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I feel like Shadowrun has a ton of metaphors and symbology that pretentious cyberpunk fans deliberately ignore and well-meaning but oblivious folks completely miss.
Dragons in Shadowrun represent the idea that rich capitalists, the people hoarding gross wealth and paying the working class as little as they can get away with, are inhuman and cannot be trusted. From William Gibson's Count Zero, Chapter 8: Paris;
"He's quite horrible, Virek, I think..." Marly hesitated."Quite likely," Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee."Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal sort?"I felt, at one point, that he wasn't quite human. Felt that very strongly."
The fantasy species called Metatypes were not included in Shadowrun arbitrarily. They stand in defiance of contemporary fantasy, and as a construct for players to discuss themes of racism (and empower them to destroy it) without feeling "too real."
Contrast D&D, which to this day blithely uses heinous racism to describe core characteristics of their player races. This is a game which has long been about "good" species killing savage "monsters." It's repugnant.
In Shadowrun, society is not good. People are bigoted and shun Orks and Trolls for being what they are. The key difference here is that none of the design team went "okay, we need to list the ways these metahumans are inherently bigoted regarding each other." People are people in Shadowrun, regardless of their genetics. In 5e, introductory sections explain that science is unable to prove that trolls are genetically less intelligent than other metahumans. Then they set the limits of Logic, Intuition, and Charisma significantly lower than other metatypes.
This isn't a game balance thing. It's not tacit confirmation that trolls are naturally unintelligent and ugly. It is a quantifiable measure of the way society shuns trolls and actively denies them opportunities to learn and grow. Trolls aren't monsters; the people oppressing them are.
I know this might seem in stark contradiction to my interpretation of dragons. Lots of folks are Horny For Dragons figuratively and literally. I'm a furry so I get that. Something that Shadowrun explains, especially when discussing Dragonslayer mentor spirits, is that even in the game's setting dragons are figurative first, literal second. The corporations that rule the world--these are the eldritch beings who need to be killed. The fact that several of them are owned or influenced by literal dragons is an unfortunate effect of most dragons being born into power and wealth, and being too enormously long-lived to care about the here and now.
In Shadowrun, metahuman emotions are deeply intrinsic to navigating the Astral Plane and casting spells. This is hugely important. The Sixth World is not a good place. It is a dystopia, the kind of world that most cyberpunk engages with. The difference here is hope. Empathy. A coldly logical designer would bar magic from their story. The designers of Shadowrun use magic to suggest that emotions matter. Get angry, harness those feelings, use them to fuel change in the world, and to tear down oppressors.
Some folks say that cyberpunk is dead or obsolete.
If that's true, it's because people don't care about the message intrinsic to the genre.
Cyberpunk isn't even subtle. It is practically screaming the ways in which the modern world is fucked up.
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Nton
Really insightful post! I agree that "race bonuses" in RPGs are kind of an odd topic nowadays that warrant a more thoughtful design process than "orks bad, intelligence low and strength up". As you said, I think there should be some hint or clue at least of these bonuses being not based on inborn differences necessarily.
I think one other way to play with this design space is the idea of fantasy races that were created artificially (or by magic): They were created for explicit purposes and that is why they have different attributes. The focus should be that they were made this way for some reason, which can also work as a metaphor for societal processes. The "masters" or "creators" of these races would symbolize the people in the real world who heavily profit from such societal processes, who are often quite adamant about keeping things the way they are, because these are socials mechanisms for their groups to stay where they are (mid- to higher class).