Maybe work in some runs that give the players some cyber-/bioware as 'loot', to encourage the sammies. Add some opportunities to steal drones and commlinks, and pirated programs for the hackers, and the gap between mages and mundanes shouldn't widen too much.

A problem we ran into in my long-running game was with extra karma handouts. From jokes, from spotting references, to getting the plot and doing epic things - over a year, it adds up, and I'm pretty sure I was near the top.
I had enough to throw away 20 or so on a Plot Event that needed payment in something more than nuyen, and also burn an edge to save the team, and STILL buy all the stuff I needed to stay current - not excel or min-max or shoot for the top, but I easily could have if i wasn't self moderating.

And this problem happens when you hand out lots of karma. People will horde it up to buy big-ticket things that may change game balance(particularly if karma->cash exists), instead of doing a more moderate, measured scale up - which seems to be what you want.

What I would suggest is handing out flat skill ups or discounts on buying specific things.
Things along the lines of 'You've been hanging out with rich fratboys for most of last month on a long con, mostly on football days, so you've picked up the knowledge skill for that at 1' isn't that much of a gamebreaker.
But when it comes to raising your Special attributes, learning spells, or other more sensitive things like Active skills, handing out freebies isn't the best approach.
As the newbie runner start to develop contacts and mentors that can teach them(for the right price) to be better, you're probably going to want to encourage your players to reach out and role play those experiences, and there's nothing that really supports the system.
One way to do it is to hand out specialized karma that can only be used for certain things. "Your gym membership over the last month has earned you three karma that you can use to buy anything you can reasonably learn there". for example. Ditto for hanging out with a hacker boyfriend, or developing a deeper connection with your mentor spirit, or even designing your own spells from scratch - all worthy endeavors. Another good example might be the Sensei quality(it might be an Advanced Lifestyle thing too), or maybe learning a martial art from scratch.

The other possibility is to use the same reasoning but give a karma discount of a point or two when a player wants to indulge in learning something from a contact. Instead of getting color-coded karma, which is a hastle in bookkeeping, the option is there for when you want to buy it if you decide to go in that direction.

The benefit for this approach is that your players gets to improve and feels rewarded for their effort, without throwing gobs of karma at them. They will gradually grow to fill their roles instead of pooling karma to advance in big leaps at a time when critical amounts are hit.

Generous for me means you get to advance something, usually not big, every few weeks. Our current group has been playing bi-weekly for over a year now, and we have maybe 30-odd karma and 100k nuyen to show for it. YES we are slow, as in, everything takes gobs of time. I would still be a little more generous than that. If you start at 300 you ahve to expect to need a few hundred before you can reach prime runner status, or even regular standard runner status.

I would be very careful with handing out hand-crafted freebies, because that's just GM ego-stroking. But handing out customized karma for certain other investments would be in the game, anyway - as karma for cash.

The saving up can be enforced or hampered with downtime requirements: If you say you need time to learn (and I would say it generally does for anything you don't use every day), then the PCs need to learn it when they have the time. And as long as they actually need to work because they have a hefty financial toll to exact every month, then downtime is a limited commodity. This was one of the reasons I wanted the debt mechanic.

IMO, this is sounding less and less like a "street level" game and more and more like a "how hard can I fuck my players in the ass before they kick mine" game. But hey, knock yourself out.

Ok, seriously, why do you even care?

You've heard my definition of street level. It's CHARACTERS WITH LITTLE MONEY. You can go ahead and stick your millionaire in a hovel and call it street level all you like. It will never be.

I can do monty haul just as well as the next guy. But it gets old. The only point of doing something like this is to FEEL a bit of the cold hard gnawing of existential necessity in your fucking butt cheeks. The characters in my current game are pretty elite. They are not by any means min-maxed, and they don't sport humongous dice pools, but they are individually tougher and stronger and faster than anyone else walking the block. They don't NEED to advance much. They in fact care so little that they often don't even know how to spend their money. I want a change from that.

You still seem fuzzy on this point, so let me explain it again: having decent gear does not make a character wealthy. Their stuff might be stolen, it might have been payment-in-kind from previous jobs, whatever. It does not necessarily mean the character went out and blew a hundred grand on their kit. Chargen is not gameplay is not chargen.

Moreover, as multiple people have explained, limiting cash gets you MagicRun. Magicians and (to a lesser degree) adepts have such huge advantages over mundanes that MagicRun, by definition, can never be "street," unless you want to make Awakened personnel as common as dirt.

I can virtually guarantee you that your stated rules are not going to get you what you say you want. You can keep adding more and more restrictions, and what you will eventually end up with is a bunch of unplayable PCs. You're trying to achieve a specific atmosphere for your game, and atmosphere is not a function of rules. It is a function of storytelling. If you want to make the PCs lives hard, then make their lives hard. You can do that no matter how many karma or BP the characters are built with.

Umm... actually you couldn't be more wrong. The story is what happens from the actions of the player characters (and some NPCs) within the framework of the scenario. Rules have EVERYTHING to do with these actions, because they literally specify what a person can do. Anything else is just playing make-belief. I can pretend that a full cyborg/bioware monster/etc lives as bum and takes on 2k nuyen milkruns. Sure enough, and with the right backstory this might even work. However, this will break down as soon as my voluntary confinement in this role ends.

The best chargen methods don't cause a break in plausibility when the game starts. With your method I would have to impose restrictions on the game, with my method I simply move the initial snapshot to an earlier point in time.

I'll repeat my claim that obviously the game is so borked that I need specific measures to stop magicrun. I'll also take care to make magical opposition common enough. Even so, magicrun can be street level without problems, it'll just evolve from there quicker.

I've actually pitched a game idea to a few friends recently, basically on the theme that Yeah, The World Sucks and also Magic Is Really Rare.
The players just flat out aren't allowed to take things that let them cast spells, summon spirits, or engage in the more super powerful or game breaking Magicrun tricks. Adepts are fine, mystics are not.
No, its not a Magic Doesn't Exist game - its enforcing the theme that magic is supposed to be rare, unique, and sought after. It certainly exists - the opposition will probably have it, and if the players want that capability on their team, they are going to have to go to NPC contacts to get it. They will have to decide if they want the unreliable drunk stoner mage, the hippie healer who won't do anything *offensive* with her talent, or the brash competent asshole who WILL fill in the blanks, support the team and do what needs to be done but is also an absolutely insufferable TWAT to work with because he's a frakking mage.
Without the good/powerful magic, basically the easymode is off and the players are given reign to run around in a kinda crappy dystopian gameworld where their skills and (more importantly)attitude get them jobs, and overcasting stunbolts won't get them out of tough fights. Adepts and Astral Sight are fine, but Magicians and Mystic Adepts are no-nos.

Basically taking the 'NPC hacker theme' and applying it to magic instead.

That's an option. The problem with that is that, while a hired hacker can basically get you information and maybe control security systems now and then, a mage is necessary for hands-on offense and defense. So basically the guy you need to hire all the time is just too important, thereby deprotagonizing the PCs. Although actually a group without a hacker is also severely gimped, I would say.

I still think you can basically cure the game world by making awakened more common. Suddenly everything works out.

Even Umaro's uber-characters can be foiled in many, many cases by a simple F3 or F4 barrier that is dirt cheap to maintain and simply may not be pushed through due to mission requirements. Now he's suddenly standing there without his bound spirits and with only those spells he can freshly cast. This is basically a given in my current game, although here our mage just got advanced masking, so... now his 3-4 spirit sustained spells won't have to be switched off.

That and Initiation shouldn't be possible before max magic is reached otherwise, don't know if there is such a limitation in the rules.

Its wierd, but he's right and wrong with the rarity of magic.

Shadowrun puts it at about 1% of the population displaying magical talent. Yeah, that seems small, but consider homosexuals currently make up 1% of the population now, and look how loud and vocal that group is? They'd be everywhere, but at the same time, not.

YMMV.

Where did you get that number? I've heard 2-3%. I do think it's valuable to put magical populations in perspective and I think way more mana tech should be available to confront mages. I'm a big fan of a lot of barriers and other difficulties for mages.

I have a mage in my current game that started with a Magic of 2 and 2 spells that has not been game breaking (as I mentioned it's a low powered game), but has utility and usefulness, so I think magic 2 as a limit is reasonable. Sure, you can make builds that are broken, but if you're a super powered special snowflake, someones going to notice you sooner rather than later. And then your Magic 2 is going to end up really sucking.

To be fair, the standard response to a barrier is to just drop the spells and walk though the barrier. Then you just recast them on the other side. Spirits are just put on standby and then recalled (this doesn't use services). Since it should only take you like 9 seconds to get your buffs/spirits back up*, it doesn't really matter out of combat time. In combat time, you do have to try to press though, but then the time for subtlety is over. And if there is a crazy ambush on the other side, you typically can see it coming (barriers are invisible on the physical plane) and you can still stunball just fine if you get caught with your pants down once you pass though.

As for initiation, there isn't a limitation in the rules. Nor do I think there should be. If you haven't reached max magic, then initiation just is paying for metamagics which are just neat abilities. Why can't a fortune teller character use divination without having be able to cast force 12 spells? It also means augmented mages discover the inner mysteries sooner than regular mages which seems odd.

*- First Turn First pass, turn on sustaining focus and power focus. Second Turn First Pass, cast Increase Reflexes. Third Turn Passes 1-3, turn on foci, buff, or call spirit as desired. Drain is pretty low for buff spells so that shouldn't matter. You also could speed this up by taking Cram if you're really worried. Then you could be back by the Second turn or 6 seconds.

Yes, I made a mistake, there: I thought spirits you had bound would always be on the astral space, not on their metaplane at the ready, as they actually are. So those spirits can be called any time. I'm still in doubt concerning spirits which are sustaining powers or spells on you. Can they also be on their metaplane? We talked about it today with the group, and without looking for rules much we agreed that the metaplanes were too far away to sustain a power or spell from, so those spirits had to be in the astral. But I'm not sure it's RAW at all.

As it is, our current mage sometimes had problems because he used the Edge method of casting into sustaining foci. And you can't cast with edge every time you need to recast. He should at this point have invested in a more powerful focus, but instead he now has extended masking, which will let him pass through barriers.

This begs the question why there are even rules for spirits moving through barriers, considering they can apparently just short cut through the metaplanes around any barrier. We house rule it that a ward is a ward that keeps magical things out and there is no metaplanes back door.

It's the only instance of rules text which prevents the mage from playing the entire run from his couch.

Sensible, actually. A loophole in the rules, I believe.

Or maybe you only let free spirits teleport, not summoned or bound. You can also limit metaplanar travel for bound spirits only to and from a metaplane, not through the metaplane to another place the mage isn't present. So you can send him off, cross the barrier and then recall him, but you can't send him throught he barrier via shortcut.

I've also had spirits sent on astral searches for people cross barriers the brute-force way, resulting in the victim of the search being alerted via the mage that put up the barrier. This cuts down on that utility a bit.

Right. Bound spirits can be called from the metaplanes to their mage. They can't just teleport.

I'm unclear on why you'd care about spirits being able to sustain spells from a metaplane (RAW, they can). Why does it matter? They can also sustain a spell from a kilometer in the air or whatever if it matters.

Right... that somehow made sense last night. I remember: The point was, if they are on the astral, and the mage passes through a barrier, then the spirit needs to push through to reach him, in order to assist him with other things. If the spirit is on the metaplanes, it can just be called.

Yes, that's correct. Also keep in mind it is a Simple Action to whistle up a bound spirit. So they are sort of like sustained spells - barriers temporarily inconvenience you, but they aren't impassable.

The spirit teleporting thing comes from them being able to return to places they have already been(via astral shortcuts).

Mana barriers aren't a problem, but only if they have got inside them before. That is to say, not really useful when breaking in some place.