I'll have you know I'm originally from Houston - my parents and my mother's parents are/were Texas Democrats (My parents live in WA now, since the family moved in 1990, and Mom's parents are dead). Wrap your head around THAT one, why dont'cha!

IIRC I think Alabama has the highest yearly rain fall in the U.S.

Back on topic:

74.) Death is only one way to fail... and an easy one at that. Some of the alternatives are much, much worse. Spend some time and creative energy thinking about what can happen to the PCs when they fail besides bleeding to death all over the drab (but sensibly tread-resistant) office carpet. Your runners could be left for dead, captured, brainwashed, tortured, inhabited, implanted, conscripted, etc. Any of these will generate plot threads you can use for future adventures.

75) Arrested/captured does not equal out of play. Give the players a chance to get out of the situation, and don't just limit them to a prison break. I recently had my player group arrested for a crime they caught performing red handed. They spent the next two sessions having contacts and buddies lean on the judge at the bail hearing, have evidence destroyed by a police contact, hack the DAs office and mess with their files, bribe jurors, and pay off witnesses. Smart players can still have fun even in lockup.

76) Encourage your players to share their conspiracy theories...and then steal the best ones It's amazing the sorts of connections that players will make during the course of a campaign. They'll often see patterns that aren't there or that you hadn't planned for. Steal the best ideas you hear and incorporate them into your personal metaplots. I'll give an example: A group of PCs were highered to break someone out of a holding cell at a Lone Star station. They made several calls to contacts including a mob enforcer as part of their regular legwork. The run went badly, VERY badly, with the extractee getting killed. One player blurted out that the entire run must have been a setup to get the extractee killed, and blamed the mob for the whole deal. The next day, I had one of their regular contacts confirm their suspicions.

77) Write runs that rely on supernatural methods of information gathering, rather than runs that work around those same abilities It's no fun for the mage detective's player to find out you wrote an entire run to stop him from doing what he does best. Instead, have him/her hired specifically because of those abilities. Knowing who did it in a mystery only gets you half way there if you also have to find physical evidence to prove it. Especially if the culprit is someone Johnson refuses to believe did it.

QFT. Your GM-fu is strong.

I said that because (it's my understanding) that pollution in the sixth world has made the atmosphere incredibly unstable. I mean, don't the Tir elves use their atmospheric monitoring system as some sort of geopolitical bargaining chip?

It seems, however, that I did overstate the amount of rain Washington gets, but, again, I don't think it would be out of place for a GM to use sudden and unexpected nasty weather to keep players on their toes.

I think its still a very good tip. Weather is easy to forget in an RPG.

I love using weather and similar. "The wind has been in the south lately, and clouds of dust and ash are blowing on out of Puyallup. Everyone's wearing masks these days." And now the player of the character with allergies is going to be feeling his character a little more. And guards are a little more suspicious, since no one is showing their faces. It's a simple thing that reminds the players of where they are.

Related to Prof EO's #77 is
78. Give each character a chance to shine. Every character has a abilities for which build points were paid. They deserve a chance to use them. You can even go so far as to design a whole mission around a particular character.

The flipside is the negative qualities. Everyone got BPs from them, so it's your job to make sure they come into play. Otherwise, they're free points. "You've got to get the door open. You hit the button but nothing happens. You check the motor, and it seems that someone has yanked the wires out. You want to try to twist some wires together? Roll Industrial mechanic to see whether you do it right, or burn out the motor. You're incompetent in that? Oops."

Gold. I love it.

- J.

I think I remember reading somewhere that most of North America was suffering from unusual weather patterns do to all the magical activity and left over mana from the Ghost Dance.





Consider these ideas stolen for use in my own game.

Don't forget that visibility penalties are also applied to ranged attack rolls.

And applicable spellcasting tests!

This thread is awesome and chock full of great GM advice. It gives me evil chuckles and ideas every time I read it. Keep it coming!

I don't think this has been brought up yet so

#79. Prepare the mission thoroughly before hand. I always try to cover all the basic bases before I run my PCs through a scenario. This means thinking about likely situations and methods of attack and planning your responses / information for them. Just make sure you have the basic stuff covered - it is not about preparing for Every Possible Situation. The Players will think of things that you haven't prepared for. That is where it gets fun .Having the basics covered means that you won't searching frantically for info or sitting there blankly and hold the game up.

I'd like to expand on this one a little bit. Make sure you have a response for every scenario your players throw at you. If you're new at this, you might want to run through some possibilities, and make sure you've decided what a reasonable response is. A veteran might already know these things, and only needs to decide what the specific target/map looks like, and what their resources are.

What you don't want to do is come up with the solution, and try to get the team to pick up on the clues. That almost never works. Enact your scenario, and let the players find their own solutions. Depending on how you run, this might be a good way to make things fresh.

Good luck with that!!

80.) Expect your players to come up with things you never expected. Enough said.

That's one of the joys of RPGs - the players aren't straight-jacketed by a script like the characters in a book or movie. They aren't prevented from taking an obvious action that would resolve a situation. A good GM learns to anticipate most of the obvious courses of action and plans accordingly, but no one can foresee every possibility.

Good players occasionally come up with something completely unexpected and off the wall that should, logically, work. In those situations all you can really do is roll with it, and congratulate the players for the idea. Quickly decide if the NPCs would have thought of the possibility. Remember that the PCs have to outsmart the bad guys, not you. If the opposition wouldn't have thought to prevent that approach, well, then the PCs have just outsmarted the opposition. Congratulations, you have good players! That's not a bad thing, and can be a lot of fun, especially in a game like shadowrun where the PC are supposed to be able to outsmart the opposition - shoot outs are for when you mess up! (Or when that's what you are getting paid to do).

Now if it's an insane, stupid, what were they thinking idea...hit them. Hard. Repeatedly. Then throw dice at them till they calm down and come up with a real plan.

That's a corollary to what I said. You can't predict what they're going to do, so don't even both trying to railroad them down your solution. And if I wasn't clear enough about the planning, what you need to have is an understanding of how things work in your game world - not only physics, but corporate and social dynamics. So that whatever they do, you have an idea what should happen. If it means they solve your mission in the first half hour, so be it. And they get bonus karma for smarts.

As an extension, you should understand things well enough to make things challenging for them.

Thanks for the clarification Wind_in_the_Stones. That explains my obtuse post a lot better. Plan for the predictable but don't railroad or lead PCs by the nose.

Although Professor Evil Overlord has captured the essence of RPG-ing to me. That is what makes it so fun ! I always try to encourage creativity (even towards the insaner edges of creativity) because that's what I enjoy.

81. Plan out realistic security, then sit back to let your players think around it

Don't obsess about trying to think of what way in the PCs will take. Make a building with realistic security (for the value of the contents), and let the PCs work out how to deal with it. If they find a glaring weakness, let them exploit it, and your NPCs will then update their security manuals for next time.

Yes, that's exactly what I (and the others) are saying. But I think we're getting a little off-track of keeping things fresh.

82) Come up with interesting reoccurring enemies with unique motivations Sometimes the opposition isn't out to kill you or make money. Maybe that ganger just wants to impress you (or your fixer, Mr Johnson, etc) enough that you'll let them join your team. Maybe those runners are trying to beat you to that prototype cyber-heart to save a sick child. Maybe that thief steals from private collections so that she can hand them over to museums for the public to view. Maybe that little old lady has been calling the cops on you because she's really a drug dealer and you've been scaring away her customers. Etc.

83) Come up with interesting reasons for the players NOT to kill reoccurring enemies It's no fun if the PCs blast that NPC you worked so hard on. Especially if its the first time you used them. So give them a good reason not to blast them. Maybe that annoying ganger is your younger cousin and you'd never hear the end of it if your buddies just shot him. Maybe they decide not to kill that rival team when they learn about that sick kid. Maybe they decide they agree with what that thief does. And maybe the runners want the cops around when they're hiding from the mob.

84) Vary your play style Do your players prefer stealth runs and fast talking to gun play? Are they stone cold pros or pink mohawk types? A run catering to the opposite type of play can be a nice change of pace. All you have to do is have Mr Johnson specifically ask for it. Sometimes Mr Johnson actually wants large scale destruction or a perfect infiltration, and is willing to bankroll expenses. It's even more fun if the players don't have access to the gear they want and have to establish contacts to get it. That alone can turn a simple job into something far more complex.

85) Use background and theme music in you game If you don't already play music during your games, start to! Even just a couple of CDs can give you a couple of dozen tracks for your game. Computer savvy GMs can use programs like itunes and media player to play specific tracks off of their computer by connecting a laptop to a set of cheap speakers. Some programs even let you chop up pieces of music so you can play part of a track. Keep a good number of tracks to use as ambient background, plus a few for the matrix, astral space, vehicle chases, and combat. Save some others for theme music. Players will learn quickly if you always use the same piece of music for a location or NPC. Only use those tracks for those locations/NPCs in order to maximize the impact. You know you've done your job if the players cringe every time you play the BBEG's theme music. Locations deserve music to, have one for several locations that the PCs hang out at and for general locations/neighborhoods. I use a specific piece of music for each area in Seattle (Redmond, Downtown, etc.), their hideout, and the three most common places they hold meets, I play it as the first piece of music for that area before switching to ambient background.

Necro-shazam!! Yeah, I did it. This thread is too valuable to loose, and I've been thinking about a new idea:

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86.) Build the background. Consider this for a second: what if the players' character sheets where not the starting point for the campaign, but the end point of a prequel? Instead of generating a bunch of characters complete with skills, gear, qualities etc, maybe spend a few sessions allowing each player to role play their backstory. For example, let each start with 300 bp and choose 400 bp worth of stuff to work toward in whatever way they see fit. Tell the story of how the street sam got that sweet custom cyber implant or how the mage learned to conjure a unique spirit. Tell the story of how so-and-so escaped Aztlan and gained a powerful enemy. Your player wants an advanced lifestyle with the "Concerned Neighbors" edge? What did he do to earn their loyalty? If they RP well and succeed they get the goods (inc. gear, starting cash, contacts, positive qualities, etc). If they fail, they earn the appropriate flaws (enemies, negative qualities, infection!, etc). You will find that the character may not be exactly what you expected when the campaign starts, but they will certainly be more dynamic and interesting...