Older Shadowrun Systems
 

Am I able to use the current Hero Lab Shadowrun package for older editions? (Specifically 2e, but I'm curious in general.) Failing that, has anybody put together something that works in that way?

No, the datafiles contain only information from the 4E rules.

You could conceivably write an entirely new datafile for the 2E rules, but you wouldhave to start completely from scratch, and I'm not sure how well you could do things like Priority-based character generation.

2e Shadowrun is my preferred ruleset too so I would love to see an HLSR2e dataset.

Cheers
Mark

2ED isn't supported by Catalyst, I have severe doubt that it'll be considered for Hero Labs.

But if you want to run in earlier eras, they are looking at releasing a rules set for the first SR timeline using 4e rules.

I'm afraid that it would take quite a lot of different people interested in a previous edition - enough to show that there would be a reasonable return on the time investment we'd need to put into them, in order for us to devote the resources needed to make Hero Lab files for an earlier edition, and to convince Catalyst to expand our license to include a previous edition.

The authoring kit is certainly an option - if someone wanted to create a dataset for an earlier edition, I'll help as much as I can. I don't think there will be many things that need to be acomplished for the previous edition of the files that haven't already been done (or are at least mapped out) in this edition, so I don't think there would be any roadblocks that would prevent someone from finishing the files. Just be aware that building the files will require a lot of time, and that the authoring kit documentation doesn't currently go into detail in a lot of cases, so you'd need to figure things out yourself in those cases.

You can try google fu... there was an Sr2 chargen app a long long time ago.

Sr2Chargen... Srcg2.8a

My google fu can't find it, but it's out there on the internet somewhere.

Finding NSRCG is a pain...

I am afraid I have to second Mathias on the Time Investment.
Programming data files takes a lot of time. Personally I like the current edition over its previous incarnations, simply for the fact I am not rolling 100+ dice for one attack roll. I would rather have a rulebook for playing in previous eras with the current rules than go back to needing a brick of 3 pounds worth of six sided dice to run and play the game.

Maybe it's because I haven't played any editions before 3rd, but in my experience dice pools in SR4 are bigger.... my cybered wolf shaman rolls 14 dice for a Manabolt (without spell foci or metamagic) in SR4 but only 8 in SR3, and when he uses his assault rifle he rolls 17 dice yet in SR3 he only rolls 8 (though granted he can throw 16 if I use all his combat pool).

Now I'll admit that probabilities to hit and the like are different, and armour is much more effective in SR4. But most people seem to knock previous versions for the rediculous numbers of dice used, yet SR4 almost doubles all dice pools since you're adding attribute+skill as opposed to just skill.

I personally love the SR4 setting, but would prefer 3rd edition rules. However, playing the 3rd edition timeline using current rules would also be cool - especially as we have HL :o)

You can roll 14 dice for a manabolt in this edition yes, but everything in SR4 has a maximum of 6/9(augmented) vs the capacities of 20 that 3rd edition gave. Very Rarely does something exceed that in skills / attributes. The dice you roll are much much less.

Lets go back to the older edition where if you had 20 dice with a minigun to hit something, and the gun explicitly states you roll 5X that number of dice... 100 Dice. Sad thing is, I am not joking, that is literally how it used to work. Armor doesn't really matter much against a dice pool of 100. The only game system that is worse in terms of number of dice rolled is Exalted 1st edition, but I won't get into that here.

And last time I did algebra, it told me that 100 Dice > 14 Dice.