Really? That's my idea?

Keep in mind that this discussion is available to be re-read by any member of the forum so that they can judge the accuracy of your claim for themselves. Even the original joke I made outside of this thread that started it has been copied into this thread in it's entirety.

In order to defend your position you've created an entirely new extreme position and claimed that it's mine.

Is that really the kind of person you want to be here? Is that really how you want to have this discussion?

He never said that; he argued that the PCs used a plan that the GM hadn't thought of, but when you think about it, is pretty simple and obvious. Like getting an earth elemental to dig a tunnel; that's pretty basic.

Or, the other case: the NPC is so smart that it could have anticipated the PCs' plan, due to having mental stats in the 9+ range and millennia of experience.
In that case I might have the NPC roll Logic to see if he anticipated the plan/realizes what it might be leading to when he sees the first parts of it, and coming up with a counter.

Personally, I reserve the right as a GM to say that a PC's plan was anticipated, because it's something that makes sense for NPCs to have tried before, of the opposition to have thought of because it's an obvious idea. Even if I didn't think of it myself, I can still steal the idea and adapt against it, but I make a note to give the player additional Karma for being clever.

Thats pretty much his SOP.

On topic, i think its completely appropriate for the security guards to realise that theres a shadow run in progress when all of a sudden 40 new signal 6 nodes start to move inside their complex.

Its the balance between adapting a game to keep it interesting for your players, and not making it so ez-mode that you could go, "Yknow what, guys, just write down what you think happened and rewards you got, and we'll go with that'. Exploits (without the negative connotation) are fun, its a moment where you realize, man, I really found a weakness! SR Hackers use them all the time, but the fluff also notes Exploits tend to have value when they are infrequently used and not made aware to the general public. The more a hacker uses an exploit, or allows that exploit to be shared with their community, the less likely it'll last, because someone will finally notice it and hopefully plug it.

The same sort applies to new tactics and approaches PCs come up with. I guess as a player, I'd prefer balance, much like I take a generalized approach to my characters. I'd rather have a backpack full of tricks that I can vary pitch on, rather than a couple awesome ones that will eventually get negated due to overuse.


Hm...example, bad company 2 multiplayer. There are several awesome sniper camping spots on the maps, when you can unleash hell from them, its an amazing thing to behold. Thing is, the more experienced players, or the ones that have seen it in use enough times, know those same spots, so when they're on defense, guess what spots get mortared or counter-camped?

Is it metagaming to hone in on those reused tactics?

Anyway, I do agree it should be about fun. But fun for everyone, not just the DM, not just the players, or not just a specific player. If the whole group isn't having fun, they shouldn't be playing together.

First of all:
Not every plan the PC come uo with will work.
From my experience 90% of plans I did not think of as GM are lethal to the PC or pointless, if followed through.

This is not a surprise at all.
Players always lack information. Most of these Information are turningpoints of the story.

It is good to keep in mind, that "runs" are written to be survived in the end (if you follow the "rail").
So the only possible options to die are:
1. Leave the rails.
2. Very bad luck.
3. Too much heat from the GM.

Since 3 ist out if the GM knows what he is doing and 2 is bound by the rules of probability, the first option is the most likely in the avarage group.
Or put the other way round: It is hard to fail, if you have read the "run" before.

So no, it is not Metagaming, if players die because of leaving the plot. It is nearly bound to happen. (If the players are not really smart and lucky)

I guess I don't really see the difference, except that a layer of concrete is 'common, moderate security' and the second one is 'uncommon, extreme security'.

If the PCs are breaking into Dunkie's personal estate, they should probably expect to see the latter. Dunkie is (was) attacked once a week, I'd guess, and has set up pretty impressive defenses against it. If they're breaking into the pre-shutdown Arcology, the former seems more reasonable (the second seems reasonable for post-shutdown, because hey, if it's important enough for the military to set out camp there, it's probably important enough for them to set up some pretty flash defenses).

I don't see either one as more or less metagaming. One is just a reasonable response, the other is an unreasonable one. Presumably both are equally 'not in the plan' but you had to make up at the last moment when the PCs said 'what do we encounter if we dig under it'.




Again, it depends on who it is. If you're in Lofwyr's Treasure Room, shooting at Lofwyr, he probably has magical dragon senses that tell him the snowplow doesn't belong and is in fact a threat. I could make up a hundred reasons after the fact if the players asked. But it doesn't seem reasonable to me that Lofwyr, the Great Dragon, Lord of the Fourth Age, having survived for over three thousand years and across dozens of planes, would be fooled by the old 'hide it in the snowplow' trick.

There's also the fact that, if following my plotted adventure, the Big Bad Guy is supposed to escape this scene, it may be more fun for the snowplow plan to fail for some reason or another. This is a GM's call (and not an easy one!) but it's not something I'm going to rule out right away, especially if the PCs stand to profit in the long run if he does escape.

Yeah, I'd point out that even TODAY using a snowplow or other vehicle as an attack method has been anticipated and won't work on a lot of places.

You ever see decorative planters around buildings? Those aren't actually there to make things pretty. They're engineered to be able to stop even largish trucks cold from ramming the building, heavily weighted and secured to the foundations and strategically located to allow foot traffic while preventing vehicle traffic.

There is of course the standard vehicle barrier or bollard. They come in fixed varieties and pop-up varieties. Many won't be fazed by even the strongest snow plow.

Unless the players are using a really unusual tactic, there is always the possibility the opponents would have anticipated a given attack vector. That's what security systems design is about, after all.



-karma

I'll run with the snowplow since it's the example du jour.

Some perfectly decent questions:
1) Is this happening somewhere where there are snowplows?
2) Is this happening at a time where the snowplows are likely to be hooked up to the trucks. (i.e., winter)
3) Is it snowing? Snow on the ground? Snow predicted?
3a) Are the snowplows mostly in the lot or on the street, because suddenly I have to create a place for a working assembled snowplow to be stolen from.
3b) Is someone going to say "Why is there a snowplow out there?"
4) What are the defenses against large vehicles ramming the place or vehicle bombs or vehicles in general?

The questions I'm most likely to ask:
1) Is this fun/funny/memorable? Since I tend to think it is, I'm likely to seriously fudge the answers and responses to the above questions in favor of the players getting the snowplow and chaos ensuing.
2) How can I run with this and keep the adventure balanced? (i.e. what new difficulties am I adding elsewhere to balance any reduction in difficulties given by the advantage of the snowplow) On the front end, there's the getting of the snowplow. On the back end there's the complete loss of subtlety. If someone was driving down the road in the middle of July in Austin with a snowplow, videos are gonna be showing up on cybereyesvideo.com (domain name still available). That may have some repercussions on the back end. In a similar fashion, I would expect increased security on all city vehicles and lots for awhile. I'd also expect local law enforcement to have a bit of a grudge on.

One thing to recall is that as the GM, I'm playing the role of all the other characters of the world, the characters that make the heroes the focus of the story. I'm also responsible for the environment and scenery and all the fluff. Up front, I'm going to organize the core items and events that make the setting the setting as well as any characters and setting expected to be encountered in the story. On the fly, I have to create and run with all the characters and settings I didn't expect to be encountered but now suddenly are being encountered. (Such as the snowplow, the place the snowplow is kept, the people there, the roads between there and the pre-mapped areas, and the people along those roads.) I have to build all that on the fly and it has to be built in a way that the other players at the table will enjoy.

If, at the end of it, some player wants to claim that I'm cheating and it's not fair, they can go sit at the table with the other people lacking in social skills. The one at the far end and situated downwind of the ventilation system.

Actually, come to think of it, the whole issue of metagaming is separating GM knowledge from in-character NPC knowledge.
If the NPCs somehow get the information they can't realistically possess, sure, it's metagaming.
But what about the other way round? You're using the very same infiltration scheme on a dozen runs against the same corp - even if you're not caught, the security analysts are bound to suggest countermeasures by the time you run against that corp again.
And come on - that's the Sixth World, you don't need to retrain the whole security dept to implement new tactics, just send every one of them some arrows.

Also, a lot depends on what you believe the Sixth World to be like. Say, I remember reading a story about a GM whose guards attacked every van in the vicinity once the alarm sounded cause everyone knew runners use vans. The same logic applies everywhere - if you believe the runs (not only PC-related once) happen regularly, and, say, the other runners most often use sns and other non-lethal methods, as Jackpointers suggest IC, it makes sense for the goons to wear some heavy insulated Impact armor. If you believe the society to be totalitarian, with omnipresent control - say, driving through downtown or using a copter anywhere can become a lot of fuss for the PCs.
You just have to warn your players in advance via news, background descriptions and yeah, OOC explanations.

This I agree with. GM fiat once let me defeat security using an army of devil rats doped up on kamakazi. By the rules the kamakazi probably would not have done anything to the devil rats but the GM loved the idea so he said it worked. This was again cheating but for the benifit of the PCs and a cool story.



I disagree with this because letting a PCs awesome plan work is not ruining an adventure. Sometimes the plan can work, sometimes no shots are fired, and thats ok.

That's not disagreeing. *If* being blindsided (human GM didn't think of something that NPCs would have) would ruin the adventure, then that's what we're saying shouldn't be allowed simply be the human GM 'lost' the battle of wits. That's unrealistic and unfun. If, instead, the 'awesome plan' *would* work on the NPCs (even if the human GM did expect it), then a good GM would naturally allow it to work.

Again, no one is saying 'punish PCs for creativity'. We're saying, 'the GM should play the NPCs, not himself'. After all, PCs are allowed in plenty of cases to resort to saying 'I don't know this, but my character does/would'. It's exactly the same for the GM, and it's not metagaming (or bad) at all.

As long as the PC plan really is awesome.

I did a run with a hacker character.. where there was a Nexus, inside a ward, inside a room with wifi neutralizing paint, inside a building guarded by dobermans and some guards, behind a security node I had no change of hacking.

The Johnson wanted the target not to know what files had been mucked with.

We did all this reccon work, etc..
We got the lay of the land inside by having our face impersonate some secretary.

What I ended up doing was:
We got on the roof, and used an access vent to move 2 optical tap drones into the building. One which had optical cable running from my commlink, to it.
1 drone stayed just inside the wifisuppression, with a wire back to me
1 drone crawled it's way to the nexus, (not triggering the guardian spirit that ignored the 0 life energy microsized drone) and tapped in.
From there I preceded to hack on the fly into a system with minor security only.
I edited the files, cleaned up after myself, and crawled back out.

The security never had a clue we were there.

Admitedly we turned what the gm thought would be a 1-2 session run, into a 5 session run..
But large chunks of that was new player/established GM issues, and new player vs old player issues.
I'd say.. out of those 5 sessions, there were 2 sessions of ageda, and 3 sessions of actual play

Maybe I just put more pressure on myself but I have always been of the mind if I didn't think of it then my NPCs didn't think of it.

See, that's wrong. It's easy to think of times when that would be the unfun choice. I'm sure it works most of the time, but my point is that it's certainly not the one true 'non-cheating' way to GM.

Well I do cheat, whenever my PCs come up with a cool plan that I already accounted for I just pretend I didn't account for it. I don't want it to be me vs them, I'm on their side I want them to win. And frankly I tend to know way more about secure facilities than my players and I have been running Shadowrun since the 90s and playing prior to that. Most of my current PCs dont have anywhere near that level of experience.

Just like PCs and NPCs shouldn't have unreasonable access to player (GM) knowledge, they shouldn't be unreasonably burdened by player (GM) ignorance.

Otherwise, you couldn't really GM any scenario about which you know less IRL than your players, which can become a problem very quickly. Not all GMs are security specialists IRL, and they shouldn't have to be, just to run a game.

Agreed, Ascalaphus. I'm sure you do a good job, tete. I'm just saying that mine is a better general principle for all GMs.

Sure, I mean I love it when my players pull off some Ocean's Eleven style complex plan with contingencies and backup plans and moves within moves. Those type of things are usually great fun for everyone.

What's not fun is when players find a blindspot that lets them bypass most of the adventure. The classic example: when I was running my first D&D campaign, many years ago, one adventure was the PCs were hired to retrieve a gem from the middle of an outdoor, deathtrap maze. The PCs had just hit level 5 (I'm sure most of you see where this is going) and sure enough, the PCs got to the maze, the mage said "I cast my new spell, Fly and fly to the middle of the maze and grab the gem".

End of adventure - 3 planned sessions of work out the door. I've never let that happen since.

I let my players share infor, I let my NPC's share info (if warrented). That is not meta gaming. An NPC doing legwork on the PC's is not meta gaming. Also your level one loyalty contact you talked to, may talk to others about you and may try to profit from it. Irrespective of how this may impact the PC's. Again not metagaming.

A mage casting detect thoughts, guns, or other spells---again not metagaming.
An opposing hacker scanning for hidden nodes--not metagaming.

Ok-now what is the flipside to this:
A group of heavily awakened PCs always being sent into places with background counts making their abilities useles.
A groups hacker never being able to d anything cause everyone follows SPOP (Standard Paranoid Operating Procedures).
THe street same always facing loads of elementals, and no mundanes.
The level 6 Jammer that always goes off when the hacker or rigger get on scene.

To sum up:the opposition always knowing the weaknesses of each runner or having information on the runners plans that no one else posesses other than the runners.

I missed something. How does either the opfor or the runners know the rating of the jammer that goes off? How does the opposition know the exact rating of all of it?

See and I think that is totally awesome! As a player or GM I would enjoy that.




You may a good point. I've only ever had the less knowledge problem once. Call of Cthuhlu with an English major, I messed up on the date a book was published by a month so he fixated on that even though I admitted my error and felt the book had to be the key to the whole plot. Granted this player had the problem of wanting to be railroaded, and thats just not the way I roll.

Not 'the problem', the *preference*.

The point I think we all agree on (with maybe one exception) is that this is a game, and we're here to have fun.

Players coming up with wacky plans is fun. Bypassing the GM's plans may not be as much fun for him, but sometimes if you roll with it, you can have fun as well. Neutralizing, or worse, punishing, PC's for making crazy plans is Not Fun, and you're discouraging creativity and roleplay in your game.

It's fun for about 5 minutes, and then it's kind of, "Soooo, what's next?" And then it's back to legwork for the next part - it's hard to not feel a little cheated at that; even as a player. But I do agree with Cain, at this point we're really just quibbling on "how much is too much" and that's going to always depend on the group of players.

It sounded like some posts were saying that *any* is too much. That's wrong.

There is so much wrong in this post I don't even know where the begin.

Using another easily broken system that is very specifically broken by the class mentioned (wizard, because sorcerers don't usually bother with fly). If you want examples on how bad it is, go check out the various forums dedicated to power builds.

Also, deathtrap maze? No one likes killer traps. Even when written into book adventures (stupid wail of the banshee trap). Unless of course your players are masochists, in which case go for it.

I would love to play with Bull though, he sounds like he knows what he's doing.

Well you still have to deliver the item, figure out what it does, its not a plot stopper just a fast forward past bits This is however coming from a GM who let his players go on a tangent and clean up a southside gang who was mugging people meanwhile the dark overlord took over the city and began his supreme rule. Boy were they shocked when they found out the BBEG didn't wait for them to foil his plans!

Speaking as Devil's Advocate - Why didn't you see that one coming? Wouldn't they have to run their spells through you?

I mean were it me, and I saw a wizard hit fifth level, I'd just move the maze indoors/underground. Otherwise I risk an oversized magpie trying to make off with my Macguffin because it's shiny.

Well, it sounds like there are groups out there that would be outraged and feel betrayed by it. /shrug. I don't think I would want to roll with a group like that, but hey, I don't have to. My players expect my NPCs to adjust to their tactics; we enjoy the move -> counter-move - > counter counter move game^^

Some don't, I guess. I can't call that wrong.

It was 20 years ago, and I was 12 And like I said, my first D&D campaign. At the time, I left most of the paperwork to the individual player. Now, of course, I know better, on all counts^^

Some people are very locked in the rules rather than the spirit of the rules. Its one of the reasons I wont DM D&D for the RPGA or any Convention/Meetup anymore. I'm far to liberal in my style for most of the D&D crowd and arguably a good chunk of the Shadowrun crowd as well.

Oh well hell, that explains things.

Generally I won't put specific countermeasures in place when the runners come up with a plan - I'll just sneak something into the parts they don't have info on or overlook. Back to the 'burrow under fence' idea- They'd make it under no problem, but further in there's a pressure sensor along a hallway they didn't get info about (but could potentially spot), or the spider sends a drone patrol around a second time because he's bored.

My 'metagame' meter is typically dictated by a roll of the team's Edge dice. Sometimes they have unbelievably good luck, sometimes they find that the underdefended facility they just broke into is having a security audit by the central office of the company, or they're conducting 'readiness exercises' that night on short notice because someone really screwed up back at work that day.

It will never get to the point of "Your puny Shadowrunner bullets cannot harm me, I have Class IV armor on," but it might be "Your burrowing drone hit a buried power line. You might want a new one."

It all depends on the feeling I'm aiming for. If I want to heighten tension and emphasize the difficulty of the run, then I'm going to throw some stuff in to really give them the chance to get those skin-of-teeth successes to keep the mission a go...or everything goes haywire and we go from trenchcoat to mohawk with an Initiative roll.

I remember running a pre-generated game at a convention once. The author of the adventure was one that had a bad habit. He made all his dungeons in great big circles. If you followed the only passage to the left, you would eventually circle around and the room with the big important final encounter was actually right next to the entrance.

The players that showed up were doing a little meta-gaming themselves. They knew about his bad habit of the author's, and told me, "We turn right instead and tunnel through the wall to the next room."

Now, I could have just shrugged, let them do it, and get to the final room immediately. Then they would have sat there for the rest of the game slot, three hours or so, and twiddled their fingers bored.

Instead, I flipped the map layout. Scrambled the location of some of the rooms. Adjusted encounters on the fly.

Most importantly, I never let on that I was doing any of this.

No matter how much railroading you might do, it is important that the players never FEEL like they're being railroaded. They have to have at least the illusion that their choices matter. Otherwise, frankly, it's not real fun.

In the end, from all reports the players in that game had a blast. We even ran over time a little. I don't think they ever found out I altered the map.

And we did eventually get that author to break his circular dungeon habit.



-karma

Absolutely; this would be exactly the type of thing I was talking about as good GMing. I guess one point I forgot to bring up was that player perception of fairness in a lot of cases is more important than actually being fair.

I get to deal with it a lot.. my groups include archeology, biology, psychology, history and computer science students, a couple of gun nuts, and some others. Add to that my complete lack of knowledge about cars (they have colors, right?) and you might see where this is leading.

@ Ascalaphus LOL!!! So like I can turbo my electric car right

I've also been on the other side when I had a GM who insisted mustard gas did not come from mustard seeds (it only smells like mustard, thus the name... it comes from gas) and the smell of natural gas is natural. He would not be convinced otherwise... So I can see it from both sides.

Heck, a lot of players don't mind being railroaded, as long as they get to sit in the cab and toot the whistle occasionally

I once saw a player try to punch the DM because the DM kicked us off the railroad tracks, burned the train and made the tracks disappear.

Were you guys playing an Old West adventure?

Ha! See, it's the GM's *job* to bring the story. It can be fun to say, 'you're in Seattle, what do you do?', but it's more reliable for the Mr. Johnson to call you and say, 'you do this.' As with all things, we want the happy medium; in this case, choices matter, but none of this 'burn the train' stuff.

no. for a literal interpretation of what happened simply replace train with boat though.

In a way, this is why I can appreciate the professional rating you can apply to npcs. Do you want npcs lesser threats? equal threats? greater threats? uber threats? In a sense, this can also apply to facilities. They can range from rinky-dink, to 'its so well protected, it doesn't need a dice score'. Along those lines, the cunning pc plan will unfold in different ways. In some cases, it merely does the job. In some cases it does the job so well, the defenders are unaware it happened, so the tactic can be used again, in the most extreme its, "as you start to enact the plan, you hear the clearing of throats behind you, a man with a briefcase smiles, "We appreciate your enthusiasm, and would like to hire you for an alternate track."

But if that Snowplow is crashing through the fences, I am going to destroy the snowplow, that is common sense...

Or a snowplow 'off road' or a snowplow in hawaii, or a snowplow in a shopping mall, etc. Its all about blending. In some places vehicles are highly noticeable and raise suspicion, in other cases, being a pedestrian raises the same alarms.

There's a reason that a rigger would build a van equivalent to a citymaster instead of just using a citymaster.

This can not be said enough...

What we're disagreeing on is rather or not it's fair to retroactively anticipate a PC plan, or give the NPC's GM knowledge.

And you,re right that other than Suoq, who's opinion I don't fully understand and don't like what I do comprehend, no one is saying "punish the players". They are saying "Counter their ideas", which I think is equally unfair. Suoq is the only one saying "Because they use superior gear, the opposition should be able to magically deduce what kind of ammo they're using, what kind of equipment they're using, and what kind of underwear they have."

Does it really matter if it's actually fair as long as the players feel like it's fair? I mean, I don't think most players expect NPCs to be mindless cardboard cutouts either. Hard fights should be hard, and if a GM has a brain fart and overlooks something, I think it's their responsibility to still give the players a fun fight, even if it means changing things.

I mean, technically, almost everything I do is unfair by your definition, since I make up almost everything as I go these days. My players seem to find it fun^^

edit: It's not that I don't see your point though, but for me at least, it's not so much "countering the plan" as it is adjusting the numbers so they don't feel like it's a cake walk.

Again, that wasn't suoq's example, either. What he said is that *if* all the gadgets that shadowrunners typically carry had Signal 6, then guards would reasonably be alerted to a run in progress by the massive EM radiation. Those guards would further assume that, being shadowrunners, the attackers would be using Stick-n-Shock—a bit of an in-joke here on Dumpshock. In any case, it was an illustration of how unreasonable Cain's position that all Rating 6 medkits, cameras, microphones, etc. actually have Device Rating (that is, Matrix Attributes) of 6 would be in terms of the game world consequences.

I find this example wholly reasonable within the context of the game world, and in no way related to 'punish the players' or 'magically deduce' anything.

I am?

Where did I say that?

It may be that, when you first read the joke, you decided that there really was a shadowrunner team and that the team really DID have stick-n-shock ammo. If so, that happened in your head. The only thing the people talking know is the signal strength and what the devices are identifying themselves as. Everything else is assumptions they're making that may or may not be correct.

(The devices identifying themselves is a mental holdover from programming. Most protocols identify themselves. For example, if you open ANY jpg using notepad, right at the top you'll see "JFIF". It makes it really easy to find "deleted" images on a hard drive. Ethernet frames have MAC source and destination addresses. From those you can look up the vendor at a bare minimum. It's not hard to pick up a wireless signal and identify what you're looking at. Yes, It's not RAW. Then again, it was a joke. I know. I know. My bad for joking.)

The joke (or what was a joke once, it's long since ceased to be funny) in it's entirety for clarity.

And please, stop capitalizing the "s" is "suoq". It's pronounced "bons". Ask someone to explain it to you if you don't get it.

As Yerameyahu might say, it's a matter of extremes. Even if the playes come up with an awesome plat, that doesn't mean the rest needs to be a cakewalk.

Now, if you had designed an awesomely fiendish security layout, and they players discover a way to circumvent it, you can still make things fun and awesome. You don't have to roll over and show your belly. You just have to think fast and creatively, while being fair and straightforward with your players.


I should point out that gear carried by top execs would also have signal 6, so in that example, massive EM radiation would also be because of a late-night Board meeting. Great way to torpedo your career, to charge in on a Board meeting with guns blazing, wouldn't you say?


I'm sorry, I thought it was pronounced "Suck". I'll remember to pronounce it correctly in the future. However, even Toturi can't make me break my habit of using proper nouns. When it's grammatically appropriate to do so, I will keep your preferred capitalization in mind.