Longterm Campaign Rules, An alternative game structure Options

[20thCenturyFox]

I’ve recently started to run a new SR campaign that’s purposely made differently in structure – I’m really sick of ‘rail-road’ adventures - this one's designed for 'long play'. Usually I spend days trying to link adventures together to form some cinematic story arc, but I found with SR that there were so many different ideas I’d just get lost because I wanted to use them all. So I decided to just not bother linking them. I’d just take a scenario, usually based off of some idea I’d find in the sourcebooks, and make a simple run out of it. Nothing too complex; just a simple set up and some quick stats. Soon I found that I could write a Run in an hour, and that I had close to thirty written scenarios.

I decided that I’d get the team members to run their own team and look after themselves instead of doing all the work myself. I gave them an actual calendar sheet for 2061 and told them that it was the 1st of January. Everything was up to them, and the availability, repair, healing and training times rules suddenly became very important. One of the players was in charge of marking off time on the calendar as we went.

For each scenario I created a ‘job slip’ that outlined the mission type, payment and suggested skills. I cut them up and shuffled them, and whenever the team received work from ‘ShadowNet Broker Services’ I let one of them choose one at random. The team could study the job slip and decide if they had the necessary skills to take on the work. They had set times in each job slip in which to decide if they would accept, and set times to complete the mission once accepted. They’d receive a random amount of jobs per month, but usually only a couple. The randomness of the missions made for some very interesting coincidences and outcomes!

For each of the characters in the team I also wrote a quick background scenarios to slip in at any time – each of them got to write their own background so that was easy enough to do. I began to weave these in around the other ‘proper’ jobs.

Lastly, I created a system of ‘reputation areas’ (like assassination, rigging, magic etc) in which they could earn points in missions. These acted like complementary dice when negotiating deals and mission that related to that reputation area. I also created a ‘faction’ system, whereby you could get positive or negative faction with organizations (such as corps, gangs and syndicates) – these could effect the way the faction treated the group, and in some cases a randomly selected job by that faction might be cancelled because of the group’s standing with them. I made a campaign sheet that listed the character’s team, team karma, faction and rep areas. Although this is quite a ‘gamey’ thing to do, it focused the team and defined it nicely. The shadow run team has became something of importance – the players needed each other to survive and get the jobs done to earn the cash and could easily see how their rep in areas was going (they could earn negative reputation by stuffing up runs), and who their enemies were.

This method has worked really well with my group. We’ve been playing for a few months and the players really enjoy the freedom the structure allows them to develop their characters – there’s plenty of downtime between runs, however the players are always finding creative ways to fill it, including investigating their own personal scenarios. If there was nothing to do, they’d ‘fast forward’ a day or so. Soon there was wealth of story ideas and characters and locations for the game to almost perpetuate itself without having to do anything.

Just thought I’d mention it as an interesting change from the whole ‘rail-road’ adventure style. I’d like to put all of my notes together online, including my reputation area and faction rules – maybe one day!

I’m new here so be nice :)

[Kurb]

Sounds very interesting...

[Ed_209a]

I'll second that.

Any chance you could post more detail?

[Shadow]

I wish I had a tabletop group to try this out on, it sounds great. Post some more if you can, 20th.

[Req]

Yeah, my group could probably benefit as well. Post away.

[spotlite]

I run a very similar campaign with one of my groups, though not in anything like the detail you do. they have a calendar, and I have a calendar. So when a contact for example says they'll get back to the runner in a week, it may well be slightly longer, or shorter, but the team write the date suggested IC in their calendar, and I write the actual date and any consequences (like someone finding out the team just bought a barret 50 cal sniper rifle) in mine. We also run it as a smuggler campaign, which started with the mafia bringing the team together, offering them the team vehicle (a moderate range/capability T-bird built from R3 rules) on credit (with associated loan) and their first job. From that I let the team take it.

Along the way with the job they were given they roleplayed themselves into a few contacts, and bought, found or stole some swag to take with them and sell for a profit. The first run generated other runs, which generated enemies, and expanded contact web etc etc etc...

But they simply don't do 'break into corp X' jobs - unless they decide they need to to accomplish their own goals. Result - they manage their own team and I simply provide the world in which the team exists, reacting and responding accordingly. It makes for a much longer style of play: we've been going for nearly three years now, we've done just over three months of game time. at 2.5hrs per week, about 45 weeks a year on average, that's roughly a day or game time every two sessions. if we ran longer sessions we'd be much further on. With the other team, which has the same length game session, and which has been going for 18 months, we've done over a year. they do a standard 'meet the johnson do the job spend the cred learn the skills meet the johnson' campaign with downtime as needed for medical care, training, personal interests.

Both work really well, but the campaign style one is the one I by far enjoy the most, and its been running twice as long. I'd be very interested in hearing more about how you manage your factions and that kind of thing, because working that way hasn't really occured to me. I do have quite an organised filing system on my PC with literally hundreds of pages of notes on what's happened where, with whom, what the bad guys are up to in response to the players, etc etc, but its not really a 'system' like you describe.

Post more!

[Kagetenshi]

[Thanos007]

Good lord man! What are you waiting for post this info so we can check it out! Love the idea of mission sheets.

Thanos

[Jpwoo]

This is a fun way to play if you have the dedicated group to help it along. When I ran a bug city arc with the players trapped behind the well the calendar became a great tool, and it definitely helps to drive home the healing times of a wound. For at least a year after that arc my regulars were picking up symbiotes just in case something like that happened again.

The faction system is a useful tool for the GM, don't forget that faction can sprawl from city to city if they are well enough liked or hated. Within a corp faction doesn't vary much by geography as I imagine the Johnsons do a good job of sharing information about assets and liabilities.

This sounds like a lot of fun.

Unfortunately in our group, which tends to be very loose and features people coming and going we use Shadowrun as a good game to fall back on with people who may only play once or twice, or when someone critical is missing from another game. SR's ability to have small concise sessions and the built in structure for introducing new people make it ideal for this. So the possibility of a long term campaign like this is low for me.

[snowRaven]

20thCenturyFox... that's sounds like a damn near excellent idea!

I'd love to hear more about how you work this - I am soon starting a new campaign with my players, and this sounds like a perfect thing to introduce. :elims:

[20thCenturyFox]

[danbot37]

Isn't it a little ironic that 20thcenturyfox and spotlite use similar ideas? lol

[BitBasher]

My game world is freeform in much the same way, but I have never had to assign rep for specific actions, because to 99% of the SR community if they all know you did "x" job and "y" job that means you screwed something up big, fat, and hardcore. Noone should ever hear about how or when a job was done, the johnson himself shouldn't know how you did it, only that you did. Johnsons should only know one number IMHO, and that's your job complete %.

[20thCenturyFox]

[Abstruse]

Not necessarily. You do a good job, your fixer mentions it to his drinking buddy, his drinking buddy mentions it to the waitress, the waitress mentions it to a ganger, the ganger mentions it to his gang, the various gang members mention it to everyone else...of course details are obscured in this sort of thing, so if it was a good run, you're a god. If it's a bad run, you're the most bone-headed wannabe in the plex. The only time your runs will stay off the buzz on the streets is if you're high up in the heirarchy. If you're getting your jobs straight from the source, so it 100% totally clean, and don't tell a soul. Otherwise, people are going to know. They'll hear about what happened -- shootout at the Aztechnology pyramid, high-speed chase through Tacoma, etc. -- then start asking questions when they need something to talk about at the bar or whatever.

Guy 1: You hear about that helicopter getting shot down by the Archology?
Guy 2: Yeah, I heard someone was doing an extraction.
Guy 1: Damn, I wonder who it was...
Guy 3: I heard it was and elf samurai, some infultration decker with orange hair, and a troll Wolf shaman.
Guy 4: Hey, that sounds like Marky's crew...wonder if they did it...
Guy 2: Wouldn't put it past them.
Guy 1: Marky did hit me up for a surface-to-air missile last week.
Guy 2: That must've been one sweet run if they're still breathing.

The Abstruse One

[BitBasher]

[ONLY MY OPINION]
Abstrusa, I feel that would make him a horrible (end expendable) Johnson. The ONLY reason that SR's even exist is that they are deniable assets and cannot be traced, a Johnson spilling the beans like that to anyone paints a trail which is the exact thing that they don't want done.

Example by your logic: Now the waitress knows that a johnson that looks like this hired a team that looks like that to do something. Original corp that got hit has feelers in the SR community and gets wind of this and the corp has its own team(s) beat a path of pain backwards up the food tree until they get the johnson then beat information out of him to get their good back/minimize damage. This is like the Johnson comitting suicide.

If my PC's heard a johnson do that they would likely never work with him again, EVER. They would also probably try to get other SR's not to work with him until the johnson was blacklisted by most of the competent runners, but probably not to that degree of success.
[/ONLY MY OPINION]

[phelious fogg]

I dont think Guy 1 or Guy 2 are Johnsons or fixers, just people in the shadow community.

In real life there are plenty of places where you say.. yeah that sure sounds like so and so...

[BitBasher]

My little dissertation was based off Abstruse's line of:

[phelious fogg]

Oh didnt see that, yeah a fixer should keep his mouth shut. Howerver two people talking over something that was just on the news... then thinking it might have been your team, that happens

[Kagetenshi]

But then your rep doesn't depend on what you've actually done, just what people think you've done. If a true pro has a certain MO, and then you make a run copying that MO but "slip up" just enough so that the streets get wind of it, you've got a potential instant rep for all the pro's work.
I don't think people are going to base anything off of that anywhere outside the bar.

~J

[spotlite]

[Talia Invierno]

Very nice, 20thCenturyFox (and spotlite) - and since I'm the antithesis of number-crunching, I always appreciate systems from which I can borrow a bit of structure ... not least since our own games tend to walk a fine balance point between the completely player-driven - per your initial implication - and a GM-generated greater storyline flexible and responsive to the PCs' actions.

We did have a reputation system under d20 (ducks the storm of thrown dice), but I'd not yet seen a viable and solid parallel structure for SR. I do agree that the effect of reputation will always exist, and very much affect the team's future chances of landing specific types of jobs ... but it might not be tied to the runners' primary identities. Someone will always know that a job was done, and who it was done by. Only the most innocuous of jobs will have been carried off such that no one other than the (usually single person) target will know there has even been a job, so add in there observers and those directly or collaterally affected: many of whom will be informant-contacts for other runners, or other fixers, or other Johnsons.

Reputation is easy. It's completely isolating it to the persona (and SIN) of your choice - and away from other identities - that's hard.