Trouble with Game Balance Options

[Gomez]

I have been running a Shadowrun 4e game for about 5 sessions now. I am about two sessions into the On The Run adventure. I have from 6-7 players playing at any one time with starting 400 point characters.

My problem is they are mowing through all the opposition that I am throwing at them. Now we are are still learning the rules but my players are pretty sharp and have built pretty tough characters. I started out with some easy combats but they were too easy. The PC's hardy broke a sweat. And looking at the bad guys in the On the Run adventure it looks like they will hardy provide any challenge to my players.

I looks like I am going to really have to up the power level of the bad guys because any street level bad guys are hardly a bother. Maybe I was expecting starting characters to not be so tough and I can hardly imagine what they will be like with some karma under their belts.

Has anyone run into this problem.

[James McMurray]

Expecting a street level game and not making sure characters are street level will definitely cause some problems. Talk with your players about your expectations, and be sure to exercise that last step of character creation: GM approval. If you're dead set on street level and they're dead set on maxed out starting characters you should probably find a different GM.

Another problem is the size of the group. I don't know for sure how many characters the FanPro adventures were designed for, but I'm guessing it's 4, not 8. If you've got twice as many characters you'll definitely have to up the ante to keep things challenging.

[Lebo77]

[booklord]

You think that's bad?!?

[ Spoiler ]

Street Samurai
Wujen
Shaman
Hacker

Street Samurai scouts the area using stealth and perception and his massive vision and Hearing enhancements and spots the Horizon team.
Wujen astrally scouts from a distance and confirms.
Shaman and wujen astrally scouted the bar and find the guy.
Hacker easily gets through lock on back door.
Shaman cast an illusion of an empty hallway.
Samurai sneaks down hallway, and into office and abducts the guy at gunpoint.
Samurai escorts guy down hallway and out backdoor.
Team leaves area with neither Horizon or gangers aware of what just went down.

At a safe location they relieve him of the disk and interrogate him about the contents and whether he made any copies. ( I screwed up at this point. I should have deviated from the written material, and had him make a copy )

Since the team anow knows the contents, they rest of the adventure becomes moot and they deliver the goods to Mr. Johnson. Way too professional a team to even consider betraying him.

They completed the entire freaking run without using a single bullet. Try being too SNEAKY for a run.

[Gomez]

[James McMurray]

booklord, why is that a problem? It seems to me that's what a clockwork run should do.

[Ankle Biter]

[Nim]

The SR4 character creation rules really do nothing at all to enforce an equal power level between characters, or to ensure that characters end up at the power level you want for your game. It's possible to build totally useless characters and totally over-the-top characters on roughly the same number of points.

My advice is that as Step 1 of character creation, you have each player come up with a short written description of their concept, before they spend a single BP. A couple sentences should do it...what you really need to know is what role they want to play in the team and what the character's general background is that let them pick up those skills. Make sure they're all at the level you want for your game, and roughly the same level as EACH OTHER. If one guy wants to play a junior reporter from a local screamsheet, and another wants to play a covert op who's gone AWOL from an elite, top-secret UCAS military force...you're going to have some problems. Try to get a set of concepts where the characters are all roughly on par in their competence at their respective professions.

Then just make sure that the stats they come up with actually FIT the background they outlined. If you've already cut the concepts down to something that fits the game you want to run, then you ought to end up with something that more or less works. Don't be afraid to tell players things like 'Sorry, your 17-year-old street-mage, barely eeking out a Low lifestyle by casting Trid Entertainment spells in bars, just doesn't have the education yet to have Spellcasting 6'. Read over the description of what the various skill levels are supposed to represent, and actually stick to them :)

Not that there's anything wrong with having starting characters who are in the 'best in the world' category at some skill...IF that fits the game you're intending to run. Just apply common sense, and don't let them have it just because they have the BP available.

Then, if you decided you wanted a game where the PCs are starting off with fairly 'elite' concepts, make sure you're sending them into situations that'll appropriately challenge them.

[Gomez]

Well I don't have a real problem with how the characters are balanced against each other. It's the oposition that I throw up against them that the balance really swings crazily. And I cannot just say to them, "Hey you built your character too well, can you not make them so good?"

I guess I just have to raise the threat level that I through up against them.

[Aaron]

I'm reading a lot of "make the players conform to your expectations." I'm not sure I can agree with that sort of sentiment. I've always felt that the GM isn't there to be served by the players, but to serve the players. As GM, you are the "fun facilitator" for the group.

In the case of the team that did everything right, cautiously scouted the opposition and nabbed the mark, what's the harm in allowing it? They did everything right, and didn't have to fire off a shot or a spell. Sounds like a good run to me; congrats all around.

In fact, having the opposition get walked all over by the team is a Good Thing. It allows you to rachet up the opposition bit by bit in future runs until it gets to the appropriate level. It's far and away better than approaching that limit from the other direction.

[Gomez]

[Nim]

[stevebugge]

[Shinobi Killfist]

I'm preparing to run on the run, and I don't think its supposed to be a very tough adventure. I think its supposed to be fairly easy with a ocuple small challenges for a team of 4-5.

I think it is supposed to be a learning adventure where you get the rules down pat, and be almost a milk run.

So much better than one of the SR3 advenures I got for a first run with a group of frikin tir ghosts setting up an ambush in ruthenium polymer full armor.

[Nim]

[mdynna]

booklord you should have had the Horizon/Shangri-La team jump them when they were leaving with Loomis. Remeber that casting spells sets off an astral "beacon." And considering the corp team had a mage (that was watching Loomis closely) you can easily explain how they spot the team and spring an ambush. Even min-maxed characters can be challenged by an ambush where the opposition all gets 1 free unapposed shot at you.

[Squinky]

Having not checked out On the Run yet, I can't comment much on that, but as a new Sr4 gm I can comment on overpowered pc's.

I had the same problem last night, My pc's walked through my game hell of easy. I had this happen before, with the team fighting a street gang and security guards, so I made the oppisition a little tougher. The PC's were hired to get revenge on another runner team that had betrayed the Johnson.

My Pc's were an ork Sam, an Elf Shaman, and a human gunslinger adept. I pitted them against 5 of the archtype runners from the book, with gang members that they had hired to be their mooks. It was a total slaughter, It was fun, but I still am trying to find the power level. Only the Gungslinger adept was even hurt, and that was when she fought a Troll adept (Mystic Armor6, Combat Sense 6) and he clocked her on the head once and nearly knocked her out. She shot at him three times (with a predator) and he was so dead he owes me some. The Ork was pretty much walking through suppressive fire from Assault rifles and shrugging it off. Many of the Archtype runners were killed in one shot, it was insane.

Now, thinking back I think I can try this:

1. I didn't apply enough modifiers, I'm new to the gig, and in the future I am going to keep better track of lighting, cover, movement modifiers, stuff like that. I have a feeling that will dramatically change things, but my group knows we are learning as we go.

2. If this trend continues, I am going to have to throw in some opposition that specifically targets a pc's weaknesses, just to bring them down to earth sometimes. The gunslinger isn't so good at unarmed, so I can envision her fighting a person who like to unarm people and fight hand to hand. Basically, find ways to take them from their comfort zone every now and then.

3. Have the enemys fight meaner, more tactically. I'm fine with the gangers being shot to death, but the runners could have been more organized.

Thats all I got, thought I had more...

[Shrike30]

SR4's character construction results let you put together characters who are the "ultimate build" at doing something right out of the box. Asides from the ever-improving Adept exception, you can put together new characters who throw as many dice as a veteran character in a hyperspecialist role... literally, you can make a character with no room for improvement at what he does.

Keep that in mind when your players make their PCs. This is not SR3. There is nobody cruising around out there with Negotiation 11 or Pistols (Hammerli) 10(12). When you throw down a starting character with a skill at 7, the SR3 equivalent is something like 10.

Discourage hyperspecialization in your group. Encourage the use of a wide variety of skills and having people do things they're not necessarily good at. Take the rankings in the book seriously... when it says that Professionals operate at skill 3, and Veterans operate at skill 4, with Skill 5+ beginning to list things like "Famous people who were this good...," remind your players (and yourself) what going to or past 4 means in terms of balancing against the rest of the world.

I know a lot of people out there are more into the "game" part than the "role" part, or at least they enjoy being able to look at their build and say "yeah, I'm really good at what I do within the constraints of the character generation rules." A big part of the reasoning behind this is that rather than being built to very specifically limit characters, with exceptions having to be made to play more powerful characters, SR4's chargen rules are written to make it so you can play characters at pretty much any power level without diverging from basic character generation in any significant way (it's not hard to tell a group "Y'all got 500 build points"). Playing at a level below "the scariest thing I can make" simply requires the GM and the players to talk about character generation and the GM to look at the characters, ask himself if it's going to work for his game, and give the player feedback until everyone's operating at the desired level.

I realize this is more work than we, as GMs, would like :P We want the rules to turn out compatible, balanced characters that we can easily match opposition to, won't outshine each other in an unbalanced fashion, and let us run a game without having to think of things like how to get mundane guards to survive force 10 spirits. We want our players to be reasonable people, understand that the fun they get out of building and playing a walking dice pool might detract from everyone else's amusement, and never use the arguement "But the rules say I can do it!" when we try to talk to them about their characters.

That is not how things are :P

But if you put in the effort, work with your players, and try to get things relatively balanced to start with, you're going to enjoy the next weeks/months/years of playing with those characters a lot more. Figure out the threat level you want to be working with. Draw up some sample NPCs, with the concept of "easily defeated, equally matched, overpowering" levels of difficulty. Then eyeball your PCs, and see if their characters are actually going to be threatened by an "overpowering" NPC, or if an "easily defeated" NPC is going to kill them. Suggest they adjust their characters accordingly.

Try and be a guiding influence on character advancement, too. If your freshly Awakened street ganger PC jumps from Sorcery 2 to Sorcery 6 in the first few sessions of gameplay, he's playing in a different league now. Keep reminding people of what those numbers mean, and asking "is your character really that good?" Specialists are good... people have a role to fill, something they can do well and stand out from the other characters. Hyperspecialists brush aside anything that opposes them in their target field, and simply pass things they're not good at over to the rest of the group. The presence of a hyperspecialist means that unless you take that particular threat area and jack it up to a point where it's completely unreasonably overpowered compared to the rest of the world you're running in, you can no longer provide a threat to the group from that angle. If your game world works fine with players regularly throwing out devastatingly large pools, then go for it. If your game is going to be disrupted by things that can be shot/magicked/hacked/argued with ceasing to be a problem, then you should ask the player to tone it down a little bit and help you run a better game.

[ShadowDragon]

Count your blessings. My player's team almost got knocked out twice in On the Run, and that was after I dumbed down the second fight. They're a five man team, and I helped them build their characters stronger since they're new, but they suck at tactics and scouting. Hopefully they'll get better.

For your situation...I'm pretty sure On the Run is designed around a 4 man team, not a 7 man team. You shouldn't feel bad about increasing the difficulty of the fights.

[Shadow]

Start fudging your rolls. Roll behind a DM Screen and fudge teh damage rolls so your PC's take more damage, your NPC's take less. Only the players are bound by the strict letter of the rules. However, if your players are having fun, and they like it the way it is, do nothing. If you think they will have more fun with a tougher oposition, fudge the rolls a little.

[Nim]

Nicely said, Shrike.

[Nim]

[Shrike30]

We used to use the old training time rules from SR3, and it got to the point where it was annoying as hell.

I really like characters simply becoming "better" at something in exchange for Karma. It's easy, it's "awesome," it's a bit of the edge that shadowrunners who survive have got going for them... the ability to pick up new skills or get better at things they do regularly through raw experience. But the minute you put rules to it, you're introducing constraints to the amount of downtime you can (or have to) allow, you're putting in a framework for players to insist they should be able to do something ("But I've got two months off... that's enough time to train to become Michael Jordan!"), and generally adding something that you as a GM (IMOExp) are not going to get any benefits from compared to the ease and simplicity of talking to a player and asking him to spread things out a little, maybe put karma into something that isn't his primary skill.

A lot of players make uberbuilds because they want to be "good" at what they do. What they fail to understand is the point at which "good" becomes "too good" is the point at which the GM has to start taking a blowtorch to the framework of his game and making it work. Uberbuilds aren't just "good," they're godlike. Unless you want your players playing gods, work with them to prevent the creation of gods. If you've got a player who says "Hey, it says I can play a god, I'm gonna play a god," wish him good luck on his hunt for a GM.

[Protagonist]

[Shrike30]

Wouldn't that become immediately obvious the minute your perspective changed? It could fool non-scanning cameras, but that's about it.