This is also to counter the taint that is the dysfunctional players thread and to find what memorable things players have done to get to their objectives.

My players once got around the longest, nastiest dungeon I've ever invented by crashing a flying ship into it. It proved much easier to traverse as a pile of rubble than it would have been as a giant, living tower.

That anecdote got both more and less funny after 9/11, I now realize.

How about SR stuff? Please stick to SR stuff, I don't want this moved to General Gaming and killed.

Okay, this happened in the Cage Fight game, where we played 40 build point characters. Mine was a dwarven street punk named Rat. We were hired to enter Ehran the Scribe's place (not his main one - this was kind of a vacation home in the woods) and get a fingerprint from him. So eventually, we meet the man himself, and Rat puts his plan into motion - I PMed the GM, Krishcane, with it, so he could do the whole thing in a post, so it would flow better:


The imposing elf glares at Blackout and hisses something under his breath. Blackout's eyes flash, his embarrassment channeling into his usual defensive thought process. Is he making fun of me? he thinks.

Rat sees the eyes too. Aw drek... gotta move fast 'fore it hits... "Um, we as hired to get yer signature for this thing, um, I mean, a thumb print or something. Some kinda package. I dunno, yer elf wine of the week or somethin'. Anyhow, Blackout here's got the, uh, the thingie... "

Blackout stands back up with the "thingie". Deciding that punching the old man isn't yet his best move, he decides to take on a tone of authority. "Simply place your thumb right here," he says seriously, holding the print-reader out. When the elf makes no move at all, Blackout says, "Your thumb, sir, right here."

The elf continues to stand stone-statue-still, glaring at Rat and Blackout. He glances across the room briefly, gazing into the distance as if they were actually outside and he caught a whiff of something unpleasant. The air seems to get a little thicker and warmer in the room.

Rat doesn't wait for an escalation -- he decides to move his little plot along. "But, but... but she needs ya to sign it, or they can't... aw, dammit." He looks down at his shoes, dejected. These shoes are really crappy. he thinks to himself in an unrelated thought, and sighs heavily. "Is there a way outta here where we don't have'ta go 'round that freaky statue thingie? It almost beat up Kayla here, an' she's just a kid."

The elf looks over at Kayla again. He shakes his head -- pity? Disgust? Rat isn't sure. "Please inform Goldie that I shall be drawing up a bill for my time speaking to her messengers, as well as damage they caused breaking and entering into my vacation home and disturbing my pets. Ilian will show you out."

Another wood panel slides open on the far side of the room, revealing the beautiful woman Ilian in a stone hallway. "This way, gentlemen and lady, if you please."

"Yeah, and what if I don't please," mumbles Blackout under his breath. Then he shouts loudly, "Fine! I'm done with this stupid job anyway. I'll be sure to tell my employer about your rude treatment. I'm sure she'll take, uh, appropriate actions." He hopes he sounds threatening.

"Oh! Hey!" shouts Rat, distracting everyone from Blackout's comments. "Uh, I, um... found this, um, book. Uh, is it yers?" He pulls the magical book from the other room out of the front of his pants. "Oh, whoops, lemme just clean it off..." he comments, and uses the front of his greasy and fluid-stained shirt to wipe it down, revealing his pale and hairy belly at the same time.

The elf's face is strained with disgust at this performance. Rat suddenly lurches forward and shoves it into the elf's hands. "There ya go!"

"Gah!" the elf yells. He hot-potatos it back to Rat. "By all that's sacred! Keep the blessed thing! Take it out of here with the rest of your grubby possessions!"

Rat deftly snatches the book out of the air. "Gee! Thanks, mister!" He has a huge grin on his face. The elf is busy, making some kind of sigil over his own chest as a pale green glow washes over him. He shakes his head and shakes his hands as if flicking water off.

"We'd better go, kids," says Rat. He struts out of the room toward Ilian. Blackout, confused, follows along.

Lou rouses Kayla from her nap and escorts her to the hallway, supporting her as they go. She staggers confusedly along.

The hallway goes straight along for several dozen meters, and the wood panel swiftly closes behind them. It's stone on their side, and once it's closed, there is no sign a door was ever there. Not surprisingly, when they reach the far end of the hallway, it also has no sign of a door. Ilian waves her hands in the air and says, "Franost!" The terminating wall of the hallway slides down into the ground, revealing a familiar room.

It seems like the team was here months ago, instead of just the couple of hours that have actually passed. To the right is the big steel door with the maglock that Kayla shorted out, and directly across from them is the dumbwaiter that leads to the surface, disguised there as a stone bench. To the left, the stone staircase they came in on goes upward to the storm-celler-style doors that lead to the surface.

"Travel well, fair wanderers," bids Ilian. The team shuffles out into the lobby, Ilian waves, and the heavy stone wall that blocked the hallway slides back into place. There are left alone.

Rat still has a huge grin on his face. "Hey Blackout, run that thingy over the book, wouldja? Think we got a nice set of prints on it."

Heh. Not many 40-point characters can put one over on Ehran the scribe.
And it was in-character, too, in that it wasn't overly elaborate, but the kind of tactic an uneducated but cunning street punk would come up with.

That's pretty cool. What was the print used for, and by who?

We never got the whole story, just that they needed the print, but I think it was kind of the equivalent of serving a subpoena - they needed the print to acknowledge that he got a message or legal letter or something from them.

i once played a character whose obnoxious assholery saved the day.

i forget the name of the module but the objective was to get into a secure facility and provide an access point to and remove a hard drive from a stand alone computer terminal. Also had to remove a chip from the same building. Sent the team in under two different covers,

HVAC repair crew- it was time to service the specialty air filters-this team retrieved the chip.

Computer repair crew- i forget what their excuse was but they added the access point and snagged the HD

hang up that had to be over come-the entry room to the building had a rating 8 chem sniffer and metal detector and the building had a 20 man onsite reaction crew.

Solution- GM figured we could be allowed to fit 2 gas grenades into a thermos, we then wrapped pistols in ziplock bags with clips of EX-explosive rounds, then put the clips and pistols in tupperware containers stained with tomato paste. These were put in the botom of 2 metal toolboxes which were soft sealed with silicone.

this got us past the sensors and they fell for the deceptions and we were able to pull off the job, but half the time i spent waiting outside the door to the reaction team with the pins pulled on the grenades of NSVII

Hmm. I can't think of any player ingenuity.

One of my old GMs was running a campaign he came up with that was supposed to last 6 - 12 months. It involved the group being hired to travel around the world to hunt down 12 individuals and assassinate them. The group spent one session doing the legwork and finding the current names / addresses of each of the targets, then promptly flew to Hawaii. Where they then sent each of the targets a letter telling them they had won a free trip and a plane ticket. The runners rented a limo and simply waited at the airport for each of the targets to arrive (one every other day for a month) and shot them in the head as soon as they sat down in the back of the limo. They didn't get all of them, but managed to get 7 or 8, all the while enjoying a lovely vacation.

Why would anybody important enough to be assassinated go for a free trip?

Are you kidding? Since when did a person being "important" make them intelligent?

I could point to various public and government figures, but I don't want to start any arguments.

But wouldn't they be rich enough to not need a free vacation?

Actually, most people that I've spoken to that you could consider "rich" got that way by being smart with their money. I'd say doing something that's "free", especially if it interests you anyway, is being smart with your money.

So in short, I guess, "no".

Rich does not necessarily equate to importance.

Even then though, how do you think rich people get that way in the first place. There are a lot of rich people who do indeed take advantage of the many free offers that come their way over the course of a year. The offers usually come so that the rich person will become interested in investing in some venture, or lending their name to a particular endeavour, but rest assured, this kind of thing is not in any way a rarity.

So if you got a plane ticket in the mail, today, right now, you'd drop what you're doing and fly to Hawaii, no questions asked? You'd assume there were no strings attached? You wouldn't look into the company/hotel/airline/whatever that claimed you won something you never signed up for? You'd leave your security detail behind, your family, wouldn't take a friend?

Assassination is a risky business because people don't hire assassins to murder nobodies. People that aren't nobodies in Shadowrun? They have tight corporate or gov't schedules, they have bodyguards, they have Matrix protection, they have shit to do, people to do it with, places to be, and protection details to lug around with them everywhere they go. They get a letter one day with a plane ticket in it, and "seven or eight" of them don't bother to check about what's going on, and manage to arrange their schedules around their sudden new vacation, etc, etc?

BS. Good on the GM for not letting it work the last four or five times, at least. But even the first half dozen were just him not thinking it through.

I had an omae pose as a stripper to get the attention of a group of teens having a party while the rest of the team stole daddy's eurocar.

Forgive me for not going into absolute detail, as I thought the point of the thread was to simply relay examples of player ingenuity. Yes, the group did make it look legitimate, mainly by setting up a fake travel agency and having the decker place references to it in several locations. Secondly, the people who were to be assassinated were witnesses to something, and came from all walks of life.

In that case: good example for player ingenuity .

I don't remeber all the specifics, and this was all in 2nd edition.

1. It involved a GM who basically had a big spirit (something insane.. like 20). It chased us untill we hit a church (backgroud count) They had another charater meet us there, and he brought a few tess blooms (more background count) anyway, to make a long story short, they raised the background count to a point where it made the spirit almost non functional.

2. Step 1, cast Blast barrier aound enemy. Step 2, toss them a grenade. Step 3, chunkie salsa.

3. Uber doom shaman that had some weird spell to turn into a bear. Cast levitate person, take them up 100ft, then drop them.

4. This one topped the cake. We we supposed to watch this girl, but there were barriers around the place. So one of our players had the gm roll a d4 and see if it was a 4. This roll was to determain if the girl was at the end of her cycle. It was. The players character (A snake shamen, then proceded to transform herself into a snake, crowl into the sewer, and we...get something with blood on it. She then preformed ritual sourcery.

5. Same run, girl was behind this huge door in the sewer. We were truing to get to her, and the GM informs us that the barrier rating is 40. (Seriously.. it was a bit much.) So we asked what the barrier rating of the wall around the door. he agreed that it being a run down crumbling sewer, it was probably about 6-8. The troll meat tank wet through it. The GM was kinda bummed out. (and yes, the girl was allowed to know we were there.)