Game Level why must it be Street II?, puttting the train on the right track Options

[Kyoto Kid]

...OK since the original thread has been seriously derailed buy discussion on long shots, called shots & relevance of the GM, I decided to take the "better part of valor" approach and reboot the original topic:

[JonathanC]

I think the appeal of the street level game is the (misguided) belief that it will prevent/cut down on powergaming. That is, if we limit money (and maybe skills) enough, players won't be able to powergame, and the GM doesn't have to throw an army of Street Sams and Mages at the group just to give them a decent challenge.

Having been in street level games, I don't think it works. Meta-gaming is still a problem, so you've got Logic 2 characters coming up with plans that Batman would be envious of, people applying knowledge gleaned from game information that their characters haven't had access to, etc.

A better reason to use street-level as a jumping off point is that it makes the character growth much more dramatic. It's one thing to have a backstory where your character had to hustle on the street to buy his wiz cybergear. It's another to have spent 3 months actually playing through that. Some people want the experience of starting off at "first level", and working their way up to prominence. Then, when you go on an epic run with the world hanging in the balance, you really FEEL epic. Just starting off the game with super-badasses who run off and bring down a megacorp doesn't sound as sweet to me.

[Backgammon]

Could it be that we LIKE playing street level? It's called cyberpunk, not cyberpowerbroker.

[Eryk the Red]

For the most part, it allows certain kinds of stories to be told. Crime and gang stories are more fun to me, personally. My game straddles the line between "street-level" and "epic" (in fact, we're building up something of an epic crime story, w/ turf wars and so forth).

I don't think there's that much delusion about street-level games having less powergaming. But if you start small, it gives you something to build up to.

[Kyoto Kid]

...100% in agreement there. In some ways I have seen a just as much if not more min-maxing in low power games as players try to compensate for the smaller pool of of BPs. Likewise I have a player in my campaign (Standard 400 BP) who doesn't "optimise" much at all yet still makes useful and effective characters. As for metagaming, I had another player who constantly made use of information and details form a previous campaign he was in that his character would never have known about.

As to the allure of playing a character form more humble beginnings, I have mentioned a case in another thread about a character (from that other game) who I started out at first level with little more than ratty studded leather and a rusty short sword By the time he reached 10h (gasp! after nearly 5 years of RL time) he had his one Keep and was a respected figure in the regions. It got to where I knew this character so well I could take him into incredibly dangerous situations that would seriously challenge a character 7 - 8 levels higher than him.

As matter of fact I brought him into an open tournament at a con once and the DM was "amused I was running such a "low level" character. In the end, Father Tel (the character's name) and the party he led won, while a lot of the other "heavies" (many of which were rolled up at high level to begin with) never made it through.

In this way The Street level campaign is appealing, but yes, it must progress and the characters be allowed to grow past hold outs and knives and gang rumbles.

[Dashifen]

Can there be such a thing as an epic street level game? I've been in a game I'd describe thusly, but I'm not sure I'm defining the terms the same as you all.

We were a small gang (the Aces) who were hemmed in on four sides by five other gangs in the Barrens (we made them all up). By the end of the game, the four PCs (who made up the leadership of the Aces) had taken the territory of two of the other gangs and forced the remaining three to fight among themselves.

It was definitely a street-level game (hell, it was in SR3 and we had only 40 build points to start with) but I also think the scope of the game was epic, within the microcosm of the Barrens.

[JonathanC]

While we're on the subject, aside from lowering availability at chargen, what are the most popular methods for going "street level"? I think the default rules result in about the right level of power, provided you check things over and make sure someone isn't handing you a vatjob or something.

[Moon-Hawk]

Maybe "street level" is so much more popular in 4th ed than 3rd is because 4th edition tends to break when the DPs get too large. :D

More seriously, I don't know. It seems like a cultural mood, or something. It's where I am in my gaming career right now. When I started playing I wanted characters and action to be AWESOME. Then I got over that and wanted to play much more serious, realistic games. I wanted to play the super professional. Now I want games with a little bit more AWESOME in them. Nostalgia? Retro? Passing phase?

[Fortinbras]

To be perfectly frank, it's just easier. Creating an epic game requires a great deal of time, effort and creativity, not to mention a satisfying story arc that won't leave your player with a "We just spent two months of gaming for THAT!" feeling when it turns out the run was all a dream.
Street games, at least most mediocre street games, can be made in an hour and run on the fly. In the end everything is tied up in a nice little brown bow, with a decent amount of nuyen and Karma dispersed and no character grows or in challenged in any significant way. It's an easy way to blow off steam after a 40 hour work week, but isn't nearly as satisfying as an truly epic game that makes you question your character and the world in which he lives.

That being said, it can be fun to start a game on a street level and have it grow into an epic. Sin City begins with basic, street level characters and grows into national assassination. Even Lord of the Rings begins in a backwater, hick town.

No one wants to invest the time and effort into an epic game that player may flake out on because "I've got too much real life stuff going on!" so they may run a few b.s. games to create a level of trust amongst the group, meanwhile the players are so fed up with the mediocrity of the games they create excuses to no show.

I suggest going to your local Half Priced Books(where 2nd edition Shadowrun goes to die) and pick up some old supplements(there will be plenty) and convert them as best you can to 4th edition. This allows you much of that precious free time a new, epic adventure would eat up, while letting the players know that you aren't phoning it in because the conversion required a significant investment on your part.
I like Harlequin as a beginner, and once a level of trust and constancy has been established you and your group should have free reign for fun and mayhem.

[Dashifen]

I don't think street level is determined by dice pool or build points, though. Street level describes the type of game, the genre if you will. The build points just give a mechanic by which characters can be built within that genre. If you're playing a street level game, I don't think the rules need to be changed at all. But, as a GM, you should work with your players to create characters that make sense within the genre of a street level game.

My current game is probably street level. The characters are an ex-bartender and his bouncer, two brothers born on the wrong side of town, and a mage who's searching for a long-lost love. All built with 400 points, all fitting nicely into a street level campaign.

I ran a game last year set in Europe where the team was defending royalty, stopping international conspiracies led by the Vatican, and defending the world (okay, continental Europe at least) from a corrupt corporate regime in Portugal. This was an epic game and the characters were still built with the same core rules as the bartender and his bouncer above.

The difference: me. I knew what type of game I had planned and I knew what type of characters were going to be most effective in the style of game I intended to run and, perhaps even more important, I actively sought out players (I even interview people if I don't know them well) to try and create a cohesive group from which to generate characters.

It doesn't always work. One of my players this year really wanted to make his character a social, gunslinging adept and I'm still not sure he fits quite as well as I'd like for the game. The player's having a great time -- he posts here from time to time -- but the character doesn't feel quite right. He's a little too epic and not enough street.

But more often than not, you don't have to change any of the rules, the points, the availability, etc. You just need to sit down with your players and make sure they understand the game you're going to run and the style of character that's going to fit within that game and then begin working on characters.

[knasser]

I'll qualify all of the following with the caveat that I disagree with the original question - it need not be street and there's material a-plenty, as well as range in character creation and development to play a very non-street game.

Now to answer the question rather than question it, there are two answers. The first is simply that Shadowrun simply is Street because it's a valid and flavoursome way of playing - some times we play high-fantasy settings, sometimes we play gothic-horror, sometimes we play Street, it's just an authorial position.

But the second answer is probably more provactive and has to do with the 'must' in your question. I think some people perceive Street to be more valid as a reaction to certain high-fantasy settings. There's quite a bit of snobbery about "Cancer Causing" games in these parts, and the reaction against them gets a little too inclusive sometimes I think, throwing out any leanings toward high-power at the same time.

[Nightwalker450]

I vote street level for the grounds of building a personality, and not just a character. When you start small you can easily understand your character, he's only slightly better than you yourself are. Playing through the things until he's finally ready for the epic level things, or the other side being joe average still and thrown into the epic level makes for interesting character development.

I myself haven't yet had the character that I felt really connected to. I've developed interesting concepts/backstories whatever, but in the end it was just on paper, I hadn't actually done anything. I have GM'd for a single set of characters for about 5-6 years, using a homebrewed fantasy system. The characters were something after that time, they felt pride in them, and I as the GM felt pride in them. I retired them in a final campaign, speaking briefly to each player before hand wanting to know what they wanted for their character in the end. And with those thoughts ran the final campaign.

The end result is that its 3 years after that campaign, and the players still will divert completely from what we're doing to reminense on them. Unfortunately I have yet to be part of (GM or player) another group that reached that point. Gamer nirvana! :D

God I'm a nerd...

[Kyoto Kid]

...I've been on both ends and in the middle.

The High powered Uber-Awesome campaign was probably my least favourite as there was little growth since attributes and skills were already at pretty mean levels. I still wrote backstories for my characters but the fact they had already "made it" kind of took something out of it for me. On the other hand the low power campaign I was in was a blast. This is where two of my coolest my concepts my street kid con artist adept Da Brat (#96) and Cajun pugilist Hurricane Hannah (#97) originally came from.

The characters were pretty basic in their attributes, skills and powers (The GM capped MA at 4), but very effective. Hannah, while not having the "into next Tuesday" punch was still someone to be rekoned with and Da Brat even managed to fast talk a deal to get her buddies rescued after they were abducted by members of a crime syndicate. We weren't fighting mage strike teams, Prime runner sammies or GDs. THe most powerful opponents were organised crime goons which included maybe an "up and coming" runner.

Not being reliant on a tonne of 'ware, big expensive toys or heavy duty magic required more resourceful play which is why these two quickly established their personalities and became a heck of a lot of fun to play, even more so in some ways than my namesake.

I have since tried take this same approach with all the characters I work up including those in the standard 400 BP range.

[Jhaiisiin]

"Epic" can also be defined from a matter of perspective. Epic to a group of low level gangers might be an all out turf war where half their gang gets splattered, and they barely make it out of there alive themselves, but at least they survive. Epic to the Mob could be the Mob wars, open espionage, or any number of things. Epic to an immortal elf would be finally killing that fragger Lofwyr. It's perspective, and you can adjust it as such. The key is limiting the environment a little. If you want to keep it purely street, introduce a bit here and there, but for the most part, don't let elements of the ED/SR Metaplots drift in more than just to hint at darker things, that way the runners still deal with stuff in or just outside their league.

[CircuitBoyBlue]

I'd say that you can play epic or street, but street's less likely to get contradicted by canon metaplot later on. The first long-term campaign I played, we ended up doing some things to Aztechnologies that ended up destroying the corp (mostly so we could get the most bang for our buck out of FoF by going down to Aztlan and being mercs for the aftermath). All was well and good. Except that we couldn't use a lot of sourcebooks after that without at least slight modification. Not saying they can't be modified, just that it is a problem you need to be aware of with epic campaigns: the players are going to do epic things that aren't always in line with what epic things happen canonically later on.

The longest street campaign I played didn't have that problem, because the "street" aspects of the SBs don't really get into specifics so much as atmosphere.

The campaign I'm in now doesn't seem very street, just because everyone has too much money and is too powerful. I wouldn't say we do anything epic, but there's not the sense of urgency that you get in, say, Touch of Evil, where everything's happening on the same block. If something goes down on the block we're on, we kill it. I feel kind of let down, because I have an urban shaman named Streetgod that would rather talk to guidance spirits than blow things up, but that said, he is ridiculously good at combat.

[Fortune]

[Jhaiisiin]

In our last game, and as the ending to the saga of those characters, our GM allowed us to take out Lofwyr (in hindsight, we all agree we would have been bug-splat if he'd fleshed out the GD a little more), and it's caused a lot of interesting deviations in the SR timeline for us. Especially with the Tir and the Council of Princes. Interesting shakeups when you pull a player like that. Not to mention the actions from the varied dracoforms and such.

[FrankTrollman]

I usually sand box it, letting players do whatever they want and take various jobs or not from multiple contacts. And the result is that when characters are more powerful it is more effort to run. When you give players actual freedom of choice, a wealthy and powerful runner can seriously just say "Nuts on the road, I'm off! To Japan!" And as the gamemaster you're like "What? Seriously? You're going to Japan?" And because choice is real and not fake, you have to adapt and have the characters get some adventuring done in Tokyo.

For street level campaigns the characters can't just pack up and leave. Or if they do, there's whole adventures involved in finding a a place to live and food to eat in the new country and you have a week or two to prepare. When characters are rich enough to just stay in hotels and have the reps to simply have work offered to them in the new land, you have to think on your feet a lot more.

---

The other side is threat maintenance. As a game master you're trying to scare the pants off the PCs without actually killing any of them. And to that end it actually gets more difficult when the players are more powerful. It takes bigger hammers to frighten the PCs and bigger hammers are actually very likely to kill player characters outright on a slightly unlucky dice roll.

-Frank

[Dashifen]

Why are we trying to avoid killing the PCs again?

:evil:

(I keed! I keed!)

[Stahlseele]

[ElFenrir]

I guess for me it's a case of ''im a jane average in real life, i don't need to play joe or jane average every night at the table''. While supers campaigns are maybe fun once in a blue moon, i don't like being nigh unstoppable, either. I like it in the middle. I like coming out of the gate with something(400-450 range), knowing things, having experience...but i like to also build up from there. Like the high end, i do like low end now and again. It can be fun to play gutterpunks or just low end folks with more capped skills and knowledges and gear or whatnot. But not all the time. Many times i have concepts that run a little more professional...but not overbearing.

Too much of anything can be too much. Switching it up rules. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

Anyhow, if i was running street level(and i guess i can see the draw of it...but i also agree with the fact ive seen more minmaxing in street level than mid or higher level), i'd actually let the people go heavier on the attributes(raw potential), but cap skills and resources a bit more, as well as contacts(i doubt that the guitar wailing guttepunk is going to have the VP of a small corp as a contact, unless the player came up with a really good reason.)

I think my aversion to street level comes with bad experiences. Some that i have mean when i hear ''street level'', i hear ''dont bother buying crap, it's going to be taken from you anyway. Also, be prepared to be yanked around on chains like the low end mutts that you are for awhile, since you ARE nobodys and are in no place to negotiate.'' Those campaigns are not fun for me.

[Kyoto Kid]

...the low powered campaign I was in was not so much street as it was "newbie" runners just breaking into the biz. It was also a pretty good one. Yes we were limited in gear and skills (and to an extent attributes), but the characters were not unduly constrained. The threats were tough at times but not overwhelming and the payouts/swag was adequate without being too generous or stingy. Karma was good averaging about 5 per session (+ RP bonuses) so the characters were able to advance.

[Glyph]

Personally, I think SR4's default level of 400 points is a decent one - I think epic games and so-called street games alike don't play to Shadowrun's true strengths. 400 points lets you play someone who is a pro at something or another, not the absolute best but definitely better than most. It's a game where the players do dangerous things, after all, and deal with ruthless people. They should need to be tough, simply to survive.

And transhumanism is one of the major themes of the game - introducing magic into the cyberpunk mix only means that there are more ways that the players can transcend mere humanity. They can master the matrix, know a lot of important people, have a small army of drones, be capable of wielding mighty magics, or be cybernetically enhanced to a superhuman degree.

That's what I think of as Shadowrun - I'm not too interested in playing some uncybered, mundane, punk with a pistol and a cheap commlink eating rat for dinner.

That's not to say that there should be no "street" in Shadowrun, far from it. I just think you don't need to spectacularly gimp characters in a low-powered game to do it. The Panther Moderns all had ruthenium sneak suits or the equivalent, but they were still a thrill gang. Someone brought up Sin City - Marv was a freaking troll, and probably about 500+ build points, but he was still "street". Street is an attitude and an atmosphere that should be ever-prevalent.

[Method]

It seems like all too often people want to play the uber-bad-ass professional killer who never makes mistakes, but in my experience those all tend to become monodimensional after awhile. Might as well call them Neo.

I tend to enjoy character driven stories, which (kind of by definition) require complex characters with strengths and weaknesses and fears. Character flaws are what make a PC interesting to play, and I think character flaws are easier to understand and roleplay in a lower level game...

[hyzmarca]

Define street level. Please.

Is Ichi the Killer street level?

I ask because it highlights a very important distinction.
Ichi is a mentally ill brainwashed wuss who is manipulated by a low-ranking yakuza member who is using him to steal 300 million yen. But he's also a goddamn invincible super-assassin who cuts people in half with his foot blades and who leaves buckets upon buckets of blood and viscera in his wake.
His enemies are low-ranking yakuza outcasts. He gets no reward other than generic revenge against bullies. His boss is a low-ranking yakuza traitor. His only real contact is a preteen boy. Yet he's an invincible super-assassin.

Does being invincible super-assassin with retractable blades in his shoes who cuts people in half with ease make the game level epic? Does doing dirty jobs for low-ranking thugs and hanging out with with the bullied children of disgraced policemen turned thugs make the game street?

How about Hellblazer? Constantine is a relativly low-level street magician who ends up dealing with very powerful figures, defeating them using wit and guile rather than strength. Does tricking thee three lords of hell into curring your cancer somehow make the game epic even when you're a lowly street magician with little real power?