Retirement, What would you want in a retirement system? Options

[BishopMcQ]

This last week, Aaron and I had a chance to sit down with Jason Hardy and talk Missions. While I can't discuss most of the specifics, the overall intent is that we want to keep Missions fun for everybody. This means you will be seeing some changes to the Missions structure as we keep what's working and tweak what's not. (I'm a big fan of not "fixing" things that aren't broken.) The future of Missions, Retirement, Prime Runner modules, were all discussed. More information as we have concrete facts to announce, but know that we are listening.

That said, I'd love to see more chatter about:

Retirement (Yes, No, Don't Care)
--Why you feel that way
--Solutions, how you'd handle it on a global scale
--Deal-breakers for you, things that would upset you

Prime Runners
--What would you like to see
--How often would you ideally like to see new offerings
--Separation between Regular Missions/Prime Runners (How would you separate them)
--Should characters have to choose one level of campaign?

Missions in General
--What do you like
--What do you wish would change (see more of XX, less of YY)
--Do you like playing in a separate playground, or wish for more integration into a metaplot?

As a side note: I enjoy active discourse, especially well thought out discussions. If you have ideas and feedback, please share it. The more constructive and specific your feedback is, the better. If you are posting, sending me a PM, or emailing to talk about a subject, be clear about what you like/dislike, why you feel that way (if possible), and possible solutions to the problem (if applicable). Messages and posts where it feels like you are measuring your e-peen against the rest of the community don't help the discourse and honestly get less attention due to their presentation.

[CollateralDynamo]

Thanks for the update Bishop! As can be obvious by my little post count thingy, I'm new to Dumpshock, but I've been playing in the New York missions avidly since they began, and I played around with the Denver missions more then a little. So here is my 2 bit uncertified credstick, feel free to slot it (that sounded dirtier then I had intended):

Retirement
On this I am a maybe. Forced retirement I think would make the game less fun for a lot of people. Unlike that cancer causing game, most of the people who come to play missions, at least at conventions, seem to me to be the kind of people there to have a good time already. Not the kind of people to use their karma to create brokenly powerful characters and ruin the game for everyone. These people who are just having fun with a character they concocted will probably be none too pleased if they were forced into retirement early. I know it would upset me more then a little.

However, if you give players the option of retirement, with some sort of bonus for their next character, or a promise to create some nice prime runner contact for anyone who has "retired" from the shadows, then I'm sure that you will get players opting in to this.

Prime Runners
I think that prime runner content would be a TON of fun. Of course, with increase risk would come a vastly increased reward. For this reason, if you employed a Prime Runner system, it would likely be unfair to allow Prime Runners back into regular missions. Prime Runners do some crazy things and get some really twinked gear. You don't all of the sudden want to start writing missions worrying about if someone got that rocket launcher and super ex rockets back in SRM-PR-02.

As far as frequency goes, I really only get a chance to play SR missions at Gen Con, so if you were offering up intense content for karma'd up characters I'd like to see at least one (preferably 2 or 3) options per year. This way, I would have a chance to play the character I retired, and still have a chance to play in the kid pool with my new missions character.

Missions in General
Overall let me just start with a kudos on missions. Writing generalized, short length adventures is super hard work, and you guys have been doing great at keeping them interesting! But I did have a few things I wanted to mention.
Affiliations: I suppose it kind of makes sense that the megacorps all know exactly what it is you are doing while you are in Manhattan...but it is driving my paranoia meter through the roof. I quite literally got an affiliation with a company because I was "professionally sneaky and untrackable". HOW DID THEY FIND ME? But that is just my personal gripe, on a more general note, the rewards your affiliates give you are cool, but sometimes don't make sense. For instance, my drone rigger is teamed up with horizon more often then not. And they keep giving him crazy knock-out drugs or access to awakened gear shops.
As a player I want to keep the affiliation because it makes gameplay more interesting. But as a character I would be getting pretty pissed if I was doing all this work for a megacorp and they kept giving me sorcerer goodies. If you instead came up with some sort of reward options system, that would be really cool. Something like, "Horizon is very pleased with your work. They offer you either, an unbound power focus or a heavily modified news camera drone that just might have a sniper rifle hidden inside it. Which would you like?" That sort of option would make it much more entertaining IMO.

As far as the playgrounds go, keep Missions missions, and the Metaplot the metaplot. The current amount of overlap is quite sufficient.

Thanks again for this chance to ramble on and on about my thoughts on your awesome missions!

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif) Cheers (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

Collateral Dynamo (CeeDee)

[Wraith235]

I personally have seen 1 instance that is listed as a "Forced retirement"

and 1 that turned into a forced retirement (Both from the same mod BTW)

each of these is a different basket

I will do my best not to post any spoilers but enuf reference for ppl to do the math

(1) the players have the option to step into a Role that is banned by missions campaign ... now I personally dont see any player really deciding to take this route .. but I suppose its possible

(2) this one takes a bit of knowledge on the SR4 Lore ... but if you know your Lore the result is a 7 digit payoff ... I spoke to Arron about this and was told its basically a retirement option

the 2nd example is the type of situation where I am 100% for Karma transfer ... if they can pull off the requirements stated in the Lore effectivly then I believe the the player(s) should be rewarded for Knowledge, Creativity, and success of the endeavor.... not told that because of the pulicity surrounding the event that their shadowruning Career would basically be over with no compensation to the new character

I am enjoying the missions setting ... but this was probably my biggest Gripe about it so far ... and needless to say my players were not happy either (some more than others)

now I dont know if there are any other mods like this where the Lore of the Game has a chance to play this heavily into the missions campaign

Voluntary retirement I dont think Karma transfers should be allowed except at the pre approved times (Setting changes ect)

and then the 3rd type .... 6 feet under ... sorry chummer , thems the breaks in the shadows

[Aaron]

Since there has still been interest, I'll throw out a teaser: we're not planning a retirement system, we plan to do a promotion system.

[cryptoknight]

Here's my take on this.

I know that the whole concept of level based characters is anethema to SR.

but.

Why not work on releasing more modules somehow?

Have the majority be for characters with 0-50 karma, 50%
Then for 50-100 karma 25%
100-150 Karma 16.67%
150-200 Karma 8.3%
200+ Karma 4.167%

With 2 missions per month... that's 24 per year and breaks down like this. (add 1 for the really high karma guys)
12 for 0-50 karma (1 per month)
6 for 50-100 karma (1 per 2 months)
4 for 100-150 karma (1 per quarter)
2 for 150-200 karma (1 per 6 months)
1 for 250+ karma (about 1 every 2 years)

In the convention circuit, you'd see people working up new characters and then slowing down a bit when they hit fewer and fewer missions. It would encourage them to likely create different and varied characters and still give them something to do with the big bad boys.

[BishopMcQ]

Crypto--Aaron and I are working on a system that will produce more Missions per year, overall. At the moment, however, we are still trying to get the kinks worked out of the system so that current products are released in a timely fashion.