I know this is a small thing, but it was so halarious I have to share it with the dumpshock members. It might have pissed off many players, but it made us laugh. The following is the end of last session:

"You walk in the gigantic room and there is a man on a computer and, behind him, is a gigantic door. He looks at you but, despite the fact you've broken in and caused massive damage to his facility, he just waves you off with his hand, as if you're a nuisance"

*Long argument between players about whether or not we should taser him from a cross the room, we decide not to*

Inundation: Speak, now!

Man on computer: *ignores*

Dataflow(Me): Hmm, sorry for not being more polite. May I ask what you're doing there? It seems quite interesting"

Man: Are you a member of our staff? No? Then you have no business here

Inundation: Actually, we're newly employed here*Charisma roll*

Man: No you aren't, don't try to fool me.

Dataflow: That's it, tackle him!

Nex: *Rolls semi-successful grapple check*

Man: Wrong move! *headbutts computer keyboard with his arms restrained"

"The door behind you begins to open, creaking slowly to life"

Dataflow: I want to try to shut it off!

"Nomatter what you press on the computer it doesn't shut off"

(Here's where the debunk happens, read closely)

Dataflow OOC: Oh! But you forget one thing mister GM! All systems can be hacked, I want to ja-

GM: The computer explodes.




That's right, to stop me from instantly ending his little cutscene the computer randomly explodes, along with it's jackpoint. Unable to do anything about the huge door, we just watched it open to reveal a behemoth...which we blew up. All our attempts to close the door failed. Our metal manipulationist attempted to stop the door, but the GM mixed things up and said the door was some kind of ballistic plascrete that couldn't be manipulated. He then later tells me "If you hadn't of made me explode the computer you could have gotten more paydata"

*sadly shakes head*

I hate that type of GM.

And then your computer explodes!

Its just interesting that the guys computer had an auto destruct and door opening when his forehead hit the computer. I bet they don't have many people falling asleep on the job there. Heck sometimes I beat my head on the computer when I'm stressed anyways, guess I'd be terminated pretty early.

Oh boy.

Well, that's easy. Hitting the keyboard with your head releases the Behemoth (not only mustn't you sleep on the job, keyboards also are exenses wasted if you headbutt them to death because you hate your boss). Surfing non-corp Matrix sites, especially porn and chat nodes, makes the computer explode. Standard Saeder-Krupp operating procedures. It's the Lofwyr Employee Motivation Program.

The door behind my desk that opens with the forehead smash only contains a rabid squirrel, and my computer doesn't explode, it just makes exploding noises. You should reconfigure your "forehead smash" action on your computer on your first day on the job.

There are doors I would have open when the controlling computer selfdestructs (and others that would shut). IF the GM had that in mind, all is fine.

Just a note to the OP, I for one don't have a problem with the GM's handling of it. Some might see it as railroading, but sometimes the plot must go on and as a GM you have to pull something drastic to continue it.

I just see the fun of how this played out.

agree
I have to say though, if I were said GM I would have maybe had the explosion triggered by the hack. More fun that way, makes the players feel at fault.

the GM had us safeguard some secret ritualistic magic in the woods . . each of us was promised 10k per character . .
so we guard, we are told to be silent, some critters come out of the bushes because they sensed a disturbance in the force . .
like good little shadowrunners we fall back on our silenced flechette weapons . . the GM starts seething at how easyly his beasts fall
then he decides to do something to make us actually decide if we wanna break the silence . .
yep, he sends in a frigging fragon . . ok, so it was only a small feathered serpent but still!
short pow wow after having kicked the GM out of the room later, GM joins us again and looks curious as a cat . .
we present him with a full out tactical attack plan that's mostly silent . . and then comes the point where our GM went: O.O
"then we turn the tables, we have placed some explosives around the magical ritual going on, we will blow them up!"
GM:"WHAT?WHY?WHEN?HOW?WHY?"
"'cause fuck this . . we're in the woods, where noboty will ever notice something anyway, getting paid 10k per head to safeguard this from the local zooor something and probably will end up in some major world changing events through magic or something like that . . when we can get 100K per head if we splatter the dragon and sell his remains as telesma or make magical stuff out of it ourselves and sell that . . all the while disposing of a magical group that was probably up to no good anyway and would have gotten us into trouble sooner or later without ANYBODY being the wiser . . it's a frigging win/win situation and we have our own Dragons to boot!"
GM:"wait what? your own dragons? how'd you . . *grabs character sheets* . . fuck . . i really allowed this stuff? you two both have an ares great dragon ATGM EACH? . . ok, you don't even have to roll, it will happen like you said . . fuck you guys, i spent some weeks trying to cook up this sheme and you manage to LITERALLY blow it up in a couple of hours play-time and some minutes/seconds actual combat"
cue maniacal laughter from the players and a sad little GM . . ok, to let him have some kind of revenge and fun we actually statted up the dragon for him and actually did play out the fight . . and yes, he managed to more or less kill my Troll after i had chosen to go into unarmed combat with the snake . . hey, i lasted 3 whole rounds before dropping with only 1 box overflow <.< . .

If the NPC has no purpose other then to forshadow the behemoth attack, I would have placed him already jacked into the CPU, running the rooms possible defense hardware (I would have a few guns built into a room that has a door directly leading to a Behemoth's pen). Sure they could just shoot him in the head instead of talking to him or dealing with whatever mounted guns, and the cpu detonating and the door opening could be security precautions he set up in the lightening speed of his matrix connection. But what you did was okay too.

God alone knows why he didn't just let you try and hack into the node and have the doors open before you could succeed.

I have a story from a friend:

The players were going to infiltrate a building from the roof. They examined every inch of from a distance it before setting foot on the roof, and they absolutely confirmed that there was no surveillance of any kind watching the roof. They proceeded to climb up onto the roof one at a time. And then, miraculously, when the last one had stepped foot on it, the roof became electrified and shocked them all unconscious. Apparently it wasn't just a pressure sensitive roof, but it was tuned to go off when exactly the right number of feet stepped on it


For the most part though, I don't think GM railroading is all bad. It just shouldn't be hamfisted. Like, the computer shouldn't explode when you try to hack it. You can definitely keep players from derailing your cool plot idea without that kind of clumsiness. Like "You try to hack the computer, but the system is in manual override! You'll need to open it up and try to find the hard lock, and fast!" And then it turns out that, oh no! The manual override is in a different part of the facility. Railroading successful without a random, unexplainable explosion.

And for trying to stop the doors opening with magic, it would be much less stupid if the GM decided that the doors were actually pretty light, but what had opened was the creature's reinforced enclosure. So the mage seals the doors shut with his mighty magic, and then BOOM! The creature crashes through them

It's all about finesse, and creating a good story. If you create a good story by using a deus ex machina, the players will see right through it, and probably won't like it. But if your railroading is plausible, and the end result is fun, then no worries!

Okay, is this D&D or what? Seriously, I'm with hermit that this is bullshit.

"Oh, your character wants to do something that I don't want him to do, well shucks, we can't let that happen!"

I'm with swirler in that if you want to keep the door opening, make it a hard node to hack and when the system goes on alert it sets off the self destruct. Fair that way, at least the character has a chance to succeed in what they want to do. If the characters can't make choices, then why do you need humans to play them? Just go write a story in your room and try to make some money off it.

EDIT - Stahlseele that is f*cking hilarious! I think you would have made more money if you sold the Bloodmages for whatever the bounty put up by the Draco foundation is though. Or hell, kill the dragon and then sell the bloodmages. (Fuku does the loot dance)

Generally, as a GM, I'm not afraid of my PC's avoiding situations. If they're smart, they deserve it.

In this case, if the doors had NOT opened because you hacked them, so what? No behemoth to fight? Big deal. In fact, if the group had jumped the guy before he could open the doors himself, the group SURELY would have tried to open it themselves! Sometimes you need to let the PC's get themselves into their own messes.

I've got another one, and this one is BAD.

Once, my team was sent to go meet a contact. He was dead. My character saw someone out the window. It was only a few stories up, and I was virtually made of metal, so I just hopped down and went to talk to him. Apparently, the GM had been planning to have a few badguys coming up the hall ambush us. But since I jumped out the window and she didn't expect it, she basically just said "fuck it," and gave up on the whole plot.

Lots of responses here! I'll try to cover them all later, but for now I want to assure you he's generally not a bad GM. He let us do the whole session our way until that point, but apparently he really, really wanted us to fight that Behemoth, and since the artifact we were after turned out to be inside of it anyway we would have had to open the doors. We just all thought it was funny really, and he got upset later really when what followed happened:

*long argument between players on what to do*

The Behemoth is sleeping in some sort of chamber, filled with goo, that is slowly filtering out. You only have like 20 seconds

Nex: *Plants like a bunch of explosives*

All players run off.

Creature wakes up and goes boom.

We still have to fight it, but it starts with a serious injury and we kill it in one initiative pass, destroying a lot of roleplay elements the GM set up. Kind of upset him. It was only like his third time GMing and he ended up learning....cinematic sequences in Shadowrun don't work.

Wow... if I was the Gm in that case I'd have asked the players to do something like... I dunno, pull out all the red d6s from the table and count the. 19...18...17...16...



Kinda silly and on the spot, but then again, so is setting up explosives the moment you see that there is some giant critter you'll have to fight.

If it works for you it works for you.

But...

I hate obvious railroading. Sure sometimes players spring things on you that didn't plan for and might cause problems for the overall plot but there are more elegant ways of going about it than "The computer explodes". I have no idea why someone who's backup plan involves a large door and behemoth doesn't walk around his "room of doom" with a dedicated datajack for that very purpose, or... I don't know, a string tied to the "unhackable doors of doom" switch.

But it happens... and cinematic experiences can happen in SR as a long as you've planned for the characters "breaking" your encounter from the get go.

No, cinematic sequences can't be planned for in Shadowrun. Example:

I was playing in an SR4 game recently and we were hired to pick up a suit (and his briefcase) arriving at the Seattle Maglev station. We plan out for twenty minutes how to be discreet and yet keep the guy secured (he is voluntary). As the Maglev is about 5 minutes out, TOA suddenly becomes Delayed, smelling trouble we con the station managers to let know why. No need really cause a few seconds later, the explosion of the Maglev tracks and its derailing near Tacoma are all over the news. Oh SHIT! We sprint to the cars and are on our way. We get there only to find that LS is all over the place, the train is on fire, and Doc Wagon HTR is dropping in from Helicopters. Knowing our guy has a premium contract with DocWagon, and seeing our 25k/person slipping away quick, we do what we do best. Jump in! With a super lucky Infiltration role, me (the Ork sammy) and our Dwarf face quickly make our way to his car. Doc Wagon and the fire are only one car away on both sides. I put my cyberarm and Ork strength to good use and tear the door open. We quickly find our man, and a good Perception role from the dwarf spots his briefcase. We grab them both, and as we are at the door to the train we tore open, the door opposite it opens and Doc Wagon says "Freeze!"

Well, I glance at the Dwarf, he glances at me, we both glance at the door, then back to DocWagon HRT, and out the door we go!

The hacker pulls a mean hack on the Doc Wagon Helicopter (the GM was a bit new to the Matrix) and flies it into some Lone Star patrol cars firebombing any possible pursuit. Truly amazing scene, all driven by player action/reaction, and kept us on the edge of our seats for about an hour, and something we can always look back on with pride.

And Larme, great use of cyber! Why walk down the stairs? Only chumps get ambushed.

And if the GM really wanted to ambush you inside, there was no need to push the perception check so early. That's one of those ultimate GM call senarios, the only time more or less mandated is just prior to the surprise check.

...and poor sweet little Violet. Once just a shy kid genius, who in that instant, turned matrix terrorist.

...If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny...
--Yoda

I love making super athletes who can soak fall damage with relative ease. It's not hard at all to make a Samurai or Adept with at least 13 dice to resist falling damage along with cyberlimb hydraulics/freefall. They're a lot like internal air tanks; you rarely really get your money's worth unless you think fast and take into account your unique abilities when making plans, but when used properly they can save you a lot of hassle. Nothing ruins an unprepared security team's day quite like escaping from the highrise window or activating your airtank and setting off a breathtaker gas grenade at your feet.

I have always loved the idea of what I could do with maxed Greatleap/Freefall, but have never had the PP to spare for it. It is hard enough affording my favorite power Traceless walk (to make my elves as Tolkien intended), which has always had more fluff value than pragmatic sense. Wall Running is also really cool if you have the points to spare. Recently thought of a Parkour adept with maxes Freefall, Great Leap, Wall Running, Traceless walk (just because I like it) and 1 level Attribute Boost (Agility, Strength). Truly fun. Not sure how useful he would be as a covert ops specialist, but certainly walls wouldn't be able to keep him out!

That's why when I GM I don't think in terms of set events besides for meeting with the johnson and debreifing with the johnson. The actual run I just see as a tactical or simulationistic exercises. I set the stage but have no specific expectations about what will happen. The ball is totally in the players' court.

Yeah, I must say, I've never actually made use of Free Fall as a PC, although I have had a Samurai or two with Hydraulic jacks. Freefall has been featured heavily on one of my prime runner style NPCs though. The guy was an all-out escape artist, basically. I gave him a fairly arbitrarily high magic rating along with Freefall, Flexibility, Cloak, Temperature Tolerance and Combat Sense. I felt no guilt whatsoever when it comes to making the odd NPC with an absurd amount of Edge and Magic, especially since I made the guy more of a pain in the ass than a killing machine. The guy was like David Belle, if David Belle was made out of rubber and dolemite.

There is a definite place for railroading in narrative structure (plenty of things happen in real life that you cannot have planned for or expected). This was just childish bullshit, though, and for that matter, extraordinarily clumsy railroading (would've been a lot easier to just let him try and hack the computer and spend time figuring out what he was doing and then simply failing, etc).

See, that just makes my head explode as though I've just been punched by Kenshiro of Hokuto No Ken. A GM who doesn't think that PCs will egress or enter by windows is nuts. It's pretty much common knowledge that in tactical situations entering by main doors is least desirable, entering by windows is a bit more desirable, and most desirable is entering through random walls.

Or the floor, nothing confuses people like coming through the floor.

Actually sometimes the best thing is just a nicely high powered rifle round coming through the floor. Gotta love that radar vision.

I like giving trolls adepts traceless walk. Nothing beats describing a shadow stalking the players across the rooftops and then having a troll silently sprint at them from behind with a vibro-naginata in each hand.

And traceless walk does have advantages, you can move quickly and not lose dice to your stealth from heavy footsteps... Right?

Everything seems quite normal here. I mean...who doesn't keep giant awakened alligators in his office complex? And the character with the exploding computer just critically glitched his electronics check to distinguish between a computer and a bomb. Honestly, what did the GM smoke? And where do I get it?

Well traceless walk only silences your foot falls, if you're sprinting and wearing all that nice run gear I'm sure you're going to be making at least a little extra noise.

So I guess is that the troll in question would sprint at them "nearly silently" unless the troll is naked.

Which means they probably have much bigger problems on their hands.

Nice
For no reason at all I am wondering how Lord Torgo is doing in prison... Adapting well, I wonder?

Not to dump on the OP too much, but doing what you did was by no means 'outsmarting' anyone. I am only making this point because there is a name for what you did. Its called pulling out your paper dick and smacking the players with it.

You used your Paper Dick, OP. Felt good, didn't it? Just don't use it too much. Man invented pants for a reason.

Um ... I am pretty sure that the original poster was a Player, and not actually the GM in question.

ah, yes, sheer dumb(luck)[ness] to screw over a GM . . there's nothing quite like it *snicker*
playing a troll and the GM getting the drop on the team and suddenly another troll is holding a laser-axe on your neck . .
not many people would try something dumb and certainly most people would not live to tell about it . . but the troll player ^^
i had decided:"fuck that shit, we're going down anyway, so i might just do it in style and take someone with me"
well, i grabbed the laser axe, botched my roll, took damage, soaked down to a measly 1 box before deadly wound . .
then took the axe from the other troll, rolled EXCEPTIONALLY well and just like that made 2 orks out of 1 enemy troll . .
yep, i just split him from the hairs on the head to the hairs on his ass . .
flabbergasted looks all around, eery silence while my troll is standing there, bleeding from his throat and being covered in blood.
then the other troll in our group decides to remember that the minigun pointed at him only has a power of 7 and his heavy armor
is at 7 hardened ballistic armor . . so he just walks over to the ork holding the minigun and takes a full frontal blast without even
being scratched due to the rules, takes the minigun out of the hands of the ork holding it and whacks him over the head with it . .
our second troll had no heavy weapons skill, but the enemy did not know that and did not really care when he pointed the 8 barrels
in their general direction either *g*
seconds later, all hell broke lose when the rest of our team saw that the biggest threats had been taken care of by the big guys and
decided to join the fray again by throwing some slipspray and thermo-smoke grenades to the doors and screaming things like:
"DON'T LET THEM GET AWAY! I WANT THAT ONE!" and other such things . . cue the GM deciding that his NPC's would make a run
and try to get out of there as fast as inmetahumanly possible . . only to botch the roll of every single one NPC that had to cross the
slipspray hidden by the thermal smoke . . much rejoicing was heard from us as we shot them out from a safe distance of the spray
Comment of GM:"dammit! why could you guys not just give up for once? i had it planned, there would not have been too much
trouble for you either! how can people be so stupid as to try and take on a Troll with a laser-axe and an Ork with a Minigun?
AND HAVE SO MUCH DUMB LUCK AS TO STAY ALIVE THROUGH IT?"
we got another minigun out of that, we got a laser-axe and other such nice and shiney things and we took care of TEAM BALROG
which had been bothering us for some daysof out-time now . . yes, long run, went from middle of friday to sunday in the evening.
our reputation was kinda screwy after that . . at one hand, we are dumb enough not to give up an on the other hand, we did not die

i guess we did not really out-smart him, but we surely out-dumbed him and left im dumbfounded ^^

Yeah, I was the Dataflow guy, not the GM.


Actually, the whole complex was built around scientifically altering this Behemonth into a fully sentient "Atma Weapon" and inside the Atma Weapons was a magical artifact we were sent to find. There was a reason for it being there and all, but I hate how we couldn't get much out of the scientist, and Inundation eventually just gave up and stabbed him in the throat.

... and here I thought you breed the best Atma weapons on toilets in the Kevka towers ...

Obviously the corp hadn't learned that yet. Do you think they found a way around the significant vulnerability to being made invisible?

Hah, trust me when he said Atma Weapon I made my fair share of bad jokes

Me: Hey, I want to spare him and get him as a lvl 3 contact!

GM: ...Why?

Me: So I can call him at his wild parties and ask him about the Omega Weapon

GM: I can see it now..."The Omega Weapon? Yeah, I know that guy! He's an asshole"

Agreed. As GM, I never know what the players will do. Maybe a third of what I do say is "Ok, what do you guys do now?"

And as for Great Leap, we have a character in my group with it. The other night, some riots suspiciously broke out right next to our hideout warehouse, and rather than hole up on the roof like most of us, the adept Great Leaped to a rooftop across the street and was suddenly not surrounded. That's handy.

I was going to say something about how not ALL computers can be hacked. Like maybe it was an old Tandy or something But then I remembered that in SR1, there were Tandy cyberdecks, so that shoots a hilarious hole in the point I would have been making.

You know it would be nice to just read the joke, enjoy it and not have to wade through the critque. The GM was obviously inexperienced but trying to deliver. Come on kids: Smile, join in the laugh and move on.

Sigh i must be getting old.

I shall join you in a laugh.

Thankyou, thats what I meant to post it is, not as a "Your GM sucks, haha" kind of thing. It's my turn to GM this upcoming Friday anyway so I get to learn from his mistakes. I'm gonna do something a bit more simple though and go with a defense. Mr. Johnson is going to hire them to protect his new building. Problem is it only has minimal security and few employees, so it'll basically be them and shitty security versus a whole raids worth of people.

Oh Man!! I did a run like that way back in the day. I got the BRILLIANT idea to use my fee (and subsequently rip off the rest of hte party by paying them roughly 1/10th of what their 'fair share' should have been...) to open a 'legitimate' security firm, complete with lisences for heavy hardware...

We set up a killing zone around the site, assault cannon equipped snipers and basically gibbed anyone who looked remotely like a threat.


Ah... the joys of being 16 and having a clueless GM...


I'm not saying it has to go that way, that's just how I did it....

Reminds me of Sr3 when we thought astral perception allowed you to shoot through walls.

They never saw that Ghoul coming!

I usually have campaign plan and a plan for my games, in that it's a list of characters, locations and events with how they interact, and a list of objectives (and how they are met). If I say Players have to get A (npc or object) to X (place) in timeframe Z, I don't care HOW they do it. As long as they get it done, have fun, and the roleplaying is fun, it's all good. I do take note of what they do and who (if anyone) they piss off, but mostly, it's more free-form and casual.

I used to plan everything out in detail, but the players would go off on a tangent and not come back, so rather than throw another week's work out the window, I modified my idea to come up with my current setup. I've even run a few games at cons, and most players were happy with the games.

There's railroading, and there's gaffing them to the front of a speeding bullet-train that is going THAT WAY!

Hehe, reminds me of one of the times we tried to play Shadowrun with one of our players GMing, so the GM could play for a change. In our normal group, the players who liked to plan and try and be quiet tended to get outvoted by the rest, but the GM change had sorted that out, so we were planning on a game where we did our best to actually have a plan, do the appropriate legwork etc.

So we got to the legwork and planning stage, we planned for about two hours (we had plenty of time before the run) and came up with a plan that would likely achieve the goal without too much hassles. At the point our new GM realises this, he adds something to thwart our plan. Repeat the cycle ad nauseum, until the run we doing ended up being into the most ludicrously impractical security ever invented by man. I can't remember all the details, but as I recall it involved a completely externally electrified building, with the area we needed in the middle. The off line computer we needed access to was contained in some weird set of fishtank levels full of water in the middle of the building.

I think after about 8 hours of continuous planning/spontaneous plan destruction, the runners all eventually decided to give the upfront money back to Mr Johnson and tell him the job was more trouble than it as worth, then commit ritual suicide.

Needless to say, our GM didn't really get his wish to play that time.

if i were to run into such a sort of thing, i would most likely do an artillery strike on the target and then sieve out what is needed . .

First, I always assume, the PC's can never find out EVERYTHING..you throw wrentches in their plan once they get in side

Second, wow! that sounds like a fun facility to try and run through..scary thing is: our team probably could get through that..let's see, the Sammie slots diving, the Adept dives, and provides cover while teh sammie sets up a nice, rpecise shaped charge to blow the fish tanks...Hacker goes to the computer, mage provides magical over-watch...