I've got a group of 7 players and am looking to challenge them more on runs. I know one suggestion is to cause the group to split so that smaller teams are hitting each objective making it easier to throw reasonable force at them and still challenge them. I was curious what kinds of runs folks have come up with that require this kind of approach. The group consists of a hacker, a rigger, a street sam, gun-based adept, a mage and 2 shaman. The shaman are mostly support type focus (a Moon Maiden shaman as a face/illusionist and a Bear shaman with a focus on healing).

For that matter any scenario ideas that would keep all of the characters actively involved would be good. Thanks!

With a sweep of his...

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Have the Johnson hire them as Ninja Mechanics.

Interesting mix..
..How about security for a Rock Star/Media Star ??

Street Samurai as obvious bodyguard, Gun Adept as Personal Assistant [non-obvious bodyguard], Rigger drives the people around, Hacker handles all of the computers, Mage's role depends on his skills and spells, Moon Maiden as Public Relations, Bear Shaman as personal trainer/general medic ??


Have a look at Idoru/All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson, which involves a Rock Star and his support team.

Ugh. I won't GM over 5 players in SR.

You could split the group up to be achieving different objectives. Though a quick and easy way to split the group up is to keep time pressure on them. Lots of GMs just let the whole team go to everything.

Instead make it clear that you're tracking gametime. If there are multiple things to be investigated they'll be splitting up like it's an episode of Scooby Doo.

Alternatively you might want to consider getting another GM. I think this has the potential for a lot of fun. Meet at the same time. But exactly who goes on what run is up in the air. Maybe sometimes one GM takes 3 and the other takes 4 (or 3 if a player is now GMing). Sometimes maybe one set is doing a temporary 1 on 1 thing with another player while 5(6) do something else.

We have a regular group that gets together on Sunday nights and tend to rotate campaigns so the size is already decided for me. Actually it'll probably bump up to 8 players when we get to late summer as a former regular will be moving back into the area.

As for multiple folks involved, the rigger's a security and drone rigger so going on-site is certainly possible though she tends to avoid it if possible. Doesn't want to risk getting shot for some reason.

The campaign is already running and switching over to one where they're providing staffing for a media/rock star isn't really the direction I think any of us would want to go, but possible I guess. I had some ideas for investigation/staking out a corporate exec to find out what they were up to that might help tap the various different talent pools especially if they end up infiltrating. Need to see.

I'll need to do more thinking.

With a sweep of his...

Hat

Man, they are heavy on Magic!

Hmmm.. throw a dragon at 'em. That'll keep 'em busy.

Actually, if you haven't run any of the old pre-gen stuff, try Bottled Demon or one of my all-time faves, Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is REALLY a cool run set in Hawai'i. The back half of the oversized adventure is actually the Hawai'i source book and it's written by the late Nigel Findley (writer of the Dirk Montgomery SR novels, one of which was set in Hawai'i), one of the all-time Shadowrun greats.

Here's a link to it on Ebay. Its currently going for about 6 bucks, shipping included. I'd pay upwards of 10-15 bucks for it myself. The sourcebook portion is terrific and massively re-usable. Nobody wrote 'em like Findley, in my opinion.


Vlad

The Distraction Run is a classic. Usually the team runs a distraction for some other NPC team, but you could set it up where the PCs get to do both the distraction and the real run themselves.

More generally, the idea is to have multiple objectives that need to be achieved more or less simultaneously, whether as a strict requirement, or because there simply isn't enough time to do them one after the other.

Other possibilities you could throw into a run to split up the team:
* They're tracking/chasing multiple people (or creatures?), who decide to split up - if they only chase one at a time, the rest will get away.
* They need to disable/disrupt multiple, physically separate "deadman switches", bombs, ritual sorceries, any one of which will be bad news.
* They need information that can only be obtained in one place, to perform a task somewhere else, within one hour. Unfortunately both locations are 40 minutes away.

DS

if You had a mission that needed say a distraction?

have one stealth team sliding in at point A to retrieve or destroy target X
the 2nd group (rigger, mage and shaman) fly around in some sort of attack craft, maybe a chopper of some sort and attack strategic points to keep security busy for team 1 to accomplish their mission.

its also useful if you (the players or the johnson if there is one) have a grudge against the place you are hitting.

I felt my first run was overcrowded too.... so, I split the groups into 2 parts... one was contacted for a run and started out to take care of it... the other was contacted by another johnson for the same run.... but for a different mega... it was fun to watch as the players tried to outwit each other.

Tried a heist?

yeah id agree with the whole large numbers of bodies causing major problems though its not quite as bad as you think if you have a dedicated group of players. The highest my old college SR group got was 25 players in one session, for that i made everyone sign a list of 21 rules (that were basically anti-s laws) before we even got started, then i broke people into squads with complimentary characters in each one. I basically said, squad leaders are repositories of all human knowledge... if they dont know.... well sucks to be you. This couldve caused some problems but in the end it worked out really well as we were all friends and had the same thoughts on the dif between stupidity and bad luck. They did remarkably well too. First mission i sent them to (SR3 mind you) was a desert wars campaign. After they got used to working together they actually started to form a proffesional underground organization that did B&E, Extractions, you name it.... mind you one of the characters got tortured by the triads and sold them all down the river. What was supposed to be a regular arms deal turned into a triad ambush on the team that thankfully was averted (mostly) in time by a lonestar task force that a character had managed to get through to. After this they found the character that had betrayed them.... as expected he begged for his life, offered tons of cash (the triads had paid him to set up the deal and several other odds and ends... to the tune of 2 mil nuyen... at this point I expected the gang to go for it cause they were low on cash at the time (from working their contacts to find the traitor) however.... as soon as he opened his mouth and got to the money one of the more rambo esque characters in the party said, i walk up to him put my predator to his head and unload my clip into him... There was dead silence and the arguing as the other players were like dude screw that take the money then kill him. I asked the player if thats what he really wanted to do (the traitor was tied up btw which is why he couldnt miss) and he looked at me and said, this guy killed my family hell yes im doing it.

Pick a run that requires the runners to be in multiple places at once. Say they need to.. I dunno, steal the arming codes for ares' nuclear weapons (totally arbitary example). Said arming codes are dispensed at location 3, only when people at location 1-2 simultaneously turn a key maglock pass key. Then put the keys in locations 4 & 5.

Then mix up where the locations are. Say, one of the keys and the dispensing point is in the antarctic. Another key and turn point is in sydney. And another in mexico. And a turn point in hong kong.

Now they have to split up, and you'll be laughing as they cock it up horribly. Uploading a maglock's e-pass key via the trix to a hacker standing by to flash his maglock passkey with the legit code so he can swipe it is awesome. And the mage will finally have a use for astral projection to come to the assistance of the street sammie fighting some ares' bug hunters in ice caves in antartica with only crossbows as the air conditioning system is leaking explosive gasses into the atmosphere.

Pay them lots of money to compensate for the jet set lifestyle too!

i like how you think.... thats downright evil

I am serious when I say 'step up the lifestyle and payment' though, as it's much easier to set believable runs where everyone has to run around in multiple countries doing something hugely complicated when they are pulling in 30k yens +expenses a month and you handwave airfares because their R6 Sin is a super platinum frequent flyer with AresAir by accident

Another hilarious idea jacked shamelessly off ideas form this forum and something I ran for my own players

Players are hired by Christies action house to recover a priceless artifact from a tomb that is currently being used as a strongpoint in one of the ongoing wars in china.

Team 1 has to HALO into hostile territory, infiltrate the Air Defence control installation and deactivate the big tubes in the network, then defend/demolish (make it big so explosives is hard, think WWII flak tower/doom fortress) it while team 2 flies a chopper or whatever into the frontlines, then attacks/infiltrates the tomb/mound complex currently being used as a strongpoint by the warlord. What the warlord(s) don't know is that the mound is also infested with chinese hopping vampires who have been awakened by the artillery shelling.

Of course, the other warlord(s) immediately notice the air defence net is down and attack the mound/strongpoint

Players then have to fight through the vampires and snatch the (large) object while hiding from/fighting off chinese soldiers, the other armies soldiers, and very hungry vampires rampaging around, and get out, all before the HALO team looses control of the air defence network making it very hard to fly the object out in a big fat chopper.

Oh, and it's better to increase the baddies' numbers rather than their power level.

- Any run that requires a distraction.
- High speed chase with a hand off or dead drop to confuse pursuers
- Cutting the power to a remote area so another team can bypass certain security elements therein
- Make sure a certain individual is busy at location A while a run takes place at location B
- Face goes in under cover days before to gather intel- one team executes the job while the other extracts the face
- Extract a scientist from location A and his research data from location B
- Magicians need to perform a ritual or combat a spirit while the other runners hold off an attacking force
- One team poses as a criminal element, the other poses as Lonestar or Doc Wagon "We'll take it from here, officer..."
- Capture all 4-5 members of another team before they can escape from an area; Johnson wants them alive.
- Bodyguard a high profile target during a crowded event (trade show, sporting event, political rally)
- One team hunts an off site spider while the other infiltrates a secure area- find and kill him before he kills your friends

Splits are also a fun way of engaging individual characters in activities they wouldn't normally do, if executed carefully. For example, the team escorts their decker to the compound security center to pop the maglocks all the way to the objective. Something goes wrong, however, and the decker gets cut off from the team. He now has to make his way to the security center by himself, and run overwatch from there. As the GM, you can throw some weaker-then-average grunts at him.. he'll feel like a more functional character, since he'll have to figure out a way to get through them on his own.

It's also an excellent way to give a very specialized character something more to worry about while doing his job.. using our previous example, once the decker gets to the security center, he'd usually just have to roll some checks that he is obviously going to blow away.. he's a decker! However, a wise GM can use the isolation / seperation element to spice it up. Perhaps our decker will have to split his actions between running the actual overwatch, and tasking the turrets outside the center to fend off the recapture team?

It's definitely a fun angle to play. I'd say force it rarely, but always allow it as a potential advantage, and keep contingencies ready for it.

Yeah, the most fun thing about split teams is making a specalist think about how do deal with all the other problems now he cannot just be wheeled out for the Hammer -> Nail bits.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far. There are a number of runs that characters can solve by doing things such as cutting power in one location to help bypass the security in others, but it'd have to be carefully arranged such that it's a necessary objective not simply one solution. Given the number of spirits that the group can throw around there are a lot of options open to them.

With a sweep of his...

Hat