True. There is no story, this is an RPG. Taken literally, that paragraph could mean that fun could be sacrificed for the sake of "story". Fortunately for me, "story" and "plot" are undefined in SR4.

It doesn't even has to be laid out like this.
All you really need are the factions who are involved in the adventure, as long as they are linked by conflicting interests which are understandable to the GM so that he can let them act according to their interests and capabilities.
This is, in real life, how history is made.
Wars are waged based entirely on such basics.
It is what all politics boil down to.

Throw the PCs in the middle of that and it should be more than sufficient for adventure gaming, right?



Ah, D&D4.
I must admit that i haven't taken more than a casual glance at it in the FLGS.
It just didn't rock my boat somehow.
Unlike previous editions, they didn't make me go all "oh, shiny, i need this".
So take what i say about that game with a real extra grain of salt, but :
What i have heard about D&D4's approach to gaming sounds terribly trivial and boring.

NPCs do not exist to be "encounters", nor should they be designed according to the capabilities of the party.
They should have resources defined by their status in the setting and it is up to the players wether they dare to engage them or not.
They should have motivations, they should plan and plot and scheme, or go about their business in whatever other way would be appropriate for them, but they shouldn't just sit around in a dungeon and wait for the PCs to stumble in and kill them for XP and loot.

Not that it's wrong in a fantasy RPG to kill bad guys for XP and loot.
I just think that reducing a freely movable wargame with potentially unlimited dynamics to mere combat encounters arranged neatly in an order defined by metagame requirements is not enriching the hobby i enjoy in any way.
It replaces the linearity and predictability of the classic drama structure with the linearity and predictability of action-oriented videogames.
Not that there is anything wrong with either, i appreciate structure when it comes to art and design.
But in the games i truly enjoy the most, structures do not define an order envisioned by the designer a priori, but create complexity and interaction, thereby multiplying possible developments with each step taken.
These structures are not paths the recipient is guided along, but levers to influence the environment.

As well, a game world where you will always just run into tailor-made, "perfectly balanced", level appropriate opponents is, in my opinion (which is admittedly not a humble opinion in the slightest) an utterly boring place.
It is the opposite of adventuring.
It is a glorified version of bullying those weaker than you in the schoolyard.

Adventuring means exposing yourself to potentially fatal risks and having to use your cunning to minimize them and get out of it all in one piece.
The introduction of challenge ratings was, as soon as one applied them rigorously, the demise of this idea of adventuring.



To clarify this :
There was no story before.
There will be a story afterwards.
While we play, the story develops.
It's like life, but with the difference that you get thrown headfirst into an environment no sane person would wish to experience, but most people would love hearing about.

Well said! *applause*

Well if we really want to get the basic of the basic in running a game sure. It would make for good a straight up turf war with nothing but all out battle. You can only run that so many times unless your players really suffer from extreme ADD and truly lack imagination whatsoever. Sessions like that can be fun with a grain of salt. On the other side of the coin is the tossing in of a complication that causes the current adventure to just sidetrack into a whole new ballpark, maybe another turf battle is going on there like the one in The Warriors. Both are examples of extremes in how things can go. We could talk for years about this but it has gotten off the beaten path of what the original poster intended. Perhaps we should carry this into another post about the comparisons of prepared material vs purely winging it and all points in between.

In practice exactly the opposite. Really, 100% opposite of what you suggest.

Then I suggest you might give it a try if the opportunity presents itself. Oh you won't want to play a lot of it, I don't expect to either. So try just mooching the books, you don't even really need them once the PC is created. However WotC did a good job of refreshing and recapturing the essence of D&D. Also the sized to the party thing isn't really pressed anymore than prior, other than from all accounts it's mechanism for sizing opponents to the PCs is more reliable and easier. I only tried it out a couple sessions but it looks like it was in prior editions. That's the same thing I heard about 3e too and it didn't ring true then either ... other than you don't get a lot of support from the system when you wander off the XP chart reservation. It looks again like once the players have the hang of the rules kick off the interlocks and crank up the danger. It's the way it's really always been with D&D, this very stratified combat system and free-form improve theater between. *shrug*

I think someone upthread alluded to this, but I'll risk stating it again: The correct answer of how much role vs roll in any SR game is whatever the particular group in question wants it to be. My group might like story considerations overriding rules, another might be the opposite. Both are correct as long as the players and the GM are having fun.

Hehe...thanks a lot.



That's not roleplaying, then.
I do not need a GM for that, a computer could do the same job.
Like Dwight already wrote, my approach will result in pretty much exactly the opposite of that.
Unless both the GM and the players are extremely unimaginative and have no clue what to do in a game besides shooting people in the face, of course.

But assuming i, as a GM, do my job correctly, such very basic arrangements will provide highly complex interactions, as i have written in my previous post.
I mean, you can try to do whatever you want in an RPG as long as either the rules cover it or the GM is able to make a judgement call for that action on the fly, right?
Why should i stick to shooting people up when i can produce goods, trade them, negotiate alliances, build up a gang of my own, set up legitimate or illegal businesses ranging from extraction of alchemical raw materials to bunraku parlors, do PR for my newfound enterprise, blackmail my opponents, run political intrigues, bribe the entire local police forces, hire mercenaries or do a hundred other things?

This type of gaming offers as many possibilities as real life, only that it is not your life or my life, but the life of people who set up gangs, syndicates, nation states, megacorporations or interstellar empires.
An all-out turf war may ensure somewhere in that process, but it is just one of many possible methods to go about one's business- if it is the only way for the players to handle things, they will end up pretty dead pretty soon.
There's so much more to open, permissive sandbox-type gaming than fighting.
And that's just the field of syndicate and gang operations- i haven't even briefly touched on possible activities in the media sector, the corporate world, a backwater place on the metaplanes or any other part of the sixth world.
Possibilities are endless.
And you don't need story for any of that.

What you need -and this is where we are getting back to our discussion- is good, old-fashioned role-playing.
Because this is how i, as a GM, determine what the opposition does and how it will interact with the PCs.
I do not look up what they are supposed to do in an adventure module, i play them as a good player would play his character.
I do what fits their character and their abilities when trying to achieve their goals.

Does this mean that i do not need dice or fixed rules?
Quite to the contrary.
Of course, in classic sandbox strategy simulations in 19th century Prussia (the origin of tabletop wargaming), rules only covered movement of troops on the playing field.
Outcomes of battle where decided by the players (and later referees) weighing plausibilities against each other.
So it is possible to enjoy even strategy-heavy, challenging gaming without too many rules and without any dice involved, simply utilizing methods of basic roleplay GMing.
But it would be disadvantageous and unnecessary to still do so nowadays, over a hundred and fifty years later.
Reliable rules provide a better, fairer, more reliable and less time-consuming, therefor also less intrusive, basis for conflict resolution that is easier to work with, less likely to be contested by the players and that, in itself, produces an additional set of challenges.

In a nutshell, rolling the dice and sticking to the rules whenever possible is the healthy basis for a game focussing on a challenge of the player characters, as has excellently been laid out by previous posters in this thread.

But it does not substitute the reasoning abilities of the GM.
There will always be decisions to be made which are not covered in the rules, most of all which actions the opposition will take.
And these parts of the game are usually what challenges the players, not the player characters.

I wholeheartedly believe that a great, memorable game will utilize both methods of resolution, the playing of roles and pondering of plausibilities as well as the application of hard mechanics and the quick and dirty dice rolling.

There is no dichotomy between roleplay and rollplay.
In themselves, they are both necessary and helpful tools to go about our hobby, even in the most combat-heavy games out there, even in games where no one is talking in character.
A good game will, in my opinion, always need both, no matter how little it seems to focus on one of these aspects.
They are absolute basics of our hobby, both of them.
There are forms of gaming, however, that overemphasize one of these two aspects.
And i believe that doing so takes something away from the game, something vital and essential.

Therefore, i disagree with the OP that a "roleplay"-heavy game is a widely applicable solution to the quarrels about SR4A.

This has nothing to do with the power level of the game either, one can be a rules lawyer in an ultra-gritty squatter campaign as well as a freeformer in an epic game involving mostly great dragons and immortal elves.
Roleplaying, not only as a method of task resolution, but also as acting in character, developing a character's personality and so on, is integral to anything but the most dumbed-down hack&slash scenarioes.
As soon as more than a simple recollection of game mechanics is involved, as soon as we leave the tactical level and simply start talking strategies, roleplaying becomes necessary to run a good game (note that i'm still mostly talking wargaming here, roleplay comes in at a very, very early stage of gaming!).
And i'm not even touching on the less conflict-oriented parts of the game, the social interaction between PCs and NPCs, the whole downtime (which all of a sudden becomes so much more important in the type of game outlined by me above) and so on.
Generals, emperors and space traders have their private lives as well, right?
As do PCs with insane dice pools.

Never let the fact that people pay a lot of attention to the rules fool you into believing that they do not also pay attention to the setting and their character's personality.
That i, for example, insist on considering the strategic level of the game does not mean i do not focus heavily on character development and acting within my role.
Quite to the contrary.
At the table, i can switch from hardcore strategist to dramatist within a moment's notice, and i love doing so, as it offers such a diverse and unique gaming experience.

And as i have hopefully made clear, as soon as i GM the way i want to, i have to do both.



Well, if it does, i'll certainly do so.
But it's not very likely, i do not know anyone who has switched over to D&D4 (but then, D&D over here is a lot less popular than in the US to begin with).

My last reply was touching on the preparedness levels and ability to realistically create a living world on the fly of various GMs. If you look at it in that context you will see that it was on point. I could write up a long example to better illustrate it but I do not have the time to do so right now.

Ah, okay, i see where you're coming from.

Well, you're probably right about that point.
Most adventure modules tend to provide very much in the sense of pre-planned encounters and plot lines and very little in the way of ready-to-use tools for open-ended play, so it's quite understandable that a lot of GMs, as well as a lot of players (whose engagement is crucial to make such a scenario work, down to such basic levels as character creation) simply aren't prepared for it and wouldn't turn it into a working campaign.

Unfortunately, the adventures i've read so far for SR4 (Ghost Cartels and Emergence) didn't really provide what i was looking for as a GM either.
Which is kinda sad, as SR is, for various reasons, a wonderful setting for this kind of game.
What's particularly disappointing is that SR used to have supplements that really helped in running an entire sprawl as an open-ended, sandbox style campaign.
Sprawl Sites was really useful for that, even though it was based on Seattle and my group at that time played in Berlin, Hamburg and the Rhine-Ruhr Sprawl.
I've been told that Cyberpunk as well as Traveller where also particularly aiming at that kind of campaigns, so it should be relatively easy to come up with a sprawl description like that for SR4.
I'd buy it in an instant.

I'm in the same boat. I've never been to fond of the adventures as they stand. Too many times I've seen the PC's just go off the chart. I am also anti-railroading in terms of what PCs do. That being said I would recommend the adventures (I did find Ghost cartels and Emergence good as background material as well as good for NPC stats should I need some).

Although I didn't find that very clear in your initial post, I'm still going to have to say "no, not really". The GM preparation for what he's talking about looks a little different than what you might think of as preparation, and Shadowrun rules aren't structured optimally for handling it, but the alternative of having highly structured prepared stuff tends to create such problems as you run hard into the "invisible" walls created by the preparation limits. If you happen to exceed that wall things deteriorate very, very quickly. Surely you've seen this?

I've seen GMs that profess to being poor at on the fly stuff (and I agreed they aren't particularly good relatively speaking) pull off some pretty damn cool stuff anyway. Especially when they learn to ask and listen.

Ghost Cartels is pretty good if you like flying by the seat of your pants. I do, so it's a good product for me. Those who like more fully-statted campaigns might find it not to their liking.

Emergence, however, is a piece of tripe. Even Knasser was hard pressed to find nice things to say about it.

Well prior to the age of computers I relied on organized binders along with index cards and so all that jazz for prep and session work. Thankfully the days of relying on that are behind me and the stuff is in some corner of my basement gathering dust. Now in the age of computers it is so much easier to organize things for running a mission. You can quickly cross reference for rules, toss in opposition, add on the fly complications and other various things involved during a session. Web page format is very nice if you have spare time on your hands to actually transfer the source material over to it. This has the benefit of being able to add notes to the corresponding section during play if that specific thing will appear later on down the road.

Exactly the sort of preparation I was NOT talking about. Other than potentially NPC sheets EDIT: ...for the few "major" NPCs that are nigh certain to come up.

Having a variety of tools at my disposal for any given situation the players initiate during a mission is something I prefer to follow and not be stuck fumbling around with. I know ahead of time what the basis of a mission is. It just helps lower response time when resolving a situation or adding something during play. To me anything less than being one step or more ahead of where the players might lead me is sheer folly on my behalf. Running into so-called "invisible walls" has never been an issue for me. Perhaps the fact that I am selectively unemployed probably has something to do with that. I find myself with too much time on my hands very often and I have to fill it by doing something constructive.

One of the problems with SR4 is that it's very unfriendly towards improvisation. You could create a statless NPC for roleplay purposes, only to have it become a major figure with abilities the team heavily depends on. According to RAW, you have to fully stat up that NPC, down to niggling details like calculating Essence and buying gear. And gods help you if it's supposed to be a roughly equal NPC; by RAW, you have to build them up like a shadowrunner. What's more, you have to do all this during game, wasting valuable playtime.

The players have never gone more than "one step" ahead of you? That may be fine for turf wars ....

It isn't the friendliest. No small part as to why I'm working on this. It is however workable to an extent.



Essence itself isn't usually a requirement to know on the fly. A lot of the 'ware details can be handwaved too till later, unless you are going crazy with it. The only times these really come up is when the mage reads auras [and succeeds]. I just write down the ballpark range it gets limited to for later correlation, like certain 'ware must be Alpha or higher, essence must be above 3, etc. Niggling details of healing NPCs is something that is pretty rare to worry about during play ... I don't ever recall it coming up. Essence just doesn't make a huge difference in that way.

If you are "buying" gear rather than just slapping down a list for the NPC that looks right there's a major malfunction in your process.



Trying to build an NPC as a legal starting character during the session is crazy. Even if you have a computer on hand that's about 10-15 minutes of concentration solely on the computer.

Furthermore it doesn't actually make a lot of sense, especially if you are using the standard building process. The individual parts of the NPC tend to be much more important for capability balance than the whole BP number, if you are worried about capability balance. Then once the PCs have some time (and money/gear accumulation) under their belts you don't even have a proper gauge for the number of BP to use.

For surprise NPCs just throw basic numbers down on a sheet as they are needed in the session. Or flip to the middle of the book and read out of there if this is really bog standard. Then fill it out between sessions as necessary, assuming the NPC has survived and is likely to show up again (not particularly often depending on how bloodthirsty and violent your group is ).

Exactly my point. By the book, however, what makes an NPC into a Prime Runner is the fact that it's been built like a starting PC. So, making a Prime Runner on the fly is virtually impossible.

Even just tossing down some numbers is difficult, if not impossible. Often times, it's dice pool sizes, and not stats + skills, that determine how powerful an NPC is. You can't just throw down some stats, you've got to back it up with cyberware, specialized gear, magic, or what have you. You have to build your dice pools, you can't simply assign them.

Agreed that this part of the system does make it harder to judge what ultimately the pools are going to look like. What helps is to keep your stats clustered fairly tightly, at least within the categories of physical and mental (if you look at PCs this is sort of how it tends to play out anyway, over time). That way you avoid really wild results. Keeping the gear fairly basic for bonus die helps a lot too.



Sure you can, and work out the details between sessions if they will be required. "This is a 'street sam', he's got a bunch of body work so I'll give him physical stats ranging from 6-8. Body 8, Strength 6, Reaction 6, Agility 7, IP 3". EDIT: It does require a good familiarity with the effects of certain pieces of cyberware, such that if you want the above street sam to have bone lacing you need to pick the type and factor that into how the Body dice work.

Now this does get more dicy when you've got PCs with r33t surgery and cyberware technical skills. If they (the player) insist on drilling down to the details in the face of the fact that you just fabricated the NPC (with it's partial details) in front of them then toss it back on the player to work it out. Keeps them busy ... and they probably even like mucking around with that part of the rules. It's what they were interested in when taking those skills, right?

That's still a lot of work to do on the fly, especially for a character you never intend to get into combat. I might have a firearms instructor who was intended as a contact, but gets dragged into a firefight. Now, I have to decide what he's capable of in a hurry. My preferred method is simply to assign a dice pool size: 15 for shooting, 5 for dodging, whatever armor for defense, etc. It's a lot faster, a lot easier, and completely illegal according to RAW.

I've never done it that way explicitly. I guess I kinda do that in that I say "what size do I want my pool to look like" and quickly work backwards. Though calling it "illegal" for RAW is a bit of an overstatement. It only becomes invalid against the rules if you happen to pick a certain set of dice pools that can't later be reconciled back to stats and equipment. There is some wiggle room there and if you pick a series of "reasonable" pools there is a pretty good chance you can work it out later.

They try but so far I have done a decent job in thwarting such attempts. I probably just jinxed myself but I will gladly place the blame on you instead har.

Like life, NPCs (Contacts, Grunts, In-Betweeners and Prime Runners) don't always have to be fair(ly balanced) to a T. These four types have varied levels that need to be applied to them during creation but there is still a certain bit of leeway you can apply.

Contacts: Mostly they include purpose and a general stat/skill block. Having some minor gear templates just in case never hurts. If required you can use a Grunt stat block or fully created as a Prime Runner of varied level even if they might not be treated as such from the start.

Grunts: General grunt stat block format. A decent number of these are available in various books/missions

In-Betweeners: No stat block needed here as they just don't measure up or stick around to even try. It never hurts to have a few boilerplate stat blocks made up. One day Joe Average the next door neighbor might take matters into his own hands and move up in the world and he had to start somewhere.

Prime Runners: Complete load-out of stats and gear based on assigned level.

Over time your repository should fill out and make it far easier in the NPC department. Even if you create an extra one of each type, not including those associated with a mission, a week in your spare time the numbers will add up.

When all is said and done though, sometimes the best you can hope for is that you build and use NPCs in at least a semblance of balance.

As for the whole rules system, I have always preferred d20 systems. While not the biggest fan of every aspect of the new 4e DnD system there are a bunch of systems that I do favor. I am currently working on a hybrid Shadowrun system as opposed to a straight conversion.

I think they might just be humouring you, or they are a very passive group. Why do I say this? Because of this line: "I know ahead of time what the basis of a mission is."

I just don't get your reply there beyond possibly just trying to be somewhat confrontational in execution. Honestly, if I don't know the basis of a mission and what the players might possibly be heading into who does or should? Things can't be truly so open ended that we all just show up and make everything up on the spot or chaos would ensue more often than not.

So with that said I will sidestep to this, perhaps you might be more free with not leading your players as much as I might. This is one of the things I use to decent enough effect, without actually doing things for the players. Otherwise they would probably end up scratching their heads at what is going on or why they are even playing in the first place. I present the complications and it is up to them to sort out the approach and resulting solution(s) and in turn it is up to me to be able to respond in kind so things keep moving along toward the eventual roundabout for the preset goal(s). The players are not really given a chance to be passive. If I allowed that, things will just keep moving along without them since they don't have some magical time stop ability. This ends up with some things in the mission they could have had a hand in being removed altogether and replaced with a separate means to the original end which is at the core of allowing them freedom of choice without my failing to keep it all together.

Nobody gets warning about "missions" that come out of thin air during the session. I say something offhand not really thinking about it, player says "so there's a car lot on the corner?" "Er, yeah I guess I said that." "I need some wheels, let's rob that place."



Actually, yes they can and yes kickass "chaos" ensues.

The scenario I gave above was hypothetical. But a real situation was that the PCs were hurt from the main action for the night. They called up a street doc and got treatment but didn't have the cash in hand to pay for it. So on the spot I gave them (via the doc's mouth) the option to work it off by knocking over a drugstore to replenish the street doc's medicine cabinet. It was a whole "mission" that we just made up and ran in the last 30-40 minutes of a session.

The fallout for that little side run reverberated in the background for a number of sessions. Because they decided for whatever reason to "hold up" the place with grenades. The players didn't even speak the plan, it was kinda erie, bloodthirsty group think. It was quite memorable.



If your players haven't gone to a solution outside your expectated set yet I suggest they aren't really putting on their thinking caps, they've learned from experience to stay inside your walls, and/or you are pushing hard to keep them inside. I'm suspecting at least a good measure of the later because it sounds from the end of that post you are doing your best to not allow them to be proactive.

EDIT: Another name for walls, when they are tight, is rails.

They do sidetrack the main mission as I have noted in previous replies about running a session. Mostly anything they present in response to a given location/situation is usually already prepared to be responded to or in the realm of on the spot drop-in relatively quickly without a slowing of pace. Sometimes I will call a group break if I want to spend a bit of extra time being somewhat anal while expanding upon or adjusting what I already had prepped based on player actions during the mission. I keep that to a sheer minimum and usually it happens only once or twice in a long while.

I do my best to prepare for all avenues that might be traveled during my prep time, which can be rather excessive. As I go over the mission I ponder what likely options I would possibly take as a player. This allows for additional notes based on if things go one or more ways. Over time the players lend a hand in this since I have the knowledge of basic patterns in their methods of working certain things out. From that I can come up with ways to avoid repetitive player response to some of the more common occurrences. I can toss in some kinks to future iterations that won't give them the common results they have come to expect so they need to find new ways around old problems. 16 years of running various revolving game systems gives new aspects to add into the next one in the shuffle. There are always new things to learn though which is why I also put in a good bit of time with absorbing info from various source materials. I suppose like a boy scout I try to always be prepared.

What if it's the "main" mission that gets the axe? Serious. The session starts up, Mr. Johnson calls and makes the job pitch, the players say "We don't like this Johnson, screw his job. We're going to do X instead". Has that ever happened? What do you do then? You call a big "break" and try plan something out?

EDIT: Really, I don't exactly see how you can effectively plan the "side tracks" even. Unless you have a positively massive set of side tracks, as in boxes and boxes ... or you are only pretending to give them choice.

I guess my players just respect me enough, due to the work I put into preparing a mission and exectuting it, that they don't just say screw this whenever they feel like it right out of the gate. I do not have a rule against them occasionally pulling the "Iwanna" card from the start. In a way our roles get reversed and they become the GM of the night while I take on the role of their aide while still being the true GM. They can lead me on where they please since that is a very big part of the whole concept of an open ended game system. Not being able to respond because of that is just a lack of effort, game knowledge or perhaps some of both on my behalf. Once again this is something that I do my best to avoid.

Sessions were rigid at the beginning when we first started out mainly as a way to set some groundwork up. Over time things opened up. Player input is important so I always spend time outside of the group sessions discussing varying aspects of motives and goals for both themselves and as a group. This benefits myself as the GM and the others as players. As stated above, boxes of material are a thing of the past and everything is computer based now.

With all that said, I am done with this thread for real now since it is becoming more of a discussion on varied GMing methods as opposed to what the original topic was. Feel free of course to reply as I will take the time to read it if you choose to but I will not continue in this thread past this reply.

They humour you. Well I guess the way you describe it it's a bit more like being captive to guilt. Yeah, I know the feeling. "Hey, he put a lot of work into this so we have to use it." That doesn't wash with me so much these days though (since I will either warn them prior or they didn't mention anything to me before doing whatever they were doing).



I'm guessing a good part of it is not understand how to prepare for it? I've never actually met someone that couldn't improvise to an extent. But it is very likely that all that prep work you are doing is actually getting in the way of your innate improvising abilities, as well as keeping you from developing them. You seem to genuinely fear something unplanned.



That's a really good first step. The next step would be moving some of that to inside the session some, mixing of their lead with your lead rather than just following when they take on the "GM role". Although, as per the discussion between Cain and I, SR doesn't have the greatest tools for this I suspect that if you are finding that you follow your players like that then you should be able to mix the two. They are improvising to at least some extent at that point, right? Maybe try figure out how they are doing it and riff with them on this?

It does sound like you keep notes? That's pretty important, it was something I had to learn.



I think it's actually directly related to the OP. This notion of needing to chose to sacrifice either rules for "story" is at least somewhat tied up in the idea of the GM keeping this firm hand on the rudder to make sure the plot stays on track with one of the limited number of threads that are prepared, ala the Choose Your Own Adventure books. If the GM has the notion to stay within the confines of those plot options then there is likely going to be a lot of pressure to fudge dice rolls or just flat out break rules to make it happen.



Thanks for heads up on that, no worries. Hope you take my comments in the spirit they are intended. Not that you are doing it WRONG but in that you can round out your skill set and avoid some problems you've run into (sounds like you have been working on this already). It's not like I never have any thing prepared prior to the game....with some systems. Some RPG games you basically can't prepare for, it all happens at the table.

For Emergence, it might be that the events decribed gave reason for one of my player's PCs to be even more paranoid (he has yet to meet the party face to face). I gave it to him to read since we are playing in late 2070 early 2071. Since it helped me as a GM gain a better understanding of Technomancers, I thought it was decent (definitely not one of the best, but not terrible either).

Interesting conversation...

Over the years, one of the things I've noticed about RPGs, Players and the way things are done seems to be based on the rules - at least partly.

For instance, RPGs that are numbers heavy [HERO, Traveller, AD&D, BattleTech, RoleMaster] seem to have rules for everything, or everything has attributes.
Everything is explainable, and there's little call to improvise - everything can be accomplished with dice roll, so there's little call to improvise.

RPGs that are numbers light [World of Darkness, Trinity, GDW task system, Star Wars] have a core set of mechanics that can handle most things, and many things are only vaguely described.
Players and the GM have to improvise, to fill in the details of what the dice rolls actually mean and what the results are [Roleplaying

I can't say I've never heard before roleplaying defined as "filling in the details of what the dice rolls actually mean". I'm not saying I don't like it but I've never heard it described before as "roleplaying". It's something that I like to do, and enjoy others doing. But ironically something I often don't see people do enough of, describing what the in-game result of the die roll looks like.

P.S. Although there could be correlation, I'm not convinced it entirely a direct causation. It might be a matter of how the game is laid out, tradition, and emphasis is put on player description rather than just how many "numbers" there are, how many things have defined attributes. I play one game that has incredibly dense and detailed character sheets that also relies heavily on players to fill in the details, to improvise what the "numbers" (including labels) and die roll results actually mean.

I wouldn't necessarily say that rules-heavy systems impede the ability to improvise and to describe what the numbers mean.
It's not the amount of rules that's a problem; what may be problematic is the overabundance of, or better : the complete reliance on predefined possibilities of acting within the game world.
And of course, mechanics do not have to be complicated to be complex, either.

Furthermore, one should not underestimate the meaning of mechanics even within an approach focussed heavily on an open-ended, creative approach to resolve situations within the game world.
There will always be situations where it is uncertain wether the players will succeed or to what extend they will succeed.
One may handwave such situations, making it dependant on the GM's whims what the outcome of a player's actions may be- but i'd rather prefer to see the GM as an intermediate instance, someone who does not directly decide on the outcome of a situation, but who produces a resolution mechanism for it that both allows for a quantification of success and includes chance as an element of uncertainty if necessary.
In other words : instead of judging by himself wether the PC is successful if the outcome of an action is questionable, the GM should decide on the kind of dice roll to be made, while the system should allow for an easy translation of the roll's result into the amount of success the PC has achieved.

In a sufficiently flexible system, rolling the dice cannot get into the way of narrating, as the game will not grind to a halt when i can simply say "roll for X against difficulty Y, including modifier Z" in any possible situation.

However, at the same time, the system has to provide a certain amount of rigidity, as a GM needs guidelines to base his decisions upon.
A system which is too rules-light will leave the GM and the players floating in thin air, unable to match actions to specific numbers.
We need a framework to match our narration reliably to the numbers used in task resolution.

Therefore, i do not per se believe rules-light systems to be more conducive to roleplaying.
Badly designed rules-heavy systems will restrict roleplaying, but badly designed rules-light systems will hamper it equally, although from a different angle.
Not by prohibiting actions the developers have not thought of, but by providing no assistance in finding a mechanic resolution on the fly, thereby seperating the numbers from any meaning.
Or, probably even worse, giving us mechanics which claim to have a certain meaning, but utterly fail to produce results that match the meaning the system attributes to them.

A fitting example for the latter is the DeGenesis RPG, which claims to strongly emphasize the storytelling approach, but is completely unable to reflect a character's abilities within the numbers that mechanically constitute said character (in fact, it is one of the, if not the worst example of neglecting rules design i have ever seen in contemporary RPGs).
PCs who are clearly described as elite soldiers with top-of-the-line equipment within the fluff have almost no chance of hitting an opponent in combat, for example.
As soon as the dice come into play, a massive disjunction between the player's imagination and the outcomes of mechanic task resolution is extremely likely to happen.
I have asked several experienced gamers from various groups playing DeGenesis how they coped with these effects, read up on several threads discussing that issue on the official forums and the answer has always been to avoid rolling the dice whereever possible, turning the outcome not into a storytelling game, but into storytelling without any gaming involved.

As i have pointed out above, i believe that such an approach takes away a lot of possibilities, surprise and tension from the gaming table and ultimately does not further player creativity, but instead hampers it, making the course the "game" is taking much more predictable and stale.

That, except I'd probably say "degree of reliance". It's a fine line to walk between giving too much info that drowns out GM/player input and enough for a strong, extensible framework.

Exactly. Although the implementation I'm used to is a little more egalitarian in that the the roll specifics (what ability to use, what difficulty to roll against) are agreed upon rather than solely GM decision, and determination of that flows directly from the player stating what they ultimately want to see for results in in-game terms. The later subject to joint agreement as well. Basically you kick it around a little till it looks right, and off it goes. It might sound like a lot of overhead but in practice the upfront work pays huge on the back-end and over time the up front overhead really drops off as everyone gets in sync.

Of course there is still occasionally a head scratcher that comes up that can take a few minutes of thinking cap time. Such as a player declared they wanted their PC to impregnate their new bride and bear an heir. So, umm, "Siring" is not a Skill you usually find on a character sheet, I'm not sure I'd want to play a game that did routinely have such a Skill on a character sheet. But we used one of the Attributes (Health) and set a difficulty. We used that rather than the Seduction Skill because I added the twist that the roll wasn't for whether or not it would happen but the planar disposition of the child produced by the union.

You know what the thing is about story versus a game?

In a story you get lots of improbable events and gutsy 15%-chance-of-success things happening and great social resonance because it's really just some writer pulling everything together.

If you play a game, like if you tried to play through an Operation Flashpoint mission with no saves, it would be highly unlikely that you'd succeed on your one and only chance. Therefore, one hallmark of the game should be simpler and more realistic plans with more failsafes and backups on the part of the player.

I'm in the middle of reading a Stony Man novel, Warhead, which I believe would be classified under the "techno-thriller" genre of mid-90s writing. It deals with stolen nukes, a secret above-the-law American commando unit, versus ninjas. And the whole book is packed with firefights where the commandos are going and engaging everyone all the time, and it works because it makes you want to start doing bicep curls with the hand you're not using to hold the book, and plus ninjas.

Ninjas are always universally applicable, but if someone made Stony Man: The RPG and tried to make a simulationistic firefight system, smart players wouldn't just be cavalierly engaging everyone in a firefight all the time. This is because no matter how great your skill and attributes are in a chaotic situation there's always a low probability of failure/death due to bad rolls. That's why in the real world, and in a dice-fall-as-they-may game, the characters would behave in a fundamentally different way and they'd probably avoid firefights whenever feasible. It would make for a totally different mentality and approach.

That's why I feel that the problem with "roleplay vs. rollplay" is that a STORY, with a predetermined outcome and underlying social resonance determined by the author, is different on the most elemental level from a GAME, where to preserve the integrity of the game everything comes down to statistics and luck.

I mean, you wouldn't sit down to play "War of the Roses" by Avalon hill with a bunch of friends, and when there's a battle involving Percy you guys all say, "Well, the card says that Percy was killed, but Percy was the Chuck Norris of the middle ages, so we're going to let that slide and say he survives. And, while we're at it, Warwick was killed instead, because that would be a more dramatic culmination of this battle." That would ruin the game and make it pointless. That's how a game is fundamentally not a story.

Here is STORY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfRttOmwucc

Here is a GAME: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXS4-Pwwq8k

I agree. I may not be completely free-form, but I have plots, not stories. The difference between the two is that a plot is something that will happen with, or without the player characters. They will have several opportunities to jump into it, though. At that point, they are one of the many random factors influencing where the plot goes. Rather than a story, I have NPCs with personalities and plans, who bounce off of each other and the PCs. And it will go where it will go. The GM sets things in motion, runs all of the other interested parties in the game, and is in charge of things that no one can affect, such as the weather or the traffic.

I like Shadowrun's dice mechanics, which let you determine things like jumping across a ledge, hitting someone, or bribing a border guard, without getting too bogged down. And there is even Edge, to smooth out the worst of PC bad luck.

We're discussing ref style again. In this case 'story' is being taken to mean a slavish tyrannical ditcum that the ref's pre planned series of events happen before all else is bad. Which it is.
Total belief that four to 13 hours of just rolling dice without internal character driven story/plot motivation providing a reason for this dice rolling is similarly bad.

A good game balances the drives of the players, the ingame reality of the characters and game world, the dramitic and emotional fulliflment of the story/plot with the real possibility of in game death and failure.
Any extreme renders the experence unfufilling for those involved.
Each balance point, which maintaince the group harmony and suspension of disbelief in game, is different for each group.

Its a collabrative effort. Ref spends hours/days/ months preparing a plot so everyone can have fun. Player turn up to play their characters to have fun.

If anyone in the group puts what they want to do above the groups enjoyment, no or less fun is had.
Player/s say I disrespect the time you have laboured ref, your here for our enjoyment only. Ref says screw you, run your own game.
Ref says your here to do my story and that is all. Players say, screw you and your story.

Its not rocket science. Collabrative mature roleplaying. A little give and take so everyone gets what they want.

This applies to free form to rules mechanics, story versus player choice, roll vs role, pink mohawk vs black ops etc
A good roleplayer, be they ref or player will find that balance.

Let me give you an example of how I ref, ~I enforce all of these points:
I am a story orientated ref, I will ignore dice rolls if they hurt the story, I will save characters to make a better story and will make sure the story follows my plot. I will allow my players to make suggestions to improve the story.
I am also a dice orientaited ref, I will enforce dices rolls to ensure failure or success, I will kill any character NPC or PC if that is the way the dice fall, I will let the story change and flow according to player decision at every turn. I will allow a bad roll or good roll to change the story.

If you see a paradox in these statements, go and think about it long and hard. When the paradox disapears you will understand and learned something of use.

There is no paradox. There is a contradiction. When you can see that, you will have learned something of use.

I still wouldn't want to sit down and play a game of "War of the Roses" if we played it following the rules up to a certain point until we decided that Stanely couldn't be killed, since we needed to kinda sorta steer him towards suddenly tipping the final battle of the game based on his choosing to appear or not appear, because we are all along shooting for a Shakespereian ending, because that is closer to Shakespere's plot and that makes a "better story".

I'd rather just play a straight up game of "War of the Roses" based on skill and luck.

But you don't see the problem there? You make all those decisions unilaterally about plot it can cause problems. You decide what's going on, it naturally puts that before the group since you've already decided all this stuff. Then...

... you rig the rules and subvert the few tools the players do have for input. EDIT: This in turn becomes the trigger for all sorts of disfunction at the table.

Thinking about the end causes a mess, and further you don't need to do that when concerned about "story". In fact ultimately the table nearly always better off if nobody does, instead staying in the moment. Provided you have decent rules that are built towards the style of story you'd like to end up with.

*sigh, smile* I could list my roleplay creditials but you dont know me, so you still choose to believe what you want to believe. So lets cut the crap.
The only reason to dismiss my above post is because you do not understand it. There are many reason why this might be but the fact remains that you do not.
Like many of you I have been round the block a few times and knew the kind of replies I'd get.

But for every hundred, hell every thousand that dont get it; I hope there will be one person that stops, considers and learns a new insight into roleplaying. And so takes this to their group and gets a deeper enjoyment from their hobby.

I believe that this forum has the potential and therefore the responsibilty, for experencied roleplayers to pass on their insights for the good of the entire community.
I do not want anyone to roleplay my way. I want to provide the tools for someone to make an informed choice to roleplay their way.

Being told the options is not the same as understanding the options.

Even if all I have proved here is that a large wedge of descernment should be wielded when reading dumpshock, I have achieved my aim for people to make a careful choice.

I hope one day you understand. Then you will redefine your actions today.

Nope, he's pretty much right.

I could swap roleplaying credentials with you, but let's just say that the rules exist to empower the players. You might like to try and cover it in Jack Handy philosophy, but the fact that you need to cover it up with philosophical double-speak shows that you don't understand these principles as deeply as you claim.

Sounds like an acceptable way to GM.

Going through the actual process of making some sort of "roleplaying resume" might give your post an even more pompous, aloof tone? Plus risk exposing your RP Experience Penis as being not quite as big, relatively speaking, as you think it is?

What you describe is fine if all the other players are fairly passive, interested only in playing bit parts while you tell The Big Story(sm). There are players like that. But as soon as a player that isn't like that in the extreme shows up at your table you are:
1) tempting disfunction (really a matter of when than if)
2) wasting the potential of that player to help improve the resultant "story"
3) wasting the potential of the game

With your ridiculous "there is no spoon" nonsense shoved firmly aside, there is very much a paradox to what you're saying. You can't let the dice fall where they may and ignore dice rolls, both at the same time. You can't make sure the story goes where you want and let the story change and flow at the same time. You can do all those things some of the time, but you can't do all of them at once, universally.

It's not a matter of me going and thinking about it, either. It's a matter of you saying "I'm a good, safe, defensive driver," and "I have four DUI's," in the same breath. You are describing things, and claiming them as universal traits, that are mutually exclusive. You might be a good safe defensive driver when you're sober, and you might be a horrible unsafe driver when you're drunk -- but you cannot be both things at the same time.

Yes it requires to you think.
Am no martyr. I dont take on the thankless task of trying to help those who dont want it. I do believe that that help should be there for people who do want it though.

Riddles, parabels, koans have all been use by greater people than me to try to convey an abstract concept you either understand or your dont. Quoting something does not mean you understand it.
And the constant aggressive 'drag them down ideaology' of if they post something then they deserve whatever they get, stops many from posting or coming back.

So, hit me with the hostility. I can take it. I knew it was coming. Because am not addressing you specifically. I am addressing thoughs that want another option and to try something worth while. You need to prove me wrong, why? How does this impact on you? What does it matter that a stranger on an open forum trying to help someone other than you, that requires vitrol?

Just think about or dont but next time you post, ask yourself would you mother be proud of this action.

They have also been used by people, that are right about your speed, spewing psuedo-intellectual gibberish with delusions of wisdom.