When building characters, what should be kept in mind? How important are some attributes to certain character "arch-types" and how much can someone ignore certain stats...

For example if I make a hacker have a 1 in every stat except the one(s) necessary for hacking (lets just say Logic for the sake of this example) he probably will not live very long in the shadows, regardless how good of a hacker he is, specifically because he is not well rounded.

That is true, but if you turn him into a street sam, he needs body, agi, reaction, int, and possibly strength. And a logic of 1 for him isn't that bad at all. True also for Cha and willpower. Though with willpower you might want a team mage around to help protect you, as well as how many mages your GM throws at you.

While playing other Table Top games I have learned that theoretical optimization does not equal practical success, the excuse of someone else shoring up your weaknesses does not work in game.

With that said, IMHO characters should not have a 1 in any mental stat if they want to live on the mean streets... They have a habit of getting conned and dying to the natural cause of a knife in the back...

That assumes they've lived on the streets for awhile. Many of my characters are average joes, who have picked up skills which they stat using in the shadows due to some event which forces it upon them. No ones born a shadowrunner...or at least very few. Some may be born poor but many are not.

That depends on which mental stat. Willpower and Logic/Intuition should be non-1. Charisma is a more offense than defense stat, so if the character does not do anything proactive in a social sense, Charisma 1 may work. Either Logic or Intuition at 1 is fine as long as the other isn't. When a situation is bad, you'd consciously or instinctively know something is wrong, so either being 1 is fine as long as the other is high enough.

Survivability
Attributes: Body, Reaction, Willpower
Skills: Gymnastics, Dodge, Close Combat Block, First Aid, Counterspelling
Equipment: Armour, Medkit, Drones
Techniques: Take Concealment/Cover, Fall Prone, Full Defense

Even if you expect to never get involved in combat, you should prepare for shit going down and a firefight breaking out right on top of you. Street punks have a tendancy to do shit that only the vagaries of intoxication can truly explain. In short, if you can't expect to live when being shot at, you're going to die.

There are, in fact, two ways to reduce the amount of damage you take. The first is to have lots of Body, Willpower and Armour so that you reduce incoming damage to Stun and then resist most of it, with the remainder going into your Stun damage track (expanded by having more Willpower). The second is to dodge stuff by having high Reaction, declaring Full Defense, and taking cover or going prone (which counts as having cover if your attacker is more than 50m away). These approaches are not mutually exclusive. Use both.

I would suggest never taking a Body below 3. With a Body of 3 you can easily move around with Ballstic armour 6. With 6B armour you can expect some, or even most, SMG hits to be reduced to Stun. Light Pistols are significantly less of a threat to you. You even expect to reduce damaging hits by 3 boxes of damage. In short, getting 6B armour is important. Heavy Pistols and Assault Rifles are still dangerous, though.

Willpower also benefits you in resisting Spirit powers and offensive Spells. Taking cover works against Spells, but not Spirit powers. In fact, Willpower also makes you harder to social, but many GMs rule against using the social against player characters.

A final note is that you can use First Aid to heal yourself once you've got enough time. Frequent First Aiding saves lives, but the amount of damage you can heal is based on your First Aid skill rating. It pays massive dividends to concentrate medical knowledge in one individual, or take a Rating 6 Medkit and no First Aid skills whatsoever. You can replace your own Skill with the rating of the Medkit (only in the case that you have no First Aid training whatsoever), allowing you to heal up to 6 boxes of damage.

Self-Defense
Attributes: Agility, Willpower, Magic, Tradition-Attribute
Skills: Summoning, Spellcasting, Firearms Block, Close Combat Block
Equipment: Drones, Firearms, Foci, Fetishes, Ammunition, Stick-n-Shock
Techniques: Send Order, Calculate Safe Drain Value

As with the survivability section, you expect combat to happen for pretty much no reason. The ability to engage in basic self-defense frees up your teams combat specialists to go do their thing, and you can even Teamwork their attack tests (yeah, really, but it's not like you want to do that unless you can't actually do any damage).

Depending on what kind of character you are, you have a number of ways of dealing damage. Anybody can pick up a Heavy Pistol or SMG and shoot people with 5+ dice, and I would reccomend pretty much the entire team being kitted out to do just that. Everybody should have Agility 2, Pistols 1 (Semi-Autos +2), and either a Laser Sight or a Smartgun System with Smartlink. When you are shooting for yourself, you probably want to fire Stick-n-Shock, since it totally owns everything right in the face. It's pricy, but it's cheaper than a hospital visit.

Matrix-focussed characters can leverage their skillset to benefit from cheap, numerous firearm-equipped drones. So long as you specialise in one kind of weapon and one kind of locomotion, you can save a fair bit on software costs.

Magical characters that cast spells or summon spirits need to remember to calculate their expected Drain Pool results so they can calibrate the Force they cast/summon at for minimum risk.

Perception
Attributes: Intuition
Skills: Perception
Equipment: Glasses, Earbuds, Attention Coprocessor
Techniques: Wakarimasen

Everyone needs to be able to spot things. If you don't spot the 30 foot drop when you're running around on your own you get to die, no save, do not pass go, do not collect 200 nuyen. Glasses and Earbuds with their relevent enhancements are cheap (compared to the augmentation equivalents) and add dice. The Attention Coprocessor (Augmentation headware section) works out near enough in cost/dice to also be worth throwing into the arena if you happen not to value Essence too much.

Perception is actually a kind of shallow topic despite its importance. Remember environmental conditions - Low Light is cheap, and Thermographic is not significantly more expensive.

Getting Info
Attributes: Charisma, Logic, Intuition
Skills: Knowledge Skills, Data Search, Influence Block
Equipment: Commlink
Techniques: Talk to Contacts

Legwork is about 75% of the game. Take your knowledge skills and put them in stuff that is useful. Sometimes useful means "Security Procedures", sometimes useful means "Local Gangs", sometimes it means "Zoning Laws". Your contacts are not just for flavour, pump them. You have a commlink for a reason beyond the pretty flowers it lets you overlay on the faces of people you don't like.

These are rolls, side-missions (you scratch my back, I scratch yours), or just some roleplay. There's little enough to discuss about them in particular except to remind you that even Loyalty 6 contacts have limits and you'd be best not to push them.


I'd say that pretty much every other area falls into a more specialised role.

Generally, you want to be good at one thing, but functional in other things. You don't want to hard-max your specialty to the extent that you can't do anything else. Neither do you want to be so well-rounded that you don't have anything that you do particularly well. You should have the dual goal of creating a character who would conceivably get hired as a specialist, but who would also have been capable of surviving on his own up to now.

Keep in mind that transhumanism is the name of the game, so character creation is not "fair". Magic and augmentations give you a big, huge advantage - by design. Magic generally tends to mostly give you "superpowers", but augmentations can give you massive Attribute boosts and skill/dice pool boosts. A heavily augmented character can often not only have a huge dice pool in his specialty, but be better than a lightly cybered generalist in peripheral areas.