So I tried something a little bit different tonight.

After taking a 1 year hiatus from Shadowrun to delve into Undermountain, my group returned to running the Shadows of 2072 Seattle tonight.

Everyone made brand new characters, so the decision was made to run a few one-off scenarios in order to tweek stats and reacquaint people with the system. The guys playing the Hacker and Rigger had never played characters like that before so they wanted some game time in order to change programs, hardware and skills, etc. They also wanted to develop some team synergy, as the premise that they are starting the first official run with is that they all know each other and have some measure of their skills and abilities. I, as GM, also wanted to get a sense for their character ability levels so that I could tweak the details in the first run to make it fun, but challenging.

So I decided to make it interesting and came up with a concept that I call Quentin Tarantino Presents: Shadowrun. It was fun, interesting, and might even become a main. staple.

Basically, its a series of quick scenarios that might take part in a typical run... only out of order and with scenes starting "in the middle" of something already occurring. I told them up front that things were going to start a little chaotic, and that the things that were occurring were happening "in canon", but before the first official run. I encouraged them to ad lib colorful details both during and afterwards to fill in the story of what was happening, develop their personalities, create some synergy, and maybe have some running gags for later. We played out 3 scenarios (chapters) tonight, with the promise that between "official" runs we would play 1 more chapter. I anticipate 3 more in the future.

Chapter 1: I Just Wanted Some Noodles!
This was a scenario to test their combat abilities against "grunt" NPCs with leaders. For this, it was the middle of a firefight in a smallish restaurant in Redmond called "Chang's Noodle House" (a running gag from our last game a year ago). I rolled randomly for each PC and NPC and assigned various levels of damage and various rounds expended from guns. I refused to answer any questions as to why they were there, how they got into the firefight, or what their long term goals were, and was vague about other things (ie "What time is it?" "An hour before Chang's closes"). When combat was all over, the chapter was over... we then rolled into

Chapter 2: Do We Have a Deal?
This was an opportunity to give the faceman some work at negotiating. I gave them the scenario that they were in the backroom of a club with Mr. Johnsone, and the scenario started with Johnson saying: "... so for professionals with your skillset this should be easy. Pick up the kid, drop him back off in Redmond, and you could probably easily get to Changs for some noodles before he closes. Do we have a deal?" The first thing the face said to me (Out of Character) was, "What are the details?" I said, "I don't know... what ARE the details? There's a holopic of a kid in front of you... you tell me what he looks like" We totally ad libed a "reconstruction" of the mission to make sure the team had "all the details", made a few negotiation rolls to up the "fee", and ended the chapter.

Chapter 3: Speed Limit
For this I asked them what vehicles they would normally be driving in transit during a run, driving styles, and "formation". I set them down on a highway on the Snohomish/Redmond border, assigned some wound levels to everyone, and told them there was an unconscious kid in the back of one of their vans, and that the trail car has just noticed a Knight Errant Patrol drone following the van. The first question they had was, "What time is it?" to which I responded, "3 hours before Chang's closes." This was an opportunity to give the Technomancer and Rigger the opportunity to learn their rule sets and abilities. After a few passes at hacking (and realizing that they totally needed to redo their skills and programs/complex forms) they drone zoomed away leaving them to wonder what, if anything, it was doing.

And that's where we ended. It was kinda cool. Everyone loved the ad lib nature and randomness of it, and I think it also served a purpose in a novel way.

This is an awesome idea for a game, and I totally want to run a game like this for my players now.

Second. I think the phrase is: "All killer, no filler." Expect this to get stolen.

Wow, that is awesome. I would love to play a game like that, but to bad so sad for me I have a player in our party that likes to check everything down to the smallest detail (Takes hours to START a run, and we hardly ever have to fight anything, which sucks cause i'm the gun-bunny ) but it does sound awesome. Maybe if I ever, GM a game i'll steal this idea.

For a one off it sounds fun but for a campaign week after week I'd get pretty frustrated as I felt my character being railroaded into runs. There was a premade adventure years ago where the runners are dropped into the middle of it and the idea is they pentrated TT, back when it was scarey secret, and were dosed with their memory drug, the rest of ther run was trying to figure out what the flock had happened before the bad guys/Johnson caught up to us. We did it but felt terribly manipulated by the GM-like we NEVER- did something like that with regular clients again, because we all argued there was no freaking way we'd have taken a run in the Tir in the first place. It wasn't in the mode of our established characters.