"Worlds" instead of balance Options

[sunnyside]

So as I was wondering what game system to run my next game in and what kept yanking me towards SR was that when contemplating other systems I keep worrying about "game balance", and what I realized was that I had increasingly been just letting that worry go in regards to SR.

Thinking about it a moment, I think this is about the "worlds" of SR.

In most every other game (and bad SR games), there may be all sorts of builds and classes, but fundamentally they are just different ways of doing the same thing, destroying whoever or whatever is between your characters and where they want to go. In this way, having one player substantialy better at it can be a big problem, and it's also easy for players to get board as they don't really get spotlight time.

In SR there are the seperate worlds of the "meat" world, the Matrix, and the Astral. Additionally there can be less literal worlds in the form of social skills/footwork, vehicle chases, infiltration stealth.

I'd like to further empasise that, and so I'm looking for advice in the form of how to best bring out the different worlds, and how to keep other players interested and engaged while other players are in the spotlight.

So far I suppose I've achieved this by:

-Emphasisng communications. Usually a teams first fixer will check and see what they have for commo, and if everybody isn't well set up for soemthing along the lines of encrypted subvocalization at a minmum, the fixer will chide them a bit about needing to operate as a team and get them what they need out of their cut of their first run. (or if they're a bit more prideful I might just, as the GM, require they get it during chargen). This means players can be RPing and giving advice even if just one of them is doing the talking. Letting the others use remote feeds to make their own perception checks and such also keeps them engaged.

-Put pressure on the physical world. If the players can achieve their goals by a mindless assault I find that's often what they'll do. The other "worlds" pop out naturally when that doesn't work well. I primarily do this via adding in astral security (layered wards are realtively cheap these days, and background counts should be fairly common in a lot of the places runners go), and reinforcements (once the players are shooting up mooks, the management is on the phone screaming for backup. The speed of spirits and airborn drones means they can easily get to the scene in time to make a difference even given the limited time of SR combat turns if the players started off shooting, as opposed to just gunning their way out of the last stretch of a run.

What do you guys do? Do you worry about game balance? Do you encourage players to avoid taking characters that are too similar?