Hey winterhawk11, nice to see another Dumpshock denizen here.
Shadowrun is a seriously quirky game. It has many, many, many elements all shoved together, and the result can get chaotic if you’re not careful. The rules are tricky, especially if you’re used to a unified-mechanic system like d20 or GURPS (or Hero even), and especially especially if it involves an interaction between the magic and tech rules. As a novice SR GM, I found myself making up reasonable-looking rulings on the fly far more often than I ever did in GURPS, and it’s not just a familiarity issue: there are reasonably common situations that the rules as written do not cover, or cover in ways so painfully absurd as to break the suspension of disbelief.
I’d say that as a game, it demands far more of the GM than any other system that I’ve ever run games with*. You have to understand the rules well enough to extend them in sensible ways, and you have to understand the setting well enough to not step on the rest of game continuity too badly (unless you want to throw it out, of course). You have to make sure that the computer hacker doesn’t take over the game (I usually run the decker’s breakins in parallel with the rest of the party’s legwork, or intersperse interactions with contacts/the environment, but again that increases the load on the GM). You have to make sure that the drone rigger with his bog-standard Strato-9s don’t overshadow the samurai, and that the mage doesn’t make technological security worthless.
And yes, high-resource characters take forever-and-a-day to create. If you want to create a character in a hurry, low-resource mage or ganger is probably your best bet.
With all of that well-understood, I’m running an SR game and playing another and I love them both. There’s so much stuff in the game rules (decking, spellcasting, cybernetic control of vehicles) and in the game setting (voodounista, the horrors, cyberzombies, Bug City, sprawl life, Dunkelzahn’s presidency…) that it’s easy to find a tone your like and run with it. As a GM I struggled with this at first, because it seems like there ought to be a built-in Shadowrun mood the way there is with Vampire or WorldTree, but there’s so much stuff that there a exists a subset of that stuff that well-supports any kind of game at all. Mine right now is sort of reverse X-Files: in the course of their adventures the characters keep running across weird technomagical drek, which they ignore as much as they can in favor of doing the job for which they were hired. This inattention is about to shift the game’s tone into survival horror (the game date is August 20, 2055, and their home city is Chicago… :D).
*[sub]D&D basic through third, thirty million GURPS settings, Ironclaw, WorldTree, and Vampire.[/sub]
On preview: Merijeek, I have SotA:2063 and think highly of it, but I didn’t grow up with Shadowland comments and may be undervaluing them.