[RPG] Shadowrun history across the editions

Shadowrun 4 uses a largely different mechanic from Shadowrun 3: SR4 uses the new World of Darkness dice mechanic rather than the classic Shadowrun mechanic (except they use d6 instead of d10, but 66.7% and 70% are basically the same probability...). The justification for the change was to speed up combat and other conflict resolution, which it does to some extent, by not having to keep track of both target number and number of successes (all target numbers are now 5; some things have thresholds for the number of successes you need--all the math is just done on # of successes). Also, dice pools are gone, so there are many fewer tactical decisions to make, also speeding up the process. (If you enjoyed selecting just how many combat pool you were going to use for soaking so you had enough left to take out your next opponent with one shot, you will be disappointed. If you were annoyed that you had all these extra decisions to make when you really just wanted to kill the bad guy as quickly and effectively as possible, you will be pleased.)

Because of the drastic change to mechanics, SR4 is a dramatically less versatile system; it works with a much narrower range of abilities and difficulties. On the other hand, the game has been balanced so that a normal run will be right in the middle of the sweet spot where the outcomes in SR4 do not feel drastically different from SR3. So if you were doing standard runs before, and will be again, you can take advantage of the simpler mechanics without much loss. SR4 breaks badly as characters or NPCs become extremely powerful (e.g. you need an impossible number of successes to defeat them, with d20-style "I stand in the middle of a room full of goblins for hours and they can't hit me" scenarios), so there are various caps and limits that were much softer before; starting out, you can make a runner who comes pretty close to the best in the world in something. Whether you like that or not is personal taste, but it is definitely a difference.

Anyway, the take-home message is that you should be prepared to feel like you're playing with different mechanics. The same concepts are mostly there in some guise, but it scarcely would have been more different if they had switched to d20.

Despite the mechanics changes, the setting feels much the same as before. Otaku are now Technomancers, and the old separate-worlds idea of the matrix has been replaced by a parallel augmented reality version that greatly helps with integrating deckers (now hackers--no more decks!) into the flow of gameplay. The timeline has advanced another decade or so, but aside from the crash of the old Matrix and replacement with the new augmented reality stuff, there's nothing that will radically change how your character approaches the world. The new mechanics are balanced to yield similar outcomes for standard runs, so you'll be approximately equally worried about a team of security guards or whatnot; if you were using SR3 the way you were "supposed" to be, you'll mostly just notice that SR4 runs a bit faster and that you can see your decker face-to-face.

The new errata answers the question clearly:

Change to following sentence: “You get a free Power Point whenever you increase your Magic attribute, and you can gain a Power Point through Initiation (p. 324) instead of gaining a metamagic.” To: “If you’re an adept, you get a free Power Point whenever you increase your Magic attribute (though this doesn’t apply to mystic adepts, and you can gain a Power Point through Initiation (p. 324) instead of gaining a metamagic.”

Therefore, further power points do not require spending of karma, but do require to forfeit a metamagic when initiating, and can only be acquired by initiation.