A case could be made for these traditions Logic or Charisma like their parent traditions, but the case against altering the drain attributes is just as weak, really. It's all a matter of taste.

Actually, that's the whole point. Minor, mostly cosmetic changes is what a tradition is in 4th edition. There are a few big (but balanced) choices - materializing spirits or possessing spirits, and relevent drain attribute - but everything else is essentially just cosmetic.

From a game mechanical standpoint, none of the spirits are particularly better or worse than any others. Unlike previous editions in which getting (or not getting) certain spirits was a major selling point of various traditions, in SR4 every tradition gets exactly five and all of them are pretty balanced. Even the threat traditions get their extra power from their threat ratings and not from the inherent abilities of the spirits themselves.

In SR4 there is absolutely no reason why someone couldn't just play an Ant Shaman as long as he didn't have a threat rating. While it uses a different drain resistance stat and has a different set of spirits than Voodoun, it's really pretty interchangeable. In SR3 it was reasonable to want to fight tradition inflation. More traditions was more chances for the game to go off into crazy-town game balance wise. But in SR4 the different traditions are so inherently similar and balanced that there's no reason for people to even be organized into traditions at all. It's so simple and unobtrusive to create the traditions that it would honestly probably make more sense to just conduct the tradition creation checklist for each and every character. It doesn't even take much time.

Step One: Materialization or Possession? When your character summons a spirit, does it appear in a puff of smoke, or inside their body while their eyes change color?

Step Two: What is your Second Drain Attribute? Does your character think about magic (Logic), search for magic (Intuition), or persuade magic (charisma)?

Step Three: What Spirits do you summon? Air, Ancestors, Beasts, Earth, Fire, Man, Plant, Warrior, Water, Worker - Pick Five.

Step Four: Which spirits power which Spell Types? Combat, Detection, Health, Illusion, Manipulation - line them up however you want.

So there are One Hundred and Eighty-One Thousand, Four Hundred and Forty (181,440) possible tradition set-ups. But the way the game is set up they are all balanced. So don't worry about it.

-Frank

Not only that, but assuming that more spirits get added, in the next book (And since any given tradition can summon 6) Just having one or two more basic spirit types would give you a ton more choices.

Heh. For any player character that's not a choice, since only NPCs can be threats. Also that's not a balanced choice in any meaningful sense. The weakness you gain on all your spirits is sort-of balanced against the extra power you get with a threat rating of 1, but you still get a stack of extra spirit options and bonus dice on all your magical skills.

So there are 181,440 balanced PC choices, and NPCs can be any one of those or one of 181,440 completely unbalanced choices that are intended to combat a group of PCs on their own.

That's with. When going through the old traditions, I combined as many as were possible, and it turns out that you can get all the old flavor with 4 additional spirits. That's a total of 10.

The BBB has no Possession option, and only 6 spirits, so there are 3 deeply meaningful choices (Logic, Intuition, or Charisma), and 720 cosmetic options (6 options for what spirits you have, followed by the same 120 possible ways to organize your spell/spirit map - something which just about only matters to Aspected Traditionalists who aren't even in the BBB). So the BBB allows 2160 possible traditions in 3 meaningful divisions, of which it has writeups for 2.

-Frank

You think Wujin will be the third meaningfully different tradition?

Nope. I'd say nature magic (ie vanilla witchcraft) of the sort mentioned first in the Germany sourcebook fills that gap.