WHY WE SHOULD PLAY SHADOWRUN 5 OVER SHADOWRUN 4:
- I sincerely, comprehensively dislike SR4 and do not want to play it. Like this is what all of this text boils down to, if for some reason you stop reading right now: I am not looking for a Shadowrun 4 game, so picking SR5 means you have the benefit of me. What do I bring to the table? I like to think I'm a quality person and a quality player, and I have a ton of experience with the setting. In my main group, I'm also the GM and have run Shadowrun 5 several times, so it behooves me to know the rules inside and out, and I do.

- Fewer books to read. There are four main books for Shadowrun 5 out right now, and if one includes all of the secondary material, there are eleven books to read overall. For SR4, the books we'd need to be familiar with to cover the core rules and main options that will interest everyone, we'd need to read twelve, and if we wanted to include every book in the 4th edition, you're looking at around ninety. I am happy to supply everything with the PDFs they need and happy to supply character building advice, too.

- SR5's mechanics are, in general, more stable, easier to learn, functional without the need for house ruling, and capable of supporting every concept that one should be able to play in Shadowrun. In contrast, playing a rigger, a decker, a street samurai, or a physical adept in SR4 runs up against that edition's barely functional vehicle rules, how it is trivially easy to become invincible in combat, and the slow, convoluted Matrix rules that highly encourage doing hacking in a secondary session or just not hacking at all. The rules also obviate the need for having a dedicated hacker in the party, because anyone can hack just as well as a dedicated hacker by buying skillsofts in the hacking skills and a good enough commlink, or by playing a technomancer and summoning the proper sprites to handle a situation.

- Seriously, the game falls apart so hard that they had to release a supplement that adds in rules for how to roll dice pools larger than 30 and another rule for pools larger than 50. Yes, 50 dice. Fifty six-sided dice. And it's not even hard to get these pools. My first SR4 character had a damage resist pool of 39 and this was just with options in the core rulebook. And I'm not even a power gamer. I just wanted to make someone who was hard to kill and made the mistake of assuming the core rules were sane.

- SR5's setting feels more distinctly Shadowrun and is better supported by the rules set than SR4 is, while also feeling suitably cyberpunk. SR4 ended up changing genres to essentially transhumanist, and the world went from feeling like Blade Runner to feeling like Ghost in the Shell. I like Ghost in the Shell. It's a great show. But it isn't Shadowrun, nor is it particularly cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, to me, is high tech and low life, where there's the promise that technology will be the great savior of humanity but it turns out that even with cybernetics and virtual reality, humans are bastards. The monolithic megacorporations are strangling the individual and turning them into faceless tools to be used up and extinguished in their great money making machines; what are you going to do about it? Shadowrun delivers on these expectations in every edition except in 4, where shadowrunning as a profession becomes less about rebellion against the power structures and more about organized crime. Which is fine, I don't hate that concept, but I'll play a different game for that.

In summary: I find Shadowrun Fifth Edition to be an edition that offers a more stable and easier to learn mechanical environment while supplying a more satisfying setting than the Fourth Edition. Also there's a pretty baller quick start box set for new players for SR5 but no such thing for SR4. And I own it and will be happy to share it.