[Hobbes]

they are clearly just piles of stats and gear to be extremely powerful in a particular area,

All characters are literally just piles of stats and gears.  It is up to the players and GMs to make them more than that. 

RAW mechanical advice is fairly straight forward and easy to give compared to role playing advice.  At least via the medium we have here. 

Also, keep in mind, very rarely does anyone ask for role playing advice, and unsolicited RP advice is usually not at all welcome.  Most people have a clear image of their character and rarely need help with that aspect.  At most what would be suggested are plausible in-game reasons for something. 

[Marcus]

This is from a post from awhile back discussing this issue, it was a good thread, I'd recommend you read it. Consider what drove you to write this post Shadow, I think you could have a lot more fun if you let go of this prejudice, and become open to more inclusive and diverse view of gaming.

I have a hard time making a mage character without resources E.  None of the those I have made or played started with a focus.  Current character is Sum to 10 Magic A, Skills A, Attributes C, Meta E, Res E.  Background is that he is old (aged quality, low low phys stats), down on his luck (low lifestyle, takes the bus, no foci, minimal surveillance gear).  I wanted a full load of magic skills (6 in sorcery group, 6's with specs in all three conjuring skills, 6 in Astral Combat, perception, assensing, plus good dicepools for sneak, interrogation, negotiation (diplomacy), tracking (for tailing), Con (fast talk) and disguise.  Loads of dice pool 10 and 12 knowledge skills. 

So you might say I'm munchkining with AACEE, but the backstory makes sense.  I play him as old and frail, but wise and subtle with spells.  Different people prioritize different things.  I like lots of high level skills.  My dump stats (all four) make sense for this character. 

If I were playing missions, I probably wouldn't build this way.  Missions is a grinder.  Home games usually are about character and story.  Probably go Magic A, Skills B, Attr C, Res D, Meta E.  Dumb Cha and Log instead of Body and Agil.

When will people get over this "munchkin" negativity concept . Game theory was developed over a century ago, it eventually developed to the concept of taking the least bad action to help all the players as a whole, aka the Minimum Maximum or Min/Max. It was then and it is now about helping everyone playing as a whole. Feeling guilt cause ya did some math and developed a background you like is just silly. You don't need justify anything, the stormwind fallacy alive and well in so many, is just blows me away. Everyone should play the game to have fun, for some it means taking the time to math out a great build and having a great story, for others it is different. It doesn't matter the order of creation, all that matters is ya have fun playing the game.

[Facemage]

Two things more:

1. For me the forum is a good way to learn how to build as powerful as possible character. I learn what are the best qualities, weapons, attributes and skills. I think that it's very useful information. But do I select the min-maxed character and play with it? Never. Typically I still select something suboptimal (for example I personally prefer elves even though sometimes orks or humans are better). And give him suboptimal skills, attributes and so on. Always because of fun.

2. Shadowrun is a lethal game. If you build a character with a great effort, you don't want that he dies later. At least in our games a gm uses often in his missions archetype characters from the corebook.  In the mission you encounter 3 corebook archetype enemies (e.g. combat mage, street samurai and face) and your team has 3 members. If your characters are not stronger than the enemies, your probability to win the fight is ~50%. And very soon you fail and die. But if you optimize your character (give him rea 5, int 5, combat sense adept power or reaction enhancers, select a suitable defensive attribute (willpower, agility or charisma) with too pretty to hit or agile defender, rise your initiative such that you can use full defense if needed and still cast a spell or shoot with a gun). After that your probability to win a fight against archetype characters should be much higher. And still the fight is not cakewalk. The probability to fail is still quite high, so better not to fight at all and try to use social or stealth skills instead. And if you fail in your social or stealth skills, you may have to fight and again the probability to die is greater than 0... So better to be good also in stealth and social skills. And that is that. After you have put your resources such that you can survive and are competent in stealth and social situations, you have not typically much left. Sometimes nothing.

And finally a real story: My friend was new to Shadowrun and we give him Sledge street samurai from the tutorial set to test the game. Sledge is maybe even worse than the street samurai from the corebook. He threatened 3 street samurais and they started a pistol fight. Because he was slower than the samurais, they shot him twice with Ares Predator and he had something like 9 boxes physical damage. That was that. But If Sledge had been faster and more defensive (greater int and rea), he would have shoot first and maybe at least one of the samurais would have missed. With good luck both. And because Sledge would have been faster, he could have shoot again, maybe hitting another samurai and so on.

[Shadowjack]

I know this is a controversial topic so thanks for showing some restraint in your posts. However, I must insist that my view is not ignorant, it is based on many years of visiting this message board. I  have clearly stated that if you wish to power game and you find it fun that is your perrogative. What I do not like is that many people post here once and never return because of the feedback they get which basically rips their character apart. You make an excellent point when stating that most people simply post their character and don't actually specify what they expect. That is certainly an issue. I must also note that people toss around the Stormwind Fallacy as some kind of irrefutable fact but it is very far from it and many people, myself included, consider it to be completely false.

Some of you don't like failing shadowruns, I accept that. But you must consider that failure is an experience that others may enjoy and that should be considered when attempting to give power gaming advice. I am not saying this to be pretentious but I have played for a very long time and in the past losing and failing on important actions used to really frustrate me, trust me, you're not alone. But with more exposure to failure my viewpoint has changed and I think it is worth consideration, especially if you haven't experienced that side of gaming much yet (which I know many haven't).

Whiskeyjack, I commend you on your new ways. I have to say that in general you and I are of different opinions on many things, we definitely have different experiences and playstyles. To answer your question, my purpose of making this thread was to encourage others to give some thought to my opinion and also to try to prevent posters from quitting the boards because of what goes on here. I am not singling out any poster but I think it's fairly clear that many people will not enjoy responses that have a plethora of negative critiques and power gaming advice.

Herr Brackhaus' post was one I agree very much with and it sums up a lot of my feelings on this topic. If you examine the example characters in the core book, which are there for people to play, you will see that they are far from power gamed. Those characters have diverse builds and while they are slightly optmized they did not sacrifice the theme of the characters. Why is it that those characters are completely different than the characters that are power gamed? Do you think that these characters are terribly built? I suspect that most of you do and would never, ever play a character that spread out. I think those types of characters are how the game is supposed to be played, at least to an extent. They have a ton of thematic elements, the characters are realistic and in the context of the game world and I believe in them. They do not have all 6's and 1's in skills. I'm not saying you shouldn;t optimize at all but there is a reason those characters are in the book, they're not intended to be terrible.

One thing I do like to optimize is how much fun I can have. Teaching new players "the only way to play is to powergame, this is your new character" is a very one dimensional and potentially harmful lesson. I am 100% aware that as long as we're having fun the game is a success, but my goal is to offer my knowledge to encourage people to consider a different style of character creation, one which I feel will be vastly more fun. That is my opinion and I am definitely far more experienced than the majority of people that make there very first post here. I also can say with confidence that bashing people's characters and berrating them and telling them to scrap them is a hell of a lot worse than power game versus immersive build styles, or whatever the hell we want to call these things. I also know that most power gamers are quick to anger when their playstyle is brought into question but in my experience, people on the roleplaying and immersion side of the fence also know how to powergame, and VERY often have powergamed for years only to change their stance, those same people were quick to anger in the past too. In other words, I think powergaming is generally favored by less experienced players. I don't say that to offend anyone, and please bear in mind that I have not examined any of your characters, nor am I familiar with the type of advice anyone here gives, but new to semi-experienced groups tend to be full of powergamers because it's a lot easier to crunch numbers, optimize and copy build strategies than it is to hone your roleplaying skills and break away from bad habits that form early on and often last forever.

[Shadowjack]

Facemage, thanks for your post. I completely agree and everyhing you said is very reasonable. The lethality of the game is definitely going to encourage people to want powerful characters. But there is no need to make 100% min maxed characters, that is my main concern here. If you build a bad character you are probably going to fail, the only exception is if the GM is very careful and knows what kinds of challenges you can handle, or if he takes it easy on you in some cases. It is vital that the GM can assess the ability of each member of the group and the group as a whole and build his campaign around that.

[Raiderjoseph]

Thanks for your replies, I found them interesting. So many different points were made that I cannot reply to all of them, instead I will give a general reply. I don't agree with the notion that Shadowrunners need to exceptional at their specialty. This may be true if you are dead set on being successful early in a campaign, but I think it's not accurate to say that it must be this way. Some of the most fun I've had playing rpgs, Shadowrun included, was when my character wasn't that powerful. I still built these characters with the same amount of Karma as my more specialized characters (the ones that most people here would probably prefer), but the provided me with a new experience. It can be very interesting to explore the life of a Shadowrunner that isn't amazing, yet has potential. After all, not everyone starts off at the same level of skill. Working your way up can be fun, especially if you play that character for a longer period of time you will feel a strong connection because you got to experience the entire process.

While it is true that the common objective of the game is to go on shadowruns, I don't think that failure is a bad thing. In my experience, the majority of groups tend to win the vast majority of the time, and in some groups, all of the time. Each time you win you get a little more comfortable. Over time winning becomes expected and the fact that you don't lose makes the wins less fun. Failing to complete one or more runs, or losing a fight here and there can be a very good thing for the game because it makes the times you do win more memorable. Of course it's fun to complete runs but if you always complete them, in all campaigns, it isn't as fun as it could be. I will go so far as to say that I'm extremely confident that is true as I have experienced all angles of it.

I also don't agree with the idea that pools are what matters and not the skills. That doesn't seem to make very much sense to me. Attributes govern your natural (or unnatural) ability and cover a certain spectrum of skills. Skills explicitly cover how proficient you are. You could have a Face with only a 3 Charisma. He tends to rub people the wrong way and his hygiene isn't great, but he is a hell of a negotiator and he has 10 ranks in it.  That tells me that he is far more skilled than many other Faces with a dice pool of higher than 10. Taking maxed out cyber limbs and grabbing a bunch of skills at rating 1. while completely legitimate, does not indicate that you're talented at the skill, it means that your cyber limbs are carrying the bulk of the weight.

I found the post by ZeldaBravo to be an interesting one. I think you would be quite well developed for combat, there is no doubt about it. However, don't they teach you how to do first aid and survive in the wild? I'm sure they teach you many such skills, none of which are represented in the example character I provided. I am aware that many people have the opinion that you can't possibly represent all of the skills you should have, but I think you can at least make an attempt to do so. You do start with a minimum of 25 Karma, I don't see why you can't allocate some of it to purchase skills that your background supports. It seems very immersion breaking to me for a soldier to watch his teammate bleed out because he has literally no ability to use a traditional medkit. Granted, perhaps in Shadowrun they would just use the autodoc because it is available, but you get my point.

As for increasing levels of difficulty, that's another trap I've fallen into for most of my gaming career. Like many, I started with DnD and that taught me that rpgs should have a linear scale of challenge. That is extremely unfortunate and immersion breaking. It is much more powerful when the challenge is not linear. Once in a while it is good to lose to an opponent you have very little hope of defeating. Should you defeat this opponent the value of the victory is amazing, should you lose, the lose feels appropriate. Who is to say that you would encounter increasingly difficult challenges and start out with easy ones? That is more like a video game than a roleplaying game, especially since you can't view the statistics of your opposition and thus have no way to accurately guage their power consistantly. Encountering a weak opponent can also be good because it demonstates how far you've come and that not everyone is going to pose a challenge. Varying the level of difficult is a powerful technique.

I build my characters with realism and immersion in mind and my characters tend to do pretty well in the shadows. I build them with a range of power and each one has provided me with an amazing experience. I don't really see the need build super powered characters every single time. And to be clear I am capable of, and do occasionally, build extremely powerful characters, but I still always manage to stay true to the character concept. I just find it very disappointing that so many characters here are made using the same formula that was developed by power gamers and all the new players are being taught to do it. Number crunching is definitely fun for some players, some people really enjoy it and that's  great. But it is not going to provide the best roleplaying experiences. It's possible to get the best of both worlds and that's when you'll have the most fun.

My GM in a campaign im doing on here forced the first character I ever made to run under the street scum rules. So he has a great deal of skill from his previous life before he was forced to the bottom of the shadowrunning barrel. He is gonna be looked down upon. Especially becuase of his background. Every new contact he makes and character he befriends or earns the respect of will have to be because of his choices whether or not to put the work in to gain the know how and the ability to perform. I love this. I agree with Shadowjack that low skill characters provide an unique experience. HOWEVER high powered characters can also do so. In the dreaded DnD of which you all hold so low(jesus all of you must have had the worst freaking DMs. Didnt they know to rig die to give the illusion of threat... and ocassionally have a character die?)my character spent his entire life from 16 to 37(in our campaign this was roughly levels 1 to 40)adventuring and grew as a person in incredible ways. His skills and stats reflected who he was. He grew in wisdom. The ways of his deity. And life skills. And got married. I play his kid in 5e. He lived an epic life. And became a bard 10/dragon disciple 20(10 levels in epic)/favored soul 10. His enchanted bastard sword was so powerful it took an average AC of 17 for it to miss or get blocked and it was vorpal chummers made with a fusion of silver and cold steel(unlike my rogue who got eaten by a pc turned tarrasque) Its about the experiences and how you roleplay them. Not stats period. But stats should relfect the expierences imo.

[Herr Brackhaus]

I must also note that people toss around the Stormwind Fallacy as some kind of irrefutable fact but it is very far from it and many people, myself included, consider it to be completely false.

Hehe, a Stormwind Fallacy Fallacy?

I'll be honest, I'd never even heard of it until I read this thread and I had to look it up.

[Haywire]

You can play a terrible character and still not roleplay. You can play an optimized character and roleplay it. If you play a bad character, the GM should ask you: "Why someone wants to hire you?". Shadowrun is a game of professional, specialists criminals. Of course they are people too, but that is outside the game system: you are not more alive or true if you have 3 in etiquette instead of 1.

[ZeldaBravo]

Herr Brackhaus' post was one I agree very much with and it sums up a lot of my feelings on this topic. If you examine the example characters in the core book, which are there for people to play, you will see that they are far from power gamed.

They are also not rules legal. 

I think powergaming is generally favored by less experienced players.

That's the point. You see, Shadowrun is a mechanically complex system (news at 11). When a newbie comes around here and asks for help with character creation, it is better to make it powerful because it is a safe bet. With a powerful character you are a boon to your team and you have better odds at succeeding in doing your work. It gives a new player some time to examine the inner works of the system and the playstyle at their table.

When you have experience, you can actually play what you want and be as branched-out as you please and still be a playmaker, but that's because you know exactly what to do.

The attitude on this forum is not bad. I see much more posts that are like "this is not gonna work because X and Y, and Z's a common trap option, try that instead" than "into the trash it goes". Well we could show a bit more hospitality sometimes but critique is an integral part of the forum, it's in the name. And I believe that many newcomers don't post anything because they got what they wanted - a character. Then they kinda learnt to fly on their own.

[Whiskeyjack]

The example characters in the book are not only bad because they have low dice pools but they were admittedly made before the chargen rules were finalized, so they do not provide a good example of a rules-legal starting character. This is the bigger indictment to me above and beyond choices I cannot wrap my head around like deckers with bad LOG and the like.

A good chunk of this is the system. It is absolutely true that given limited build resources a character's skills are less likely to resemble a whole person and in part that's because of the limitations to knowledge skills and the relative values of different skills and attributes 

When you have 8 combat skills at rank 5 a person might reasonably think that being good at all of them means being able to be effective in all situations when what it really means under the math is a whole lot of redundancy and wasted points and money that is very unlikely to generate a return. Yes, wasted, since carrying 8 different weapons is impractical and you get to use one per pass and the situation where someone has no gear but finds a random weapon is pretty edge case. Some people care about this and some don't and it's impossible to know that when a thread is posted. Nobody here is forcing people to conform to a pro-optimizing opinion. Posters are free to take away what they will.

Frankly I consider ignoring principles like what I have described above to be somewhat foolish if done deliberately but in a lot of cases people just don't know the rules well enough to see it for themselves, and that sets up expectations that are not reflected in the mechanics and can lead to serious disappointment and loss of the character. And that is a big risk with big, bloated, over complex, over granular systems like this one that has high flying themes that you can't really achieve unless you really get how the system works.i think that's where a lot of people come from with optimizing. I know it's where I come from, and I know that I encourage my way of thinking because I find it fun. But encouraging and giving advice is not forcing people to take your advice or agree with you on what's best for their character and table.

Now of course this may not be an issue at a given table. Once again we don't know what is going on at a given table without being told, and I'm not interested in pulling those kind of teeth out of people in thread after thread. I'm not going to beg people for context they're not offering on their own. So we kind of advice should we be giving, if people are asking for it but giving no context?

Granted we are all susceptible to pushing our preferred play style, but somehow this is only a problem for the people who like to tweak the system to do but is perfectly fine for those who don't tweak the system? That's hypocritical. You may see things in threads saying "that's a mechanically poor option" but when's the last time a mechanics whiz on this forum made a thread solely to tell people playing fluffier builds that they're universally and unequivocally Doing It Wrong?

Frankly a lot of the people who post one topic and don't stick around, I doubt they're scared off, they came for an answer, got it, and either liked it or didn't and weren't interested in joining the community for the long term. Which is a totally valid way to interact with an online community, just like being here for years and commenting on most very thread is a totally valid way to interact, just different.

I have seen what I consider to be terribly made characters role played awfully and optimized characters role played wonderfully and everything in between. In my experience there is no correlation to mechanical build effectiveness versus roleplaying potential. That is solely up to the player. Saying there is a general correlation...I find that insulting and consider it a fallacy.

[All4BigGuns]

When you have 8 combat skills at rank 5 a person might reasonably think that being good at all of them means being able to be effective in all situations when what it really means under the math is a whole lot of redundancy and wasted points and money that is very unlikely to generate a return. Yes, wasted, since carrying 8 different weapons is impractical and you get to use one per pass and the situation where someone has no gear but finds a random weapon is pretty edge case.

Most people that are told that they're "too redundant" don't go that far. Most will have Firearms group and one or two of the melee skills and carry a single weapon for each skill. Often times when they have Unarmed and Blades, they'll have Shock Gloves and Cyber Spurs, so even with Firearms and one gun for each of those skills, they're carrying three weapons, wearing one and have one hidden inside their body. Heck, people have been told they're too redundant for having three combat skills.

[Finstersang]

My problem with excessive Min-Max-Powergaming is that it´s basically a Zero-Sum-Game.

It´s the Gamemaster´s responsibility to offer a good challenge to the players. When handling a group of the  "18+ shooting dice or GTFO" type of PC, he/she has to come up with bigger threats to even things out. The only thing the Players have accomplished is that they have stripped themselfes from interesting options and fluff without getting any net advantage.

Also, when PC don´t start out fully optimized, there´s more room to grow. IMO, starting out with a low-cybered "rookie" Sam, earning the money and favours to get that used Level 2 Wired Reflexes with broken triggers and slowly descending into Cyberpsychosis is a much more satisfying roleplaying experience than just starting out as that escaped-clonewarrior-guy with 0.2 Essence and an 22+ Assault Rifle pool who ends every battle in under 3 seconds - at least when everyone at the table has build their Character just the same way.

That being said, optimising can be fun. But as GM, I´d always encourage my players to give their characters a more diverse Portfolio.

[Marcus]

I must also note that people toss around the Stormwind Fallacy as some kind of irrefutable fact but it is very far from it and many people, myself included, consider it to be completely false.

Thus you prove your ignorance. Refusing to accept stormwind's fallacy doesn't actually make it untrue, the logic of it holds. Yes, you're not alone in refusing to accept it, many prejudice ignorant gamers do reject it, tragically.  But in end the gamers most hurt by their ignorance is themselves. 

I do feel bad for you having spent so much time reading and having failed to understand it all.

But the point of your posts are attempting to say power gaming is bad, and that will now and forever be untrue.  Nothing you say will change that fact. I agree that role playing is as important a part of gaming as the system is, and yes like system master it's a skill that takes time to develop. But sadly it's  not something that can be developed as much in forums, you can teach tropes and strategies, but it's not a skill that can communicated clear in the forums. To be a true master of table top you must master both role playing and the system, to master one without the other will leave you deficient in the other.

But back to the topic of your ignorance, you showed it in several places,  your generalization of power gamers as quick to anger when called in question is frankly just another example of your prejudicial stereotyping. Notice that no one has come back at you with any of usual RP obsesses silliness. Your statement that you think the example character are a good model is another example, if you know the rules well  then you know they are built incorrectly.

Finally, what this forum does is help teach people to build better character at their request (Often their first or second character), as well as discussing implementation of certain concepts, and of course there is some level rules discussion that occurs. Yes sometimes we do suggest scrapping a mechanical approach, but only when such a thing cannot be executed in the system in a way that would work at a table, or given the constraints the player has already listed. Not all things are possible in the system or under stated preferences.  Nothing in that is about indoctrinating new posters into power gamers.  Plenty of times folks myself included have posted suggestions on how to role play a concept, or given advice on how to deal with the many communication issues that arise at the table.

In closing I respectfully suggest you correct your ignorance. You have much to gain, and nothing to lose by doing so.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Hehe, I knew someone was going to go on about the "sample characters"...

For anyone responding to my specific post, note that I said "examples" and "example characters"; when I do this I'm not referring to the "Character Archetypes" that are listed on pages 112 through 127 (which absolutely have some problems, though I tend to think of them as less glaring than some here) but instead to any time an example is given.

Characters like Automatic Jane (Gymnastics 3 + Agility 5, page 135), Wombat (Pistols 4 + Agility 6 - modifiers 1, page 174), and Tesseract (Cybercombat X + Logic Y for 12 dice), and so on. These characters almost never have dice pools in the 12+ range. In other words, the examples given in the book constantly and consistently refer to characters with dice pools in the single or low double digits. That's all I'm saying.

Now, whether or not you play with high or low dice pools doesn't really matter; I do think it's a bad idea to mix and match player character where some have a wide spread skills with overall low dice pools and others have a very few skills with very high dice pools as this tends to lead to balancing issues, especially in combat.

I think the comments about having somewhat focused characters making Shadowrun easier for newcomers is a very good one; it's easier to wrap your head around the rules if you build a combat focused and optimized character as you only have to concern yourself with the combat rules. So the fact that a seemingly (because they may or may not be) inexperienced players ask questions about how to make a "good" character and receive feedback without having divulged much about the table overall isn't surprising.

In this respect, I think this specific subforum is a poor representation of the Shadowrun players in general; chances are that if you've played Shadowrun since 1st Edition, or even just began with 5th but have a firm grasp of the rules, you're not coming to ask advice on how to build your character. So by it's very nature this subforum will have a polarized audience; it's not that the vast majority of players are powergamers (and I don't mean that as a pejorative, merely as a broad label that may fit some people), it's just that people who are new to the game will inevitably ask the same kind of questions. And that is just fine.

My personal preference is to run games for people who build characters with broad sets of skills, because that means I don't have to just throw combat at the samurai or social situations at the face but can include everyone in everything, and also because to my mind players with those kinds of characters tend to focus more on teamwork for tasks other characters could easily do by themselves because these characters can't actually pull off difficult tasks on their own. But that's just it, that's my personal preference. I'm not pushing my view on anyone, nor am I deriding people who like to play characters with 20+ dice pools; whatever makes the game fun for you is cool with me.

[Hobbes]

It is important to keep in mind that Shadowrunners are not normal, believable persons. The wageslaves are, the KE officers are, the blue collars are, but not shadowrunners. They are oddballs and freaks that live outside of the society. They are terrorists and thieves and murderers, plain and simple. They must have an edge to live through another day and to be good enough to get hired.
Seriously, Shadowrun is not a game about abolutely normal people.

This. 

And keep in mind that "normal" people don't have what Shadowrun considers Computer, Gymnastics, or Etiquette skills either.  They have highly specialized knowledge skills related to their day jobs and hobbies. 

Typical real world people that spend decades working 40 to 50 hours a week on a computer couldn't do a clean install of Windows, or assemble a bare bones kit.  Much less write a report or even a simple script.  Run a report and work it in Excel, certainly.  Run a pre-written script or macro?  If it's well written and the user only needs to enter a few basic things, sure.  But for the most part what typical folks have is a knowledge of SAP, Oracle or AS400.  They're not particularly transferable skills, and certainly not applicable to anything outside the narrow range of what they do day to day. 

Ditto Etiquette.  Most people don't have what Shadowrun would consider Etiquette.  They're simply polite, non-confrontational, and have a shared sociological-economic background.  Pull your standard corporate shill out of the office and drop them in a Red-neck wedding or party on the wrong side of town and they stick out like a sore thumb.   

As technology advances people's skill sets have to become more specialized.  For example in the 1970s oil change chains were virtually non-existent, people changed their own oil.  As less people became interested in doing their own car maintenance these chains started popping up everywhere.  These days, I'm willing to bet 90% of American's under 30 couldn't change the oil in their car if you gave them $1,000 to do it.  Just an example of a skill that became obsolete. 

The Shadowrun world deliberately doesn't educate most of the wage slave population.  Propaganda, fear, and ignorance are absolutely essential tools for the Mega's to keep control.  Realize that modern day brand new college grads have far more education and varied life experiences than the 60+ year old wage slaves do in Shadowrun.