Just curious how things go with others. I tend to like playing fairly hardball. 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.

They sometimes miss objectives.

WMS

Me and a crew once went into the dramatic, final run of a campaign and completely wiped. It was the big confrontation with that one recurring character, the penultimate confrontation. . . .

And we never made it to said two-timing, double-crossing corporate mastermind because we forgot to lock the front door behind us. Damn corpsec team put a frag grenade right in the middle of the group.

Often times they do a drunkards walk to get there, but so far, my group has always performed the minimum mission requirements to get paid.

With the exception of the first game I ran as a Demo at a Convention, where they screwed the pooch badly!

I've had a complete mission wipe once, and they unleashed a zombie mini-apocalypse in the form of shedim on the barrens once. They were being paid to stop it.... so they can fail in my games. Things happen the way they happen.

Chris

Man. So many party kills and blown runs and so few stories.

I guess it could be players reporting honestly but they don't want to talk about it.

Mad props to Red_Cap for being the only PC with a post like that.

Yes the fail. Often repeatedly.

One of the traps you can fall into in GMing is being afraid to let your players fail. Don't be. If there action don't have consiquences, whats the point? If there isn't the potential for failure in their tasks they aren't being challenged enough. As they say in the gym. No pain no gain. In my experience it is only the potential (and reality) of failure that makes success so sweet.

------

Possibly the most dramatic screw up in my game happened fairly recently (well in terms of the length of time we have been playing Shadowrun). The PC's failed to stop a bio-weapon from going off in NYC. Total death toll is over 10 million, including half the PCs involved.

Good times. Made continuing the campaign a bit difficult though.

My GM philosophy is that I do not slide difficulty dynamically. My game world simply is. I have NPCs and they react per their stats. If I statted the NPC to be Inferior, then it is likely that the PCs will be able to win pass him in one manner or another. If the NPC is Equal or better, then maybe not. If the run is out of the PCs' league, either the Johnson or their fixer or the team themselves have opportunities to evaluate the situation and call it off. It is that simple. If they want to be foolhardy or it is a setup and the PCs didn't check on the J, then it happens.

They fail sometimes. Occasionally they all die. But they all learn.

Sometimes my players manage to make a foolproof plan and execute it flawlessly but typically one or more things go wrong leading to injuries, missions failed, captures or deaths. Some learn from their mistakes while some seem to repeat them over and over again. Dragging other teammates along to doom is common, too. "No officer, I'm here to do this with my friends *points* and they have just as forged licenses to their guns as I have, sir"

Through the various groups I've run for and groups I've run with we've had the mix of success and failures, but one of those groups did not just fail but outright killed the entire game in less than 5 minutes of game play.

It had taken me about a week to talk my friends who were not the biggest Shadowrun fans to let me run a game for them with my, then, new SR2 books. After about 4 hours of CharGen I finally started running, and as my players decided to want to play runners who had never met before I had to run their introductions. I decided to start with the most Shadowrun experienced players, who had decided to play a Human Rigger, and a Giant PhysAd uber combat monkey.

Well the meeting of these two didn't go too well with the players misunderstanding my desciption of the scene, and their characters insulting one another as a result of this misunderstanding. This insult throwing ended up leading to combat with the PhysAd winning on Init and using his Killing Hands Deadly on the Rigger. After the requisite rolls, the Rigger was dead and the PhysAd wiping the remains of the Rigger off his hands.

Well that one round of game combat was quite the game killer as everyone decided that they didn't want to play anymore. That game became quite famous in my circle of friends for Quickest PC death in any of the games we'd ever been involved in.

My current campaign is based upon the theme "The NPC team leader plans, the PCs mess the plan up."

technically we never failed!
realistically? i can't count the fuck ups on my fingers, and i can count the runs on my fingers and have some left . .

Actually come to think of it I've never actually had a PC die. Edge/Karma having a lot to do with that though as you can burn both to keep your fat out of the fire. That alone wouldn't be enough. But things early on the games had convenced them they could die so at least my last two groups have had a willingness to bug out before it'd get to that point and a paranoid streak.

Hmm, well the only time my players have blown it is when the run is set up fishy from the start. I know them so I can usually figure when they'll fall for a trap, but in my defense I do leave a BIG clue each time before I do that. They really need to learn that sometimes you just have to walk away. I mean come on sit down at the table with the wrong Johnson take the job meet up with the other J realize both jobs are at the same place. Too me screams somethings fishy, they think oooooohhhhh double pay for the same insertion.

My players have always lived by a code of conduct they just seemed to have subconsciously agreed on. Never back out on an agreed upon contract. Never walk away from a job unfinished.
So they might miss some objectives but always strive to meet the letter of the agreement.

Ouch. Funny story but what a downer, especially for those who were unsure about Shadowrun in the first place.

As a GM I haven't run into that but if I did I would probably congratulate the winning PC on foolishly vanquishing a potential ally, killing the fun of the game, wasting 4+ hours of prep, and pack up for the night.

They've never totally failed, but they've been dragged through some rough stuff in the process.

The most memorable was the time i had seven characters being played, and only two of them survived the run.

This game session was, however, the one which had a death so badass and rediculously awesome that it's still talked about today.

As a side note the first thing I have new players do when I get them together is have them go onto the Matrix for a little simulated combat. First of all they tend to just enjoy it and it relieves tension, but beyond that it gets them accostomed to the SR world of combat where (especially in older editions) one shot kills are plenty common and tactics matter (again especially in older editions).

Oh yeah there have been failures. My first group never really failed at what the mission was, but we all failed miserably at Shadowrun. Nothing like being inconspicuous walking along a downtown street in full body armor with an Ares Alpha, no SIN, no license, and having your driver follow you in your stolen Ares Citymaster. Did LoneStar respond? nope.

We all had no idea of how the world worked and all of us lacked subtlety, so we had a hacker who compulsively hacked every comm he came across, we had a street sam shooting little kids' mothers before offing the kids, we had a pompous Martial Arts adept who refused to use guns and got shot A LOT, a ninja dwarf who instead of B&E and using infiltration, liked the direct approach of combat axe to the face, and a GM who got a big kick out of creating ANTI characters to combat and counter our team. Being that we had a team who was really combat oriented and didn't really use tech, we always lost against any kind of magical threat, and they happened often. I can't count the number of times on my hand I burned edge on my stupid character in that campaign.

so talk about it

My previous group of players failed fairly often or eked out some success through sheer determination towards being paid. Often times it was due to poor planning, everyone having very different ideas on how to accomplish the goals with radically different means and methods. Not to mention a great deal of poorly chosen reactions.

For example, one run was to act as undercover security for a new store opening in a mall. They actually did enough legwork to find out the store was owned by Aztechnology and expected some trouble with local Humanis, likely stirred up to just cause drek. The ex-security PhysAd befriended the store's oh, 23-year old security "chief," gave the store staff a crash course in riot security just in case, and in return had the store's basic security system and personnel in line. The mage opted to hide outside the store in the ever-growing crowd opening day and watch for any astral trouble incoming. The dwarf hacker/rigger/combat monkey was watching from the second-tier walkway, waiting for action.

Out of boredom the dwarf decided to try and hack into the *mall* security, using his implanted deck. Mind, it was set in Emergence, while accused technomancers were still being strung up before they could argue. So he botches, and the security hacker decides to let him think he's in while sending two guards in his direction. Next he knows, he's flanked by two Deputy Dans, telling him to hand over his deck. "But I don't have one!" Not a good lie to succeed at, now they think he's one of "them." And he refuses to go quietly.

Many grenades, brain-bursting spells, and mini-flamethrower shots later, the dead/wounded toll in the crowd is insane, the Humanis hired to cause trouble are dead, the dwarf and mage survive only by evaporating all their Edge, the Johnson that hired them has been executed, and Brackhaven's sending them get-well-soon flowers for making it look like mages and technomancers are conspiring against everyone.

Moral: If you don't tell your teammates your idea because you think they'll try and stop you, you probably shouldn't do it.

I'm generally quite kind to my players when they screw up totally, but that's not to say there's no a sting in the tail. They usually manage to complete the run well enough to get paid, but at times I have to completely change the run on the fly to accomodate their excesses. The best example I can think of is the time I spent a week detailing an apartment block they were supposed to infiltrate to steal hardcopies a blackmailer was using to extort money fom their Johnson. The PCs at no stage displayed any interest in entering the blackmailer's home, and the whole run ended up with them demolishing a mansion on the other side of town, whose floor plan I pulled out of my arse.

"We failed a few times, we just made damn sure no one found out about it."

As mean and nasty as I'm sure I come off as, my players tend to pull it out of their asses one way or another when it's crunch time. I can't remember the last time my game hasn't been a "win" (maybe with some losses, but still a win) barring the one time a few years back where I did a TPK because the Paladin's player said the worst thing any player can ever say in a RPG session:

"Man, this is sooo easy. I haven't even taken damage this entire adventure!"

And my agonizingly looooong string of 1-5 d20 rolls immediately turned into an unending rain if Natural 20s...and everyone's level 5 character died like bitches from stupid shit like Dire Wolves and Were-rats.

Sometimes they seem to flub it, and I even had a character die just do to the fact that they had the worst idea for a character ever.

That'll teach a mage to walk in around in nothing but a leather G-string. Catch a bullet and enjoy an early death.

It's a rare occasion for our group to totally fail a run, however it has happened before.

Can I have some of your luck?

My players love me since my dice luck is atrocious. Anyone else managed multiple critical glitches on 10 dice? I've been running a campaign for the last 6 months or so and I've had more critical glitches than all my players combined, and one has unlucky, and another has gremlins. There's no justice.

It's not about luck, my man. It's purely gaming physics. Bait one of your players into talking trash about not even getting a nick this whole time and suddenly you'll be rolling 5 hits on six dice.

I have had runs that fill the entire gamut from complete pro-jobs to absolute (and literal) train wrecks. In fact, I currently have a game 'frozen' (has been for maybe 6 years) in a partially collapsed NYC subway tunnel, security coming from one end of the train, terrorists from the other and a suicidal player with a bombvest in the middle...

At first when I GM'd I was really against player death. Neither me or my players were really mature enough at the time to handle the adversarial feelings that arise when a PC either on their last breath or just gets offed. People tended to take that sort of thing personally. Luckily time has weathered us well and we can handle ourselves in a much more mature fashion.

One of the best incidents I can think of was a run to do a data steal from a Mitsuhama corp facility near downtown. The team gets onto the floor after hacking some valid IDs and posing as a renovation crew. The doors open on the elevator and they flubb some social rolls to cover up their really poor decisions (trying to take guns out near security?) and a firefight ensues. A few rounds of combat later all local security is dead, one of the PCs is sitting at a box from deadly and they have destroyed half of the data they were supposed to steal.

Ding, the elevators arrive bringing HTR teams... The sammy hears booted feet on the stairs behind them. They are boxed in. So what do they do? Affix explosives to the doors and then blow out windows on a 14th story office to escape. The mage decides to cast a series of Physical Barriers to create a "slide" down to the ground level. So they literally leap out into nothing onto shelving units of physical barriers, the mage is bleading from the nose and ears at this point from sustaining so many spells and about the 2nd barrier in huge explosions rock the building - apparently the HTR teams foudn the explosives. So now they are hanging out above the street next to a building whose windows blow out and shower them with glass (a few wounds here in there) in front of god and everybody. Not exactly subtle.

The player just shy of deadly dies and they push his body off of the barrier and he crushes a car. Fantastic. Soon they are on the ground level as air security in Wasp crafts start showing up. Obviously emergency crews are on site. They hijack a car by throwing an old lady out of the vehicle and shooting her in the back and take off hitting several pedestrians. Their car gets wrecked so they hijack another. By this point their face has been ventilated by gunfire from security and is dumped in the street. Their second car holds and they get into a high speed chase where they decided to use a little girl (found cowering in the back seat after her father is shot to have his car stolen) as a 'speed bump' to try and slow oncoming Star cruisers. They throw a little girl... out of a car... at over 100km/hr.

Anyways, the chase ends when their rigger takes one in the back of the head and spins the car into a piece of corporate art. The crash nearly kills everyone inside who are then riddled with bullets from miniguns out of a Wasp that had been trailing them.

Game over.

That is probably the worst player wipe I have ever had. Sure, they fail sometimes or other times just fail to complete all of hte objectives but generally they stay for the most part intact. Often their 'failures' result in 90% of their run payment going to medical bills and contact fees for information to get their asses out of the fire or to get the Star off of them.

^^^^^^^^^^^^above post^^^^^^^^^^^^^

aaaahhhhh hahahahaha omfg...that is great.

why do you renovation crew have guns? um...to...knock...down the walls? YEA! knock down walls. thats a good reason

I have seen my share of failures as well. Of course, PCs "win" more often than not, but failure and death are real threats. Some teams are much more effective than others as well. I have had a team fail a couple of missions in a row, go to jail, get in debt with the mob, go on another run and then fail and spend more money -and get into more debt- with medical bills.

The latest run I run was a "thematic" adventure involving a team of special security working for the Japanese government. They had at one time the honourable duty of bodyguarding their prime minister -and as the GM I intended them to succeed-
However, a coupe of bad strategic decisions laters aggravated bu bad rolling and bam!

PM dead, 25% operatives into damage overflow (were resurrected timely) and team in disgrace. Campaign over, and all it took was some hacking and one cyberninja.

We are currently re-designing characters and starting another spin-off campaign.

Cheers!

Max

Gah, that's not that bad. I have an unbroken string of critical botches, running back to the late 90's, in every single Shaodwrun game I GM'ed. Once per game, I will critically botch at least one roll, guaranteed. This includes the SR3 days, when you had to roll all 1's to botch. My record is all ones on 12 or 13 dice, in SR3.

Back on subject, sometimes the run requires you to throw it. For example, On the Run pretty much assumes you'll betray your Johnson and take a peek at the data disk.

I'd consider that one of the "GMs Plan" options in the poll.

Groups "fail" all the time in the games I run. More often than not, that leads to the next game which revolves around the failure of the previous one, and is thus even more fun than the previous game.

I'd consider it to be something else, but that's a topic for another thread. The point is, the players have to "throw" the mission in order to continue the adventure. There's also a lot of games where there is no clear success or failure, just shades of grey. That's not always planned by the GM, sometimes the player's RP just lands things that way.

Most of the time my home group succeeds...though they miss quite a few things along the way that could have benefited them or earned them some extra cred. I've had a few PC deaths, but Karma/Edge usually kept the PC in the game.

However, the Missions group failed miserably on their last Denver run. The next session kicked off the NYC story arc, so it was actually perfect to introduce all the new PCs.

Of course, the best runs are the ones they just barely made it out of alive...they're still talking about the toxic shaman who seemed to have an endless supply of spirits.

Darn it....the "Only not succeeded when it was the GM's plan"..how do you handle it when the GM planned for both? Honestly, I am not sure if my GM is making it easy for us. But I do know that she is a "let the dice fall ast they may" type GM...and even does her rolls infront of the players. And, this one run, we had a pair of Grad 2 Initiate Trolls, with maxed magic, foci for resisting drain, Centering, the whole shebang...and they droped Force 16 Stunballs into the middle of the party...and nearly died from the drain(We actually went and stabilized them, so corp med people could help them later). The party? Well...amazingly, all but 2 were all but knocked out(both were out of the LOS of the trolls), and stim patches and such got the other guys up..so we could climb into the thunderbird provided for the run....but, honestly...I REALLY do not think the GM was expecting the trolls to whiff like they did(She was rolling something like 15 dice for their drain resistance! and they both Glitched!)

@ Cain; over On the Run. It may seem unprofessional, but under the parameters of the mission weren't the runners supposed to track down any copies of the disc and make sure they didn't exist anymore? Wouldn't inquiring into the creation of the disc then in its very act be... professional? I am running that mission now and my team looked through the necessary channels to discover what the disc could be, and where copies could be if they existed. When they discovered Carrion Studios was were the sessions were recorded, and who JB was and everything, they went right to it trying to finish the mission and find other copies. They knew the value of the disc with a little logic tossed around and were even more careful as to not foul up the run and piss off Mr. J. They haven't been tempted by the final seen in the Graveyard yet though, so we'll see what some extra cred tossed around will make them feel like doing.

P.S. It was really cool, I went with the whole idea of making a mini-disc prop and made a white slip case out of paper and wrote the text on it. I tossed them the disc after they picked it up from Loomis and they went to town all on their own. It was awesome to watch. I've got an awesome group right now. I think I'll have at least one prop like that every mission. Really got them going.

I wrote a mission in SR3 for Virtual Seattle a few years back, and it was played several times, in home games and in conventions, including Gencon. There were both incredibly well played runs and TPKs.

A middle-level exec in a mining corp in Tsimshian hired the runners to investigate disappearances of company executives. The corp did its own investigation and had yet found nothing. The local Tsimshian police half-heartedly had found nothing as well. The Johnson hired the runners because he was getting scared for his life and because he wanted the problem solved before the corp investigation found he was dumping toxic waste in the forest and invoicing the company for proper disposal, keeping the difference for himself.

A malevolent forest spirit was pissed that waste was leaking into her Personal Domain, and was wreaking vengeance on the decision makers in the corp. She was aided by a twisted adept in the local community with whom she had made a Spirit Pact. He got power and jollies from her, she got a willing tool who could get inside the corp building legitimately, as a flunkie employee.

I wanted a run in which arrogant, up-front aggression would be punished severely, whereas careful forethought and deviousness would pay off. In part this was because there were a few players in Virtual Seattle at the time whose characters had so much Karma they felt they could overpower anything. I wanted an opponent that could not be blasted away in the first five seconds.

I got it with this pair. Side-by-side they were an awesome team, together via possession they were obscenely powerful. There were several avenues built into the mission to allow players to find a way to overcome these two, including talking and making a deal without any combat whatsoever. The mission presented a display of power early on to guarantee that players knew what they were up against.

Sure enough, some teams decided to shoot at first meeting. They died. Some teams found the Personal Domain and went there to fight. They died ... some slowly, possessed by the spirit so she could feel their pain and maintain their life as long as possible as the adept, a skilled taxidermist, skinned them alive. (Guess whose basement the stuffed corp execs were stored in?) Every angle that involved attacking the pair together failed, though not usually a TPK. I was so pleased!

Of the successes, the one that pleased me the most was a bunch of teenage rookie players I ran. Contrary to the stereotype of teenage players, they paused, assessed the initial situation correctly, sought info from the local shamans, recced the Johnson, figured out how to separate the pair, and set up a situation that maximized their assets and minimized their opponents'. This team restored my faith in youth.

I made the same prop. It was great fun and a rare chance for some "physical" role-playing!

I'm currently waiting for my current group of players to finish their characters, so I can start my game. They've had my copies of the BBB, SM, Ars, Aug, and RC for the last month or so, have each been through several incarnations of their characters (Some of them were playing around with some of the alternate character choices in RC).

With that amount of time they've had quite a bit of time to read and learn the rules and hopefully have built their characters with everything in mind (especially when I know some of them have been checking out these forums), if not you better be damn sure I'll take advantage of their mistakes. I'm not expecting them to fail but it should be interesting to see what they've forgotten to cover and exploiting that within the bounds of fairness.

They better be on their toes though with my game being set in LA, they may not be on the P2.0 yet but that doesn't mean that they're aren't any Camera or Surveillance drones around to capture their failures or success. Hollywood has always been fond of big explosions.

Hey I just realized that the number at the bottom of the poll tracks the number of people who have pushed the vote button.

So about half of the groups out there have had at least one failure on the PCs part. The rest having the players always at least gimping back for some pay unless the GM had different plans from the start.

By the book, there's no link to Carrion Studios until you crack the disk. And I don't recall if Johnson asked them to track down copies or not. All I recall is that he was very evasive about the contents of the disk, and didn't describe it beyond "an old format mini disk". That would make tracking down copies very difficult, if you don't know what's on it. They started chasing down antique dealers at first; I practically had to bludgeon them with the Nabo clue to get them to follow it, and I despise having to do that.

PS: I also did a mini-disk, with nice cursive writing on it. I'm big on props, too, when I can arrange it. I did a Tai Pan ripoff one time, with the team going into debt with one Mr. Darktooth , and him giving them a broken tooth amulet as a reminder. About a year later, when they were balking at the last run of Brainscan, I pulled out a broken tooth prop and tossed it on the table. The sudden shock in their eyes was well worth the time I had spent.


The type of poll allows for multiple answers, so you might be reading the same vote twice (or more).

Well, my next game will be about the group looking for the lost daughter of a corp exec and finding out about a porn(especially the bad kinds)/slavery(especially the worst kinds) ring. Props might get a bit on in "inappropriate" side, neh?

My group were all seasoned roleplayers before they started, so am not surprised that they mostly succeed. It is mostly what I intend to occure but am happy to geek PC's and stop them if I can.
I will and do push them to their limits in both their roleplaying, their teamwork and effectiveness. One PC down, one MIA and last session they literaly 'only just' succeeded and survived. And I mean every PC on over flow, killing the last big bad to win the day so the captives could stabilise the group to reach hospital. i am proud of the fact that I could not of increased the opporsition in any way with out total party kill.

Without the ref giving real adversity then the game becomes simple wish fulfilment. There is nothing to accomplish and so no sense of success. To much adversity and you turn the game into a joyless victimisation.

A happy medium.
Benevolent tyranny.
So everyone has fun.

Ugh. /has flashback to CP2020 game with the freaky old bondage guys who would bring along all their props because the "cuffs" club met after the RP club.

Nope, there's text written on the disc sleeve or case:

JB
Carrion Sessions '48
For enlightenment
seek absent friends

It's kind of funny how they were able to really make use their knowledge skills. Most of my players always get one or two fluff skills that fit their character, and since one routinely deals with ork gangers, on hangs out in a repair shop with the undereducated, and one deals with ork kids coming in off the streets in a rec center, three players all had some form of Goblin Rock, ork rock or Orksploitation knowledge skill. I let them do a teamwork test to help each other out and fill in holes where on player would forget another and needless to say, for most of the game they really didn't need their hacker to look info up. One of the players is actually in a band and knew what any kind of studio session is, and his character had the knowledge skill to back up character knowledge, so I let them make the jumps. Funny how things like that work out. It really puts into perspective how if you need insight into a run, a character could always pick up a knowsoft to help out the team...

The J did say that if there were other copies to either destroy them or bring them in. My group just made the logical leap that maybe there were some kinds of digital or disc copies at the studios.

Tai Pan? never heard, please elaborate...

In both times that I ran it, none of my players had an appropriate knowledge skill. I had them roll some off-the-wall ones, but they didn't work.

Without the knowledge that Carrion is a music studio, that lead could mean anything. Sure, you could do a data Search, but just try punching in "Carrion" into Google and see how many hits you get. You don't know it's music until you crack the disk. The rest of the clue is practically worthless; you can complete the entire adventure without solving that last bit. Additionally, the team was only asked to track down copies made from that mini-disk, not trace down the original masters. Without cracking the disk, they wouldn't know what to look for-- it could be under a different encryption, or even a double-encryption.

Oh, and Tai Pan is a James Clavell novel. In it, a major trading house accepts a fortune, in exchange for four favors for the Triads. These favors would be represented as broken coins-- they held one half of each, while the Triads held the other half. To call in the favor, the person only needed to present their half of the coin.

What I did was this: Each PC was given half of a broken tooth medallion. If someone presented the other half, they would owe that person a favor. Now, I didn't make props of the original medallion; but I had a very nice second half made eleven months later. When I plopped it onto the table, they stared blankly for a second, then their eyes went wide when they remembered the deal they had made. I had a house rule going then: if you accepted a favor from a contact, they would do something for you (earning you karma, potentially), but you would owe them something in return. If you didn't do your best to return the favor when your marker was called in, you lost Karma Pool equal to the value of the favor. Karma Pool was a lot like Edge, except it didn't front-load and was harder to get. They owed Darktooth ten karma apiece. Literally, they had sold their souls.

Moral of the story: Never deal with a dragon. Even one that looks human and is named Darktooth. I'll let the Germans here explain why that name is significant.

no reason... Ich spreche Deutsch...