Breaking continuity. We play a game because we have reasonable expectations of what may happen as a result of specific actions. If we just wanted to sit around pretending to be characters having a magical teaparty where anyone could make up any crazy shit they wanted - we would do that.

We have statistics and roll dice because it prevents the game from being Cowboys and Indians with its inherently problematic "Bang! You're dead!/ No you missed!" resolution system. We have character sheets because it tells each player what each character is capable of. Having a Climbing dicepool of 8 means that you can't climb moondust onto the space rainbow, and it also means that you aren't going to fall down and break your neck climbing the cupboards in the garage.

When you take the game away from the players and leave only the story, the game is over. The players are lost and confused, and you would be well advised to expect them to lash out at their surroundings because there is no longer any ability to "expect" any particular outcomes from any actions. Moving the game unexpectedly into crazy dream land where the normal rules don't apply is not a recipe for the players to calm down and get into the spirit of magical teaparty. If you want to play magical teaparty you should start a game that is explicitly going to be magical teaparty from the get-go.

-Frank

...better than replacing them with open-ended d1's...

That was my first thought on the subject. If you want avoid things like bloodbaths, standoffs and showdowns, why the heck would you choose a frontier town? People today are more likely to have been raised on Clint Eastwood than Gene Autry; you put shadowrunners in anything remotely resembling the old west and there's likely to be a hell of a lot more shooting than singing.

The other significant thing is that modern gunfighting is a LOT more effective than the typical old west gunfighters. Most of of the old west shooters were not good shots. The average cop out of a good academy is probably better then 90% of the "gunfighters". The average SR character I've seen is better then that, so they are probably better at shooting than 95-98% of the gunfighters, have armor, better guns, and are hugely faster than them. In a typical fight SR characters will mop the floor. It's probably going to take the situation becoming the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that they will lose.

So if violence has always been their solution before, they surely will try it here.

So he took away all of the characters' abilities with apparently no explanation. Sorry, your magic doesn't work for no reason, your gear doesn't work for no reason. Your skills don't work for no reason.

The intent was supposedly to get people to "roleplay" more, apparently by taking away all of their rules-related options. But that never works. If people don't sign up for a game where there isn't any crunch, telling them that there isn't any crunch anymore isn't liberating - it's stultifying and insulting.

-Frank

No, he took away all of their toys. I see nowhere that he says he stopped letting them use skills and roll dice. You're putting that in there so that you have something to be upset about. Last time I checked, there were pistols and rifles in the old west. There were situations where you needed to con someone, or negotiate with them. There were horses and carriages (that if need be, you could handwave them learning to ride/drive quickly).

I see tons of game left there, even if you don't have your fancy talkboxes and yer devilry. (I might leave magic in there and just give it a western flair, maybe the mage pops over with an iron that slings stunbolts and manabolts.)

If the players don't want to do that, then it probably wouldn't work, but I find your assertion that there's nothing left to be ludicrous at best.

Here's a couple of things that jump out at me:

And:

First of all, if the pc's usually rely on violence as a first resort, what did you put in the the first part of the adventure to clue them into the fact that violence would not work? And for that matter, if:

then why would violence not work?

This not to say that you as a GM did anything wrong, only that there was a miscommunication on some level between you and the players, and figuring out where and why that miscommunication occurred is going to be a big part of making sure it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, without actually being at the table, its hard to say where the crossed wires lie. But I'll take a stab at it.

Players will always hate to lose, be defeated, be put in jail. Nobody likes that, but if it isn't a possibility (and by definition, happens sometimes) then there isn't a lot of excitement in winning. Challenge requires a balance; if the players felt like they were put in a scenario where they couldn't win-- or if something they tried was a auto-fail-- then they can feel jerked around. Dogs in the Vineyard has a good rule of thumb on this one, Say Yes or Roll Dice.

Its more fun to win than it is to lose, but it can be fun to lose if you lose fair-and-square. I've gotten boned on runs and at the end of it had to admit that the outcome was perfect and that as a player I had a good time. But if the GM says, "You guys are going about this all wrong, and you fail," then that isn't fun.

Its tacky to quote oneself, but I can be a little tacky.

I'm not saying that's what you did, Dender, only that its something I've seen wreck a lot of games.

Did you tell your players any of this? Perhaps you were not effective in communicating this desire to your players? It's also possible that they just wanted to play "shoot em up cowboys" that evening.

I agree with what's been said about putting the players into a Wild West setting and being shocked that the players want to shoot first and ask questions later. Honestly, why waste your time with a Wild West setting if you don't want to use the Wild West mythos? Do you just like the smell of horses?

But seriously: If you put your players into an obviously over-the-top genre setting, you have to expect that the players will behave according to that genre's mythical rules. You would have to tell them explicitly that "even though we're in a Wild West setting, you won't be able to survive here by shooting first and asking questions later."

You are totally illogical.

In the first place, you're assuming that violent behavior on the part of player characters is the inherent opposite of role playing which makes no sense if the character is a violent character, which seems likely if the character is a professional black ops mercenary. If you force a violent character to behave in a nonviolent manner for contrived reasons, like a magical trip to the Wild West, you are in fact impinging upon character-driven role playing in the context of the game world provided by Shadowrun. You're just being a snob who thinks that violent actions are somehow unworthy of the gaming table. By implication, you are better than a GM who allows violence at the gaming table.

Secondly, it seems like you're ripping off of an old episode of Star Trek. There was an episode of Star Trek where Kirk and some of his officers are transported to the Old West by an alien intelligence who wants to evaluate how they behave without their toys. Kirk et al finally figure out that they are in an elaborate illusion and that they can simply disbelieve the hail of lead flying at them and win the situation by walking up to their enemies through their line of fire and punching them out. This appeases the alien intelligence as it satisfies them that Kirk is capable of responding to threats in more ways than just destruction.

So, what you're doing is re-enacting an episode of Star Trek from many decades ago without any explanation but then wondering why the players get upset when they thought they were playing Shadowrun from the 80s.

Thirdly, you're just plain incorrect if you believe that the Old West was a harder place to get away with violence than contemporary times. In the Old West you had fragmented law enforcment, no forensics, frontier isolation, great distances across deserts, no rapid communication, transient populations, and no effective way for law enforcement personnel in different reigons to collaborate. How could you possibly believe that it would be harder to get away with crime in the Old West than it would be in the world of Shadowrun? If we look at the situation logically, if the player characters want to get away with as much violence as possible they should perform more violent acts in the Old West than in Seattle if the number of violent acts perpetrated corresponds to the probability of getting caught.

Forcing players to play a certain way just because you illogically classify violent player character actions as being some kind of anti-role-playing and feel that your table is more elite without violence cannot lead to a quality gameplay experience. Games are immersive and engaging when they allow the players to have a wide range of interaction with their surroundings which are accompanied by a full range of realistic responses. As a counterexample, look at what made Deus Ex a very popular game. Warren Spector decided that instead of having the game force the player to behave a certain way, such as how the player in Theif was basically forced by game mechanics to sneak around, that the game should allow sneaking, OR violence, OR talking to solve problems. By allowing the player a great deal of freedom in how to resolve situations and by paying careful attention to real-world detail in the scenery and world objects, Spector was able to produce a very immersive experience.

But what do you think would have happend if Spector had gone insane and decided to produce a game where a character is ripped from Escape From New York, placed in the Old West, and is automatically defeated should he try to do anything but talk his way out of a situation? Whatever game he produced would have been a stinker so epic that it would have become legendary for weirdness and unintentional humor.

So my advice to you is just admit to your players that you were being a snob who illogically believed that violent player character actions were inherently anti-role-playing. Admit that your old west setting was ripped off from Star Trek, and start over. Use the actual Shadowrun setting which people have gathered together to play and let people play their characters the way they want instead of passing value judgements. Nobody wants to play "GM's value judgement hour".

Finally, if you want to see more non-rules-based role playing just put a lot of evocative and loving detail into your game world. Describe the cans of soda on the counter, or the color of the couch. When the characters go to the bar to meet the Johnson describe the seven beers on tap and how each one tastes. Describe the temperature of the rain or how many inches of trash are in the gutter. Then you're going to get imagination and interaction with these details that won't be rules-driven.

You'll have better results than if you rewrite the entire Shadowun rulebook to read just one sentence: "If a player character attempts to actually attack something or someone they automatically lose seeing as violent behavior is a most grevious offense to the great god of role playing."

negatory fleshpod.

Skills still work. Cyber gone, weapons and armor (heaviest armor going in was a armor long coat) changed to lesser versions (knocked off a few points here and there). They walked in knowing the statement "Show up for the job. I'll tell you what i can, and then you'll leave immediately". They looked different. Because, in the end, they weren't who they were. The party picked up on that instantly. The ubertwink cyberarm? turned into a regular arm, but the character's str jumped from a 2 to a 5. The fleet of stolen vehicles (the rigger who has gotten near max in every hacking program almost from the outset of the game goes out of his way to steal every vehicle and weapon he comes across)? nope, but i gave the guy ride skill. The "psionic" influencer incompetent with guns? someone else had a bow, and she has max ranks in that, and slowly her magic "came back" though a little differently. The gun monkey? still has a revolver, a good number of bullets, and ten dollars. in 1876, thats a hell of alot of money.

The idea was to get them to try something, anything other than "kill everything until it dies in the first round because i can". Get them off balance and thinking about whats going on. Not no violence at all, just anything other than shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more and when everyone is dead try figuring out whats going on. It wasn't exactly "get them to roleplay in a way i deem appropriate" but "give them a chance to roleplay something different". They didn't autolose against who they were fighting, they slaughtered who they were fighting. Unless shadowrun is really just the game of Kidnap/Kill/Steal/Sabotage. Then sure, I'm totally doing it wrong.

As for dead or alive, they return to their actual bodies, they didn't know that walking in. They got arrested for killing 4 people. The only one who initially had a weapon drawn was a 14 year old who went around to the back of the bar to practice drawing and aiming and trying to look badass.

And, by the by, the thread was intended to be "Have you killed a game? How" with sharing my own experience. Though, i think i'm fine with it being a total dissection of how i screwed up by trying something i thought might be interesting. I do appreciate the actual suggestions more than the repeated browbeatings. But either way keep the hits coming.

First off, yes i am totally illogical thank you. The highest of all compliments

Seems to be the theme that No Violence was Allowed. Misconception. Violence was SUPPOSED TO BE DISCOURAGED due to an unfamiliar situation. I turned on cruise control there because, well, First Last and Only response was "how can i kill everyone in town, then burn it to the ground" with the backup plan of "and piss on the ashes". But hey, if every game of yours is letting the player walk through halls, littering the ground with the hundreds of bodies of every man, woman, child as well as magical and cybernetic threats while only getting a scratch on a cheek as damage, Hey, kudos to you. Bonus points if the scratch "only makes the character madder" and refreshes edge. The Johnson screws them out of 50 nuyen? Kill him! His bosses send a team after the party? Kill them too, and the bosses! And hell, decapitate Hestaby while they're at it. Cause Thats Goooood Roleplay.

I vaguely remember that episode. I liked it better in ST:NG when it was Worf and Data against Q's Mutilex Foreign Legion. But hey, a GM like you checks every book, video game, movie and television show ever made before designing a campaign to make sure that it is 100% origional and no part of it has ever been done before. I respect that. I don't have the time nor the patience for it, but hey, You are Clearly the best GM evar. I bet you even houserule the matrix to be called something like The UnderTubes because of that pesky trilogy.

Wow, you actually know every single detail of the game, even when i didn't reference it! thats A-FREAKIN-mazing. So then you know that the Sheriff was in the bar when the party started fleecing the townsfolk and that the people killed were part of a "gang" running a protection racket that doubled as the local militia men. And that they were completely ignoring the party until people started firing weapons in town.

thats EXACTLY what i said and implied. Man, you really are the best. You should be, like, a private investigator or something. Deducing my every motivation with but a glance. Fantastically done sir. Because a town wouldn't get on the defensive quickly if someone threatened to burn a place full of alcohol to the ground. And excepting that at no time did they stop being able to murder everyone in town. it was Discouraged. They surrendered when the sheriff (who left the bar just before the gang/militia showed up) came back with his deputies expecting to break up a brawl.

If that happened, you'd be playing Dreamfall. But you already knew that from your extensive library of research.

And what great advice it is, Master of All things Rock and Awesome. And maybe whenever my players have a problem with the way I'm running the Second Best Game ever (because yours shall always be first) I'll explain to them with all the arrogance i can muster to speak with the vitrol you produce that they are wrong and if they don't immediately change and admit they were stupid, that they should leave gaming forever, and kill themselves. Why would anyone ever get bored of invading slightly more difficult than last time corperate enclaves, slaughtering thousands of guards and employees to steal a datafile, then punking a dragon on the way out for a whoping 500 nuyen. Man, that just SCREAMS best game ever.

Right up until The Enemy shows up and actually uses its "Roll magic. If successes are greater than targets essence, target dies in the most painful way possible. See chart on page 131 for 30 minute description of how they die" power.

And remember, if you want to post like an insulting jackass, don't be surprized if thats how people respond

My, my. You sure seem to be upset that someone (more than one person, in fact) gave you the very advice you came onto DSF asking for, after having explained how you very nearly killed a gaming group's enthusiasm for the game.

This actually is the perfect illustration of why your games aren't successful. If someone suggests that you could be doing things better you get sarcastic and enraged and say that their suggestions are unreasonable. You even slip in a scathing critque of your players there, which is ironic since you originally were asking how to make aforementioned players more happy. It shows that their concerns about the game don't matter to you because you know you're right and they're stupid. If that's the attitude you take to the table and show to your players of course they're unhappy.

If you tell us that you put the player characters into a weird setting, took away a lot of their gear, and that they were angry at the negative outcome of their actions, and then a few posts down get defensive and go on and on about how much you hate what the players were doing, that reinforces what I was saying in my last post more strongly than anything I could possibly say.

To me it seems as if he wasn't asking what he did wrong, but he was asking if we had ever done something wrong and how we turned it around.

He was asking for us to share our experiences, not to pick apart his experience.

It seems since he was asking for us to share something, he shared first.

...is to be the one taking the first shot. Er... step, yeah...

I've been slowly working on a game where you have El Paso and Jurez. El Paso is a high tech city where tracking people is doable, Juarez (during the mad-dog Second Revolution) far less so.

Note the part where the guy said he killed the game, this implying he was at least partially at fault.

Unless their Eastwood of choice is the Paint Your Wagon variety.

Pure, unadulterated hogwash. That's a recipe for people falling asleep and later making jokes about your GMing that you'll never live down.

well, this *is* dumpshock =P

How all 7 beers on tap taste, what kinds of soda cans are on the floor, and what color the couch is isn't setting detail, it's useless rubbish. My groups shows up at the table to game, not listen to the GM try to wax poetic in a doomed attempt to make his boring game exciting again. One man's "evocative and loving detail" is another man's "enough with the monologue already, we get that we're in a bar and would like to actually play the game."

Edit: that probably came across as a bit harsh when it wasn't intended. The point is that if a game is in the crapper because the players like to shoot stuff and the GM wants more social interactions, being boring is not going to help anything.

Thank you Thyme Lost, thats exactly what i was hoping to do. I started with the barest of details, which i had figured were the worst of it all. Because if you screw up, its generally the worst bits that do you in. Just seems like several people, the same several that WR is talking about decided they'd rather kick someone while they're down than actually say something constructive or read the full post before replying. Which is funny, because at least one of them jumps on the "search before you say/ask something stupid" wagon.

KK: Jerk. Now i have to find a copy of Harlequinn's Back.

Beer Fanatics near and far: The most detailed I've gotten with the setting is that one bar serves a beer brewed in house. As in, actually brewed, none of this synthahol or soy crap. Its based off of a beer actually brewed currently in Aurora (denver game afterall) called HMS Victory. Look it up, and if you can actually find a bottle, SEND IT TO MEEEEEE.

And WR, for your info, when my players have issues, i ask them what they want, and try to incorporate it into the game at a speed that doesn't seem hokey. Or at least i try to. If they act like a total ass, they get treated like one. Usually if they're creative, its rewarded. Creativity like "i want to create a cyber arm laced with explosives" is usually laughed off by everyone. Creativity like "i kidnap the giant ghoul, and feed it the homeless folks and prostitutes in the area till i can condition it to be my mobile weapons platform" is... punished by the players. Don't get me wrong, wouldn't trade them for anything short of a time machine that works.

Yea, i screwed up. Thats the whole idea of "I screwed up, heres how. Have you screwed up?"

Everyone has flaws.

Though if they had started singing, i really don't know what i would do.

...sorry, but I did sense a bit of similarity having participated in the campaign.

I am so glad that someone else takes care of that kind of game so I don't have to run that kind of drek.

Different strokes for different folks. Thank the gods for variety!



Back to the thread.

I have played in a game that committed several of the kinds of faults that you are describing. I have also been in the driver's seat when making a left turn from the right turn only lane (woops! GMing can be hard...).

I find that it is easiest to recoup a campaign when returning to fundamentals. In the case of Shadowrun... return to Shadowrunning... re-emphasize social networking and basic 'running by bringing the game back into the city, back against small corp targets etc. While keeping it simple and returning to the basic structure of what Shadowrunning is about you can find out from your players what they wanted to do with the game, what their character goals were and the like. Once you have that information you can find ways to put their goals on a collision course with the basic runs you have been doing, or even with each other's goals.

Either case, its a return to the fundamentals of gaming: character goals, mission-oriented infiltrations, buy-sell of stolen goods, running from the law etc.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~Ernest Hemingway

Yeah, you have a point there. While I do let the players drive the story, I still do my fair share of taking those seeds and nursing them into a plot and when the players are stuck and aren't driving things, then I have scenarios that I can put in front of them and get them through.

The nice thing with our group is that we only meet for four hour sessions, so for me, its really easy to keep things moving during that time. I almost always have a little outline of a handful of things I have planned, whether that is as simple as the mechanic calling to say their armor plating is in, to the next time the runner goes home, he finds a proximity grenade waiting at his front door from an antagonist three runs ago...

If the players do something with that, great, if not, some of it is still there. So, I usually try to have a simple outline of several things that could happen...sometimes, the players will go on a tangent and drive the whole session and my entire outline is still valid for the next session. Other times, we zip right through it and I have to run on the fly...

So, yeah, balance is usually where everyone is going to get the most out of the game and have fun!

Ironic...after our last session, we are doing just that, getting back to the fundamentals, most notably, character goals. While none of my players are complaining, I've managed to get some feedback that nuyen rewards are pretty low, based on what the characters have been wanting to get.

Granted, I've been keeping them on smaller, one night runs for a while, with very little legwork needed to be successful. But it sounds like they are ready to hit some bigger runs, with more risks and higher rewards...seeing our last session did not see a single encounter with combat (players had some opportunities, but decided to pass), I think they are ready for missions that require a large dose of legwork...

But that is key, the keep the fundamentals there and make sure no matter how much fun your players are having, that if they are not suggesting anything, that you, as the GM, ask them and find out what they want!

There is a substantial difference between kicking someone while he is down and constructive criticism. People want to help you improve your game based on the information you provided; there is nothign wrong with that.

[Martin Lawrence]Ddaammnn![/Martin Lawrence] I wish that I had thought of that. I just have giant homosexual trolls use skinny gimp-suited elf ghouls as dual-natured clubs.

When I've killed games it has invariably been due to neglect.

It depends on what they sing, doesn't it?

There is great deal of free space between waxing poetic and starring in a Ms. Swan sketch.

GM: You see a man
Player: I observe in detail *Four successes*
GM: He looka *Dramatic Pause* like a man.

That is not a fun game, not at all.

GM: You enter a room
Player: What is in the room
GM: I don't know. It's a room. Make something up.

That is not a fun game.

Since the GM is going to be providing details, anyway, it doesn't hurt to add a few adjectives (or adverbs). The poor person has a plain wooden chair in his home. The rich decadent person has a chair upholstered with the skin of the last *insert endangered para-animal*. These things will be different. You don't give the obscenely rich person and the dirt poor person identical bland generic furniture because it damages the atmosphere of the setting.

And you certainly don't limit the description of NPCs to "the man looka like a man" unless his indescribable nature is a plot-point.

When your giving descriptions, it doesn't hurt to throw in an extra adjective or adverb for flavor.