A tad more informal here. The freelancers are often firing email back and forth, asking, "Hey, I want to have person X do Y. Anyone have plans that contradict this?" Usually, everyone handwaves it, but someone might go, "Wait. Before you do Y, check out page # in book Z. That person had a different viewpoint. Maybe you can use this other person instead?"
Some characters have a plot arc lined up, while others don't, facilitating their use at different levels. Their importantce, however, isn't ranked by a chess analogue (Which isn't a bad way to go, in all honesty).
Keep in mind, there was The Incident, which resulted in the loss of a great number of writers, and plots that they had went with them, so, several storylines wound up getting dropped or changed, while others had to be started anew. This threw a wrench into the works and it'll be a year or three before enough raw work is done to get things back on the "What has come before" building level. There are notes on characters that some people know and others don't, generating a small stumble now and then, but that's again being worked out as everyone settles in.
For example, in Twilight Horizon, I wrote the chapter on new product lines from Horizon. There, I introduced Marionette, a 'runner from the Phillipines who relies heavily on Activesofts (And Knowsoft and Linguasofts ... you get the idea) because, as far as I could tell, no one on Jackpoint has any and I needed to talk about them. It turns out that Hard Exit has a set, so I could have used her and didn't know it. D'oh. On the plus side, we didn't have a Phillipino 'runner, so no one was there to have a good voice if we needed to talk about Masaru or the general situation over there, so, she might come up in the future. (She could also chip in about Yakuza issues, Bunraku parlors, and a few other things based on her background).
Ultimately, the freelancers are in a situation not unlike being a comic book writer: You're working with someone else's intellectual property and, as such, you want to play nicely and leave things where you found them for those who come after you. If you kill a storyline, you should plant a few seeds so that others can have something to work with, and if you plan on a big change, you'd better talk to the boss before pulling the trigger.
"Okay, so, I want to write the ultimate Joker story, where at the end of it, Batman kills him. It'll be HUGE! Sales will be through the roof!"
"Dude, I have a drawer, here, *filled* with 'Batman kills the Joker' stories. Kill him off, and we can never do *any* Joker stories again. Try something else."
Keep in mind, Shadowrun has a lot more change than, say, Marvel comics. People get killed off. Crash 2.0 cleaned house, Dragonslayer was killed later, Fatima went down at the start of the Ghost Cartel saga, and no one has absolute plot immunity. There's a running joke that every freelancer has a story that starts, "Okay, so, we kill off Lofwyr," Fuchi was erased, and Nightmaster the Great Dragon died in a mid-air duel. In every brainstorming session, there're always some big ideas that get floated because, well, everybody has one that they think could be awesome. "WIll this make a good story? Will it create fun for the playerbase and gamemasteries running their local games? How will this effect the metaplot?" ... important questions.
So, take a look at the "Death of Lofwyr" plot. Will removing ol' Golden Snout make the world more interesting or less? We've seen that when a Great dies (Big D!), that big things can happen, but we've also seen that it can kinda vanish (Nightmaster) ... how would it effect Sader-Krupp? Can this generate more stories or less stories than Lofwyr still on top? Obviously, it makes DIFFERENT stories, but better? What about these plots that he's involved with, here? What happens to S-K when he's gone? How do other dragons react? Etc etc etc. I'm not saying it can't be done; I'm saying before you do it, you'd better have a plan.
Nobody in Shadowrun has plot immunity, but some have pretty hefty levels of plot armor.
