most perfectly accomplished runs, OK - now let's see the great victories! Options

[Dun Fe'Ran]

Well, my last post was on botched runs, and that seemed to lower everyone's self-esteem a notch. :oops: So this time, let's hear about some impossibly heroic victories. Unfortunately, most stories of mine involve me screwing up in some way or another, but I can still remember some pretty slick moves we've pulled. I think that the most notable was when my johnson was geeked and a 4th level initiate mage took his place, but my buddy and I found out moments before our meet that we were gonna get "our payment in full" for our job well done. After a harrowing chase, we managed to destroy 2 drones, 2 force 7+ elementals, and fend off (more or less) the mage (hey, we're 1st grade initiates here, and he had a katana weapon focus in the astral. no fair! 8) ). no money (except for what we got up front...), but we escaped with our skin and got a fair amount of reputation from surviving such a brutal assault. On the flip side, I don't know if I'll ever trust that the Johnson at the end of a run will be the same as the Johnson at the beginning of a run.... :dead:

[nezumi]

Umm.. one of my first runs, the First Run, I successfully purchased the 12 pack of Aztec Cola I was looking for.

Oh yeah, and I physically lept through a guy (6D - Killing hands) and my partner killed someone by an incredibly skilled throw of a Better Than Egg.

I think I need to be the player in more games...

[mfb]

me and my partner in crime ended up with nothing but the clothes on our back, in Charlotte, NC (normal stomping grounds are Seattle), surrounded by a gang of white troll supremists. our adventures and wacky hinjinx included taking on an electronics shop full of rednecks, ambushing a six-man cleanup crew (street sam, adept, and weapon specialist archtypes from SR3), storming a mansion guarded by paramilitary types, and taking on a pair of SR3 adept archtypes with ork stat mods. ended up making a little money and driving home in a nice SUV. considering what we started with, i was pleased with the outcome.

[Lilt]

What? People complete runs?

[mfb]

it takes a few months (or a few years *cough*Brainscan*cough*), but yes.

[Talia Invierno]

Curious, how this thread is so much shorter than any most botched runs or candidate for CLUE files thread :grinbig:

For me, I'll offer part of our run which involved a yakuza attack against someone we were bodyguarding - not because it went perfectly according to plan (we didn't really have one for this part), but because I've never seen so sudden and one-sided a combat result.

The particular PC I was running is impulsive, overconfident, highly emotional, and (although a spellcaster) seems to have become very physical in her reactions of late. The attack came (predictably) at a time when the team was split - the only team member there (a very dear friend) fell unconscious at the moment the rest of us returned. The moment my PC realised, she reacts - physically - against the one that turned out to be the yakuza mage (and thus main threat). Carromeleg 3, ST 3. One kick ... which (with some of the most polarised dice rolls I have ever seen, on both sides, but in opposite directions) ended up dropping the mage in her tracks with D damage before anyone else could react. The rest of the yakuza were taken down before the end of the second round, by a total shadowrunning team of three, none of whom were primarily combat-oriented. (The others, wisely, kept their distance and picked off their targets with pistols.) Only one spell was cast through the entire thing - a control emotions (Fear - but so as to be afraid of a non-team NPC ally, long story) - and again a similar dice result.

Not one of us is wired. (I come closest with a sustained spell.) Not one team member or guarded NPC (besides the originally unconscious NPC) was so much as scratched. I was the only one who might have gotten hurt in that (BD 3!), since I was the one in the middle of melee combat with at least two or three other yakuza with considerably higher unarmed and weapons skill ratings. I don't think I've ever rolled so many 6's in my gaming history.

(Although I am wincing at the thought of what the GM will think up for next time.)

[Velocity]

Hopefully, one of the PCs who actually pulled the job will post details of this run (*cough*Sunday_Gamer*cough*Nova*cough*), but one of the most brilliantly-executed runs I ever witnessed happened a few months ago:

In a nutshell, the PCs were hired to break into a Renraku owned-and-operated "executive retreat" located in the heart of downtown Seattle. It was basically a high-security spa for visiting high muckity-mucks from Renraku offices overseas: it had an Olympic-sized pool, a stable and large riding park, a luxurious (though small) hotel, theater, several private lodges, etc.

A team of Red Samurai were permanently posted to the place and another team had arrived as escorts for the weekend's guests: three major shareholders in the company. Together, the three owned just over 11% of the corp's outstanding shares and they were in town for a shareholder's meeting. Midway through the weekend, a third team of Red Sams were scheduled to arrive because Renraku counter-intelligence had felt their spidey-sense tingling.

The job was complex: the three shareholders had to be abducted from within the facility and brought to a rendez-vous point downtown. Since all three were monitored 24-7, either the surveillance had to be spoofed or duplicates substituted for the originals, etc.

Once the three were brought to rendez-vous point A, they would be collected and taken away. The PCs then would kill several nervous, sweaty, "ohmigod-the-Red-Sams-will-be-here-any-fucking-second-I-can-feel-it" hours until they received a call. They'd be given another rendez-vous point where they would find the three abductees, unharmed and unmarked but unconscious.

Wait for it.

The three shareholders then had to be returned to the resort with no-one the wiser.

No evidence must be left behind: no clues, no DNA, no astral signatures, nada. The run had to be perfectly clean. (One of the best parts for me was that not a shot was fired. :))

And the sneaky devils (my PCs that is) did it. It was a great story, filled with honest-to-goodness tension, thrills, near-misses and brilliant successes. It taxed their wits and creativity and (I think) made everyone feel legitimately proud of themselves.

[Diesel]

Well I think the best run I completed was Saturday night. The characters broke into the compound by scaling the wall around it, and trying to run across the loading dock. My security guys split them up, and the decker ran onto the roof and down a vent, pursued by several stun grenades. The other three get pinned down behind a bomb barrier, and are shot and naded to pieces before they breach a window and smash into a conference room.

Meanwhile the decker has gained access to the main computer and is downloading the schematics and fucking with security (lights off, sprinklers on, etc.). Runner #3 (the terminally retarded gunbunny) we'll call K. K runs outside (where they were being shot at before) and makes a lot of noise about it. The security guards were still there, and backup arrived, not to mention those guys on the roof got over right quick. He's shot to pieces without so much as a yell.

Runners #2 and #4 (C and M) sneak through the offices into where the decker (S) is still hacking away. A wall explodes, automatic fire is laid, and several grenades are flung, ending with a hand of God for S, who now has the consistency of fried chicken, but alive.

C sneaks onto the manufacturing floor and hides behind a rather large machinery, and as the truck is pulling up to take the computer, she fires at guards. Kills one, the other surrenders, being outgunned and flanked from M. M walks up to the surrendered guard, puts a hole in his head. S is so pissed by this, that despite having a +4 from wounds, +fuckload from visibility, still manages to nail M in the face (hit location system, baby) with a deadly wound. M is dead (no HoG left!), S is dying, looks like C is going to get all the money when the three guards who breached the wall earlier pop out, and with the help of some LS officers (no extraterritoriality here, bee-itches) gun her down.

End result:
K: Dead of multiple gunshot wounds
M: Dead of gunshot to head
C: 9 boxes physical, multiple gunshot wounds, escaped successfully
S: Deadly damage, severe burns/shrapnel wounds/neckshot. Lived to make it to the ICU.

I haven't played IN any good ones yet. Just GMed em. :D

[Moonstone Spider]

A run I completed a couple of weeks ago.

We had only two players, my female Shamanic Rigger and a lightly wired Street Samurai (It was a very street level campaign, no serious power.) Our mission: Ruin some college kid's life for no apparent reason.

My character, being paranoid as all hell, wondered what the Johnson was really up too and applied a little light pressure to a contact to find out what. It turned out Mr. Johnson was a pedophile and the college kid had a 13 year old sister. College Boy also put Mr. Johnson in the hospital when he went after said sister, which was why Johnson wanted him hurt back now.

My character's absurdly moralistic (and also a kleptomaniac which has some odd results) and didn't want to help a pedophile, but also didn't want to lose out on the nuyen for the run. So we went ahead with it by setting the kid up, the Rigger posed as a part of a super-high-skill professional shadowrunner team that wanted to induct the kid who had "Awesome Potential as a Shadowrunner." Meanwhile the Samurai had some contacts who owned a warehouse. Rigger took the kid to the warehouse for an attack and handed him a pistol full of gel-rounds, then ditched him after getting him to walk in from of the cameras. Security did the rest. The only downside was that the kid also had a secret holdout gun he pulled and he wound up losing his hand when the Samurai shot it off stopping him and getting him arrested for B&E. Mr. Johnson was ecstatic.

Here's where things got really fun. The Shamanic Rigger proceded to get a tape recorder and, using stealth, record Mr. Johnson's gloating spiel over how they'd ruined the kid's life over lunch. Then she headed to the Kid's family and traded the tape to them for a second payoff, taking a skilled lawyer contact instead of nuyen this time.

Double the payoff (And I got a karma bonus for imaginative planning), and after all it's not a Shadowrun unless you've screwed your Johnson twice right?

[moosegod]

[Moonstone Spider]

[moosegod]

Or the troll ran off and did something valorous and needs help.

(In this case, valorous means stupid)

[Traks]

If you have completed run succesfully, your GM is slacking off :)

[toturi]

If you didn't, you are a lousy player. And your GM is slacking off.

[Squire]

Our most successful run (not necessarily most lucrative), we found that the target used an outside contractor for janitor services.

We did some decking to convince the janitor company that two of our team members were new employees assigned to the target.

They went in, did a thorough job cleaning and quitely smuggled the prize out of the target inside a trash-bag.

A bit of decking afterward convinced the janitor company that the two new employees had been reassigned elsewhere and their personnel files were accidently "lost."

In the end we got the prize and the target didn't even know they'd been hit. Zero collateral damange, as near to zero exposure as you can conceivable get.

Absolutely beautiful.

[mfb]

six runners, dressed for a meet--street clothes, pistols, a few scattered SMGs, one shotgun in a duffel. a double-handful of script-kiddie otaku--collectively, our johnson; wholly useless in the meat. a team of five loaded-for-bear red sams accompanied by a medusa and a force 7 earth elemental.

runners: 7, deus: 0.

[Quix]

We were hired to retrive the details of a gentically engineered plant. The information wasn't stored on the Matrix so we had our decker 'set up' an appointment for an outside source to verify their test results. The troll and my physad waited a mile down the road with a semi truck in case of an emergency. In through the dooors went our cat shaman, our Jack of all trades orc who was also a science wiz, and our face. At first the man they meet didn't believe them and so called thier boss. Our decker intercepted the call and did the greatest improvisational routine we'd ever seen. Had the company man convinced that thhis was legitimate and had all the other players rolling on the floor.
Then they brought us the data. Our orc ran it through his deck where he was in the process of burning a copy. Our face looking over the orcs shoulder was using his eye camera to take pictures of every page. Also the orc was broadcasting the data using his head radio. I was pulling in the radio signal and jerry rigged it through my cell phone to our decker who was also burning a copy.
Afterwards our team walked out the door and left the company none the wiser. :grinbig:

[Squire]

Genious Quix. Well done.

[kenji]

hmmm... best run we had (one "mysterious death" casualty) was a classic "fake your own death" run against a top-notch Barrens Bunker owned by Ares. (the team's resident nemesis corp. we even hid out with the Azzies once, just to let the heat die down.)

so, after all our hiding out, and the massive amount of profit we had sneaking out some pilfered Orichalcum from under the Azzies noses, we needed a way to "gracefully retire" from the Shadowrunning lifestyle. also, we wanted Ares to stop fragging hunting us.

first, we bribed the heck out of a late teammate's Buddy, the DocWagon Executive, so that we could pilfer the clone-bodies for all our Platinum memberships. to do this, we had to plant our faux-nightone Coyote-shaman at a "disposal facility" as a late-shift worker. she has never forgiven that. :P and the exec made it clear that under no uncertain terms were we EVER to attempt to contact him again.

then we fitted our Us-scicles with the appropriate external cyberfittings and gear, and (after the appropriate recon) launched a somewhat successful destroy-from-inside asset destruction run on the hardest target i've ever seen. (for which i decked up a storm (look at me, i'm killin yer IC!) and a vastly more experienced co-decker did the hard work.) predictably, and exactly on schedule, Ares launched air support from the next nearest facility (a few minutes as we'd timed it) as our group was fleeing the building, into the surrounding kill-zone.

at this point, we pulled a vehicular switcheroo, and the van holding the clones took off on RC evasive, just like a panicked SR team. the Ares chopper blew it away, and the remaining sec goons recovered our blasted "bodies", positive ID, targets dead.
(all excepting the team's PhysAd, who mysteriously died in one of the demo charges in the building. all that was found was his magic sword. presumed dead by all parties.)

later, the real Van swung around to the deckers' lookout (it's a hard target, so we had to deck in via a direct signal at the matrix-uplink dish. yuck.) picked us up, and we went so far underground.

[Cray74]

The most perfect run was one I GM'd.

The run took about 2 real world hours (and it took that long because the players were suspicious of how smoothly the run went). The runners were hired for some foreign work (in Singapore, I think - Mr. Johnson didn't want locals involved in the run). They found and snagged the crime boss Mr. Johnson wanted, delivered him, collected their fee, and went back to Seattle.

Now, admittedly, the rest of gaming session wasn't perfect because the flight back to Seattle crashed on Zombie Island (with fleshforms standing in for zombies - it was a Halloween run), and the PCs got into some zany fights-for-their-lives there, but the run itself was flawless. ;)

[Nova]

[Tom Collins]

Wow....just wow. It was timing the drugs effect that really put me over the top for this one. I can see my group coming up with most the rest of it, but not the drugs. Sir, I bow to you. I've been invovled in some pretty impressive runs, but nothing to compare to that.

[FlakJacket]

Fairly simple run involving the killing of a mid-to high level corporate VP/Auditor. For some reason this guy had pissed someone off, we didn't care why, so he was getting whacked. Maybe he axed some exec during a company review or something. Now this guy was already mid-level management so he had good security, a personal bodyguard squad and since he spent most of his time travelling and on corporate property was fairly hard to reach. However, he did do a fair bit of visiting to different corporate branches/subsidiaries so we figured we'd get him then.

First off the decker really got into this guy's life and did a bio on the guy with all the information she could find- know your enemy right? This was then passed on to a contact that was a specialist in putting all the data into a proper picture and had a high psychology skill so she could give you a good picture of the person and how they ticked. Now we had a fairly open timeframe since there was a thirty-day deadline on the contract. Which was lucky for us since it's usually 'I want this job done a week last Thursday'. :)

After some very good rolls the decker is able to pull the targets itinerary for the next month and finds that he's going along to visit a smallish subsidiary- biotech firm I think it was- in eleven days to do a preliminary interview with the manager for the full audit he was about to do on them. We figure this is the best place to do it since whilst they own a large office building, the security isn't as tight as a megacorporate place.

So we pull the security plans, mull them over and come up with a plan. The decker goes to work and starts making the lifts act funny. Shuddering a bit, going to the wrong floor occasionally or refusing to go to the basement, interior lights flickering etc. Maintenance is called out but can't find anything wrong so they say it must be the computer side of things. The matrix boys look things over but don't find anything wrong, or traces of the intrusion, and take the view it must be a mechanical fault and that maintenance missed something.

The decker noticed that the e-mail they sent to the facilities department was a bit sarcy and had the bright idea of improving inter-departmental relations. A quick change to the file headers and logs, and a copy accidentally gets CC'd to the maintenance guys. The faults continue and the both maintenance and matrix get called out and keep blaming each other, quite emphatically since they figure the other is trying to get out of the rightful blame. Four days before the auditor arrives though the faults stop so everyone's happy.

The day comes around and the auditor turns up and has the interview. Finishes up and goes to leave, walked out by a flunky to the lifts. Pushes the button for the basement car park, everything seems fine until the lifts start 'acting up' again whilst they're between the first and ground floors. The lifts shut off and as a standard security feature the emergency systems kick in, and it descends to the next floor, opens the doors and locks there.

Auditor blokey is not pleased. We'd already got the shrinks report back on him and turns out he was very much a type A person. Uber-punctual, hated lateness or 'inefficiency' as he saw it. The flunkey accompanying him was very apologetic but the things aren't working. Auditor throws a fissy hit allowing him to bag on some underlings, another thing the pysh profile suggested he liked doing and demands that his limo is brought round to the front since he's already late- a cardinal sin.

Car pulls up, and they walk out. The groups mage has positioned himself over the road with a sporting rifle and currently invisible, decked out in ruthenium overall, which was a bit obscured, as well in case anything happens to the spell. Ally spirit was in the astral keeping guard there. The rigger had a small drone orbiting far out loaded with another sports rifle just in case and to cover my exit. Spent two actions aiming at the Auditor's face and fired an enchanted hollow point bullet foci. The bullet was loaded with linked Detect Barrier/Destroy Barrier combo, which took down his Detect/Bullet Barrier protection ring. I'd thrown all my combat pool in as well and with a decent roll got him all the way past overdamage and instantly dead.

Run over to the back of the building and throw the disposable stealth rappelling rope that had been tied off earlier over the side and down into the blind alley below. Was already wearing a harness so hooked on, dropped the four stories down and touched a catalyst stick to the line so that it dissolved. The rigger was waiting in the alley with the car and pops the trunk. I get out of the harness and overalls- was wearing a business suit san jacket and tie which were in the car, dump them in there with the rifle and get in the passenger seat. The drone had some sort of self destruct mechanism- thermite charge I think- that slagged it so no liftable evidence left.

We drive off to the barrens, switch cars and firebomb the first car to get rid of the evidence. Go pick up the decker and head down to the rental lot where we'd hired the car. The rigger had jiggered the transponder and switched the plates and only put them back just before we got there. Return the car, and catch a taxi to the marina where the yacht we'd hired beforehand was waiting. Proceed to sail off to Hawai'i for a month, dropping the rifle and other evidence into the water in the middle of the Pacific. Wasn't bad for a filler run when only three of us could make it. :)

We did luck out though in that we forgot to come up with an alternative if they'd used the emergency stairs when the lifts went out, but we figured they were out back and trusted the psych profile was reliable. The GM was nice since he liked the planning.

[Panzergeist]

Nova, that is truly awesome. I hope I can pull a ggrand slam like that someday. Flak, that sounds pretty neat too, but what the hell is a bullet focus?

[FlakJacket]

Basically just a regular bullet that got turned into an Anchor focus to hold the spells.