Looting Dumpshock for Ideas, Help me out, will ya? Options

[McCummhail]

This is a way to keep the 'tech+magic' feeling of shadowrun: why settle for something you can do in cyberpunk when you can add magic, too?

If you are playing with seasoned veterans of Shadowrun, it might be worth while to break some of the established rules of the world.

Magician compatible Bioware (no essence loss)
Selective body shifting
Dormant AI using 'unused' brain matter as it's home node
Earthdawn critter gene splice (tskrang or something)
Magic/Tech based teleportation / portal technology
Psychosis free Cyborg union

Throwing a wrench in their perception of the world might make their concept of the world more malleable (and be a step outside the norm).

[Adarael]

Yeah, these are all people I've been playing with for 6-10 years, so they know their way around the block. Interestingly, the "AI using brain matter as home node" *is* one of the PCs. One of the things I'm doing is I'm asking them "What concept do you want to play and what are the character's touchstones in terms of skill and personality?" And then I'm the one making the PCs. They'll never see them until they begin play - and even then, things they have and know won't appear on the sheet until they 'unlock' them.

I'm looking for serious wrenching, and I figure a great way to do that is to break the wall of familiarity between player and PC, to drive home that the PCs are unfamiliar with themselves.

[3278]

Medical experiments with a heavy dose of mindphunk?

Make them psychotic. If they don't get regular (EXPENSIVE) medical treatments, you start handing them notes to tell them what they've seen. You know, "you just saw [a little girl in a nightgown] run through the intersection of this Azzie blacksite hallway. Roll composure or follow." Or "You've just realized that you haven't bathed in two weeks. Your teeth feel funny. Roll composure." Or, best yet, "You just realized that you have no idea when you started getting your treatments or how you came to find [Dr. Bentway]'s facilities to begin with. Roll, ..oh sod it! Psychotic break time!"

And/or: don't ask them to "roll composure or follow," and thus give away that it's a hallucination. Just tell them, "A little girl is about to run into traffic; you're probably close enough to catch her." After they get hit by a car or two - metaphorically; you'd want to mix up the hallucinations and their effects - they're going to stop obeying the hallucinations: then you give them one that's real, and let something really terrible happen because of it.

You could pretty quickly get to the point where not even the players knew what's real anymore: did the character's wife really die, or is she just missing and the character is remembering everything wrong? She could be right here and you wouldn't know!

Obviously, this can go too far, and I wouldn't do something like this with every character, anyway: they should all be mindfucked in different fascinating ways.

[Method]

One idea that I've been toying with is changing the way contacts work. Instead of buying connection and loyalty the connection rating is determined by the contacts back story and the PC purchases loyalty at [connection x 2] BP or whatever. This makes well-connected high-loyalty contacts much more valuable. For your purposes I would recommend not telling the players how loyal the contacts really are and devising a system for increasing and decreasing loyalty based on player actions. When loyalty drops to zero or below the contact sells the PC out.

[Dave E]

Print out some nuyen play money, and actually carry out all the transactions. Props are more vivid than a number on your equipment listing. (Bonus points if you know how to make credstick props that work.)

Old post, but I could see using cheapie flash drives and a password protected(only gm knows) Excel file to contain info on the credstick rateing, and nuyen amount. Multiple directeries keep it simple for characters with multiple fake id's. There is a chance someone could hack the excel password, so dont depend on it for keeping track of character money.

Dave

[McCummhail]

Have you had a chance to begin this atypical game?
I'd be curious to know how things are going and what choices you went with.

[Tyro]

Have you had a chance to begin this atypical game?
I'd be curious to know how things are going and what choices you went with.

I too would like to see how this turns out.

[Adarael]

Have you had a chance to begin this atypical game?
I'd be curious to know how things are going and what choices you went with.

Not yet! Probably in a month or so. I'm on the last 3rd of the Jovian Chronicles game I'm running as a break from Shadowrun.

[wind_in_the_ston...]

This is a great thread. I'm bookmarking it. Thanks for asking the questions well enough to get such good responses, and thanks to all for those responses.

As for money, instead of giving them paychecks, give them moneymaking schemes. Ones that don't pay off at the beginning, and then only pay enough to keep them on the line. I suck at making ideas concrete, but I bet your or someone else her can come up with some schemes.

Also, make them work hard to hold onto what they've got. Not only gear (with SOTA costs and armor degradation or whatever), but make them invest in their contacts to keep them. Opponents that like to destroy foci as a combat tactic (but don't overdo that one). Their homes and hideouts get found and destroyed.

[Adarael]

As for money, instead of giving them paychecks, give them moneymaking schemes. Ones that don't pay off at the beginning, and then only pay enough to keep them on the line. I suck at making ideas concrete, but I bet your or someone else her can come up with some schemes.

This is the best idea I've heard all week, and that includes the idea to give me free cake. One of the main things I want to drive is the need to interact with a world that doesn't want to have anything to do with them, and quite possibly will make them dead. Because if you don't do that, it rapidly becomes a game of "I move to a 3rd world nation and hide for 10 years."