Have you ever found yourself taking a roll in the team you didn't expect? My Combat Decker, for example, has also become the team face as well as the team's leader and strategist. I find myself talking with the Johnsons, barking commands, and trying to keep everyone alive whilst they blindly fight. We have Cover Ops Specialist, two fighters, and a combat mage, and I seem to fill in all the remaining roles! I was wondering, has this ever happened to you? Finding yourself doing a job you didn't intend to upon character creation?

Always. I got so tired of being the party leader I started making mousey guys with no gumption. They still get thrust intot he fore front

QuickDraw, a Runner that started in First Edition as a modified BodyGuard< quickly became the runners negotiator, equipment wrangler, most times driver and pilot, and eventually became the first of the PC Deckers as well. I had been looking forward to just playing a combat specialist, but them is the breaks.

For the record we had a group of 10 runners. At first QuickDraw was the point man thanks to being the only thing with Wired reflexes 2, then he started pairing up with the Burn-out mage Spectre, then later was the unofficial babysitter of Balrog (Troll Street Samurai) and WhisperDeath (Over cybered Street Sam). Other members were ShadowJack (Mercenary), The Terror (Dwarf Street Sam), Wolf (Wolf Shaman), Viper (Snake Shaman), Shredder(Combat Decker), Jonny (Rigger and girlfriend of ShadowJack) and StealMachine (female Street Samurai). And we achieved our success through superior planning, supperior speed, superior initiation, and superior firepower, which included four stolen Ares Manpack lasers when we busted a friend out of Prison.


I loved playing QuickDraw, so named becuase he once drew his gun and shot a street samuria through the head and put the gun away before the Sam got the chance to act.

Well, while not Shadowrun, it's still old FASA....

I was playing a Mechwarrior game a few years ago, and I planned to be the Medic/Mechanic.

Somehow, I ended up being the combat tactician, as well.

I still can't figure that one out.

...well in the last campaign she was involved in, the Short One (that's an even dozen) became the team's "Designated Driver" as she had the best ability even defaulting due to having the highest Reaction Attribute. Mind you this is a character that counted using her fingers.

"...uhh that's the intersection of East fifteenth and fifteenth East? I'm so confused!"

It's the fun.
I miss the Black Cat Squadron (the team my RPG buddies created). We won, but it was usually a phyrric victory. My personal Mech was a 25 ton custom job with MASK, 2 axes, 12 small pulse lasers, an over sized engine and double heatsinks. if everything hit in a charge, i could drop an atlas in one volley.

In our group, no matter what we play, it falls to either Finbar or me to take the party/team leader position. During a game I ran, that Finbar sat out, the rest of the group spent four six hour game sessions planning out a milk run, and only eventually completed the run because I got fed up and told them their time was up.

I am the nebie in the group so I just usually played my part, but Snow Fox , usually plays the shaman, but functions as the face.

My street samurai ended up taking the leader role. The only reason why she took that role was because the only other person who wanted it was an over zealous shark shaman who's philosophy was to bust down the door and shoot first. Not necessarily a bad outlook but when he tries to pull this off on every single run and lands us in a world of trouble when he does it, it doesn't work too well... Now she's the decker, face, muscle, and soccer mom (long story on that), back up mechanic, and musical producer/manager/video director... I figure if she ever lives though all of this I can retire her and land her a decent job somewhere.

Now that I think about it, it's sorta weird that I want to get her out of the shadows and become legit. I blame 'Mom and Dad'

Its interesting, as the person playing the gunbunny knows the most about the setting, but its the face/driver who kinda seems to call a lot of the shots.

The team's hacker, a French-Canadian expat to Seattle, has recently picked up a few points of Con after he almost blew fast-talking a bored Lone Star beat cop.

The team's weapon specialists/upcoming Samurai (getting cybered little by little) is the only one who can skillfully drive, too.

The orc... well, come to think of it, he's not good at much.

yup
seems to happen to me often in any game system
fortunately not ALL the time, I try to step back as much as possible

I had a charisma 1 mage with a few social flaws and a low negotiation score end up pulling the role of face once because the socially competant character and the nearly braindead thug were in a busy discussion at the time (in the same room, about nothing, not listening at all to the job or corncerned with the pay).

i don't know how it happened, but my main character right now, built as a face-guy . . has become main combat-guy somehow . . probably because i refuse to play anything that can't propperly defend itself *g*

My cyber-psychosised covert ops agent kept winding up being the de-facto team leader in my only face to face campaign. Everyone always looked to her to plan things - they said that IC it was because she seemed even-headed and very experienced/consistent. I RPed her pychosis (hehehe, typoed spychosis at first, which for her is a very appropriate typo) as becoming worse and worse as the campaign went on, but the other characters just called her a crazy slitch and then asked her what the plan was in the same breath.

She also wound up functioning as the street sam of the party, as we had her, a face/rigger, a technomancer, and an adept. She was originally intended to be a covert ops agent with a lot of skill as a sniper - all her 'ware was utility oriented, with the only straight up combat ware being wired reflexes 2.

Later incarnations of the character incorporated the leadership skill due to that campaign.

hrm . . then there's the fact that i am mostly playing the tough guy of the group, the meat shield tank damage dealer . . Trolls and the likes of them . . Int of 3, Charisma of 1, no social skills . . somehow i still ended up as the teams leader . . probably because NOBODY wants to tell the 3m STR15, Body 17 Troll :"No!" . . and probably because i kinda think military/security style . . tactics and strategics and the such x.x . .