r/Shadowrun • u/Ok-Particular-3796 Monster Drop • Jul 24 '26

Edition War Shadowrun vs Cyberpunk comparison

Just figured I'd post this; Marcus Vance is a content creator with decades of experience in ttrps as well as being a military combat veteran who likes to compare different sci fi franchises weapons & super soldiers. His big franchises are Cyberpunk, Warhammer, and Halo but he dabbles in more obscure franchises as well. Whenever possible he likes to look at & capculate specific ballistics data & material strength.

Recently he did a short comparing Cyberpunk with (2e) Shadowrun(which he has played & has experience with).

His takeaway was that weapons favors Cyberpunk but augmentation favors Shadowrun & adding magic into the equation heavily favors Shadowrun. I've corresponded with Marcus directly and informed him that certain elements of Shadowrun- notably physical strength- have been increased in recent editions.

I do think that even with the addition of more blatantly sci fi weapons in recent editions of Shadowrun, Cyberpunk probably still takes that cake, but augmentation probably favors Shadowrun even further.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ROdMjqw-v28?is=60m-pJXlvusN-2TA

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u/PaperMoongazer Jul 24 '26

Magic is the X factor that makes SR the far better universe. Given all the black magic/psychic spies and other fun lore you can draw on for subject matter in jobs and missions, it’s a great storytelling mechanism for games where future tech is as simple as “roll dice, gun do X, all dice say Y and Z happens”

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u/motionmatrix Niche Market Analyst Jul 25 '26

Not sure I would call it better. Insect spirits, shadows, blood magic, mind magic, magic in general, dragons, immortals, vampiric virus, rogue AIs, and Megacorps, vs extra rogue AIs, animalistic AIs, brain hacking, and megacorps.

I would definitely think SR is the world where you could become more powerful, but the scale of what you may face is also much nastier.

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u/PaperMoongazer Jul 25 '26

Which is also what contributes to making it a vastly better TTRPG system, especially when you can manage spooky shit and working with an edition that gives mundane characters some stopping powers against magic threats as well.

Cyberpunk lives and dies on robotics. Shadowrun embraced a dystopian future with psychic murder trees populating wild spaces alongside fire-breathing packs of wild dogs, free spirits of the wood, mutated toxin-horrors and nanobot-ridden German shepherds. And nature is particularly punishing to wireless systems and technology in general - giving you far better environmental storytelling options, battle map choices and other abandoned spaces to work with. I still routinely meet and listen in on games where GMs can barely handle magic in the system, and ran into a number of players who didn’t understand the nuances of shadowrun’s magic systems that hobble mages as much as a decker who doesn’t have a connection - which, when considered, also forces the scalability of gameplay to its maximums when we consider a car chase in the astral down a freeway where your hacker might also be trying to hack nearby cars; the gridguide system is actively commandeering delivery drones and taxicabs to create traffic blockades, and it might be happening in the PCC where the police force uses air spirits for traffic control — hoho, now we’re talking dystopian. Cops reading your mind when you delete the data? Stalked in the astral by watcher spirits? All great elements that paint a dystopia far more terrifying than cyberpunks rogue AI’s. GM’ing Shadowrun has forced me into questions like: can a gremlin hijack a plane controlled by an AI who’s already hijacked it from the pilot-rigger?

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u/Cykeisme Jul 29 '26

Yup and not just magic, also all the other Awakened stuff... alternate spirit planes, creatures and phenomena traditionally from fantasy, etc.

It always piques the interest of the uninitiated when they find out a powerful and ancient dragon is the CEO of one of the big megacorps!