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OneThirtyEight
QUOTE (Stahlseele @ Sep 23 2008, 01:34 PM) *
so talk about it

The job was a prison break. Seven characters went in, and only three characters (and the npc they were rescuing) made it back to the getaway van.

One character was the driver, he was relatively uninjured. Another character was the face, who was pretty messed up and could barely keep herself conscious. The third character was Bishop. Bishop was your typical uber cybered gunbunny type. He was unscathed, as the player rolled really well that night.

There was a chase involving several Star squad cars and the van. Through a combination of tricky driving and liberal application of automatic weapons, they'd dispatched all but one. Both the van and the remaining squad car are battered and torn to hell. The driver of the van tries every trick he can, but just can't shake the Star on his tail.

Here is where I should make note, that I run my game forsaking some of the realism in favor of action movie flair. It's important because otherwise, what happened next never would have if we were running it by the book.

By this point, they'd cooked off just about every available round they had. Bishop remembers he has a pair of flashbangs. He tells the driver to slow down, so the distance between the van and the squad car will close. He does so.

Once the squad car gets closer, he kicks the back doors of the van open, leaps from the van to the hood of the car, pulls the pins on the flashbangs and drops them in the laps of the two Star in the car. He takes two bullets while doing this. Bishop is wounded.

Flashbangs go off, and the car veers into oncoming traffic, where it hits another vehicle and flips, sending Bishop flying. Bishop lands and takes damage. Bishop is messed up.

He fails a reaction roll and gets hit by oncoming traffic. Now, he's VERY messed up, but still conscious. He manages to hobble/drag himself almost back to the van before he passes out.

He wound up dying later in the hospital, because he was too heavily cybered for a shaman to properly heal him.
Gelare
The mission I'd given my players was very open-ended, perhaps a bit too much so. It was The Last Run, as featured on Aaron's site, where the players have to get into a hotel where a party is being held and get down to the sub-basement to crack a safe and grab the loot.

Their plan was pretty awesome, all things considered, except for the part where they killed, like, thirty innocent/semi-innocent people and blew a hole in the side of the hotel with plastic explosives. The guards who were waiting in the basement radioed for help from the mage they'd hired, and two angry spirits later the PC's decided to call it quits. Still, it was a lot of fun.
Daddy's Little Ninja
We have sometimes missed the target on a run, but not commonly. either a target escaped or a file was destroyed before we could grab it or a place we were buarding, but never a person we were guarding, still got hit.
p3ndr4g0n
QUOTE (sunnyside @ Sep 22 2008, 08:16 PM) *
Players don't lose too often, but it happens. And most missions have degrees of success, rarely do they come out as good as they could.

Personally I think the challenge and actual tension that results adds to the game significantly.


Couldn'ta said it better grinbig.gif

I like my noir/fantasy-soaked nitty-gritty realism. So I make it somewhat realistically difficult, but doable. And I usually don't change what I have planed to make things harder or easier. (I'll also never go out of my way to kill off my players. Or throw them up against something I know they'll lose against.) So when they screw up, they generally know why (unless it's part of the plot that they're not supposed to get it), and when they win, they usually feel like they actually accomplished something.

From the feed back I get, it seems to work out pretty well.
TKDNinjaInBlack
The mark of success without outright domination, or utter failure is usually the mark of a good GM. They have a good idea of their own groups abilities and the world's setting and dangers. When the players start failing or dominating too often, it's time to change the difficulty level a bit.
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