About to start a Shadowrun campaign (ran a couple in the past uner 4th Ed rules) and I want to get away from that whole "Okay, so you all receive a call from a fixer to meet" as a way to get all the characters together.

I like my games to be a bit more character oriented and free flowing, so I'd like to take a more organic approach to getting everyone together. My idea is to all have them working on a different part of the whole plot (for their own reasons) and have it all converge at various points so the characters can meet each other.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has tried this, or if anyone sees any red flags with this approach?

Thanks!

I have used this method once. Since they are shadowrunners who tend to keep their business secret until they need to share, I had to do a lot of preliminary legwork before the actual Saturday night game. Whether through email or a chat over coffee/beer, I took each individual player and gave them a 'mini run' to get them situated on their respective jobs.

It took a little extra work but I think it was better for the opening of the actual campaign. Each character came in with a little game time under his or her belt to help build on the character concept before meeting the rest of the team.

My favorite campaign starter, however, was introducing the shadowrunner team in the middle of combat, escaping a corporate response team.

The only game I have GM'd so far used this approach. I only really play at table (Thankfully my Uni has a fairly large Roleplay Society) but we are all fairly heavy roleplayers, in fact one of my players was a Creative Writing student type. So instead of just throwing everyone together and saying "Hey, everyone, your all a Shadowrunning team, and your fixer just called you" I had each player write out a semi-detailed history (The 20 Questions thing in the Shadow Runners Companion thing is great for this, plus it lets me reward good history building with some Karma) and then ran them through a mini-shadowrun to explain how they all got together.

This basically involved pulling each player aside and using VoiP software to go through the events that lead up to each player joining the group and then a Starter Run (The Fixer Contact I gave them all for free needed a few Gangers removed from a part of town) to get them used to the rules. It worked nicely and it set the tone of a more Street Level game that I was going for.

Its hard to keep things a secret when you are all at the same table. And you are putting a lot of stress on your GM to keep everyone involved semi-equally.

I've found that its normally just the GM that really gets tired of "you get a call from a fixer" campaign starter. The players really don't care (normally). They just want to get past all the intro shit and start playing.

Now, if you are playing PbP or whatever, you really can keep secrets and actually have a lot more leeway in getting started separately.