of this book is almost 2x its paper size and twice the content at the same price. The price reflects notostagia, more than its content.As to the game itself...I would like to say it simpler than modern Shadowrun, but it really isn't. The dice rules are based on d6s. In the modern edition, a roll of 5 or 6 is a success, and you need x number of success to achieve a goal. In this edition, the number you roll on the d6+modifiers determines your success. So if you have a target number of 8, you need to roll a 6+2 point for a modifier to his the 8 success number. Also, when you roll a 6, you reroll the 6 and add the second roll. This means if you have a target number of 10, you need to roll a 6, and then reroll for at least a 4. This wouldn't be so bad if you had a lot of plus modifiers, but you don't. There is hardly any, except for environmental modifiers and those almost all add to the target number.Instead, the characters just accumulate more and more dice. So if you need to roll three 8s, you need at least three 6s, and reroll them for at least three 2s. This is highly unlikely and the game compensates this by giving you a crap load of dice to roll. A character on average will be rolling as many as 10 to 15 dice in an given action. This breaks down further when you consider the average chance of rolling multiple 6 is always 1/6, no matter how many dice you roll. You could roll 25 dice, and only have four of them be a 6 and then you'd still need to reroll those to get at least three 4s. That means the remaining four dice has a 50% chance of being high enough to reach a target of 10, and you'd still need 3 of those.When you take damage, the target number for hitting goes up, rather than subtracting dice from the pool. This means, once you start taking damage, trying to fire a weapon is almost impossible as the target number is upwards over 10 on a rerolled d6. This isn't so bad when players are tracking it, but it's extremely difficult when the game master is forced to track NPC damage modifiers. In my games, we always ignored these rules.In a lot of ways, it a more crunchy game that the later editions. The Matrix rules, are a completely separate system and game from the rest of the rules. This means, if your running deckers, you're playing 2 separate games, which means, one group is going to be left out of the action. This makes the game very hard to run. In my experience, most game master ban deckers for this reason.The decking rules are also terribly explained. Of course, this book was written before the internet, when the idea of what a matrix would look like is almost impossible to imagine. Its seems to assume that a future internet is a videogame that immerses you and that when you beat the game, they give you secret information. It's very confusing and the book uses very unclear language to describe the matrix. Outside of the Matrix, deckers are useless, and inside the Matrix, all other characters are useless.Magic Users also have much smaller dice pools than the cybered up Street Samurai, which means magic is easily resisted, or has much smaller effect than guns. Adepts are mostly useless for this reason.Rules for guns is the most crunchy, requiring you to actually count bullets in an automatic gun, for reload actions.There was a 2nd edition of Shadowrun that was almost an exact copy of the first edition. It even had the same cover art, but mostly just cleaned up text, corrected typos, and explained the rules a bit better. There was no mechanical differences between the two. If you just want to try classic Shadowrun, I would suggest buying an old 2e book, as its the exact same game, but cleaner and probably cheaper."