"Mr Johnson´s Run of the Week", thoughts on Run vs Runner -oriented gameplay and GM advice Options

[silva]

This topic at RPGnet made me notice something weird with shadowrun:

For a setting so big and fully fleshed out, isnt it weird that GM advice focus almost exclusively on a kind of "run-oriented" gaming ? You see, in all editions there is this huge page-count about the "world outside of runs", but somehow the GM advice ignore it almost completely, promoting instead a kind of "Mr Johnson´s run of the week" playstyle (not so different from the "Old man in the tavern" from fantasy tropes). Isnt it weird ?

I mean, I know a lot of people who play the game in a "runners-oriented" playstyle (me included), where the sessions focuses on the exploration of all that page-count (the "world outside of runs") following the actual lives of the shadowrunners, their personal ambitions, day-to-day struggles, etc. with the actual "shadowrunning" even taking a peripherical role. Where is the GM advice for this style of gaming ? Aside from some small hints (mostly in the Companions), there isnt any substantial advice on this.

So, judging by the huge amount of resources invested in fleshing-out the setting - city books, factions books, lifestyle books, etc. - shouldnt it be logical that the game have a much more substantial advice on making it more than just a "Mr Johnson´s Run of the Week" ?


Silva

[CollateralDynamo]

I feel like all the peripheral books that explain the day-to-day world more or less ARE the GM advice for doing non-runny things at the table. At its most base Shadowrun is about 'shooting people in the face for money' so the core book is only really going to provide the GM information on how to get the players there. However, side books like Attitude and the Runners Companion both discuss a lot of details not strictly involved with running, they seem to flesh out the mechanics and the fluff for how that stuff would go-by.

I feel like you can't really tell a GM how to run a 'day in the life of a runner' type game because every table will want to focus on different facets of that 'life'. Perhaps I'm just not understanding what you want them to actually discuss in the book?

As an aside, I tend to run my games as a 'Run of the Week' with runs that are either heavily based on a character's background or heavily based on whatever plot-arc I'm trying to push at the time. I like the feel of 'episodes' for this game, but I agree that exploration and continuity of what occurs between run is critical if you want to get maximum enjoyment out of it.

[almost normal]

It's my intention to screw the party over on a run from time to time. If they don't feel like getting revenge, and just want to accept another run, that's on them, not the GM.

[Eratosthenes]

Well, you're playing shadowrunners, not shadowdancers or shadow-I-work-at-Stuffer-Mart-and-my-life-sucks-ers. The game is centered around the players' chosen profession of doing shadow work, in whatever form it might take.

Truly, the Mr. Johnson's serve the purpose of an easy plot point for a GM. Much like the proverbial tavern did in DnD (before WoT turned it into World of Warcraft on paper). They provide an easy focus for a GM to provide hooks, rewards, and twists that keep the game moving. Running all the other stuff in the richly developed world of Shadowrun can be difficult for a novice GM.

[Tecumseh]

I would love to do more "day in the life of" scenes with my players, but the challenge is that most of these only involve one character at a time. I think the Advanced Lifestyle rules in Runner's Companion provide a lot of opportunities to explore what a character does (or has to put up with) in his/her free time, but that doesn't always translate into a compelling storyline for the rest of the team. Pursuing this sort of character development might work better if the characters in my team hung out with each other after jobs, but ICly they don't mix socially. (The street sam went so far as to move apartments after the technomancer found out where he lived.)

There's nothing wrong with a scene that focuses on one character, but they need to be interspersed with team-oriented situations so that everyone stays engaged. Maybe you can push this a little further if you have particularly patient players or if you have a strong group where everyone is interested in what happens to everyone else's characters. Otherwise, think of it like an issue of Spiderman: every issue you have a few pages about what's happening with Peter's job or in his personal life or with Aunt May, but he still beats up a bad guy at some point during the story.

[Vegetaman]

Well, you're playing shadowrunners, not shadowdancers or shadow-I-work-at-Stuffer-Mart-and-my-life-sucks-ers. The game is centered around the players' chosen profession of doing shadow work, in whatever form it might take.

Truly, the Mr. Johnson's serve the purpose of an easy plot point for a GM. Much like the proverbial tavern did in DnD (before WoT turned it into World of Warcraft on paper). They provide an easy focus for a GM to provide hooks, rewards, and twists that keep the game moving. Running all the other stuff in the richly developed world of Shadowrun can be difficult for a novice GM.

True... But the more rewarding games, in my mind, are the ones where some runs are interwoven, and choices from earlier have great impacts later on. On top of this, things they do in their "free time" can weigh heavily in on what happens as well.

So if you're going to take Extra Enemy / Hunted Level 3 and have the backstory to prove it... Don't be surprised if they manage to get tangled up in your stuff while the team is running around Seattle. Opportunity can rear its head and any time, and enemies are a fickle beast... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[Eratosthenes]

True... But the more rewarding games, in my mind, are the ones where some runs are interwoven, and choices from earlier have great impacts later on. On top of this, things they do in their "free time" can weigh heavily in on what happens as well.

So if you're going to take Extra Enemy / Hunted Level 3 and have the backstory to prove it... Don't be surprised if they manage to get tangled up in your stuff while the team is running around Seattle. Opportunity can rear its head and any time, and enemies are a fickle beast... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I like to have tie-ins and continuity throughout the game. That DocWagon paramedic you helped three runs ago might be a key player in the latest caper, or that rumor you heard four runs ago might be the key to solving the current twist. And of course, players should have some impact on the game world. Unless of course you're playing it so dystopian that no matter what they do, they always lose. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

But that requires a fair bit of book-keeping on the GM's part. That, and managing the world details and setting can be daunting for the GM.

And as Tecumseh said, non run-time often boils down to what each of the individuals are doing with their time. The hacker's out making botnets, while the mage is in the metaplanes, and the samurai's polishing his latest boomstick.

[mister__joshua]

Our most memorable runs always seem to end the same way. Run goes wrong. Team gets hunted. Team fractures and survival is the only goal. It's rarely the GMs intention to go that way, but when it does everyone seems to have fun. Survival is a much more worthy goal than money, and people are willing to do even more to achieve it

[noonesshowmonkey]

I am a big believer in the 'what happens off camera', as it were.

Shadowrun is a game that is extraordinarily hard to GM. In no other game that I can think of does the combat system become so granular in timekeeping, do things happen so fast, and where there is so much to do at any given moment.

A common mistake of tabletop RPGs is to just go too fast, to work too abstractly, and to smooth over the simple complications of any given task. A gamer that I play with regularly says 'I do thus and such', and I find myself waiting for him to describe how he does it, with what he accomplishes the said task, and then what skills he intends to utilize to see it through... But he just moves on, having already accomplished that task in his mind. All it takes to derail some of his sillier plans is to ask him for specifics like what gear, what skills, etc.

Gaming slips all too easily into an abstract plane where simple details are glossed over. One of the most rewarding games I ever ran had as players a band of friends who were also improvisational actors. Not only were they novices, uninterested in power gaming, totally unaware of how the mechanics could be leveraged in ways that break down verisimilitude, they were also close friends and willing to take risks with each other. And, perhaps most importantly, their improv acting experience taught them to assume vast amounts of detail about any given scene, to flesh it out in their minds, and to reach into the scene and touch the objects in it, to take their time, to think things through on a literal, visceral level.

Shadowrun has as the core storytelling method the Run itself... But as anyone here can attest, the Run is usually 95% prep and only a little bit of action when things go south. And beyond that, even if a character is taking on a lot of Run work, the Runs themselves only really only occupy a handful of hours or days, rarely more.

As I have gone onwards in Shadowrun, I have trended more and more towards a Sandbox, Character-oriented game. I've put a ton of work into fleshing out a version of the Seattle Metroplex, much like Seattle 2072, that makes very good and clear sense to me. Players make characters and set them afoot in the Metroplex and things just start happening. Contacts call them with offers for work, they put feelers of for things they are interested, and eventually a run comes along that is interesting to them. There is a lot of lead-in work for a game like this, but the good news is that most of the prep-work is not wasted. Any location or NPC that I cook up can be used to fill in an ad-hoc need at a later date. One of my PCs has a biker contact that wants to set up a meet? I check through my wiki for any 'biker' tags and one or two bars show up. Bango, I have the location (on gmaps, too!) with a short write up for what it is like and we are off!

What can get difficult in this style of game, and really any Shadowrun game, is finding a group of players that are willing to make characters that are willing to play together. Too often, a player sits down at a table with a total sociopath, some kind of paranoid schizophrenic, and by the game's end have tried to convince me that their character engages in all kinds of insane, highly disciplined, totally paranoid and anti-social behavior. What I wonder throughout is 1) why any other PC in the group would trust / work with the character in question, 2) why the character in question would work with anyone other than a cold-blooded killing machine, 3) why, when we are playing a cooperative game, someone sits down with a character clearly against the grain. In an extreme example, I have had a player bring a 'suicide bomber' to the table: an ork with a bomb vest and a death wish. Dramatic? Yes. Cooperative story-telling ready? Maybe. Poorly suited to the group's needs? Definitely. Ego-centrically played and able to derail the larger story? Yup.

Playing a Character-Driven version of Shadowrun brings out these kinds of behaviors in players. If you are playing a more 'in the tavern we meet a J and get a dungeon run!' kind of game - the week to week Run only game - then the fit of characters and whatever sociopathic personality their player has cooked up for them matters less and less. But, when you play a game that focuses equally on down-time and makes players really deal with Addiction, Enemy, In-Debt or any of the very common vices that a player takes to earn another skill rank in Automatics, then characters and their flaws come forward and the question comes up regularly, 'why are any of these people in league with one another?'

[Darksong]

In our group we view the episodic nature of the de facto Shadowrun metaplot as a feature and a bug. On the one hand, it makes it relatively easy to pick up and get going, even after a long hiatus or if some players are missing. On the other hand, it does tend to get a little monotonous to just do run-of-the-month, and not all characters are equally interested in spending time at the table on where their apartment is located, much less saving toward retirement, finding out the mystery of the artifact stumbled upon during the last run, figuring out childcare for the sam's niece, or helping the mage find a magical group. As such, we do a lot of that in bluebooking between games, via email or google docs (our 15-year D&D game has a wiki, but that's a bit more infrastructure than our SR group demands at this point) and that seems to work out well. The people who really want to develop their character get a chance (and karma rewards) for doing so, and the people who just want to show up to throw grenades and lay down cover fire get to do so.

[silva]

As I have gone onwards in Shadowrun, I have trended more and more towards a Sandbox, Character-oriented game. I've put a ton of work into fleshing out a version of the Seattle Metroplex, much like Seattle 2072, that makes very good and clear sense to me. Players make characters and set them afoot in the Metroplex and things just start happening. Contacts call them with offers for work, they put feelers of for things they are interested, and eventually a run comes along that is interesting to them.

THIS !

Its exactly what I meant in the original post. You see, there was a point when my friends got simply exhausted of "Mr J´s Run of the Week" and we stopped playing shadowrun for a long time (some 5 years I think). Just when we figured out there was this whole world out there awaiting for us, and the "dungeon crawling for old man in tavern" is just a small part of it, that we came back for it and the game really shined.

It was by this time that our most memorable characters came to life - not because of great fluff background or what they accomplished on runs, but because of what they made accomplished outside of runs, with their day-to-day lives and personal ambitions - be it freeing their local community from a thrill gang influence, or helping out a BTL addicted cousin, or going up the ranks of the local Seoulpa Ring, or seeing their own seedy bar on the redmond barrens prosper. THIS is what made the characters come to live for us, making them much more than mere "heroes in a action flick".

So, it seems a natural evolution for a lot of groups - begining with the "Mr J Run of the Week" style and then sliding to a more "open-world"/sandbox/"character-driven" style. The problem, in my view, is that the game has a rich enough setting and premise to be played by both styles from the start, but the instructions/advice in the books do not acknowledge this, just providing support for the first style (Mr J run of the Week). And its a huge wasted opportunity in my view. And the thing gets more schizo when you realize there is already a framework/understructure in place for supporting this player-driven/sandbox gameplay (info on sports, music, legality codes, gear avaliability, corps ratings and activities, etc).

TL;DR:

Shadowrun has such a rich setting and premise that advicing/advocating on just "Mr J Run of the Week" playstlye feels lacking. A lot of groups go beyond this and explore the "world outside runs" by themselves in some degree. So shoudnt the very game text contain advice for it from the get go ? (specially considering there is already a framework for it in place in the form of everyday life descriptions and mechanics like legality codes, etc? )

[HaxDBeheader]

THIS !

Its exactly what I meant in the original post. You see, there was a point when my friends got simply exhausted of "Mr J´s Run of the Week" and we stopped playing shadowrun for a long time (some 5 years I think). Just when we figured out there was this whole world out there awaiting for us, and the "dungeon crawling for old man in tavern" is just a small part of it, that we came back for it and the game really shined.

It was by this time that our most memorable characters came to life - not because of great fluff background or what they accomplished on runs, but because of what they made accomplished outside of runs, with their day-to-day lives and personal ambitions - be it freeing their local community from a thrill gang influence, or helping out a BTL addicted cousin, or going up the ranks of the local Seoulpa Ring, or seeing their own seedy bar on the redmond barrens prosper. THIS is what made the characters come to live for us, making them much more than mere "heroes in a action flick".

So, it seems a natural evolution for a lot of groups - begining with the "Mr J Run of the Week" style and then sliding to a more "open-world"/sandbox/"character-driven" style. The problem, in my view, is that the game has a rich enough setting and premise to be played by both styles from the start, but the instructions/advice in the books do not acknowledge this, just providing support for the first style (Mr J run of the Week). And its a huge wasted opportunity in my view. And the thing gets more schizo when you realize there is already a framework/understructure in place for supporting this player-driven/sandbox gameplay (info on sports, music, legality codes, gear avaliability, corps ratings and activities, etc).

TL;DR:

Shadowrun has such a rich setting and premise that advicing/advocating on just "Mr J Run of the Week" playstlye feels lacking. A lot of groups go beyond this and explore the "world outside runs" by themselves in some degree. So shoudnt the very game text contain advice for it from the get go ? (specially considering there is already a framework for it in place in the form of everyday life descriptions and mechanics like legality codes, etc? )

Preach it, brother. Preach it.
I am a sandbox GM too and can't enjoy running much of anything else anymore.

That said, I have found ways to coax a group into sandboxing by building on the episodes.
First: contacts & enemies
Then: give them some "downtime fluff" and have some of it matter for an episode (but not all)
Then: blend episodes; ie while they're babysitting a device/fugitive for a month they have to cope with all their lives impinging on the episode (debts, contacts, annoying neighbours, etc) culminating in an imposed but unrelated run (rescue a contact, pay back a debt with a service, etc) that they have to accomplish while still babysitting.
It's not easy but you can build their interest in downtime.

[Blade]

I think that the problem is that the outside-run adventures depend a lot on the characters, so it's harder to design an adventure that can apply to all groups.
A run with a Mr. Johnson is something that most groups will be able to play. That's why published adventures will mostly be classic runs with a Mr. Johnson.

For outside run adventures, you still have all the fluff, and campaigns books like Emergence that let you improvise something oustide of runs for your PCs.

[CrystalBlue]

Shadowrun tends to be one of the most complex role playing games that I’ve ever had the chance of encountering (with White Wolf being a close second). What makes it so complex and so interesting and, by far, my favorite game to play is it’s deep and rich story in the background of everything that’s going on while being mixed with a dystopian cyber-punk magical future space for me to enjoy. It’s all there for the taking. From the initial crash to the Comet flying over head, a dragon being elected president, Deus taking control of the Archology, Crash 2.0, Technomancers, the wireless Matrix, and whatever else the shadows have in store for us. We have so much going on in the background of our runs, including what our DM’s have for us at the time, that the game is almost perfect.

That being said...I will agree that the “Monster of the Week” style gaming is a bit clique and boring. But many people that have these types of opinions of games are the players that have never once picked up the GM gloves and tried to tell a story. And that’s one of the reasons why I get so polarized about this particular topic.

I want it made clear. My view and version of gaming in general is very different then everyone else. I think that a wide-open and player driven game is one of the single dumbest ideas that a GM could ever come up with if they value their own sanity. Giving players free roam of the game world, what jobs and choices they could make, and what they will happen to do next is a sure-fire way to shoot a campaign in the foot with uncompensated recoil. And continuing down that path is the gangrene.

Most people don’t know why I think this way. They get angry when I railroad them. I’ll give you an example. I have, in my SR gaming group, no fewer than three sociopaths at any given game. Now, they will not outright tell you that they’re socipaths. You get the joy of figuring that out on your own. But for arguments sake, let’s say they’re normal players. Player one is out looking for their lost brother. Player two is trying to make ends meet. Player three likes cool toys and likes to shoot them off. All three of them are Shadowrunners. In this episode, we get to sit and watch all three wake up, have breakfast (or lunch), and then go about their day of… well… crap.

But, let’s again assume that rent is due. They all call up their fixers for a job (magically at the same time) and they get a call from their contact, listing a Johnson that needs something done. Now…if I were to give those three people the same job at the same time, all three players would look at me with disgust on their face and say “Come on…we all get the same job?” Yes. You do. I’m not running three fragging missions all at the same time. “Why not? You can just go from one to another every 15 minutes.” And what happens when combat starts? “Well…we’ll wait for it to be over and go to the next person.” No. You won’t. You’ll whine or go eat a pizza or watch TV or play fragging Minecraft on your laptop because you’ve done it before and that was when you were IN the combat going on.

Separate actions seem nice until the GM is the one that has to deal with that drek. And the players don’t care or give any leeway on that subject. They want every story to be about them and they all want the spotlight at the same time. And I can’t give that to them. I can only focus on one story at a time. That is why Shadowrun seems like a “Mission of the Week” type game. Because much of the game is happening in the context of a mission. There isn’t anything that says you can’t give one person a few hooks to their long-lost love or tell one of them that their daughter is doing BTL and they have to deal with their child during a run. But the run is what gives us context to put all of the other stuff in. If you have no hamper for your dirty laundry, it just sits all over the place and I have to pick it up to give you something useable back. I give you the hamper for a reason.

This is a big problem for one of my players, and I have never found a way to satisfy them except to make them the center of the story and have all the runs come from them. All down-time for other characters is quick and to the point. This character wants me to role play them going to dinner with their boyfriend for 2 fragging hours while all the other players just…what? Sit around and talk?

That is why I don’t think this kind of gameplay type works well.

[noonesshowmonkey]

The pit falls of having an open world game are large, and most of them start where any problem with a game starts: the players or GM.

When players are given so much lee way, when their characters can do anything at all, it is very easy for the players interests to collide with one another just as it is likely that their characters will all go in different directions.

Shadowrun already suffers from a serious attention span issue, with so many actions and activities going on in so many different places all at once. Hacking, meat body, astral, leg work, social conflicts, sneaking, shooting... So many different ways to go about solving a given problem, and so many of them all at once. Players have to be willing to work with one another, not just on a PC agenda level, but on an interpersonal one as well. It is no accident that my best group of Shadowrun players were a close knit crew of improv actors. Many of the key rules and elements of good improv are also fundamental to good RPG playing. Things like 'never say no' or 'always complicate a scene' or 'add something interesting'. The dynamics of good improv acting are such that each player becomes the spotlight for a given period of time, often in dialogue with another player, each feeding off each, before relinquishing control of the scene to another player that comes forward.

These kinds of dynamics are really hard to find in ye olde RPG crowd... And not to point fingers or name names, let's face it: the reason that gamers have a reputation as socially retarded is because a huge number of them are socially retarded. Sure, there are plenty of well adjusted, intelligent, socially adept folks that play games; but there are also tons that have only one or two of those traits.

One of the ways in which I have combated the unique problem of Shadowrun's mission workup, namely the personnel problem, is to have players create two or even three fully fleshed out PCs of varying kinds. Often, they will share a pool of contacts, where each is only a few steps removed from any of the others. When a job comes up, the players can choose for themselves which of their PCs are interested in working it and, from that list of possible personalities, they can put together a 'crew' for the job.

Too many times I have sat down at a table and one of my players, usually a dwarf, claims that he is 'racist against elves', and is a (hilarious) disruptive ass the game long. If you are building a team out of a pool of available talent, it isn't hard for players to self-select whether or not they find that kind of tomfoolery interesting to them or not. Who knows, maybe they are into it, and they always run with a racist dwarf and his fairy little elf partner... Or maybe that character's abrasive and disruptive personality trait only comes up with NPCs and doesn't disrupt intra-party dynamics.

[ludomastro]

I agree that it is incredibly hard to do this with a table full of people. However, some of my best PbP games have been in a one on one type situation where we could go off on tangents to our hearts content. Difficult but rewarding under the right circumstances.

[mister__joshua]

Too many times I have sat down at a table and one of my players, usually a dwarf, claims that he is 'racist against elves', and is a (hilarious) disruptive ass the game long.

In a game I was running, our Dwarf player asked at a hotel 'will there be any humans going into my room' before booking in. The receptionist looked at him with disdain before answering politely, but word soon spread about the grumpy racist tenant. This, while funny, was an honest mistake by the player. What he should have said was 'Is your cleaning done by a maid or automated drones?'. Still, made for fun times (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[mraston]

I'm currently running my first Shadowrun campaign and I've had a semi-open world approach to it. Obviously I started off with a Mr. Johnson that was a contact or two separated from each of the PC's and from there I had a number of NPC's with different motivations that the runners would interact with during the run. Since that first run I've made every "run" subsequent to it an extension or consequence of what happened in the first run. The actions that took place in that first run triggered events that expanded the world around the runners and each action they take I take note of and fill in the details stemming from that for the next run.

Each session I have a general guide for where I want to take the story, but make it plausible in relation to what has gone before plus allowing for the runners to go and partake in a certain amount of craziness peripheral to that.

Seems to be working well, and I much prefer it to running through a published adventure that has a predetermined ending.

[mraston]

I'm currently running my first Shadowrun campaign and I've had a semi-open world approach to it. Obviously I started off with a Mr. Johnson that was a contact or two separated from each of the PC's and from there I had a number of NPC's with different motivations that the runners would interact with during the run. Since that first run I've made every "run" subsequent to it an extension or consequence of what happened in the first run. The actions that took place in that first run triggered events that expanded the world around the runners and each action they take I take note of and fill in the details stemming from that for the next run.

Each session I have a general guide for where I want to take the story, but make it plausible in relation to what has gone before plus allowing for the runners to go and partake in a certain amount of craziness peripheral to that.

Seems to be working well, and I much prefer it to running through a published adventure that has a predetermined ending.

[HaxDBeheader]

I'm currently running my first Shadowrun campaign and I've had a semi-open world approach to it. Obviously I started off with a Mr. Johnson that was a contact or two separated from each of the PC's and from there I had a number of NPC's with different motivations that the runners would interact with during the run. Since that first run I've made every "run" subsequent to it an extension or consequence of what happened in the first run. The actions that took place in that first run triggered events that expanded the world around the runners and each action they take I take note of and fill in the details stemming from that for the next run.

Each session I have a general guide for where I want to take the story, but make it plausible in relation to what has gone before plus allowing for the runners to go and partake in a certain amount of craziness peripheral to that.

Seems to be working well, and I much prefer it to running through a published adventure that has a predetermined ending.

This is pretty much how I manage sandboxed games. I also like to keep running lists of contacts and use them as figures in the game world; it adds some depth and continuity.
The nice part is that once you have a solid world image in your mind around the characters it is easy to improv your way through their forays into areas you didn't anticipate.