Positive interaction between GM and players, Share your good experiences! Options

[Talia Invierno]

Well, over in the SR4 forum, we've just seen what is almost the worst end of the spectrum for GM-player interaction explode across at least three Dumpshock threads.

Let's have some positive stories to balance :)

I'll suggest two directions to start with: either a potential conflict between GM and player that both worked together to iron out quickly and without rancor; or even just a simple "isn't my group great to work with?"

[Critias]

www.shadowland.org

:D

[fistandantilus4....]

ouch

[Wounded Ronin]

Many, many years ago, when I was still able to play Shadowrun 3rd edition because I was in the US and had a good internet connection, I gamed with one particular group of people for at least 4 years. Most of the members of this group had many strong positive qualities to them.

The youngest member had started playing with us when he was in high school and continued as he went to college at UGA. Even though he was younger than everyone else it was always a real pleasure playing with him.

In the first place, I liked his personality. He was always sharp tounged and cynical about any non-game related topics. It was great to just chat with this guy on IRC and ridicule one thing or group of people after another. I loved his inappropriate and tasteless wit.

When I GMed and he played he often did things (not intentionally, I don't think) which made his characters die. They were pretty funny. For example, one of the first campaigns I ran was a horror style adventure. The shadowrunners were hired to discretely destroy a spirit that appeared to be murdering people in a large park. It turned out that the spirit was doing this because (in a cliche I should probably be ashamed of) the park was built over a cemetary which was supposed to have been moved but which wasn't in order to cut costs. The adventure was actually based on the NES Friday the 13th game in terms of how I ran it. I drew up a map of the park and asked the PCs to describe their patrols across the park. Next, I rolled randomly for the monster and the little girl it was using for its Hidden Life power. If a player met a monster combat occured. If not, the searching was uneventful. I actually had some fun with lone PCs having to flee from a little girl and things like that.

Anyway, eventually the PCs were battling the evil spirit near a lake. The evil spirit was in the lake and for some reason the guy I'm talking about wanted to have his PC swim up to the spirit underwater. I don't know whether he genuinely made a mistake or if it was some kind of suicidal act done under pressure in the absence of better ideas and borne of a desire to not look incompetent. At the end of that combat turn the spirit dumped all of its combat pool, which it had been reserving, into a huge melee attack against the PC. "Do you have the Underwater Combat skill?" The PC died massively.

I think the spirit got away after that and the remaining party was left with this savaged decapitated character's body. One player said his character was picking up the severed head, which was in a helmet, and was throwing it to another character. I said that the severed head fell out of the helmet and spilled on the ground and the helmet was the only thing the other player caught. Wow, what good times. You really can't get events like that in your game without some first-rate players.



As a player I was always very excited to play in this fellow's games. He was always working out variant scenarios to play using the SR rules. I shared his love of history so I was delighted when he ran games set in Victorian England. We got to be British troops in Shanghai during the era of treaty ports, for example. It was so much fun. Even though his scenarios tended to be pretty statsitically difficult and often we failed and/or died the challenge was always invigorating to me and as always I was enchanted by his sense of humor. Hell, I remember how in the aforementioned Shanghai scenario we the players fucked up so badly that we started the decline of the British Empire. That was his ending speech. It was glorious. Plus, my PC got to fire on civilians in desperation. Boston Massacre II: The Shadowrunning!

He even ran another game set in Victorian England where I got to play the role of the traitor within the party. Basically I was an evil cultist disguised as a priest of the Church of England. The scenario not only ended in a total party kill but it happened when, stuck with a Serious wound and one player left, I chose to cast Manaball on myself at maximum power and put all my dice into casting and none into resisting drain. I killed the last of the party but my cult leader had also been killed in the firefight so it was a true nihilistic ending.

It all ended a bit sadly, though. This guy and another player, after many years, suddenly left our group. I think they had gotten tired of playing with us and joined another group. Shortly after I left the US and stopped doing SR altogether and last I heard all groups I've mentioned in this post have disintegrated. This guy I like so much never responded to any of my emails, either, which is the nature of the internet but also actually does make me sad.

A lot of the people I consider my friends I've only met on the internet. I've met some people in the flesh who I knew first on the internet. It really does grieve me that this person I'm talking about is pretty much entirely gone from my life now.

[Wounded Ronin]

I want to say one more thing but the topic is completely different so I decided to make a new post.

I sure hope that this doesn't come out as disturbingly homoerotic or anything like that, but I really respect hyzmarca here on this forum. We'd been corresponding on the internet for years now. Every time he makes a post about SR it just seems so perfect to me, like something you'd want to add to your game right away. Things like sanity rules with examples about extraplanar tentacle monsters are so brilliant, wonderful, and not easily seen elsewhere in the SR or even the RPG world. As long as we're trying to say positive things in this thread I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't admit my deep admiration for one of my fellow posters here.

[Critias]

Suck up!

I kid, I kid. Alright. Story time! If you want to, skip to about the last three-four paragraphs, for a summary of how fucked up things got (and for why I liked these guys so much).

One of my best GM/player experiences involved a game I ran, where I made it clear from the get-go folks might get screwed over (moreso than even your average Shadowrun game). My group had seen a whole slew of games in a row where everything went off without a hitch, we all had a gazillion dice to roll at our specialties, our plans fell together just right, and we were rolling around on piles of corp scrip and doing horrible things to our girlfriends with credsticks every single night. It was raining alphaware, we could do no wrong, and our poop smelled like strawberries.

So I set out to make a game that'd play out a little less pleasantly for the group. I sent out the call and OOC'ly asked for people who were down on their luck, or new enough to the business, to take a potentially distasteful job (running a bunch of Tir civilians out of their refugee hideaway in Tarislar, or just killing them outright). I ended up with a hitman, a combat biker wannabe, an adept, a half-assed mage (who, IIRC, Centered by reciting Playboy Playmate bio facts), and a worthless rigger. I say worthless, because I specifically asked for combat-oriented characters (it was going to be a straightforward job, without any Matrix running required, so the Johnson was after straightforward Shadowrunners). NoS was...not a combat oriented character. I think he had a Pistols of 2 as his sole combat skill. Maybe a 3. He mostly just had a car skill, and lots of electronics/mechanic stuff. I asked that player if he had another guy he wanted to toss in, but he insisted on using his worthless Rigger. So, okay. No problem to ME, I'm the GM!

So, off the intrepid band goes. They're going to go roust some helpless refugees from Tir Tairngire (who'd smuggled themselves out with Rinelle help), and get paid good money for it, right?

Only most of the refugees, thanks to the Tir's mandatory military service, actually knew what they were doing, and the Rinelle terrorists that had gotten them into the city were still hanging around keeping an eye on them, and the Princes of the Blood had been contracted for extra security and had a half dozen guys on scene. It was nothing awesome -- guys with 4s-5s in combat skills, and a few assault rifles or machine pistols -- but there were a lot of them, and they were firing from high ground and cover down at a bunch of 'runners standing in the middle of an empty street.

To quote Boondock Saints, "There was a firefight!"

The Adept gets smacked clean to a Deadly wound in one burst of submachinegun fire, and we roll, roll, roll -- a lost leg to go with her lost Magic point! The worthless Rigger is up to a Mod or Ser or so. The would-be Combat Biker ork? Well, she gives herself her (IC, with dice rolls) first ever dose of Kamikaze to bulk up... and prompty rolls just what's needed to become a hopeless addict.

By the time they've got all the visible targets dead and are working their way to the door of the run-down housing project, there's a riot brewing outside. Why? Because not one of these motherfuckers is an Elf, that's why. And they're butchering Homo Sapien Nobilis wholesale in the heart of Tarislar, flashing fully automatic weapons, combat spells, and one dikoted claymore.

The too-cool assassin guy? He has a habit of his characters having crap for Lifestyle, but a jillion nuyen in cool action-hero toys that he keeps in the trunks of his really expensive Lonestar-modified (then repainted) Americars. This particular Americar was left in the street (and used for cover versus assault rifles), and by the time the band of 'runners has the house mostly cleared (two last Invisible elves were left, one with an LMG)...the car's belly-up out on the street, with the good citizens of this particular elven ghetto gleefully arming themselves after popping open with crowbars every hatch they can find. Some are making molotovs with the gas in the now-ruptured fuel tank.

That assassin is also the one who finds the half dozen crying elf-children that had hidden in a storage closet when their folks ran to the windows to try and repel the invaders. He shot 'em all to death, so I didn't feel bad at all for taking away his character's every earthly posession.

I -- being a kind GM -- had left them a way out of this mess, though. I'd given pathetic fuck of a Rigger a chance to shine. The van the smugglers had brought this latest batch of refugees north in was sitting out back, and all the rioutous elves were out front! The worthless Rigger could hotwire it, and drive them off to safety!

After being nudged to do so, he goes ahead and the group piles in (with the Kamikaze-dosed Ork carrying Hopalong the Adept), and off they go. Back to the Meet. Back to the Johnson, who screwed them and owes them money.

...who promptly kicks the shit out of half of them when they push the point. Unarmed. The pair of stealth-sniper drones that had been following the group's zany misadventures let loose with gel rounds and take out the mage. The last guy -- Pathetic Rigger Guy -- ends up trying to engage Mr. Johnson in melee combat, and failing at it so badly (while Mr. Johnson succeeded so well) that he gets an eye punched out.

Those in need are stabilized. Then each of them was dosed with Laes, stripped of weapons and electronics, and left to wake up in a Bump-and-Snooze motel room the next morning.

While all that was going on, I made visible to them a folder of short fiction I'd been working on during the adventure. It showed the goings-on from the point of view of everyone involved but them -- it explained why there were combat-ready soldiers there (not pitiful refugees), showed all the behind the scenes stuff Johnson was doing, even explained that the snazzy machine pistols the Princes of the Blood were toting were their payment for the security work (which is why most of them sucked with them). It was the "why" behind all the "what?!" they'd gone through.

Every one of them lost their stuff. Their combat bike, their tricked out sports car, their security-boosted Americar full of all their guns and toys. The Adept lost a leg and a Magic point. The Rigger lost an eye. And Mr. Johnson turned out to have been a long-running Street Sam of mine, former Tir, who'd been tasked by his Tairngire bosses to get the job done (who just couldn't bring himself to kill a bunch of kids and refugees, had arranged the whole thing to get out of having to do it himself, but couldn't quite bring himself to murder his pawns for doing a job he told them to do). I'd done it not only to show some Shadowrunners getting screwed, but also to advance our shared timeline to get in some mention of the troubles in Tir Tairngire (and to show, off-panel, that my character was involved with them).

The important thing is -- they all loved it. Most of those characters have been back in games that I've run, specifically because I've run them. They all lost all their stuff, some lost Magic, some lost body parts, they were given well-above-average karma for their troubles but their characters didn't even know what had happened... and the whole crew of them were great sports about the whole thing.

Good times were had by all.

[fistandantilus4....]

[fistandantilus4....]

was writing mine up when Crit posted his. Can't help but notice that most of our treasures stories have a shared theme. Everyone is losing/failing/dying.

[Sphynx]

I have the coolest group in the world. And the reason can be summed up in a single word. Excitement.

Like, when I brought the new Magic BP system to them, they were all excited and all made (or modified) characters to use it. We all work as a group, never a backstabber in the team, and the GM always asks what direction we want to see the story go after a bit of a run in a certain path.

I don't have any particular story to tell, just saying that the bad groups aren't all that there is. :P

[Trigger]

It all started with a group of the most wacked individuals I have ever met and it all went downhill from there.

This was a group I had been playing with for a long time, hell I had been living in the loft above the old gamestore that they were renting to play there games in 6 of 7 nights a week. As I said, there was every sort of game there almost every night a week, but it was the weekly Shadowrun game that always kept me the excited about playing.

So, for one session our GM brought us all together, a group of some the most diverse, slightly sociopathic, and might I add almost all awakened runners our humble table has ever seen. First there was my favorite, Whiskey Jack, a big hunking adept Minotaur with a penchnce for dikoted weapon focus combat axes and hand grenades...as well as a rumor about also being hung like a bull. Then there was the hermetic mage whose name slips my mind, but he was almost always wearing a pink bathrobe and a bulletproof vest...he too thought himself a real ladies man. There was the deaf, and extremely sociopathic, ork sniper, who was also a bit off his rocker and once walked through the middle of a Class A zone carrying a sniper rifle in broad daylight, only to grumble when Lone Star kept the gun when he got out on bail from who knows where. There was also Ace, the also slightly insane Monkey Shaman, who modeled himself highly on the old trids of a one Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Needless to say, he drove everyone else nuts. And last but not least was my very own character, Xander, a played to the extremes, sword wielding and highly homosexual elf adept. In a group of testerone pumping runners, he may have been the least liked, but at least he carried his own weight.

So, that was our group, the very bottom of the barrel in runner material, but with the very highest of dreams for financial success. We took on the craziest and most hair-brained runs because they were the only ones we could get, and we excelled at every single one of them. So bigger and more hair-brained schemes kept coming our way. We travelled from good old Seattle across country to Boston to overthrow the heads a small time merc group that pissed off our Johnson. We ambushed them and then proceeded to get paid and also take their pristine Class A Zone mansion and make it our own base of operations. We hunted Great Spirits in the Carribean, pirates in the Atlantic, blood mages in Canada (yes Canada, it may be cold, but blood is still warm), and everything else up until our very last run when we all died horrible.

It was a simple smash and grab on a deepground Ares Research Facility, including an UltraViolet matrix system and all, but we made it in, with I think a Mod wound being the highest on any of us. Our luck was soaring and we were flying high. That was until we found what they were researching... high grade advanced deltaware and particle beam weaponry that practically cut through most of our own mil-spec armor. And who were the experimenting on? Why their own guards of course. Needless to say after the decapitation of Ace, we cut and run, only to hunted one by one by said super sammies with sustained Improved Invisibility spells on themselves by mages tracking us in a chopper in the middle of the night in the forest around their base. All I know is that my character was never confirmed dead, as DocWagon never showed a loss of brain activity when one of my next of kin investigated a couple of weeks after said incident, so I am still waiting for my GM to spring my own PC back on me one day.....oh, how I still live in fear.

Anyways, that is still one of my most memorable games I have ever played in, and it like the ones above this, also ended bloodily and in a great bang. Total Party Kills make for the best memories I guess.

[Stumps]

My GM of old is the icon of which I preach the word of gaming.
The stories of his lessons are heard by any that I introduce.

My old group, and the only group I've every had, was the same as my beer mates, so there wasn't anything foul in it at all.
Funny, yes; dumb at times, yes; insult prone, yes; but negative? Never.

In fact, he's registered on here, though he doesn't post that often here though: EVLTIM

[Wounded Ronin]

[Talia Invierno]

Maybe it lies in the distinction between the GM who enjoys setting up a challenging scenario for players and pushes the characters further than they knew they could be pushed -- and the GM who is perceived to be "against" the players.

[fistandantilus4....]

I honestly think that this is one of the reasons why Shadowrun and , my personal favorite setting Darksun, have been so popular and enduring. They're challenging. There's no guarantees of success. It's rare that you can get by on just dice rolls. So that at the end of the day(run), you actually feel like you've acomplished something, and beaten the odds.

[Angelone]

You two could be onto something there. Most of the gaming memories my groups bring up are our, well clusterfucks.

Darksun is for the weak, Ravenloft ftw!

[fistandantilus4....]

Ravenloft is for the Vampire kids. ;)

:P

nah, Ravenloft has some cool stuff. I loved the dream lords, or whatever they were called. And of course Lord Soth. But no one beats Borys. Rikus was a fluke.

Then of course there is Dregoth. He's dead and the other sorcerer kings still fear him. So many Darksun stories from our groups.

[pbangarth]

For years I ran two Shadowrun groups through various Virtual Seattle modules. The one group was made up of players who had been in SR from the beginning, and styled themselves as professionals (not their characters... themselves). The other group was a bunch of teenagers, my daughter and her friends. They were, among other things, fans of Big Eyes, Small Mouth and played that regularly as well.

Consistently the games with the 'professionals' were boring for me as GM, as the players came up with the same old plan after hours of futzing around, and I did what I could to not TPK them and to restrain the munchkinning.

Consistently the games with the kids were light-speed brainstorms of ideas that were mostly insane, after which they would settle on one that worked in ways I could never have dreamed of. I was constantly on my toes, wondering "Oh my God, what do I do now?" I had so much fun with those kids. I miss them dearly.

[eidolon]

To echo Sphynx, no particular story, just that I have had a few really, really good groups with some awesome players. Some that came up through my learning to GM SR, some that GM'd for me. Some of my most memorable gaming has been in groups playing predominately SR.

I think it's great that WR is pointing our favorite fellow posters, because he's one of mine. I have yet to read a better take on meshing SR with the 80s. I may not even really run my game to that end, but IMO his take on the game is just about as perfect as it gets. :D

And yeah, we have some awesome SR minds around here. I don't always think to mention that I'm doing so, but I can't count the number of great ideas and characters and NPCs that DSers have inspired or that I have flat out yoinked over the last few years.

[Critias]

There's nothing cooler as a GM, to me, than when the players get into a big fight, start to get nervous, say "holy poop we're all gonna die" and mean it... and then still pull a win. That sigh of relief afterwards, the greedy look in their eyes when they realize how much karma/nuyen/gold/xp that fight was worth, and the feeling of badassery that comes from beating long odds? It's awesome.

It's certainly possible to get that same feeling in a D&D game (I've recently had a friend bring his hundreds of painted Warhammer fantasy miniaturse along for our D&D sessions, and the look on their faces as I begin to put down the green mob around their little pewter heroes is always great) -- but I think that feeling of desperation is easier to get in Shadowrun because the game can be so much more lethal. It also works better because, unlike many game systems, Shadowrun has karma/edge/combat pool (depending on edition) that all make "skin of your teeth" a lot more possible.

Being able to weight a die roll from time to time is perfect for those last ditch "this had better work" moments right out of Star Wars or something.

[fistandantilus4....]

[Critias]

Aww. Thanks Fisty. Sure, I'll be your Valentine.

[fistandantilus4....]

Sweet. I like those little heart candies, and those mints they put on tables at Easter time especially!

[treehugger]

I'll add a few of my very good experiences.
First i must say i have a group mixed with "very" experienced players (15 years of rpg and larps) and total new commers. Also half the group is usualy female (the players not the characters :P )

As a GM my goal is to have a good time with friends, and in my experience i always try to give what the players wants. Not what they ask for ...

I ran a 7thsea campaign for about 4 years, we where all adicted. I realised one day that i had achieved something when one of the players, able to transform into animals, was more afraid that her character would grow excessive body hair than loosing some magical skills.
I realised how attached to their characters my players where.

On an L5R campaign (players play samourai characters), after 5 real years of game play (for maybe 150 game sessions) the last session, concluding the whole epic campaign (they didnt knew it would be the last game whatever they choose), my players choosed the "good path" (good in the sense of following their duty, and staying true to their characters motives) :
The legendary archer was corrupted and killed the invincible swordmaster that never lost a fight in 5 years, the archer was killed by the warlord after realising he was corrupted, the warlord comited suicide because he killed his archer friend he had sworn to protect, and the ninja made the final ritual to "save the world" but corrupted himself doing it, and became a monk to cleanse himself during his remaining days.
I had NO idea how they would end, but they all played their character to their limits, and gave themselves (and myself too) the greatest end i saw in an RPG campaign.

Once trust exists between players and GM they can achieve great games.
In my opinion, to have a good gaming group, us, as GMs need to know each players : their natural flaws and qualities, their beliefs, and more importantly their motivations.
I never hesitate to "give" in a game, power, information etc ...
But each time a player earns something he will have to pay the price, so that he knows perfectly the value of what he just aquired.
I love it when my players struggle to learn critical informations, background knowledge, and finaly tell me "I wish i didnt knew !".
Some times they act foolishly and refuse to take their responsability for their actions, but i never let them go away with it : sooner or later they know they'll have to pay.

For exemple, i had one character loyal to a secret society. He learned secrets about another one, but he was told that if he revealed his knowledge, they would know and act accordingly.
He choosed to discard the threat and revealed what he know to his secret society.
5 game sessions later, those he revealed his knowledge to where dead, and one of the characters from the group had to sacrifice himself in order to protect the rest of the group.
The player was horrified and ashamed : he would have prefered that his character would die, but he was told that he had to live with his shame, and that he was more usefull alive than dead.

Yes you can have players play suicidal characters ^^ (but not just some mad guy running and killing everyone)

One thing i must mention about all these exemples : never "cheat". When you want your players do something, or if you attempt to kill them, be fair, what the NPC use the player should or could be able to use too.

Anyway, as a GM i enjoy my "duties" and i dont complain a lot about my players. I'm sorry if the experiences i share arent SR4 related, since i just started GMing it.

[fistandantilus4....]

[Kagetenshi]

The important thing is not to let friendship get in the way of the game. You may lose a few friends, but as long as the game is fully realized, it's all good.

~J