Hi everyone! I would like to know what do you do (or what your players do) when there's a "down" time like a decking run or roleplay scene involving only one character. I know of a lot of people who like to read books or draw but do you have any suggestions to stay in the game or be creative? I know that you can always either listen to what's happening or discuss in-character with other players but I'm trying to see what are the other possibilities here... stuff I haven't thought of yet...

Thanks a lot. Peace!

Crossfire

My characters all masturbate, a lot.

Do you role play it?

I'd laugh at him, but that's exactly what the rigger did last time the decker was doing his stuff.

And he did it on the decker.

My rigger character did smuggling runs, built drones and maintenenced vehicles mostly.

I never had much down time with any of my other characters.

Thanks for those "self-pleasuring" examples lol but I was referring more about the players themselves. Let say if a decker is taking 20 minutes to hack a site, what are the other players doing during that time?

Peace!

Crossfire

I think Crossfire is referring to last night's difficulties. Sucks to try to GM for a decker when there are two other conversations in the room. Sucks also for the players who's characters are waiting for the decker to do something.

Now, as a GM, I can try to give them some other stuff to deal with, but that presents two problems: 1. It slows down even further the progress of the decker, as I have to jump back and forth between two activities. 2. It tends to send the non-decking (or rigging, or pit-fighting, or crocheting) characters off doing something else, seperating the team even further.

Having said that, in retrospect it would've been cool to help me with the decking stuff. Look up rules, offer suggestions to the player. Hitcher jacks are wonderful for justifying such things.

As for characters... that's tricky. In Crossfire's case, he was playing a mage who could've easily decided to do some astral wandering. (Thanks for not making me deal with that as well.) Anything that doesn't distract is going to be pretty passive and boring for you guys. One more reason that I make decking runs rare and try to get them over as quickly as possible....

In character 20 minutes is waaaay too long.

Out of character it can be too long, too short, or just right depending on the size of the system being hacked, the familiarity of the GM and hacker with the rules, and the number of unexpected situations that occur (such as cybercombat on a botched roll that should have been easy).

In our games if 20 minutes are going to go by, the GM does his best to find something for the other characters to do. In that vein we generally avoid any situation that could involve lots of solitary time for one character (primarily astral scouting and decking).

Decking is easily avoided by having an NPC do the decking. You can make all the rolls ahead of time and just give the results to the players at the appropriate time. ?Unfortunately, this has sometimes had the effect of numbing the players to the matrix because none of them ever saw it. It was "something that NPC does." SR4 helped this a lot with it's easier access and always around matrix.

Astral scouting is usually cut to a minimum by wards and/or astral security in the form of spirits or other astrally active entities. The mage gets a little scouting done and then goes back to the group to share the info.

The 20 min was OOC time.

As I said, the problem with giving the other character's something to do is that it drags out the situation of having them seperated. I'd much rather have them involved --even if only periphrially-- with the decking as it happens. Any suggestions?

My post was not the best written post.

1) Avoid decking. This is fairly straightforward, but unless it's a very nonstandard campaign or you have an NPC decker it can start feeling very fake after a while.

2) Let the players run the system. You can up matrix security levels and set it up so that cybercombat is very likely. Then give the other players some IC, Agents, or Security deckers to play in the ensuing battle.

3) Find a way to string their actions alongside the decker's. In the example given, some security gaurds could arrive from another location (or called in from their homes nearby) and a combat ensues. Stick the decker in his initiative slot and work them all at the same time. This can get incredibly confusing though, especially in editions prior to SR4 where decking and standard combat was a drastically different rule set.

The above ideas also work to avoid the same issue happening when mages astrally scout out an area. Of course, if you find yourself running decking, astral scouting, and standard combat at the same time things can get really bad, especially in SR3 and below.

Oh I see what you mean, yeah the "decker takes over the game for 20 min" maneuver. Mostly the rest of us hang around the table and BS, usually drawing what would normally be a 20 minute decker episode out to 40 min because we keep distracting them from getting done.

Keep them rolling init when nothing is happening? Why, other than to waste time?

the advantage of playing online: downtime can be filled up by playing more games!

as for the other kind of downtime: my main char takes his family on vacations, trains, and takes classes at U-Dub, roughly in that order. my other main character splits her time between working long shifts in the Seattle General ER and killing people who she thinks deserves it. everyone needs a hobby!

Cool. In my group rolling for init when nothing was happening would make them want to start delaying actions because that's what you usually do in combat when there's nobody to shoot. Differently play styles I suppose. It's all good.

True enough.... I find player paranoia entertaining.

the decker didn't happen to be a 5-yr old asian boy, did he?

While that video did inspire the rigger to scream those particular words, no. Humping five-year-olds is more the street sam's thing.

I repeat, these people terrify me.

I don't think I want to click on a video labelled 5-yr old asian boy that was posted in response to a post about hot dickings. Is there something the FBI needs to know that you're not telling us?

We used to use an old formula, back form the days when many of our players played AD$D....when the game had to stop for certain plot-points, some would use the time to hit the bathroom, get a quick smoke, make a quick snack-run, make calls, ect.
When you use the basement/play area of a gaming store, you can check out what's on display, order books, buy/rent spare dice, ect.

But you remember to clean up your messes, return books/dice/items borrowed during the game, & make it a pleasureable experience for all.

Our group's favorite use of decker time was to plan what to do with the information he was getting. We'd start with a couple of rough ideas and then tell the decker we need to know things 1, 2 and 3. Then the rest of the PCs would step into the next room and plan different possibilities for things 1, 2, and 3. When the decker was done we'd sift through our possible plans and find one that (A) we thought would work and (B) we liked. Then we'd have at it.

Usually during downtime we'll converse amongst oursleves on how to get out of what ever dicked up situation we happen to be in. When there is a strait path or plan we'll try to come up with a plan B. Looking over your equipment list every chance you get, isn't a bad thing either. Usually having the right tool (improvised or other) can mean the difference.

Barring that we'll look through the books (we haven't memorized everything...yet) and maybe even work on another character, depending on the situation.

/me marks another notch in his keyboard

Mark several, I sent it to both of my old gaming groups.