So having played now 7 or 8 SRM missions (yeah, I'm still a noob) I finally had the chance to "give back" and run some SRM at a con.

Now, I ran a table of 5, and it was a Green table; one of the characters was newly-rolled, a street sam, and he'd been built with Augmentation (which I have) and Arsenal (which I have now, just arrived yesterday TWO WEEKS after I ordered it, but I didnt have at the con).

The game was a ton of fun, especially during legwork (i'm an RPer, what can I say), but then it came time to throw-down...

The enemies in the mish are supposedly a bad-ass ex-shadowrun team, but they are all built and equipped core-only, and were frankly no match for a street sam with radar vision, stacked armor, and a rifle that could put out 9P damage with -3 armor piercing. When prepping the mish I had this great scene ready, but it played out as more a "fish in a barrel" encounter, just from technological superiority on the part of the sam.

Now, it's my fault for not being familiar with Arsenal, and if I had been I might have statted out a v2 set of opponents "just in case", as well as added some surveillance countermeasures to the encounter location (a house), but the issue (and every game has this issue as it adds supplements) is the classic "power creep of new supplements" versus "missions written under pre-supplement rules".

So, just something for GMs to be mindful of, especially for a con setting - when prepping the missions, it might be a good idea to have a "arsenal-ready" version if you need it. Ironically, it's not such a problem with higher-karma characters rolled pre-Arsenal, because they actually have to make rolls and spend a lot to get the 5+ availability equipment; it's more an issue with new runners, built from the ground up with modded weapons, stacked armor and the like.

...

Oh, and one important piece of advice for GMs in a con setting - check armor vs. body for encumbrance! Amazing how many Body 3 characters out there are wearing Armor Jackets... without taking the -3 penalty to Agility and Reaction. Perfectly innocently, I'm sure!

There's always the "Pushing the envelope" options in most sections, did you try any of those during the mission?

Yep... don't get me wrong, we all had a lot of fun, it was just a case where if I pushed the envelope to accomodate the sam, I would have wiped the rest of the team.

Also there's the reality of convention play - everything needs to happen in under four hours. For me, the key rules are (i) keep it moving and (ii) keep it fun. If I can accomplish those, plus give the players at the end the sense they barely survived, that's a good run.

We did keep it moving and fun, even if I couldn't touch the sam's 13 armor

The other thing to try is to attack the PC through their weakness. Did the samurai in tons of armor get hacked, become the target of spells, social engineering, and get called primary for the heavy machine gun attacks?

I thought it was geek the mage?

Thanks!
(I wasnt there or anything, but every SRM GM is a blessing...)

Also, were you applying appropriate penalties for the Street Sam's 13 armor? i find it unlikely that the sam had 13 body unless he was a troll.

Street Sam only needs 7 body... BODYx2 determines when Armor Encumbrance comes into play.

Oh yes, quite right. I never layer armor in the new system, so that slipped my mind.

The "Power creeping" should essentially be considered the normal in Shadowrun. What is state of the art one year (or even one month sometimes) may not be at time of play. Old runners have the experience but not often the newest tech, yet again a fact of life unless they're a cyber-fetishist with a street doc or black clinic on speed dial. It's a common enough situation where an experienced, possibly famous (infamous works too) person in a combat related field is in a face down, or face off with a newbie with new toys and an itch to make a name for themselves.

Please dont take this as a slam, but your mistake was not giving your players enough credit. I was not there, but you did not post any serious power playing by anyone in particular. In this newbie's with the new toys against the experienced team you may have not deployed them as experienced, ie better skills and tactics they developed as a team. Again, I wasnt there to know how it went down.

An experienced team should have out classed them, a new team fumbles with its roles and does not understand eachothers strengths or weaknesses. The old runners should have deployed smoother, faster and more coordinated as they drew from their experiences.

Again, not to slam but here's some ideas to help (I believe in pointing out solutions rather than just problems)

Outclass them with:

Higher skills, toys are toys but experience is king.

Plans as free actions (Checker calls across the hallway choked by fire "Remember the Are's complex in Guatamala?" Digger smiles as he lays his SMG along the wall, retrieving two grenades from his pouch, he uses his teeth to pull the pin on the smoke before tossing in the hallway, a moment after the audible pop and hiss of smoke he repeats the manuever with the flashbang. Pop, Flash.....Checker smiles as he rounds the corner guns blazing.) This draws from there experience as a team.

Intimidate them, its a social interaction where the newbie runners might actually have a clue to what the experienced team is capable of...use that to leave them shaking or second guessing. ie. "Oh gezzus! its Buckshot Roberts...they say he's killed more men than small pox"...."Lets skin out'a here!"-Young Guns movie reference.

Dont kill them, the PC's I mean. Use your GM powers to fend off the reaper. Even if they get wiped out, the experienced team can apply a trauma patch or heal them. Why?, its class. It provides a memorable enemy, who you (as a player) dont really hate but you know you have to beat. You cant be the man till you beat the man.
ie. The pain is unbearable until it starts going black, its the end even before it started for you and your team. It begins as a growing sense of warmth and of dulled pain, light floods back into your eyes. The blurriness fades as you look up to a grizzled but smiling face, your eyes dart to your gun arm...the gun is gone but an overlarge hypodermic needle is still hanging in your arm it has red lettering 'LIFE GUARD: YOUR SECOND CHANCE AT LIFE'. The grizzled face gives you a wink and a smile "Nice try kid, maybe next time." he says as he walks away, your head grows hazy again, the pain killing effects of the trauma patch/syrum are slowly weaning off.

Again, please dont take this as anything other than constructive and if you do I apologize.

Dakka, welcome to the Dumpshock Forums.

You might want to review a bit more information on the Shadowrun Missions campaign before offering advice on how to run the scenarios.

Shadowrun Missions uses publicly available scenarios, so that GMs and players can experience the same game and freely transfer their characters from game table to game table. Changing the scenario and statistics in the ways you suggest aren't acceptable solutions.

Sorry about that then, I didnt realize there was no leeway or room for interpetation.

That's always going to be the challenge of a large, multiplayer campaign - sitting down at a convention table where no one knows anyone else, and running a scenario which wasn't written explicitly for the team you're running. The scenario author has to balance challenge for an experienced table versus survivability for players who may literally have just rolled their first Shadowrun character.

The *is* room for leeway, that said. The problem in such cases is that if you ramp up the challenge to match the cheese monkey (sorry, a street sam with Cha 1, close to zero essence and no social or knowledge skills of any kind is a cheese monkey, regardless of your stand on min/maxing ) you might punish the "balanced" players with excessive lethality. I have GMed at cons for years, so it's an old issue I've grappled with from time to time.

I suppose the concern I'm voicing - and the "power creep" I'm referencing - is that it's possible to almost gain more combat effectiveness from "stuff" than from actual skills and traits, which always sort of worries me in games; that is, when "gear" becomes "integral part of the character" rather than just "stuff the character happens to have on him to help him out a bit".

Again, I could have done plenty to challenge this guy, but in the reality of a 3.5 hour run slot you have to keep the game moving and keep everyone engaged. I could have punished his dump-statting charisma and social skills with hang-ups at the border crossings for example, but that just slows play and isn't "fun. I could have penalized his use of a ridiculously high-power rifle by having the bullet go through the target, through a wall, and hit their subject of interest - but that's mission failure, and not necessarily fair to his teammates. And so on.

As it was, I went diceless that last encounter and ran it cinematically in the interest of time and fun, and on balance everyone at the table had a good time - mission accomplished!

In any case, if I run some Shadowrun at DragonCon (probably the next time I'll have a chance to play) I should be more familiar with the various new books, and ready to counter them...

Gear helps, there is no denying that, but experience is king. I've seen players with five to ten years of experience in Shadowrun bring in a zero karma character from the BBB and trump a 100 karma character with all the latest books. A lot of it comes down to choices made, understanding mechanics and philosophies, and a good bit of nerve.

Obviously a player with experience who is running a character with all the greatest toys will be better, but there is a huge breadth of differences between three different 400 BP characters. Is the character an investment (shapeshifter mystic adept in SR3) or something that is fairly strong out of the box (Street Sam)? All of these change how two different characters will manage in the same situation.