If I may take the liberty of opposing your position...
... in a deep mirrorshades campaigns, the least useful archetype is probably the mercenary, not the magician.
But beyond that, you mistake my position. I do not
QUOTE
have that big of an objection to magic
, especially not in the abstract. If I did, I'd be running CP2020 instead. My objections are to the way that magic is implemented right now in Shadowrun, and specifically the difference between the way the rules implement it and the way it is presented.
Right now, a magician in Shadowrun is a swiss army knife. Maybe half a dozen useful spells, and .... uh, that's kind of it. Sure, some offline spirit wrangling, but really you've covered what they do. Oh, you want to do something else? Karma. Lots and lots and lots of karma - and better hope you like your choice, because you're stuck with it. On the other hand, short of ritual magic or big summonings, magicians can pull their favourite five or six bunnies out of a hat at a moment's notice.
This doesn't make magicians cerebral, it doesn't make them flexible, it doesn't make them particularly intellectually consistent with the idea of magic being this deep topic worthy of postgraduate study or massive corporate investments in magical laboratories. It makes them underbarrel grenade launchers with a few weird buttons marked FIREBALL, HEALING, INVISIBILITY and HOTCOFFEE.
What I'm trying to do is to make them more interesting, more flexible, more generally useful without turning them into godlike beings of unstoppable power.
In combat:
Let the weapons specialists and physical adepts go nuts. The deckers, mages and other crunchies should probably keep their heads down. If they want to return fire, great, but there's no inherent reason that they should expect to be as effective as a samurai throwing a grenade or a physical adept doing a flying lotus death kick.
Legwork:
Deckers do legwork, mages do magical legwork, faces do the greasy dives, and weapons specialists help with interrogations.
Downtime:
Deckers work on cracks, gunbunnies polish and upgrade their guns, riggers get greasy, faces get laid, and magicians work on more spells and magical connections.
If you think that a run is 20% legwork and 80% cosmic destruction, then yes, nerfing magicians would be inappropriate. I'm looking more to 3 weeks of legwork and preparation, 3 minutes of being ghosts. Combat speed casting is not a big nerf in that context. Magical flexibility (changing up karma costs, making spell research more feasible) is much more important in the kind of campaign I'm looking at. So what I'm trying to do is shift the rules in the direction of the kind of campaign, not arbitrarily nerf-the-mage because of some kind of weird hatred for magic.
On a different but related note, I forgot one other aspect of hackers/deckers that I was going to mention above:
I was going to allow on-the-fly hacking as a test by the dice, based on available software to perform the cracks, but to greatly raise the chances of being observed. In other words, it's flexible, and requires little or no legwork, but is ugly, unreliable and loud.
Outline for on-the-fly hacking that I currently have in mind:
Extended test of logic + hacking + software rating + other mods.
Every iteration of the extended test, the target's firewall + intrusion detection software (if any) gets a chance at detecting the interference.