Grit, Adding more grit into Shadowrun Options

[Chrysalis]

Greets,

I was thinking about a while someone in one of the threads commented that Shadowrun is not really dark, just a bit smudgy around the edges, like all those bad 80s adventure movies rolled into one.

Well, I was thinking how can Shadowrun be made grittier. I don't see shadowrunners living in hovels, I don't see Seattle being a place of rain. I don't see NPCs just as well shoot them as help them.

So my question beyond the assenine "it's up to the GM!" how can SR be made not only darker but grittier. How can we take the happy realm of Shadowrun and turn it into a dark mysgonistic, racist world, where corp enforcers decide they don't like you and beat the living crap out of you just to show where they stand. No freedom fighters, no pretense even of ideals a world where you have to be a monster to survive.

[Oenone]

A lot of the atmosphere is down to how the players actually want to play. No matter how gritty and dark you might want things to be it's no good if the party decide they're going to hide themselves inside a giant pink cake and have themselves delivered to a wetwork targets house.

Using the severe injury rules works as does making low essence impact upon a player by warping their personality.

The GM can influence this by picking themes for missions. For example to make the last run I GM'd a bit more dark I had them break into a research lab only to discover they were using Elf babies for DNA testing. Complete with creepy science lab with it's own inbuilt nanite baby blender.

[Wesley Street]

- Screw over your PCs. Have the Johnson only pay half as much as promised because of some petty detail a runner failed to pay attention to.
- Have your PCs be the victims of regular burglaries if they don't pay for adequate security. It prevents squatter power-gaming too!
- Have equipment break on critical glitches. Say, for instance, a PC's TMP submachine gun comes unbolted in the middle of a firefight and disintegrates in his hands.
- Award karma for only EVIL behavior.
- Failing all that, randomly kick your players in the shins.

[DireRadiant]

Mechanically, the number one item is to eliminate Edge, or reduce the refresh rate for edge significantly. Look at bumping drain values for spells to DV, instead of DV/2. Reduce armor effectiveness in reducing damage. Don't switch Physical to Stun, make Physical always physical. There are a list of grittier mechanics options in all the books.

Anything that makes it harder to do things, more likely to get hurt, and harder to recover will contribute to the mood of grittiness.

And deciding on those options is in fact up to the GM.

[Ryu]

Retaliate against the runners. Destroy their assets, force them to change IDs frequently. Even if their rate of pay is sufficient to supercompensate the losses, they will feel that they have to fight for everything they own.

But by all means, don´t force that upon the players if they don´t like it.

[Pendaric]

I simply point out what their contacts have to do to survive and therefore by extension what they have to do. For example a 'retired fixer' contact in the barrens geeked a breeder chiphead for disrespecting his turf, simply because not to would make him look weak.
All the characters have lived in poverty at some point and know all to well the hell hole they dragged themselves out of will reclaim them if the cred stops flowing, the barrens re-illustrated to them every time they enter for gear or paydata.
Dystopian reality that drags down those with ideals to the most primative necessities and amoral imperatives.

[Gyro the Greek S...]

As to grit, you don't necessarily have the game more mechanically challenging, or punishing to those players who are playing a character who should know about security (read: any professional Shadowrunner) who are not themselves conscientious of such things.

Even relatively little things can make things dark. Just have the local gangers beating up on some kid on the street, really going to town on him. These are the gangers the character pays for protection, and if they intervene, they just hosed themselves and their possessions. Either way, they're paying money to thugs who sometimes hurt undeserving people for giggles. Don't let them forget that.

A lot of 'darkness', like the example above, can be atmospheric. The used-looking junkies on the asphalt, the ghettos, the sense of futility, the people who will never go anywhere in life. Daily police reports about murder, rape and all the rest with a community that shrugs its shoulders and doesn't care so long as it doesn't happen where people with money live.

Then, as has been mentioned previously, are the runs. I ran a canned run called "Born to Die" by Aaron Pavao. There are a couple of brainwashed little kids the characters have to kill to complete their mission. Their mission is to rescue a pregnant woman whose fetus is being experimented on, but they find about twenty-nine extra women. If you were playing it dark, you could structure their confinement such that there's no way to break out all twenty-nine. So you rescue the one you're paid for, and leave the rest and their children to...whatever you can imagine.

To me, it seems to me that Shadowrun is as dark as the elements that you emphasize.

[Rasumichin]

- Have equipment break on critical glitches. Say, for instance, a PC's TMP submachine gun comes unbolted in the middle of a firefight and disintegrates in his hands.

I thought critically glitching a SMG test would rather come down to shooting yourself in the foot.

- Award karma for only EVIL behavior.

Grit, not slaughterfest. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)





My recommendations :

First of all, don't confuse gritty and dark.
The SR background in itself isn't dark.
In fact, much of it is cheerfully bubblegum coloured, even if it's completely messed up, cruel and insurvivable.
Take the whole cyberzombie stuff- creepy as hell, even with deep implications regarding human identity, self-perception and the whole meaning of life stuff if you want it to, but at the same time, it comes with a nice side dish of science fantasy kitsch rooted deeply in classic pulp culture.

SR is the gonzo game.
Not as much as RIFTS, but for successfull mainstream RPGs, it's as gonzo as it gets.


But is it gritty?
In the sense that it's a harsh world that doesn't give a fuck about Joe Blow on the streets?
Where incredibly powerful entities do incredibly evil things and no one can do a damn about it, and even if someone could, wouldn't do so because he wouldn't even bother?
A place ripe with mysery and human suffering?
Full of racial tensions, exploitation, imaginative new ways to die a slow and painful death and tons of eerie stuff lingering just out of sight of the masses?

Sure it is.


It's also a much more deadly game than, say, D&D.
The whole eggshells with hammers stuff.
No excessive hit points, no resurrections, even though there's the whole hand of god stuff around and damage can be healed insanely fast if you tale the right precautions.

Player characters tend to have a fairly good chance of survival if the players don't act too dumb, but it's not a CR-adjusted cakewalk either.


If you want to bring up grit, use settings such as Bug City, SOX, Tripolis Hot Zone, Asamando, Lagos, Belfast, PCC, Tenochtitlan, the North Sea, that toxic zone in England, glow city or whatever.
Bring in a stronger focus on the barrens, ghoul communities, genetic experimentation gone awry, hate-mongering policlubs, bunraku parlors, Tamanous, shapeshifter mutilation sex slaves, toxics, serial killer twisted adepts, jarhead kiddie brains with an identity crisis and so on.

It's mostly a matter of spotlight and focus to up the grit factor.

I disagree with most of the suggestions for simply making the game deadlier.
SR can digress into a cakewalk if you run it too easy and without considering the full impact of the rules applied against the characters, but i don't think that's your problem.

SR isn't like Cthulhu.
If your character gets wrecked (killed, crippled permanently, deprived of 500K of ressources, gets his good rep ruined forever or whatnot), you'll end up with hours of character creation.
If that happens every other game session, it gets tiresome.

If you want PCs that can die at any moment, play CP2020.
Better to have chargen that is done rather quick if you want that kind of game.

The "unfairness" of rolling up a character instead of tweaking around for a couple of hours helps, too.

SR basically always was the game for your own hyperawesome custom super(anti)hero fantasy.
That's countergritty on a very basic level.

SR is, on a very fundamental, non-fluffy, systemic level, more for said superheroes overcoming the grit than people who are going to take a hearty bite out of the shitsandwich they call their world.

Grit in SR is basically a way to make your character appear more awesome and to show that there are people who are much, much worse than him.

D&D = heroic
SR = antiheroic
Rolemaster, Runequest = gritty
CoC, CP2020 = victimizing

[TheGothfather]

In my experience, there's really three things that you can do to make your game grittier, and only one of them is mechanical.

First, frame your scenes. It seems obvious, but scene framing can really crank up whatever mood you're trying to get across to your players. Also, skip to actual scenes. Unless there's a reason for you to let the players meander to a destination, as soon as they say "I wanna go to the bar," then they're at the bar, and something should be happening. If that something is gritty, then your game is gritty.

Second, when you introduce conflict into the game, make sure that the stakes are set in a way where the PCs have to make a serious choice. If you want the game to be gritty, don't focus on whether or not they beat a particular challenge, or come out on top in any particular conflict. Instead, focus on what the repercussions of that choice are. Sure, the players may blow away the group of gangers that accosts them on the street, but the consequences of that action might be that the gang's going to come after them, and you can bet that there are more gangers than the team has full clips.

The last one kind of ties into the first, but I found it useful to make the players state their intent on every roll - that is, I let them tell me what happened if they succeeded. The flip side to that is that you have the opportunity to tell them before they roll what happens if they fail. The reason for this is that they can choose to not roll - basically voluntarily failing at a task without suffering the consequences you informed them of. Say you've got a character running from an LS rotodrone across some rooftops, and he comes to a wide gap. He says he wants to jump across, and you tell him that if he fails, he's going to fall and break a leg. He then has the opportunity to make the jump and escape, miss the jump and break his leg, or not jump at all and risk getting arrested. The really important thing to do if you use a technique like this is to keep piling on consequences for failed rolls. Sure, it's going to take your game in weird directions, but it also makes every roll a difficult choice for the PC to make, which in turn gritties up your game.

Of course, these are just the things that worked for me, and the campaign I ended last weekend was pretty non-standard for Shadowrun.

[hyzmarca]

As I said before, grittiness is slaughtering a cave full of kobolds and then discovering their babies.

Grittiness comes not from systematic oppression or uncomfortable lifestyles or even bad rolls. Grittiness comes from those little things that let the PCs know that what they're doing hurts real people.

You want an idea of real grittiness, I suggest watching Generation Kill and Over There. Both are good and show just how fucked up things can get even with the best of intentions due to human fallibility.

When the PCs start checking dead guards, have them discover things like crayon drawings proclaiming the slain individual to be the world's greatest [parent of the appropriate gender]. Guys who look like corporate strike teams from a distance are really just juvenile camel herders. Stuff like that.

From an old thread:

Always make sure you add in personal touches.

Like the guard with a cute crayon drawing in his pocket, signed "I Love You Daddy!"

Or a secret love letter to another one of the guards that never got delivered.

Maybe a picture with an attached note, from a tracing service telling the guard "Good news! We found your biological mother!" - and it's a picture of one of the runner's parents.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)


-karma

[sunnyside]

As people have mentioned the basic SR setting is "grittier" than most people play it.

But that said one of the things I liked about SR is that it makes sense. There are games like CP2020 where the corps are getting silly. Like they want to destroy old art, because, well, that's a bad thing to do. It gets to the point of straining suspension of disbelief and goes against the SR trend of being smarter than other games. The dragons don't just wait in their dens to get ganked or pointlessly try to work out evil schemes. No they go on cable TV and then run for president.

I'd say if you really want to get down and extra dirty just change the setting. Instead of the reasonably stable Seattle send them off to South Africa or one of the warring Chinese provences. Or anyplace where some African style genocide is ongoing.

I mean as you read this some woman in Darfur is probably being raped next to the body of her dead child. You don't have to go far to find all the grit you want. Doesn't have to be Africa either, the Japanese were known for gutting Chinese women they gang raped back in WWII and leaving them to bleed out in the street. Now that they're a powerhouse and still as racist as every that could be going on again where they're expanding.

[tete]

I don't know how Seattle was in New Seattle or Runners Havens but Seattle in the ancient 1e Seattle Source book was not a nice place. You had the dump of the barrens that the cops wont even go out to without riot gear and the pollution giving you acid rain to ruin your armored jacket and red smog days where you need to go outside with a respirator. Putting things like that in your setting will add more grit than any rules could hope to achieve.

[HeavyMetalYeti]

Dont forget rats. Have the PCs follow the sound of a crying baby only to find it being eaten alive next to the remains of its mother who ODed/killed in a driveby/tried to give her 12 gauge a bj...etc.

Have a jumper land on the hood of their car while driving in broad daylight in the posh area of town or have someone step infront of them while their driving to the meet with the J.

suicide is grit

[Sir_Psycho]

BTL is a canon shadowrun "substance" to be abused.

It's one of the most disturbing drugs. Heavy users are so distanced from reality, they might defecate on themselves, they might idly scratch at their arm due to a damaged sensory response, and walk down the street bleeding profusely. You see the tell-tale twitching and glaze-eyed stares from the joytoys, the amerind in the alley punching a wall in a BTL induced hot rage, the child, barely 13 years old, sitting on the doorstep of a long closed down store, not playing with the collect-a-idoru game on his commlink, but lying there zonked out on a hot sim.

And if this drug abuse doesn't effect them, if it's too outside their personal sphere, then have it encroach on their life. They notice the tell-tale signs in their favourite contact. It gets worse. If the runner doesn't do anything, maybe the contact accidentally slots a black death sim and they find him rotting away in his place of business when he doesn't return your their calls. And don't forget family members.

Also, play up the cybered society angle. You basically need to invest in cyber to get anywhere. Shadowrunners are the first example. Ever wonder why Shadowrunners have low lifestyles, but 200,000:nuyen: in ware in their bodies? Because they want to keep that edge. The sarariman wants that encephalon, math spu or cerebral booster to get an edge over his contemporaries. Bodyguards, security guards and bouncers need to get wired, the body builder needs some synthetic muscle enhancements and billy gets laughed at at school for his thick glasses, because mummy and daddy can't afford cyber-eyes for him. And once they get cybered, does it make them feel better? Does it make them feel adequate? Does it stop them needing, or thinking they need more enhancement? So many people feel the need to be special, to be better than their peers. When a few grand can buy that "better", how far do you go?

And don't forget, cyber does things to you. Essence is not just a decimal system to stop you filling up on ware. Every bit of cyber you put into your body, you feel less whole. You can see, but those cams don't feel like your eyes. Read/Re-read the intro to the cybertech section of Augmentation. Find the now ancient Cybertechnology and read up on the life and times of Hatchetman. Sure, he's a cyber-zombie, but he recounts his first mods. He talks about how his cyber-eyes made him feel. He talks about how jumpy he became after getting wired.

Cyberware has proliferated throughout Sixth World culture. But it doesn't make people happy. The bouncer that got wired? Why did he do it? For piece of mind? Maybe. Did he get it? Hell no. Now he's even jumpier than before. He twitches everytime there's a sudden movement in the line. Eventually he loses his job because he accidentally slit open a club-goer with an innocent case of ADHD with his spur. Maybe he becomes a shadowrunner. Maybe you meet him.

Shadowrun is supposed to be dystopic. And if your characters are playing it as if they're living in a rainbow gumdrop, then (and this sounds rather bitter) punish them. If they want their character to be happy, to be successful, then they're going to have to work their arses off. Through the blood and the grime.

[Blade]

Blade's guide to grit (short version):

* Environment: Pollution is everywhere. Corporations can do nearly everything they want, and those who are against are labeled as eco-terrorist. Even when there are no coulds, the sky isn't exactly blue but blue-grayish, there's no "air quality" rating but a "pollution" rating corresponding to the required respirator's rating. Don't hesitate to have your PC fall ill because of the pollution (for example after swimming in a river or in the sea outside of regulated areas, or after spending a whole day out without a respirator). In the Barrens there's no garbage collectors, garbage piles up where the wind takes it, attracting flies and rodents... And you don't want to be anywhere near these when it rains.

* Quality of Life: Even with a "middle" lifestyle, a character won't eat natural products regularly and will rarely eat real meat. With a low lifestyle, you get power failures, your tap water (when you actually get it running) is sometimes muddy and toxic. If you don't have security devices, you're likely to find squatters in your place. In secure neighborhoods you need to get past checkpoints to get to your home. Middle lifestyle aren't very common: you're either a have (high or luxury lifestyle) or a have not (street to low lifestyle).

* Society: Traditional values don't have much support anymore. People have lost their bearings and turn to corporations in hope of structure and values. They live under a permanent stress they can only escape through consumption, drugs or simsense. SINless people are criminals just because they live, and for most of them the law is just the local rules. Rich people are above the law. They can get away with nearly anything (as long as nobody important is affected).

* Magic: Magic is often seen as the light of hope, except for some bad inhuman things, which is too "black and white" to me. That's why there are a few things I like to keep in mind. For example, magic is linked to nature, but the sixth world's civilization is often incompatible with nature. That's what led to the totalitarist green dictatorship in Siberia which isn't exactly a nice situation. Keep in mind also that Magic is primarily used by corporations, which means that it will be used for profit rather than for "greater good"... no wonder that the most common spells are combat or mind manipulation spells. Finally I really like to consider that the need for karma of awakened character is an in-game mechanism to represent the awakened's thirst for power.

* A runner's life: don't forget that Shadowrunners are criminal. They aren't hired for the greater good, they kill (and don't tell me you don't kill people with Gel rounds, even a punch can be fatal. Gel rounds are just "less than lethal" ammunitions.). And if you want to make the world a better place, why are you a barely human killing machine? So you rescued these children from a horrible corporate experimentation... what now? How can you help them live a happy life? You are quicker than anyone, you can summon powerful creatures, but what can you do to really help these children?

[DV8]

A long time ago, a question was posed on the ShadowRN mailing list about what the Seattle Barrens was like, much like Blade already did, many people came up with really immersive and comprehensive answers. I decided to keep a few of those answers here, and I think they might help anyone interject a little detail and grit into their game as it did with mine.

By the way, Blade, that's a great graphic novel you have there, and I don't say that very quickly. I hope you'll get to it again sometime soon. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Blade]

Thanks! I've actually resumed my work on it this week and I hope I'll be able to publish a graphic introduction to Shadowrun soon (in a month or so).

[Wesley Street]

I don't know how Seattle was in New Seattle or Runners Havens but Seattle in the ancient 1e Seattle Source book was not a nice place. You had the dump of the barrens that the cops wont even go out to without riot gear and the pollution giving you acid rain to ruin your armored jacket and red smog days where you need to go outside with a respirator. Putting things like that in your setting will add more grit than any rules could hope to achieve.

It's the same in 2070 (4th ed.) as it was in 2050 (1st. ed.). Just the famous faces and power players have changed.

[DV8]

Thanks! I've actually resumed my work on it this week and I hope I'll be able to publish a graphic introduction to Shadowrun soon (in a month or so).

Awesome. Keep us updated on the progress, if you can. Looking forward. The concept of a webcomic intrigues me, but the results are so incredibly mediocre. The only thing I liked, before bumping into yours, was NYC 2123.

[VagabondStar]

"Grit" can mean a lot of things, and everyone's measure of gritty is going to be a bit different. (Duh)

I think that the best way to run a gritty campaign is going to be one in which the moral ambiguities of shadowrunning are played up. This is going to require cooperation between the PCs and the GM - because a campaign that is heavy on the girt is going to be tantamount to running in a futuristic film noire. The feeling is going to pervade everything. The common man leads a hopeless existence at the behest of huge, faceless megacorporations that count him as little more than an (very small) asset. Everyone is on the take, everyone is fallible and you can't trust anyone for too long. Betrayals are common place and there is no honor among thieves. Or Shadowrunners. Or Corps.

Beyond enforcing existing rules (be they common rules or optional rules) and making Mr. Johnson screw the players, there will have to be a degree of common belief in this world of drek. Everyone will have to be on the same page, and it's not going to be easy. Too often, games can degenerate into simplistic "roll to hit" scenarios where the PCs triumphantly smash all obstacles and run away. It can't be that easy. Every action has a consequence, though some will be more obvious than others.

Ultimately, everyone (the players) will have to care about the world, and the impact they (their characters) are making in it.

[psychophipps]

My group has made wound penalties increase the threshold by the usual modifier because removing 3 whole dice from being almost dead for a 12+ dice pool specialist is, well...a frickin' joke. It worked great in older editions were you might have rolled 5-7 dice w/o Combat Pool, but it's not so hot for the current set-up.

Another interesting one is to use a single wound track. Rather than the two tracks, just add the 1/2 stat bonuses from Body and Will to the base 8 boxes. Extend the modifiers to the -4 or maybe -5 and go from there. Stun damage is marked with a "/" in a box and generally heals first. Physical damage is marked with a "X" and is healed normally via time, first aid, and/or magic. This reflects reality a bit more where getting socked in the head and being shot makes emergency treatment, and continuing to fight, a bit harder to do.
I'm warning you now that this is quite a bit harsher, especially when combined with the optional rule above, but really makes your players think twice (or three times) before they decide to just take the lovin' because they have good soak scores for damage and/or casting.

[DV8]

I'm not entirely sure the OP was asking for house rules to make the game deadlier or more difficult. I think this was a question of flavour.

[Chrysalis]

I wanted flavour, ways to make the game grittier. But how not to over do it. Tenth strung out hooker on the street starts becoming numbing.

[Wesley Street]

Shadowrun is a setting of extremes already. I'm frankly at a loss as to how it could be made more grim 'n gritty...

Take a look in the newspaper and see what's going on in the world. Take the concept, make it doubly intense, and introduce that. What you and I think may be gritty are probably two different things. I already live in a proto-Sprawl so grit is an everyday reality for me.

[psychophipps]

I wanted flavour, ways to make the game grittier. But how not to over do it. Tenth strung out hooker on the street starts becoming numbing.

Well, that's part of the grit as well, IMO. When the players are so jaded that drug dealers using a small gang of orc kids as mules and burnt out 14-year-old hookers are normal, then I say that you've hit "Shadowrun" just fine.