Endless planning of combat, Enter the bureaucrats... Options

[Double_Dice]

I've been playing SR3 for the about 8 months.
Since my old group spilt up during the summer and moved to different part of the country, I have begun gamemastering for a new group of five players (one of them played SR before, the others played D&D).

We have played seven sessions in July/August/September, and most of my new players have a good understanding of the rules. Three of them plays street sams, one is a combat mage, and the last is a rigger/decker, they are very similar to the templates in the main rule book.

They do legwork and information gathering without any hesitation - sometimes their legworking ideas actually surprises me.

But when it comes to combat everything grinds to a halt during the planning.

I think out last session is the best example I've experienced:

The group was hired by a johnson to perform an investigation of several organlegging-related murders and dispose of the perpetrators. They managed to track the perpetrators to an one story building in the barrens. By doing a day of surveillance from a nearby building they managed to size up their opponents (6 gangers two of them with a few cyber implants) and a surgeon. They even managed to find some minor clues on who the surgeon was and why the johnson wanted the perpetrators dead.


After they performed legwork and surveillance, the players formulated a plan.

Enter the bureaucrats, the true rulers of the game...

After carefully and tediously evaluating numerous combat approaches, such as:
- Sneaking up to the house, lopping a few grenades into a window, and shooting the survivors (this plan was formulated within the first a couple of minutes, but quickly rejected).
- Stealing a petrol truck and driving it into the building.
- Sniping people as they leave the house.
- Full frontal assault
- Having the mage conjure several elements and have them trash the place.
- Calling in extra manpower and have them solve the problem.
- Several other plans involving very big objects or huge sums of :nuyen:.

After two hours they reach a conclusion and formulate the following plan:
-The rigger/decker stays on the surveillance location with a sporting rifle, and provides cover and surveillance.
-The mage conjures a fire elemental and provides astral cover while remaining on the surveillance location.
-The three sammies would sneak up to the house, loop a few grenades through the windows and shoot any survivors.

By now the three sammies starts arguing (again) about who should go first and why they should enter the house. Half an hour later they decide to stick to the original plan again. But the mage is disgruntled because he has to astrally assist in the attack by dispatching the spirit into the building when the grenades explode.

15 minutes of combat later, six gangers and a surgeon lies dead on the floor - one of the sammies are moderately wounded by a sawn-off shotgun and another is lightly wounded by friendly fire.


This situation is a reoccurring problem, they spend hours on planning even the simplest thing and will do almost anything to avoid even the smallest amount of damage. Any light wound is and has been a valid reason for fleeing. And no excuse is to little when avoiding combat (the "I didn't bring my gun"-excuse has been used, personally I found it very amusing).

I once did a pure investigation scenario with them, and they actually complained about the lack of combat.

As a gamemaster I don't take much pleasure in watching my players spending half a session on debating the simplest plans.

How can one teach the players to speed up their planning and that no amount of planning can make the risk of taking damage go away ?