My thoughts on the GenCon 2006 Shadowrun 4th edition tournament, AKA ‘Third Law’:

Let me preface my missive with this: I’ve never played an RPG at a convention before. Though I’ve played Shadowrun since its inception, and I’ve stuck with it through four editions now, this is the first time I’ve attended a convention. All of my RP experience is in tabletop gaming with friends, or on various MUSHes. So, keep in mind that my experience comes from an ignorant point of view, with no reference points.

My initial impression as I walked into the room reserved for the tourney was ‘Wow! That’s a lot of Shadowrun gamers!.’ It was a great feeling, seeing that many people interested in a game system and universe I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years. I attended GenCon this year with several friends, so we went over as a group to a table. Of course, there were odd numbers of people (the tourney had 6 PCs per group), but things were easily and quickly worked out. All in all, things seemed fairly organized. The volunteer GM staff all had materials ready for us, and we quickly got down to the task of assigning character sheets to PCs, and being briefed on the adventure in store for us.

Before I continue the narrative of my experience, let me explain how the tournament was set up. There were roughly 15 tables of 6 people set up around the room. The tourney was broken up over 3 nights, with each night running from 7 PM to Midnight. You stayed with your team throughout the tourney. Now…there were the predictable snafus due to GenCon’s manner of posting events. A lot of people showed up on night one and didn’t know the entire thing ran three days. Scheduling conflicts ensued, and a lot of players were simply unable to be there for nights two and three.

The tournament was a little bit different than standard book fare. The characters, in this case, were not shadowrunners at all, but were instead federal agents. While I’m all for new gaming experiences, it became apparent to me that the writer that put the plot together for this event simply hadn’t considered the ramifications of ranging so far afield from the core of what Shadowrun is.

There were six PCs per group: A hacker (actually a technomancer, who was posing as a hacker and hiding his true nature) from the NSA, a heavy combat character (I use the term loosely) from the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Thaumaturgy Department, a cyber-adept spirit hunter (I’ll speak more about him later) from the Department of Homeland Security, a mage from the Central Intelligence Agency, an adept from the Federal Marshals, and, finally, a mystic adept from the FBI.

So, then. We all took our places at the hallowed gaming table of FanPro. The GM on the first night allowed us to pick the PCs we were interested in. The group I was in, at least, was easy-going about it, and soon enough everyone had a character sheet in hand. Thus, we ran into the first snag of the tourney. Though the bios of the characters were relatively detailed, the sheets were created in a haphazard, incomplete format. Several rules from Street Magic (which was released only days earlier) were put to use in these PCs, but no explanation of the abilities was included. This lead to a great deal of confusion about what some of the stuff meant.

Now, in a tournament environment in something as big as Gencon, put on by the developers of the game system, here’s what I expected: well-written pre-generated characters with colorful backgrounds, a plot of exceptional quality, and those extra touches a good GM puts into a game: handouts, maps, and what have you. Little devices to increase the suspension of disbelief and to draw people further into the adventure. Sadly, none of these were in evidence.

Four of the six characters had combat skills that ranked below that of a neophyte ganger. Agility scores and Pistol skills ended up at a combined 3 or 4 in most cases. The mage was pretty well setup. The primary combat character didn’t even have the dodge skill, nor any ability at close combat. The spirit-hunting cyber adept was very obviously written as a character focused on killing and dealing with spirits, to the point that he had Astral Perception, very high unarmed and blades skills, and was specialized in Astral Combat (Blade foci)…except, he did not have Killing Hands, nor did he have a weapon focus, making his presence utterly irrelevant. The Mystic Adept had no offensive ability at all, save (I believe) 3 or 4 combined dice in pistols. The adept was entirely focused on perception and forensics investigations, but had combat paralysis and 3 dice (total) for his only combat skill.

Only one of the characters had anything other than a pistol, and at least one of those characters did not even have ammunition for his weapon. All of which would have been fine, I suppose, if we had been able to ask for some sort of material support from the federal government we supposedly worked for. As it was, we were told ‘all you have is what’s on your sheet’. Several of the characters lacked any contacts at all. Other characters had useful contacts, but we had no money or favors with which to leverage them.

Now, I don’t expect, demand, or want min-maxed, twinked-out characters in a tourney. However, the focus of each character was so narrow that each PC was left with a VERY small area of expertise (at which they utterly excelled). If that area of expertise wasn’t relevant to the situation, they quite literally had nothing to do, from a mechanical point of view. Many hours were wasted by each player in turn, watching someone else do stuff, instead of /all/ the characters doing something most of the time. Each sheet had an unfinished feel. It was as if each one were rushed through in a span of five minutes, and no one ever bothered to see if they made sense. I will say, though, that the bios I got a look at were pretty good.

Let me get onto the meat of why we were all there, after my lengthy digression, oh faithful reader.

The tourney was kicked off by a gentleman standing up and delivering a spoken 'briefing' to the entire room – each table turned to watch a man in a grey suit deliver a briefing to open the game. I’ll be merciful, and sum up: The boss had six people from six disparate federal agencies arrive to deal with a situation. In typical Shadowrun fashion, the details were sketchy. However, here’s my problem with this: we were told during the briefing that the entire operation was classified, and to be subtle. I don’t know about you, but ‘subtle’, to me, means not running around with dark sunglasses, flashing badges, and generally making it painfully obvious you were a federal agent. More on that point later.

After being given a barebones briefing, we launched into the actual adventure. However, here’s the problem with that. We were given no clear chain of command. Understand, we’re federal agents from six different agencies. If the federal government were able to have 6 people who’ve never met each other simply ‘work things out’ without some kind pecking order and clear directive (filled out in triplicate), do you honestly think we’d have as many bureaucratic snafus as we do? The entire feel of the plot, then, was slipshod, haphazard, and poorly thought out.

We followed the obvious leads on the first night. There were no surprises, and no real puzzles to figure out. Our group was pretty willing to think things through, though. At the end of the first night, we had found out that the object we were supposed to get a hold of was on extraterritorial corporate property. We, of course, decided to break in, as we were a) told this was of the utmost importance, and b) told to keep quiet that the federal government was involved. Thus, we kept the badge-flashing to a minimum.

We managed to infiltrate the compound, get the device, and exit the compound on the first night undetected – however, another team was there. We were forced to stun three of them. No death. As we broke on night one, our team was leaving the compound undetected as alarms sounded, courtesy of the other team. Given that we had prepared a spirit to conceal our vehicle and planned ahead about where we physically parked, and planned an escape route ahead of time, we weren’t THAT concerned.

And then Night Two began. The end of Night One was promptly retconned. We were moved back to exiting the building we had just broken into, instead of well into our getaway. Suddenly, all of our careful preparations were tossed out the window, and a bad guy we had not seen before had the box we were seeking. He was ten feet in front of us, outside the building, despite not having been there the night before. Why there were three teams there, I have no idea, but we had a decoy article, while the Ultimate Badguy apparently learned how to teleport and alter time. He made a mocking remark, and then disappeared. Yes, disappeared, despite the fact a character was there astrally, watching him, and another character was astrally perceiving. No initiative was allowed to be rolled, nor were any attempts to stop him allowed. The GM didn’t even have the courtesy to roll some dice behind a screen and act like we blew a roll.

What ensued after the first five minutes can only be adequately described as a cross between your average voyage on Amtrak and an animatronic Disney ride featuring the world of Shadowrun.

Despite our aforementioned planning, after the miraculous, diceless disappearance of the Ultimate Badguy, who was carrying the data storage unit we were after, Knight Errant, Lone Star, and the local media outlets showed off that in 2070, time is meaningless. Within 2 combat turns, a Knight Errant response team, a Lone Star response team, 4 media drones, several helicopters, and four spirits of unknown origin arrived. Now, understand, we hadn’t been detected on the way in. The security alerts went off as we were leaving, and the Ultimate Badguy delivered his Ultimate Badguy lines before his mechanics-bending departure. In the span of a few combat rounds, several dozen men, spirits, drones, and whatever else was kicking about appeared on scene. All of them, by some mystical power, were either on one side or the other of the only road in or out of a place in the sprawl of Seattle. In short, the entire situation was blatantly manipulated, to the point of ignoring the rules, so that the PCs would have to be caught.

The reason for this soon became clear, as we skipped over to a ‘debriefing’ from our superior. The GM read from a prepared script, where the NPC in question expressed his extreme displeasure at how messy and loud our operation to that point had been. Besides the retcon, there had been exactly three shots fired, and no one had been killed. The only alarms that were triggered were by NPCs. In short, the plot was so linear that there was no way to win. The prepared script demanded the PCs be caught, so the rules were changed to serve the plotline.

We were briefed about what was on the data storage array that we were after, and about the Ultimate Badguy. Again, it became painfully clear that there was a single track to follow, as our superior expounded on the contents of the data storage array and our foe. The data array, by the by? It contained an operable Artificial Intelligence named ‘Patches’. Aside from the fact that as a 4 year old, I had a cat named patches, and desperately wanted to coo ‘Here, patches! Good boy!’ the entire plot, it struck me as unlikely that an AI could fit on so small a device, when an AI named Deus needed an entire arcology filled with supercomputers to become sentient a few years before.

My suspension of disbelief thoroughly shattered, we were then forcibly further railroaded by media organizations claiming that a ‘group of federal agents’ (our pictures, naturally, were attached to the events) were running amok, blowing up schools and buildings. The entire affair seemed trite, unlikely, and further aroused my suspicion that any choices we made were irrelevant.

Night Two was capped off by a group of federal agents suddenly and unbelievably painted as terrorists fleeing to the Barrens of Seattle to a purported dead zone. In the span of a few hours, bounty hunters, Knight Errant, Lone Star, and various news organizations all appeared before the fleeing federal agents. Where they gained the Oracle-like insight to our whereabouts, given the precautions we took to not be found, is unknown. But that pales in comparison to their inability to do more than drive us down the narrowly linear path (both metaphorically and physically) that the written script demanded we take.

Night Two culminated in a sudden (and predictable) ambush by the Ultimate Badguy, backed up by at least 8 guys who were equipped with demolitions, grenades launchers, submachine guns, assault rifles, and, given the number of dice the GM rolled in some cases, far more combat oriented sheets than the PCs. Interestingly, however, our adept who could roll 15+ dice on percept checks was never given an opportunity to spot the explosives that blew the vehicle we were in up.

The destruction of our car (which required no dice rolls – game mechanics are irrelevant in a scripted event, after all) was followed by no less than 2 rounds of being peppered by automatic weapons fire and grenades. No dice were rolled at that point, though. Given the fact we had no chance to live, I hardly blame the GM. Besides, the script said we were supposed to live.

The climax was when the federal agents see their quarry, the Ultimate Badguy. Of course, when our team’s unarmed guy approached him, using legitimate tactics and mechanics, the NPC rolled an unbelievable amount of dice that could have only been achieved via a full dodge…and then that same badguy proceeded to ignore all spirit and letter of the rules by performing an impossible action (a complex Full Dodge, drawing a grenade, tossing the real data storage array, dropping a grenade, and having the grenade explode, ALL IN THE SAME ACTION) before running off. Not only did he instantly disappear, the team was simply told ‘you can’t find him’.

End Night Two.

Night Three picked up right where we left off. I’ll spare you the details. The Ultimate Badguy, in addition to being able to teleport and alter the flow of the space-time continuum, was apparently a buff dude, too. He was able to transport in excess of 20 kilograms of plastic explosives, in addition to all his other gear, and set up tripwire based booby traps that were impossible to spot. I’ve been remiss, dear reader, in my narrative up until this point. You see, Seattle was in the grips of a blizzard. Therefore, the several feet of snow on the ground made it impossible to spot the tripwires.

Our superior magically managed to provide us with material assistance at this point. Despite the fact that until this point, we were unable to requisition basic pistol ammo for several team members, we were handed real-time satellite imagery which showed that several dozens of Lone Star, Knight Errant, and spirits-knows-who-else teams were all around us. There was but one physical path that we could take. At least that fact was within the theme of the story to this point.

So, we went down the one path we were able to take, occasionally being blown up by impossible to find demolitions traps. I can only assume the many kilograms of demolitions material the Ultimate Badguy was carrying was used so liberally because he was tired of carrying them.

Eventually, the team wandered into an ambush, despite the efforts of the adept who couldn’t fight, but had 15+ dice on perception tests, and an astrally scouting mage. By some providence, we managed to kill off the badguys, with the liberal application of permanent Edge burns.

Epilogue. We arrived Sunday morning for the awards ceremony. Now, by no means did my friends and I think we were God’s gift to RPGs, but we did achieve every assigned goal. The AI was released, the array was delivered to our superiors, and everything we were told to do was accomplished in as subtle a manner as possible, given the linear nature of the plot.

By Day Three, there were only five teams left in the room. We were, frankly, a bit surprised to find that the GM’s secret balloting process did not include our team anywhere in the 1st-2nd-3rd spectrum. After all, the other teams accomplished their goals through such means as shooting Knight Errant security personnel in the face with a panther assault cannon when asked for identification, and flashing their badges in every possible circumstance, despite the directive at the beginning of the adventure to keep it top secret. Some of them failed to achieve significant goals.

In short, it seemed that the 'federal agents' of the winning teams acted in an inappropriate, violent manner that was at odds not only with their chosen professions, but also with the law and their mission objectives. I can only assume they more readily enjoyed the amusement park feel of the event, and were easier to deal with. I did get the distinct impression that the winners were chosen based with GM popularity firmly in mind. I didn't enjoy high school the first time. Why would I pay good money to be subjected to yet another popularity contest?

Our disgust fully welled up, we departed GenCon 2006. Personally, I will never play in another FanPro-run event again.

(My thanks to Nick, whom I freely used as inspiration for several turns of phrase in this review!)

Wow. Sorry your first taste of Gencon was so sour.

Wow I laughed my ass off as i read that! ROFLMAO

That's the kind of DM I would have dropped like a bad habit after the start of the second night.


I would have had to have raise a fuss and said "Hold on, what? What? We didn't trip any alarms. We had the box. We were on the road. No, you be quiet. We did this quiet-like, and now suddenly this guy has warped time? What? What? Stop, just stop, man. You're being a disgrace to the game and making me ashamed to play. Is this the best FanPro can do? Is this the best you, as someone who should be proud to be called Gamemaster, can do? Is it really what you want to put forward as your best game face?"


Yeah, I woulda been kicked, but it woulda been worth it.

For future Gencons -- never forget, they're being paid to run those games. You paid money for a ticket, you paid money for your badge, you paid money to get there in the first place. People that run games get free badges, hotel discounts/paid rooms, food discounts/paid meals; I'm not saying they aren't still (after a fashion) volunteering for the work, but they are being paid for their time. You're paying them. You've got no obligation to stay there and take their shit (in fact, it's largely the other way around), if you aren't having fun.

I would have stole the one working pistol and shot all the agents in the head, then ate a bullet myself. Then went and found a real game of players that are just hanging out somewhere.

I failed to mention in my review an important fact. Let me redress that now.

Each night, you got assigned to a new GM. I suppose the idea is that if each team gets rotated to a new GM every night, it will be fairly judged and no one team will be stuck with a lousy GM.

The GM we had on night one was pretty good, bordering on excellent. He was prepared, knew the rules, and worked with us as well as he could within the terribly restrictive constraints of the plot.

The GM on night two was, in short, the suq. He didn't know the rules well, threw them out whenever he felt like it, and made absolutely no attempt to hide the fact he was doing so. He was the one who retconned major portions of night one.

The GM on night three was mediocre, but he at least tried. At this point, after all of the crap from night one and, especially, night two, we were pretty fed up, and I'm sure we weren't easy to deal with.

I mostly blame the way the tourney was setup and run. The GMs were simply not allowed to deviate from a plot that is below the level of quality I expect from a talented twelve year old.

It's funny. Some of the lame plot devices that your "GM" used, one of my GMs used before he went back to playing D&D. Our AI was trapped in a very small super-computer box as well, with a wireless inhibting shell. Inside the AI, Adam (guess what the other AI is named?), was infected with some data bomb that would blow up the Matrix if he was ever let out. "Crash 3.0! It will be teeeeeeerrible!" WE went from light-hearted runs to saving the world in one session. Our former enemy, Straight Edge (no magic, nor cyber, yet better than any of us), approaches us and asks us to help him save his brother, Cain (pbbt!), from the grip of an Evil AI that has him in his grips. One of our players actually got ready to kill the motorbike-stealing bastard until our "GM" pleaded with him OOC to not kill him. "What do I have to do to get you to let him live?" This same Evil AI (a fragment of Deus, of course ) plans on releaseing the Adam-bomb to....destroy the Matrix, the only place the Evil AI exsists in the first place! We (green runners) infiltrate and high security compound (size of warehouse) fending off security (many guards die with no rolls) and retrieve the top secret AI-box by pressing a button (red and flashing).

Our "GM" wasn't as linear as your awful experience, but I can relate to the feeling of being let down. Cliche AI plots with unstoppable NPCs, the novice GM's weapons of choice. I'm appaulled that you sat there and took that abuse for three nights straight. I would have asked the table if they wanted to go play a quick run somewhere far away from GM-magic.

Also funny, your characters used rules from Street Magic, a book that states explicitly:

Street Magic is worth it. It was well written. I really enjoy it

I agree. I picked up the Street Magic PDF the day it came out. I just didn't really have time to read it before GenCon.

Excellent, well-written supplement.

I occured to me that your Ultimate Badguy might be a Free spirit using the Metaplanar shortcut trick, but I don't think you can bring stuff (data-array) with you to the metaplanes with that trick. It would have made the whole thing even more absurd, though

It's possible the first night GM was also terrible. He should have hinted at silent alarms or otherwise had the other team there set off the alarm obviously if the plot really called for it later on. There are elegant ways to guide players toward a necessary plot event. Not trying and then dumping your mess on the next guy is not necessarily a sign of a good GM.

Having attended the GenCon 2006 SR Tournament, I'd have to back Ghost up on his assessment. I'll provide my views of it later. However, the Ultimate Badguy, labeled the Frenchman, wasn't a free spirit as a completely different team was allowed to capture the Frenchman. Not sure how one or two groups have super invincible bad guys and others have normal ones.

The Frenchman reminds me of the European guy from Ocean's 12.

Illusion?

Oh, I certainly agree he could have been there. He could have been concealed. The team inside could have been an illusion for all I know. Not likely, though, because we had an astral mage in there with us, assensing everything.

The salient point is that the guy already had the goods, even if you assume all of the above to be true. Why would he let the federal government know that he had it? Suicidal people don't grow up to be Ultimate Badguys. They grow up to be in federal pens.

Not an illusion as the astral mage who asked to assense him would have at least had a chance to pick up on the fact that the 'person' was just a spell.

Was his teleporting form an illusion? The one outside taunting you?

Edit: okay

I've already forwarded this thread to the con team head, so feel free to post your further feedback here, or you can send it to adam@shadowrunrpg.com and I'll get it to the correct person.

Three nights would probably have been enough time to run an abbreviated version of On the Run. Sure it's been out, but it would definately have been better than that load of crap. Hell, as railroads go, it wasen't even that imaginative or even believable.


And the volunteer DMs should be screened for being jackasses or not knowing their rulebook from their porno mags before being allowed to run the event. That guy on night two - oi carumba.

You sound like you want your $3 refunded. Oh, yeah, you omitted that part when talking about parting with your hard earned money. Critias mentioned we get paid for running the game and we did. Game credit worth $5 an hour, and no the game was scheduled from 7-11 not 7 - midnight, so there was 3 nights of overtime that we did not get paid for. We also had 6 hours of pre-run time that was not reimbursed. (We needed to make an early trip Wednesday for a 6 pm meeting finished for the night after 11pm and needed to make the first night of the Tourney an hour early for a meeting. I must say we made out like bandits. I did get 3 free bottles of water.) But you paid $3 for 12 scheduled hours of entertainment. My standards could have flowed with the bargain price.

I had about an hours worth of response, then lost my connection and message. I'll skip a lot of how the game was GMed, because your experience was quite different than others I ran or heard about.

But you seem to be angry about not winnning. From your description, I can guess why. Team work made up a significant part of the vote, and you guys could not even pick a chain of command or team leader. I guess you wanted that railroaded determined for you. Roleplaying was judged, so if you are OoC constantly going how did that happen, it is going to show. Good ideas were judged, but it sounds like you guys decided to just go along where the tracks led. Lastly was how much of the provided material you used each night. The first night there were many leads to get to the object. You sound like you got there rather quickly which may have actually worked against your score. The second and third nights I scored completeness by how many different groups you encountered.

I also was not the happiest with the Tourney from a GM standpoint and will agree the characters did not make the most sense. I think the guy who wrote it writes Missions, which Adam already explained have little to nothing to do with FanPro. Even little things like stapling the lower left corner of the scenario made it harder to run. We also could not get a copy until the day we ran it, so there was little preperation for the first night.

One comment, If your GM the second night let you keep the storage array, you were done. You could have then sat for t days waiting for the results. From the rating process I described, you could have amassed no more than a third of the possible points. So a little understanding helps.

Another comment. I had a guy who kept questioning how people kept on having better leads or were ahead of them. I gave him a couple of logical explanations, just like how I could explain everyone showing up at the end of your night one heist. Niether of you are going to accept them. I wonder how you play SR, because as a player you never know exactly what is going on.

I'll start off by saying that I was a GM for the second night of the Tourney. Blitz, Andromeda and myself rotated through the table that Bull et al played in. I heard some players voice certain levels of frustration though certainly at my table, (which I watched partially the first night and played in the last night to cover an empty chair) people seemed to overall have fun.

Now, let's talk point by point...

The gentleman who stood up and gave the briefing was effectively reading the boxed text that each team would get at the beginning. It was decided by the Tourney crew that by having him stand up and deliver it to the entire crowd before handing each team over to their departmental handlers (READ: GMs) we could evoke the sense of authority that the Director projected.

RE: Six departments and no CoC--Here, I would have to say that many of the teams I watched as I moved through the room, fairly quickly built a chain of command within themselves. Each group did that differently, but it was a requisite for working together.

RE: GMs, writers, et al--As you seemed to know the GMs are all volunteers (If you work enough hours, you get a badge comped as well as about 40% of your hotel room, plus a free book in exchange for the pleasure of running the game for 20 hours of your weekend.) Because of that, the tourney and the characters were written by volunteers. This year, as happens when volunteerism meets real life, there were some delays with getting the Tourney released to the GMs and we were catching minor notations such as new powers as we got started. (I'd also like to note, that to stave off such things happening in the future, we have already begun planning the Tourney events for Origins and GenCon 2007, so that the Con Team will have plenty of time to work through any glitches well before they come up.)

Into the Game...

There were pre-set positions where GMs were supposed to end each night. Without knowing the exact details of your team and GM it is difficult for me to comment directly to why your GM carried you past the ending point for the first night and into material that was covered in the second night.

I apologize that your team had the previous night's events retconned. I understand why the second GM did it, because there were parts of the story and plans in motion that may not have been evident to the first night's GM unless he or she had read and prepped the next night's material. It was undesirable and obviously the product of a lack of communication and planning which as I said above we are striving to correct.

While there were some scripted events, my experience with them was that they did not feel particularly forced and in fact some tables took extraordinary measures to stave off certain events and thus they did not happen.

Ghost--in addition to any feedback you send to Adam, I'd like to see a copy as well as I am helping with next year's tourney and want to know what errors you saw. A lot of the events you mentioned have already been spoken about between the Tourney GMs on a separate list as we go through our GenCon debriefing.

Adam--I'm sorry I missed meeting you down at the booth. John brought me down to make sure I met Brian and Rob, but I'm guessing you weren't around at that moment.

Got the last message posted w/o loss.

I mentioned the night one media, KE, LS showing up when you claim you never triggered any alarms. Remember mentioning you ran into another team? They call in back up. Remember mentioning some other guy shows up out of the blue and has your target? The Stealth group quite high and wanting to disappear in the confusion of LS and a media circus, so he alerts the media about a juicy story involving alphabet agencies KE and LS and hits a LS panic button.

Far fetched? I've had worse.

And remember, if you head back to HQ with the real storage array, it's game over. I would have let you make a perception test of the guy with a similar looking array and let you get back to HQ before letting you find out you had a duplicate. But I am a bastard that way. Your GM probably thought he was helping you and you slam him for it.

Tisoz--The person who wrote the adventure is different than the individual who made the characters, though I am not sure their relationship to the Missions team. I know that it was never explicitly stated to me that he was a Missions writer.

And you can blame the stapling errors on the man known to some as Moo.

this is all the fault of SR4!

i wonder what happened. maybe the script--er, that is, the run didn't have had much, or any, support for the team not getting caught, leaving the 2nd GM up the creek without a paddle.

So long as they make it to someone who matters, I feel it is only appropriate to post my more constructive feed back in this thread then.

Item 1) The /basics/ of the plot weren't all that bad. As my friend Nick put it: 'The box could actually be a critical 'key core' component that houses release codes for the AI when it is activated would be one way to fix it.'.

My initial reaction to finding out an AI involved, deep down inside in my private happy place was 'Ugh. Another stupid AI plot. Great.' The way it was introduced in the plot, by an NPC reading from an immutable script, was jarring and heavy-handed, in my opinion.

Had the AI been tangentially involved, it would have been a much less bitter pill to swallow. Why not have a technomancer pretending to be an AI, or acting as a trapped AI's agent? That would have been much easier to believe and far more palatable to me admittedly jaded tastes.

Item 2) The pre-gen characters were not very well done in my opinion. As I mentioned previously, the bios weren't bad at all. However, the stats, gear, and contacts associated with them seemed to be poorly thought out. Though I didn't review everyone's character in close detail, naturally, I can tell you the ones I did glance at lacked the skills I would associate with a crack team of federal agents brought in for something as potentially destructive as a rogue AI. Look at what happened to the UCAS the last few times an AI got loose. The feds would certainly not be sending a team so unfamiliar with each other and so overspecialized that a group of gangers could cack them half the time.

There were a few combat scenes that featured opposition that had automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and demolitions. There were only three characters out of six that were remotely suited to combat -- and only two of these had a weapon with a range longer than a heavy pistol.

The gear on /all/ of the character's sheet was something I would expect for an agent on desk duty. The bare minimum of stuff you might see on the average federal agent's daily equipment list was represented, save for the heavy combat guy. In many cases, the gear the characters had simply didn't seem to match skills and attributes. Why in God's name give a character a specialization in Astral Combat (Blade Foci) and not give him a weapon focus?

The problem is this: these characters were supposed to be dealing with something potentially world-altering. They should have had the stuff they needed to deal with it.

In the future, if the characters don't have access to stuff they might reasonably need on their starting sheets, they should have the contacts and leverage (be it money or favors) they need to have a reasonable chance of success, given a decent plan of attack.


Item 3) The format of the tourney itself was a large part of the problem. The idea seemed to be this: Each team of players rotated to a different GM every night, with nothing but a brief conversation in a roundtable format and some handoff notes between GMs available to fill the new GM in on what happened last. It simply doesn't work. Having personally witnessed this exact phenomenon in Internet-based games, I can tell you there is almost always a major or minor fumble when you hand a scene off from one person to another. It's inevitable. People are tired after 5+ straight hours of GMing, and fail to make clear notes, or fail to convey the nuances of important facts or situations.

With that in mind, why try to force a format that is so prone to error? In my opinion, it would be better to do one self-contained scene each night. General goals should be outlined for each night, and when the next GM comes in the next day, the team runs what is essentially a new adventure -- but the outcome and fallout of the previous scene would be known, and incorporated into Day Two, etc. NPC A was offended. NPC B was killed. Goal A was accomplished. Goal B was botched. These are hard facts where the exact circumstances are less relevant, day to day.

A new scene can be run each night, where individual GM styles matter less. This also makes such a linear format much, much less unnecessary.

Item 4) The linear plotline was my primary problem with the entire experience. Bad GM calls, disagreements about rules, etc? All that should expected any time a new group of players and a new GM come together for the first time. With mutual respect and a mutual willingness to work things out and have fun, everyone, including the GM, can have a great time.

A plot that requires A then B then C then D to happen for any sort of resolution, good or bad, is doomed to fail, without simply ignoring the rules. In my case, that's exactly what happened. Rather than be rewarded for careful planning and good teamwork, a team involved in a linear plotline is forced into situations exactly like I experienced.

A former mentor of mine on an old, old Shadowrun MUSH once said: No plot survives contact with the players. That is a truism, in my experience. In a fluid convention/tourney environment where each group of people is, ideally, judged against their peers, plots should be arranged in groups and blocks. If an NPC (any NPC!) dies, is captured, is mindprobed, or is abducted by the runner's personal Great Dragon buddy, the plot should be arranged and written in such a way that it can go one, pretty much intact.

Having each night represent an adventure that influences (heavily) the next night is a great way to handle this. The GMs can get together, discuss what happened the night before, and a /common/ plan of attack can be formed by the tournament coordinator and the GMs. The experience, from the player side, will be a thousand times better.

Item 5) Preparation. When I run stuff for my tabletop group, I do the outline and basic framework the week before. I draw up maps for critical locations. I pull interesting satellite photos from Google Earth to serve as imagery. I draw simple (sometimes complex) maps. I draw up matrix security info, including what happens at certain success thresholds.

I give my players the sense that if they do legwork and ask for data, I will be able to give it to them. More importantly, there is a great sense of immersion when a runner team does pre-run surveillance and I can actually provide maps, visuals, and an idea of what security they are facing. It's not at ALL hard for a GM to throw curveballs and surprises at a well-prepared team. In fact, I almost always do, because where's the fun in a pre-ordained outcome?

The cost of such preparation might be a concern from a FanPro point of view. While I certainly can't speak for everyone who might want to play in future FanPro events, at GenCon or elsewhere, let me say this: I would happily pay 50 bucks for a three day tournament I /knew/ was going to be top notch.

A friend of mine played in the sole event that the makers Call of Cthulu did over the weekend. Those guys came with an LCD projector, a sound effect setup, handouts, maps, etc. At one point, the GM throw a box of rubber snakes across the table when the PCs in that game came across a whole bunch of snakes during the course of the game.

Her comment to me was this: I am /soooo/ glad I went to Cthulu rather than the Shadowrun tournament. She meant it. And take this to heart: She doesn't even like Cthulu.

Item 6) Plot Review. I spoke with Serrin Sol of FanPro briefly, while I was outside smoking a cigarette. Basically, my side of the conversation was that it seemed like this entire thing was thrown together at the last minute. He seemed to agree with me, though he didn't get terribly specific about the details. He did say that the idea was to have the entire plot written by january or february of 2007, and have people review and comment on it. Excellent idea.

I'll tell you what. If that happens, and I hear about it, I will make a personal pledge before the demanding denizens of Dumpshock to be back at GenCon 2007 and play in the tourney. Heck, I might ask to GM, though I know nothing about how that works.

Item 7) Spend 15 minutes briefing players in a general sense about the tournament itself. There was no attempt to give players an idea of what the format was all about. There were player choice awards....but no one mentioned them to my group until we were finished on Day Three. We literally had no opportunity to vote on stuff, or keep our fellow players in mind for these things.


Bottom line: GenCon, and an RPG tournament run by the makers of a game should be a positive experience. I certainly wouldn't want my company name and flagship product line associated with something that really, truly sucked.

Nice post, Ghostfire. My feelings are now hurt.

I can now see how high your expectations may have been and we failed you.

Obviously all stories have multiple sides. But couldnt you have let them go back to their boss with a fake box (as a duplicate may have been enough to end the game, not sure if the run premise was to get the box so no one else could have that data) and have him berate them for a while, then give them the data you were going to give them any way? Or give them another lead to run down?

And having the GM basically ignoring the rules with over elaborate attacks in a game that wont let you shoot and ride a motorcycle at the same time any more is just flaggrently telling the players you are going for a ride wether you want to or not.

Telling the players no initiative rolls allowed to let your NPC escape and prolong the story is silly also. He could have rolled iniative and faked dice rolls to cover the NPC miraculous escape to keep the facade up.

Its basically telling the players that they make no difference in the game that was more his bitch. He said more then a few times.

I made that mistake once running a game while our normal GM was "taking a break" from GMing. He wanted to play. I think he felt threatened that I might have taken over as the GM as they the players said a bit they liked my games. So one game he was going out of his way to screw up everything. Shooting players and everything else for no reason. So I introduced an Uber NPC. He wanted to roll initiative to fight the guy, I laughed and pretended to whisper, "Roll all the dice you want for initiative hes going to go first." The GM yelled fuck you throw his dice across the room and left. Which was my goal, but it could have been done differently. We worked it out later and everything has been chill since. I only ran the game because everyone wanted to play but he was burnt out on GMing.

And big deal if they finished on the first night. Like he said he had other things to do. I know people that have gone to cons and if things fell through like poorly ran games or games that fell apart they always found games ran by people in their hotel rooms or did other things. Sure they might have been talked into playing another companies product, but what gamer doesnt already play a bunch of other games? Especially ones that go to cons. They may have lost because they didnt get all the imaginery flags in the game, but at least you wouldnt have people bitching you ran a shitty game. I dont know any of the GMs at the con and am not aiming an insult at them, but of all the GMs I have played with, the ones that can go off script and run a good game even though they eventually got the game back on script (with pre written adventures) or just let the players play and achieve the most important goal of the game, having fun are the best GMs. You cant win an RPG no matter what a munchkin thinks, railroading that badly was self defeating.

I'm not endeavoring to start a flame war or make this personal. Was I dissatisfied by my tourney experience? I have to admit, I was. I've tried to clearly lay out what my problems were, not in any effort to 'have my $3 refunded', but to offer anyone interested in attending future events my opinion of how things went.

If you would like to talk about /me/, well, perhaps you should be first very sure about who, exactly, I am. I honestly have no idea who you are, or if you even fit into my own experiences. I'm not attempting to justify my own decisions during the tourney. I'm telling my side of the story, which is filled with my own bias, and my own perceptions.

There are a million logical reasons about why certain things might have happened. As a player, I am well aware I never have all the information, and that fact was never far from the front of my mind as things unfolded. But it's pretty hard to swallow when the first thing you hear when coming to the second night of a multi-night adventure is: I don't care what happened last night. THIS is what really happened, and any planning or countermeasures you may have taken are irrelevant.

It's all about perception. The perception on my side of the table was that we were in a Choose Your Own Adventure story, without the Choose in there. Lest you think I'm alone in that feeling, the above statement was plagarized from another player in the tourney who will remain nameless. The perception, however, is from a point of view that did NOT have all the details, and did not have the plot or the judging standards in front of us.

Look. Different GMs have different styles. Sometimes those styles simply do NOT mesh well with the playstyles of a group of players. Given that any random grouping of people is, well, random, conflict on that front is bound to occur.

I don't want my money back. I don't want anyone who took the time and expended the effort to GM at the tourney to feel persecuted. All I want is to voice my opinion and try to offer constructive criticism from my point of view.

Take it or leave it, I'm not out to hurt people's feelings. I understand /all/ too well how ego-mashing and unpleasant it is to have any creative endeavor judged harshly. I'm truly sorry if you took my comments personally.

I liked the tourney. And while the pregens at the tournaments are usually really, really bad, if you had have just given the NSA decker an HK you could have rocked any opposition. That must have been where you had problems.

Regardless of how you feel about things, tisoz, and regardless of how well you feel you may have done as a GM of this scenario, IF we are to assume Ghostfire is telling the truth about events, certain glaring things become apparent. Glaring things that you have not addressed - but I wouldn't expect you to, as it doesn't sound as if you're one of the GMs Ghostfire had to deal with. To whit:

1) The Frenchman disappeared without any rolls being allowed to see what spell he was casting, identify his astral signature, etc. Disallowing players from rolling for the sake of plot is a BAD PLAN. It essentially tells players, "You can't affect things, despite the fact that you paid for skills so that you might do precisely that." Further denial of dice-rolls for basic things like perception checks breaks the fundamental rule of Shadowrun: pay for sensewhere, know your surroundings, and be paranoid. If paying for senseware, having an amazingly high perception pool, and being paranoid can't even influence surprises a little, that's wrong.

2) The Frenchman's mechanics. Conceivably, the Frenchman could do all of these things at once. Quickdraw Grenade, free action. Toss data storage, simple action - unless he wanted to just drop it. Arm and drop grenade, simple action. However, unless the Frenchman was dropping the grenade from a launcher, the grenade should have exploded on the next pass at The Frenchman's initiative score. There are no provisions in the rules for insta-blast thrown grenades. Especially when they allow for The Frenchman to ALSO perform an additional complex action - be it casting a spell or commanding a spirit - enabling him to disappear.

3) Average snowfall in Seattle, annualy, is 7.1 inches in Seattle Proper, 11.8 in Sea-Tac/South Seattle. So, unless they'd moved into the mountains and Ghostfire didn't mention it, that's some pretty f'd up weather they had - ergo, poor writing. Assuming that the average twipwire will be 1-1.5 feet off the ground, to catch the ankle, they'd need approximately 14-16 inches of snow in one day to fall, so as to account for the melt that would invariably occur during the intervening day, if the ground was blank to begin with. If it wasn't? Let me just say: Seattle doesn't really get... blizzards.

4) Beginning federal agent characters sans contacts, sans ammunition, etc? That's just stupid. That defies ALL logic. By DEFINITION, their superiors in their organizations should have been contacts.

5) 3 pistol dice for ANY agent of ANY of those agencies is too low. I would consider 4 to be bare minimum.

In summation, I realize you may feel the urge to defend the tourney, tisoz. And I also realize I wasn't there, and I'm only getting Ghostfire's side of the story. But if Ghostfire's giving us the chip-truth...

That was a piss-poor tourney. I could show up drunk off my ass and GM that scenario better than the monkies he got.

I'd just like to say that I've tried to, in the course of my review, explain what I experienced in as factual a way as I remember them. I was a member of the team called 'Shoot'.

I will, of course, be happy to discuss any differences of opinion about the facts. It was 15 hours of tabletop gaming, and I'm writing several days and 4000 miles of travel later.

That said, them's the facts as best as I remember them.

I'm highly amused, utterly unsurprised, and yet still a bit shocked why you didn't leave the table halfway through Night Two.

OTOH, your GM seems like he'd have a promising career working at BNSF.

So to summarize...

Ghostfire: I am dissastified with the game I participated in because of [clearly enumerated and explained reasons for dissatisfaction].

tisoz: I am crazy and am going to turn this into a flame war! I take your dissatisfaction personally, for reasons I won't explain, and it's your fault it went bad for [no clear reason I can discern, possible suggestion that Ghostfire is lying].

Ghostfire: [vaguely confused apologies to tisoz for unintentional offenses, repetition of earlier-stated information because it may not have been clear enough]

I've gotta say, tisoz, I have no idea why you're attacking this guy or what your stake in it is, but when I read your posts, I see any useful contribution vastly overshadowed by blatant attempts to turn this into another meaningless flamewar. Cut it out.

My two cents:

Cycling GMs is a bad idea™. It may be an awesome display of your GMing skills or the solidity of your module that you can hot-swap GMs and suffer no jarring gameplay alterations or dismay among players, but nine times out of ten, or maybe closer to ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this doesn't work.

In this case, nonlinear GM 1's shenanigans were not appreciated by linear GM 2, who, not prepared to deal with what's basically a totally different start point from what he reached during the last session, decided to just cast Major Reality Alteration or somesuch and transmute the end results of GM 1's scene to conform to his intended end results (probably the end results of GM 2's scene on Day 1).

Having a script from which substantial deviation is impossible is an even worse idea™. Even the best laid plans are never set in stone. If you've got a series of plot events that just have to happen, a series of waypoints that must be reached the same way, and a series of outcomes that occur no matter what the path the players take, you shouldn't be running an adventure. You should be writing a story. It'll probably hang together a lot better when you're controlling the entire plot and every action and reaction.

Harshly linear plot in a tabletop RPG inevitably ends up full of messy retcons and railroading, getting the players pretty frustrated and putting the GM in a position where the players are the enemy, doing their best to "win" by having their own contributions to the game impact events and outcomes. It's not too much to ask that they be capable of this, and the GM should not "lose" when they do. At least when you just write a story, no one ends up mad, and it always turns out the way it was intended to without needless infighting among people who are supposed to, ideally, cooperate.

Alright, we've identified a problem: Hot swapping GMs is bad.

Now for the constructive portion of constructive criticism: Given that this is a tournament environment, and there has to be some method of comparing how one table is playing to what is going on at other tables, so you have some shot of getting a fair relative ranking how do you achieve that when throughout the whole three nights of the tourney, a GM is only aware of what went on at his own table?

One possible solution would be to double up on personnel, have a GM and an "Observer" at each table, and hot swap the Observers each night. However, that means that the organizers have to dredge up that many more warm bodies to run the thing. And you can also run into fairness problems if the skill level from GM to GM varies widely. One table would be stuck with the bad GM every night, and may not have a chance to properly shine. Of course, the observers could try to factor in the skill level of the GMs they sit in on, but that just makes an already difficult job harder.

Another suggestion I've seen in the thread so far is to have the adventure writer try his damnedest to make sure that each night of the adventure is very compartmentalized as to minimize the effect of hot swapping, but there's only so much compartmentalizing that can be done without railroading.

What other solutions could be tried?

Just a bit of clarification:

Our Cthulhu event was /not/ the sole Cthulhu event at Gencon. Indeed, Chaosium supported several, some prereq, and some generic only.

I /was/ heartily glad I attended the You Too Can Cthulhu event that I did. It had several things going for it, including it's own room (You could actually HEAR what the GM and other players were saying!!!). In fact, I liked it enough to visit the Chaosium website, and have ordered the sourcebook.

On to Shadowrun: I didn't play in the tourney. But:

There are actually reasons for rotating GM's, but I agree they don't generally make sense. I played in last year's Fanpro Shadowrun games, during the day, and they had a part 1, part 2, part 3 scenario. So not only did you have a different gm each day, you also had different players. Please don't do this. /Everything/ we had done, we hadn't done, because the only things remaining the same were the character names. As a long-time GM, I have discovered time and again that if you design 6 ways for a scenario to go, the players will not only discover and consider ways number 7 and 8, they will choose to go with 9 or 10. Flexible is a must. But if the GM is going to change...unless he's been briefed on the team he'll be inheriting thoroughly...a retcon is almost inevitable.

Given the three-day tournament scenario, with everyone needing to end the same way--shouldn't that have been discussed between GM's before the tournament even began?

Incidentally, I heard only good things about the 2005 Gencon tourney, so...surely the situation is fixable. And the more I read Street Magic, the more I like it.

Ah, one more thing. It was not clear in the description that this was a non-elimination tournament. I was told (after I'd picked alternate events), that it has traditionally been non-elimination, but for those of us who haven't played in it before, STATE THAT /clearly/!

Why make a tourney at all? Who cares about ratings . . . Just make a good run.

Hey folks,

Just thought I'd stick my nose in here to address a few misunderstandings.

-The author of the tournament has written several Shadowrun tournaments. However, he is neither a freelancer for any of FanPro's published works nor is he a writer for Shadowrun Missions.

-As the coordinator for Shadowrun Missions, I can firmly state that the only connection between Missions and the Tournament is that we share some GMs. My involvement with the tournament is peripheral (I helped with scheduling and I glanced through it for major gameworld continuity errors), so I have some notion of stuff that happened as an observer, but I wasn't involved in writing or running it.

-The tournament was completed extremely late this year. There are a lot of reasons for why it happened this year. There are many more reasons for why it WILL NOT happen next year.

-The characters were in fact finished up late night Wednesday. Several people who agreed to create characters did not follow through. If they seem hastily assembled, it's because they were.

-Out of a GM staff of 23 people, we had 6 people back out within a week of the start of the convention. Their reasons were varied, and most of them were due to familial issues, however, that caused a lot of problems for us.

-GMs are NOT FanPro employees. They're all volunteers. For instance, you mentioned Serrin Sol -- he's a great guy, but he's a convention GM, not an employee of or freelancer for FanPro. While they're compensated, the level of compensation in no way compares to the amount of effort they put forth. We're here to have fun just as much as the players are.

-A tournament scenario is always going to be a railroad. At least to some extent. It's the only way you can comparatively judge 12 tables.

-Your GM the first night created the majority of your issues. It was explicitly spelled out how the first night had to end. He allowed you to break the scenario. Your GM the second night had to work within the constraints of bringing you back on track. (pun intended.)

-There are many reasons why we switch GMs from night to night. That is something that won't be changing. While the suggestion about an observer is a nice alternative, that would require manpower that we simply DO NOT HAVE.

-Ghostfire, you mentioned that you didn't know how GMs were recruited. There were multiple postings on livejournal, rpg.net, enworld, dumpshock, shadowrunrpg, and several other gaming forums. The way we find GMs is we scour the internet for them. If you'd like to GM for us next year, we'd love to have you. Passion for the game is one of our most important criteria, and you clearly have that.

-There was a standardized system in place for scoring. It wasn't a popularity contest. I don't know how exactly it worked, (again, I'm not directly involved) but there was a sheet of paper covered with an awful lot of numbers for each table.

-There were 10 tables of tournament run the first night (not 15) and 8 tables run the third night (not 5).

I'm sincerely sorry that anyone didn't enjoy themselves. I hate to admit it, but I do believe that this year was better handled than last year. We'll keep trying to improve, but when you're working with a team composed entirely of volunteers it's not easy.

Sounds like the tournament format should be three runs with a common theme, not a single run split over three nights.

Trying to keep a scenario on track over 12 hours of players messing things up would never work.

I dunno about everyone else, but I had a blast at the SR Tourney.

Railroading?
It's a tournament, and not a typical tabletop game like we have at home.
Everyone gets a premade character and a stock situation to deal with, everyone is graded on how well they deal with it as well as how well they do certain things, like stay in-character, use certain terminology, etc. A certain amount of railroading is to be expected.

Cobbled together plot/ characters?
Being an all volunteer group, with real-life jobs and lives, even with impending deadlines for their hobby...things could be better. So there was a little confusion over the ability listed that wasn't fully explained. I thought the crew did a bang-up job in putting that info out in-game, going to the tables, explaining what it all meant. Characters get put together at the last minute, it isn't like these are made months in advance and playtested extensively like a published product. I thought it was a cool twist on the typical Shadowrunner fare.

Winning, Munchkinism, rules-lawyering and just having fun...
I was at the table Blue GM'd with Bull, Josh, etc. From the start, we knew we weren't competing, so we just had fun with it. We meandered as most PCs do, on tangents that didn't matter. Either way, we developed our own heirarchy, and stayed mostly in-character. We were there to have fun, and that we did!

Like anything where you place pre-concieved notions and expectations before simple enjoyment, you will be dissapointed. Watch a movie that is a remake, or an adaptation, and most folks walk in with expectations...and they are rarely fulfilled and the experience ends up being sucky. Go in to a game like this expecting a superior product, like a published adventure, or having the depth of play like your home GM runs...and you will be dissapointed.

I guess part of the problem is that they see TOURNAMENT, and see competition...and that equates to WINNING. But what is the goal? What are you trying to win? Beat the Frenchman to the AI? Or having fun? Staying in-character? Blowing up things? All of these can be construed as winning...not just one of them.

I'd be interested in seeing a list of who won what.

For my part, I had a blast. We focused on simply having fun, going along with the streamlined plot instead of fighting it, understanding the limitations placed on the GMs and laughing a lot when we went off on tangents and when we as players acted in-character (especially Josh who played the Merc).

Could it have been a better, more polished product? Sure. It always can be. But in order to ensure my own and my compatriots enjoyment, I'm willing to go on faith a little and let some of the quirky issues ride.