Some will remember my last run where i have put the chars. in an volcanic inferno right in the middle of hells kitchen. Unfortunately neither the chars. nor the players know ANYTHING about volcanos, pyroclastic clouds, calderas or earthquakes etc. So they stumbled in some quite difficult situations. If i assume my own knowledge, the only sources i got informations about this happenings are my college-education and my personal interest in documentations. But my friends are more into soccer and their chars. have no school-education at all. They also lack ANY knowledge skill that is academic or an interest skill that could be defaulted on.

So do you see any chance to prevent such situations for the future? Should i launch a "general education"-knowledge skill that they could refer to? What, besides their knowledge skill, does a char. know about his world? I mean, that is what knowledge skills are for. If you don´t have it, you don´t know anything about it.

Remind them between sessions to ask you "does my character know anything about this" ? Maybe someone saw something in a doco trid, or maybe something is simply common knowledge. When actually running the mission, though, don't offer them any help. I'm guessing shadowrunners could search for info on the matrix in real time (4th ed.), even without any formal education.

Last session of D&D I played, my players had to topple a stone arch. They attacked the heavy stone pillars of the arch, and it took them quite a while. They could have succeeded much quicker had they attacked the central stone of the arch, but I knew that because of my academic education. They didn't know it, but they could have asked me about it, had not most of my adventures be about combat and exploration, with very little riddle solving. Just make them aware (as I did after the session ended) that there might be situations where academic knowledge and original ideas might come in handy, and they should ask me about it if they encounter an unexpected phenomena. In D&D, unexpected, sadly, means anything other than combat or traps, at least for me and my group.

I have the problem in reverse with my shadowrun GM. He knows a lot about computers, and I basically know how to turn them on and off. So i'm pretty sure he can come up with ideas that I will not expect in any way. So i'm just going to ask him about stuff that may well be common knowledge for a 2070's person, but totally unknown to me.

It's not hard to use the SR equivalent to Google to find basic info via commlink.

I'd also suggest that many knowlege skills should be ablle to Default to the Attribute for Test with a Threshold 1 or 2. A high Intuition and Logic can substitute for a basic knowledge of a great many things.

The problem is having the players even realize that they can do something about a problem they have no real-life knowledge about. They may not even realize that the cave they are exploring may have dangerous gases under some depth, so they may not even ask. Of course, the GM in such a case should alert the players, but in other cases alerting the players spoils the entire point of the riddle/challenge.

That is the point. If i would be in such a situation, i could refer to knowledge i didn´t even learned in college. So i have spent karma (which means i invested a lot of time) but they didn´t. Even if you have a logic of 6, you wouldn´t know that some gases are lighter than air and reaching a high spot could save your ass (just think of tribes that don´t have much contact with civilization).

About the Matrix-search, i should have added that the signal was broken because of the ashes, fumes and whatever the volcano had to offer. I wanted them to be on their own.

Next time i will kill them, so that they care a little bit better about their knowledge skills.^^

Why didn't they slot a knowsoft? Or is that jost soooo sr3?

Hmm...because they care more about drinking in bars than thinking about possible catastropies.^^

I've never had a character who had knowledge ranks involving volcanoes. That doesn't mean the characters are poorly thought out. It's a game; the characters shouldn't have to be geologists.

What skills would even be useful?

Geology
Volcanoes
Earth Sciences
Pacific Northwest or Pac Rim history, geography, or current events
Evaculation Techniques

... what are you really expecting from these characters? Knowledge skills are important, but if they are playing street toughs or soccer hulligans, you can't really expect them to know about volcanoes.

With that being said, I believe you can default on knowledge skills, just like you can with active skills. Everyone knows something, after all. If the knowledge is REALLY common place, make the Threshold 0, and have them roll to see if they glitch.

Would you think of the mentioned problem being a Threshold 0-task?

Woo, brb, going to go double check the situation.

Reading back, you just make reference to your last run. If there are more specific details, I'm missing it. No, I would not normally consider volcano stuff to be threshold 0 unless it's super simple (though low Logic tourists glitch all the time and walk out on the hot volcano fields...). In this case I added the threshold 0 note just to be thorough, since we were talking about knowledge tests. Depending on the situation though, alot of volcano stuff should be fairly low threshold (1-2), and if I was trapped in a similar situation, I would totally use some edge on the knowledge test.

(Or convince you that it was a intution situation, and thus have lots O dice to default with.)

Now i am curious what will come out.^^

Sorry it wasn't more interesting.

Hmmm...

The point of the game is to have fun, and lacking knowledge about science fields like this shouldn't interfere with that fun to such a large degree as your suggestion implies. That solution screams "dickhead" to me, but since you claim to be posting from Germany, that puts it in a different light.

Aeeeehmmm...what exactly do you want to say with that?

IME, the playstyle of German gamers and me having fun don't mix well together.

Yeah, we stick to the rules. And wanna know what i experienced? The older you get, the more you stick to the RAW.^^ I can remember the good old times where we didn´t knew how to play that game. The one that said first "i shoot" had the first IP.^^

In my opinion going in the Hell Kitchen without any knowledge (be it accademic or legwork) is downright moronic and suicidical (and amatourish/unprofessional). The 6th world isn't the friendliest place to live in and anyone who hasn't spent his/hers life sheltered in a corporate box will know better than going around without any knowledge of the area (especialy of its gangs and various hazards); with the ubiquitus matrix aquiring information is not an issue, if the runners have chosen to not pay attenction they deserve to suffer the consequences (including the hit to their reputation for being totaly incompetent).
Mechanicaly speaking the runners can ask to contacts or do some matrix search, in both the cases the treshold of the test should be "1" and buying hits should be allowed as the information is a simple scentific bit of non-paydata (Earthpedia is there for everyone) and if the players don't have enough wisdom to do some legwork the charactes should be allowed to make an INTUITION + LOGIC (1) test to see if they have the common sense that the players seem to lack (shadowrunners are supposed to be paranoid). Also remember that as GM you can decide that that simple piece of data is common enough to allow defaulting the test, making it a LOGIC - 1 (1) test.
The most important thing to do, however, is to talk to the players and make sure they know the importance of the legwork, the consequences of failing in it and that the cold shower will come if they botch; play hard but fair, your players will love and hate you for that.

I preface this with: I have no knowledge of you, your game, or your players. There got that out of the way.

That said, this situation sounds pretty lame and like you haven't progressed much from your early days of playing. A GM's goals can be varied, but if you diverge from where the game has been and then throw the characters into a situation that they have no knowledge about....it's merely a deathtrap.
The players only have so much they can do with their characters builds. Unless you give opened-ended amounts of BP for skills, or allow them to build based on backstory rather than BP, it's rude to expect players to use karma or money for such esotaric skills as Volcanic studies, Spelunking, or Geothermal Hydrodynamics. These things, unless hinted at, show up so rarely that it's just silly to waste points on them.

Hopefully, the players had fun and learned a lesson about being prepared, but the GM knows the limitations of the players and has the obligation to try and test them within those limits...or at least give them some way to know about the situation they are in.

The four that I've played with knew the rules well enough, but tended to follow them doggedly even to illogical extremes. Additionally, loopholes left by the designers were exploited, because the 'rules allowed it' and fun really suffered.


I've seen quite the opposite in my times with non-German gamers (I havn't played with the German set in almost 10 years now). Older players are more willing to accept that the rules can't cover everything and don't cover some things appropriately to maintain the fun of the game. IME, it's the younger and less mature players that seem stuck on RAW over fun.

Meh, I'm in the "kill them" camp provided that you didn't throw them into the volcano via DM Fiat. However I have to agree with HappyDaze when it comes to playstyles, the people I've played with tend to drift away from RAW as they mature, not towards it.

Aha, so you think that situations where you don´t know everything about, that might be risky because you lack knowledge etc, are lame? I thought it would be interesting, and dealing with dangerous situations by getting creative would be fun. But the opinions may differ. I can remember the times, where every player read every book. You hadn´t been able to throw ANYTHING at them, because they were not surprised a bit. THAT was lame.

I do not see why that would be lame. The characters would be surprised if they did not know about whatever you were throwing at them, the players might know, but that would have been OOC knowledge. Using OOC knowledge without an IC reason to do so is lame. Not able to throw anything because the players read everything is lame, on the GM's part.

Yeah, but you can´t always build runs around your runners knowledge. I can remember very well, as i started in the renraku arcology at "shutdown" with bow and arrows, because i thought it had been overrun by ghosts. I play mages, i had no idea what came up to me, i didn´t make a proper research, i paid for it.

Putting characters (and players) in odd situations is great...taking them out of their comfort zone is something that is needed. But the GM can put characters in a killzone situation at any time. Oops, the owner of the crappy general store saved all his money for years to get the automated weapon system with maxxed out sensors and rotary canon...everyones dead...haha you all should have known! The pilot light on the stove was out and when you shot a weapon it ignited it and blew everyone up! haha should have known. You get caught in a volcanic eruption even though that volcano has been dormant for 10,000 years..haha you should have known.

understand that my argument is really about somantics. If you had put them in the same situation, but with access to information about volcanos and survival in them (i.e. a scientist or FEMA type npc or even a pock. secretary with files about it) then it would have been on the characters to access the information and use it. But your description said that you made it so they had no contact with information and that you knew the characters had no knowledge skills about it and then you are going to penalize them for it with possible char death. Just seems unfair to me and little fun for the players...cause even the biggest nilmax char still wants to feel like they are doing something other than ramming their head into a wall.

From a GMing POV though, you have to be careful of the backlash of this type of stuff too....spend a bunch of time putting a game together just to have the players so "no thanks, that seems to dangerous."

If I were your gm and the run/campaign is going to central around the Renraku Arcology Shutdown, I would have probably let you know about it.

It's perfectly reasonable for a character to not know about what's going on in the arcology and take up the job anyway. But if it will make the character want to back out of the run or otherwise deviate too much from what the rest of the group, it might have been best to let the player know that his character doesn't suit the game as it is.


On the other hand, if it's only for a few runs, then the player might have to live with his character. Not everyone will shine in all circumstances, though he should probably have a fighting chance. 

Even if their character and the players themselves lack proper knowledge, you can suggest them to do some legwork before runs. If a character doesn't have knowledge skill: volcanoes or whatever, they can still very well do some quick google and find out. Depending on the group's preference, maybe all they really want is just to run and gun and not worry too much about the consequences. If you want to encourage them to do legwork, they will more likely do so if they find incentives behind it.




How would bow and arrows help with with a arcology haunted by ghosts, btw?