My first game of Shadowrun

I've always thought of Shadowrun as 'cyberpunk, but with elves,' and having played it, this is entirely correct. And I'm not a fan; crossing cyberpunk with urban fantasy doesn't work for me. I didn't feel like the fact that we had an elf, dwarf, orc and troll in the party made any real difference to what was happening, beyond a bit of cool character art. Having a wizard in the party did have a mechanical effect, allowing us to do a few things that wouldn't be possible in a conventional cyberpunk game, but the whole magic thing still felt a bit stapled on alongside all the hacking and stuff.

So on the whole I'm with William Gibson on this. I don't want elves in my cyberpunk.

That said, Shadowrun is an immensely popular RPG that's been running consistently with a bunch of spin-off material for the last 30 years in a way that Cyberpunk never quite managed, and I think I can see why.

It's so much easier to play.

To be fair, I've only seen 5th Edition, and I don't know how it compares to the earlier versions, but despite being in my first ever game, I felt like I knew what was going on each time I rolled dice.  Compare with Cyberpunk, where the moment combat started I was completely lost. Each time I've basically just given a number to the GM, who then performs some complex calculations to determine if the person I shot is dead or not. And getting shot back? Here's my armour on that location (and dear gods that's some maths by itself), don't tell me anything else, just tell me how many hit points to cross off.

Add to this the fact that Cyberpunk's character creation is horrifically unbalanced and strongly favours min-maxing if the GM doesn't set some arbitrary limits in advance, while Shadowrun seems to have at least some common sense applied to the matter. Shadowrun's archetypes are far more playable and RPG-appropriate than the Cyberpunk classes, with our little gang of five working way better as a team than the bizarre bunch of weirdos I've encountered in Cyberpunk games. (The most recent game I've played where most of the group are Solos is really the best team I've played with.)

It's also moved with the times.

While being stuck in an absurdly 80s future can be pretty entertaining, there's a certain frustration in Cyberpunk when you look at the price and capabilities of a phone and compare it to the actual phone you are holding right now. Whereas Shadowrun has kept bringing out new editions and adapting to real world changes like the ubiquity of wifi. Elves notwithstanding, the Shadowrun future feels like it's the actual future future, rather than the 80s future.

And some people just like elves.

We were using pre-gens for this one-off game, and I picked my character based on a totally awesome bit of character art. (Ms Myth, should you want to google her.) I would totally LARP as her, because I love urban fantasy as much as I love cyberpunk, and while the two together doesn't really work for me, I can see why other people might enjoy it.

It does, however, include far too much planning.

Blades In The Dark has introduced me to a whole new way to do mission-based gaming. One with absolutely minimal pre-planning, where you just jump straight into the action and use flashbacks to explain how you got there. It's a complete paradigm shift in gaming, and takes some getting used to, but the result is the feeling that you're in a heist movie rather than a strategic planning meeting. The Sprawl, a PBTA cyberpunk game, still has the planning phase but heavily abstracts it down to a form of currency (gear and intel) that you acquire to spend in the action phase, with said action phase being the focus of the game.

Shadowrun makes it far too easy to get bogged down in the planning phase, and while our GM did a great job getting us to nail things down so we could actually get on with the heist, these newer systems that aim to kick you into the action at the first possible opportunity are in my opinion, the way to go with this kind of gaming.

So in conclusion, Shadowrun's setting doesn't quite work for me as it crosses two genres that I prefer individually, and it would benefit from the innovation that recent indie darlings have brought to this style of game. But it's a vastly better game than Cyberpunk 2020, and I wouldn't be adverse to playing it again.

At least until I find a decent Forged in the Dark cyberpunk game, anyway.