I'm finding that it's getting to the point where I have to tailor everything for the team in order to challenge them whether it makes sense or not. Or else I have to constantly betray and ambush them. Both seem very forced and it is showing with my players. It's at the point where every security hacker/rigger has to be a technomancer (and even that doesn't really stop them), every secure site has to have a competent, dedicated, and super paranoid mage, and every security guard has to be cybered or high as a kite.

SR4 is interesting and I'm having a lot of fun making characters but running it sucks donkey b**ls. I'm at wits end and I'm wondering what the GMs out there or game devs/testers did to challenge their characters WITHOUT specifically altering the setting to account for their team.

Are your players geniouses? if so i'll trade you a couple of mine then.

you might want to try giving security guards things to hide behind, running and cover gives a lot of dice penalty to shooting them. Automated security (wired, not wireless) is always an equalizer also. and if all else fails, you can try the 100 kobolds attack technique

I know our street sam was in quite a bit of trouble yesterday when 4 people kept shooting EX-EX bursts at him, he can only dodge so much per pass.

Have you tried giving them some actually easy runs, and then having enemies use actual forensic techniques to hunt them down?

20 norms kicking down your door with predators should scare the crap out of even berserker trolls.

-Frank

Have them steal from a dragon's lair. There's, like, no good way to kill them in SR. Stupid lack of magic items.

Eventually you need to raise them to the higher levels. Against governments, the arcology, orbitals, stuff like that. Guards are only good if they're in sets of a dozen and they encounter more armored drones than humans. Of course, the pay increases to mirror the difficulty.

That, or decrease the emphasis on combat and increase other challenges so they have to think and their stats aren't quite as important.

I echo both of Nezumi's suggestions.

That's one of the trickier aspects of GM'ing in my opinion, balancing enough action with enough puzzles and pure roleplaying situations. A well though out adventure should have all 3. My weakness in this sense is that I tend to over emphasize the puzzles.

if they are kicking endless butt in combat, there are realy two way. Have them fight clones. Not actualy clones, but a for each sam, an enemy sam, for each mage, an enemy mage. Maybe mage their foes a bit weaker, but toss in some cannon fodder. The PCs willh ave individual edge, the bad guys group edge, so they should win.

or, have other obstacles. put them on a boat, the sink it so they have to swim to shore (does eveyrone have athletics?). On the way there, some nasty sharks or water monsters. On the island to which they swim, they are cold, wet, hungry, time for survival rles. Maybe the beach is very rocky, to get to the island itself they have to climb a cliff. etc.

Actually its not the combat that's a problem. I haven't even put the latest team through a session of combat yet. It's doing the runs that is causing most of the problems. It is very easy to sleaze your way through security in this edition and its getting very difficult to design security that is general yet challenging. My D&D reference was in reference to the fact that security is starting to feel kinda scaled.

As far as the follow ups and all of that, it will come up but the timeline in the campaign is still too fresh.

Why don't you give us example of what you're trying to secure, and have everyone chip in some ideas and see what comes out?

This is assuming that, since your guys are well developed runners, they're infiltrating the high security building, not stealing beer from the local stuffer shack.

• The goal of the local security force is not to capture you, only to find you and slow you down until the professional response force arrives. So your first encounter is probably with weak, expendable assets: dogs, low-level security guys, and watchers. They're all cheap, and nobody will care if they get chewed up (except them and their families.)
• Local guards should run away from confrontation, pushing their panic button as they go, unless they have overwhelming odds. If they're smart they're probably also doing things to increase their survivability, like dropping thermal smoke and flash/bang grenades and fab grenades,
• All guards should have their company's equivalent of a GPS and Biomonitor built into their uniform. Same thing applies for watch critters. So if you shoot him, everybody's going to know immediatly.
• As soon as the first guy gets shot, or hits his panic button, spirits, astral mages, and/or drones will move into defensible ambush positions. If these guys are remotely intelligent they will not come barging into the room your in guns a-blazing.
• Most rooms and hallways would have cameras and/or some way to observe the characters.
• Doors are all remotely lockable.
• Choke points, like the hall that everybody has to walk down to get to the important room, should have non-lethal systems for taking down assailants. Preferably these should be systems that don't require targeting and couldn't be dodged. (Gas delivery systems, sprayers with dmso, freeze foam, slip spray, metal floors and a shock system, etc) controlled by a hard line (not wireless).
• Choke points should also be equiped with balistic doors and high-rating locks.
• If you do manage to get out of the building and/or off the corp's turf, they probably won't try to gun you down. They'll follow you from afar until they decide to attack in a place and way of their choosing with overwhelming force.
• Usually what brings down the tough guys is not a single really bad wound, but is a lot of little annoyance wounds that add up to give you impossible modifiers.

Some individuals in my group complain when they can't walk through the game with no problems. If you feel there is a way for your group to get out of it with their current ability, then you have no problems. If the situation is completely impossible sounding, then they are out of their league. You gotta pick your battles. If the run sounds like too much for them, they should have the option to not take it or just walk out.

Have remotely triggered permanent emergency locks on all the doors so that security riggers can seal them so well that the only way through them is with an arc welder or a depleted uranium rocket shell. Upgrade security technology with things like this that can't be beaten just by having really good skills in hacking and high drain resistance.

Remember: Life isn't fair.

How's the following run outline:

The players, having a reputation for success, are hired by a local mafia boss to protect his teenage daughter from a yakuza hit. It's only for 48 hours, and the whole things looks pretty easy - the mafia boss's mansion has a reasonably secure perimter, etc.

The daughter is in a rebellious phase and doesn't really understand the seriousness of the situation. She'll want to go to the mall with her friends. If the players try to stop her, she'll complain to her father who will side with her. When out, she'll try to ditch the players using such tactics as sneaking out the window of a public bathroom. She'll also try to sneak out at night with her punk orc boyfriend to some marginal part of town. She won't do anything herself to help security - she'll claim she will and then forget or even try to actively thwart the players.

The opposition is a high end shadowrun team, better statted and coordinated than the players. They have a dedicated support rigger, a deeply submerged technomancer who knows and uses all the tricks, a high end street samurai, and a heavily initiated mage. They start with the upper hand to the point of their technomancer having been present in the Mafia boss's commlink during the initial meet with the PCs. They properly use drones, sniping (including drone sniping), spell defense, spells, metamagic, spirits, explosives (including drone explosives), to kill the girl in some gruesome fashion as close to the father as possible.

Once the girl is dead, the father blames the PCs. The real mission: don't get killed by the Mafia hit squads, which are slightly weaker but more numerous than the yakuza hitters were.

What if they monitor the comlink, too? And if it happens and they don't wipe out the enemy team, then do they get a karma bonus? This better have a REALLY good karma reward; they won't get paid, and you'd be railroading them towards one of the worst states of being hunted possible.

Why get the true names of a few master shedim? To have an army of shedim at your beck and call?

So that if the person you're guarding gets geeked, you can have the Shedim possess the corpse and still get paid.

Oh... Holy shit...

Which reminds me of another old run idea. Custody battle/kiddnapping run only some leg work will show that the Johnson isn't divorced (everything else is perfectly fine). The punchline involves one member of the team being compelled to cook his own face and feed it to the cute kid. Or, you could have them the the mafia girl's second set of bodyguards after the first one took my advice.

Corridors full of monowire.

"So you walk down the hallway? Okay, you hit 3 strands of monowire. Make body resistance tests."
*player rolls*
"Okay, you take 18 boxes of physical damage. You body is sliced several more times before it hits the ground."

Also, fill the matrix host with oodles and oodles of Black IC. Even the best technomancer's going to have trouble if he's getting swarmed with dozens of IC programs.

security mages w/ fiber optics in different parts of the building.

Fire elemtentals engulfing sammie's specifically to set off their ammo.

There are some good ideas here, but a lot of them...well, ARE sort of leaning toward the ol D&D tradition of 'they're killing my stuff, lemme throw bigger and badder stuff at them!' To me, that was the ol' D&D way of handling things. "They have a Machinegun? well than the enemies have a Panther Cannon! PCs have Cannon? Enemies have Thorshot!!!"

I typically liked the lines of 'play the other stuff smarter'. Rather than beefing up enemies til they are nearly undefeatable unless the runners have subtactical nukes...playing a party roughly equal, if not a few karma more powerful, VERY smart can ruin a runner's day just as well.

And besides, a lot of out of combat stuff can be done to challenge them just as well.

And I always thought the most challenging runs were the 'If one bullet is fired by any side...you failed the run'.

I would try some of them before throwing force 12 spirits at the PCs.

I'm not saying big spirtis, or big guns. In my example, the PC was taken down by an Ares Predator and one spell.

Just build the security [I]smarter[I]. The fiberoptics is a very cheap way to make one security mage go a long ways. Sending an elemental aginst a street sam is just being smart. It's a quick and easy way to disarm him, even with a mid-force elemental, that doesn't cost any sec guards lives. Remeber that these buildings that they're going in to have people that are actively trying to keep people out, and are going to cover any weak points that they can find. That is EVERY corp building they go in to. They might not all have the resources to buy all the toys they want, but enough to make it difficult. When you draw up a map of the place they're hitting, don't draw it up with a way in on your mind. Rather, draw the map, see if you can find points to exploit it, then do what you can (within reson and your idea of their budget) to plug those leaks.

Find a guy and deliver a message to him (not a ephemism for violence, an actual message). No combat whatsoever if the runners do it right.
The catch, the guy is missing and was last seen in the general vicinity of Tibet.
The runners have to track him down and this may require getting into Tibet (a difficult task itself considering the impenetrable barrier and mountain-sized fire elementals that they do not want to make angry).
The run iself is pure legwork without any violence unless the runners themselves do something stupid.

I find it helpful to think about the background of a run - not just the "why" but the "how." How does Mr. Johnson know that Ares has this hotshot research scientist that we'd love to kidnap? Did he send in a hacker? Did the scientist himself decide he wants out of his contract and covertly emailed his resume around? Does Mr. Johnson have a secretary on Ares in his payroll (i.e. a spy)? Any way you slice it, there's always a chance (sometimes a good chance) that the opposition knows something is up. Maybe the hacker got traced (or at least set off an alert). Maybe the scientists email was intercepted. Maybe the secretary is a double agent - really working for Knight Errant to lure in types like Mr. Johnson.

If security is on alert for trouble, they're going to take some extra precautions. They're justified in sending in some guys with cyberware or installing extra sensors/drones/spirits. Maybe they'll try to be real obvious ("we'll scare off any troublemakers") or maybe they'll try to be really subtle ("those troublemakers will never see THIS coming"). Either way a routine run is a whole new ballgame.

And you can take it a step furhter - if the target has an inkling something is going down, maybe they're already in the "preemptive self defense" mode with loads of agents (or shadowrunners) looking to stop the team. Maybe that Loyalty 1 Fixer really has the straight dope about security plans. And maybe he'll make twice what you're paying him for selling you out to the corp, instead.

The best part about this sort of paranoia is that it starts to make the players work harder than you do. They'll get worried about being followed or overheard or ambushed anywhere - even a routine meet or a pizza delivery can get scary as shit. They'll chase their own tails and turn ordinary details into impossibly elaborate security setups and traps. As long as they THINK the game is hard, they'll act like it is and have that much more fun!

One thing I always did when I ran was create "soft" corridors that would funnel the attacking runners into areas because it was the "best" way in. Using fiber to watch exactly what the runners are doing, the security would hit them from hardened positions that limited the runners choices for retailiation.

SEAL that is vicious. I'm totally doing it next run . . . .

In the best adventures there is a point where a character says, "this was a really sh*t idea". We used to play SLA Industries and so everyone was always paranoid anyway so I just fed that.

Hearing your players plan for 2 hours and getting to hear "this was a really sh*t idea" is just music to my ears.

My group outlines Plan Z as "Charge in and react accordingly."

They stopped doing that after a while.

I agree with the people before about making the other parts harder than just the enemies. Sometimes as a GM i fall into the fault of giving to much to quick, and i see a balance start to fall. In a situation like this i use the regular enemy types but the fact of completing the mission and coming out ok is two different things. Having one of the runners seriously injure a part of thier body and magical healing is expensive or not around.

I have an adept in my group that got to be extremely powerful. He was unlucky during combat and passed out the only other person that was running with him was unconscious as well the team took him to a street doc and told the runners that the damage was to great and the arm from the elbow down would have to be amputated. When the adept woke up he was without arm and pissed i must say but he had to get a cyber arm and that hurt his essence.

Also create dumps for them something were they have to spend the money so they can't just be buying everything that they want. Also make the availability harder for them to get. Leave them in situations where doing a run itself is far from their mind and roleplaying more and thinking through things is the way to go.

Just some thoughts

Sheezes. If you have to do all that, you're missing something. That just sounds like GM assclownery.

A zero essence cloned replacement limb costs less than cyberlimbs and is several times more common. Why would the adept have to get a cyberlimb?

You can take your run and just cause little problems to come up during the operation. The vehicle they are traveling in has problem such as a fuel line rupture and sprays the group with fuel and generally making them misrable. They could also have problems such as an accident when they arrive and people can get hurt then. They have done the planning and have to hit tonight even though things are looking bad.

They go in and find that even though everything they accessed had shown that security on site would be 40 guards total and a few biologicals, turns out it is several times that number, several are cybered and have some awakened critters and mages. The team has some comm problems once in the facility and has a hard time coordinating. Throw in some friendly fire and while they may succeed they will pay for it.

Your players may b*tch about it and say that they are professionals and that should not have happened. If so, ask them to do some research on Operation Urgent Fury because this is not unlike what happened to SEAL Team IV (now DEVGRU).

Does not matter how much they plan, things will go wrong. Operation Gothic Serpant (Mogadishu) started poorly because Pvt. Blackburn fell while fast roping and tied up resources early. Just something to always hold over their head, not something on every mission but often enough that they are good and paranoid.

Turn it from Shadowrun to Shadow Call of Cthulu. That generally gives my players good cause to be nervous.

Make random (bad) luck really random - roll for it.
Otherwise it just has a bitter taste.

Little things can really mess them up too. Consider having a Lone Star detective notice that all those spent casings at the 4 mass murders have matching trace DNA and prints. Now have him pretty sure that it is runner X and start following him around. How careful are runners about not leaving DNA and prints on the trash? Going to McHughs (I think that is the name) and leaving with your trash to properly dispose of it will raise some eyebrows. Then again if they are happy to go outside you could have a group of runners ambush them because they hit that target that they were spending all that time casing for their Johnson.

Using the CoC flavor can be a nasty surprise. That is what our GM did for bugs to add that alien feel and to keep us from understanding exactly what was going on. SR4 does not have good rules for insanity but do some research on PTSD and then you can use that to help explain to the runners the nightmares they are having. Are those cold sweats from PTSD or are you sick?

Another good tactic is to take the players out of their element and/or deprive them of their equipment from time to time.

I have a group of players that is effective and very creative, but their jobs tend to be on the noisy side. Recently they had to go to Japan to help out a friend. They travelled on a commercial flight, disguised as tourists, so they couldn't bring any weapons or illegal gear -- and when they arrived they didn't have to contacts to buy anything.

I also made the police presence pretty heavy, and played up the fact that Japan is very law-and-order oriented and that noisy, violent actions would get them in a lot of trouble.

The toughest opposition they faced the whole run were a few plainclothes cops with light pistols -- guys they could have walked over normally. But the whole run they were *terrified* that they were going to get caught, and they definitely felt challenged.

In another run, the train they were travelling on was attacked by a Comet cult. It took them a while to even figure out what was happening, and they were forced to react to the circumstances instead of planning everything ahead of time.