[Talgrath]

Leverage is a TV show; their leads don't ever KILL people, so of course death to a PC main character or primary supporting character isn't a real risk.

The characters are never at risk of being taken out. I use taken out in a FATE or Cortex+ interpretation. This means they are never really at risk of being removed from the story. They don't lose in a way where they don't come back. Sure, the stakes may be different, but that doesn't remove them from the category of competent bad-asses. Even with burning edge to survive death, the characters in a shadowrun game are not assured of the same. Runners feel like they are constantly running to stay on step ahead of a doom that is on their heels.

When I think superhuman I think of comic book super heroes. Powers or not, they are a cut above. Batman is not threatened by some punk with a gun. You need a villain to challenge him. In shadowrun a nameless goon can off you. Even spending edge to live doesn't really fix the disparity of power. I don't count the ability to see in the dark as some kind of miraculous super power. If I did than our modern military would be full of superhumans. Technological aids for guns already exist and they are nothing earth shattering either. A modern red dot sight is staggeringly good. Still not superhuman.

As for the magic... welcome to magerun. Its the aspect of the system I like the least by far. I don't disagree with the rest of what you say. My vision of shadowrun is perhaps darker. I like the fact that you don't need a super villain to challenge the players. The faceless, innumerable, grunts are enough to put the screws to a runner team. Sure, corp security might be taken down quickly, but their bullets are just as lethal and there are always more of them waiting to harry the runners. The question isn't if you will lose, but in how long. You race against that invisible timer, trying to get out before you are surrounded and out of options. You can't fight a stand up battle against a corp. You can't punch with the megas. So you suckerpunch them and try to get away clean before the behemoth can get up and crush you.

This.  So much this.  The fact that Shadowrun is like this, where characters might often just barely crawl away, is part of what attracts me to the system.  The characters should feel like they barely squeaked away, even when they win.

[Rooks]

Nah warhammer smacks PCs so much harder

[Glyph]

To clarify, The Wyrm Ouroboros was pretty much dead on regarding what I meant by "superhuman".  Sure, magic, augmentations, and the matrix are ubiquitous, but the PCs are still the outliers from the norm.  Your average Joe doesn't hack onto corporate hosts, or have implants or magic that give him extraordinary abilities, or tote around milspec weaponry.  And yeah, they can still get smacked around - but they have to be tough to even attempt to make a living at what they do.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

My point is that your derision of elements of SR not being 'competence porn' and comparing it against Leverage is flawed at its most basic level.

The 'superhumanly skilled' people in Leverage are serviced by the story considerably much more than they are forced to service the story.  When realistically or logically what happens next is that Eliot is really in either the hospital or in the morgue due to a sucking chest wound, or Sophie is in County behind six sets of steel gates, or whatever, the writers get to say 'No, Hardison sees them coming and Eliot disarms them of their guns before they can get off a shot, then there's a fight scene for two minutes before Eliot's knocked them all out and walks away like the cool dude he is.'  The only time a character is in the hospital or in jail is when it will make - for a strictly limited time - for a better story.  The writers, in short, aren't playing a game with a randomization aspect; they're only telling a story.

Even starting characters in Shadowrun, however - presuming a 6 or two in their particular area - are extremely competent.  I don't think you're understanding the difference between 'security guard has a 3 and a laser sight' - the equivalent of a trained soldier - and 'street samurai has a 6, a smartgun link, and Wired-3'.  Just because you consider 'superhuman' to be 'superhero' level something-or-other - powers and gadgets and skills that put you well above the normal human - doesn't mean that's what 'superhuman' means.  Modern military guys see at night and have laser and red-dot sights, sure, but it's gizmos external to the body.  Give them basic clothes and a gun, and the street samurai - all wired up - will shoot them in the dark, because even naked he can see in the dark; this is what implants are about. And when your standard soldier has a R3 Automatics, a starting character who has a 6 is definitely a kick-ass difference.  'Superhuman' simply means 'greater than human'.  And sure, that can apply to SpecOps, whether that's the guys in the US, France, Britain, Australia, or Israel, when it comes to combat the are greater than human - because of intensive training to kick ass and do a DNA scan for names.

Even taking your interpretation (more or less) into consideration though - is 'superhuman' the equivalent of The Bride in Kill Bill?  Jack Reacher?  Ethan Hunt?  Then 'superhuman' is definitely within reach.  While it may take a hundred, or five hundred, a thousand or two thousand (or four or six) karma to get a character into 'superhuman' levels (call it a 9+ in three or more skills), and though it may be out of the reach of the starting character, even a basic Wired-3 street samurai can kill eight people in three seconds with a pistol.  Without breaking a sweat.  A seriously competent adept with a top-notch blade can kill even more, if they're within his 'area of mobility'.  I'd call that superhuman.  Yes, a nameless punk can drop you if he's got surprise and a big gun, a ton of luck, and you're sleeping; it's a lot less likely if it's a face-off, even with a starting character.  It doesn't make you not-superhuman just because you can be killed.

As for the modern tech, sure it helps a lot.  It's still nothing compared to a smartgun link, which will cock your gun, indicate to you precisely where you're pointing it (so long as it's in your visual area), allow you to fire your weapon with a mental impulse, and eject the clip the microsecond it's empty, while giving you continual updates on the condition of the weapon and the number of rounds left in the clip + chamber.  The only thing it won't do is load and clean the weapon.  Ain't nothin' modern that'll do that yet, that's for sure.

And magerun?  Sure, mages are powerful - for a limited time, because all that power comes at the cost of drain.  I cannot tell you how many times the non-magical-at-the-time Hawatari has eliminated an enemy mage - and at several junctures, the mage was a PC - without in her case breaking a sweat.  Because of planning, and all the rest.  In a stand-up fight, sure, magic is the trump card - but if you're going for stand-up fights in Shadowrun, you deserve all of the ass-kicking you're receiving.

The point, really, is that yeah, SR is a dangerous place, and yeah, you should be exceptionally competent in whatever your area is - but that being competent exclusively in that area is a bad thing, and for all intents and purposes powergaming.

[Whiskeyjack]

And magerun?  Sure, mages are powerful - for a limited time, because all that power comes at the cost of drain.  I cannot tell you how many times the non-magical-at-the-time Hawatari has eliminated an enemy mage - and at several junctures, the mage was a PC - without in her case breaking a sweat.  Because of planning, and all the rest.  In a stand-up fight, sure, magic is the trump card - but if you're going for stand-up fights in Shadowrun, you deserve all of the ass-kicking you're receiving.

I agree with your whole post aside from this, there are trivially easy ways to mitigate Drain that make it a relative non-issue. But you're right about fighting a mage - if you're going toe-to-toe with them, pistols at dawn, out in the open, they will probably shred you even if they don't know a single Combat spell. But why are you fighting them that way to begin with, when it's common in-setting knowledge that any mage might be able to make you eat your own gun if they see you, if not fry you like a chicken dinner (and even if a given mage actually can't do that, you should assume they can and will, just to be safe).

[Marcus]

SR is not one of the new style total narrative focused system like Fate. It predates that shift in the industry by decades. That's not a bad thing by any means, the traditional ways are still great ways. SR has always been about it's own meta story and by extension the parts of that story the PC adventures tell, of course that meta story has drifted in many directions, and has often shifted almost totally between editions. We have seen the IP change hands several times, and while we are in what I consider to be sort of classic throw back stage right now, I don't really think that it matters a whole lot in terms of how the game is getting played right this minute.

The technology vs magic balance is always hard point to sell. My opinion on this differs greatly from many of our regular posters, I think 5th magic as far as PC's are concerned is considerably weaker then it has been in past editions. Tech is at a high point, in terms of effect, Deckers are back and better then ever, they are certainly are well ahead of technos. Alchemy has disrupted the magic scene mechanically, it may yet turn out to be strong but even after the hard target changes alchemy remains pretty incoherent.  I don't think anyone is going to argue that SG is anything other then ether the weakest magic books or at-least among the weakest we have ever seen in SR.

No one is ever going to make the perfectly competent character, and even if you did, it would be hella boring to play. The flaw of the Stormwind's fallacy has never been with it's logic, it's always been with underlying assumption that b/c players have the option to role play they will. We all know one of the reason this keeps coming up is many do not. Why no one on the other-side has figured out how to present that argument in some reasonable format is beyond me. The reality remains it takes both skill at role playing and skill at the system to achieve everything you can in a given session.