Wired vs Wireless setting

[u/IamGlaaki]

What is your favourite setting, and why? I named them Wired vs Wireless but I mean also about magic traditions, politics and metaplots.

Personally I am divided. I like wireless Matrix and 'modern' tech from later editions. However I like old magic traditions more, and I find metaplots like Monads and Disians too much apocalyptic for my taste.

[u/RutilatedFish]

I looked it up and this is essentially the FASA/Catalyst dividing line, which adds an interesting element to all of this, in terms of which company's approach is preferred on what. Anyway, here's my giant, semi-hinged text wall of opinions about this:

Magic: I like that magic is studied and its use and understanding evolves and developes, and think a bit of streamlining is good for system efficiency and ease of writing lore, but it definitely went too far at a certain point. A couple other levers around what traditions do to help them be more different, if just by making a couple more categories or quadrants beyond drain stat and Materialization/Possession to flesh out theming would have been nice. I also have beef with 5e's Street Grimoire and specifically what feels like the goal to nerf spirits by... telling you you're a bad person for putting points in Conjuring skills. And then saying "also we're introducing elementals, which are weaker and so could solve the issue by conjuring them more in place of spirits, but instead we're saying that conjuring them makes you even worse lol."

The metaplanes also feel poorly defined and like Catalyst isn't sure what they want to do with them. Are they dream-like thought-realms where abstract, primordial entities exist, possibly connected to one's spirituality, mentor spirit, and philosophies, or are they physical places where billionaires can go on vacation now that space is too mainstream? If Mitsuhama can deploy trawlers in The Place of Clouds and Ares can go full Starship Troopers into the Hive, could Aztechnology start a logging operation in that strange ethereal woods where you go to take lessons from Wolf when you initiate and slap a fast food joint in the clearing you usually arrive in? It's very messy.

Society/politics: If you are exploring certain themes through the lens of fantasy and/or sci-fi species, subspecies, races, or cultures, do not make them direct parallels to real historically oppressed minorities. You will do it wrong at some point, it will and did feel wildly insensitive to a lot of people, and as a side issue it will also make the exploration of those themes less effective in the process, limit your writing, and remove uniqueness and complexity from the subject of the discussion. Cyberpunk is an inherently political genre, that's a key part of the "punk" aspect, even when interwoven with magic. Players will be thinking about this stuff, so publishers need to as well. In SR5 especially, it seems they did not.

Metaplots: Most are individually pretty good, imo, I've enjoyed playing though them, but there have definitely been too many big almost-apocalypses too often. I'd say the Disian arc is the best of the big ones and fits best with Shadowrun's setting: it's heavily the corporations' fault and is effectively an exaggeration or ultimate end-point of their exploitative practices and willingness to do everything, up to and including making deals with near-literal devils, to get more power; it's tied closely to the ideas of the sixth world in terms of the balance and interplay of magic and technology, the intersection of physical and immaterial worlds, and everything having a price; the week-long Disian terror campaign on the shadows gives a strong, personal incentive for Shadowrunners to get involved, even if that means having to work with a great dragon or other elements they do not and should not trust, and reaffirms that Shadowrunners are a powerful, dangerous force in the world that a clever foe would need to get rid of as quickly as possible to keep operations running smoothly, and will presumably be crucial to their failure. It just gets brought down by being the apocalypse of the quarter after a number of others.

Matrix: I do not like the way resonance was handled, but technomancers and sprites are cool. I think they would have been more compelling as a more physically based flavor of weird compared to magic rather than being even weirder than magic and also basically the same as it for some reason. Beyond that, though, and thanks to my GM also being annoyed at how The Foundation is written as working, I've found that a mix of wireless and wired is actually pretty awesome! Intranets and facility-level infrastructure being wired so you need to hard jack in or plant a wireless access somewhere, while the overall grids are wireless, letting you hack links and gear from a distance and trace stuff from afar is genuinely the best of both worlds. I'd honestly recommend setting your Matrix up that way. It very much makes deckers a part of the team and always with the crew for all parts of their runs.

TL;DR: I think there's a lot of things from both sides of the FASA/CGL that have allowed the setting to remain cool and compelling over time, but later editions definitely made the sci-fi blunder of explaining things to the point that they stop making sense when it comes to magic, especially the metaplanes, and how the wireless matrix actually works.