Thats part of the problem with these kind of games. To do the job successfully you have to cover your sector and trust that the rest of the team is doing theirs. That is hard to get across in an RPG. Hell, it's hard to get across to people who do this stuff in real life. Everyone wants to move to the guns, but what you have to do is keep doing your damn job. Unless you are on the counter assault team, your job is almost certainly not to dash off in the general direction of the action.

Most of those thresholds are just guidlines that I use when I think about how difficult the test might be. In actuality they end up being lower during the game. This is also the first draft of my notes and will see at least two revisions before actual game play.

I figured that the crowds would be thick and make things more difficult to spot. I'd rather mess with the thresholds by one or two than worry about modifiers for my players. It makes things quicker overall for my gameplay.

The sniper is detectable by other means. Writing down the stuff about the comlink is for me to remember that with the lack of long range weaponry in the PC group that focusing on the comlink is a good way of getting the hacker involved in the action as well.

That's up to you, it is your game. But altering the Thresholds can drastically change the difficulty of the test, in order to get a success, you'd need about 3 dice on average. Increasing the Threshold by 1, the character needs another 3 dice to have a good chance of making it. On the other hand, reducing the dice pool by 1 doesn't really have as great an impact, to have an equivalent impact of +1 Threshold, you'd be talking about reducing dice pool by 3-4.

oh, right, we're talking a game. yeah. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Look at the various approaches people are suggesting. They screw the characters if the players behave like people playing a game and not as experienced professional bodyguards. That's why the whole "players bodyguard Mr. Blah" is most often a complete disaster of a scenario. At the end the GM is frustrated, the players are both bored and angry and NOBODY had fun.

If you read my posts on this thread, I did suggest that the various Security and Tactics Knowledge skills that the PCs may have be put to use. Sure, it may end up little more than rolling buckets of dice but at least some people enjoy that sort of thing.

the problem with real body guard work is that you're purley reactinoary, the fun comes if you can start hunting down the shooters while someone else hangs around the mark.

Mmmmm... counter assassination. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lick.gif)

GM: "well, since the bodyguard run didn't work out so well, I've got a new one for this week."
Players "Oh, cool, what!"
GM: "Forensic accounting. Here, each of you gets a spreadsheet...."

I think that sometimes it's a good thing to force the PC's to react. Things can't be in their control all the time and I find that doing something like this every once and a while forces them to make hard choices and can encourage some character development.

To a large extent I am in agreement. I sometimes like making my players realize they are not all-world-centric and as shadowrunners they are often pawns to the larger conspiracy.

When in doubt, if you're set on the bodyguarding thing, make them the counter assault team for a large PSD. Spare them the monotony of walking the diamond, doing preliminary surveillance, and long boring convoy duty and start things off two seconds after the first shot is fired, when the PCs get to tee off on the attackers so that the rest of the security detail can get the principle out of the ambush zone.

Or just swamp them with groupies and coke.

So I ran this run Friday night and everything went really well. The team liked the idea of a "legitimate" job and were really amiable to the idea of guarding Janus.

They handled the two encounters that I gave them in the underground well. There was some good RP as they tried to convince the twitchy terorists from the Son's of Sauron that they weren't invited to the meeting and should leave, and were able to get them to go without any violence, though it did come close. And they were smart and checked out the sound from the air ducts instead of just riddling the thing full of holes, especially since it was only three ork kids trying to sneak into the councel chambers to see what all the hubub was at the Underground city hall.

They handled the attack at the Seattle Center like pros. One of the team took Janus, put himself in a position to intercept bullets and rushed him inside to cover. Our shooter stood in the way and did his thing, and the weapon specialist girl enguaged the cyber assassin with swords that kept her pinned down in one place.

The best part was the attack on the limo at the end. They decided to take the car chase option to get away and ended up being chased by two cars after ramming through the back end of the third. Our hacker delt with one of the chasing cars by hacking into the controls of a nearby crane at a construction site and having it dump a bunch of metal girders on one of the cars. The adept, who was driving did some good driving rolls letting the weapons specialist pop out of the sun roof and hose the chasing car with full auto fire from her SMG causing the car to go crashing into a building.

Fun times.

If anyone is interested a full writeup can be found here

Sounds like a good, excellent run, ShadowPavement. Looks like you have a good group to work with, too.