Updating Your SR2 Character

>>>>>[Converting your favorite Shadowrun character over to the new system can be very difficult. Hopefully my solution to this problem will help others out there.]<<<<<

I happy when I saw how improved SR3 was compared to SR2. Unfortunately I was also annoyed at the lack of good conversion guidelines. My players really did not have to worry about it much, since the GM converted all their characters for them.

Skills

Some of the skills in SR3 became less generalized, while others got more so. I also would like to point out that I feel the Knowledge Skills have been left far too open ended for my taste. (If I wanted open ended rules I would play Champions). Thankfully most of the skills strayed the same so it is no problem determining what skills a character should have. Then we come to the combat skills.

Generally if a character doesn't actively use a weapon I see no reason why they should have the specific combat skill. A character can always default from another skill. My 400+ karma point character had a few of every type of firearms available in the SR world and a skill of 6 with firearms. (I believe in making a character who is well balanced, he also had 6's in a lot of other skills). Since he only really used his submachine guns I decided that he needed the Submachine gun skill at 6. He often used an assault rifle, but since he was a hunter I decided it would be more appropriate for him to have the rifle skill and to default for Assault Rifle. I gave him the rifle skill at 4 since he used it far less.

A lot of GMs allowed players to give characters extra skills based on their intelligence. Generally these skills easily translate to Knowledge Skills as do many of the character's hobbies and interests.

Metahumans

In some ways metahuman characters get a big boost during conversion, in others they lose out big time.

The loss of half their karma pool is the only true downside there is as far as I can tell. Mike Mulvihill's reasoning for this was that the key to being a human gets lost in the actual "numbers" of any RPG, because the human character technically does not get a "bonus". The key to a human is their ability to adapt and there really is no game mechanic for that in SR (although ED did a great job of it). To show the versatility of a standard human he decided that it would make more sense for them to be able to have more karma pool dice to reflect this nebulous ability.

From what I have seen, metahuman characters in the new edition generally have access to more skills and more attribute points and generally more resources than in the previous edition of shadowrun.

It is pretty easy to compute the new karma pool for a converted Metahuman character. All you have to do is divide your karma pool in half (round down) and minus 1 from the total. The difference between your old Karma Pool and your new Karma Pool is how many extra good Karma you have to spend.

Magic

Magic conversion is very tricky, since we do not have all the rules as of yet and the rules have changed so much in some aspects. As a general rule of thumb you need to follow the gradual initiation rules out of the Shadowrun Rules Companion. (This is how third edition magic initiation will go from my understanding).

Most of the spells convert nicely over to third edition without too much trouble. If a mage has several of the spells that were combined in 3rd edition I would be inclined to raise the power of the highest spell a bit. I would only suggest 1 force point per duplicate spell though.

The Easy Method

If you were lucky enough you kept track of how much money you started with and have an account of how much karma you have earned in your shadowrun career. If you do, then great! It means that you can easily convert by remaking your character via SR3 rules.

Last Updated 11.21.2000