Statswise at least, not sure I'd include Sasquatch in complains of being underpowered :
The fact that they have dual natured prevents them from seeing a lot of tables. On top of that, while they have somewhat comparable stats to a troll, their charisma in no way helps them at the things they are predisposed towards and using charsima as a sasquatch for uses other than drain, spirits, and over the matrix is complicated because you are a big fuzzy monster. Finally, because they share a priority with trolls, they already are 'hard mode' because any priority above C has very serious ramifications for a character because it necessitates dropping multiple priorities down by 1 point. Dropping a D priority to E isn't generally a big deal, but dropping a C priority to D is a massive loss to a character. As A B priority metasapient a sasquatch requires you to drop 3 priorities, which means you not only get the C to D problem, but you also can't really start dropping priorities anymore and something you actually care about now has to end up near the bottom. Worse, squatches requires you to be an awakened PC for a power source both due to dual natured's downsides and the fact that a dual natured PC who burns out to 0 dies, and it is notoriously impractical to make a magical priority B metatype character. Sum to 10 helps a bit, but not that much, especially as squatches likely need to be mystic adepts to handle flying astral threats and they already are some karma in the hole.
The problem with sasquatches is that dropping dual natured from them
would make them another pixie: A metasapient with just better stats than a metahuman paid for by social disadvantages that can be overcome or avoided.
Have yet to see a table ban AIs yet. I HAVE seen tables where players whine they can't build their AI the way they want it - thus it's unplayable.
I have seen many do so, more because their rules make them an unplayable mess rather than being under-powered, but in many ways the symptoms are linked to their core mechanics just being plain bad. Depth as a mechanic doesn't work as a power source and actively makes the AI worse at what they do forever with each point they obtain, but AI need depth to operate most of their abilities, which ultimately are not all that potent with rare exception. Then on top of that there is the utter lack of clarity to how the AI actually works in the matrix, the entire question on how to capture an AI is just left unanswered despite decidedly being a canon thing. AI are literally a mess of mechanics that prove how serious mechanics really are in supporting 'snowflakes' because hope and desire alone can't make it work.
it's interesting you bring up the word "balance" like its some all powerful thing in the RPG community. Really, it's not.
I have no idea what RPG communities you go to, because game balance is incredibly important in any RPG review and when discussing the game. I have never seen it not matter. There is a reason people blast Exalted or nWoD before its update for having really terrible balance in its mechanics that creates massive party disparity. People make tier lists and get sad when archtypes, not necessarily classes but entire archtypes, are no longer powerful enough to matter.
Balance has never been at the heart of the table top experience, nor has it ever been. There are entire books that discuss this very point! In fact, TSR published a book that broke down the power curve of every class over 20 levels based on the game mechanics, and at no power were any of the classes "balanced".... The heart of every table top is "Is this enjoyable?" And admittedly, that takes a measure of balance. The balance of game mechanics, player choice, difficulty intended, and atmosphere is not something that can be boiled down into a straight X=Y=1 formula.
TSR's dungeon's and dragons was a very different beast from where RPGs ended up, still having its feet firmly in wargames. Modern ideas of game design weren't exactly a thing yet, and the player experience wasn't always focused on. However, I would argue that TSR did a better job than you think, because regardless of the power of each class at any given level, at that point in history every class in D&D had very strong niche protection, especially in terms of exclusive access to entire categories of magic items which is why a class like rogue which underpreformed at a lot of levels was still always valuable simply by being the best person to hold many useful magic items. Furthermore, as a designer it is your job to think in terms of balance. A balanced RPG is inherently superior to one that isn't, all other things being equal. Saying balance outright doesn't matter is just silly.
The last tabletop developer that thought along your line of thinking lost thousands of players, millions in revenue, and spawned a competing company that makes and arguably more popular game! (DnD VS Pathfinder. Hasbro Vs Paizo). Even development studios, with a decade in the MMORPG business spend more time patching for "Balance" then any other issue.... Heck World of Warcaft is HOW old??? And they are stilling "Balancing" the classes!
Actually the last developer to think along these lines was Montie Cook, who went out of his way to make a game with immaculate class balance and a focus on story telling that has become a critical darling and a kickstarter success no less than 3 times over because people really appreciated the focus on making a game that was fun to play in the way people wanted to play it, after openly stating that he was an idiot for making 3.5 the way it was. 4e failed because it lacked soul. Its mechanical quality was good but there was never any threat or edge to any encounter. 4e's class design is still clearly in 5e, which is being very well received as far as I am aware.
The dissatisfaction with poor mechanics is also, frankly, why the community went out of its way to demand errata from catalyst. Because it is very obvious people care, even if you don't think they should. It is also why rules lite systems are coming into vogue right now, because in general they enforce balance by making all choices fundamentally the same and only affect the narrative of the game, something attractive to many players who are tired of having to deal with something they enjoy being arbitrarily worse to enforce an RPG system mastery concept literally recanted by the person who invented it as a terrible idea.
As for world of warcraft and mmos... yes. Balance is an eternal struggle and you never fully reach it. But you realize they are fully aware their business is dying because people are so fed up by the lack of balance remaining in the game and continued pushes of low quality content made for an assumed guaranteed audience that is rapidly going away, right? Sound familiar? WoW tried because it understood balance was important and the number one way for your game to just turn people off is to be bad as a game. RPGs have role playing, sure, and many people think the mechanics are spereate from this, though the stormwind fallacy basically disproves this idea. But it is also a game. And there is a reason that people enjoy games like Go, which despite not being perfectly balance has mechanics built in to ensure both a more even match and to ensure that stupid situations don't show up like an infinitely repeating loop of play, more than they enjoy tic-tac-toe, a game so obviously imbalanced you don't make a single legitimate choice throughout it .
No, "Balance" is a myth, a pipe dream. A good acid trip. "Balance" can never be achieved. Why? Because we want choices. And when we introduce different choices, those choices reflect the "balance".....
Race: 10+ choices
Stats: 10 attributes range of numbers (Oh the Choices!!)
Magic: More Choices on Choices, with Choices!
Gear: Choices, more choices, and even yet more choices!!!
You starting to see where I am going? These are all things that are in the game, that affect that finished outcome of a character..... they matter. The fact that Purple People Eaters cost 5 more karma then Green Veggie Sprouters is of little concern after the final tally of those said choices and the effects of said choices on "balance".
First of all it depends on what is going on. If the purple people eatiers gain +2 in xand the green veggie sprouters get +3 in x, and that is all either of these PC types offer, and they take up the same resource, you objectively failed to balance these choices, and the idea that you can 'fix it in post' by just designing is outright not good design. There is wiggle room to determine how good an extra +1 on top of a +2 is in the context of X, but you need to recognize you must think about it and not just arbitrarily make the better mechanical option cost more mechanically.
You open up any game design textbook and they will tell you that asymmetry and variaty in choice is the outcome of balance, not a determent to it, because if you ignore game balance enough some choices stop being a choice. If everything functions roughly the same you end up with first order optimal solutions where one thing is clearly better than everything else at what it does, and you saw this constantly happen in SR4 because a lot of the design wasn't thought through and many gear pieces just had first order optimal solutions. It still sorta is around in 5e, armor is not in a good spot for player choice right now for example because most of the best armors have no real tradeoff involved, and sometimes there just is a way to potent metavariant or metasapient. Also, riggers are still struggling, obviously, but I don't think that bit is in doubt.
In fact, 5e has a lot of clear thought to balance in it, and the fact you can't see it is saddening. For example, weapon categories in 5e are probably in a better spot than they ever have been, because of changes made purely for the sake of balance coming in and kicking automatics around a little bit by removing their primary benefit (Bonus damage) and instead just flat out making every gun stronger. No longer are the days you would rather be shot by a sniper rifle than machine pistol. There is even a really nuanced curve to weapon classes that make them vary in power based on your dicepool because of the differences now in automatics and single shot.
Other things that prove balance exists in the context of shadowrun include: dodging now being a thing where it was categorically impossible before, not everyone forever being a burnout adept or mage, spirits losing the ability to freely use their own edge, vampires now having to buy qualities to have powers over time, initaitive being entirely reworked to make having an initiative aug less overwhelmingly potent, direct damage magic being heavily nerfed so that indirect magic is now viable, limits, force re-balancing on spells to make it harder for mages to overcast while still geniusly going out of its way to make sure low force casts are still easy for many staple spells, and the evening out of soak values between roles by taking a lot of soak off augmentations and putting it onto personal body armor everyone has access to, and making agents on comlinks outpreforming deckers impossible.
None of these things reduce player choice. They in fact, increase it. You can now toss a fireball instead of a stunball and not be outright hurting yourself more than the enemy. You can not play a soak tank and still get into a fight without instantly dying to a machine pistol. Chosing to use longarms or pistols or bows actually works now, you aren't just depriving yourself of literally over double your base damage on attacks. Chosing to use cram is now going to actually let you fight only a little worse than someone with wired 2 rather than comically terribly. By focusing on making more choices work in the mechanics, otherwise known as balance, we actually have more options than if we didn't. This is why 4e monobuilds aren't really a thing in 5e anymore, you don't see standard pornomancers or nexus mages because there isn't one true way to build an archtype anymore. By using priority to force players to give something up, and making as many choices have a trade off as possible rather than being pure upside or downside, the game got better.
You don't even need a textbook to figure out balance is real, because 5e did it. I shouldn't have to defend the objectively true concept of game balance from someone working on the errata.
Like I get that this may come across as insulting, but this is a serious request:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_(game_design)
Read this article. Notice how many balance terms came from RPG players. It is absolutely something important to this medium. Specifically, based on the next quote, you are looking to Gimp metasapients, IE make them unfairly weak compared to what they get, something not historically looked upon kindly in the RPG community.
But really Sir_Prometheus said it best.
" And the "snowflake tax" isn't meant to be a "barrier" so much as a weighting .....it's not that people don't want to see these characters, they just don't to see them all the time with a frequency that strains credulity. "
I don't see the overflow of metasapients at all. In the history of the hub and net they have made up maybe .5% of PCs. That is literally less than proportional to the population of Seattle, not more, and they logically should actually be overrepresented in the shadows.
But any such mechanical weighting doesn't work, and more importantly is, no matter what, just your own personal viewpoint. If you think you are seeing flocks of infected and shifters being played for mechanical reasons (you aren't by the way) that means the game's balance is off. You need to bring them down and back in line with other options, not make them arbitrarily worse because
you don't like them at your table. Any given table has the power to ban or limit these archtypes, not every table has the mechanical knowledge to untangle a poorly written errata made to push an agenda and fix those archtypes mechanically. Putting a mechanical weight on your own personal views of how the game should be played is clearly not valid errata content.
The simple fact that you flocks of Pixie Runners tells me that they are too cheap and should be adjusted up in Karma costs. (and IF they are packing assault rifles, the player smacked up side the head with a physics book)
Pixies aren't too cheap necessarily, and in fact prove how weighting doesn't really work. They already are pretty expensive and even without the ability to use guns they still are a dominant metatype, because weighting isn't actually a good system compared to real balance.
I mean obivously if you pump up their karma cost you will see less, but karma efficiency is a very binary balancing tool and if its the only thing keeping you from doing something you hit a point where something is either efficient or its not and it either sees a lot of play or it doesn't. At the end of the day pixies are flat out the best at mental stat archtypes that don't need to use firearms personally, meaning that even if they aren't karma efficient they will be attractive for these roles because they let you go higher than anything else. You would need to make them so karma inefficient that they hardly even work to balance them, which then would just not be fun or fair. Arguably, as many pointed out, they are the metasapient that jells best with being dual natured and it is somewhat bemusing that they aren't. They have much more overt magical abilities, downright melt into a metaplane when they die, and more importantly have the best chance of surviving and thriving with dual natured due to their ability to fly, conceal themselves, and excellent mental stat line, and as a bonus the roles they tend to gravitate towards anyway aren't especially devastated by being dual natured compared to the more relatively 'front line' infected and shifters who run a far more serious risk of getting forced through a barrier and just ending up on the ground or having to spend a full minute trying to walk through the doorway in a building.
