What were the big hang ups?:

I started running an SR4 game about 4 months ago. I started with 2.5 players (players 3 really wanted to play Gundam Run and I wouldn't let him, we parted company after a couple of games). We ran 6-10 hrs games once a week as duty permitted. As of last weekend we now have 6 players who chase me down and pester me about game stuff between session (which I love). I'm separating the info into two sections, what we started with and what we have now. I also added a long rambling rundown of the first couple of sessions to give you an idea of what a cluster it should have been but wasn't.

Initial Public Offering:
1 X BBB (1st printing)
0 X Supplements
1 X GM (me):
Experience Gaming: ~15 years
Experience GMing (In Person): 5-6 sessions
Experience GMing (Chat/MU*): ~1 year
Experience with SR: ~3 years (Almost exclusively online)
Experience with SR4: I bought the book, complained about the crappy 1st gen binding and promptly lost it about a year ago. Found underneath a bunch of meticulously organized DVD's.
Fan of SR: Hell yes
Fan of Cyberpunk: Hell fucking yes.
Tired of D&D Xe: Yep.

Player 1=Caliban:
Archetype: Troll tactician street sam
Experience Gaming: >15 years
Experience with SR: Only played a few games and that was in SR2. Didn't really like it.
Experience with SR4: Not so much.
Fan of SR: Meh at best, not really at worst
Fan of Cyberpunk: Sorta
Tired of D&D Xe: Sorta

Player 2=Cas
Archetype: Orc Gun Fu Adept Sniper
Experience Gaming: 0/Played a few computer/console RPG's and liked them.
Experience with SR: Ork's with machine guns?
Experience with SR4: Ork's with machine guns? They made 4 books about this?
Fan of SR: Not really.
Fan of Cyberpunk: Not really.
Tired of D&D Xe: Watched a player's well thought out, long running, and enjoyable character buy the big one because he failed a single "Save vs Death". He was done with D&D before he even really played.

We played about 6 sessions with just these two players (One with a memorable "Guest Star" a guy who was leaving but wanted to see what all the fuss was over tabletop RPG's. He was an awesome RPer and he enjoyed the hell out of the game he played in). NPC'd or handwaved magic/hackers and focused on good planning, adaptive execution, and realistic results. Had a ball but wanted to expand into magic and a larger group.

New Guys:
Player 3=Jeremiah
Archetype=Human Shamanic Mage/Face
Experience Gaming: <1 year. Played a D&D game a long time ago.
Experience with SR: Nope
Experience with SR4: Nope
Fan of SR: Sounds cool.
Fan of Cyberpunk: That's like "The Matrix" right?

Player 4=Kanta
Archetype=Human Cyber Gun Bunny/Utili-Kill
Experience Gaming: <1 year He plays a bit of Axis and Allies and played some D&D when he was younger
Experience with SR: Nope
Experience with SR4: Nope
Fan of SR: Sounds cool.
Fan of Cyberpunk: Like Desert Punk/Blade Rnner.

Player 5=Man Whore (I can never remember his characters name)
Archetype=Human Rigger/Face
Experience Gaming: Nope
Experience with SR: Nope
Experience with SR4: Nope
Fan of SR: Are there hookers?
Fan of Cyberpunk: If there are hookers.
Tired of D&D Xe: Not as many hookers?

Player 6=Skinny
Archetype=Human Mystic Adept Pornomancer
Experience Gaming: ~15 years
Experience GMing (In Person): Has played exactly 3 games as a player
Experience GMing (Chat/MU*): Plays frequently on chat and message board
Experience with SR: Heard of it.
Experience with SR4: Heard of it.
Fan of SR: Eeeeeeeh....
Fan of Cyberpunk: Really like Neuromancer, hasn't read anything else
Tired of D&D Xe: Loves D&D but loathes 4th ed.

The new guys were a bit of a shock, the magic user came in several sessions before the last three and we had time to fuck up the magic rules until I finally learned them well enough that I could deal with his character (thank you Dumpshock!). The magic was a huge headache until I forced myself to really read the rules and actually follow them without being a lazy GM and hand waving or flatly gimping his powers. I'm guessing we are running about 90% RAW magic rules right now and every game I introduce a few more elements to keep fleshing out magic. As bad as it was I think it might have helped to gimp magic until we had a firm grasp on it (I ruled that spirits only had one power and all stats were equal to force). After a dark ages ruling like that, introducing the full spirit rules along with proper binding meant that the players have been having a ball the last couple games and I didn't feel like it was a constant fight to keep them from "breaking the game". I'm having a similar experience with the rigger and hacking. Initially I flat said that we would NPC all hacking because I hate hacker boredom. I made an exception for riggers because I thought I was playing SR3 and rigging and hacking were two different things. Now that he's been rigging for about 3 sessions I see that hacking and rigging are so close now that it really wouldn't be that much trouble to have him hack on the fly and resolve the more complex stuff via email between sessions. If I can keep a 5 drone, full party gunfight going I think I can handle a couple of hacked PAN's.

Oh by the time we transitioned to the larger group we had added the following supplements to our table:
Augmentation
Arsenal
Runner Havens
And a handful of stuff I pulled off the net (namely some old description of the ork underground)

Looking back I think the best thing I did was to avoid fire hosing my new players with rules and elaborate setting. I gave them very simple objectives and encouraged them to seek interesting and fun solutions. As they got better I ramped up the complicity until they were pulling off multi stage runs and a running gun battle/negotiation run. My watch word has been "Fun" and I've quickly eliminated rules or themes that interfered with that. The cool thing is that as I've gotten more comfortable with the system I've been adding this elements back in and the players are snapping them up and running with them (rather than staring at a page full of charts and going "Uh... I shoot him with my Ares Predator"). I've also made it a point to write my adventures so that every single players gets to contribute to a scenario, even if I have to shoe horn their skill set into my story. Better I molest my story than I help their dice tower building skills. It also helped that my initial group was very small and that one half of that initial group is a fabulous roleplayer that has acted as a pseudoassistant GM and overall bullshit caller. Even though he's never been a fan of the setting, let alone the system, he's found elements he really likes and runs with them. More than that he's helped show newbie players what makes tabletop such an awesome experience, the stories you can tell.

With the exception of my half player who just didn't want to play the game we were playing, everyone who has sat down to this SR4 game (currently run with only a handful of house rules) seems to enjoying themselves and continue to make the 30 minute bus ride to my base to play in it. More important than simply enjoying SR they seem to really like the idea of tabletop roleplaying in general. I'm running out of good plot and I've said that the current story will probably be concluded in 5-10 games. After that there has been talk about everything from D&D to some homebrew campaign we've been kicking around.

A large part of why this game has been successful is because I finally figured out how to GM passably. However I contribute a great deal of our success to the ease at which everyone picked up the SR4 rules and how easy it was to pull bits out until we were ready to use them. There are some valid complaints about SR4 getting away from it's roots but I've exploited the huge change as a way to show just how much the world has changed in the 20 or more years since the players were born. Old runners still sport Predator II's in grizzled hands, drones tool around with logos from corporations that don't exist anymore, deckers lament the change in name and "Facebook Culture", old fixers are still trying to figure out how to offload 200 crates of high quality NERPS. There may be problems with the new fluff update but for me it's effectively doubled the amount of flavor I can throw at players. I can spend 20 minutes talking about the slow shift from cyber to bio and introduction of nanotech. Or I can just say "The old decker beats you to death with his dikoted deck."

Agh... that ended up sounding preachy I think. But I stand by it. We've introduced 5 newbies to gaming and they like what they see. I consider that high praise for any system.





The Long Painful Journey=
Been gaming for near on 15 years now, mostly D&D but with my eyes turned ever lustily at Shadowrun/Cyberpunk. Before my current table I've GM'd all of 6 times and Shadowrun once (I ran Brainscan for some buddies). I rank my previous GM outings between painful (forget dice towers, my players built dice cities) and mediocre (The table later reported "Not too bad..."). The only decent GMing I ever did was on the Shadowrun Detroit MUX (SR3e with houserules/gear) and I never ran a serious plot, I specialized in flavor encounters and plot hook NPC's.

So we started with a green as grass GM who hadn't done more than look at the pictures, an experienced RPer who really didn't like Shadowrun (setting or rules), and a guy who honestly had never considered sitting at a table with other grown men, throwing dice and playing make believe. We took about a week to decide that we actually wanted to play a game (and that I should GM) and spent an entire session simply hammering out characters. I had read through the rules ahead of time but I was learning them at the same time as my players.
That's when SR4 started to shine for me. After reading the BBB history sections and fielding a few basic questions my players were already thinking of things they wanted to do. We started at the front and worked our way to the rear. It took about 4-5 hours to hammer out basic characters and another hour or two to clean then up. Nobody got lost and we really didn't have any moments where we went "Huh?" for more than five minutes.

The next session we finished up by cleaning up their gear lists, working out some contacts, going over some general gaming rules and than I ran a mock combat so we could all get a feel for what we had gotten ourselves into. Killing 3 gangers has never taken so long but the combat ran and the players sorted out the details pretty quickly (God bless you summary boxes). We ran a second quick combat to sort out the autofire rules and hth. We were all still reading straight from the book but it was working and it was starting to show the first glimmers of... fun.

Our first run was pretty simple. Fixer calls, tells them that Humanis is roughing up one of his friends who lives above ground (we're playing Seattle), tell players to return the favor with interest but avoid drawing down the fuzz.

Players plan well, hire the right help and end up ringing in 2070 with the merry clink of Molotov cocktails.

Players were happy, GM was happy, everything was gravy.

The next game took place January 1st, 2070. We were excited.

I started running SR3 the year it came out. What was that? 98?

Anyway, I had been roleplaying since I was in middle school (in the early 80's), thanks to an introduction (via AD&D) by my 15 year older brother. (I credit roleplaying games among one of the biggest things that allowed me to bridge the age gap between us!) Then, I started playing in HS with a few friends, where we all took turns DMing. I basically quit playing at about age 19 until about age 22, when I married and settled down. At that point, I got involved with a large group of players who played a lot of D&D, first and second edition, and other things like Space 1889, and Star Wars D6 adn a few other rare sessions of more obscure things like Traveller and Paranoia. They rotated GM's. It was a full day Sunday game and the rule was no one played another person's campaign. One person ran Al Qadim, one person ran PLanescape, one person ran Star Wars, etc.

Anyway... I was looking for a game to run. I had seen ads for Shadowrun over the years but knew little about it. I looked into it and thought the background sounded amazing.. I'd always loved things like Johnny Mnemonic, Gravity Fails and Blade Runner. So, I bought the main book and taught myself. I had a working 3 day weekend where I left town to help a friend move stuff a few states away. There was no tv, no computer access... so I took my book and spent all my spare time jsut reading through it, front to back. By the time I came home, I felt like I had the basics down. I found the Shadowrun novels and my first read was 2XS, which I think was a perfect Shadowrun book! It certainly helped me get the feel f the specific universe.

I individually went to each of hte players and helped htem work up PC's, spending a few hours with each. Then we started playing. We had a blast! I ran a regular game on most Sundays for something like 4 years, with as many as 10 players a few times but usually around 5-6 very regular ones. We grew into the game. I did much the same as Doc... I stayed away from magic and outlawed "deckers" until I felt I was up to snuff on handling them. I introduced magic first, and really no one ever wanted to play a decker anyway. (To this day, and even under SR4, I still do a "quick" system of the matrix. )

I have always thought, more importantly than the game system itself, the thing that set Shadowrun apart was the setting. It's unique but instantly understandable to most folks. There's not that much of a learning curve for the setting. Everyone has seen Blade Runner and Johnny M and other movies with a near future backdrop. People can get right into it. Now, toss in magic, ala Big Trouble in Little China, and a bit of D&D style fantasy with the metahuman races and paranormal animals and spirits and man, do you have a wonderful universe or what? Anything can be run... any type of campaign... from a gritty street gang flavor, to special ops, to crime/syndicate stories, to "capers" to detective stories... and really, all of it can be done in the exact same campaign! The universe is practically the limit!

Vlad