Greetings all,

I'm new to forums but new to Shadowrun as well. I don't have a whole lot of gaming experience (I've played a lot of D&D4e) so I'm like a total newbie to you guys, but me and my friends really like the world of SR so wanted to give it a try, I'm GMing.

We went through "Food Fight" and did one other run I wrote, and all the PC's were built with the 400 build point system.

The problem (and maybe it's not a problem) is that the enemies I put in get killed really fast -- it seems like maybe it's too easy for the players, and there's not much of a sense of danger.

I've been using Corpsec guards from the BBB, and I used some of the Sample Characters in there as well.

Chewing through 6 Corpsec guards went fast, and even when I threw the sample Street Samurai at them he died in like two turns.

It seems like it should be harder than this, am I doing something wrong, or do I just need to put some tougher enemies in there? My PC's are all at starting level, so I was expecting more of a challenge for them. Especially from a built sample character (which should be at the level of Prime Runners, right?)

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

Try using the terrain to your NPC's advantage, taking cover can reduce the lethality of the PC's ranged combat abilities. Surprise and opportune reinforcements can add to the threat level, especially if it entails media coverage or surveillance recordings. Alternatively, you could bring down the power level of the PC's. What do your PC's base DV and Combat pools look like?

First, Shadowrun is, or can be, pretty deadly. Usually, it boils down to who fires first. Getting hit with a burst from a submachine gun is very very bad for you. You should try to avoid that.
Second, do your NPCs use tactics? Like, any tactics at all? The sample grunts are pretty wimpy, but they should be real people. (Albeit pretty shortlived real people.) Do they use cover? The occasional flash-bang? Or just stand there in the open? Static targets are dead targets. That should be any security-grunts mantra.
Also, they are not crack-shots, but they would be aware of that. Do they use covering/supression-fire? Do they try to nail the runners down and call for re-inforcements? Maybe try to out-flank the runners on occasion?
Do you apply the modifiers for additional attacks? Even a street-sams reaction/full defense pool will run dry after a couple of wide bursts.

These are just a few basic tactics that can make any PCs life a little more interesting...

Fourth Edition doesn't have boss fights. The best you can do is some high force spirits, say 9 or above.
The designers responded to one of my posts much like yours and said to have villains work through henchmen.

There is also the new game, as the previous posts have pointed out: How many visual mods this time Dad?
Combat is expected to have layers of visual modification built in. Bad guy should live in fear and cover, apparently, as a start. Glare is a handy -1 slice of cheese. I have adapted to use some but my players move before the bad guys and many grunts die with their flashpak in hand or while they were thinking of going for cover.

I've just decided to add a great deal more grunts. So far it works for us.

It depends a lot on your groups makeup but yes, generally speaking NPC's will be significantly weaker than PC's. Just like how in D&D a first level party thinks nothing of chewing through twice their numbers in goblins a reasonably well built team of runners should be able to chew up most grunts with a professional rating of 2-3 no problem.

They can still be a threat though, especially if you tweak them a bit. One of the nastiest things you can give a bunch of grunts is a dose of Jazz. That ups their IP's which makes them a much, much bigger threat.

Remember the teamwork bonus' too. If the NPC's focus their fire on a single character his dodge pool is going to shrink pretty damn quick. Whoever the PC's are fighting will typically be in a defensive position too, or at least more familiar with the territory. Use that. Use cover, suppressive fire, call for backup, and all that sort of stuff. Also remember that if the PC's chew through a whole bunch of security grunts they'll pop up on said security companies radar. Not a huge deal if it's a low budget rent-a-cop agency, but things could get really ugly really fast if they snag the attention of someone important in Knight Errant or one of the other high end security services. Likewise with gangs and organized crime. The Mafia, Yakuza or Triads might not look too kindly on having a bunch of their goons gunned down.

Shadowrun also plays somewhat differently philosophically than D&D. D&D is all about epic battles against opponents who are pretty similar in terms of ability as the PC's. There are rarely, if ever consequences to the fact that the PC's just wandered into a cave infested with goblins and wiped them out. In Shadowrun even the smallest corp has more resources than the runners could ever hope to amass and if the runners cut a bloody swath through their R&D lab they will be pissed.

This Thread has some good points about how to turn an organization like Lone Star into something to be feared. Other organizations will have similar responses (though to varying degrees) if the runners do something to piss them off.

As a general rule of thumb though, if the grunts outnumber the PC's by at least 2:1 some of them will survive long enough to be a threat. Also make sure they all have the dodge skill, and spend their first IP running for cover and trying to stack up situational modifiers to toughen them up.

Hey Chummer hang in their 400bp can make some serious monsters... I know cause i have one. The bbb in some ways is way under cutting edge for sample character me and one other team mate could take on all the sample characters @ once and come out of it nursing some wounds but victorious. If using crappy stat grunts bring in to play out numbered rules or back up... It's alright to feed some guppies to your players here and there but our GM always has us at a heightened state of paranoia and fearing death around every corner... make some of your own npc's and find a good balance make your runners pay for every piece of karma they get and they will enjoy the game a million times more if they barely pull off runs by the skin of their teeth.

Yeah, SR4 can be pretty lethal.

Don't forget to apply negative dice pool modifiers for things like poor lighting, weather, cover, and so on. You don't need to get too nit picky about it (I usually assign a flat negative modifier and use it throughout the combat). It can make a big difference in terms of NPC (and PC!) survivability if you cut that Dice Pool of 10 down to a 6 or so...

As others noted, going first is huge, but that doesn't mean Wired Reflexes and the like are must-haves (though they are very good). Surprise is god-like. I've seen whole groups of NPCs wiped out in the surprise round by one or two PCs.

I encourage players to tone down their "casual carry" weapons to pistols, which works out pretty well. Unlike previous editions, even light pistols can be dangerous in skilled hands. As an added bonus, pistols don't freak NPCs out as much as, say, SMGs or rifles.

-paws

Grunts are by nature much wimpier than a 400 build shadowrunner. I would guess they are about half power at best(tho' I ahve never bothered deconstructing one. I am sure that plenty of other tweakers on DS have. )

Foodfight 4.0 is designed by it's nature to be an introduction to SR4 and SR in general. It's supposed to be easy and non-lethal.

The key thing with grunts is to do what the above posters mentioned: tactics. Grunts can typically overwhelm runners with numbers. A team of three Runners can laugh off 6-8 Lonestar cops or gangers. But what happens when the backup rolls in and they are now facing 20 cops and an Ares Mobmaster (urban tank/mobile command point.) What happens to them when they blow away a couple of hte Barrens gangers that are holding them up on the street for tribute and the hidden snipers with pilfered assault rifles on the top of the near-by building starts blowing them away while about 10 more come pouring out of hte doorways and sewer grates.

What I have found best is to create a couple 400 point (or at least 350 point) NPC chiefs and then add to them a few grunt flunkies. This creates situations that are more challenging to the runners, that while they will usually win, a few bad dice rolls on the part of the runners and a few good ones on the part of hte NPC's can have them sweating. There will be real injuries. I know it takes some time to create build point characters, but since htey are NPC's you can usually jsut eyeball it in creation. Also, if you need something on the spur of hte moment, just recycle one of your previously used ones. Change the name, change their skills around for weapons, give them a whole different persona. You can literally do it on the fly if you are halfway organized. Keep a couple pages of Chiefs, statted out at hand and jsut use a pencil to make some quick changes and notes.

I also dont hesitate to use group edge for grunts. A group of 5 might have 2-3 points between them. If hte PC's get Edge, why shouldn't the grunts? And the "Chiefs" get full use of hteir edge points from creation. This can offset some bad GM dice rolling and create the occasional "WTF? Who is this ork? I shot him 3 times and he still keeps coming!" Of course, use sparingly. The PC's should feel confident most of the time that they can handle the situation at hand. This makes the times they can't that much more memorable and nail-biting.

Vlad

Shadowrun is a VDCS (Very Deadly Combat System) game, much the same as GURPS. And just like GURPS, if you are not using modifiers and penalties, then high skilled people are unstopable juggernauts of distruction. At least till they run out of ammo or actions.

So you have to do two things before you start cranking up the number of mooks or increasing their stats. First, make sure you apply visual modifiers, movement modifiers, cover modifiers, etc. Second, make the mooks use some tactics. Ambush, blind fire around corners, cover, Suppression Fire, get into cover, snipers, flank the PCs, did I mention cover, overwatch (don't move in one group, split into two, one moves and the other holds actions ready to fire), gas grenades, more cover, spy & combat drones, and as always: COVER!

The NPCs are not just nameless monsters waiting to be killed for gold and xp. They are living breathing people and should react as such. If you were a guard and some crazy gun-toting criminals showed up, what would you do?

A) Stand there shooting at them until you get plugged...
B) Duck into cover and shoot back at them until you get plugged...
C) Duck into cover, shoot and move...
D) Duck into cover, use suppression fire while calling in backup, fire a suppression spray and move, keep up till help arrives.

You NPCs should be using "D" or better.

Thanks for the tips! I appreciate it!



Average Damage seems to be around 7 or so, after the resistance tests, and most of the time they're rolling around 15 dice on their attack rolls. For a corpsec guard rolling like 4 to defend, it gets bloody real quick.



Very limited tactics, but not nearly as much as you outlined here. Thanks -- this gives me more ideas for how to turn it into an intelligent battle instead of the shootout at the ok corral. What made it easy for them in the first skirmish was that a Magic-using PC started casting "Mob Control" on the guards, and mind controlled them into throwing themselves off balconies. I couldn't complain too much because it was so freakin' awesome, but you're right, tactics will make a big difference.


Thanks for making this point -- since none of us have role playing experience outside of D&D, this was tough to realize at first, since our expectations are very different. It's hard not to have boss fights, but having bigger consequences for their actions will make for richer stories, which is what we all care about most anyway, I think.

Thanks for the tips, I'm more excited to play now!

I would usually assume that most starting enemies are much weaker than starting characters. If you sit at my table, that can also be true for very advanced characters. (Should I say could? )

How does it work?

First, armor is your friend. You want to avoid that your guards are one-shot killed. At all cost, coordinating strength of large numbers is hard.

Second, cover is your friend. Full cover is often better than partial cover. Delay IP´s, choose to act before the runner that enters the hideout. Combats are over fast if the full group gets first and free choice of target in the first IP. This is because you can expect that all combatant characters go before any unaugmented opposition. Derivative: The PCs should only get to see the oppositions forward elements in the first IP. Evil Minion Rule: If my partner goes around a corner, and suddenly goes silent, I will not go investigate. Less so in case of gunshots!!!

Third, use weapons with high DV instead of better guards. Low chances of being hit, combined with medium damage from being hit, is good for suspense. Bad rolls are costly, but a few! hits are surviveable. If you hit more often, but usually do no damage, players will stop to care. If you cause damage in 1 box-units, players know that they need a series of bad rolls to die.

Fourth, attack from multiple angles. Denying the PCs cover is important, unless your guards are good enough to hit at -4. (This aspect can be corrected by better guards.)

And fifth, in some situations, the actual number of opponents does not matter. Keep them coming. Large corporate facilities might have MANY more guards than your runners want to fight.

I would like to add that the "chew up the NPCs" thing isn't just a 400BP thing. I'm playing in a 300BP Go-Ganger game with a starting cash cap of 1/5th normal and an availibility cap of 9 at char gen. My Ork muscle still manages to throw 11 dice with guns and I killed a crap ton of people in the game over the weekend mostly single handedly by liberal use of tactics and an tweaked AK-97.

You want to surprise and shock your players several times at the begining. Make them think, make them plan, force them out of that stand up face-to-face and fight D&D mentallity. After a couple of times getting flanked, sniped, drawn into ambushes/crossfire/booby traps, and generally shown that getting shot sucks, believe me they are going to start thinking and planning themselves.

Once they do that, they will start chewing on the mooks again (though not nearly as bad as now), but it will involve them actually planning stuff and hopefully generate some very memorable and enjoyable moments. Plus they will remember that a single mook shooting from ambush with a hunting rifle can kill most PCs with one shot if he gets lucky on the attack role and they suck on the soak role (no defense since they got sniped).

Oh, don't over do the snipers. Save them for when the PCs do something stupid in a place that could have snipers instead of just walking down the street... *BOOM!*

Random Post # 7

I love the tactic that has been around since SR1...

GEEK THE MAGE FIRST!!!

If a PC starts showing he can do magic all the guns should be pointed at him first as he will most likely go down the quickest (even if he is just badly hurt he will slow down the rest of the runners) and he can inflict the biggest amount of damage to the NPCs.

Have your NPCs say stuff like, "Oh Frak! Its a spell slinger, we need backup now!" and then toss a grenade toward the mage.

The last part is where you mess up. It is not 'toss a grenade', it is 'toss lots of grenades'.

Sorry my bad

Welcome to the evil club, and congratulations for having your NPC´s say things in combat in the first place .

When designing a target for the PC's to stomp remember that a professional has designed this target to be secure. Does your facility have roving patrols on the perimeter? Do those patrols have dogs? Are there drones and spirits attached to the security teams? Are there choke points in the building floor plans? Is the landscape designed with natural barriers? Are there barricades to provide both cover to the security details and obstacles to vehicles? Are there traps?

Also consider how effective misinformation and inconvenient coincidences can turn the tide to the NPC's favor. For example, what if the floor plan for the target your team has is inaccurate? What if a street gang causes a problem just as the team in trying to sneak their way into the facility? What if another Shadowrun team shows up to steal the same gizmo that your team is stealing? What if a car accident impedes they're escape? What if the target is having dinner with a dragon at the time of his extraction?

Actually one of the best things you could do is after one combat situation in a facility where the runners' target is a person, have the security alarms go off. Target is not being evacuated from the facility (along with any other non-combatants) and an endless stream of mooks will be sent towards the PCs (including Lone Star or other more deadly security forces).

The point of Shadowrun is to be stealthy. This doesn't mean you can't kill anyone, you just have to be smart about it.

In my last session five PR 2 thugs wielding only stun batons overwhelmed my three players armed with ranged weapons. *cracks knuckles* Am I just that awesome? Or did one side use cover to its advantage and did the other side forget? You decide!

Does it have to be an exclusive "or"? Because I know you are just that awesome.

no trolls in your group either i guess? ^^

I actually have many of my corp-secs with Predators and the like. Smartlinked they toss 8 or so dice. Now, this isn't instant death. But with 5P, -1 AP, even one net hit means 6 boxes must be soaked. Not every guard will have these-but a few do.

Also, I'm a fan of stun. Stun batons, shock gloves, stick-n-shock(the latter is amazingly powerful and a couple of good shots could render a PC pretty out of it rather quick). Gel rounds are also resisted with Impact armor-which, on average, is a bit less. A couple of corp-sec with shotguns loaded with gel-slugs can cause a naasty bruise on a PC, and probably put 'em on their behind. A Defiance EX Shocker has a base damage code of 8 Stun. (Electrical damage also halves armor.)

Unconscious PCs are still out of a fight. Stun damage gives - modifiers on die pools. Also, a knocked-out PC probably has another teammate out of the fight a round or two to get them to safety(if they care about each other at all, that is. ) Also, a group of knocked-out PCs can be captured and questioned, and an adventure can be formed in and of itself to break out.

Of course, your PCs might start caring about things like Non-Conductivity on armor, and Stim patches-but hey, you made them use some tactics and preparation, in a way, if that's the case, and still made them sweat a bit(damage can overflow, remember.)

One thing to remember is that your runners should be fast, or dead. Get into a facility, get out. If they pull it off well, then they pull it off well, kudos to them. If they pull it off poorly, then the are in deep drek. Even if they manage to kill EVERY security guard in the building, Knight Errant can come along with a Rocket Launcher or some Helicopters with miniguns and ruin their day.

If you are looking to REALLY challenge them, send them up against a Runner TEAM. Only do this every once in a while, because it is a lot of work for you and can get pretty annoying on their end, but it is also epic.

I remember, back in 3rd ed, we had a 3 session long super-run that lead us through several locations and several days. In the end we had the drop off with our contact on the 14th floor of a partially-constructed office building. We were ambushed by a vehicle rigger piloting a helicopter (with an LMG), a troll with a minigun, and an elven adept (we were only a 3 man team ourselves.) Plus there were grunts on the ground. We had our ouchies but managed a narrow win (mostly due to our own Drone rigger with his anti-vehicle APDS LMG mounted on a turret of one of his drones. . . shot down the helicopter in one round of full auto.) It was white knuckle but also super fun.

So, have your runners ambushed by a group of Core Book runners. Depending on who is in your team, I would recommend the street sam, the enforcer, and the combat mage as some of the best. Also, make sure that they are smart. Take cover behind plastacrete, use suppression fire or wide bursts, and concentrate fire on one dude. Remember, for every gunfire dodge after the first, the dice pool shrinks by 2.

One grenade is just begging for a magic fingers or levitate to pick it up and toss it back.

Air bursted grenades from an Alpha don't suffer from this drawback. I can't remember the last time anyone used a hand grenade. I know I had a character use one years ago playing SR3, but that was due to an ambush.

Yeah, I think all the grenades I see in my game now are airburst.

A caveat that I would point out(that I keep pointing out in fact), stupid people do stupid things, smart people do smart things. Low level Grunts are stupid people who do stupid things. Smarter Grunts do smarter things.

Unless you would encourage your dumb-as-post PC to use smart tactics (aka use player knowledge instead of remaining IC), I would say that smart PCs plowing through mobs of dumb NPCs should come as no surprise.

Or impact.

Survival instinct can make some stupid people do smart things like adhere to basic training

Force 10 fireball coming on line.

Medic!!

Ah, the drain is better now.

One wouldnt be so bad. Its the fact that two of you can cover huge areas first IP that pisses me off. And its not like I can take your "Mage sticks" away like I can with guns.

Can I just say how awesome this forum is? I've gotten a wealth of responses in just a few hours, and every single one of them has filled my head with awesome ideas for stuff to do on runs. I can't wait till our next session.

Well done.

Well. Now if only drain was really that easy to heal.

If only it wasn't! (You could house rule it so but RAW, drain is no more difficult to heal mundanely than a similar wound from other sources.)

You can't use the Heal spell to heal drain damage. Specifically.

Still though... Two actions that even the dumbest rent-a-cop elementary school dropout will do almost instinctively when faced with a heavily armed intruder are:

1) Run for cover while shouting for help.
2) put as much lead in the general direction of the person who just scared the shit out of them. If they have a gun capable of it this will involve suppressive fire or bursts, otherwise they will just pull the trigger as fast as possible.

Both of these will vastly increase the survivability of grunts. Between this thread and the Lone Star one I almost get the impression that you have the average grunt reacting like this (or this if they're Knight Errant I guess) which might be cool for a thrill gang or a bunch of psychos on combat drugs and might work great for your campaigns but I think it's a far cry from how a security guard would actually react when faced with someone who wants to kill them.

Will they make dumb moves? Sure, but they'll make dumb moves that (they think) increase their chances of survival.

Also security guards (of any kind) are going to have a Loyalty Meter: how much damage are they willing to take before they say "fuck this shit, I don't get paid $12 and hour to DIE" and run away.

Those aren't the actions even the dumbest rent-a-cop will do almost instinctively - he could instinctively just piss his pants and do nothing or drop prone and pray the intruder doesn't kill him.

True, but they would have to be at a pretty low level of competence for that to be the case.

The 6th world is a pretty barbaric society, under an equally thin veneer of civilization. The average person is going to be much more accustomed to violence than a 2009 suburbanite, which lets face it, most of us are. Everything from combat sports and radically violent sims to the nightly news teaches people how to survive with that. Propaganda for weapons is all over the place and a far greater portion of the population knows how to handle them. People that can't react somewhat well to a crisis won't even make it to grunt security guard, or humanis thug or even competent stuffer shack clerk if they couldn't handle themselves in a fight, or at least deal with someone pointing a gun at them. Hell they would have been killed by looters during the 2nd crash or the technomancer riots, or any other big shakeup in the past 5 years if they couldn't deal with that.

This means that pissing your pants just wouldn't be a reaction that they would have. Are they brilliant? No, but at some level they're survivors.

Not only that, but just for gameplay reasons, killing guards who are pissing their pants really isn't a challenge or much fun IMO. If you can make them tougher by fighting smart (or at least smartish), they can become one.

Also sometimes the security might not be trying to so much defeat the runners head on, but delay or lure them. A high security facility can be an opponent in it's own right. Aside from all the detection systems you have wi-fi negation, hardwired auto-turrets, gas delivery systems, etc. A security teams goal might sometimes involve redirecting or luring the runners into the facilities own intrusion countermeasures.

Actually all those things do not teach people how to survive a violent encounter. Sports, sims and the news are entertainment. Weapons are a lifestyle option.

You do not know who will react well to a crisis until they have experienced it for themselves. So pissing your pants and not provoking the aggressor would be a reaction they would have. At some level, they were survivors.

For just for gameplay reasons, there is no reason for the runners to kill sec guards who are not offering any resistance, provided they cannot identify the runners. You can keep the bodycount down by making the guards harder to kill or making the guards not worth the effort or the ammo. I can challenge my players without making my sec guards tougher to overcome.

All you need are lase rounds. One shot they fall down and forget you.

I agree, but the level or training will change the curve. If you look at real life security it runs the gambit between your typical 'flashlight cop' to high risk fast response teams that are more like mercenaries then what people would associate with security. In SR it seems pretty much the same though runners are more likely to have run-ins with the higher end of the scale. Despite the varying different levels of capability and training, there's a few commonalities between all of them that will determine how they'll respond.

The first thing all of them will do is report there situation to there superior. This could be there team leader, shift supervisor, spider or what ever. This could mean using a comlink, radio, hitting a panic button, yelling or all of the above. It will be the first priority for all levels of security and may require the security to take cover or run away if things are to hot.

The other thing they will do is cover there own ass. If they are outgunned or out maneuvered they will back down, fall back or bug out. Unless it's bodyguard and sometimes fast response work the rule is, my life is more important then yours. The reasoning is that if the guard dies he can't relay what happened or help survivors survive. This means that if the runner group has an obvious advantage, the security will not engage the group and will try to contain them or call in bigger/more guns (this may include Lone Star) if available.

I would almost always assume that if standard security personnel encounter runners, they will almost always avoid direct conflict unless they have an obvious advantage. This means being at least equally armed and using choke points, drones, access control, ambush and greater numbers to contain/eliminate the threat.

I ask myself this question: What do security personel do when they encounter intruders? Run away unless they have an obvious advantage? Challenge and apprehend them? What do they do? They would do the same when they encounter my PC runners.

If the security personel think they are outclassed, they would avoid conflict unless they think they have an advantage. But first of all, they'd need to know they are facing professionals, not the punks they put away last week, and how would they know that?

At the higher Professional Rating, the Grunts are smarter. However at Professional Rating 2, a corp sec is Intuition 3 and Logic 2, not really dumb but still slow on the uptake.

Obvious cyberware, higher class of weapons, equal (general rule of thumb is approach with two to one), greater numbers, etc. This is why the first encounter with security personnel will usually involve the guard/s assessing the situation and making a report to whoever is in charge. This means that if you have a group of runners in a secure facility that obviously don't belong there and are wielding weapons, the guard that happens by will most likely not confront the runners and will go someplace safer and report what he/she saw if able to do so.

On Edit: If this is your typical corpsec and the runners appear to be lightly armed (pistals, stun batons, maybe a sub or two) the corpsec will approach with twice the number and try to exploit terrain and anything else they can use against the runners. If they appear to be heavily armed (use your imagination) or can confirm there's mojo, then they'll likely bring in a rapid response team and back that up with as much typical corpsec as available along with drones and mojo if they have it.

They will try to contain the situation as much as possible. If they can do that without getting into a firefight they will, but it's shadowrun so they will kill if needed.

This assumes that a lone sec guard manages to detect the runners without any of the runners detecting him and swiftly neutralising him in return. That is not likely at all, if you are using most of the player created builds seen here.

The reference is to the use of First Aid. You can heal up to level boxes of damage with First Aid. So imagine healing 4 boxes of drain in 4 rounds after the fight is over.

In a sense, its easier to heal Physical Drain.

BlueMax

Don't try to win!

The Shadowrun rules do not approximate real life gunfights. They don't even approximate movie or TV gunfights. They are closest in spirit to first person shooters like HALO where you can chew through multiple enemies without getting scratched.

Try designing your combat like a level from a computer game, not a battle. Let the PCs blast their way through one group of goons, move to a new spot and blast through another, etc. Combat will take as many rounds as the PCs have distance to move . . . .

Only if your medic has their skill at 4 (or better) and gets 6 successes.

Not saying it's impossible, just saying that you aren't going to be right as rain.