Have you ever had a straight forward run planned out that the players insist on making harder for themselves? For instance I put together a difficult but straight forward multi-part run. The characters were to retrieve some data, plant different data in 2 different politicos commlinks, whack a politicos secretary, and plant "evidence" that she was a metahuman poser.
Most of this was ok by them but one guy (the nominal group leader and face) has a problem with "needless" wetwork. He figured that the secretary was an innocent so there was no need to kill her. So he want out of his way to avoid killing her. He was playing a female character at the time but by using magic and technological disguise techniques he got close enough to her to get into her apartment. Before things got too compromising he drugged her and stole some hair for DNA. He then arranged to have a clone made of her. This, of course cost WAY more than the runners could afford so he put together a bank robbery (the only way he could think of making a few hundred K really quick) to fund it.
So the characters manage to break into and steal a great deal of valuables from the safety deposit boxes at the bank and fence them for just over what they needed. Then then had the clone made, "kidnapped" the secretary, shot the clone with a pistol they stole from the politico they were framing, firebombed the apartment with thermite so that the clone was a mess of burnt flesh.
They then called one of the PCs police contacts and told them where the gun was dumped and bribed him to say he "found" it. They then had a new ID fabricated for the secretary and relocated her to NY.
By doing so they made a difficult run that was on a tight time frame even tighter, but they managed to pull it off. The politicos were implicated in the murder, they were "discovered" to be former Humanis members, and they were pilloried by the public. The secretary survived (earning them more karma), and the politicos opponent won the election. What the PC later found out was that the guy that won was affiliated with Alamos 20,000. They should have done there homework a bit better/