Thinking about a setting..., ...and the characters the play in it Options

[CrystalBlue]

Since I first got into Shadowrun as a setting, I've loved pretty much every bit of it. However, I've always thought of it, and the players, as kind of hopeless. And it's true. Though I won't get into my views of the world and how rundown it looks and feels, I would like some suggestions on how to keep the feel of Shadowrun but make it more...acceptable to players.

The reason I ask this is...most of my pool of players that I could get to play SR are into the shinning knight, happy endings type games. That, or Vampire LARP. and I'm not going to get into why I refuse to ask those people. *shivers* Suffice it to say, I need to make due with the players I have.

Is there any suggestions on how I should tailor my campaign to suit their needs/wants? I want to keep them as shadowrunners, but I don't want to give them a gloom or doom ultimatum of their lives.

[Gelare]

I think we're in a similar boat. Me and my friends did the whole knight in shining armor bit before switching to Shadowrun. One thing to note is the emphasis in Shadowrun on letting the GM do pretty much whatever the hell he wants to the game and setting to make it more fun for the players.

So, some suggestions, then. Find some runs that have the players doing "heroic" things. The first two runs my group did were Ping Time and Born to Die, found on the website of a fellow on these forums by the name of Aaron, at http://pavao.org/shadowrun/adventures. Both of these involve rescuing people, and assuming the players don't accidentally shoot their objectives in the head, they should have happy endings. The point is, there are plenty of heroic things shadowrunners can get paid for. And you can use this type of adventure as a way to sort of ease the players into the higher gloominess factor of the setting.

And watch out for those vampire larpers. ;)

[eidolon]

There's plenty of room in SR for more "heroic" runs, deeds, runners, etc. It's all about the type of job you give them.

I suggest going through character creation with them, and during that get a feel for what they want their characters to be/do. A lot of times, if you players are looking for a more "good guy" approach, it will show in the characters and their back stories. Things like "used to help protect his neighborhood" and "wants to clean up his old hometown" and so forth.

Then, just de-emphasize the less happy aspects of the game (for example, leave our bunraku parlors unless they're rescuing a worker or something) and emphasize the "doing good in the world" aspects and you should be fine.

[kigmatzomat]

Go for some of the older adventures. They aren't as well written but they have more options to be the good guy. Queen Euphoria and Universal Brotherhood are good because the baddies are so bad. Dream Chipper's a bit darker b/c it involves some harder choices but the PCs are still basically working to stop a psycho. Bottled Demon will let the party be on the side of good but there's some walking through drek.

Harlequin 1 requires too many morally ambiguous events to be a good match for the paladin types, without a lot of fudging. Not sure about "Harley's back." I vaguely remember DNA/DOA but I was playing a mentally deficient physad and had way too much fun roleplaying (which ironically the spell checker doesn't recognize as a word) so beyond making bunnies & squirrels out of plastique and punching through walls I don't remember much of the plot.

[deek]

While I wouldn't say my campaign is heroic, I don't through the standard downtrodden feel of SR onto my players. Yeah, the megacorps are evil, the law is out to get them and for most all of their runs, they are criminals and would be sent to jail for life, but...

Most of the people they kill are in self-defense or are pretty much malcontents anyways. The group is pretty loyal and honest to each other and their main contacts. I haven't given them any wetwork.

They pretty much play as mercenaries...they will take a job if the nuyen is right. I haven't really double-crossed them, although they have made plenty of enemies based on the objectives of their missions...honestly, the campaign feels like a futuristic version of the A-Team!

Granted, their missions haven't been to save or rescue anyone, although they did once rescue a contact that was kidnapped...but that was their own choice, not anything they were hired to do.

I really think you can keep the grit and dystopia of the SR world, but have the players be neutral to good, without having to be "do gooders". Like I said, with my campaign, the players have no problem killing and stealing during a mission, but the focus is more, getting the job done, then anything else.

[Kyoto Kid]

[mfb]

basically, you make the good guys good and the bad guys bad, and you make it easy to tell the difference between one and the other. figure out the type of game you'd run in any other setting, and run that same type of game.

[Moon-Hawk]

Color-coded hats might help.

[Cabral]

[MaxHunter]

...or they could all be something different to the classic mercenary type shadowrunners, like: docwagon workers, journalists, antiterrorist special police (GitS), ecoactivists, members of a freedom fighting group in an oppressed land (I suggest England), etc, etc.

Good luck!

Cheers

Max

[swirler]

SR doesnt have to be completely bleak. I mean I know it's supposed to be cyberpunk, but part of it is fantasy. You don't have quite as much entropy as in Bladerunner. You have some people trying to heal the earth. There has to be a little hope somewhere or else most people just give up. Okay alot do, but that's not my point ;)

here's a small series I ran back in SR2. I had a Johnson contact them and have the guy show up in a red tailored suit, white beard. Think "Boardroom Santa". He hires the team to rescue some missing children. They have been grabbed by organ leggers and are being kept for parts. Or something as sinister. place it as a hidden section in a warehouse. I had mine as a locked down upper floors in a a warehouse. I also made it obvious that this was a hidden project and not everyone connected with the location was aware of it so it's not like they should feel the need to "smear everyone". That of course doesnt stop some players with bloodlust, but maybe it might some. Having the Johnson offer up narcojects might help some. Of course he'd bring "toys"

rooftop helicopter access is probably a must for escaping. Unless you want to drag drugged children througha firefight
heh

okay so they scape and take them to the safehouse he has set up. He waves goodbye blah blah blah

now if you want to twist things up, have them discover (far too late, maybe days later) that he is actually a corp child wrangler for a group that specializes in pedophiles. If you have some particularly hard arse characters and that's not enough to make them work on going after the kids again, then remind them they can most likely now be connected with it. They will probably start seeing the percentage in fixing that situation.

yes I'm messed up

:twirl:

[Kyoto Kid]

...not a bad little scenario. Mind if I borrow on that for my next holiday run?

[swirler]

please do
have fun
heh
yeah it'd be great for the holidays

[raggedhalo]

The intro to Harlequin's Back makes it explicitly about being heroic. And I kinda think that Bug City works as a setting for (low-level) heroism because it forces you to put the group before just yourself.

[kigmatzomat]

[Kyoto Kid]

...sweet. In the Short One's (#21 woohoo finally legal) early days she was a huge fan of Neil the Orc Barbarian. When she was confused, I often would have her stop and think about the situation then ask herself "what would Neil do here?" Then she would act on her memory of a certain episode she recently saw that dealt with a similar situation.

Yeah sometimes "bricks" can be a lot of fun

[Serial_Peacemake...]

Well really a person as a runner can really do a lot of good in Shadowrun. Part of it is that a runner can easily do runs to support good work that they are doing. Also some of what the megas do is so terrible, that when you kill the entire facility you might very well have improved the world slightly. Also I know people complain about stun batons, and S&S ammo occasionally, but non-lethality is very viable. At which point you can easily justify your activities in a Robin Hood sense.

[hyzmarca]

Start them out as semi-legitimate entrepreneurs in the "freelance troubleshooting" industry. It's sort of like shadowrunning, but they have a union. And they're likely to benefit from the legal protections provided by the Corporate Interactions Act. They have an office, they advertise in the yellow pages, and they're much more likely to get legitimate jobs that don't require any sort of criminal activity.
Start out with some simple and obviously heroic runs, bodyguarding the innocent person, voluntary extractions, bug hunts, that sort of thing. Slowly introduce more and more of the darkside of SR as the storylines progress; give them criminal contacts; reveal to them some unpleasant realities; casually integrade stuff like televised death-sports and bunraku parlors into the background. Bring Urban Brawl or Golden Glory to the foreground by introducing a player of a client. Then, somewhere down the line, once they understand that the world is dark but they have a false sense of security about the righteousness of their actions, introduce them to the classic Ghoul Bounty run. Mindless flesh-eaters are scavenging the bodies of dead homeless who succumbed to the elements. A "Good Samaritan" is concerned about the possibility that they'll start attacking children and other easy prey once the weather improves and the homeless' death rate drops. If they take the run and go in guns blazing, they eventually find that they're killing intelligent ghoul parents who were just trying to protect their own children. It makes a great "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! What have I done!!!!!!" moment.
And after you hit that, you can start introducing more moral ambiguity, not so much to make the attempts to act morally seem hopeless, but enough to make the PCs think twice before deciding to commit genocide for the forces of Good.

[Mercer]

Well, this may just be the candy corn talking (gotta gear up for the holidays), but I always felt that the small-scale "heroism" of Shadowrun (or well, anything) was bigger than the large-scale "heroism" of D&D, because it was more relatable.

(Keeping in mind that with all this talk of heroism, we're still talking about a bunch of geeks sitting around a table laughing and tossing dice. It reminds me of a quote from the Jose Cheung episode of the X-Files, I guess all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons must have taught me something about courage.)

[kigmatzomat]

Most of my characters wound up doing charity work in the days before "cash for karma." Our party unofficially adopted a couple of kids and funneled money, tech, and knowledge to them, going so far as to set up various college funds and foundations to provide them scholarships.

Sometimes we were a little weird about it, like in one "Harlequin" adventure we found ourselves "opposed" by some bush league gangers. The mage knocked them all out with one stunball spell. When we left town we gifted them with our weapons rather than deal with the hassle of smuggling them home. I'm sure that upset the local socio-political applecart when those goofballs had body armor, a couple of smartlinked glasses (for the mage and shaman), two dozen automatic weapons and cases of APDS ammo.

We'd take some jobs pro bono; bug or blood spirits were our hot button items. We were also miffed with Alamos20k but after a case where they hired us on the sly and put us in an ambush we've been a bit more
selective about when and where we screw with them. Self-extractions from Aztechnology were something else we'd low-ball. Plus the occasional psychokiller who's preferred victim was a party member. Pays to be proactive, y'know?

[Synner667]

[eidolon]

[kzt]

We had the elite professional bit down pretty good. The "never mess up" part not so good. :)

[Riley37]

Dr. Funkenstein is running a play-by email in which the PCs work for the Draco Foundation. You could take a look over in that forum.
Have the PCs work for CrashCart or DocWagon; have them work in Knight Errant or Lone Star's specialized anti-bug/blood-spirit team; have them be resistance leaders in 2060s San Francisco occupied by Japanese Imperial State; there are lotsa potential backers who will have them working against unambiguous enemies. Or have them working for a biotech corp, and in the course of a run, stumble across the classic "create a plague and get rich selling the cure" plot; they can get paid to derail and expose their sponsor's competition while also saving civilian lives.

[Whipstitch]