I know a lot of people who have liked the concept of Shadowrun since 2nd or 3rd generation (I'm one of them, I still have my 2e book).  The setting is awesome, and while I think people who take their "real world characters" and toss themselves into a D&D world to try and emulate the idea of us dealing with a fantasy world is LAME (Gah I hate when I hear someone is going to run this cool idea blah blah, sorry, it might be superawesome if you like that kind of thing, to me, its lame, dead in the 80s, let the cartoon go ;)), I think the idea of "our" entire world being meshed with magic in some sort of post Mayan apocolypse to be very intriguing, especially with 4th edition where they've caught the technology up with our own and stepped it up a bit.

But why aren't more of us playing it then? I'm running a game over on the forums of dndorks.com (http://forums.dndorks.com/forums/thread/810092.aspx) and one of the principal issues I'm having is the lack of GM support.  A lot of sections vaguely tell you how to handle a particular type of conflict, but the core book doesn't do a very good job of explaining what are ideal difficulty levels, especially for a group of new players.

The next problem I have is related to the first, which is that there isn't an easy way to determine what is an appropriate challenge for characters with 0 karma, 30 karma, 60 karma, 100 karma, etc.  I'm sure if you've played a group through 50 points of karma, you probably know what they can handle, but honestly I feel like there should be better difficulty tiers.  I noticed the adventures often have whats called a Threat Level, some sort of system to describe who can handle what or how to modify the adventure appropriately.

But honestly, for someone like myself, creating a run by myself as a new GM to Shadowrun, I feel like I should be given a better idea of how to plan the run, what kinds of IC to use, what kinds of spiders, etc etc.  

I feel like part of the reason is that Shadowrun leans much further towards "realism" in its rules, meaning that the system describes the rules as it is, rather than as some sort of gameboard for the players to play on.  So if you know the typical stats for a large important matrix with its IC and so on, then thats what it is, even if it'll instantly kill your 0karma players...  and thats fine, I suppose, it'd be lame if it was just as challenging to hack Ares at the start as it is 10 adventures later. 

BUT shouldn't there be a way for me to know at what point can the group handle a run against Ares?   Other than going over their large and complex charactersheets looking for every possible combination? 

I posted a nice big summary of all of the online playing tools over at http://dndorks.com/   It explains the different tools I've added recently, a bit on their current state of functionality, as well as some info on how people can help post bugs and such.

I also created a new area of the forum so that people who have some spare time and want to play online.  Have Dice Need Game  

Not everyone understands what the point of online play by post play, and quite a few people come into the game looking for a direct correlation with tabletop roleplaying.  These people are often disappointed and if they don't stick around long enough to see what a pbp game "is", they might never see the pros and cons of such a gamestyle.

Pros of PBP roleplaying

• Opportunity for extensive roleplaying.  Posts can be long and as descriptive as you want.
• Time to think.  Everyone can, if they choose, spend a good amount of time coming up with exactly the right dialogue tat fits "your" character.  No need to feel rushed when you can spend minutes or hours thinking of your responses.
• Recorded play.  In most cases pbp games are up virtually forever online, and with archive.org, they're pretty much permanently there. You can explore your old games as much as you want, relive the memories of your character.

Cons of PBP roleplaying

• Slow.  PBP games tend to be slow, you post, the GM might post 12 hours later, a combat round can take 1 or 2 days or even a week. 
• Anonymous internet means players drop out frequently.  You're waiting for the cleric to heal you, but he never does.  The guy never comes online...ever again. Why? I don't know, it just happens.

I have some solutions if you're running a game and want to keep your game moving.

If a user takes a long time to reply, and you have another 2-5 players waiting, post the next obvious action for that user.  Maybe that user lost internet access for a month or had an emergency, you'll lose the rest of your players while you wait for that user, which means when the user shows back up your game will be dead.  So give your other players respect by keeping the game moving. 

If a user vanishes without a word for a week, have that character conveniently leave for a while (with the option to come back) then a week later post that you're looking for a player to replace that user.  This way your group is constantly full and you also get new blood into the game.  With the history of the thread new users can often catch up right away.

Some GMs don't like the idea of posting for their player, but honestly, at tabletop if someone has to leave for a few hours, we don't cancel the game for the afternoon, we just play for that player. Its the same thing here.