D&D gets pretty boring after awhile. Every campaign boils down to
1.Get quest
2.Go to dungeon
3.Kill everything that moves
4.???
5.Profit
Many official Shadowrun missions are set up so you can use only social skills to complete them, and even when you have to fight the social skills are never useless.
My brother is DMing a Shadowrun campaign he made. We are a gang in the ruins of Cupertino, California. Since the terrorist group Winternight detonated a magically enhanced nuclear bomb on the San Andreas fault, much of California has become flooded or uninhabitable. The San Francisco and Cupertino areas are now considered Z-zones, basically a lawless ghetto where no emergency services will travel to. The top gang, the Granny Smiths, ended an ongoing civil war by blowing themselves up. Now the power structure in the area is completely changed and rival gangs are setting up to take over.
The kinds of characters you can be are much more diverse than D&D, just because you can give yourself any skill you want as there are no classes. I am a hacker type with electrical, chemical, and hydraulic engineering skills.
All three of them were useful as when the Granny Smiths blew up, they took most of the area's infrastructure with them. We had to restore power(lots of ghetto rigged windmills), restore water(lake became contaminated with boron and another reservoir was taken by another gang), and I made fertilizer bombs.
I actually only fought someone in the tutorial battle for some of the new players in the group. The rest of the time I never left a server room. One of my friends plays a server computer that became sentient so I work through him.
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