Greetings!

So my group and i are getting into SR4 and having a decent time of it. Im running them through last years Missions campaign. I was thinking that
the legwork portion of things seems too simple to me at times.

Runners need to know something. They call up their fixer, etc and make appropriate
tests and their fixers tell them what they know.

Thats how I've been playing it. How do you, my fellow GMs, handle legwork?

Runner's Companion has some more advance ruleage on the subject.

How about the Batman way?

The runners need to know something.
They call their fixers.
The fixers tell them who knows it.
The runners find the guy and hang him by the feet from the top of a 30 story building until he spits it.

For SRMissions, to avoid complicating the game too much and extending the length of the game, I think the legwork portion is necessarily short and simple.

If you wish, you could make the legwork portion of the game to be more involved and your characters can roleplay it.

* Roleplay: The fixer knows someone who knows, and arrange a meet with that new NPC.
* Challenge: Those who know the answer don't want to give it to the PC.
* Tension: Some people don't like it when PC ask around for something.

Interesting things that can happen during legwork (on the top of my head):
* The PC have to ask for something/someone in a place where they clearly don't belong: metahumans PCs having to go to a Humanis HQ or the classic gay-bar trick (though you'll have to update it since people are supposed to be more open-minded about it in 2070)
* The people the PC are supposed to talk to are all found dead with their severed head floating in their toilets.
* Someone/something is shadowing the PC during their legwork (in the physical world, astral plane or the Matrix)
* Someone suspicious enters during or after the meet with the contact.

Really dpends what you and your players are looking for. If you want to spend some more time into it , roleplaying out meets for information, you can go a lot more into depth. It can require more contacts as well, as you need to talk with people who's area of expertise deals with whatever you're looking into. Or it can involve checking other contacts besides the Fixer for people that might be in the know. As the bartender for a corp or Lone Star contact, or the chip dealer or stripper for a connection with a syndicate. Maybe it's a matter of finding the right site on the matrix, talking with the conspiracy buffs about what the government is "really" up to.

There are a lot of ways to change it up and add volume and depth to it. It can also be a great way to add more contacts to the PCs list. It will also take more time that way. You can throw back to something more like 2nd edt. Make an etiquette roll against a threshold the GM sets. The more hits you get determines the more info you're able to get from "various sources". It all depends really on how much time you want to spend on it.

Old Bruce Wayne: "I can't ever believe I was ever that green... THIS is how you interrogate a subject!" *Grips Cane*

Thanks all.

"heads floating in their toilets" Love that one!

Yes im looking to make it a bit more involved...to give a bit more flavor to the game. I know the missions were intended to be rather short, etc.
Just want to get my players involved and expand their minds a bit as to what they can do (they are SR noobs relatively).

Thanks again.

I highly suggest, in the case of them being n00bs, to let them roleplay the legwork, getting them more involved and letting thm enjoy it a little, rather than just 'roll, roll, roll, OK, this is what you've found..."
If they screw up, there's always the dice to fall back on.

As has been said before, players take to paranoia like ducks to water. If your players are already smart enough to do legwork, that means they are smart enough to want to do more legwork to check up on their legwork.

What I have done is the past is roll the PCs etiquette roll secretly, then rp the encounter with the contact. The resulting roll is the max info they can get from this guy, but if they don't ask the right questions...well then they miss out. It takes longer but is alot of fun if the players and the GM are willing to put the effort into making their contacts real people and not a stat block of knowledge skills.

I once had the PCs stake out the apartment of a head of security for a minor Corp. They found a Bowling Ball-Sized hole busting into his apartment wall (From the apartment next door.).

Had nothing to do with what they were there for, but it earned them some Karma for doing a good deed.

Just make sure the legwork scales to the mission. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to get followed around by assassins when trying to question info on a museam nor having to beat the info out of someone over who the Johnson is since most of them are public figures anyways in the srm03's.

Find someone. Wait and watch. When they are alone, follow them, and kick the crap out of them until they tell you what you want to know or give you the name and address of someone else that does. Rinse, repeat.

Shadowrun : Assassin's Creed edition.

I still enjoy and employ the tactics from a lot of the old adventure modules (and heck, IIRC some of the more recent Missions stuff).

I plot out a series of stuff that can be found, with more hits on a particular test meaning they get more and more obscure information. I try to mix up the stuff, making some of it "just interesting" and some of it actually pertinent to what they're doing. I don't use a hard and fast "each hit is one more level of info," because I might judge it differently based on what contact or what method they're using to come by the information. I do this so I have

CorpYouWannaKnow
1. thing
2. other thing

not

CorpYouWannaKnow
If by Matrix
1. thing
2. thign
If by contact Z
1. thing
2. thing

And I just ballpark it mostly, because the point of my "secret information" is to give it to the players for being smart and asking for it. (In other words, your players are supposed to find stuff out via legwork. I might reserve a particularly piece of juicy info for a particularly ingenious way of finding it out, but that's an additional reward thing, not an attempt to withhold info.)

I know one guy that got through High School that way.

I know him, because I was usually target number one, as I knew most of the answers.

I hate it when bullies get lazy.

Obviously everything depends on what your group finds fun; but for our part we prefer to invest a lot of time into the leg work. It's a lot of fun, and can be the impetus for a lot of things-hooks for future adventures, random encounters, red herrings, you name it.

If you're going to do this kind of adventure scripting I suggest taking some time ahead of the game and make some notes. I tend to use a few basic military terms, but really anything will work.

You can make this as complicates and long as you wish. Leg work leads to lead A. which with more leg work leads to clue 2 with with leg work leads to person b which leads to clue c, with leg work leads to fight which leads to person A, which give clue Z etc

Like any investigation it starts vauge and gets more precise with more info, so you start being able to ask the right questions, of the right people, in the right places, using the best means to get the right answers.

If I had to guess, a quick note on the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of a Mission would be enough to improvise leg work, unless I am mistaken being a newb myself. I would leave how the PCs figure that out for themselves based on their skills and contacts, thus the need for improvisation on the bits I already made note of. I think I would base difficulty on some sort of scale going from public (easy: 1) to private (hard keeps notes in a "safe" place: 4 extreme only in thoughts: 5)

The way my GM has been handling it, we roll to see if we get in touch with the contact. If we do, a quick RP of a meet or phone call as the player asks what he wants to know-- the GM then passes on info or lack of it. Data searches via Matrix have been more like info-dumps-- the summary of the data found, or not-found. Given the nature of a general search, its about like what I'd do in real life-- search a subject on the web, note down a summary of the information along with any specific sites. If I went with a specific Matrix-based contact, or dug into a specific system, it would probably roleplay out more.

You can also use a quick leg work scene as set piece to high light a PC's place in the world.

Rotate it around so that each session another player gets the spot light.