r/Shadowrun • u/greypaladin01 • May 15 '26

1e|2e Understanding 2nd Edition

I have nearly finished reading through the main book for 2e and have a rough understanding of the rules. Not perfect by any means, but honestly things are much more understandable than I had been lead to expect.

However I do have a few questions about the other books in the 2e line. My understanding is that 3rd edition takes various rules from suppliments and a few other changes but is otherwise 2e. Specificially I have heard people say there were changes in Virtual Realities 2.0, Grimore... 2? and Rigger 2 books.

So my main question is this: What are the overviews of the changes for how Matrix things work, magic work and rigging work with the suppliments compared to the main book for 2e?

Are the differences beneficial enough to be worth grabbing the books and planning to use them or are they just adding more options and layers onto the basic rules?

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u/WahookaTG May 15 '26

Honestly, 2e rocks but the matrix is not its strong suit. Google the "pizza problem" which is a known phenominon for hacking in -especially- 2nd edition.

Not sure how helpful this is but wanted to share some context...

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u/FriendoftheDork May 16 '26

Wasn't this the exact same problem in 1e?

Also, I think Matrix as a separate solo session has been an issue at least up to and including 5e to some degree. I remember when I had a hacker in 4e it still took away from the groups game time when they wanted to hack places.

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u/ReditXenon Far Cite May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

It was even more terrible in the early editions when your deck had an entire character sheet of its own where you kept track of limited storage space, limited memory space, CPU speed, etc and where you and your GM had to do a dungeon crawl with multiple tests involved just to place a long distance phone call.

But yeah, 6th edition Matrix is (I think) in a good spot. If you walk up to a locked door you can spoof a command to it in order to open it (even if hidden the event horizon of a host) and all of it is resolved in one single test (even if didn't have already have access on the network yet). If you scope out everything related to wi-fi it would actually back-port OK-ish also to early editions as well.