Un-Shadow-ee Players, Warning: Long Options

[Monnock]

Hello, I'm new here (really new, I just found your forum) and I'm new to the Shadowrun system... and setting... Ok, I'm really new.

Now that that's out of the way, here is my question: My players refuse to work in the shadows! Just last mission, they were tasked with getting something from a truck that was delivering its cargo to a depot where it would be loaded onto a bullet train. They had no idea what the cargo was, though I don't think that played much of a part in their plan.

Their first idea was to blow the train off the tracks... Thank goodness they didn't go through with that, though perhaps that would have been more subtle than what they ended up doing.

The truck was being escorted by two KE police cars (very low security considering the cargo, but the idea was to keep a low profile and reinforcements were on standby). The party took a hummer, armored it up, mounted a light machine gun (Ingram White Knight equivalent) on it (it fipped up so it wasn't obvious) and loaded it up with explosive rounds and attacked it. The funny thing was, the LMG was used to just blow out the tires. The party technomancer hacked the two patrol cars running one of them into oncomming traffic and putting the other in reverse so it crashed into one of the cars that had just returned to the road after the chase had passed them. The mage killed the guard in the passanger seat with a mana-bolt for no reason.

Well, they managed to stop the truck and got the cargo. Through some good driving, they managed to escape the vehicle with all the KE police in the area chasing after them, and the driver managed to get the car away by driving it into the Rox (crime hotspot of Boston) where they didn't pursue because things had been quiet and they didn't want to be lead into an ambush.

At least they got away without anyone knowing who they were... Only problem was they got too greedy. Two people were offering them the same job, each from a different fixer. They gave the package to their first Johnson because he offered more, then sold him out to the other Johnson. The other Johnson was sent by the corp that they were stealing from once they caught word that information about the shipment was out there, and they had hoped to cover their hind-quarters by hiring their own Runners to get the package for them. It was deemed cheaper to hire them to steal the package (which they could cover the cost of with the security breach compensation that the KE offered) than to hire them to escort, which could lead to problems of its own (like them stealing the package for themselves anyways).

So here is the situation, by the next day the Johnson they gave the package to has been arrested and, of course, after being betrayed rats the runners and the fixer that set him up with them out.

KE was massivly embarrased by this incident, as a vehicle with military grade weaponary (that only shot out the tires, but the media loves leaving that out) just attacked and escaped into the Rox; Lonestar is capitolizing on this by publishing adds that are along the lines of "Lonestar wouldn't let this happen to you" and promising to clean up the Rox (though of course this is just propoganda, Lonestar is no where near equiped to handle such an invasion). It is unlikely that Lonestar could wrest the contract from Boston due to intanglements the government has with KE, but the possibility still exist, and it could prove costly to KE if it happens. They have a huge inscentive to regain popular support by bringing these guys in.

Ok, I'm really sorry for the LONG post, but the reason why I put it all out there was because this happens all the time with my players, not just in this system. They never seem to 'care' about the reprecussions of their actions, which tends to get them into a LOT of trouble since they love to abuse their power. To me it seems obvious that ratting out the guy who gave you work is just bad business, am I wrong? Attacking KE with military grade weaponary, hacking their patrol cars to kill innocent bystanders, and (to add insult to injury) they have magic too that they didn't even use other than to kill some guy who wasn't even a threat to them seems like it would draw a HUGE responce from KE, or would they really not care as much (would the public care that this happened?) It's getting to the point where I feel like I need to give them 'Deliver this teddy bear to a little girl" missions just so they don't go psycho and get themselves arrested or killed, but I also want to make sure that I'm not blowing things out of proportions.

I want to run a game that is more complex than just a simple 'gun them all down' game, and honestly so do my players, but they just don't think at all about their actions. Any ideas how I can get this through to them? I feel like saying something like "stay in the shadows" wont be enough, since I already prefaced this setting with that. The mage is already talking about commiting small-scale genocide of Force 1 spirits to fuel his spells (I have no idea why he wants to spend all that :nuyen: on that), I guess he doesn't think that the spirits will ever care about it or retaliate in some way in the future.

My plan is to have them set up by there fixer to go on a run to a wearhouse where a S.W.A.T. team is on standby to capture them using non-leathal force (unless absolutly nessisary, though they shouldn't need to since they are using gel ammunition). Once captured a 'mysterious benifactor' will help them bail out under the condition that they get the Johnson out too. Not sure where I will go exactly after that, but I'm hoping that this will send the message. I'm also not sure what to do if they manage to escape the capture.

Meh, ok, I'm done. What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this whole situation? I can't help but feel like I'm being a 'bad guy' here by throwing the consequences at them when they are just having fun. Sorry for the rediculously long posting, I'm just a bit overwhelmed.

[fistandantilus4....]

This comes up a lot. THe simple answer is, warn them once of the potential consequences. If they don't listenl , give htem the consequences. Maybe the new characters they ahve to write up will be smarter. You know the old saying "those that live by the sword, die by the sword." Havethem go down in a massive gun battle with the cops . I had one group that normally plays pretty well, but they jsut went off once on the STAR. By the next session, two guys were disabled and at a street doc's after taking deadly wounds, one was identified by the cops and going in to hiding, one was never seen again because his ally spirit dragged his dying form away form the fire fight, and one was captured, tried, and given the electric chair. THere are only two characters left. Last time we saw them, thye were wounded, unarmed, and vehicle-less somewhere in Snohomish, with the STAR looking for them.

The next team they made did much better. It's harsh, but , hell, that's Shadowrun.
If we wanted it to be easy we'd play D20.

[Calvin Hobbes]

It's been a comment I've heard about our team's action: we routinely opens indiscriminate autofire in downtown areas in order to cover their escape, and we'll kidnap fifty year old men to get their daughters to play nice with us. The GM wants us to be a more honorable team of heroes, and we're just a gang of cutthroats who'll kill everyone who gets in our way.

Personally, I think one key is to improve players' understanding of the things that they care about. Players tend to be indiscriminate with things like their lifestyles and all the other accoutrements of their lives so long as they keep their guns and car through the drek you throw at them. Spending games detailing their lives might sound boring to some (although if they're serious about "role playing" over combat, they're probably for basic interaction with people) but it also has the benefit of highlighting the stuff we don't want to lose: friends, family, dreams. Everyone shadowruns for the money, but what is that money *for*? And if the character doesn't have any motivations beyond the job, then ask the player to reimagine, or help them discover something.

Admittedly, sometimes it's hard for a group of dudes to run things like romance between character and NPC, but there are other things we can care about. Encourage players to develop their homes more: it really hurts when your kick-ass home in an abandoned movie theatre gets firebombed by the mob as a message about your organlegging syndicate.

When the PCs and the players, are faced with situations where the consequences of their actions end up effecting people they care about, it's sometimes a really hard lesson that they learn from it.

As to the deus ex machina, screwing with the players by hitting them with an ambush because of what they've done is occassionally okay, but rely on it to work perfect, and you'll just end up having to re-examine the miscommunication between you and the group again when it goes wrong.

[ShadowDragon8685]

On the other hand, one could think about how to resolve this situation without ruining their fun, like Fisty said.

Though ratting out a Johnson is something you Do Not DO, and all, and certainly a hijacking on the road was a bit loony.. If you just have sinpers take them out (likely what would happen) the players will rightly feel angry.

"Roll a damage resistance test Vs. 14D."
"Fourteen D?!!?"
"Fourteen D. And your armor dosen't apply."
"... I'm dead."
"Exactly. The rest of you hear and see nothing until the huge armor-piercing round turns your chummer's head into beef stroganof. And, uhh... Roll your own resistance tests, same type of round."

... Yeah. Real fun, that.

[eidolon]

[FanGirl]

Well, fixers are supposed to find jobs that are suited to the team, right? Why not send them on runs where they're told to do something flashy, but are actually meant to fail: the team is only sent to distract security so that another team can take advantage of the chaos, or a corp just wants to test the mettle of their elite security squad. Also, don't be afraid to have them suffer the consequences of their actions.

Oh, and make them read the C.L.U.E Files.

[ChuckRozool]

How old are you guys? highschool? If so i think it's great that you, as the GM, want a little more than massive firefights from your players. Our GM at that age was more than happy to let us lay waste to anything that moved and in return try to lay waste to us. College or beyond? Well I wouldn't know what to say to you without sounding like some pompous RPer who's all about the meta-game and street level Blah Blah Blah. I've matured as a player but I'm not a "meta-gamer", so...

If you're not cool with their attitude, maybe find new players? They don't sound like they're ready to "take the game seriously". Or you can suggest they read Blackjack's articles, that change my views on RPing not just Shadowrun but any game.

[Kanada Ten]

The real consequences won't be from KE - they'll just pick up a couple of stooges, unless a PC wanders into their "we've got a rocket launcher going cheap" sting.

What'll happen is that their contacts will dry up for a couple of months. Nobody returns their calls. If they ask a fixer for work, he'll say, "And when the insurance agents show up offering 10%, will you be giving me up? You want work? Keep your fucking head down for a month, and we'll talk. So ka?" They'll start to need cash and probably turn to theft. But then they need a fence, and anyone willing to deal with them (gangs and outsiders) will pay crap. A couple months paying lifestyle with theft will make them long for a good job.

Then you give them a babysitting job. But you'll have to let them pull out the guns to even it out, they play along and you give them some fodder. Have them sitting on a wageslave when the home corp shows up en masse. Missiles, APCs, long range snipers from a stealth helicopter. Make it a fight worth a LMG, armored humvee and a chase through the Rox.

Keep giving them jobs where they have to protect the asset and show what happens when the enemy uses brains and stealth over firepower and flash.

[toturi]

The problem is unless the GM is using the "Me GM, this my game, wat me sez goes" there is no game mechanic to punish the PCs if they go firing off their heavy artillery. And the thing to remember about people who sell heavy stuff is that oftimes they are undesirable themselves. "Don't be naive, Bob. What did you think I bought those LAWs for? Now, do we talk biz?" At best(or worst depending on your POV), I'd add a +6(outcome: disasterous to NPC) mod to the Etiquette TN and that is no big hurdle for a tricked out Social Adept.

Who is going to know that the PCs are the ones that blew X up or that they kill so-and-so? You as the GM knows, but do all the NPCs know as a result? Ask yourself this. Know this: If you close off their contacts, you'd force them to go into business for themselves just like low pay will inevitably do something more profitable with their time. Do you want to play Shadowrun? Or Sim Runners?

Firebombing safehouses as a warning might seem to be a good idea until you realise your PCs all have street lifestyle. Firebomb the dumpster? :eek: Ratting out a Johnson is a bad idea unless you can pull it off. If your PCs are good enough to convince other people that it wasn't them that ratted on the Johnson or somehow or another convince people that it was the Johnson that got sloppy, then it wouldn't reflect badly on them.

Remember it might seem that it is a bad idea to do X. But this is a game with game mechanics, with enough dice rolled, you can achieve enough successes for X to be a good idea. So what I am saying is that if the group is good enough, nothing (not even front page massacres) is a bad thing. I had a group shoot their way into a zero-zone, walk out through a SWAT army AND convince their contacts that "those guys" weren't them. It is ALL about the dice, TNs and no. of successes.

[Kagetenshi]

[Kanada Ten]

[eralston]

Shadowy examples help groups be more "shadowrunny" (which just sounds awful, BTW).

Good examples would be:
M:I 1
-Use of disguise to enter a building
-Use of planning to make a 'plan' (betchya they don't use those either)
-Use of classic building infiltration plot device: Air Ducts

The Italian Job
-PLAN! PLAN! PLAN!
-Use of misdirection (really good one for SR)
-Their are myriad SR-like things that go into their planned heists, too many to list really. It's not a very good movie as movies go, but it is on basic cable and worth your time if you don't mind commercials

Metal Gear Solid
-While terribly cheesy at part, MGS has used every plot device available in the stealth-espionage genre to help players get, get out, and get it on. If at least one person in your group isn't a raving insane MGS fan then maybe you guys should play D&D

Speaking of D&D, you really have to tain people out of using: show up to the dungeon, slay the monsters, loot the bodies as a model for shadowrun. SR is more like: snoop in the matrix, make a plan, pay off a guy to get building schematics, make a back-up plan, case the joint, exploit a hole in their security, get in, do the job, get out.

A good exercise for this might be forcing a run w/o guns (as that leaves most meatheads SOL)

[Kagetenshi]

[ShadowDragon8685]

Alternative, if you don't wanna piss on your player's thunder and steal their cheerios, you could just, you know, have extra-plus-sized air vents and air scrubbers, for the trollish population's air needs. :)

[Kagetenshi]

Yeah! And then you could have all the bullets incorporate special technology to throw people hit by them back a dozen feet!

~J

[ShadowDragon8685]

Kage, that is so 1980s.

This is 2006. When we want to throw people a dozen feet, we use pieces of electrically-heated-to-the-point-of-glowing-red rebar and super-strong crossbows. Not only do they have pinpoint accuracy (once you compensate for the fall-at-range), but they also stand a good chance of pinning your target into a wall or other object if it's barrier rating is lower than the damage score.

[Kanada Ten]

Small vents are good. They encourage shapechange spells. Plus, if the team mage doesn't have the spell, they can outsource it - and who needs a better excuse to turn the hacker into a real rat for a few hours. Maybe he'll get stuck passing through a ward inside. "Hey, Boss, there's another idiot stuck in the vent." "Damn it, they just pulled the last guy out becasue he was starting to smell."

[Monnock]

I just want to point out that I wasn't going to pull a "a sniper shoots you in the head and you die" on them (though as a funny side note, a GM did that to one of the players once, completely forgetting how infeasable it was to deploy a sniper at such short notice and shooting a guy who was mostly disabled just to finish him off, rather than the person who was holding a gun to the hostage's head who had full HP [D20 modern] and knew that he could take the bullet). First of all, that would be rather difficult to pull off, as it would require luring them into a location which is open enough to pull such a thing off, and on top of that it would require multiple snipers that work in unison to blow all their heads off at once... And on top of that, as tough as these guys are, they could survive the shot from a sniper rifle (we are playing under 4E for reference). Also, keep in mind this, they are using non-leathal force. Despite popular belief, traditional SWAT teams are supposed to incure as few deaths as possible, even if it is an armed criminal. With gel rounds to simply knock them out, I fail to see why they wouldn't use them. I'm not about to just gun them all down, what would be the point of that? I see this as a reasonable compromise. The players get arrested for their crime and they get offered an out which leads to other runs where they will hopefully play it more safe.

I see luring them into a simple trap just makes sense. I mean KE knows who their fixer is for goodness sake, and considering how from their dealings they seem to only care about the money, it just makes sense for them to do this. Am I wrong? Someone pointed out that a character can talk their way out of a situation if they are tricked out enough, but that's kinda hard when they are SINless, dealing with the cops, and there is crystal-clear evidence proving that it was them that did it (and that they are VERY armed and VERY dangerous to approach to chat with).

I try not to metagame anything (I say try because we are all human, we can make mistakes, I never do it intentially), but sometimes I feel that I may be blowing things out of proportions, like KE actually having a big incentive to bag these guys. Lonestar has been wanting to take the contract from KE for a long time now, and after this stunt, its a pretty big hit to KE's ego. Like the media usually does, this event is blown way out of proportions, which just adds to the situation.

Is this reaction unreasonable? I feel that it isn't, but I am fallible. I am new to the world and society of Shadowrun, so maybe running military grade firepower around in an armored hummer wouldn't draw very much backlash with the press/public or 'jeapordize' KEs position in Boston (though I feel this wouldn't happen, it doesn't stop STAR from trying or KE from sweating a little).

The PCs were careless, plain and simple. They sold themselves out when they sold out their Johnson. The Johnson told the cops who they were and how to contact them because he had nothing to lose by doing so and figured that he would likely have a pretty good chance of getting off the hook if he turned the runners in. The recording was done by one of the players, and it is obvious from the recordings perspective who it was. There is no metagaming here. The only thing that may be off about this situation is that the Corp looked for shadowrunners to get their own shipment as a sort of insurance (it's win/win for them: If the runners succeed, they keep the package and collect the insurance, if the runners fail then, hey - they are out 2.5k for hiring them to try and the package gets delivered - if there are other runners trying to get the package, they will act as an improvised escort at half the cost).

The Corp found out the information was out there when the players used an information broker (with loyalty 1) to get the paydata on when the shipment was heading out, which he - in turn - sold the information that it was leaked to the Corp for a hefty sum of money (of course leaving out that he was the one who leaked it). That's why the Corp had a Johnson out giving the mission.

Oh, I apologize for the terrible title as well, haha.

Though I would like to note that the idea that KE will just pick up some stooges to take the fall would also work, and I'm wondering if KE would just do that over doing any work even when it's staring them in the face. Like I said, I'm new to this setting, but I do know that corruption and backstabbing are quite common throughout, so the idea that KE would just blow this situation off wouldn't surprise me, which is part of the reason why I'm asking you guys.

Sorry again for the long post. I tend to think of the world as very dynamic; every action has a consequence. As a result, I tend to have a lot of random background 'noise' going on behind the scenes. You have to know the full picture otherwise you will say things like:

[hyzmarca]

[Monnock]

[James McMurray]

Definitely hit them with the hammer. If the hammer doesn't fall because they don't take the job (or whatever other reason). Keep the investigation up until media coverage forces you to grab some convenient scapegoats.

[TinkerGnome]

Last night, I caught the movie Layer Cake on Starz (On Demand rocks). If you haven't seen that movie, I highly recommend it. In any case, it put me in the mind of doublecrossing your Johnson.

There are all sorts of things you can do to teach your players a lesson (and many of those things are outnlined above), however, you have to ask yourself if you really want to.

One of the things that might help is playing a lower powered game than the standard. Make characters off 300 bp (SR4) or an with altered priority system (SR3, I think there is one in MJLBB) with strict availability and skill rating restrictions and then go from there. Start them on the street just trying to break into the shadowrunning biz and make the jobs small and their resources even smaller.

Alternatively, you could just do the classic SR thing and start geeking them when realistic opposition to their carnage tracks them down. Surely they left some tracks somewhere (like who put those armor plates on that humvee? I doubt any of them have a vehicle facility, so there's someone out there who knows... and may be getting nervous with the star snooping around).

Finally, the SR core books don't describe karma in the same terms as pretty much every module and the SR3 companion do. You get karma for doing things that teach you things, obviously, but you mainly get karma as a "universal reward" for doing the "right thing" when the option presents itself. Doing very bad things tends to not get you as much karma or gets you karma penalties in extreem cases. There is also notoriety to consider.

[Daddy's Litt...]

If they keep selling out their Johnson's who would hire them? The high paying jobs should start to dry up. Would you hire someone who is likely to double cross you?

[James McMurray]

Why would a fixer even consider you for a job after that? Their livelihood is on the line as well.

[Lagomorph]

Yeah, I would have to say that even if the KE is a fumbling giant and never catches the runners. The word would spread that they sold out their johnson. Their contacts should dissapear. No jobs, no friends. Who wants to be a friend of a guy who only cares about the bottom line? You can even make it blatently obvious when they call "Sorry, I don't deal with sell outs" "I'd help but I'm afraid you'd give me out to the competition"