kzt wrote:How does a really skilled gunman with a really cool gun deal with a spirit who just uses materialization to walk through him? Is this a huge issue? If sometimes guns don't work is it ok if sometimes computers don't work work either?
(It does point out the whole MagicRun aspect of the game, but that's pretty much how it has always been.)
Balancing magic is a separate issue. Many cyberpunk games do not
have any magic. Games which
do have magic give all kinds of limits or lacks of limits to the magic in them. A lot of fantasy games hand out magical power that is actually bullshit small, and while there are games where magic is super strong, that's nothing like ubiquitous.
In Shadowrun in particular, magic gets
hugely boosted over what it is capable of in, for example: Earthdawn. This is done because the magic in Earthdawn simply takes too long, is way too short range, and has effects too minor to compare favorably to modern technology. Someone able to do that crap would be able to make mad bucks as a stage magician, but at the limit they aren't actually able to leverage their powers to do anything that a tech specialist of the future or even the present would be particularly impressed by.
But while those boosts are for the most part simply to keep magic from being the laughingstock that RuneQuest magic, Rolemaster magic, Earthdawn magic, or Tunnels and Trolls magic would be in a setting with submachine guns and cars; the reality is that they still had various
stuff that the magic characters can do that other people can't. And when you combine that with the fact that magic got boosted up to the point where you are totally on an even level with other people on the non-role protected factors and then have role-protected abilities on top of that make them overpowered.
-Username17