Making players follow MY plan...subtly, Psychology experts welcome Options

[StealthSigma]

Give them at the end of each run something like the "newspaper" presented at the end of some of the Denver's Missions. Put some big new on the cover and small news with details about other things on the cover. It might get the attention of some of them.
I know some of them got my attention.

The only thing I don't like about that is my campaigns are Machiavellian. Mr. Machiavelli prefers that most of the activities go off unnoticed until all his plans come to fruition. There may be some news stories about some oddities that have happened. Unfortunately I'm not a fiction writer, so coming up with all the noise I would have to put into such news papers in details enough to hide the important "articles" is a bit out of my league. That's really the problem. My ideas from a Machiavellian perspective require me to develop a lot of fluff that is purely pointless and maintain this throughout the campaign up until Mr. Machiavelli's plot has been realized and possibly past that.

You could also just be quiet on the details. They say they remove the disk and do the swap. Make sure you don't mention any wastebaskets around and they're not likely to think about tossing it, and this certainly isn't the place to destroy it, so they'll probably forget about it. Wait 'til they're out. As you're tidying up after the run, ask if they do anything with the original disk. Wow, now they have a disk, no strings, in their safe lair. Why not dig about, see if there's something valuable on it?

See above. "Do you do anything with the disk?" is a pseudo spoiler unless as a GM you routinely ask about every little mundane object the players pick up and don't drop. The players are going to think. Hey there's something special about this disk when Sengir is trying to avoid that. The issue is consistency with the little things. Yes, you can easily get the PCs to take it off site. No, you cannot easily get them to analyze the disk, copy the contents, or hold onto it without selling or trashing it. If he wants/needs the PCs to retain the data without making an obvious allusion that he wants them to keep the disk then he's literally relying on a roll of the dice.

The major issue Sengir facing is how to motivate independent minds to come to the conclusion he wants without making the independent minds suspicious of the object in question.

[Inncubi]

This is based on an adventure I ran. When it is well done, its.... hilarious. After 5 years my players still talk about it:

Let's start with the premises:

Mr.Johnson wants a disk swap. He wants to switch the security hard disk in X corporate enclave.

He doesn't need the information that is on the disk they are taking, he only needs them to put the new one in its place. Why/how, this is your creative fill up to make it believable.

He tells the PC's he wants the job silent. Very. So much he doesn't even want them talking about it later.

He, however, has this security flaw they can exploit: a guard shift, a ventilation duct, the keycodes to the maglocks inside the facility, etc. This is a help in their planning, not an autowin button. They still have a planning to do and are responsible for doing it right: you are simply giving them a little help, because you want them inside.

Let's go now to the complications:

(You can go with assassination attempt, I went with suicide and crazy scientist/whatever, I'll give you what i did, you work it out to suit your purposes):

There is an Elite Top Notch, BEST OF THE FRIGGIN' BEST, team inside the facility. Their propblem is they f*cked up with an influential executive and received as a punishment the regular uniforms and weapons of standard security guards. They have high stats, work well as a team, but are armed with clubs and pistols... maybe tazers. Just make fun of corporate heavies in misery.

Doctor "X" -as in put preferred name here- is loosing his mind. He has spent the last three months smuggling an AK-97 into the place where the disk is located. He snapped and today he smuggled ammunition -go for APDS for extra fun, if you feel specially bloody he has one or two frag grenades too!- , one or two clips of it, and coincidentially, as the players are in the computer room doing the disk swap the door opens. They can hide and the Doctor "X" enters oblivious to what is happening. He mumbles and starts to piece together the AK-97, pieces are all over the room in nooks and niches. He pops a clip inside and goes to the lab area, opening full autofire suddenly against the employees there. Go nuts with your blood bath: brains all over the place, gore screams and... ALARMS!

... then when all the HTR's are deployed, and a couple of their men dead in the labs next door of where the PC's are... Doctor "X" blows his own brains away. That's it. He kills himself. Dead. Suicide after having 34 dead emplyees and 40 more wounded (any numbers will do).

The real run is the players going out. They will also have to think of a way to clean their reps, since the corporate PR will want to keep this quiet. The Top Notch team is simply a complication -Through legwork you can even give them this information-, just enjoy the show and keep the players biting their nails, but never being able to comfront the opposition directly (if they leave no clues, it means more deniability to the Johnson and Fixer that it wasn't them the one who started such a bloodbath). They can use the disk you want them to keep as a way to prove their innocence in the shadows PR department -Street Cred, reputation, etc-.

Just enjoy, a lot, their faces when you start killing your own NPC's with hatred and mad joy. If you can show them a schizoid face while you describe things, laughter is assured. Just run everything full of mistery and the crawl into the enclave as a succesful perfect run. They manage to avoid patrols, etc, again as long as they do it smartly.

The expected results:

Laughter and hilarity. Its odd, its new, its unexpected. See how fast your players can think on their two feet. Theyir cover is not compromised, yet, but the alarm is full on and the encalve is on full alert. The thing is, they are not the targets.

They will take the disk with them, or anotehr disk: where the documentation of the whole situation happened. Its contents can include other things too. They will have a real, actual and relevant incentive to take the disk with them.

Fun. As a GM. Seeing surprised looks on players when you run a small combat between security guards and those tehy are supposed to protect... is just... awesome (Have Doctor "X" use edge: he has lucky and 8 points. This way he rolls horrible successes as he dies in a blaze of gory glory).

Do your worst... to yourself. Again: the players looks are awesome.

Then look at them and have them think fast: This is the real actual challenge... and let them see what they do.

If they clean their names Mr.Johnson pays tehm the full deal. Its difficult, so reward them.
e

[Brazilian_Shinob...]

The only thing I don't like about that is my campaigns are Machiavellian. Mr. Machiavelli prefers that most of the activities go off unnoticed until all his plans come to fruition. There may be some news stories about some oddities that have happened. Unfortunately I'm not a fiction writer, so coming up with all the noise I would have to put into such news papers in details enough to hide the important "articles" is a bit out of my league. That's really the problem. My ideas from a Machiavellian perspective require me to develop a lot of fluff that is purely pointless and maintain this throughout the campaign up until Mr. Machiavelli's plot has been realized and possibly past that.

Just pick a real newspaper cover and change the names, companies etc. Pick one of the news to be the one with the hint.
I remember that one of Denver's Missions, where you have to do a wetwork has the assassination filling half the page and a small sidenote saying that a local casino has been increasing security, 3 runs later you have to breach the casino.

[deek]

I'm thinking that with the swap, you add a software trigger as well. And, to make this more 4e, both the Johnson's drive and the swapped drive have wi-fi enabled.

So, basically, the drive the J gives them is turned off. They take it to the server and turn it on. For detail sake, turning it on, has some sort of auto-script that runs and starts rebuilding the data or whatever description you want to give and it runs for x minutes. Once its complete, it identifies the drive you have to swap with it, so there may be a quick search to find the right drive. Swap the drives (solving any of the RAID issues above or any triggered alerts to whomever, just cause I like to tie those loose ends if they have been brought up).

The J give the runners a special wi-fi inhibiting bag that they can dispose the swapped drive in. He goes on to day he doesn't care what they do with it, but it will trigger an alarm if turned off, so the wi-fi has to stay on, just jammed (by the bag). Now, it may be common sense not to leave it in the building, but the J may as well suggest they dump it a safe distance from the building, more of a precaution to their silent escape than anything else.

Now, the runners likely won't destroy the drive. Maybe try to sell it, maybe even just dump it. Either way is okay, I think, because when you bring your assassination plot back up, you can just that to detail that it looked like the security data was removed from the system. Give enough details to make sure the runners figure the drive they took was the missing data. They now either have it or have to find it (either attempt to track it where they dumped it, or get it back from the fence).

Or, I suppose, they may not be interested and wait for another mission...point is, in the above, adding the wi-fi bit and having to get it out of the building undetected probably will do the trick.

[Manunancy]

The players have been hired to swap the disk with the substitution unnoticed. Prying loose whatever data's stored on it and selling it is defintively a breach of that clause. There's no subtle way around that, which leaves only the thin thread of curiosity 'let's have a look at what's on the disk but we won't make anything with it' for whatever you have planned to go unnoticed.

If I've been asked 'no trace', I'd rather use a bit of thermite to fuse the disk into an unidentifable clump to be dumped in a river than spilling it's content on the market. Or at least thoroughly wipe the content and the serial numbers before selling it to a fence or giving it to the hacker.

The likelyest possiblity would be to hold and check the disk for a possible insurance against the Johnson, something of the 'screw us and you scheme'll go public.' sort. Give some reason of the players to be wary of the Johnson and odds are they'll double-check the disk for hints of what he really was up to rather than just tossing it in the nearest trash truck.

[Sengir]

Working as intended.

That doesn't follow my understanding of RAID mirroring. The RAID controller acts as an intermediary between the hard drives and the CPU. It performs all the read/write calls. When you mirror, the RAID controller doesn't update one disk from another during normal operation. It simply writes the data to both disks.

To achieve the results you described it sounds as though the RAID controller itself suffered a failure and was sending the same garbage to be written to both disks. I'd be surprised if the system continued to run in this state.
Another option is that whatever program that was creating this data was sending bad instructions to the CPU which came up with the garbage.

I don't like either of those options because they reflect a continued system instability and a non-permanent resolution when you restore a backup. What I suspect occurred, though only you could verify, is that one hard drive had a mechanical issue that was causing corrupted data to be written to disk. Then someone or something issued a rebuild of a hard drive using the bad drive as the source for the data. Perhaps the second drive failed and a replacement was inserted. That would trigger the RAID controller to rebuild the new disks data from the remaining (corrupted) disk.

OK, the whole story: Two file servers, E and F. Each of those contains two RAIDs, one for its own data and one for mirroring the other.

First the RAID mirroring E (inside server F) failed and had to be replaced. The replacement RAID of course was empty and needed to get a full copy from E, not just the changes since the last sync, and that obviously took some time.
Act two, E fails COMPLETELY, with file system corruption. Hey, no problem, F has a mirror of...oops, that mirror was still busy copying over stuff from E.

Great, hm?

The problem I see with that is that you require the players and their characters to have knowledge beforehand which you have expressly said they won't know. They don't know they need the disk to prove their innocence when they pull the disk and take it off site.

Well, that's the whole point: The previously useless disk suddenly becomes important...which the runners might not even know.

[StealthSigma]

Well, that's the whole point: The previously useless disk suddenly becomes important...which the runners might not even know.

Right. So without telling them "Hey there's something important on this disk" you're tossing dice on whether they hold onto it. Unless you regularly tell them useless details about things saying anything regarding the disk will tip them off that there's something useful on it. Like I said, go with a shill in the group. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[tagz]

I'd say make sure that there is another way to get the info or prove non-involvement.

If they destroy the disk that's fine. When things hit the fan they'll look to self preservation. They can sneak back on site and gather evidence (that may have been swept under the rug due to inside job?), they can track down the killer, run, etc. Lots of options for them. And at the end... ah the end... you get to tell them they had it in their hands and threw it out cause they didn't check it. There should be face-palming on their side and laughing on yours. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Really, this seems like a minor detail that can be easily worked around.

[Sengir]

I'd say make sure that there is another way to get the info or prove non-involvement.

If they destroy the disk that's fine. When things hit the fan they'll look to self preservation. They can sneak back on site and gather evidence (that may have been swept under the rug due to inside job?), they can track down the killer, run, etc. Lots of options for them. And at the end... ah the end... you get to tell them they had it in their hands and threw it out cause they didn't check it. There should be face-palming on their side and laughing on yours. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Sure, the surveillance tape will not be the only option. I'm just afraid an open-ended task like "find the murderer, without any initial clues. Oh, and your Johnson hates you ass, too" might lead to a weird game, so I'd like them to have the disk as an initial clue.


Anyway, thanks for the input to all who posted (also those whom I did not directly reply to). I'll certainly incorporate a lot of the feedback (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[StealthSigma]

The rule of three is your friend. Make sure you have at least three avenues for players to discover this information.

[Inncubi]

The rule of three is your friend. Make sure you have at least three avenues for players to discover this information.

I correct. The rule of three is your best friend.

Carry on.