Currently, I'm GM for two, count 'em TWO players. (The one other regular guy is out of town for a few months, and others come and go... mostly go.) We're just wrapping up a successful campaign, but I noticed that such small team translates into less variety of perspectives and problem solving approaches, ie. fewer options for them and for me, which translates into a more basic, street level campaign. I'm figuring this can be changed if I allow more points for character building, so the characters can have a wider range of skills and abilities. I wonder if anyone else has faced this, and can offer a good BP suggestion for two characters.

Before anyone suggests it, we're not into playing multiple characters.

Round out the team with NPCs. It won't provide any more input, since NPCs tend to remain more or less mute during planning, but it will allow the players to consider a wider array of options.

My recent summer campaign was 2 players. It was the best campaign I've ever had. We could roleplay a lot more and focus on character's personnal activites more, too. I had to be a bit careful about how I designed my runs. Basically one was a demolition expert and the other a face/sam. So they were mostly hired for runs that required demolitions in one way or another. The trick was being original about it. It ranged from knowing how to safely move explosives (not technically a problem rules-wise, but easily RPed as something important), to make car bombs to all out facility destruction.

Also, to follow up Velocity's comment, I prefer to make the players understand that they can easily and safely hire extra shadowrunners on a per-run basis. That way, the NPCs don't become personalities that provide too much input and the characters can accept a wider job variety by hiring talent to fill in the blanks as needed.

My players (when I had them) used to out-source all the time. Especially when it came to the matrix and/or driving, which worked well for me.

That and the PC runners should or would adjust their tactics to suit the job at hand.

Of course, this also suggests that the PCs might be interested in more specific roles that don't require large team efforts.

Investigators, bounty hunters, couriers, etc. are all viable 'runs that don't require the same degree of manpower.

-Siege

My first real campaign, which lasted for years, had only two PCs. That was GURPS, though, where character designs tend to converge as build points approach infinity. Shadowrun is more restrictive, because of the magic/cyber dynamic: unless they're hard-core number fiddlers and you give them a bunch of extra points to play with, no one's going to build a RiggerDeckerFaceMage. Adding points will, I'd think, mostly make them better at their specialties. Even if not, you've still got the perspective problem, which is intractable without more warm bodies.

But that's not a bad thing. Like the other posters have said, it's a matter of understanding the abilities of the characters and the players. I'd stay away from combat scenarios, just 'cause there's so little margin for error/bad luck. Lots of legwork, lots of NPC interaction, lots of matrix work if they're in to that. Enjoy it: you don't need worry about giving everyone a chance to contribute, and you've got two sets of subplots to track instead of six.

Small group campaigns, in my experience, give you the best chance you'll ever get for a really good roleplaying experience. It lets the characters develop in a way that can't happen when there is 5 of them. You can actually roleplay their downtime, and if done well it won't actually be "downtime", because on run, or off run, it will all flow together smoothly in to one gaming experience. And the ability to explore downtime lets you explore facets of the characters that you simply couldn't otherwise

I'm a HUGE fan of small group gaming in Shadowrun. More one on one interaction, more character dev time. So much easier to GM for them too. With all that character dev and so few characters to incorporate into the meta plot? Wheeee!

That said, I wouldn't necessarily go with the Uber characters idea. I like giving them NPC runners that they can work with and trust (until they stab them in the back, wHEEEEEE Again! ).

In my experience , 3 characters is ideal. But when you have ideal, getting them to branch out and multitask can be a real boon. Try giving the ma bit more karma and encourage them to use it to delevop other skills. For example, if they have a usual fixer, let him tell them about some jobs he's had to pass on to others because they're not so good at "skill x" , and ask them to work a bit on it. Maybe not matrix or magic ( which is obviously not something they can just tag on), but exoand their skills a bit. "Otherwise you;ll just be doing demo runs until you get grey or geeked. Just a thought."

A tight game, two players with GM or even one-on-one, can result in some of the most intense roleplaying experiences ever, but only when all players and GM alike are willing to immerse and invest themselves in the joint reality. The smaller the group, the more need for drive from every group member. If any one of them "drags", the game will quickly disintegrate.

As it happens, two players only just happened to us too (in the Shadowrun group), but as a result of work-related attrition, leaving an (in-game) brother and sister team.

One had to move permanently back to her home city by way of job-seeking. We did have a couple of sessions to tie up her story quickly, leaving some parts of her story open for the rest of the team to complete: a combination of obligation to a former team member, complications, and what is owed to a newly potent NPC contact. (In about a month of game time, if all goes well, the former amnesiac will be accepted into her birth position during the Tir rites: and the rest of us scummy shadow types will have a highly-placed Tir noble who had become a friend on our contact lists. If all doesn't: well, if we're lucky, we may have to get out of the Tir in a hurry.)

Before the next session, when we would have been winding up the next story -- we knew an employment/visa-related move would be soon involved -- word came that a hoped-for job had materialised in a different city, and that the expected move was in fact happening this week. Obviously that plotline could not be tied up: and he remains an NPC decker-mage loosely affiliated with the team, occasionally doing favours for us while he pursues the few Matrix leads he has. Again, in the roleplaying context, existing obligations continue to exist.

It is the height of metagaming to imagine that everything that had been a pressing matter before suddenly evaporates, simply because a PC becomes an NPC: yet the lack of "real time" immediacy, of a player sitting physically at the table, seems to make these obligations somehow unreal to one of the two players remaining. In fact, he wanted -- expected! -- to just instantly abandon everything else as though it had never existed, in pursuit of what interested him specifically.

It required an entire game session of re-evaluating before we found a balance that could follow the existing plot threads at least to some point of resolution before abandoning the Tir and pursuing his agenda.

As some of you may or may not know, we run in Velocity's game and there are only 3 of us.

Nova - Our Uber Sam. He is what all Samurai strive to be... friends with me. (Haha!!)
Gauge - Penetration Decker, and a mean one to boot. He'd be a competent streetsam even without that deck in his cyberarm. With it, he's the meanest decker I know. ( ok, he's the only decker I know...shhhhh. )
Kong - The amazing skateboarding mostly naked monkey shaman of doom. They keep me around for entertainment purposes.

When we need more people, we hire them.

Kong

I agree that role-playing and character development is far superior with a smaller group. In fact, when I've played in large groups, (up to 11) I'd supplement the regular GM as a sort of side-bar GM just to cover PC-PC interactions and downtime. When the run was on, I'd go back to my character, who was basically just muscle. It was a quirky system, but that GM and I worked well together.

I guess the real issue that I'm facing is that I want to run a more high-stakes, jet-setting kinda thing, but I feel like I'd be throwing Jack Burton into a James Bond world. The general response seems to be "outsourcing" but I dunno. Tell you what: I'll let you know how it goes in a couple.