Why do you Shadowrun?, What do you look for in a game? Options

[Kanada Ten]

[James McMurray]

Mice can be interesting. You don't need ultramagepowerzord to be an interesting character, just personality.

[emo samurai]

The thing is, I need a blank sheet to draw anything I'd look at. I need to be able to make whatever I want; my background has to be what I choose.

[ Spoiler ]

I could have easily made my elf-uber-mage with magic 4 if the BP were limited enough; I just need to make whatever I want, otherwise things just seem constricting. He has to be Shen, whether it's Shen the fledgling mage or Shen the magelord; he can't be "Up and coming mafioso with randomized angst generator."Nothing I make can be totally ordinary within context. That's why I'm making him more of a fairy tale archetype who contrasts quite markedly with the consumerism-meets-crime setting of SR. His life is centered around that fairy tale perfection meeting with the grim darkness of the future; to me, that's quite unique. Archetypes that fit in their worlds too comfortably bore me.

[eralston]

Players generally only need one little hook for their character and they're in love. Like when a man sees a woman and loves her for her large, round....eyes...

[James McMurray]

[Kanada Ten]

Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's not exactly unique. Actually, it's practically cliche at this point. Besides [clash of ideal and reality] being the basis of about half of all runners ("I worked for Shiawase and thought we were a family, until I stumbled across..." or "I was a patriot, following orders without question, and then my government tried to eliminate me." and so on); but it's also an actual shadowland character from second edition: Taran Greenbrough. Poor guy disappeared somewhere after Denver. Not that there's anything wrong with that type, my first real character was a Former Paramedic fired for healing a non-contract while on the clock.

[eralston]

I like the gratuitous backstab background in so far that it creates purpose in a very succinct manner.

Overall, it's hard to craft a good reason to "home grown" shadowrunners. Most every shadowrunner who just up and decides to be one gets killed first thing.

Everyone is an ex-something, I divide them into categories:

1) Gordon Freemans: I was _____, but then _____ happened that caused me to take up a life of ________

2) The A-team: I've always done _____ and when something happened to cause that to end, I just kept doing it

Really no difference

[emo samurai]

Most of Shadowrun's centered around conflict; you either accept it and become a heartless mercenary, or you don't, and you become a tormented good guy.

[eralston]

Tormented good guys are kind of a drag. It's really hard to RP moody without crossing into really awful LARPing

[Kagetenshi]

I've always been a big fan of the backstab character background. For example, as far as I can tell my current character once test-drove advanced prototypes for Saeder-Krupp. From what I've gathered thus far her manager probably changed, and she didn't like the new one or the new policies or something and ran to Ares with a bunch of highly sensitive material.

Oh wait, you meant the corp doing the backstabbing :)

~J

[hyzmarca]

[eralston]

Well, with an assumed beachead in the streets, certainly it's easy to just say they were extraordinary enough to dinstinguish themselves; however, in the specific case of "powerful" or highly competent characters, they generally need a good reason to have access to superior resources and training.

Certainly you can have superior SINless people, but corps are just a lot more efficient at building competent killing machines.

[Kanada Ten]

Yeah, but the end of SR3 gave us plenty of "national" wars and displaced peoples that one can easily have NAN warriors who fled the Ute or Tsimshian rather than work for the enemy. There was also a few mercenary companies that went kablwee and then Surhand's paladins or the Seraphim from Cross.

One other thing on revenge motivated; the prevalence of hackers in 4 coupled with identity theft of today (and face shifting technology, DNA masking) one could easily be the target of a frame-up. Hackers will look for those who make plausible scapegoats - such as those with violent personalities (they just search around for your online order of lithium, for example) and then erase your alibi and plant the evidence. Sure you could hope that the mindprobe proves you innocent, but with memory modification technology a good prosecutor could knock it down. All the hacker needs to do is lure the mark to the scene of the crime and arrange for the police to catch him red-handed. Maybe the hacker even exaplins this to you as the sirens close in, he's gloating, but you manage to escape (perhaps burning edge) and run to the shadows for protection - and to track the fucker down.

[emo samurai]

[eralston]

I suppose I could extend payback a bit, or comment on why I've never played a fairy tale (I seriously don't know anything about this Shen guy, emo. AND IM ME don't crap on this thread just to tell me)

No, I want to extend the reasons list, currently it's:
Pure monetary gain
revenge
being a fairy tale caught in a dystopic future (?)

[Kanada Ten]

Exoneration - Perhaps it's to escape personal guilt or just a guilty charge... (Examples: The Fugitive, Cane, The Shadow)

Freedom / Independence - Live free and die free or maybe just pick the jobs you do. (Examples: ?)

Status Quo - "I've always been a criminal, my father was a criminal, and his father was a criminal." (Examples: George W. Bush, The Kennedys, Gotti)

Fulfillment - "Killing is the only thing I know how to do." (Examples: Batman, Art Danthwalker)

Excitement - "The only time I feel alive." (Examples: Hatchetman, Brock Sampson, Hackers)

[shadowfire]

i play shadowrun because i'm a natural at espionage- at least mentally. i can think in those circles pretty easily. so unlike other games, i can use all that ability.

[fistandantilus4....]

[emo samurai]

These character concepts seem to be molded far too much by the social context; there's too much inertia in their backgrounds. "My father was a blah blah blah, I've always done blah blah blah, I'm on the street so someone in my family's in a gang/addicted to drugs/saddled with a kid." There's really no overriding conviction in most of their chracter concepts, and that annoys me. There's fear, greed, and ambition, but no real passion. Greed and ambition don't make you unique, and aren't real passions. Greed and ambition reduce you to numbers, and even if you become a big number, you can still be summed up by a number.

[Kanada Ten]

I could have put in "the passion" idealogy, but that's really just a variation on revenge, exoneration, or fulfillment.

The rest of your post is nonsense. Everything can be reduced to numbers.

[e] And saddled with a kid is fucking comedy gold every time. It allows the character to grow in any direction. They can become more dark, or open to the kid, or just try to "make things right".

Hell, social inertia makes the world go round. :spin:

[e2] Oh, that reminds me of another background:

Dissociation - Whether the person is lost in a Shadowrunner Sim or programmed by p'fix, they run by design. "The chips made me do it!" (Examples: Cyberzombies, Meat Puppets)

Recognition - "I am the best!" (Examples: The Black Archer, Kane, The Gingerbread Man)

[James McMurray]

[Dog]

Wow. This has to be one of the most insightful RP discussions I've seen.

I'd like to point out the difference between the issue of background variety and what I guess one'd call power-level of the campaign. A cliche character is just a cutout, whether he's in a street-level protect-the-neighborhood campaign or a Harlequin/James-Bond save the world thing. A well-developed, original, creative character would make either kind of campaign better. My preference for the ridiculous components of the game is just a preference. I don't think it makes a superior game. Nor do I adhere to it. My friend is running a very gritty sort of minor mob-war game right now that I'm enjoying.

[ronin3338]

[Kanada Ten]

"Pure monetary gain" from the poster above that one. That's not the only work for SINless; but it pays better than picking toxic moss from buildings or the other landscaping jobs they get picked up for - and so on.

[WyldKarde]

This seems like a good excuse to finally delurk and bore you all rigid by belting on about my current character. :newbie:

For a quick yours truly background, I'm a long-time shadowrunner, having cut my teeth on 1st edition shortly after it came out, and I'm currently involved in a 3rd edition campaign being run online through OpenRPG.

For me, when I'm creating a character the most important question is 'Why do they shadowrun?' After all, most starting characters have the sort of skills that can translate into lucrative employment in many less dangerous (or at least, less highly illegal) fields. That means the motive has to be more than just sweet negotiable currency.

So, here's exhibit (a). David Six Guns Blazing, Owlman to some, Blaze to his chummers. 'John Blazer' or 'William Honing' depending on which credstick of dubious provenance he's using to collect payment from you. In terms of stereotypical archetypes he's a street shaman who follows Owl.

So why does he run the shadows? He needs the money. But it's not for him. Blaze is a genuine tribal shaman, it's just his tribe are a little different. They're squatters in Redmond. They've been there for a while now and are well established. They have their own 'turf' carved out, a place where they can walk safely because they enforce the law for themselves in that area. Aside from an occasional clash with local gangs it's a more or less peaceful neighborhood. Sounds like they're doing alright, huh? Except for the fact that everyone lives on or below the poverty line, power and clean water are pretty hard to come by, and conditions are unsanitary at best. Blaze has his work cut out for him just keeping everyone healthy. Then there's that occasional tussle with neighboring gangs that means he's off to provide some magical backup to the tribe's braves and then has to mojo the bullets out of them afterwards. All in all, life's tough and pretty drekky, as you'd expect it to be in the barrens.

Blaze pretty well blundered into shadowrunning by accident. A trip to the local stuffershack one night turned into a firefight (Why yes, there were a lot of newbs at the start of this campaign, how did you guess?) and when the dust settled there was a chromed up dwarf nearby who was impressed with how our young hero handled himself and invited him for some less than honest work.

So Blaze managed to get some serious money for the first time in his life. He rented himself a decent apartment not too far from his tribe's turf and was able to actually eat regularly for a change. Then it all went a bit pear shaped. There was a run, standard stuff, grab the MacGuffin off the couriers. The ambush went as planned and payment was made, but it seems one of the ambushees (a rival runner team) had some kind of honour code or 'saving face' drek that meant the he wanted to hunt Blaze down and 'make him bleed three times for the amount he bled from me'. Trouble is, Blaze was pretty hard to find. Blaze's tribe, on the other hand, were very easy to find. So the rival runner decided to lure the shaman out. Once per night he'd sneak around tribal turf and mug someone. He'd leave them unconscious and unharmed, except that he'd take their ear (Blaze had shot the guy's ear off with a near-miss from his pistol). Once the tribe realised the pattern to these attacks word got out pretty quickly and Blaze managed to end the threat and even get compensation for the attacks.

Trouble is, Blaze isn't a 'pure' Owl shaman. His old mentor was the tribe's former shaman, the late lamented Laughing Hound. Old Man Hound was a shaman of Dog. and as a result Blaze has a distinct Doggish streak to him. One of the things Hound drilled into his apprentice's head was that you always take care of your pack. Blaze realised that while he'd gotten himself out of living in trash, he wasn't able to properly fulfil his duty. It's not enough to get himself out, he has to get them all out.

So that's why he does what he does. Most of the money he gets from Running actually goes into tribal coffers. It pays for food, medicine, chip books to educate the young and so on. Eventually Blaze plans to have enough money to buy some farmland out in Snohomish or somewhere and set the whole tribe up to live a decent life. And on a metagaming note, it's an interesting challenge to play a character who gives away most of the money he makes. No huge strings of Foci for Blaze. In fact, he owns two, and one of those is loot from a defeated enemy.

Well, there you have it. Think I've managed to stay more-or-less on topic. Hope you've not all been bored rigid.