[for DM] What's the consensus about coward characters?

[Satinavian]

SR has a lot of niches, but not really much niche protection. It does allow hybrid characters and makes them quite viable. What abilities you combine and use and which you leave completely out are basically up to you. You just have to balance your strategy around it.

It is utterly possible for one group to feel like full of one-trick ponys and the next group to feel like full of generalists and both work.

Let's demonstrate :

And Shadowrun (likely earlier editions) was an example I'd heard (but never played) of one where you need a decker (who generally can't do magic or really contribute much to combat and who cannot be replaced/helped by anyone else), a mage (who engages in whole adventures in magic-land where no non-mage can even start to assist), and a rigger (who is the only one who can really do much with vehicles in any kind of important scenario even if everyone else can drive during narrative time). It doesn't have niche protection (from what I've heard) in combat, but a heavily-built street samurai-type or martial adept can generally do orders-of-magnitude better than a non-combat-specced person.

I've only played 3rd-5th edition including some second edition supplement, but :

A decker only really needs a datajack. You can afford that easily even on a mage (and can take some nice other stuff before you lose a second magic point) and make a mage decker. Which i indeed have played once in 3E. Aside from the datajack, a decker only needs skills everyone can buy and a deck which costs money. You can make nearly everyone a decker as secondary speciality. Amd of course the only thing preventing even a starting decker from being really good at fighting is the the lack of money for a really good deck and a complete set of combat implants.

A rigger is more complicated. You can't put that easily into a magic character because it needs more essence. But beyond that ? I have played a streetsam/rigger mix and a decker/rigger/streetdoc and all were more than good enough at all their jobs. Now a pure rigger or pure streetsam would have been more powerful in their field than the first of those characters but not that much more.

And adepts ? well, mage-adeps were a thing for all those caster/martial adept hybrid and sometimes even those had implants. The synergies you could get...

Now as for adventures in magic land : There is astral projection, which really only full mages could do. But that was overpowered anyway and didn't make for a good game so many groups kinda skipped/restricted it. More important and interesting are astral journeys. In theory those where mage exclusive. But there was a workaround. With a help of a spirit with the correct spirit power the whole group could go there. Which is what mostly happened anyway as those were often big enough to be their own adventures.



To iterate : SR has niches, but no niche protection. That one comes only from how it is played.


But there is a significant difference to D&D5. Where D&D5 is basically "everyone can try everything and has a chance", in SR you generally have to invest into something for it to make sense to try. Depending on edition and exact task, otherwise you are at "extremely unlikely" or "straigth impossible" and there are also fumble rules with fumbles exponentially more likely the lower your corresponding stats.




Coincidently, SR didn't feel much of a game where combat was "where everyone needs to contribute". Most characters did anyway, but there was little pressure. What felt far more like "everyone needs to be able to do that" was stealth. A runner who couldn't infiltrate anything without being noticed did often feel like a liability. There is only so much, remote support can do and most of those options are indeed only valid for certain archetypes.