ADIPD

All Death is PermaDeath. No resurrections, no continues. This would prevent characters from becoming too powerful and it would prevent characters who do become very powerful from just slaughtering bunches of people single-handedly. Characters who go crazy and start killing masses get killed themselves very quickly. ADIPD would also make PvP very scary for high-level PCs and less so for low-level punks, as it should be.

Then the griefers use low-level characters in mobs. This is a solution?

~J

(Cross-posted in the other thread)

I think an SR MMORPG that doesn’t rely on grinding is a lot more workable than others have made it seem. The key is implementing a set of self-regulating controls (namely legality and availability), as well as several different (and somewhat related) resource sources.

First, Frank's idea about coding for GTA-style police attention is spot on. Set a security rating for each area, with restrictions on weapons carried and allowed actions. Break the law in the wrong area and find yourself drowning in Lone Star. In effect, this drives certain activities (PvP, griefing, high-noon shoot-outs with Panther cannons) to lawless areas like the Barrens, which is perfectly in line with the Shadowrun world. It also adds concealability as a factor in the gear grind, because all of the sudden that “+0 Predator� is a lot more appealing in certain situations than a “+5 MP-Laser.� Same could be done with foci – carry your bound Power Foci 5 into the arcology, and magical security all of a sudden is three feet up your ass.

Next comes resources, namely Karma, Nuyen, Gear and Reputation/Contacts.

Karma: awarded ONLY for completing jobs/quests. IIRC, something similar to this was done for D&D Online.
That’s one control right there – there’s no grinding for karma/xp, so players’ only method for advancement along the karma track is to do what the game is all about – taking jobs, whether that means shadowrunning, fixing, gang development or what have you. It also provides a nice death penalty: you die on the run, you get nothing (except medical bills and lost equipment).
You could have jobs for various occupations available: random or instanced shadowruns, ganger quests to eliminate neighborhood rivals, bounty hunter quests to bag paracritters, even fixer or Johnson “quests� (ie., get a fixing job with the Yaks to sell a certain number of HK-227s, or set up a certain number of runs).
As a result, there’s no karmic benefit to grinding or wandering the Barrens shooting bums and barghests. By making most runs too difficult for anything but a superhuman individual to solo, you enforce/foster teamwork, as well. The only way to get ahead on the karma track is to cooperate.

Nuyen: There should be tons of ways to get it, and as many ways to lose it. Charge for everything – the pad where players keep their extra gear, medical treatment, training, bribes, etc. – so players are always wanting more. Found gear could be sold (for varying percentages based on the type and level of a character’s contacts). Grinding could be allowed here (those bums in the Barrens don’t have much, but it’s something) but the reward ratio should be small compared to other avenues. And money is only as good as the contacts you have to spend it with …

Gear: The trick to gear is strictly enforcing availability and illegality ratings. Sure, everyone wants a Panther cannon or two to stash in the closet, but you won’t hold on to it long strutting around downtown in full daylight. Losing carried gear would be another good penalty for death or arrest. If PCs are constantly looking over their shoulders for Lone Star, they’re likely to make do with “sub-par� and easily replaceable gear except for specific runs. The heavy stuff will stay in the safehouse until needed for an appropriate run.
High-end “drops� could be used for some items, but developing the appropriate contacts would be the more likely avenue for acquiring high quality loot of all types (weapons, magic gear, cyber, etc). Randomized inventories or a system that gave a contact a percentage chance to have an item could also help control high-end loot and foster a PC economy.
For certain equipment, such as beta- or delta-grade cyber, there might be only one or two sources. Want a move-by-wire system installed? Better get in good with Doc Swanson at Shiawase by performing certain runs or building contacts. With the possible exception of some sort of organ-legging quest system, “looting� cyber or bioware probably should not be possible.

I’m not that familiar with SR4, but the variety of gear in SR3 is sufficient so that I don’t think you’d really need “+5 Predators� – sure, anyone can pick up the basic version at Weapons World, but with the right contacts and reputation (or skills) you could have a weaponsmith add a custom grip, extended mag or burst-fire function. There’s always ammo, too – hit the right warehouse or develop the right contacts for a couple clips of APDS, for example.

Reputation: This is where an SR MMORPG could really set itself apart, although it could require some complex coding. In addition to an over-all rep tied to karma or completed runs, you’d want to implement a system of individual scores for various groups (corporations, gangs, initiatory groups, etc) and individuals. Higher general reputation could lead to tougher or higher-paying (karma and nuyen) jobs, as could faction reputations. Group reputations could lead to jobs, too (or retaliatory hits), and could grant access to better gear. For example, Fixer X may be able to supply APDS ammo on a regular basis, but you’ve got to gain Fixer X as a contact first (perhaps by gaining reputation with the local Yakuza), then boost your reputation with him (through jobs, bribes, or repeated business).

Magical initiation could be handled similarly, although you could set up a more difficult avenue for self-initiation that requires more karma and maybe certain magical texts or other found materials.

The real kicker would be to set up a reputation system involving other PCs. So, at the end of a job, each runner gets to “rate� their team-mates, resulting in a reputation boost or hit to general reputation -- as well as with every group the rating PC is affiliated with. Word gets around in the biz, so someone that routinely screws their team is going to gain a bad rep with everyone the rest of the team knows. Same with runners who consistently act stupid in secure zones – they gain a reputation as a hot-head punk, hurting their street-cred, which then affects the availability of jobs and contact-related gear.
-------------------
Taken all together, I think those factors would steer most players in the desired direction while leaving a number of viable play options.

Want to build a prime runner? Get a team together, act professional, complete runs and build up karma and nuyen. You’ll still need to spend some time doing social/reputation “grinding� however, if you also want access to high-end gear.

Want to be a fixer? Karma’s less important, so focus on money and contacts, stock-pile rare gear (available through said contacts), then start selling to your less socially adept fellow players. Want to join a gang? Take ganger quests, which could require extortion, brawling with rival gangs, etc. Want to be a street-doc? Build up your Biotech, work up some contacts with a cyberware supplier and run a chop-shop out of your apartment.

Griefing is still possible, but appropriately and realistically punished. It offers no karma and a high risk of arrest or death by Lone Star. But if someone wants to do it, they can. Hell, you could basically build up a character the “right� way, then set up your own kingdom in the Barrens, blasting trespassers and demanding tribute. Seems pretty Shadowrun to me, and creates an appropriate incentive for other players to shell out the nuyen for a nice doss in a part of town with fewer crazies.

But overall, its simply not possible to advance by playing like an asshole 12-year-old. You can’t get karma from griefing, and you can’t gain the (good) rep necessary for better jobs by acting like an idiot. Worst case scenario: some l33t-speaking doofus grinds bums in the Barrens, saves up enough cash to buy a PC-auctioned Panther Cannon, goes postal outside Club Penumbra and gets geeked by security/Lone Star, thus losing said Panther and gaining nothing for the effort. Which would be completely SR-realistic and awesome.

Please don't cross-post, the structure of the boards makes it pretty unlikely that the sets of readers of the threads have a meaningfully large symmetric difference.

Not a mod, no special authority.

~J

If you allow PvP there will be griefing. Griefing will make sure there are not alot of serious players left in the game. Except on private servers.
If you make it GTA style there will be some stupid punk running you over with a Lone Star truck right after you entered the gameworld. anywhere, anytime.

The only way to make this work is on tightly controlled servers, which isn't possible except you allow servers run by players. Which again leads to other abuse problems.

There is just no legal and effective way to punish idiots who ruin the fun of others. And if you dont allow random PvP and random PvE that wouldnt be shadowrun anymore. dilemma

Even in Desert Wars it wouldn't work, because the suicide bombs would be coming from your own team.

Personally, I think the best compromise is that the difficulty of coming back from "severe injury" is based on your character's highet connection rating (which you get from doing jobs for people) and your number of Stars when you went down.

Make it a little bit harsher than GTA as far as weaponry use in public and murder, and you're probably good to go. So if you're walking around and some griefer starts flame throwering the crowd, his character is automatically locked up in jail (removed from the server) as soon as the police take him down, and you repawn in the hospital.

And if you've been playing for a while and have some Yakuza connections, then you can actually be being chased by the cops, get shot in the head by a griefer, and then wake up in the hospital anyway because the Oyabun "pulled strings" (you probably get a message that the Oyabun now requests a favor).

So in this manner, long running characters have "llives" which they can get back by doing faction quests. And mules and instant action characters have only one life. But getting whacked while you hadn't been caught doing crime doesn't even cost lives.

-Frank

heh, i just found a backdoor(me decker) to the old SRO Boards that were supposedly taken down ^^

The problem with player created security is that everyone is going to put back doors in said security and then that information is going to be variously disseminated. Other people are going to make the "security" simply be that the area is made out of plasticrete and there's no actual path to the objective. There simply aren't controls on that sort of thing, nor can there be.

I like fan created content, but I don't think it is practical or desirable in areas that people make runs in. Too many areas would be thematically jarring with unfinished or unmatched textures or giant clown heads or huge penis jokes.

-Frank

Wouldn't zone security codes help ease some of the PKing?
Also posting wanted posters for griefers allowing a bounty hunter type character to be played.
And what about giving those who want pure carnage of destroying anything in their path the ability to join one of the gangs in the sprawl who specialize in that?

Things like if your in a AAA zone your not going to worry to heavily about someone killing you randomly.

Also a reputation mechanic will prevent any lasting character from doing these kinds of things, leaving mostly lower level characters doing this.

This does assume a bit on mechanics but from a concept point of view this would curb it to some degree.

Or you could include an Alternate Reality component in which the personal information (mane, address, etc.) of chronic grievers are posted on public boards and players are given in-game rewards for beating the crap out of the bounty-targets in real life.

I like Frank's 2 and 3, although I'm less keen on the other two options. Another option would be figuring out some way (in-game) to tie a griefer's low-level characters to the established character providing the explosives/other griefing gear.

I thought about adding some sort of ownership tag to equipment -- so the grenades used to bomb the club could be traced to the griefer's character that gave them to the bomber — but I'm not sure how feasible or desirable that would be. Having guns/other equipment tagged as stolen offers some interesting possibilites, as would tying explosives/foci/etc. to their creators.

Another possibility would be to use the reputation system, by creating reputation/connection hits tied to economic transactions. So, if Griefer character 1 (the established character) gives or sells Griefer character 2 (the new character) a satchel of C4 (creating a reputation connection) and character 2 bombs a night club, then character 1 takes a reputation hit, as well, because he's been "doing business" with character 2. This could encourage PCs to only do business with established, well-trusted other PCs (not a bad thing), but could be a pain in the ass overall. I can also see easy workarounds (leave the C4 in an out of the way place, then let griefer 2 "find" it) for committed griefers.

(BTW: Isn't it sucktastic that the majority of the thread is focused on mitigating griefing, rather than fun stuff to include in the game?)

Wouldn't there be some lone star strato drones passing through the AAA air space in reasonable numbers? And I seem to recall astral patrols as well.
Standard police in the area ready to call something in or run over the perp.

In a place like this, your not going to be able move far from a "Killing spree" without being spotted quickly and brought to justice.

A proper mechanic would be to give the player the option to have a safety to prevent the player from pulling out a gun with a missed keystroke.

When I consider a person hell bent on destroying others in a AAA establishment, I see GTA police reactions swarming on the person and other runners taking off to avoid being questioned. Throw in some elementals and spirits just for amusement.

Another mechanic could be that the players ties to a fixer which dislikes their employees being killed, or even the players others contacts who may investigate the players death. Being disliked means your not going to be missed.

I agree with others who have suggested a dynamic means to trace something from 1 person to the next. In general I'd like the game to have a dynamic feel to it.

If I could have 1 wish though, I'd wish that each player had their own apartments and the world had a feeling of having a finite number of objects. So that their could be some personalization rather than everything being copies of each other.

[post removed because sometimes the things i type make more sense in my head than when they are actually posted]

One problem I have with Shadowrun as an MMO is that the basic plot of SR is that shadowrunners are relatively unusual, unique. Somebody recently posted an attempt at figuring demographics in the SR4 forum, and they show a few hundred runners (in the whole range from elite runners down to substandard wanna-be's) out of the entire population of millions in Seattle.

...So if you're in an MMO with a hundred thousand PCs running to a fro shooting each other and extracting research scientists from EVO, griefing each other, etc the setting starts to fall apart for me. It becomes more like City of Heros/City of Villains than Shadowrun.

The other issue with SR that sets it apart is the finality of death. In the RPG, when you screw up and security shoots you in the head, you're dead. There's no resurrect spell, no re-spawn shrine. This adds to the tension and realistic feel, and focuses players on acting smart instead of running in and challenging Alamaise to settle things 'mano-a-mano' (mano-a-draco?). This probably won't happen in an MMO.

No need for number-crunching and estimates—in Tir Tairngire (p143), Monitor pegs the number of "real" (read: hardcore, successful, likely to survive, the kinds of people that at least our group tries to make PCs part of) Shadowrunners in Seattle at less than a hundred. Tack on maybe twice that number of up-and-comers who probably won't last out the year and call it good.

It should also be noted that on the same page the idea that a government would hire Shadowrunners is presented as fairly unusual.

~J

...@Apathy [blasted slow connection]

I agree with you on both points which is why I don't get into MMOs (Played City of Heroes I it seemed there were more supers than norms per capita). In a standard face to face campaign each GM has their own "world" and it is distinct and separate from another GM's. This is also why I do not like letting characters cross over between campaigns even in a group that has multiple GMs who take turns running. I may have a certain Corp. or NPC personality that the other GM doesn't have or wish to use and vice versa.

As to Edge, the way it is used makes me feel I'm almost playing that other game. It's in effect a "saving roll" to avoid something nasty. In previous editions, there was the old Karma Pool, but it could only be used for the following:

...To re-roll failures (and you could still fail the roll)
...Re-roll dice in an open test (at an increasing cost per die, also not guaranteeing success)
...Turn a catastrophic roll (rule of 1) into a normal failure
...Buy an extra dice (at an increasing cost per die)
...Buy a success (in which case the KP point is burned forever & the original roll still needs to yield at least 1 success)

The Hooper Nelson Rule (permanently burning KP to lower the TN) and HOG (permanently burning all good Karma plus Karma Pool to avoid certain death) were alternate rules. If HOG was used, it was a "one time only" hoop saver.

...somewhat related...

Our group had adopted a house rule put forth on this forum a while back where Edge is treated more like the old Karma Pool. It cannot be bought up at Chargen and has to be earned (the attribute cap still applies). So every character begins with 1 (humans 2) and she can only increase it after earning 10 Karma, then 20 Karma for the next point, 30 Karma for the next etc. These increases are automatic and require no karma expenditure. So far, it seems to be working fine and characters tend to think a bit more about their actions when they don't have that all edge to throe around right up front. I am also considering making the Avoid Certain Death rule more like HOG in that the character also has to burn any good Karma she has (& she has to have at least 1 Karma or she can't do it).

I suppose that the first of my issues (should be only a few runners in the city, not tens of thousands) could be partially addressed by having discrete instances (like GuildWars) where upon exiting with your team you won't have any interaction with other PCs outside your team. That seems like it would undermine other people's desire for a persistant world that is impacted (from everyone's perspective) by your team's actions. But it would probably be necessary; you can't retain suspension of disbelief if every week hundreds of corp execs were assasinated and hundreds of research assistants were kidnapped/extracted.

As far as the second (use of edge), I personally agree with your home rule, but think it would have to be dropped for an MMO. There's no way the standard teenage gamer is going to accept that 6 months of dedicated character development could be lost in an instant due to ganking or lag from a poor internet connection. It might be acceptable, however, to have separate 'Normal' and 'Hardcore' worlds. Then if the players choose to take on the additional risk they have less room to whine when it goes badly.

One of the things that would be really nice about taking a game like this and making it Massive would be being able to finally get rid of that "team" nonsense. Sure, teams would form, but much of the fiction (and the nature of the business) points towards much looser alliances than the sorts that tend to form in RPG groups.

~J

Regardless of how many "shadowrunners" there are (and 100 is absurdly low considering that fucking private detectives count as Shadowrunners), the amount of people involved in organized and disorganized crime in the Shadowrun world is titanic.

Sure, there probably aren't that many Street Samurai, and there are "only" fifteen thousand magicians in the Barrens. And in any case, a lot of those guys never do much more than scrounge for food and talk to the spirits and crap. But every single person in the Barrens is breaking the law every day. If they have power and water, it's because they are stealing it. They don't pay rents to the lawful landlords, and they probably steal food and clothing.

When I say "GTA Style" I'm dead serious. Your first missions should seriously be trying to get the power on in your squat, not assassinating the Governor. Shadowrun is a world which has a really legit reason for people to spend a period running around the sewers beating rats and each other with baseball bats with nails in.

---

You set the game right after a war, with the army being demobilized. Then players can pick a backstory:

• Barrens Born - You start play with a squat and some contacts. But you're SINless and all your starting equipment is asstasic.
• Ex-Military - You begin play in the Hooverville of unpaid vets. Also you get a nicely diplomatic message from your country about how they are thankful for your service (but not thankful enough to actually come through with the retirement plan that was hinted at earlier). You begin play with some cyberware in you, and a small pile of Â¥s. But you've also been evicted, and your contacts aren't particularly helpful.
• Refugee - Pull down menu: choose a country! It doesn't really matter, but gives you some slightly different stuff and dialogue options. You're here from overseas and your are fresh off the boat. Your SIN doesn't strictly say that you are in this country, and you don't strictly know anyone in this country either. But you have the commcodes of some distant relatives who are vaguely related to you through the old country. Most of them tell you to frag off and get your hobo-self a job, but one of them is a member of an organized crime syndicate, and now so are you!
• Ex-Corp - Pull-down menu: choose a corp! It doesn't really matter, but gives you some slightly different looking stuff. You start with a nice set of clothes and you're hunted by the corp you skipped out on. You start with no contacts at all (hung out to dry), and you can attempt the high-difficulty mission "break into your own apartment and get all your cool stuff" whenever you want. So while you get a datajack, and a half-way decent commlink, you get no Â¥s at all and have to go find a squat in the barrens as your first mission.

Each of the backgrounds gives you some starting hooks, some starting missions, and what is essentially a tutorial as to how the game works. The different opening missions give variety by presenting the material in a different order (for example: as a refugee you get the "making commcalls" tutorial right at the beginning, while as with the barrens bred backstory you steal a commlink near the end).

And yes, there are literally tens of thousands of these people doing crime and scraping by at any given time in whatever Shadowrun Sprawl you choose to set things. I think actual game play should be more like Longest Journey than Duke Nukem. And actual body counts should be pretty low.

-Frank

not to mention Dirk. on the other hand, Dirk didn't identify himself as a shadowrunner. i don't think guys like private detectives would necessarily be counted among most in-character estimates of the shadowrunner population. we count them, out of character, as runners, because we play them as such. likewise, we often play OC associates, mercenaries, and government/corporate agents as "runners".

The existence of an archetype named "The Investigator" does not provide any kind of firm base whatsoever to draw the conclusion that all private detectives count as Shadowrunners.

~J

that still wouldn't make you a "real" shadowrunner, and it doesn't mean all--or even any--PIs are counted in any in-character estimate of the shadowrunner population.

I like Frank's list of starting characters!

I don't think there's any reason to assume any starting characters would be proper shadowrunners, or that a majority of experienced characters would make most of their money that way. If anything, real shadowrunning would have such a highly demanding skillset that most people aren't going to even attempt it until they're close to their 'maximum level' (or whatever you'd want to consider the SR equivalent). I can imagine a character starts with 0 in all skills, he only becomes a Shadowrunner when he's gotten some up to 5 or 6. But there are a bunch of shadowrunny jobs he can pursue - mafiosa, gang-member, investigator, courier and so on. That would be in addition to all of the other jobs available. I would imagine that shadowrunning would not pay as well in cash or karma as a lot of other jobs out there, the reason you do it is for the thrill. So a lot of people are going to make something else their bread and butter, and moonlight as a runner.

That said, having 50,000 people who try and do runs at some level or another wouldn't be all that bad. Very few will be advertising themselves as runners, and successful jobs are almost never shared, so as I walk through a bar, I still see people by their 'public' personas. Only the truly stupid or truly experienced might advertise themselves as real Shadowrunners. That means from my point of view as a player, I might as well be only one of 200.

Frank, what you're saying is directly at odds with vast amounts of canon material—to skim through the adventures I have on hand (discarding ones that are "unbusinessy", most notably Harlequin's Back):

<I had a big long section detailing the subsections contained in Corporate Punishment, Harlequin, and Missing Blood, and arguing that except for the last they don't in the least indicate the generality of Shadowrunners that you describe and the last is strongly suggested to be unusual in the text, but it got eaten while editing>

If I get the time I'll dig into my physical library (adventures and novels), but I'm really not seeing how you can defend that view of Shadowrunners based on canon material.

~J

I'm not saying that people who set bombs on oil rigs or perform high level espionage aren't Shadowrunners. Of course they are. The thing is that the people who track down and repossess missing prototypes (Dream Chipper) or get hired as extra emergency bodyguards for pop stars (Queen Euphoria) are also Shadowrunners.

James Bond is a Shadowrunner. The Dude is also a Shadowrunner. Both of them take dubious jobs under the table for employers who need plausible deniability. James Bond is what the Fuchi RAD would refer to as a Permanent Asset, while The Dude would be referred to as an Expendable Asset. But they both go on Shadowruns, they are both Shadowrunners.

-Frank

not to most characters in the game. even a RAD case officer is going to understand the difference between a shadowrunner and a member of the shadow community, and a given asset's status as one or the other is going to be a factor in whether the RAD officer hires that asset, and what jobs the RAD officer will hire that asset for. he'll view both as potential hires, yes, but if you asked him how many shadowrunners he works with, he'd tell you the number of people who self-identify as shadowrunners. he probably wouldn't include in that number his ganger contacts, his merc contacts, his OC contacts, and so on, even if he frequently hires those non-runner contacts for the same types of jobs that he hires shadowrunners for.

That is not consistent with what the RAD tells its actual Johnsons (according to the SR Companion).

Um, there's a big difference between the "pink mohawk crowd" (who are, IIRC, well-represented amongst the professionals—I'll have to go back through my novels, but I distinctly remember several of the higher-powered teams being described with "distinctive fashion sense") and the kinds of private investigators, gangers, etc. that we're discussing the inclusion or noninclusion of.

~J

Sure, but neither of you actually addressed FrankTrollman's point, in order for the 98% quote that he brought up to make any sense at all the corps have to be looking at a much larger sample size then "less then a hundred" so In-Character the person who wrote that article does use the broader use of Shadowrunner that FrankTrollman is defending.