Game Proposal: A Co-Op, Because there are never enough games to go around. Options

[Divine Virus]

Ladies and Gentlemen,
It seems to me that there are never enough games to go around. New games are few and far between, and when do come up, they fill up fast.
I am already running one game right now, and I lack the time and energy to run another one entirely by myself.
So lets form a cooperative, and take turns running the show.

I have a particular idea to allow people to get to play characters they haven't had a chance to play, and to have no irregularity if their is some shifting of the character roster as different people drop out to run the game. I have deemed it the "Global Frequency Format."

Global Frequency was a comic written by Warren Ellis. The Global Frequency was an unofficial rescue of a thousand or so skilled individuals around the world linked together by its founder, Miranda Zero, and Aleph, whose brain was wired in such a way that she could coordinate all operations. When a disaster threatened, they would call up whoever had the skills they needed.

In the Global Frequency format, all the characters are in some way tied to an agency -criminal, corporate, underground rescue, whatever- that, like Global Frequency, call upon people whose skills are needed, when they are needed. Said agency would have emergencies of some sort, or missions of some sort, and would tap its talent pool. So the Co-Op would work like this. It would be one person's turn to run the game. He would come up with some kind of mission for the group to complete. Each person in the Co-Op would have a few different characters. Say a 350BP, 400BP, and a 500BP character. The person running the mission would select a character from each player's roster, based on what he thinks the mission will require. He runs the game, and awards the players karma. The players then award the GM karma. Then another person takes on the role of GM, prepares a mission, and selects characters from the roster.

The downside is that this lacks continuity found in other games. The upside is that it lets you play. Moreso, it lets you play a variety of characters you might not have a chance to play otherwise. We could use more unusual ideas, like having full body cyborgs or AIs on our character roster, and individual GMs could just choose not to use those characters.

The details are open. Stuff like how many characters in each players roster, how many BP they each get, the nature of agency... I am not attached to it. We can agree on whatever makes everyone happy. Heck, I'm not even particularly attached to the Global Frequency Format if someone can suggest a better idea. Once we get a group of people wanting to be in this co-op, we can sit down and agree on the exact format and house rules.

So, anyone interested?

[Mister Juan]

I would be terrrribly interested!

[ludomastro]

Interested. Please explain how, in your view, that this is different from LITS.

[Divine Virus]

I am not familiar with LITS. What is it short for please?

[ludomastro]

Life in the Shadows

It is/was an ongoing world with revolving GMs set in SR3 using the boards as the operating point.

[Divine Virus]

In that case I would say with certainty that the format is different (assuming we use the "Global Frequency" format) and the edition is different (this is SR 4). We are also starting fresh, and are fully open to players. I don't know enough about LITS to say what else is same of different.

[ludomastro]

Either way, count me in. I have often wanted to run / play in an agency style game.

[BlackHat]

This sounds pretty cool to me, too. It's worth mentioning that it would require 3x the amount of work from the players (and, presumably, a lot of players also interested in GMing) so there would be a much larger investment in the game. In my experience, that does help keep the game going, though, so I don't think that's a bad thing. It will also result in a much larger pool of characters to choose from for a given mission, which I think will make for some better-fitting missions.

I'd love to here more of the details, as they develop.

[BlackHat]

Another thing worth thinking about, is that in SR4, especially on these boards, I have run into a lot of not-well-defined-rules that you sort of have to bounce off of each GM to see how they're going to handle it, or if they have their own house-rule to address it. With multiple GMs there would have to be some sort of voting system set up to agree on these as they come up.

[Divine Virus]

Agreeing on a set of house rules and interpretations will be challenging. Also would be problematic would be if some people were lacking certain books. House rules and interpretations will just take time and discussion to resolve. For the matter of missing books, perhaps we can list what books are required by a particular character. i.e. a street sammy will probably not require Street Magic, and a Mage might not need augmentation. That way when selecting characters, a GM can choose one that doesn't rely on rules from supplements he doesn't have.
Needing to have more characters ready does make it a bit of a larger commitment, but I think it is still manageable. I know I have about half a dozen character more or less ready at any given time (currently 7). I figure when we get about six people (self-included) we can start discussing what we want for rules, start designing the agency, etc.

One thing I want to say is that I don't want to have any special status. I mean, it was my idea, but that it. I want this to be a group effort, so lets do things democratically.

[Mister Juan]

Life in the Shadows

It is/was an ongoing world with revolving GMs set in SR3 using the boards as the operating point.

By LITS, you are refering to Living in the Shadows, correct?
If so, the LITS project is still up and running, and to my knowledge does not have revolving GMs. It also currently runs on a slightly modified set of the SR4 rules.

That is, if we are speaking of the same game...

[BlackHat]

I have the same problem. Always about a dozen characters on the back-burner, and way more ideas than opportunities to put them to use. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I've also been itching to try my hand at running a PBP game on here at some point, and this does sound like a pretty good opportunity to do that. I would certainly be up for it.

Would the games be concurrent, or sequential? I'm not sure how long a typical mission goes on these boards, but based on the games I have played, it can take a long time - but with concurrent missions, there would be other issues I think, like the majority of characters being busy, and that GM basically scraping the bottom of the Agency's barrel. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Anyway, count me in. I've never looked too closely at teh LitS stuff, but I think that its probably along the same lines - but don't necessarily see a problem with that.

[Divine Virus]

I was thinking sequential. I don't have the time for that many games running at the same time. I figure we could draw lots (or rather, like true gamers roll, dice) to determine in what order we run games. Because games do tend to be slow here, I was thinking that, like Global Frequency, time is very limited. Not a lot of time for planning and legwork before the crews need to hit the field.
So, just to give a random example off the top of my headfor a "good" or rescue type organization.

Begin mission
At 16:00 we discover that human supremacists have created a targeted toxin to introduced into the Seattle water supply that will sterile trolls.
At 16:01 Hackers A and B, Sammie A and B, Rigger, Mage, and Face are all called into duty.
At 16:05, Hackers A and B pinpoint the location of the truck on its way to deliver the toxin to the water plant, then Rigger and Sammie A go to intercept it. Meanwhile, Sammie B, Mage, and Face are hitting the streets and shaking people down, trying to find out where the factory that is creating it is.
At 16:25, Sammie A and Rigger take out the truck.
At 16:30 Face and crew find the location of the factory and move in to destroy it. Sammie A and rigger head that way to reinforce them. Hackers A&B begin to compromise its security.
At 16:55 the factory is destroyed, with the research files uploaded to hackers A&B so they can search the matrix and make sure there are no other copies of the research online.
17:00, all research and physical evidence is destroyed.
End Mission.

Next mission something completely different. Individual GMs might have their own plot arcs or reoccurring antagonists that they develop during their turn to run games.
Now I need to jump off.
Bye!

[BlackHat]

I like that idea. I agree that several games at once might be too many, and having deadlines like that might help move things along.

[dionysus]

I'm interested. Only one concern re. houserules & gm discretion: if we try and get all our houserules straight before we start playing, it'd be easy to get bogged down in haggling over rules before we even start. I sort of prefer the "cross that bridge when we come to it" rather than the "let's plug all the holes right now" approach.

Would it need to be the world-spanning, champion-of-the-underdog type of organization? It might be more fun to play something a little more...morally ambiguous.

[BlackHat]

I'm interested. Only one concern re. houserules & gm discretion: if we try and get all our houserules straight before we start playing, it'd be easy to get bogged down in haggling over rules before we even start. I sort of prefer the "cross that bridge when we come to it" rather than the "let's plug all the holes right now" approach.

I would agree, except that if we have 6 people, making 3 characters each - there is a good chance that any given "fuzzy" rule will come up during character creation - as the player will want buy-in from all GMs that they're okay with whatever thing he's selecting at char-gen, otherwise he needs to know this then so he can change his idea or shuffle points around. There's still no reason we can just do this as they come up, but I suspect there will be a good bit of this to do, at the beginning, still.

Normally, its a pain to begin every new PBP game getting a feel for a new GM, and creating a character, and hammering out the details and multiple possible interpretations of things with one person. Doing the same thing, 3 times, with 5 different people will be probably 15x as much of a pain - or it could go really smoothly, I'm not sure. Either way, it will require some discussion and consensus.

Would it need to be the world-spanning, champion-of-the-underdog type of organization? It might be more fun to play something a little more...morally ambiguous.

I think either would work. I would have fun with either. One possibility would be something corporate that could go either way - that way, some GMs could run missions where we're doing good for people, and others could run missions where we are simply protecting the agency's bottom line.

[Mister Juan]

Overall, I believe we should try to keep house-rules to a bare minimum. I mean, I know perfectly well that SR4 is far from running as smooth as we'd all like to, but adding in too many "this goes like this instead of how it says" will simply bog us down before the game, and during. Overall, just for the sake of always trying to all be on the same page, we might want to stick as much as we can with the rules as they are written.

So.... how many are we going to be?

[Divine Virus]

I agree it would be good to keep things as RAW as possible, but some interpretation is needed.

Does anyone have any huge pet peeves with any of the rules?

I think five people would be a good minimum, and I am pretty sure we wouldn't want more then 9 people. Maybe maybe 6 or 7 people being an ideal number.

And of course we can make the agency whatever we want. I was just giving an example. I like Black Hat's idea of having an agency that can go either way. I think in this game, flexibility will be a boon.

As for characters, what kind of criteria or limits do we want? Do we want to say everyone has to have exactly three characters, or just have three as a minimum, and let people have any many in their roster as they want?

I have been thinking about it, and I think it would be good if everyone had one character who was strickly 400BP BBB. No rules from any other books. Just so everyone has at least 1 character that could be run by any GM.

And I think we should have at least 1 character with karma to spend at chargen, since I have some ideas for characters that require submersion or initiation.

For the record, I have the following books
BBB
Augmentation
Arsenal
Street Magic (not fully read)
Unwired (not fully read)
Corporate Enclaves (haven't even opened it yet)

[BlackHat]

I agree it would be good to keep things as RAW as possible, but some interpretation is needed.

Does anyone have any huge pet peeves with any of the rules?

Tons, but nothing I am not willing to just accept. I don't expect a lot of problem agreeing to play by RAW, but SR4 seems to have more trouble than some Other Games in having everyone agree to exactly what RAW is.

To borrow an example from your character in another game, can Technomancers emulate/thread Empathy Software? I would say (and have said) that there is a strong indication that if your GM agrees, you can, but, by strict raw, there is no rule that explicitly says you can, the way they call out SimRig and SmartLink as new CFs.

I think five people would be a good minimum, and I am pretty sure we wouldn't want more then 9 people. Maybe maybe 6 or 7 people being an ideal number.

If we had 6-8 players, would the idea be that we would have especially large teams sent out on these missions (padding our PC base to make sure we've got enough people posting to keep it active)? or would the idea be that for a given mission, a smaller team of people would be selected, leaving the other 2-4 sitting on their hands waiting for the current mission to end?

As for characters, what kind of criteria or limits do we want? Do we want to say everyone has to have exactly three characters, or just have three as a minimum, and let people have any many in their roster as they want?

Again, if the idea is that everyone plays, some minimum would be nice if the GM is going to have any choice in the matter (or if we want ot keep one PC from sprinting past the others karma-wise). Of course, making characters is a lot of work, so requiring a certain number might be restrictive too. Certainly, the guy trying to maintain a dozen active shadowrunners, but who can only take one out at a time would be at a slight disadvantage against the guy doing a fourth of the work to play 3 solid runners who all see more action.

I have been thinking about it, and I think it would be good if everyone had one character who was strickly 400BP BBB. No rules from any other books. Just so everyone has at least 1 character that could be run by any GM.

I like this idea a lot, for the same reason - but depending on how the selection process is set up, we might be likely to get a lot of "Joe Lastresort" characters made that way, with better versions that use the appropriate rulebook along for when a GM runs that allows that book.

And I think we should have at least 1 character with karma to spend at chargen, since I have some ideas for characters that require submersion or initiation.

I wouldn't be opposed to this, but we would want a fairly similar amount of money and availability awarded too. Experienced Shadowrunners should have some upgraded gear, and there are a lot of toys that would be fun to get a chance to use, that require availability > 12 or rating > 6.

[DireRadiant]

I'm interested.

[DireRadiant]

Interested. Please explain how, in your view, that this is different from LITS.

LITS main stream is along the "Day in the life" for runners. Actual runs are offshoots and are in their own threads for various GMs and players.

This concept looks to be primarily focused on the run itself. Outside of the run there will be nothing.

[Divine Virus]

Tons, but nothing I am not willing to just accept. I don't expect a lot of problem agreeing to play by RAW, but SR4 seems to have more trouble than some Other Games in having everyone agree to exactly what RAW is.

To borrow an example from your character in another game, can Technomancers emulate/thread Empathy Software? I would say (and have said) that there is a strong indication that if your GM agrees, you can, but, by strict raw, there is no rule that explicitly says you can, the way they call out SimRig and SmartLink as new CFs.

Same, I have tons as well, but none that I can't accept.

If we had 6-8 players, would the idea be that we would have especially large teams sent out on these missions (padding our PC base to make sure we've got enough people posting to keep it active)? or would the idea be that for a given mission, a smaller team of people would be selected, leaving the other 2-4 sitting on their hands waiting for the current mission to end?

I was thinking larger teams, or perhaps different people at different tasks. ie two people hacking, two people working face, four doing musclework, or whatever the mission requires.

Again, if the idea is that everyone plays, some minimum would be nice if the GM is going to have any choice in the matter (or if we want ot keep one PC from sprinting past the others karma-wise). Of course, making characters is a lot of work, so requiring a certain number might be restrictive too. Certainly, the guy trying to maintain a dozen active shadowrunners, but who can only take one out at a time would be at a slight disadvantage against the guy doing a fourth of the work to play 3 solid runners who all see more action.

True, but I think if someone is crazy enough to try a dozen runners, he should be allowed to. Or I suppose people might be able to "retire" characters from their roster, or add new ones.

I like this idea a lot, for the same reason - but depending on how the selection process is set up, we might be likely to get a lot of "Joe Lastresort" characters made that way, with better versions that use the appropriate rulebook along for when a GM runs that allows that book.

I have been trying to figure out how to not make such a character a last resort character as well, without luck.

I wouldn't be opposed to this, but we would want a fairly similar amount of money and availability awarded too. Experienced Shadowrunners should have some upgraded gear, and there are a lot of toys that would be fun to get a chance to use, that require availability > 12 or rating > 6.

Absolutely. We would have to work out rules for higher BP/Karma character gen.

So I think we have about six people now, self-included, so I think it is safe to start brainstorming and hashing things out.
Unfortunately I need to run and shan't be back on till tomorrow evening.

But just to start things off, lets talk about our employeer.

I like the idea of a mid level corperation, something that lets us play both altrusitic missions and morally ambiguous ones. Anyone have any ideas about what such an organization might be like?

Anyone have any character ideas they want to share?
Talk to you all tomorrow, goodnight!
DV

[Dumori]

I have a few runners. I also think karma should be given to all runners on your roster so no one Lagos behind rules wise I dislike emcimbersnce but I think that's optional and I like the contact points rule by franktrollman. Other than that RAW all the way. We should remove the softwear degradation and piricy rules to keep down book keeping. And count me in.

[BlackHat]

We should remove the softwear degradation and piricy rules to keep down book keeping. And count me in.

An option would be to assume that the "agency" by whatever means it has, maintains updates for our programs once we get the original clearance/assignments. Perhaps it prefers that we not use buggy open source or virusy pirated versions of programs, and so a character can pay normal price for programs, but just assume they won't degrade, but won't be easily traceable either.

[ludomastro]

In no particular order:

I'm in favor of contact points as a houserule since it adds some degree of realism to the number of contacts.

I'm not a Matrix guy - PC or GM.

Also in favor of not using software degradation.

I would say that every character in a player's "stable" gets the same amount of karma as the active character so that the game can progress without each GM going, "Ummm, yeah, your Street Sam looks interesting but he's gonna die, so no."

I would suggest, but not enforce, that each player has three characters.

I agree that each person should have at least one character who is completely BBB compliant.

I have the following books:
BBB
Street Magic (my precious)
Augmentation (skimmed, not entirely comfortable with all the rules yet)

Proposed Houserule:
Because the caps RAW places on skill advancement, I have been lowering starting skills to:
one at 5 with the rest at 3
OR
two at 4 with the rest at 3
AND
Skill groups capped at 3

It's not everybody's thing but it has been working for me.