If you read my previous post on the subject, it's no surprise to you that I love Shadowrun. I've played all the video games and run several campaigns at this point. People often say they love the setting, but find the game inaccessible, so I'd like to use this post to talk about all the things I love about the game in addition to the setting.
First though, just a moment to talk about me. Who is this guy and why should I care what he thinks? Well, frankly, you don't have to care, but in terms of qualifications, I've been playing tabletop RPG for almost 30 years now. My first was the original AD&D. I played often with a core group of other kids and had a long thriving campaign in the Forgotten Realms that spanned almost a decade.
I've played and GM'd lots of systems and my first exposure to Shadowrun was 2E. I loved the idea and the setting, but had nobody to play with, so stuck mostly with D&D and lots of video games. It was really about 3 years ago that I discovered Roll20.net. I have been GMing 5th edition ever since, more recently in meat space. I have (I think) all the books in PDF format (love you http://drivethrurpg.com/) and several of the adventure guides. I do predominantly gumshoe style storylines (often referred to as "black trenchcoat"). SR5 is not perfect. It has plenty of warts. We'll get into those in another post. For now, these are some things I love...
The Shadowrun community is amazing. This is one very passionate community with an active subreddit, many online games to play, and an array of youtubers doing everything from live play videos to tutorials on the rules system. People LOVE this game and it really shows. If you are ever unsure of how to interpret a rule or implement your own rule to cover something you can't find a reference on, there's almost guaranteed to be someone in the active community who has already asked or written about it. Very few games enjoy this sense of community and it feels good to be a part of that.
There are rules for pretty much any scenario. It's rare you will find yourself in a gaming situation where you want to do something or something happens where you are not able to find some reference in some book (or website) that refers to that specific scenario. If you're just not sure how to proceed, this is really an ideal scenario. Most people find the stack of Shadowrun books intimidating. With somewhere around 40 books in 5E at this point, there's a lot of reading material, but PDFs make searching those resources a no brainer.
Freedom. Rules are great and it's super helpful to have a stack of books covering every situation, but almost every rule ultimately includes a disclaimer making it "at the gamemaster’s discretion." This means a lot of things. I found most rules to be very well thought out and helpful, but every now and then I see things that are just mean spirited (looking at you Addiction disadvantage) or too easy/hard that need adjustment. SR5 in general is very much in the spirit of "This is your game." This is easier than you might think to train new players to deal with. I often start a campaign with new players using a very pared down ruleset and introduce more complex ideas as we go. It works well.