A Game Rife With Problems, Or, How Do You Fix Everything At The Same Time? Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Outline Switch to: Standard Switch to: Linear+

[tsuyoshikentsu]

Okay, here's the problem.

Right now, I have a group of seven players. All of them are my friends, and three of them are my roommates. (We live in a suite.) Also, these are the only people that I know of that play Shadowrun on campus, barring one guy who earned himself a permaban from any game I run. The game's had... oh, six sessions or so now. And if I cannot fix a vast majority of these problems, I find myself wanting very much to either reboot the game or just kill it dead with fire.

Now, just about all of these things are my fault; I just didn't care about what seemed to be my worries: everyone was having fun. But when it became very, very clear to me that about half the group wasn't... well, when it's not just me, it's a problem. So now I have to fix this massive mess I've caused, and I really just don't know how to do it myself.

Here are the issues.

>There are two players I'd love to get rid of due to behavior. Unfortunately, they're both roommates of mine, and the third roommate is someone I really want to keep in the game.

>Five of the seven characters can be summarized as "moar dakka." The other two are a hacker and a sneak. Between the two, only the hacker is any good at what he does, meaning that, if I want to involve the entire group, it's dakka or TPK.

>On the flip side, because there's so much redundancy, three people are feeling completely useless. All of them are players I want to keep.

>The hacker, who is (again) the only person competently focused on something besides dakka in the group, is one of the players I want to drop.

>The group does not have the attention span to deal with lots of people splitting up.

>The party has so much dakka -- we're talking lasers and airburst grenade launchers, as well as Barretts/miniguns with antivehicular rounds -- that I am struggling mightily to find a way to have enemies not die without having them being completely immune to normal damage. I am avoiding that last because the party's entire non-normal damage resources consist of the mage's Stunball spell.

>The common response to the above would be to have them arrested. But that's rocket tag: they're incredibly easy to track down (someone has Distinctive Style 3) and could probably take on easily anything that wouldn't kill them outright.

>I also don't want to strip their weapons, because so much of their resources (especially qualities) have gone into buying said things.

So... what do I do, Dumpshock? Do I start over? Is there any way to ask Roomies A and B to leave without making my housing situation miserable for the rest of this school year? Should I just call it quits and form a different group with a different system?