That's Broke!, Help me Obi-wan, you're my only hope... Options

[Spike]

Hanging out on game forums has exposed me to a lot of stuff I have rarely seen in games. A lot of that stuff is horribly borked, even game wreckingly so. We've seen the a lot of that around here, and you old timers on Dumpshock have undoubtedly seen stuff that has since slipped away into obscurity that was even worse.

Maybe your players won't ever try for a Bloodzilla, and I'm reasonably certain they wouldn't set up a ritual assassin circle... not without the GM handing them a bunch of really really two dimensional NPCs*

But you can bet they will go for the mini-gun troll tank of doom. You can bet they will be calling down the biggest baddest spirits they can get away with. You can bet their riggers will have drone armies, and the mage will spam stunballs if he thinks he can get away with it. The face adept pornomancer will put in an appearence and one player will be tossing out twenty dice pistol shots four times a pass^

Get one of these characters in your game and things will head south fast. Get two or even three and you might be tempted to toss up your hands, declare them all living Gods and drop a Thorcow on them... maybe two, that Troll is pretty tough.

Have no fear, for Obi-Spike-Wan is here to share that most uncommon of things, Common sense. :talker:

Now, to start with I'm not going to take the tack of 'kick the bastard from the table' or 'houserule it away' or any of that nonsense. Those are hammers and we're working with porcelain here... or something like that.

More, those are out of game solutions to what is an ingame problem. Yes, virginia, an in game problem.

In general I prefer to use two principles when dealing with problems. Escalation and resources.

Escalation: The players stomp around with a pack of farce 12 spirits as backup? Eventually, and by that I mean sooner rather than later, someone is going to set up a way to stop just that. Be it their own pack of farce 13 spirits or maybe just finding the true names of the spirits the players use+. Have a Troll that can beat a Citymaster in a headbutting contest? The other guys WILL have anti-tank rockets just for him. The more extreme the character the more likely this sort of escalation will happen, simply because it is that extreme. That level of 'power' is damned uncommon and people WILL learn about it in short order, and then take steps to fix it. One fun trick is to simply copy the PC's character sheet and use them as Nemesis.

This brings me to the second point.

Resources: There are at best half a dozen characters. There are billions of metahuman NPC's. Anything, any rule, that applies to the characters can apply to any one of those NPCs. And if the player hasn't totally topped out, somewhere is some bastard who can beat him, there's just too many people for that not to occur. Worse, all those corporations, governments, mafia types.... they all have more money than the players and a vested interest in not being challenged. Ares might not mind the occasional shadowrunning team beating their security, but they damn sure will object if it becomes known that they can not, no matter what, stop this one team. Without the benefit of total anonymity (and sorry, Tank troll, or Loamage or Pornomancer Elf just don't qualify for that sort of thing....) Ares WILL move heaven and earth to prove that they are the biggest dog in the yard.


Of course, this sort of thing can simply lead to further escalation from the players, particularly if handled poorly and used exclusively. Players like to match force for force, and object if they feel the GM is 'cheating' to beat them... even if cheating means that some security mage targets TankTroll with mind control spells exclusively. This brings us to part two.

In some cases it is necessary to provide disincentives to the players to prevent totally borked characters. Again, I have a couple of buzzwordy ways to do this: Exploitation and Enforcement.

Exploitation: This one is shockingly easy. Give me 2000+ karma and an unlimited budget and I can make a character that is good at everything... expert at everything, that is. Anything short of that and the character is going to have weaknesses that can be exploited, so exploit them. TrollTank is probably a drooling idiot, and drops like a punk to the weakest of spells. Bring more casters and the party counterspeller will fail him, probably at the worst time. Use a sniper against the counterspeller... hell, start using snipers more often if the PC's are that dangerous in a fight. It might be a bit much to ask, but play smarter than the players. Extreme firepower makes 'em cocky, use that against them. Put them in situations where they simply can not bring their most borked aspects to bear. Make the technomancer have to fix a broken computer (hardware) before he can hack it for the paydata on it. Sure, he'll succeed, and still do so using his borkedness maybe, but I doubt he's optimized for Hardware tests. TrollTank is useless when stealth is needed. Pornomancer gawps stupidly at the incoming wave of drones, as does the mindcontrol mage...

Enforcement: Anyone who has gamed with me, and probably a few of you who have read my posts, will know that I like to take it easy with rules, I'm all about just running with it. Thats right, Enforcement means 'Ruthless Enforcement of the Rules', something that absolutely needs to be done to deal with potentially borking characters. Technomancer spends every waking moment registering sprites? Legal, even feasable, if not exactly realistic. No problem, start keeping notes on how many sprites he has, how many services they've got, then bring on the 'long run' where you burn all that off him. Ditto Minigun toting 'TrollTank'. Say, who gave the TrollTank that minigun after all? Make him have to work to get more ammo while the other players are just marking off nuyen between runs, if that. Same with PACman. Got a mage working to become 'Bloodzilla Boss'? He still has to learn that bloodmagic in game, don't he? That's some serious legwork, and even more serious negative attention coming his way. Got Lucky Edgy in your game? Who controls when Edge recovers? You do. Lots of the most borked character examples seem to be designed with high edge in mind, even for 'casual rolls'. Edge is cool, yo, but it don't have to be free as well. Once again, bring on the 'Long Run', the multi-session run with no downtime where expendable resources are burned off. An easy way to do this is to have the target of a 'difficult' run turn the tables and start actively hunting the runners. Such heavy hitters are visible, and putting the players 'on the run' is a perfectly valid 'adventure' for a group of professional criminals. If it isn't, your players are spoiled brats. :P


When all else fails you still have one last resource before resorting to Thorcows. It is the awesome power of the GM fiat. Rules don't provide for a 'no-mana zone' where farce 12 spirits can not abide@? Make one. Put the Mcguffin in it. Don't tell the player unless they check or step in it. Want an unbreakable encryption? Make something 'uncrackable'. Just don't use it for everything. A one use device, say, not a datafortress. Player makes all the dice rolls necessary to become a bloodmage and prepares to summon Bloodzilla? Declare that he has 'won', his character is now an NPC feared, respected and hated by everyone. For bonus points, hire the PC's after that to 'assassinate him before he tries again' and run him as borked as the player made him.


Disagree with me? Tell me why. Think I don't know what I'm talking about? Challenge me. Give me a legal character, give me an expirenced character and I'll tell ya how I'd handle it. If I gotta pull out the Fiat, you win, I was wrong and we can continue chortling over our badassatude. No houserules~, no 'I don't use that book/line'.



*More than usual, I mean. As in 'slavishly devoted to furthering the PC's goals for no reason'

^ Don't ask me how, I'll just lie. I totally made up that number, but I can 'semicasually' get close to it.

+ I mean use the system to remove the assets from player control. Unsummon, whatever, and stack the situation in the NPC's favor. I figure Farce 12 spirits are uncommon enough that the player can not logically argue he is using new spirits for every summon... The existance of free spirits is proof enough for me that spirits are as 'real' as any other NPC.

@ I seem to recall reading of such a rule actually, but I'll be damned if I know for certain it exists, much less in this edition.

~ A houserule either requires a dice roll or negates/alters existing dice rolls. Spirits as NPC's, for example, isn't a houserule, its a method of RPing something in setting, as long as I don't force, remove or alter a roll from RAW. Likewise, where the RAW requires interpretation due to vagueness or debate over meaning is not a houserule either. A wildly inaccurate(unresearched recently) example: casting a spell through a ward at inanimate object 'focus' of the ward to bring it down easier than actually bringing it down. This was debated alongside ritual assassin circles a while back, and to my dim memory there is no rule that says wards have to be cast on a easily identifiable focus object. I would treat such an attempt as a flashy way to 'attack the ward' per the rules. Not a houserule, simply applying the rules available to me in a vague instance (the entire Ward debate was illustrative of houserule/not houserule in that almost any interpretation of the wards vs. ritual spell attacks could be called RAW or a Houserule by the opposed party). To sum up: Interpreting the rules in a favorable way is not houseruling, its the GM's job. Making some shit up or altering the rules in some meaningful way IS (fer ex, changing matrix rules to attribute vs skill. Altering the encumberance table, adding a trousersnake table to affect seduction rolls...). Caveat: I reserve the right to make simple, on the spot, rulings to cover areas of 'no rules exist'. Fer ex: If there is no rule regarding sleep, that does not mean I have to allow players to function as if sleep, and lack of it, did not affect them. Thus I can 'on the spot' say that only 16 hours a day is useful for summoning, compiling, hacking etc, and I can apply penalties to players who attempt to walk across the sahara desert without food or water. However, I will endeavor to avoid doing this in this thread unless someone gets stupid with it.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

[Orient]

To pull from a decidedly non-cyberpunk source:

"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between his shoulderblades seriously cramps his style."

[Spike]

[Synner667]

"Nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"


The matter of dealing with overpowered characters is discussed quite well in the CP2020 Ref's manual, 'Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads !!'

[Emperor Tippy]

[Spike]

[Spike]

[Orient]

Also, the word "knife" is occasionally spelled "d e a d m a g i c z o n e."

;)

[Cain]

[Fortune]

I think a better solution (or even preventative measure) is to spend time explaining to the Players just how your version of the Sixth World works. This combined with a one-on-one, hands-on chargen process seems to alleviate any problems I have in my games.

Of course, I don't really have a problem if the Players all want a game where they are all world-class characters either.

[Spike]

Cain: Read my footnotes, seriously. :D

While I certainly intend to treat any and all challenges with research and seriousness, the OP was as unresearched as you can get and still post about Shadowrun.

Unless you are presenting me a legal character with a pack of force 12 spirits backing him up, I feel no need to tell you (as in, I got no idea) if spirits have true names or not pre binding/freeing.

[hyzmarca]

And we just keep coming. But you can kill a hundred, a thousand, a thousand thousand and the armies of Hell besides and all we need is for one of us -- just one -- sooner or later to have the thing we're all hoping for.
One . . . good . . . day.

Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later it's gonna catch you. And part of you wants it... not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but because you're just a little bit in love with it. Death is your art. You make it with your hands, day after day. That final gasp. That look of peace. Part of you is desperate to know: What's it like? Where does it lead you? And now you see, that's the secret. Not the punch you didn't throw or the kicks you didn't land. Every Slayer... has a death wish. Even you.

The only reason you've lasted as long as you have is you've got ties to the world . . . your mum, your brat kid sister, the Scoobies. They all tie you here, but you're just putting off the inevitable. Sooner or later, you're gonna want it. And the second -- the second -- that happens, you know I'll be there. I'll slip in . . . have myself a real good day.

-------

Just a little bit of wisdom blatantly stolen from another Spike. And it is true.

Every player has just a little bit of a death wish for his character because skating as close to death as is possible is very very fun. And one day, a player will skate a little too close or simply decide that skating isn't fun enough, and the character will die.

Invincible characters are fun for 15 minutes. Just try to play a PC game on God Mode. Use a game genie to give yourself invincibility in an NES classic. It gets boring quick.

[Spike]

[hyzmarca]

The best way to counter PCs who use smart tactics is to use smart tactics. NPCs, played correctly, tend to have infinitely better coordination than PCs have. A half decent team with coordination and intelligent preparation can smash an every-man-for-himself munchkin team.



Anchored Detect Life + Anchored Detect Enemies + Hidden Mode Comlinks + wired AR HUD with automap + buttoned-down offsite matrix overwatch give total information superiority. The only real vulnerability is the comlink, which is unlikely to be hacked due ot its hidden mode, and can simply be disconnected and destroyed if it is hacked.

[Spike]

Oh, I agree completely, Hyz. My objection was that 'your method' is often the first warning flag I get from a potential GM that he doesn't use 'smart tactics' but rather attempts to channel the players into stupid tactics.

Heck, if you took a few of the threads I've posted here, you'd think that no PC survives their first run with me as a GM... :D

[Adarael]

I'll put it this way:

I'm the GM. I control the horizontal and the vertical. I set the assets players can access and work with, and I set the assets the opposition can bring to bear. I can make the player characters' lives a living nightmare or a walk in the park. For ever Bloodzilla that a player tries to summon into an orphanage, I have a Divination-enhanced SWAT team waiting in the eaves. For every troll with a minigun and 24 dice of soak, I have an mage with Control Thoughts. For every one of Buster's Horrible Ally Spirit Guy, I have a banishing specialist. Or a drone swarm.

Or I have the ability to tell my players no. No, you can't find a Rating 12 Weapon Focus Monowhip on the market. No, nobody will teach you blood sorcery. No, there's not two tons of Seven-7 on the open market. A 'specialist' is a different beast than a one-trick pony designed to exploit rules holes. Don't try to tell me a character designed like Buster's Horrible Ally Spirit Guy is at all the same as making a character to be a master hitman. It's not. Because with Buster's guy, you have to ask the question: "How did you survive long enough to get to this point? What were your rolls for getting the spirit? Why do you have no skills except magical ones?" And most importantly, "Why haven't you been arrested yet? Or killed by carpet bombing when they tried to arrest you?"
Only a total idiot or a horrible cheesemonger would actually try to play Buster's Horrible Ally Spirit Guy as a serious and believable character. The only reason to build a character that way is to exploit rules weaknesses.

The GM is the content coordinator for the game and the world. The GM decides how much to let in and how much to keep out. The GM is also responsible for rationalizing WHY game-breaking rules holes haven't broken the game world. Even if Bloodzilla is allowable by the strict interpretation of the rules, it is the GM's job - and DUTY, I would venture - to ensure not only that it does not happen, but that there is a reason it CANNOT happen.

The GM sets the tone and leads the band. The players do the solos. But if the players wanna do a guitar solo from "Ride the Lightning" and the rest of you are trying to play "Blue in Green," you have to make sure that doesn't happen. It's as simple as saying "No, here's why."

And if your players can't handle the fact that you're plugging rules leaks to keep the game coherent and good, you need new players.

Period.

[Spike]

Ad: Were you reading my playbook? Seriously, man, I put most of that in there in one form or another. I see exploits, I see escalation, I see resources... I see the sort of stuff I regularly use... okay, not regularly, my players generally don't try silly stuff in my games.... but it is all stuff I have had to use in the past (altered suitably for game/situation/whathaveyou)

In other words:

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout!

[Adarael]

Well, it DOES seem like the logical response to me.
Thankfully, I don't have players that try blatantly broken stuff.

Or at least not blatantly broken stuff that they don't talk about with me beforehand.

(I had a player make a monk in L5R once that couldn't die. No, seriously. He had a tattoo that let him spend 2 void to return to life at full health, and another one that let him have a void pool of like... 30. But that was his THING. He didn't do anything except be a monk and be full of wisdom.)

[Buster]

@@Spike, if you don't like the rules, you need to fix the rules, not punish the players. If I see a loophole in the rules big enough to drive a tank through, I tell the GM and we patch the problem before it becomes an issue. It's not hard. It might require you to think things through a little bit, and maybe doesn't need to be permanently fixed that night, but you're better off fixing the issue than leaving it.

Bloodzilla and the Conjurer Of Mighty Possession Spirits are illustrations of problems in the system and those problems need to be fixed. For example, Bloodzilla is EASILY fixed with a slight rules tweak. And possession spirits are easily patched by using any one of the many houserules I've posted on this forum.

You don't need to get vicious, just patch the rules and move on.

[Riley37]

[Fortune]

[Glyph]

A GM shouldn't need to compete with his players. All the players have are the character creation rules. The GM has access to all of the resources of an entire world.

Characters built around cheesy rule exploits (Agent Smith armies, Pun-pun, etc.) can be denied. Characters such as pornomancers and some possesssion tradition builds are only dangerous if the GM is too lenient (letting social skills act like mind control, letting "be me for a day" count as one service).

Other characters, such as the troll tank, combat mage, or pistol adept, are not really as big of a deal. So they can kill a few more mooks - just put a few more mooks in there, then. Other than the aforementioned cheesy rules exploits, most builds are not inherently munchy - it's how they are played. The troll tank who is a team player is not a problem. The troll tank who causes fights when he gets bored, bullies the less combat-capable characters, and brags about how tough he is, that's a problem.

But player asshattery can be dealt with OOC, where it belongs, and players treating the game like a first-person shooter can simply reap the logical consequences of their actions. High powered characters can get higher-powered runs. And characters can be challenged in their areas of weakness, as well as their areas of strength. But remember that it's a game for fun. Use their weaknesses to introduce some drama or humor into the game, and occasionally let them cut loose in the areas they are good at, too.

[Spike]

[Whipstitch]

I liked my old GM's solution to the overbearing troll tank problem: have a LoneStar HRT team driver blow a point of edge on running him over. With a CityMaster. Twice.