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So let me make this clear: I actually love Shadowrun. When I think about my favorite tabletop RPGs, it usually tops the list. It's a melting pot of a bunch of stuff I love: functional magic, cybernetics, gritty mercenary work for hard cash, the occasional neo-noir sensibilities, and a rather anarchist streak when it comes to identity politics. But as much as I love it, Shadowrun has always had some pretty nasty problems with balance, and while I love the way a lot of the systems work these days, I think the balance is, if anything, getting noticeably worse.
One of the key balance problems Shadowrun has always had is 'cybernetics vs. magic.' In purely gamist terms, there are pretty frigging obvious reasons why you don't want your juiced-out cyborg super-soldiers flinging around fireballs and healing spells; it has, almost since the beginning, been a divide defined by ensuring that no one character can min-max enough to be completely unstoppable. And the way this divide is enforced is Essence. Essentially(heh), Essence represents a character's 'naturalness,' their sense of for-lack-of-a-better-term humanity and thus receptiveness to magic. Higher Essence means you're more magically-attuned(spells work better on and for you), lower Essence means you are more magically-resistant(spells work worse on and for you). And that would be okay, except for one severe problem: it asserts in-narrative that cybernetics are inherently dehumanizing(in the unpleasant emotional sense rather than the transformative sense). Cybernetics is held in-universe to be self-destructive rather than self-assertive, which IMO kind of ruins the actual point of cyberpunk, which is that the potential for physical self-determination is at an all time high... at the price of individual compromise for the resources to achieve same. Dehumanization should come from dehumanizing social and legal interactions, not from personal physical choices.
This dovetails with another issue, which is Adepts. Adepts are essentially the magical equivalent of physically-oriented cyborg characters: think bitchin' rad kung-fu powers and the like. Which is hella sweet! But again, balance issues rear their head, because up until recently... Adepts were just flat-out inferior(in MOST cases, I'm using 'core rulebook' as a baseline for the purposes of discussion, you CAN make pretty broken Adepts in older editions) to a cyborg character of roughly the same experience level and resource access, because magical kung-fu kind of doesn't stop an 8-foot-tall troll with a shoulder-mounted anti-tank gun. TECHNICALLY, Adepts had a higher potential power-arc than a cyborg due to the ability to eventually raise their pool of Adept powers via magical initiation, but this was a long, slow-burn process that tended to result in awkward, fragile characters compared to the sheer out-of-the-gate power of a cybernetically-specced character.
And this competing flux of balance issues means that basically, you just never saw Adepts unless somebody was REALLY into the idea of roleplaying as one. Which is something 5th Edition Shadowrun tried to fix, by redefining the balance between cybernetics and magic. It is also something 5th Edition Shadowrun fucked-up horribly.
See, when creating a character, Shadowrun operates on a 'Priority' system, where you assign a certain priority-letter(A, B, C, etc..) to various elements of your character(species, base stats, starting resources, etc..). And traditionally, if you were playing a cyborg, you'd assign an A-Rank to resources, giving yourself roughly a million bucks to play around with to buy all your cool augmentations and gear, leaving you sitting pretty at a really comfortable, beefy power-level right at the start of the game. But with 5th Edition, this was rebalanced to offer you(if I recall right) slightly less than half that; meanwhile, assigning an A-Rank to Magic, traditionally-required to be a full-power Adept or Mage/Shaman, now makes you a Mystic Adept... that is, a full-powered adept who also has spellcasting. Or, in short, 'exactly the kind of do-everything character optimization Essence was originally supposed to stop.'
All of which boils down to the fact that now, in purely-gamist optimization terms, the only reason to ever play a cyborg is if you're not usually going to be in a direct combat role and need something to shore-up your likely-subpar physical abilities(IE, deckers, riggers, etc., all of whom need some degree of basic cybernetics just to be functional). Since the pricing of better-and-better cybernetics that allow you to optimize your Essence costs rise geometrically more as you go up in grade, a starting-tier cyborg faces a choice between either buying one or two actually GOOD augs or a bunch of crappy ones that ultimately gimp them due to their limited growth-potential. Meanwhile, Mystic Adepts and even regular Adepts have a functionally-unlimited growth curve, since Initiation still only costs Karma Points and never actual money. This rebalance, while finally giving Adepts their day in the limelight, also completely obsoletes combat-focused 'street samurai' cyborgs, arguably the most recognizable archetype of the traditional Shadowrun game. Even a solution I MYSELF proposed, 'Cyber-Initiation,' which would allow cyborgs to boost their effective Essence total to permit greater long-term growth potential, runs into the problem that cybernetics still cost fucking money, resulting in cyborgs having to pay twice as much just to be half as good.
And all of this is basically building to a larger point, which is that I just really, really, really fucking hate Essence as a concept. It is a pointless, poorly-thought-out artifact of a MUCH earlier period of cyberpunk fiction awkwardly kludged into an otherwise decent system to justify a balance restriction that allows magic systems to be functional. Bluntly: Essence costs and the escalating balance arms-race between magical and cybernetic characters is killing my long-term interest in Shadowrun, no matter HOW much I love the setting otherwise. So what's the solution?
Get the fuck rid of Essence and Resources. Instead of some lame late-80s moralizing crapfiesta, make cybernetics and magic/adept powers work the same way: direct, one-to-one Karma Point buys. You can even KEEP the whole thing that trying to do both results in both working less effectively, because that's an inherently balancing dynamic, in addition to under-specialized characters just naturally being less effective than specialists. And by removing the 'money' factor from cybernetics, you also remove the OLDER balance concerns because there's no longer a way to buy-your-way-to-victory because you got lucky and scored a ton of cash. It's not even that complicated, because it's easy enough to just say that Karma Points are an omni-resource; let the players figure out what their Karma Point total 'means,' whether that's a hookup to an underground doctor, the money to buy your way into a fancy cyber-clinic, magical tomes and training regimens, simple experience, whatever the hell fits their narrative best.
RPG systems work most effectively when they mechanically operate to permit players greater latitude in defining who their characters are as people, rather than greater latitude in munchkin-y minmaxing. And when you stop drawing hard ideological/metaphysical divides between self-expression and naturalism, shockingly enough, you end up with characters that are much more believable as actual PEOPLE.
One of the key balance problems Shadowrun has always had is 'cybernetics vs. magic.' In purely gamist terms, there are pretty frigging obvious reasons why you don't want your juiced-out cyborg super-soldiers flinging around fireballs and healing spells; it has, almost since the beginning, been a divide defined by ensuring that no one character can min-max enough to be completely unstoppable. And the way this divide is enforced is Essence. Essentially(heh), Essence represents a character's 'naturalness,' their sense of for-lack-of-a-better-term humanity and thus receptiveness to magic. Higher Essence means you're more magically-attuned(spells work better on and for you), lower Essence means you are more magically-resistant(spells work worse on and for you). And that would be okay, except for one severe problem: it asserts in-narrative that cybernetics are inherently dehumanizing(in the unpleasant emotional sense rather than the transformative sense). Cybernetics is held in-universe to be self-destructive rather than self-assertive, which IMO kind of ruins the actual point of cyberpunk, which is that the potential for physical self-determination is at an all time high... at the price of individual compromise for the resources to achieve same. Dehumanization should come from dehumanizing social and legal interactions, not from personal physical choices.
This dovetails with another issue, which is Adepts. Adepts are essentially the magical equivalent of physically-oriented cyborg characters: think bitchin' rad kung-fu powers and the like. Which is hella sweet! But again, balance issues rear their head, because up until recently... Adepts were just flat-out inferior(in MOST cases, I'm using 'core rulebook' as a baseline for the purposes of discussion, you CAN make pretty broken Adepts in older editions) to a cyborg character of roughly the same experience level and resource access, because magical kung-fu kind of doesn't stop an 8-foot-tall troll with a shoulder-mounted anti-tank gun. TECHNICALLY, Adepts had a higher potential power-arc than a cyborg due to the ability to eventually raise their pool of Adept powers via magical initiation, but this was a long, slow-burn process that tended to result in awkward, fragile characters compared to the sheer out-of-the-gate power of a cybernetically-specced character.
And this competing flux of balance issues means that basically, you just never saw Adepts unless somebody was REALLY into the idea of roleplaying as one. Which is something 5th Edition Shadowrun tried to fix, by redefining the balance between cybernetics and magic. It is also something 5th Edition Shadowrun fucked-up horribly.
See, when creating a character, Shadowrun operates on a 'Priority' system, where you assign a certain priority-letter(A, B, C, etc..) to various elements of your character(species, base stats, starting resources, etc..). And traditionally, if you were playing a cyborg, you'd assign an A-Rank to resources, giving yourself roughly a million bucks to play around with to buy all your cool augmentations and gear, leaving you sitting pretty at a really comfortable, beefy power-level right at the start of the game. But with 5th Edition, this was rebalanced to offer you(if I recall right) slightly less than half that; meanwhile, assigning an A-Rank to Magic, traditionally-required to be a full-power Adept or Mage/Shaman, now makes you a Mystic Adept... that is, a full-powered adept who also has spellcasting. Or, in short, 'exactly the kind of do-everything character optimization Essence was originally supposed to stop.'
All of which boils down to the fact that now, in purely-gamist optimization terms, the only reason to ever play a cyborg is if you're not usually going to be in a direct combat role and need something to shore-up your likely-subpar physical abilities(IE, deckers, riggers, etc., all of whom need some degree of basic cybernetics just to be functional). Since the pricing of better-and-better cybernetics that allow you to optimize your Essence costs rise geometrically more as you go up in grade, a starting-tier cyborg faces a choice between either buying one or two actually GOOD augs or a bunch of crappy ones that ultimately gimp them due to their limited growth-potential. Meanwhile, Mystic Adepts and even regular Adepts have a functionally-unlimited growth curve, since Initiation still only costs Karma Points and never actual money. This rebalance, while finally giving Adepts their day in the limelight, also completely obsoletes combat-focused 'street samurai' cyborgs, arguably the most recognizable archetype of the traditional Shadowrun game. Even a solution I MYSELF proposed, 'Cyber-Initiation,' which would allow cyborgs to boost their effective Essence total to permit greater long-term growth potential, runs into the problem that cybernetics still cost fucking money, resulting in cyborgs having to pay twice as much just to be half as good.
And all of this is basically building to a larger point, which is that I just really, really, really fucking hate Essence as a concept. It is a pointless, poorly-thought-out artifact of a MUCH earlier period of cyberpunk fiction awkwardly kludged into an otherwise decent system to justify a balance restriction that allows magic systems to be functional. Bluntly: Essence costs and the escalating balance arms-race between magical and cybernetic characters is killing my long-term interest in Shadowrun, no matter HOW much I love the setting otherwise. So what's the solution?
Get the fuck rid of Essence and Resources. Instead of some lame late-80s moralizing crapfiesta, make cybernetics and magic/adept powers work the same way: direct, one-to-one Karma Point buys. You can even KEEP the whole thing that trying to do both results in both working less effectively, because that's an inherently balancing dynamic, in addition to under-specialized characters just naturally being less effective than specialists. And by removing the 'money' factor from cybernetics, you also remove the OLDER balance concerns because there's no longer a way to buy-your-way-to-victory because you got lucky and scored a ton of cash. It's not even that complicated, because it's easy enough to just say that Karma Points are an omni-resource; let the players figure out what their Karma Point total 'means,' whether that's a hookup to an underground doctor, the money to buy your way into a fancy cyber-clinic, magical tomes and training regimens, simple experience, whatever the hell fits their narrative best.
RPG systems work most effectively when they mechanically operate to permit players greater latitude in defining who their characters are as people, rather than greater latitude in munchkin-y minmaxing. And when you stop drawing hard ideological/metaphysical divides between self-expression and naturalism, shockingly enough, you end up with characters that are much more believable as actual PEOPLE.
