QUOTE (Glyph @ May 1 2016, 10:32 AM)
Part of the reason the street samurai is so OP is the he is 200,000+ over on resources. Still, he is hardly a prime runner. He can sneak or drive (a little), shoot things, or hit things. That's it. He defaults to 2 dice for perception, and 1 die for social skills (except that he cannot even default for con). But hey, he has a knowledge skill of Poetry: 1, so at least he's well-rounded.
Amusing, never knew that. Quote for the archetype: "And he made every nuyen stretch." Stretching by 200k is quite impressive
It could be explained that all his ware is second rate, installed by some crazy doc who used second-hand ware that could be glitchy. In addition to making him closer to a cyberzombie and affect his social interaction, the gear could be extra glitchy and sometimes power down or weaken at inopportune moments. That could at least balance him somewhat against the other archetypes, although he will still be a combat monster than will generally outperform all the others with the possible exception of the pure mages.
I do play a street level game myself, and I had to limit magic in the beginning to compensate for the lack of gear. However, once the game truly begin I will use the normal gear values for ware so that the only non-awakened has a chance. No one bothered with hacking though, probably due to the prices of decks.
I think gear bundles dependent on priority is a good idea that can be combined with the street level rules. The Street scum rules looked interesting, but also heavily favored the awakened (you can start with Magic 5). In my own game I capped Magic at 3, and slowly raised the cap until it reaches 6. Nuyen will also be similarly delayed, so the runners start dirt poor and with really weak Magic, yet has the chance to become a proper shadowrunner.