[halflingmage]

To pull the thread back from the realm of shedim and horrors to the question of the original poster.

Shadowrun can be brutal if the GM chooses to run it that way.  Its not a level based game, there is nothing stopping the GM from putting a sniper rifle round through your left eye socket the moment you step out of the van.  Nothing but the fact that a good GM understands he is there to provide an interesting, challenging experience but that he is not in competition with the players.  Can a good GM kill you seven different ways before you finish the meet with the Johnson?  Sure, but he shouldn't.

And keep in mind several things-

First, Shadowrun has transhumanist themes.  Characters with solid builds are head and shoulders above the ability of the average man on the street, or even the average security guard on the job.  A well organized group of characters with a plan can pull off some rediculous nonsense and live to tell the tale.

Second, armor is really good in this game.  much of the time you will be taking stun rather than physical damage.

Third, healing is crazy.  A med kit followed up by a heal spell can take someone on the brink of death and put them back on their feet nearly good as new.  You only have to win by a little, little bit.

Fourth, you have edge to use,and if necessary edge to burn.  You can catch an assault cannon round to the sphincter of you choice and the most you will loose in an edge point.  Yes, its costly in karma and eventually you will run out, but dead is often just mostly dead.

As to needing certain roles, honestly not really, assuming the GM has 4 brain cells to rub together.  Published adventures are written for conventions and organized play events, which means that you can sit down at a table with 4 faces and a performance adept and the game should still be runable.  There is usually more than one way to solve a problem.  Home brew games should be tailored to the individual party.  Thats not to say that the the GM should not push you out of your comfort zone now and then, but if you don't have a hacker your fixer is obviously not going to send you the data steal jobs.  If you lack magic the gm should back off the number of magical foes you will face.  Honestly, having a mage on hand really just mean more magic on the opposing team.

When looking at your characters, ask the following for each character- Do they have some way to help out in combat?  Do they have something to do when its not combat?   Do they have some way to contribute to leg work?  Obviously different characters will have different areas of emphasis and answer those questions in different ways, but if you can answer those three questions you probably have a playable chracacter and together they will make up a playable group. 

[Marcus]

Shadowrun is a brutal system. You aren't heroes standing taller then everyone else, you're just normal people with will and a bit of an edge.

Speak for yourself,  omae. I, for one, am a proud member of the White Hat Brigade.

Yeah I'm with you on this one. There is plenty of room for heroes in SR.

[Rift_0f_Bladz]

Hey now! The Horrors are really just cuddly CareBears! All they want to do is hug the world so tightly it explodes with love!! LOVE!!! Oh, and tox mages and blood mages are just misunderstood, and need some friends. And bug spirits just need a home as do the Shedim. Any takers? Anyone?

(PS: This post is complete BS and I know it)

The fragging Care Bear Stare is a Horror spawned power, I just know it!

Nah, the Care Bears maken even Horrors run screaming in terror! Not to mention the Small Equines Who Shall Remain Nameless!

NOOOO! You have invoced them, DOOM IS NIGH! REPENT!! REPENT!!

[Rift_0f_Bladz]

Shadowrun is a brutal system. You aren't heroes standing taller then everyone else, you're just normal people with will and a bit of an edge.

Speak for yourself,  omae. I, for one, am a proud member of the White Hat Brigade.

Yeah I'm with you on this one. There is plenty of room for heroes in SR.

Honestly, I would put my character's team into the White Hat (or at least really light gray) group as well. Just be clear on if you want them alive when we bring them in.

[Dinendae]

Hey now! The Horrors are really just cuddly CareBears! All they want to do is hug the world so tightly it explodes with love!! LOVE!!! Oh, and tox mages and blood mages are just misunderstood, and need some friends. And bug spirits just need a home as do the Shedim. Any takers? Anyone?

(PS: This post is complete BS and I know it)

The fragging Care Bear Stare is a Horror spawned power, I just know it!

Nah, the Care Bears maken even Horrors run screaming in terror! Not to mention the Small Equines Who Shall Remain Nameless!

NOOOO! You have invoced them, DOOM IS NIGH! REPENT!! REPENT!!

Friendship is Madness! 

[Moonshine Fox]

Shadowrun is a brutal system. You aren't heroes standing taller then everyone else, you're just normal people with will and a bit of an edge.

Speak for yourself,  omae. I, for one, am a proud member of the White Hat Brigade.

Yeah I'm with you on this one. There is plenty of room for heroes in SR.

Agreed. Most of the characters I've played, while not being Robbin Hoods, do try and see that the area around them is kept safe or improved.

[Sendaz]

Friendship is Madness! 

Nice image, but what would it's cutie mark be?

Elder sign with a No Symbol over it?  :p

[Dinendae]

Friendship is Madness! 

Nice image, but what would it's cutie mark be?

Elder sign with a No Symbol over it?  :p

Perhaps this?

[Halinn]

Friendship is Madness! 

Nice image, but what would it's cutie mark be?

Elder sign with a No Symbol over it?  :p

You'd go mad at seeing its cutie mark, so the artist of that pic didn't include it.

[Rift_0f_Bladz]

Well, we will all be dead soon, but the it symbol would be the ShadowRun logo, why because who needs a 4th wall.

[Magnaric]

Not sure if I can add anything to the conversation that hasn't been covered yet, so I won't try to say the same things over. Others have akrwady replied better than I could. I will point out a couple interesting things though, even things written explicitly in the rules that your GM might have forgotten about.

Shadowrun to me isn't brutal, but it is dangerous. However, real life is dangerous too. Any Joe Schmoe can tussle woth the wrong guy at a bus stop and get his head kicked in. But it's far more likely that he'll just get beat up, have to go to a hospital, and maybe end up with a broken tooth and some nasty bruises. The point is, there are varying levels of danger in Shadowrun, and not everything is instantly LETHAL.

Let's assume the team frags up a run and gets into a firefight with some security guys, or Knight Errant, or whatever else. Depending on the nature of the fight, the orders the guards have been given, etc, the runners very well might survive. Maybe they just get tazed/gassed and in police custody. That's still bad, but who knows, maybe they could then call in ALL their favour abd have another team bust them out once they get on the bus on their way to prison. In this case, they'd likely lose most or all of their gear, have criminal SINs, gain some hefty notoriety, etc, but they'd still be alive. And at the end of the day, that's often all a Runner has in the Plus column.

Or maybe they don't even go to jail. Say a Runner team gets caught on megacorp A's turf, but one of the team members has a contact with said corp that's connection and loyalty 5. He pulls some strings abd gets them released, but now they owe him a BIG favour, and rest assured he WILL collect. This is still bad stuff, but not instant death.

Now, let's assume the runners get into a real shit show of a fight, maybe against HTR guys, Red Samurai, Toxic Brony Cultists, whatever, abd they start taking enough damage to straight up kill them. Shadowrun has in 4E and now 5E this cool rule about burning edge to save a character from certain death (if the GM allows and the situation warrants). Edge goes down permenantly by 1, seriously Bad Stuff happens, but not death. Maybe they get an arm crushed in rubble, their cybered especially get wrecked, they lose essence from a spell, etc, but if there's a way they can survive the situation, they do so. Your GM seems to either be coming from a game where this wasn't allowed and so he's unfamiliar with it, or he just doesn't like it and so won't use it. If it's the former, that's somewhat understandable, but if it's the latter it strikes me as just taking an already dangerous system and dialing it up to deadly, which is unecessary.

-------------------------

Now, onto roles unfilled on a team. The other people who already posted before me covered this pretty handily, in that a team gets hired to do a job they are the right fit for, and it's the GM's job to tune the game to his players. However, what about those jobs where it was supposed to be a simple milk run abd they encounter an undisclosed obstacle they can't get past. Maybe it's a password protected node they knew nothing about, or the site has spirits as well as guards, etc.

People before touched on hiring other specialists to cover gaps in the team, and I wanted to point out that sometimes you don't even need to hire hire a full team member to fill in, but just pay for a service. In the 4E book Unwired, it s tually has s table listing costs for hacker services based on the danger and complexity of a task. So that password protected node? Maybe the team makes a quick call to negotiate a hacker to Crack the node for them, and then that hacker is done with them. Sane thing for a magician to summon a spirit for the team, or hire a sniper to provide over watch,  etc.

There's actually a fluff story in one of the 4E books where Slam-o does just that. He's on a hacking job and cones up against a node or ic or something he can't get past (can't remember the specifics). So he calls out to a cracking group he's a member of, and ends up grudgingly trading a copy of the new custom-program he just wrote in return for what he needed to get past that obstacle. So that type of exchange actually has a place not just in the rules, but in canon fiction of the universe.

Anyway, points to take away are that the system is dangerous but not INSTADEATH lethal, teams should do jobs they're the right team for, gaps in roles can be filled on a number of temporary basises (basis'? Basies? Weird word), and if anything the higher danger level will encourage players to play smart instead of just relying on rolling well. Sounds a lot like your GM may need to be reminded of this.

[Darzil]

People before touched on hiring other specialists to cover gaps in the team, and I wanted to point out that sometimes you don't even need to hire hire a full team member to fill in, but just pay for a service.

In the game I'm GMing, there is no hacker, but one of the players invested a lot into a contact that will provide those services, for a fee. As he is high loyalty, he'll usually do it at short notice.

[ProfessorCirno]

There is a very important axiom to Shaowrun, and it goes like this:

"Shadowrunners exist."

If you create in Shadowrun a setting where runners will always fail and cannot exist, you are very explicitly doing it wrong.

One of the big mistakes I see GMs young and old making (albeit sometimes for different reasons) is making corp sites into these weird anti-Runner paranoid deathtraps.  Like, for some reason, these corps are throwing away millions and millions of nuyen every day on defenses they'll probably never use on the offchance they might get to kill a small team of runners.  This is what generally leads to the idea that Shadowrun is suuuuuper deadly and every run is just a TPK every ten minutes.

Remember that one of the themes of cyberpunk is that the corps are in this for the filthy lucre and nothing else.  The same corp that's dumping their sludge into the barrens because it's the cheapest option is not going to have billion nuyen state of the art defenses everywhere.  They're going for cost effectiveness here.  Nobody wants to be the manager who tells the board meeting they lost an astronomical amount of money over their paranoia that there might've been a runner hit.  They want to be the manager who brags about how much money they saved by converting to a more "efficient" security setup.  They want to talk up halving the cost of security salaries by switching to "community friendly" based security based on hiring cheap locals without much training.  There isn't a single thing that matters more then that quarterly report - you better believe they're going to cut as many corners as possible.

Runners exist because there's space for them TO exist.  On one half, it's because the corps cannot actively move against each other without the whole corporate court falling down on them.  Nobody wants to be the AAA that started a full world war.  So they hire someone disposable, with no legal or official connection to them.  But it's also half because there's space for them to actually operate.  Security in most places going to be a small handful of guards armed with tasers, flashlights, and a one-way phone to the actual heavy security ops who talks big on how fast they can be on-scene.  A spider who has to manage not only keeping up on all the various cameras and security systems, but also watching tonight's Urban Brawl match, because nothing exciting has ever happned in the year and a half she's worked there, so of course nothing's going to happen tonight.  The matrix has been declared totally safe for everyone and unhackable not because it actually is literally unhackable, but because the corps hit a point where building up their own defenses "just in case" simply wasn't cost effective.  They gated out enough people; going after the rest was going to cost more money then just shrugging and writing it off as shrink.

Now, once you hit the big leagues and go after the primo corp real estate, you're going to see an uptick in security...but it's still security made of flawed people, and most likely funded by someone who had Big Ideas on how to maintain that security.  Everyone's had an idiot boss that had no idea what they were doing but still called the shots.  Shadowrun is no different, except now that idiot boss has to prove they're saving the company money every few months or he's out on the streets.  So now this corporate site has a SOTA security system, except it's going to have some holes in it because Mr Masters in Business was 1000% sure he knew what he was doing when he was calling how it should all be set up.

My point is, the biggest reason for the belief that Shadowrun is super lethal and everyone dies always and you MUST have all the archtypes is built on flaws premises.  Yes, Shadowrun isn't D&D; you don't necessarily go running in hoping to get in a big messy gunfight, because those can and will leave you face down and full of lead.  But by the same token, Shadowrun isn't D&D, and corporate sites are not Future Cyberpunk Dungeons.  If the hallway to the computers lab has flamethrowers pop out when it doesn't immediately get an accepted SIN, that place is going to have nobody working there because it keeps murdering it's own employees.  Most fights aren't pitched gun battles on rooftops with the best of the best, it's punching a hole through security because you took to long and they're between you and the getaway car and you are absolutely need to be getting away, or it's against a group of yak strongmen because the vory want to break up their protection ring, and what better way to prove they can't protect anything by, well, just plain murderin' a bunch, or maybe you just got hired to ensure those punk Halloweeners leave town, in a box if need be.  You don't hit Red Samurai on every run.  Or MOST runs.  They're supposed to be scary because they're supposed to be rare.

[Sendaz]

There is a very important axiom to Shaowrun, and it goes like this:

"Shadowrunners exist."

If you create in Shadowrun a setting where runners will always fail and cannot exist, you are very explicitly doing it wrong.

AMEN

But by the same token, Shadowrun isn't D&D, and corporate sites are not Future Cyberpunk Dungeons.  If the hallway to the computers lab has flamethrowers pop out when it doesn't immediately get an accepted SIN, that place is going to have nobody working there because it keeps murdering it's own employees. 

To be fair, Lofwyr is said to have one facility set up like a Cyberpunk Dungeon with all the bells, whistles and deathtraps you would expect.

Supposedly it's not just for catching runners in, it's where he rotates department heads who fail to meet the quarterly goals so he can play with his food a bit first as well as field testing 'security measures' drawn from concepts found in a well known series of trap books written by a certain troll back in the day.

Just keep that in mind if you ever get offered a job to do a run on a S-K facility only referred to as 'Schloss WS' on the books.

[Adamo1618]

There is a very important axiom to Shaowrun, and it goes like this:

"Shadowrunners exist."

If you create in Shadowrun a setting where runners will always fail and cannot exist, you are very explicitly doing it wrong.

AMEN

AMEN^2