More ruminations on how to GM Shadowrun "right" Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Yesterday I got a bit introspective when posting on these forums and thought a bit about the things that made me like GMing SR3 and not like GMing SR3. With the music from Bloodsport where Van Damme rides the bus and thinks about Chong Li in the background I thought about beefy Asian men on busses and finally came up with some revised 80s type guidelines for GMing.

These are just my thoughts about how to balance difficulty level and payoffs so that the PCs don't get too powerful but at the same time are able to maintain their chosen lifestyles and be challenged each week at the gaming table. I think a big mistake I made early on when I was GMing years ago was awarding karma according to the guidelines given in SR3, which tended to end up being ~10 karma per run if you followed the guidelines and gave points for things like "Right Place, Right Time" and "In Character", since these mini bonuses really added up. The problem is that this, combined with my too-low difficulty levels, lead to karma pool snowballing which ruined the game for me faster than anything.

I also decided to take cues from the Genesis and SNES Shadowrun games. I reasoned that the video games represented the image that FASA wanted to present to the world of their game. If I can convey some of the atmosphere and setting detail from these games I may be closer to finding "the real Shadowrun".

With the 80s to inspire me in the quest for the "real" Shadowrun, I sketched up the following guidelines where I've classified difficulty levels and mission types. Please let me know what you think, or if I've finally permanently lost it.
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Street Level
Theme Music: Beat It (Michael Jackson)
Types of Jobs: Delivering illegal packages of moderate-low value (like drugs or BTLs), escorting two-bit criminals through hostile neighborhoods (where legit bodyguards would be more expensive)
Types of Opposition: Normal metahumans with "average" stats and combat skills from 0-2. Light pistols abound. Hardly any cyberwear. Just like in real life a lot of str33t confrontations can be diffused because people usually want easy prey. Hardly any magic.
Payoff: 1 karma point, 100-200 nuyen per team member.
Notes: The point of these runs is to familiarize the players to the system and describe the atmosphere of the world. Since opponents are weak GMs can invest a lot of time and energy in flavor to flesh out the world in the imaginations of the players. The GM should describe big hair, Michael Jackson, leather jackets, and elves with permed mullets. Perhaps a disturbing amount of inspiration can be found by looking at archived Playboy magazines from the 1980s regarding big hair and big glasses and Barbie-like women of horror.

Another point is that since SR is supposed to be disutopian the majority of NPCs are bitter, grumpy, and impolite. It's the big city and most people are afraid or resentful of everyone. I remember my personal experience living in New York City as a child back in the 80s; my mom was afraid to walk outside on the street after around 7:00, the subways still had graffiti on them right out of The Warriors, the crime rate was high, and angry service-sector employees liked to glare at you and wait 20 seconds before doing what you asked them to do.

Think also of the SNES SR game where people are almost universally rude to your character. My favorite example of this was the "gay" bartender at one of the shadowrunner clubs who would say, "Nice aftershave! Very street level!".

The PCs should be able to get a job like this every other day or so so that they can theoretically maintain a Low lifestyle working full time at low risk.



Corporate Level
Theme Music: "Running With The Night" (Lionel Ritchie)
Types of Job: Stealing items from corporate offices, annhilating a small/medium neighborhood gang, annhilating a community of ghouls, assassinating or extracting a corporate officer.
Types of Opposition: Ranges from "average" stats and skill ~3 in large numbers to skill ~5 or 6 with a reasonable suite of cyberwear and a mage or two. Reasonably nasty security mechanisms should protect corporate offices so that carelessness will result in casualties. If the PCs do something indiscrete the GM should give them 5-10 minutes of in-character time before pelting them with ~20 Lone Star officers and 2 LS mages, and after that give them another 5 minutes before the SWAT team shows.
Payoff: 3 karma points, 500-1000 nuyen per team member. If the PCs squeeze in around 3 per month and fence a lot of loot they can maintain a respectable mid level lifestyle.
Notes: Thisis a basic mission which should tax new players but which good players should be able to perform flawlessly. The time crunch is introduced to make injuries actually matter in the next mission, rather than just amounting to nothing but a cash deduction. Security guards should be hostile and looking to bully anyone who looks (or smells) "street level". The GM will probably spend a little more time crunching numbers and rolling combat and less time describing the 80s hairdos which the players should by now assume.



Asian Level
Theme Music: "Japanese Boy" (Aneka)
Types of Job: Assassinating or extracting a VIP or one of a kind item, springing a high profile convict from a Lone Star convoy, annhiliating guerilla camps in the jungle, annihilating special forces teams, tangling with the yaks.
Types of Opposition: Plenty of initiated mages, rating 8 spirits, sammies with 0.1 essence, or ~30 "medium" opponents from the last difficulty level who are all hiding and ready to blow you away in a giant VC style ambush. Enemies may have vehicles, artillery, advanced riflemen, support weapons, and plenty of magic. Ninjas may begin to appear and stab you when your M16A1 jams like in American Ninja 1; being rushed by 50 melee physads at once is quite a challenge.
Payoff: 5-7 karma points, 10,000 nuyen per character. Only one of these jobs should be available per month but the runner who can succeed every time through meticulous planning and professionalism can afford the coveted High lifestyle.
Notes: In the 80s everything asian was magically better. Therefore, only really good players with hyper asian levels of meticulousness, fighting spirit, and magical powers can pull this off. Just look at Bloodsport. If Van Damme didn't have super magical asian blindfighting powers, he totally would have been pwned by Chong Li's beefy asian powder throwing ninja-fu.



Drop the Hammer
Theme Music: "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" (Cyndi Lauper)
Types of Job: Dying
Types of Opposition: See above. Every 10 minutes. Also, constant sniping when out in the open. Unlimited enemy air and magical support.
Payoff: Your war is finally over
Notes: Should the PCs do something so flagrant that a corporation has no choice but to make an example out of them they just keep getting pelted until its all over. There is a way out of this, though, and it is steeped in the wisdom of pretending to be asian. The Way of the Tiger ninja gamebooks included a "Ninja no Chigiri" which had a line to the effect of, "I will die many times, yet I shall live again." Perhaps if a PC is killed and his body falls into an inaccessible location he can Hand of God to survive and then work on changing his identities. Ninja creeds, as usual, offer rays of hopes in otherwise insurmountable situations.

[Sharaloth]

Not my type of game, and you jump from 10K per run to dead. The advancement would go at a snail's pace and high-maintenance runner types would be left fairly useless without enough money and karma to keep them going. If you're getting paid only 10K per person to assassinate a VIP, you're being horribly ripped off, like by a factor of 10.

Street Level: fine, looks okay, deserves a higher Karma reward variable.

Corporate level: standard-looking. Still too low a karma variable and the money should show more fluctuation (in the upward direction). Perhaps 1K-10K per run per runner, depending on the job.

Asian level: Too high level opposition, too low payoff. From what you're describing and the types of job listed, runner's aren't going to be going for these jobs, because they're too high risk with no reward. Up the Karma level considerably and the pay even more (20-200K depending on the risks of the mission), and you might be closer to reasonable.

drop the Hammer: Why even include this? Player's royally screw up, they die in-mission. This looks like a GM deliberately out for a TPK, and that's not cool.

[Wounded Ronin]

[James McMurray]

[emo samurai]

Plus, there's the whole issue of game balance. If near-impossible missions paid only about :nuyen: 10,000, then they'd never buy anything but guns; cyberware would be too damn expensive. It's :nuyen: 100,000 for a basic cyberarm; everything above that's just unattainable. It's actually kind of evil and petty to keep pay scales at that level.

[Backgammon]

I love you Wounded Ronin :love:

Your posts crack me up every time, and you get that Shadowrun = 80s

[hyzmarca]

[emo samurai]

I used the frame skip on decking jobs to do the same on an emulator.

[eralston]

A pretty good guide for threat/reward I've used before is asking the players to set out some sort of financial goals for their chars. Just a sophisticate name for: What do you want to buy? Usually it goes something like this:

mundanes:
AV rounds
Big Gun
Upgrade all ware to alpha
Significant Piece of Cyberware

magicians:
Materials
Expensive focus
Very expensive focus
Hunk of orichalcum size of head (AKA ludicrous focus)

Then just plot out how quickly you want them to attain it per level.

That's a bit of a top-down approach to payment so it might not work for everyone

[Glyph]

Rather than limit payouts, I would favor an "easy come, easy go" approach. Yeah, you get the big bucks - you are in demand, a highly skilled deniable asset who stands out from the expendable street trash by being discreet and getting the tough jobs done. With all of the risks involved, and the well-paying, safer legitimate work that most SR characters could be doing, being a professional shadowrunner should be lucrative. But you should also have to shell out a lot of that money on bribes, upgrading your toys, replacing those drones that got shot to hell, getting a new place after your old apartment gets firebombed, buying fresh fake IDs, etc.

If necessary, follow Blackjack's law of "having money without spending it". :)

[Wounded Ronin]

OK, it makes sense to boost the payments up. I guess the question is, "realistically", how much would a Johnson pay for a job? If a Johnson pays a five man team 200,000 nuyen apiece to do something, he'd be shelling out a million nuyen on a given mission. Do you think that's reasonable? Personally, I have a gut feeling that a Johnson wouldn't want to pay a million bucks to possibly accomplish a given objective, but I don't really have a basis for that, so maybe I'm mistaken.

The other issue I want to ask about is karma. I definitely made the karma rewards smaller than "cannon" because I feel like too much accumulated karma pool messes up the game. Ideally, I'd want the PCs to burn karma at roughly the same rate they accumulate it, since I feel like once a pool gets around ~10+ dice the character gets too powerful. Opinions on that?

[eralston]

Well, metahumans screw with the pool a lot. I generally play with an alternate hand of god rule:

"Any player can hand of god if they die a meaningful death and they have non-zero karma pool. This act resets karma pool to 0. This can be used whenever applicable [no limit on number of time]"

Under that rule, the biggest KP ever achieved was ~5

The big thrust on economics would be that the more you pay the players, the most dangerous they become so you go down a bit of a slippery slope because you will have to pay them more for them to up the ante on challenges (because the challenges will become inherently more difficult, requiring more incentative to undertake them)

[Wounded Ronin]

[eralston]

Well, if they get a grenade chucked down their throat and they are rendering unrecoverable, then I have never brought them back. The general case is, they get mortally wounded leaving a complex, the guards drive you away from them before the team can render help. Their fate is largely unknown.

Hand of God == always available ressurection does kill the game quite a bit, so you have to be harsh with that "meaningful" part.

Yeah, if you can keep profit margins constant while still making big payoffs, that will keep the team invested. Lord knows my friend who's GMing right now could stand to figure that out.

[James McMurray]

My group has never had a problem with multiple Hand of Gods. The removal of the one-time restriction in SR4 was one of my favorite changes. Who wants to make a new character every other session? Some people do, but my group doesn't have anyone like that currently.

[eidolon]

Meh, I've always been on the fence about them having even one HoG. I would never allow it as a constant "insta-rez" though, that much I'm sure of.

If I want to play a game in which dying is something you just roll your eyes over and go get raised, I bust out D&D. (Not a dig, I love both games.)

[James McMurray]

Hand of God, if done "right", is far from an instarez. It's more of a trials and tribulations thing then a get out of jail free.

[Aku]

personally, i never saw HoG as "insta rez" in that sense, sure it saved your hide, from the damage, but if you're buried, it dont matter much cuz you're still likely to die.

[James McMurray]

I would never put a player who just HoG'ed right back into an instant death situation, like taking the damage and then still being there in the firefight ready to take the same damage from the next sec gaurd's turn (or the same sec gaurd's second simple action). HoG should be a story altering event.

[hyzmarca]

Hand of God is related to the old "if you haven't seen a body then he isn't really dead" television and movie trope. One of the bad guys says "no one can survive that", thus ensuring that your character not only survives but eventually comes back to haunt them.

[James McMurray]

Nah, that's the easy way out. ;)

[eidolon]

I never said that I ran it as "ah, you're dead, better blow that karma and respawn back at home base".

The last HoG I had a player do, the character had done something really stupid in a high class restaurant. She killed the head of thier security and two other goons with her fingertip monofilament whip, and proceeded to run out across the main restaurant floor in her blood covered dress. She ran for the kitchen doors, but before she could fly through them, another security guard hit her with his taser for D stun. I informed the player that given what he had done, the character was going to go to court and receive the death penalty. (There was no way around it. Killing three people on camera with multiple witnesses, etc.) Since this was effectively character death, I allowed a HoG.

The result of the HoG? The taser trodes impacted the kitchen door as she ran through. Continue scene. Due to the ingenuity of the player, the character made it out. However, she also became severely indebted to her fixer after he helped her arrange a face/fingerprint/voice/eye/new identity.

It was great, and I liked the character, so HoG was a good thing in that instance.

Even given that, however, I still don't really care too much for its existence. The main thing that lets me leave it in the game is that it's restricted to one use. That, to me, is the balancing factor. Therefore, in my opinion, allowing it more than once is the equivelant of "insta-rezzing", because regardless of how "hard" on the player/character you are afterward, they still get another chance.

And like James said, I'd never bother giving the player a HoG if they were just going to die again. (As was implied by Aku's "HoG but you're buried" comment.) To me, that's just stupid.

[hyzmarca]

Remember the SNES shadowrun game? Armitage wakes in in the morgue with full amnesia and the attendants are peeing in their pants and locking temselves in the closet because they think he's a zombie.

I beleive that he did use HoG to get to that point.

[Kremlin KOA]

Kitsune == god?

[eidolon]

I've still never played the SNES version. I played the Sega version and didn't care much for it, but the SNES version usually goes too high on Ebay. (Read: I refuse to pay more than $10 for any SNES game. :))