Corporate Runs (how do I do it?) Options

[deek]

The more scenes you run, the less time it takes to give your players more detail on the fly. I've always liked starting out writing down this level of detail in my early games but after you play enough, a lot of those details are just off the top of your head and the only reason you'd need to write any of it down was if you were submitting something to a publisher or wanting to share with other people.

I've been playing SR4 for a few years and DnD for a couple decades, so if anyone took a look at my notes or adventures, they'd be quite disturbed at how little was written down...

[Neurosis]

Hey I used to be a 'winging it' GM too...I've just transformed into a planning GM with age.

[Relecs]

It seems to me what I really need (as I prefer to wing it as our group comes up with some pretty out there stuff that I'm never going to think of as the GM) is this...

1. Johnson's request
2. Johnson's real motivation
3. The structure and/or npcs who will appear at the final location of the run.
4. A number of random locations and npcs for those random events
5. a general understanding of where things will appear.

As long as I have that it seems like I should be okay...

Thoughts? Did I miss anything really important? Is there anything up there you disagree with?

[graymagiker]

Looks good. You might also consider other interested parties besides the J and the corp/group directly being attacked.

Example:

J hires runners to hit a MCT plant and retrieve some data, his real motivation is that he works for Aztec and his higher ups want the data and told him to get it by any means possible. But another runner team has been hired by a disgruntled ex employee of the plant to do as much damage to the plant as possible. The second runner team isn't necessarily working against the first but neither should know this for sure before it comes up.

[onlyghostdancesw...]

I'm kind of an "expert" in planning these kinds of runs to the last detail. If you'd like to see a detailed breakdown of a corporate facility and it security as an example, just let me know.

out of curiousity what did you use to make that floor plan? to me it looks like you used vacant in COD4 in a top down view.

[Smokeskin]

I was also thinking i played some fps in that, couldn't recall the game though.

[onlyghostdancesw...]

Indeed I think I haz won the cookie.

[Tiralee]

In all cases - Make it a simple mission.

If your players are the type to plan at all, they will complicate things beyond anything horrible you could have thought up.

If your players are the type to drive a dump-truck full of plastique (Expensive, but god, what a mess) into a wall, then you can mention things like police response time, etc. "What? You guys could have done some legwork..."


BTW: who else enjoyed Red Faction 2? I seriously loved loading up a heavy-hauler with a MOAB, remotes and a few gas cannisters and driving off a cliff into a heavily-fortified base. The only problem was the "helping hands" who dived into the truck to help me....I will always feel guilty about doing that with 100% approval.

BTW: dropped to 15% approval after the blast.
-Tir

ReeeeeeeeeedFACtiooooooooooooon!

[PoliteMan]

In all cases - Make it a simple mission.

If your players are the type to plan at all, they will complicate things beyond anything horrible you could have thought up.

If your players are the type to drive a dump-truck full of plastique (Expensive, but god, what a mess) into a wall, then you can mention things like police response time, etc. "What? You guys could have done some legwork..."

QFT

I'm primarily a player and I recommend you add exactly one twist to the standard mission parameters of "Mr. J hires you, you bust in, grab stuff, leave". Maybe Mr. J is double-crossing us, maybe the facility has a surprise inspection, maybe the goods are actually somewhere else, all are great but in a standard 4 hour session my group can only really handle one of those twists. We usually spend about an hour on leg-work, an hour on planning, an hour shooting our way out when things go wrong (of course they go wrong!) and an hour joking around, eating pizza, etc. That's just not enough time to deal with all the different twists I hear on these boards sometimes.

Besides, I vastly prefer one twist with a lot of depth behind it than four twists that we rush over because we don't have enough time to explore them.

[Mardrax]

I do still wonder how people can actually do a complete run, beginning to end, in 4 hours. My group tends to take three sessions, if not more. Even without too many twists and whatnot. Decreasing through proper use of cheatsheets, but still, 4 hours? No way.

[deek]

Mardrax, I hear you. Most of my runs span 2-3 sessions. I think a lot of it is due to my players being too used to DnD. Even though we have been playing SR4 for a year or two, they still seem to go into each mission asking Mr. J very few questions and then after accepting the job, expecting me to just hand them all the details they need. When the figure out they actually have to do legwork and formulate a plan, they just take a long time to process everything.

In fact, I had to specially tailor a campaign in which they were a corporate black ops team and I basically set up the mission, the objectives and gave them a bunch of "options" of what they could do, varying the difficulty of the opposition. That helped a lot, but they still ran into times where a little research of their own could have helped them save a lot of time and headaches.

With that being said, some groups just take longer to get to the SR mindset. Even with a lot of hand holding...

[onlyghostdancesw...]

Mine also tend to take 2-5 sessions (and this is good sessions at least 4-5 hrs) to do the real major portions of some runs even as dedicated old school SR players, there really is just that much LOD in my campaigns and they like it that way, course I am a pretty good karma fountain afterwards.

[Mardrax]

Mine actually tend to do legwork to a level where I'm scratching my head where they're coming up with the stuff. It's all good though, with my GMing style of mostly winging things, it forces me to make things up and visualise before they actually go somewhere. That makes a lot of it legwork for me as well.
And yes, the meat of a run will often take 3 or 4 runs by itself. Especially when combat gets involved. We actually had a one and a half session combat not too long ago. That was admittedly fairly large scale, but still. Karma fountaining is indeed appreciated. I tend to give karma per session, not per run, so that ups karma substantially.

[PoliteMan]

*Shrug* We have a couple players with kids, wives, jobs, all those pointless distractions. We're lucky to get a session every other week. A job which requires 3-4 sessions is two months real time.

[deek]

*Shrug* We have a couple players with kids, wives, jobs, all those pointless distractions. We're lucky to get a session every other week. A job which requires 3-4 sessions is two months real time.

Yeah, same here. The way I get around that is to boost karma rewards. I typically give 8-16 karma per session. 8 karma is just for showing up. While that makes for quick advancement, playing every other week, we need that as to not be totally stale. And typically, that's while I like premades. Once we start on one of those, I'm guaranteed to be ready to GM for more than a month...