I get mixed messages about what people look for in their games; the consensus amongst the "veterans," at least on my game threads, seems to be "street-levelism." That is, a constant frantic scramble for survival in the shadows of corporate giants that would stomp them to the ground if they weren't so tiny and insignificant. Then again, those same people want to play a game "where he (the hero) looks heroic, shoots the bad guy, and taps the female lead and her sister at the same time." This was said by Critias, who, in the old days of a few months ago, would constantly admonish me for not being "street level" enough.

There also seems to be a consensus against powergaming; it's bad to have stuff that is too good, to have players that are too powerful and effective. I construe this to mean that may people want good role-playing. At the same time, there seems to be a constant pressure to conform to this monochromatically dark standard; people seem to like and even require "mundane hitman/detective/hacker/gangster with a mercenary heart/chip on his shoulder/bad conscience/religious devotion to 'professionalism'" type characters; requisite cliches contrasting with a stated desire for "creativity."

The question I want to have answered is what the hell do people want out of Shadowrun? Do you want a Mary Sue hero or a whiny street emo geek? Do you want anti-productive creativityin which people try not to make specialized, effective characters or dumbass archetypes that people are, if this world has any justice, tired of? Am I not getting something, are people trying to be disagreeable for the sake of testosterone backlog, or none of the above?

Personally, I'm looking for excitement, twisted, dark humor, with moments of genuine heartbreak that are in no way diminished by the objective wrongness of the situations sprinkled in. What about you?

I shadowrun because otherwise my perfectly good basement and virginal friends would sit around collecting dust.

But what do you look for in a game?

*Shrug* I like more cinematic gameplay, but based on the kind of cinema I watch. So theres a lot of Road Warrior/The Warriors-esque gangs and whatnot. And then general ridiculousness, like sending the PCs on a run to rob an armored convoy shipment of super-rare awakened coffee beans. Character interaction and conflict is always fun. I once had a character sneak into a PC's girlfriend's house and kill her, because the character felt said PC's girlfriend was becoming a liability and annoyance.

Wow... thanks for responding.

Now for all the people who make a habit of shooting down my ideas; what do you want from Shadowrun?

A believable experience where I can pretend I'm a professional badass in a dirty grimey world.

Why? I have no clue. But I love it.

I mostly enjoy watching people react to the things I've made up; I'm open-minded about the nature of the game in which this happens. The one I'm running right now is pretty high-powered: 100-ish karma, with a bunch of mathematically ept people for players. It's street level in the sense that the characters aren't corporate and wouldn't want to be, but gangs (frex) are a threat only in large numbers or when led with unusual intelligence. The PCs are highly skilled professionals, and their fees (and challenges!) reflect that.

I play it because it's fun. Street level, medium, or ultra-high powered can all have their places. If it's a challenge without being impossible and gives me something to wrap my brain around while sometimes venting frustrations on imaginary targets, great!

I don't.

I'm the Games Master. I'm way too much of a ball hog to be a player.

High stakes and and dangerous/nefarious opposition.

Examples: Harlequins back, Double exposure, stuff involving Deus.

I play mainly for the roleplaying and the combat. I like the cyberpunk theme, but I don't find the planning phase as interesting, and a lot of games seem to get bogged down in the planning stage of the run.

As far as power level goes, I am flexible. I don't mind low-powered games if the characters can still affect the world around them, even if it's just stopping the local protection racket. I don't mind high-powered games, if there is still enough realism for me to be able to suspend my disbelief, and if there are still real challenges in the game.

Morality-wise, I prefer gritty antiheroes who have to do bad things to survive sometimes, but who are still better than the opposition most of the time. I like romanticized criminals, but not overly-romanticized ones. People who have to occasionally do bad things for the greater good, or even simply to survive. People who fight the system but realize, deep down, that in many ways they are still part of it.

I don't like games where the runners are psychopaths. On the flip side, I don't like the cold pro games that much, either, where there is too much planning and paranoia, and not enough fun (for me, that is. For people who like the planning aspect, these games are probably all kinds of fun).

As far as the game, I try to adapt to the GM's style. The only thing that I really dislike is excessive railroading. There's nothing wrong with a plot, but the PCs should have the ability to affect things.

Street-level is such mindless posturing bullshit. It's like the argument Synner and I got into over PM last year where he kept bringing up Heat while consistently missing the whole point (Which is why I think he's completely full of shit, or clueless, or both). This was a movie where one of the protagonists fronts $100,000 of his own money to buy the bank job (plus a 10% cut on the backend). There's not one goddamn thing about that crew that is "street" and yet I've been told over and over again that a crew of 20-something street scum are somehow supposed to be on average as professional and skilled as McCauley's crew, yet still live in the fucking gutters.

Bullshit.

I play in the same world as Crit does (Did. Whatever) where professional criminals can make a fairly decent living because they get paid for their skills because their skills are rare and the resources that go into prepping a job usually exceed those of what Fanpro considers a decent average payment for a whole team. But they're still professional criminals where plenty of resources go into covering your ass, plenty of time is spent in the Barrens because that's where the action is and because that's where you can make all those nasty deals and field-test your l33t combat skills with weapons without the Star dropping two platoons of SWAT cops on your ass, and where the likelihood of coming home maimed or not at all from a job is virtually assured.

And that's the game I play, because that's the only way the game makes sense.

yeah. Heat was good. but it was not street. i don't know of many good crime movies that are all that street-level. Bandits, maybe? The Big Hit? City of Industry is stretching it.

Personally, I like the fact that you can create some freak that spews 5 or 6 phases of full auto AV fire per round straight out of chargen.

Why? Because things like that grant players the illusion of invincibility/omnipotence, then they go and USE those skills... and find out that the second they use that godly might, they've forfeited their pay/brought the wrath of a multinational corporation upon themselves/implicated the wrong people through their indiscretion.

The best and most memorable runs I've been on were astounding failures... where we barely got through with enough assets remaining to limp to the drop-off, only to find the guy with our pay had been turned into a thin film coating the majority of the surfaces in the room. Oh noes. And we've still got the package! Shit.

To me, Shadowrun's a system where, if the job is done "right", there's generally very little proof that it was done at all. It's a system where, at some point, the "heroes" have to run for their lives. It's a system where the only cures for paranoia are money and death. It's the Indiana Jones "out of the frying pan, into the fire" progression. It's the little guys fighting against the oppression of the big guys, and losing because they have to play by the big guys' rules.

It's a system where a guy with 18 dice in Cyber-Implant Combat and a pair of dikoted spurs can't succeed on his own, and whose street name is probably "Plan C"

But that's my two cents. Some play heroic fantasy, and that's swell.

If people were paid 20% above lifestyle, they would never buy cool toys. That's enough reason for me to pay my players a lot.

There are ways to justify the suggested pay scale. Volume, for example. A team that is good at managing their scheduals and working their contacts could do legwork for a several runs all at the same time and then pop them off over the next week.

A four man team could easily do legwork for a dozen runs over a week and finish two per day over the next week. At 2000 per run split evenly they'll be grossing 12,000 yeach per month. That isn't half bad.

I play SR for all sorts of reasons. I do enjoy working 'on the streets' with a gritty feel to everything, where you know your stuff but you're still a small fish. I like the high-level espionage campaigns where the world is your oyster. I like hunting magical critters. I like playing the sasquatch PC in the winnebago. I like the dice system, the attribute break-outs and the magical rules. I wish they had a cyberware list a bit closer to CP2020, but that's okay. I like the ideas emo has that are internally consistent, although in general I like to have clear lines of 'this is the normal world Joe wageslave sees every day' and 'this is the rest of the world', with a reason why the two do not meet (something I think emo's campaigns oftentimes lack). I enjoy a sort of Alice in Wonderland feeling to my games, I suppose.

That's why I pay them a ton of money; that means everybody's happy!!!

Except for you, it seems.

I've got to agree with Straw Man on this one: "The best and most memorable runs I've been on were astounding failures...."
I love the planning, I hate seeing the best laid plans of mice go to pieces, but the most memorable runs have been the ones where our crew was just trying to make it to next week.

Yeah Jack Frost if you see this I mean you.

I would first like to say that you play one high velocity game of Sr if you think it's conceivable for a runner to two runs a day. The logistics alone might make sense; however, Shadowrun just doesn't work that way. No one is professional enough to not get involved and no one is skilled enough to not get killed.

On the grander scheme, I must say that, in general, I run for "the good runs" that are told around dork tables for years. "Good runs" are generally characterized as high risk. THAT DOESN'T MEAN HIGH DANGER, it means high risk. It means that characters dying, especially NPCs, would mean the loss of not just a life, but a reordering of lives around them. I'm talking about getting players so attached to characters that they do not consider walking away (which is something that would happen a lot if there were only danger).

The ability to apply pressure to create risk instead of danger is the real dividing line between "good" and "bad" (though potentially still viscerally enjoyable) Shadowrun, and I play for the good runs.

Oh, I'll have good runs. Wait and see.

It seems to me that one of the better things about this game is that it combines a highly developed game world with a variety of possible campaign styles. Street punk, carribbean pirate, global corporate espionage. The list goes on. (I do, however, recommend that the GM and players figure out what sort of a campaign it's gonna be before characters are made; Otherwise: train-wreck.)

As far as the character role-playing-ness of it, one of my favourite themes is trying to stay the good-guy in a dark world. Like seeing your buddy sell out and move to a condo on the beach, while you live in a roach-motel because you don't want to answer to the Yaks, or Ares, or whatever.

And remember, kids. Just 'cause what I like ain't what you like, doesn't mean one of us is wrong.

Great thread, Emo.

I like your comments, Eralston. I'll have to give them some more thought.

Also, I love the tongue-in-cheek social satire of it all. There was a lot more of this in earlier editions, and I miss it. It's great when the guy in the next office cubicle has turned into a zombie, but between the flourescent lights and overtime, nobody notices for a week.

Shadowrunners can stay street level even though they earn lots of money. If you look at movies, and real world criminals too, a lot of them still live in the hood. It's just easier to do buisness there, and they feel more at home. They get tons of respect for their fancy cars and what not, while they would be frowned upon in fancier neigborhoods. I could also see a posh face character living in downtown asociate with lowlifs to get a job done. They may be payed the same amount, but they won't necessarily spend it the same way or change their lifestyle because of it.

I GM, and the characters of my players shadowrun because it's what they're good at. At one point they got into a life of crime, and that's part of the background of the characters.

ATM though. We are playing that background instead, and so they haven't even begun shadowrunning. They're gangers and SINless scum, is the reason this time.

I Shadowrun because it's fun and I can hang out and bullshit with my friends.

The MCP says...
---End of Line---

Never mind.

Why? because I need the money

In a game, or maybe I should say when I'm running a game, I look for anything that will provoke an emotional resposnse form players. I love having players sweat, or get anxious, anxiety attacks, anything! I've ran games where literally the entire group was near, or at tears. I look for excitement, fun, and andventure.

The style doesn't matter, as long as it;s tun right. WE've played games where we only picked up dice a few times, and onew where we almost never sat them down. Games from starting gangers trying to get in to gun running to games with PC free spirits and young dragons.

I prefer ones with balanced rules. In answer to emo's question about people harping on him for ideas, I don't like some of the things that you use because they throw off the balance. Even a dragon, eve na great dragon, is within the balance of the game because it is within the rules. If you stay consistent within the system, everything works. I don't like some of your suggestions to overpower things because, IMP, it's like cheating. I only use video game cheats after I've beaten the game. I don't use that sort of stuff in SR because you can't "win".

I'm not in anyway trying to say that I'm right and you're wrong. These are jsut my preferences and my reasons. Sometimes it;s great to have this just totally out there, but you have to keep some sort of in-balance/in-context leash on it. Otherwise things spiral out of control. Like the adventure Paradise Lost. There's something in there that basically completely protects against Black IC. But within a few months the corps compensate and it's worthless. A series of checks and balances keep things from getting to far afield, to where the GM no longer has the control he/she needs to keep the game world within the balance.

You're looking for a different balance, and that's fine because it's your game. I'm just throwing in my two cents. Thank you, come again.

What do you mean by cheating? What do I do? I consult the Bug City rules for insect spirits and abide by the book rules as much as possible; what do I do wrong?

And awaaaay we go.

Remember, anything you do that is outside the rules (like removing chargen caps) is cheating. Not necessarily wrong, but cheating in the "deliberately violating the rules fo the game" definition of the word.

Of course, given that there are rules that contradict one another it's really hard for someone to play a game for any length of time without being forced to cheat.

WOOHOO!!

CHEATING IS FUN FUN FUN!!!

If K can have a sam with 9 agility and synaptics 3, then I get a cyberzombie with steampunk cyberlimbs and a blood spirit as a hidden life thingie. That's only fair.

Because K is so much better than you that you need the leg up just to feel adequate?

I will never feel inadequate compared to his character because I let him have 450 BP; no matter how awesome he gets, it will always be due to my magnanimity, nothing else.

I play because it's a blend of sci fi & magic. Few games even attempt this, and I like the SR mechanics best. I've played since SR1, and I love nearly everything about it.

For style, we play a little gritty and a little cinematic. As has been pointed out, you can play it however you like. If you enjoy the game, then RAW and anything posted here doesn't really matter. If you and your players enjoy high-powered, over-the-top adventures, then do it! If it means bending/re-writing the rules, that's what the GM is for!

You know I just like the game system and enjoy playing with it. The only thing I look at in a game is the GM. If their some pompous ass who is going to spend their whole time either trying to kill my character or punishing them unless I have a perfect flawless run every session, then I'm out.

A lot of people seem like hardasses. It really annoys me.