So, DM shouldn't be full-player, but can fill the lacking role with a NPC; dnd 5e and SavageWWorlds are good for beginners, and Dungeon World is not a proper rpg. Get it, thanks everyone, hugs
No, you definitely DIDN'T get it. You're missing the most important point here:
you're not infinitron tho
How do you know? Obsidian is good, to split threads is good, see, I could be Infinitron
And what about Shadowrun 4e? Is it any good for first-timers?
Shadowrun 4e and 5e (4e is a departure from some core mechanics from editions 1-3 and 5e is a refinement of 4e, and I say this somewhat unironically) are not beginner friendly by any metric. They are not intermediate-friendly, either. Any Shadowrun game requires massive bookkeeping from the GM, plus you will have to learrn three systems (physical, magic, and hacking) because the game is fucking schyzophrenic. I'd rather run Rolemaster, because I'd have to check a lot of tables but they would at least be contiguous and I'd be using a coherent system. In Shadowrun, they attempted to streamline everything and at first sight you'd think that they succeeded, but they fucked up. There's a lot of tables you'll be consulting often that are spread all over the fucking place. Magic is broken unless the game is full Hogwarts. It's also a pain in the ass because if you thought having to learn magic stuff to run D&D was a pain, you haven't seen anything yet. The team's tactical marines will get bored and frustrated when your magic users go on yet another Harry Potter magical escapade. The net was designed by people with no fucking idea about telecommunications, and you will probably want to pressure the group to subcontract an NPC for hacking just so that you can abstract the hacking mechanics, because it's a pain in the ass deling with the wizards already. My last Shadowrun GM ended up burning out (running 5e), and this was a guy with decades of experience as a GM. I had plans to run a 4e campaign, but ended up making it an one-shot when I realized that computer-assisted character creation still took more than an hour per character, and this is for pre-gens where I don't have to talk to the player about his character, and that the rules were fucking broken (especially magic). Both systems (4e and 5e) are designed to hobble cybered characters and benefit magic users, i.e., they were designed by a fucking hippy faggot. Cyberpunk my ass.
This is a game where you have to use square roots to calculate explosion damage (not that there's a problem with calculating square roots, but the choice itself, the fact that they are not used anywhere else and that the mechanic is only in place so that you have to use outrageous amounts and explosives to do any significant damage while flaunting the same rule every time you use an HE grenade, which has a fixed damage value, and compare that to Deep Space for CP2020, where equations were used to calculate the rate at which a habitat is depressurized, not just for pulling your leg), and then some if the explosion happens in confined quarters or there are solid objects nearby that can withstand the initial explosive damage. I have told this before in another thread, but a friend of mine ran a game (in 5e) which culminated in a tense scene where a there was a car bomb in a parking lot. My friend used all tricks and excuses to prevent us from moving the car, because it had taken him half an hour to calculate the bomb's damage value. And this guy is a fucking engineer, and I mean a proper engineer, not a "sanitation engineer". So if you don't want to be running three games at once and dealing with stupid design decisions, either get Shadowrun 3rd edition, or even better, adapt the Shadowrun setting to a superior system, such as Savage Worlds, because sometimes less is more.
There, I went on yet another Shadowrun tirade. The fluff is nice, but the rules are bullshit.
