[X] My Assistant

[Faelan]

It never fails to amaze me how much you seem to dislike magic. You do realize that you are playing Shadowrun? You know the game where part of the background is that magic will continue to ramp up in power? It ain't Cyberpunk 2020, so why the surprise? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Draco18s]

Whoah, whoah, no need to whine and moan at me, I was the least effective character in this group. The character who did the hurricane had twinked himself really really badly. He had an ally spirit possessing military grade armor. I had nothing to do with it.

In any case, the high winds really only prevented the GM from throwing helicopters at us as we attempted to escape Pudget Sound (which in all honesty is what we'd been hoping for, we had no way to take care of aircraft).

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Whoah, whoah, no need to whine and moan at me, I was the least effective character in this group. The character who did the hurricane had twinked himself really really badly. He had an ally spirit possessing military grade armor. I had nothing to do with it.

In any case, the high winds really only prevented the GM from throwing helicopters at us as we attempted to escape Pudget Sound (which in all honesty is what we'd been hoping for, we had no way to take care of aircraft).

If there is someone in your Team that can whip up a Hurricane via a High Force SPirit, then you have someone in your team that can take care of Aircraft with said same High Force Air Spirit. Accident is a wonderful thing, and you do not even need a High Force Spirit (I assume your team's guy summoned something on the scale of a force 8+ Spirit?), Force 4-5 will generally suffice for Drones, and Force 6 for normal Planes with Pilots; That Threshold of 3 is a Tough One when you are losing 4-6 Dice.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[longbowrocks]

Whoah, whoah, no need to whine and moan at me, I was the least effective character in this group. The character who did the hurricane had twinked himself really really badly. He had an ally spirit possessing military grade armor. I had nothing to do with it.

No worries, I've just been looking for an opportunity to repurpose hellfire into a magophobia song.

[longbowrocks]

It never fails to amaze me how much you seem to dislike magic. You do realize that you are playing Shadowrun? You know the game where part of the background is that magic will continue to ramp up in power? It ain't Cyberpunk 2020, so why the surprise? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Ech. I think it just continues to bug me that almost any character build can be improved with adept or mysad.

Background on my end is this: when our house starts playing a new class based game, my first character is always a stealthy rogue, while my friend upstairs creates a magician. I've done this so much that magic beating a mundane rogue and encroaching on his territory feels like a personal affront.

Anyway, don't take me too seriously if I'm just raving. Hellfire is such an epic song, I wanted to see if it would keep some of its oomph if I changed the words.

[Draco18s]

If there is someone in your Team that can whip up a Hurricane via a High Force SPirit, then you have someone in your team that can take care of Aircraft with said same High Force Air Spirit. Accident is a wonderful thing, and you do not even need a High Force Spirit (I assume your team's guy summoned something on the scale of a force 8+ Spirit?), Force 4-5 will generally suffice for Drones, and Force 6 for normal Planes with Pilots; That Threshold of 3 is a Tough One when you are losing 4-6 Dice.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I suppose that's true.

[Faelan]

Ech. I think it just continues to bug me that almost any character build can be improved with adept or mysad.

Background on my end is this: when our house starts playing a new class based game, my first character is always a stealthy rogue, while my friend upstairs creates a magician. I've done this so much that magic beating a mundane rogue and encroaching on his territory feels like a personal affront.

Anyway, don't take me too seriously if I'm just raving. Hellfire is such an epic song, I wanted to see if it would keep some of its oomph if I changed the words.

Gotcha. Shadowrun is one of the few games outside of Mage: The Awakening or The Ascension that it does not bother me when mundanes get punked by magic, it is kind of built into the system and setting. Of course I still house rule a bunch of stuff in SR to bend it closer to Earthdawn as far as concrete limits existing instead of relying on the "It will never happen" method.

[MJBurrage]

My favourite Shadowrun adventure plot was the investigation of a Johnson's belief that a free spirit was summoned during a magic spike in the 1790s. It was not until we discovered that it was also bound into a homunculus and last seen in the far North Atlantic that we realized what we were investigating.

My favourite strategy used during a run, involved dealing with a man we believed to be a vampire with masking. He drove an SUV who's defenses we were unable to penetrate secretly, and per the run's instructions we had to keep the job quiet. Security was more than we wanted to deal with where he lived, and the only point of repetition in his routine was that once a week, he would park in the same spot outside an apartment building for a couple hours but never left the car. We figured out that he was parking over a storm drain, and that it connected to the basement of the building. He was using the pipes to go in and out in mist form. So we waited in the basement with an industrial wet vac and prepared wards, so that he could not take corporeal form while we trapped him in the warded vacuum.

[Draco18s]

My favourite Shadowrun adventure plot was the investigation of a Johnson's belief that a free spirit was summoned during a magic spike in the 1790s. It was not until we discovered that it was also bound into a homunculus and last seen in the far North Atlantic that we realized what we were investigating.

Spoilers please, it's unlikely that my GM will ever run it, and I want to know more

He was using the pipes to go in and out in mist form. So we waited in the basement with an industrial wet vac and prepared wards, so that he could not take corporeal form while we trapped him in the warded vacuum.

Haha, awesome.

[MJBurrage]

Spoilers please, it's unlikely that my GM will ever run it, and I want to know more

It was not a published run. My first GM loved subtle references, so he used details from well known novels, with all the names changed so that it would not hit us over the head. The date was bugging me the whole time, but it was not until we found the ship in the ice, that we realized we were investigating the "truth" behind Frankenstein.

This was circa 1991. In a later run, we first found out there were spike-baby elves while investigating a British elf who turned out to be the grandson of an elf born during a mana-spike in Africa in the 1870s. This one got us a bonus payoff from the spike-baby, and a subtle but clear warning about how much his family valued their privacy. This one I got almost as soon as the run started since unbeknownst to my GM I was (and still am) a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, so I already knew the hints he had borrowed from Philip José Farmer's Tarzan books.

[Draco18s]

Nice

[Nebular]

OK. I'll give the full story.

...

A coked up cow, freaking out, and one M-16 with a M-203 underbelly grenade launcher away from going Tony Montana on them! It was kicking the hell out of their commercial van they were all crammed into. And, suddenly, it's implanted Commlink starts broadcasting:
"I'M BEING STOLEN!!!"

Further hilarity ensues.

This is freaking hilarious. I may have to steal this idea. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[CanRay]

Go right ahead, it's a great "What the Frag!" game. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Sir_Psycho]

It's the goose that lays the good shit.

[CanRay]

It's the goose that lays the good shit.

No that's me.

...

That came out wrong.

[TheLaughingBandi...]

My second game was perhaps the most fun. I just took a page from the "tailchaser" mission from Contacts and Adventures. I had my team steal an eyeball from a street doc first (as the book suggests) and the guys did NO legwork at all. So the covert ops actually broke in and stole the whole canister instead of the eyeball itself, because he had no way to grab the eyeball without hurting himself, or transport it without damaging the eye. He had to go through a dozen security systems as well as avoid cameras (disguise paste) and so on, all on a time constraint he didn't know... and all he was SUPPOSED to do was take a look at the Doc's place, not break in and finish the whole thing in a burst of ballsy luck.

Then I spiced it up. I figured, if the "Johnson" was a 15 year old geeky kid who was messing with these guys, why not make him play the part? I had them hide the eyeballs (sans container) in a jock's locker during school hours (which they accomplished by bluffing past the security at the gate and picking the locker door in a crowded hallway). Then I had them vandalize the school a bit (avoiding guards and cameras and making a getaway afterwards) and finally had them take pics and vids of an asian girl from the school. It was fun to try and keep a straight face when one of the runners said "Who is this guy? I mean, what's his maturity level? Is this Johnson a kid?"

The stalking portion had them all looking at each other like "really? I dunno if I feel comfortable with this" but the covert ops said "sure. nuyen is nuyen." Which made the other two runners look at him weird. The rigger muttered "creepy." So the rigger and the cov-ops (disguised again) go down to the girl's house to finish the job.

The stalking part went fairly smooth (the girl lived in a fairly low-sec house) until the covert ops actually got a bit overzealous about getting pics of her swimming in her backyard pool. "If I get more footage, we might get paid more" was his excuse. But the rigger just looked at him and said "creepy mother*****." Not that he did much to stop him. So the rigger, as the cov-ops ride, patrolled the neighborhood (I had had them have a run-in with Knight Errant during their first mission because they didn't check the neighborhood around another location and had a patrol run into them at the worst time). Meaning that the cov-op was by himself when the girl noticed him skulking in the shadows of her backyard. He bolts, she chases, and he finds out that she is in WAY better shape than him (star athlete that she is). The elf gets chased down the street for a few blocks, him in a chameleon suit, her in a bikini, with her gaining on him constantly and screaming bloody murder. The cov-ops is a wuss in a fight, so he is truly afraid of dying (he min-maxed his character as best he could for just being a sneaky creeper). The rigger managed to get his bike in between the pair and get the cov-ops up on the bike, but not before the cov-ops took 2 fatigue damage AND the girl hit him with enough force (and bad rolling) to nearly knock him out in one combat round. More rolling (lucky this time) let the creeper hold on to the rigger as the bike sped away, letting both runners get away with a car chase that followed (knight errant responded to the girl's call ruckus) instead of just getting dead. All for 2000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

When they got back to their pad, they saw a trid-feed of the creeper (in disguise) being chased by a girl a foot and a half shorter than him.

To this day, the cov-ops is still seen as a creeper, and as a guy who runs from nearly naked, Asian school-girls.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Heh... Awesome... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[CanRay]

To this day, the cov-ops is still seen as a creeper, and as a guy who runs from nearly naked, Asian school-girls.

The moral of this story is: Don't Min-Max without at least SOME combat skill. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

[Sir_Psycho]

I would've made sure that particular player kept his hands above table at all times.

[TheLaughingBandi...]

You know, I kept asking him before the game even started "What is your motivation? Tell me a bit about your character. Why is he a runner?"

It should have set off more alarms when he kinda gave me a blanket answer of "I just wanna be good at being sneaky" and it REALLY shoulda hit home when he took Ninjutsu as a martial art... /sigh

[CanRay]

You know, I kept asking him before the game even started "What is your motivation? Tell me a bit about your character. Why is he a runner?"

It should have set off more alarms when he kinda gave me a blanket answer of "I just wanna be good at being sneaky" and it REALLY shoulda hit home when he took Ninjutsu as a martial art... /sigh

Yeah, that's not a good answer at all. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

I have a thread about why our characters 'Run.

[Rubic]

My favorite, so far, was a solo run that was the last I pulled as my character, Mr. Tso (he doesn't put on airs of being a 'General' or having a chicken). I had just made myself well known to a group of prime runners, and in order to not get killed by them, I was sent to get some biometric data from some woman so that they could break out their friend. I was told that this woman had a bodyguard who would NOT let her go anywhere with anybody. So, being the porn-star, I decided to hit on her bodyguard. Since he was putting on an aggressive front, I decided to go with an equally aggressive approach, completely ignoring the actual target until he made issue about not leaving her alone, so I casually invited her along. A fade to black and a few hours later, I had tissue samples, fingerprints, hair, etc. from both of them and a character too useful to the important people for me to play him anymore.

Suffice it to say, I have a habit of successfully retiring characters faster than anybody else in my group.

[The_Dood]

One of my most memorable runs which I GM'ed was in response to the player's mercenary, no-one stands between me and my pay day approach to everything.

The PCs were hired to kidnap and hand off a girl to another team. Initially the PCs had an issue with the amount of pay but decided to take the job regardless (money is money I guess.). The PCs reconnoitered the target and discover she had no protection, was 14 and they could easily grab her on the way home from school. Not once did they wonder why they were being paid for a snatch and grab of a defenseless target.

So they execute the plan and arrive at the agreed place to handover the girl, a low-lifestyle apartment or as I described it at the time, "it looks exactly like the apartment your playing in". The PCs are watching the news coverage of the girl they grabbed earlier when the other team arrives, two shooters armed with shotguns*. The PCs suspecting this is where the real game begins start sizing up the other team. I let them know that it would be a 50/50 match up as the shooters took up advantageous positions but continued to engage in friendly banter. The PCs, getting anxious wanted to be paid. Unfortunately for them the shooters were just hired bodyguards and were waiting on the doctor who would pay the team when he inspected "the goods" as they said.

After a few raised eyebrows later and several attempts to renegotiate the deal (including offering their bank account details in the hope they would get paid later) fell through. The players started bickering amongst themselves about whether it was a good idea to take the job and if they could take the shooters on. They knew they would lose the hacker and mage in the firefight (acceptable losses for the two PC shooters*) but weren't sure if they would both make it alive (which was unacceptable).

So after a good RL 30 minutes of debate the doctor shows up, hands the PCs their pay and lets them know they can go. The PCs found a moral bone in their bodies and suggested they hang around. The doctor didn't care either way so let them stay.

After hearing the terrified screams of a 14 year old girl the PCs decide it's time for a rescue mission and open fire on the doctor killing him instantly. Unfortunately for the NPC shooters they now found themselves along way from the only exit and must shoot through the PCs to escape. As predicted the mage and hacker were the first to go down, followed later by one of the PC shooters. The NPCs never made it to the door but did let off a frag grenade as a parting gift.

The girl and 1 PC made it out that night and we didn't (couldn't?) play Shadowrun for a long time after that. The players still don't let anyone stand between them and their pay day and still don't investigate their employers. If they had that night they would of realized they were working for Tamanous as part of an organ harvesting job. Instead we ended the campaign with a weird pedo vibe.

* They also came equipped with the exact same morals as the PCs.
* Being a street samurai is very different from the typical shooters my PCs play and I never refer to them as such.