ARGH! HELP! My players are too good., ...need help.... Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Switch to: Outline Standard Switch to: Linear+

[Adhoc]

Argh! Help!

My players are too good. I'm one guy up against 6 players who are using HeroLab to create characters I can't challenge.

Half of the group are magicians or adepts and the rigger & the decker are very good at what they do.

At the same time the players are very analytic people - we have:
- a Chief Financial Officer (very good at number-crunching) in Excell
- a former military officer, turned programmer, turned business developer for a very large company
- a regular programmer (who work with DNA-sequencing)
- another business analyst for very big bank (who crunches number in analytic tools all day)
- one more guy who is a bit more chill

They are all very passionate about the game, so they bring everything they have to the table.

The problem is I don't have the time or energy to match them.

I mean: this is the level of planning they put into things (made by x-military officer): Tactics for scouting. This is based on his experience as a in-field military commander from live operations. How can I match this?!??!?

Their characters are min/maxed to the hilt. They're all very interesting characters, but they're also shadowrunning monsters. They have no discernible weaknesses that I can challenge. Besides they see all that I can send at them way before it has a chance to reach them.

I can't use the pregenerated characters as opposition - they'll eat them up like Oreos (When will SR learn to make proper pregen characters?)

There is a huge complexity issue: I can challenge them by throwing single hostiles at them - dragons or large spirits - but that just not interesting or realistic. If I'm going to create an interesting encounter for them, the complexity of making it is staggering - 4-8 unique characters made with every single trick in the books? If I'm going to create encounters that are varied, I'll have to spend weeks preparing.

I can't set up an ambush - they discover them way and just go a different way - meaning all preparation is moot.

Essentially I have to be able to improvise encounters on the fly based on what they do and run them - and Shadowrun is not a simple system that makes it easy to improvise.

So can you help me? Do you have any suggestion for a way to challenge them? or to reduce complexity?

Best,
Adhoc

[Stahlseele]

Sure. Chicago.
BGC, Insect Spirits, no Matrix-Access.
Or the SOX. Radiation and BGC and no Matrix.

Otherwise get them out of their comfort zone.
Runs in the Wilderness(i hear horrible things about Australia)
Pirate/Anti Pirate Runs at sea.

The Jungle. The Arktic Regions. If you wanna go full hog, Shadowrun . . IIN SPAACEE!

[Koekepan]

I dream of a group like yours. They mean that you can unfold your sinister wings of umbral evil and soar into the night like the vampire of souls that you truly are - that we all are.

... or maybe that is just me.

Hey, and this is just a hypothetical question, if I kill you and eat your liver wrapped in bacon and grilled in a skillet, do you think they'd want me to run that game? Just asking, no real reason ...

Anyway, you wanted ideas, and I am here to provide ideas.

Let's start with some basics: your players are sharp, and play tightly optimised characters. I'll take you at your word, that you found no real weaknesses. Great! That actually simplifies your job a lot, because what it means is that you expect to put regular opposition in their way, and that is not intended to defeat them, but is kind of an annoyance/delay factor, it eats up their ammunition and supplies, and distract them in the moment from the big picture.

I put up a post not long ago, talking about physical security strategies. Here's a precis:

o Direction. Security architecture is intended to drive people in manageable ways. When the fire alarm goes off, the signs flash and tell people how to best leave the building. Similarly, the walls and razor wire and barking dogs suggest to people that it's just easier and less risky to go through the security checkpoint. The security guard there doesn't have to lift a finger to make people come to him. They just naturally do. If enemies such as runners do penetrate, the architecture should suggest how they leave as well, leading them into the waiting arms of overwhelming power.
o Deterrence. Big walls, razorwire, visible checkpoints and scary security dogs deter most gangers, casual vandals and drunks. This principle does stretch beyond intimidation as well. If a place just looks uninteresting, people are less likely to bother with it. Another facet of deterrence is making it clear that one is under surveillance. Cameras (real or fake) can be quite obvious, perhaps every fifty feet on top of a fifteen foot wall. Large, open, sweeping lawns also make people less inclined to try to cross them if they are up to no good.
o Detection. So Drunk Dave decides to climb the fence and play with the security dogs. The surveillance will collect his data. It might archive it, or send it off for analysis and correlation with other trespassing reports, or notify security and Lone Star, or try to identify him by public records - or all of the above. Either way, they know more.
o Disable. This one is often more subtle than it seems. It doesn't mean crippling every customer or vendor who shows up, but it might mean offering people approaching the building a poor view of what's going on. Maybe the shrubbery screens people from outside. Maybe the pretty lights tend to blind surveillance. This can also extend to vehicles, with bollards or other vehicle management tools to prevent people from driving a van in through the front entrance. The whole system is designed to put the security team at an advantage, and enemies at a disadvantage.
o Depth. Bad security is like an egg - a crunchy perimeter and a nutritious centre. Good security provides defence in depth. The runners should always be challenged, confounded, confronted and confused.
o Delay. Everything goes better for the corporation when shadowrunners have to slow down. Time delay safes? Great. Slow opening doors? Great. Locked doors they have to navigate? Excellent. Strategically placed structural bars that make trolls have to constantly bend down? Installed everywhere. Complex internal corridor structure? Of course.

Those will help give your super-organised players something to chew on, but it won't stump them.

OK, so where is the real meat? If you can't defeat them in the field, you can't get the jump on them, what can you do?

The long game. I will write another post about that soon, I just need more coffee...

[Koekepan]

The long game
or
How to challenge people who are experts at the short game

If your players are tactical experts, you can't expect to plausibly challenge them on the tactical field, unless there is plausible reason for something to have gone wrong - but this reason can come after the fact.

Example:

Alice, Bob, Cindy and Dave break into a supposedly low security lab to make off with a prototype. Standard run, no surprises, it looks super boring from the outside, scouting indicates nothing particularly weird until Dave the Decker does a wireless assay of the lab and discovers that the whole place is rigged to flood with nerve gas, and there are pop-up autoturrets hidden at the angles of every major passageway. This is obviously insane, and way out of proportion for what the job was supposed to be. If the team is novahot, maybe they do the run, and discover that everything is also covered in panic buttons and there's a HRT response on constant five minute watch as well, but it's more likely that the team regroup for a meeting, maybe involving the fixer, and say: "What is up with that fragged-up site?"

What you as the GM know, but they don't, is that the prototype itself was a red herring. A macguffin. The team's security expertise was what Johnson really wanted, because Johnson really wanted intel on the site. Johnson was working for RunnerFragger Corp, which is trying to get the jump on their competition, Boese AG, and was thinking of using the lab but wanted to see if the lab was really up to keeping their secrets.

That is just a small example. Think of it like a psychological test: the first thing that psychologists absolutely have to do when designing a test is to make it look like something else. Testing someone's compassion levels? Make it look as if you're testing their reaction time. Testing someone's reaction time? Make it look as if you're testing their preferences in computer games. Something, anything else.

OK, so we've established the principle that no run is ever what it looks like. If you have a run that is what it looks like, it's only to fake them out. But really, no run is ever what it looks like.

If you're having trouble with this, when you plan a run make sure that you have at least four conflicting interests in play: The original sponsor of the run, Johnson, the team's fixer, and whoever's delivering the message to Johnson.

Example:

The fixer likes the team, but thinks they're too low profile. If they were more notorious, they might command more money, which would get them more jobs, and the fixer more money. So the fixer nudges them towards higher-profile jobs .... meaning, more risk.

Johnson wants to get maximum results for minimum cost, so lies about the nature of the target. Not the security necessarily, or the name of the target or anything that blatant, but says things like: "We want to make sure you exit the facility with at least one cockatrice in the bag." when what Johnson really wants is not the cockatrice as such (although that's certainly useful) but to do an analysis on the cockatrice for tracking hardware, because targetcorp has been working on sexy new tracking hardware for paracritters.

The original sponsor, someone like Ares, or the Tijuana Inflatable Sexdrone Company, Incorporated, has their own priorities. They want the opposition's prototype, not to slow them down or confuse them or steal technology (although that's all good too) but to send a message that they can achieve this, that they will spend the money, and that they're hard targets who aren't afraid to get dirty. Whether or not the prototype is stolen, or even ever existed in the first place, is kind of irrelevant. They might send the runners on a wild goose chase and not care.

And then the person pulling Johnson's strings might have entirely different priorities. The company might not care about the opposition's prototype, but Johnson's handler totally wants the prototype, and will sell it under the table to a third party, and turn to the main company and say: "Yeah, the runners fragged up, they got the wrong thing. But whaddya gonna do? Ignorant street scum."

OK, so that was kind of the medium game... long game post coming after more coffee.

EDIT: Just realised this was my post #666. Cosmic symbology at work!

[Koekepan]

OK, more coffee inserted into the IV. On to the long game.

Your runners are fish, and every run is a flap of the tailfin. But where are they swimming? In a vast, all-encompassing reef of mutant madness.

What you want to do is create a rich, vibrant, colourful environment in which they can swim, and admire the scenery. How?

The first thing is that you want a corporate family tree. You want to have a list of corps operating in an area, all the way from small business development loan recipients to Horizon. You want to know their ownership relationships, their contract relationships, and their general attitudes. You want to have a list of at least VP-level people in them, and if there are any major relationships with others.

Example: You're in the Seattle 'plex, and one of the corporations is a baby one: Olive Street Organics. They sell naturally scented beeswax candles, evergreen resin incense and stuff like that. Big money, disposable items for the luxury market. To get them off the ground, the original owner sold a 30% stake to the landlord (Interbay Realty Corp.) and a 30% stake to their major supplier (SuperNatural Supplyco). The owner retains 40%, but lives in a constant state of paranoia about being muscled out of the business by the investors. It turns out that the business is way too small to interest the investors - they're more interested in Olive Street Organics staying in business and making a profit and driving more business for them, but there's a wrinkle, because you as the GM also know that Interbay Realty is a joint venture between Ballard Property Development and Queen Anne Drones (who make domestic robots). Queen Anne Drones has a part owner who really wants to buy out Olive Street Organics, but nobody in Ballard Property Development gives a damn, so you can have entire runs where a rich eccentric living near the space needle is doing everything in her power to get the team to go on nonsensical runs to convince SuperNatural that Olive Street's owner is incompetent and needs to be bought out by SuperNatural and Interbay jointly, with Interbay getting 51% and SuperNatural 49% (or less) so that bit by bit this crazy control freak can corner the scented candle market in the Seattle enclave.

Now have at least five different parallel stories of greed, spite, animosity and ego running at the same time, with conflicting lunatics driving the team in different directions ...

Your goal is to have the team sit down and say: "Why the frag is Septic Sewage asking us to run a datasteal on Vashon Yacht Design? This makes no sense!" It's not because they can't do the datasteal. Of course they can! They're the experts! And you're sitting at the table, grinning like a maniac because you know that the datasteal isn't a datasteal, but a message being sent to the wife of the principle sailmaker, who happens to be a professor at UW where she's responsible for teaching Sperethiel to the daughter of the local Vory boss.

So there's one thing missing, and that is: why do, or should the team care about this level of depth?

On one level, they don't. It's scenery. It's window-dressing.

On the next level, it's cool, because as they develop more understanding of the NPCs and corps in their environment, they get more involved, and more able to develop a bigger appreciation of what they have going on. This is fun, and can even open their options.

On the next level, this is where you get to really cool things. What does your group care about? For example, does a shaman care deeply about green space and urban raccoons on Magnolia Hill? Slowly, it should become visible, ever so slowly, that the corps are planning on buying it out and turning the whole hill into an arcology. Piece by piece, every run, every plan, everything has been moving to destroy all that this shaman holds dear - and he had a primary role in the whole scheme. In fact, even runs which appeared to promote the raccoon population were there to increase the corporate argument that there's a health risk on the hill. Everything turns around in the end.

This is the long game. Watching the runners screw themselves in slow motion, and slowly, gradually, sprinkling grit into their lube.

[Warlordtheft]

First give them a hug from me--a group like that is pure gold. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Second, you're not the opponents of the other players, the point of the game is to have fun.

Third: What you're really asking is how can I challenge my players--I'm not a dragon with 18 intelligence, or a corporate master with 3 tours in Desert Wars (unlike at least one of your players).

To the third point: Design the security system as if you were the corporation in question. Does this mean that a low level Mcguffin will be less protected? Yes. Could it be a complete cakewalk for the runners? Yes. That is ok. Most security is designed to handle some issues, like low level vagrants or mass mobs of civilians or prevent terrorist attacks from entering the facilities. For the professional runner, most facilities should be a piece of cake.

Heavy magic groups will be tapped for heavy magic issues. So don't be afraid to up the magic challenge.

A good decker and rigger is worth its weight in gold. That is another area that can be upped in the challenge level. Drones (even combat ones) are cheap compared to personnel. Matrix programs are also cheap deterrents. So don't be afraid to throw them some curve balls.

The social and moral: Suppose they enter a facility filled with children being experimented on. Their job is to rescue prisoner #453 and torch the place. Have there be fall out from that inicdent that goes beyond the job. Are they cold hearted and burn it down, have a relative (a prime runner) of one of the kids find out what happened and go after them. If they save the kids, the Johnson might go after them for failing to do the job.

Another good counter plays off the last point. Either the johnson or the prime runner hires another team to take the team down.

[toturi]

Argh! Help!

My players are too good. I'm one guy up against 6 players who are using HeroLab to create characters I can't challenge.

Their characters are min/maxed to the hilt. They're all very interesting characters, but they're also shadowrunning monsters. They have no discernible weaknesses that I can challenge. Besides they see all that I can send at them way before it has a chance to reach them.

I can't use the pregenerated characters as opposition - they'll eat them up like Oreos (When will SR learn to make proper pregen characters?)

There is a huge complexity issue: I can challenge them by throwing single hostiles at them - dragons or large spirits - but that just not interesting or realistic. If I'm going to create an interesting encounter for them, the complexity of making it is staggering - 4-8 unique characters made with every single trick in the books? If I'm going to create encounters that are varied, I'll have to spend weeks preparing.

I can't set up an ambush - they discover them way and just go a different way - meaning all preparation is moot.

Essentially I have to be able to improvise encounters on the fly based on what they do and run them - and Shadowrun is not a simple system that makes it easy to improvise.

So can you help me? Do you have any suggestion for a way to challenge them? or to reduce complexity?

Challenge them? I think their point is that you DON'T. In fact from your write up, your players seem to be not only experts at the short game but also the long game.

This said, you CAN use the pregens. Use them fully expecting them to be overcome. Go with the flow, your group is the irresistable force and you don't seem to have the time nor inclination to come up with the immovable object.

[Adhoc]

Thanks for the great replies - I'll sink some time into some considerations and come back to you.

As for challenging them: I try - but they are very good. Case in point: yesterday they went to a small abandoned town to search for an artifact.

Samuel (the one with the map) of them have Spatial Sense with extended range, so he can "capture" all architectual structures (and warded areas) within a 600 meter radius. The scouting route on the map is set, so that if they drive it with a Spatial Sense range 600, they'll have covered the whole town.

The character also have eidetic memory, so han kan remember all the details of this - and the skills to sketch it all out for the rest of the team.

Congratulations, they now know every single buiilding, basement, tunnels - whatever - in the whole area.

The only thing that took them for a ride last game night was that they weren't prepared for the background count in the area - a toxic mage ghoul had been deliberately polluting the area for a very long time.

So...I believe it is about time for the corp/runner-community to take notice of them and up their game.

A.

[apple]

Samuel

Force 13 Spirit of Air (Wind) (Edge)

Force 10 Spatial Sense, Extended, Sustained

Force 12 Deflection (Edge), Sustained

Levitate on self, Force ?, Sustained

Improved Invisibility, Force 1, Sustained

Physical Barrier, Spherical, around self (and
possibly Ravens) while levitating, Force 10,
Sustainied (-1

From the linked PDF: how does this work out? I mean drain, force 1 invisibility?

SYL

[Adhoc]

From the linked PDF: how does this work out? I mean drain, force 1 invisibility?

SYL

Drain would Force -1; aka 1.

However from description of Invisibility:

Anyone who might be in a position to perceive the
subject must first successfully resist the spell. Simply
make one Spellcasting Test and use the hits scored as
the threshold for anyone that resists at a later point.

So if they don't have a lot of Hits, they'll be easy to spot.

And the Force (1) acts as the limit on the spellcasting test, so they can maximum have 1 hit. And if they use Edge to bypass the limit ( :Force) they loose that Edge while the spell is in effect.

I think they might be using Reargents to change the limit to get more Hits:

Spellcasting: In a pinch, you can spend reagents to
set the limit for Spellcasting. Rather than using the spell’s
Force as the limit, use the number of drams of reagents
spent. SR5 s317

"

A.

[apple]

That was my thought as well (using drams to bypass the force limit). However force 13 spirits mean that these spirits have usually 13 dices AND 13 edge to counter the summoning, especially if thesummoning mage does not have 13 magic as well. How exactly are your players able to summon force 13 spirits without bigger drain issues? Even with 20+ dices and edge it should not be that easy, especially if the spirits feels that the raw power of the summoner is below of that of the spirit.

How are the spells sustained? Ally spirit? Focus? Advantage?

SYL

[Machiavelli]

I smell a problem in game-mechanics here. I am not very experienced in SR5, but i am quite fluent in all other versions. I cannot remember if the rules changed that much, but if not, the problem you describe seems like you don´t use all the options you have to challenge or limit the characters, while they misuse the RAW by the sheer lack of knowledge of the rules. I am a powergamer as well and even (or especially in SR5) you cannot simply run around with spirits of that force. Summoning alone is a death-risk. Also the spells work wrong (or better: you let your players use them wrong). Levitation cannot be put on/off at will. You levitate with a certain speed. You cannot say "i use it when i need it, on all other occasions i will walk". If you want to change direction, if you want to move, it costs an action. This is so hindering, that no one sane enough will use this spell for mere travel reasons. I tried, believe me. It is not superman-flight-spell. Sorry. Also invisibilty doesn´t work that way and honestly most of the chars should be able to negate the effect. Also he still is a astral-bonfire with spells sustained / quickened / whatever, and if you don´t throw initiation-grades at them like smarties, this should stay like this for a while. Don´t forget background count, that should negate the spell completely (SR4-knowledge, though). Could have changed.

[Kyrel]

Vel mødt (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

You already have some good advice above, so I'll keep it brief:

First of all, if your players are optimizers, make sure that you know the rules as well as they do. I'm not up to speed on 5th ed., but I always become suspicious when I see multiple Force 10+ Spirits and spells being cast and sustained. And bear in mind that as the GM you do have the option to both houserule and ban stuff that you deem unsuitable for your campaign or overly powerful and gamebreaking. Don't be afraid to exercise that power, but remember to be consistent.

Second, forget about specifically challenging them. Your job is to make sure that the players are having fun. If they have fun stomping all over their target's defenses, you're doing well enough. Build the world and the target location and make it "realistic". A really professional crew will be able to penetrate most places, either with ease, or with some level of preparation, and most defenses are designed more to delay an intruder until heavier opposition can arrive, rather than to stop them outright. As you say, these guys are very good at this, and their characters don't really have any obvious weaknesses. IMO that's actually a good thing, because that means that they are likely to be more "durable", which gives you some more room to misestimate the danger of the opposition you put in front of them, and still allow them to survive, even if they become a bit singed around the edges.

Third, remember all of the options you have available to you. Mages can be severely hampered by background counts. HTR teams and other Prime runners are as capable as they are, and there might be more of them in some places. Though it's the most common, not all places will have WiFi running. Highly secure locations might well be running everything on wires, and have the important matrix systems inaccessible from the general matrix and from off-site. Some really low end places might even run on some form of legacy IT equipment that the players modern equipment won't even be able to interact with (how do you think a modern piece of software for Windows 10 will work out, if it tries to interact with whatever OS existed on an old Commadore 64 from the 80'es?). The hacker might still be able to hack into the computersystem, but he might need to use an ancient hardware keyboard and mouse configuration, he'll have to be in front of the computer in question, and he'll have to decipher how the hell the code from back then worked in the first place, before he can really hack it.

Fourth, in terms of planning things out, bear in mind that you might not have to stat out every bloody NPC mook that you put in their way. Unless you have a crew of players who loot like crazy, it really doesn't matter what particuler gun and armour the security guards are carrying. It's just something that does 5P AP-1 in damage, and the guy shooting it rolls X dice as basis when he shoots, and resists damage with Y dice basis and have Z boxes worth of "HP".

[NeVeRLiFt]

Just cherry pick your npc's from these two sites and build your own teams to throw at them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hubchargen/

https://www.reddit.com/r/shadowchargen/?cou...after=t3_3cqfv8

[Prime Mover]

Use strengths against them once in awhile. Disinformation, countermeasures and distractions.
Health and confusion spells are great for decreasing stats and turning a strength into weakness.
Reoccurring antagonists will certainly be expecting there tricks and plan accordingly.

[Sn00py]

It's not just about doing the crime; it's about getting away with it too.

I have good players in my group (including an ex Ranger whose character is optimized beyond belief). Tactically, against mooks, they are more than likely to win. Every now and then, I throw them up against parallel opposition - eg a rival runner team using the same tricks they do - drones, magic, snipers, sneaky hacks, who are more challenging. Plus add in complications, unexpected civilians, multiple groups in competition for the same prize, etc.

But the real challenge, as I see it, is for their characters to go on living safe and secure as they pile up more and more consequences for their actions, people they've pissed off, little mistakes they've made, evidence left at the scene. Keep secret records of what weapons they fired, in which jurisdictions, and what happened to any bodies they left, how well any crimes were investigated - maybe bullet fragments match, maybe they killed someone with cybereyes who was recording at the time, or there was a witness hiding... Think about how fast major criminal / terrorist investigations can go, with access to all the data and cameras etc that cops have now - then think how much more data they're going to have in the 2070s, with some near (or actual) AI combing through it looking for matches. And then there's the dogged detective who just can't let the case go, or the mob enforcer who starts by targeting their contacts and friends.

Honestly though, your players sound great!

[Iduno]

Did the mana static spell make it to 5th? That was pretty good for portable background count. Completely takes out low-force spells and spirits, and weakens stronger ones. Throw counterspelling on that, and magic is pretty well weakened

But yeah, most problems with magic seem to combine rules abuse with the GM not using background count or counterspelling. Something like 1% of the world is magically-active. The corps will have prepared for that, and have enough money to hire plenty of their own for protection. If mages are getting paid much better to do magic than work on an assembly line, you'll see a much higher percentage in security or similar roles. Maybe they are not present every run, but they should have at least left behind some spirits and wards.

Good planning and careful use of resources though? Reward that.

[Glyph]

Challenge them, but keep it fun. Don't go all Minority Report on them. The occasional enemy trying to track them down is fine, but keep in mind that this is a corrupt, decaying, balkanized world. An enemy that is after them is likelier to simply fabricate "evidence" rather than have a dossier on the last three places they hit. Use background count sparingly. It is a horrible, fun-sucking mechanic which is also a horrible way to "balance" awakened types since flat penalties actually encourage min-maxing. Even a background count of 1 should have a good story-related reason to be there.

I do agree with Machiavelli and Kyrel that all of those high-force spirits and mutiple high-force sustained spells are very suspicious. There are only so many ways to mitigate drain - they should not be soaking physical drain so reliably. Reagents only reduce drain for ritual sorcery.

[Sendaz]

It's old, but still relevant:

Levelling the field

[Beta]

On a mechanical level, you might want (for game balance reasons) to adopt the following rule from the Missions FAQ (which is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/022gpaf8wkohvwy/S...200.1.pdf?dl=0)

Q: I want to do X, which can be done in game or as a downtime action. Do I roll skill dice or buy hits?
A: Anything that is permanent or has no explicit “expiration date” to it must be done using the “buying hits” method.

Q: If I Quicken a spell during play, do I buy hits or can I spend Edge and Reagents and roll my skill as normal?
A: You must buy hits, and cannot use Edge or reagents.

But my main suggestion is that at least some of the time, make the game not tactical. They get hired to make sure that a trid shoot doesn't get disrupted -- and that includes them not disrupting it with heavy handed tactics. They need to extract someone from a formal party (without getting all the attention of shooting up the place). A new group in the barrens is offering free magical training to the awakened, a wealthy family traced their run-away child as far as the cult but don't know what happened to him or her afterwards, and they want the group to find out. A deep undercover agent has indicated to his controllers that he has an item to pass along, but is under heavy surveillance, so suggests contacts infiltrate the corporate Christmas party as part of the entertainment and he'll pass it along disguised as a present. Etc.

They can still prepare and plan and all of that, but the final objective is not so clear, so they have to adapt on the fly. And more critically, there are loads of innocent bystanders, so they can't do this with pure brute force. Your group is good--I have no doubt they can pull these off. But pulling it off by being clever and adapting well is much more satisfying, IMO, than succeeding because you can just outplan the scenario.

[Blade]

Last time some players asked me to challenge their 40+ karma pool SR3 PC, I found the perfect opposition: a hundred sick kids.

The PC were good samaritans. They were convinced that they were big heroes, always saving the world. Since most of the other GM just threw the biggest thing they could think of (bugs, cyberzombies, blood/toxic mages and even horrors) at them, they pretty much did.

So I designed a run where they slowly uncovered a child trafficking network (killing everyone involved in the process). The physical opposition was low-key, but when they had to rescue a dozen of children from a brothel, they had to call another PC to find a solution for them. So imagine their reaction when they found, at the source of the network, a science research ship full of sick SINless children (about a hundred of them). That made them realize that no matter how good they were, they were just glorified killing machines.

EDIT: I did this because I thought the players would find it interesting (and they did), but I it probably won't be to everyone's taste.

[Kyoto Kid]

...updating an old 3rd edition setting (pre Crash 2 2060s) of mine, I'd say send them to the Balkans to extract an up and coming musical genius (and daughter of a high ranking and respected noble) who is abducted by State Security of a ruthless dictatorship (backed secretly by a major power or powers) of which is little detail about their internal workings is available to the outside world. This nation tends to rely on old tech to store critical data (that actually requires the decker to physically jack into) and what wireless there is available is heavily restricted both within the nation and to/from the outside. Awakened characters need to be very, very, careful as the intelligence bureau actively recruits awakened citizens (mages and adepts) for their special corps and astral overwatch. This nation is also not above sending dissidents, prisoners, or people they just don't like, to "Re-Education Centres". The lucky ones tend to become "good members of society", the unlucky ones are sent to "reconditioning" for indoctrination into the "Special Soldier" Programme.

Does any of them speak the local language with an idiomatic accent?

How good is their General Etiquette skill?

Does the Decker have a Datajack, data cable, and Knowledge of Legacy Architecture and Data Structures?

How good are they about keeping things as quiet and moving as quick as possible (because the incident has not gone public and it would be best if it didn't)? This would be an extreme "black trenchcoat affair" as they are heading into a political and social dystopia as well.

Of course Dr. Nowaks' (Mr J's) generous offer, hint of a nice bonus if everything is kept mum should be incentive enough to entice them.

[ludomastro]

If you're looking for a combat challenges there's always Tucker's Kobolds. While the write up is D&D focused (hence my statement about combat) there's some good advice hiding under there about using "weak" enemies to the fullest extent of their powers to challenge the PC's.

[JanessaVR]

If you're looking for a combat challenges there's always Tucker's Kobolds. While the write up is D&D focused (hence my statement about combat) there's some good advice hiding under there about using "weak" enemies to the fullest extent of their powers to challenge the PC's.

Sounds like they were the inspiration for the kobolds in the Dragon Mountain boxed set from the 1990's. I purchased that one when it came out and thought "Dear Gods! I never thought kobolds could ever be dangerous! These guys are actually smart. Worse, they're organized, and trained!"

[Neraph]

Challenge them, but keep it fun. Don't go all Minority Report on them. The occasional enemy trying to track them down is fine, but keep in mind that this is a corrupt, decaying, balkanized world. An enemy that is after them is likelier to simply fabricate "evidence" rather than have a dossier on the last three places they hit. Use background count sparingly. It is a horrible, fun-sucking mechanic which is also a horrible way to "balance" awakened types since flat penalties actually encourage min-maxing. Even a background count of 1 should have a good story-related reason to be there.

I do agree with Machiavelli and Kyrel that all of those high-force spirits and mutiple high-force sustained spells are very suspicious. There are only so many ways to mitigate drain - they should not be soaking physical drain so reliably. Reagents only reduce drain for ritual sorcery.

I dunno. I specifically built more than one character to mitigate the effects of up to 5 spells being sustained at a time. I assumed certain dicepool penalties and calculated what kind of successes I'd need to offset them. These people seem smart enough to have done the same.

That said, one of the more challenging missions I gave my PCs was kidnapping a cyber-and-bio-enhanced rooster and keeping it alive for a week so it missed the cock fight and the owner had to forfeit. The "robo-cock," as I called it, nearly killed two people before they were able to put it into a medically-induced coma.