Well, on that, I can certainly agree =)

Why would the secret board meeting be 'sneaking' up on a run target without bothering to tell security? Certainly you've suggested one possible scenario, but this is Shadowrun, and the other possibilities are more likely.

Well, I am reasonably sure that the Security detail knows all about that board meeting going on, and I am also reasonably sure that the board meeting is not being held along the North Wall on the exterior of the building, but in a comfortable Board Room inside of the facility...

Just Sayin'

But it was a funny joke when it was introduced... so Kudos for that at least suoq...

Or it could be the janitorial crew, with rating 6 cleaning equipment. Or any one of a number of possibilities. A bunch of high-Signal devices could mean anything or nothing. Automatically assuming it means shadowrunners and putting out a "shoot first" order is not only silly, it's metagaming.

Well, to be fair, having everything have a signal strength of 6 is also silly and requires some logical leaps that the RAW really doesn't support - even if they are worded poorly.

Except a janitorial crew really wouldn't HAVE Signal 6 equipment.

Very, very few SINners would, really. Since even Signal 1 equipment can usually connect to the Matrix just fine due to the prevalence of nodes all over the place.

There's only a handful of Signal 6 using folks in any given city. If anything of Signal 4 or higher shows up in the building, especially at night when there's nobody supposed to be around, a security guard might not run in guns blazing, but he's certainly going to investigate the source.



-karma

Why isn't the janitorial crew expected by the security, either? You're being ridiculous. A high concentration of (needlessly, incorrectly by RAW) powerful transmitters unexpectedly advancing on a secure facility is a perfectly *reasonable* indicator of a shadowrun team, just as incoming emissions of the same characteristic power of, say, an F-15 or something would probably not be presumed by the Russians to be a board meeting or a cleaning crew.

No, KarmaInferno. Cain's position is that a rating 6 camera has a Device Rating of 6. It has 6 Response, 6 Signal, 6 System, and 6 Firewall. Same for a rating 6 medkit, etc.

While I don't have my books handy, you're also assuming that you can't turn down the gain on your equipment. A high concentration of high-powered transmitters could also be a distraction, the morning rush, or any one of a number of things.

If it's not expected, it is not unreasonable for guards to at least take a look to see why they've got a bunch of transmitters incoming.




-karma

Or, it could be a bunch of shadowrunners. The point (of this thread) is not that your Device Rating position is untenable. The point is that it's not metagaming for NPCs to react reasonably, which is what suoq's amusing example was demonstrating. The fact that shadowrunners wouldn't realistically be running around antennas blazing is the joke; if they *did*, then the NPCs could humorously 'see' them coming a mile away.

Seriously, man.

If anything, my earlier example is a LOT more meta-gamey than some NPCs that may or may not anticipate a PC's tactics.

I had a pre-drawn map. The PC's tactics would have let them bypass 90% of the map. I chose not to let that happen and altered the map without telling the players, so they would run into all the adventure's encounters in the order expected by the text.

The intent was so the players could actually spend the next few hours actually enjoying a game, instead of sitting around bored.

In a home game, I could see easily running into the same problem - I plan an elaborate adventure for the evening, but I miss a loophole that the players spot that lets them bypass a huge part of the adventure.

I COULD just let them take it, and tell them 20 minutes later, "Okay, you win, adventure is done for the evening, go home."

OR. I can secretly alter the adventure on the fly behind the scenes so the player's actions DON'T bypass 90% of it. Maybe they find their loophole wasn't as effective as they thought it would be. Possibly I'll give them some bonus for being clever, give them a Moment of Awesome for their efforts. They might get the drop on some guards that were meant to ambush them or something. Whatever. The rest of the adventure, however, unknown to the players, I'll alter so they still have to go through to complete their mission.

I find absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's the intent behind the act that matters.



-karma

Well, I'd say the result is what matters. The result of your actions is avoiding having the adventure ruined (bravo!), and no one could say that yu did the wrong thing.

OR, you could run with it, and see what happens. You may surprise yourself. Things take a different path, and instead of an intense combat night, you could have a night of intense roleplay. Maybe even both, depending on how things turn out. ANYTHING can happen if you go off the charts.

The PC's figure out how to bypass security and end the run in an hour. So what? They now owe someone a favor, so they spend the next three hours paying that back. They avoided one combat? Save the stats, and have them encounter a similar group later. You don't have to cheat and railroad to keep a plot going. You just have to make sure you come up with a different plot, and have fun.

Personally, I've discovered that going player-directed is a much more satisfying way to game.

You are right, I could do that.

I guess my perceptions are colored by the fact that most of my GMing time is at conventions.

You don't have the option of just making up a new adventure direction there.

But really, even if I do "run with it", there's nothing wrong with salvaging some of the 'bypassed' stuff to fill out the new direction.

Additionally, let's assume I run with it, let the players bypass the adventure I'd prepared, and we spend the evening going off in a different direction. I at that point would be making up shit on the fly to react to player actions. How is that different than meta-game altering a pre-prepared situation to... react to player actions?




-karma

Both are options. Neither is morally or philosophically superior.

You're reacting, instead of railroading. You're working *with* the players, instead of fighting them.

Also, I've done a lot of convention-style gaming recently. I did the Denver Missions, and I regularly run D&D RPGA events. If the players want to dump the adventure and go kobold hunting, then that's the direction I'll go. I'll try and feed them plot hooks, and I've always succeeded at getting people back into the adventure.

Given that tasers are cheap, reasonably effective and entirely legal weapons, all security guards should wear nonconductive armor anyway.

Also, what is the executive team doing with emotitoys in the middle of the night by the north wall?

Given that tasers are cheap, reasonably effective and entirely legal weapons, all security guards should not wear nonconductive armor.

Why do these runners have their PANs on Active mode while attempting to infiltrate?

I prefer this method of GMing myself. It also allows for the GM to build things ahead of time: what spots are real death traps and which are less secure, which missions would be suicidal, and which cakewalks on paper. In the end, players will always do something unusual and change things up.

I do however agree that NPCs should react accordingly: investigating strange high signals would be routine, I think. Six is not your typical signal rating. Deducing the PCs entire skill set, capabilities, and equipment from the signal? Not so much.

And yet no one has suggested that this happens. No one. (Which means the forum actually appears to agree on something.)

Cain's repeatedly accused me of saying it, but when asked where I said it, he's been remarkably absent. The whole "Deducing the PCs entire skill set, capabilities, and equipment from the signal" is a baseless accusation that won't go away. In it's own way it's become even sadder than the joke that spawned it. All it needs is a tin man without a heart and a lion without any courage and it will go dancing off to Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage".

Not accusing you of anything personally, suoq. Merely commenting on the situation as presented.

I got confused again. Why would the runners have their equipment broadcasting on a run?

That would be counterintuitive.

Because they're apparently amateurs.
If I was a hacker, I would use hardware to mod my commlink to have variable signal strength. So I could choose to have it broadcast at a 2-3 when I'm out in public.

That being the case, it would then be metagaming that you can deduce that the team is on the grounds by signal strength. Yes?

Just because a team has it doesn't mean they're running it at full power. Or even on. Off switches are back en vogue post-Crash 2.0, or so I hear.

But not all GMs are equal. Some of us like to plan. Some of us like to run things on the fly. Some of us can hook the players back into the adventure while others end up discarding the adventure once the players leave it.

I've built scenes for one mission that have been bypassed or simply not needed and then later, I find a place I can fit them in. I don't feel that is railroading. Its taking a fleshed out scenario that I am really familiar with it and reskinning it. It gives the players a much more complex scenario to deal with, without me, the GM, having to figure it all out on a moment's notice.

I sometimes give myself a break when GMing and just want to sit back and let the action planned take place. Running a game every week, sometimes means you are not really in the mood to run a game, but don't want to let all your friends down and cancel the weekly game, but you really don't want to sit there and have to struggle to react to everything the players are doing.

Again, some GMs do this well. Some that do, have an off night.

Nights like that breed the creation of Dongasaurus and the Land Narwhal.

I'm now lost in the catch-22.

What I think you're saying is that there's really a team, they're really at the North Wall, and they've retroactively turned off their devices because it's been explained to the players that the guards have detected the signal strength of some of their toys and now one player is accusing the GM of metagaming and cheating.

Yeah, I've sat at THAT table with THAT player before.

<- beats head against desk.


Player: "I pull out my gun and start shooting"
GM: "What kind of ammo are you using?"
Player: "What kind of armor is he wearing?"
GM: "Are you changing clips based on his armor?"
Player: "No. But you're going to cheat and change his armor based on what I say I'm shooting. So you tell me first what kind of armor he has and I'll tell you what kind of ammo I always keep loaded in my gun."
Other 4 players and the GM: (cry on the inside, knowing this is 4 hours of their life they'll never get back.)

Well no.

This is a problem of player vs character does and don'ts and what the GM will catch you on.
If the team is filled with non-techno types, and they have a signal 6 commlink for some reason. Then it's perfectly reasonable for the GM to screw them for not having said, "oh btw, we're running in silent mode"

If the team has a hacker and/or rigger with an Electronic Warfare skill of at least a 3, and maybe a security procedures knowledge skill. I would argue that the character would never be so dumb as to move in with the eiffel tower broadcasting from his backpocket. He's a professional, he understands how electronic warfare works arguably better than the player does.

It's an assumptions thing. Do you want us to tell the GM every little detail of preparations? Spend a good 10-15 minutes per character detailing exactly what we mean by "I sweep the room for bugs" or "I do my basic prep for an infiltration?"

Or do the gm and players setup an "SOP" so they can say, "i prep" and everyone knows what that means.
IF I was playing a hacker, and I being caught up in the game forgot to say "I put the team's commlinks on silent, or I drop the signal strength to 1" and the GM screwed me over for it, saying the security is triangulating our position and gunning for us based on our signal 6 commlinks. I'd complain.. right there and then. If he was insistant.. I'd be "fine" and play it out. And then afterwards, I would painfully and precisely explain every action I did. Describe in great detail /how/ I was searching a room, how I was scanning.

What I'm saying is we're dealing with technology in the game that we don't have. Our characters know more about 2072 than we do (since we're about 60+ years away from it and all), and as such it isn't a far leap of logic to believe that a shadowrunner team at the north wall isn't going to have their Rating 6 Emotitoy there let alone broadcasting, and they're going to have their commlinks toned down for 'quiet' transmission.

Unless they're rank amateurs, which some of them are, in which case screw with them all you like and reap the consequences.

On a game mechanics scale, we can assume that the basics are covered so we as GM's and players aren't lost in the niggling details of every run and focus on enjoying the storyline (or in the case of others, breaking it).

There is no real 'catch-22' here. Either remind them gently as a GM of the basics or train them to get lost in those details. It all depends on how badly you want to mess with your players as a GM.

Edit @sabs: That's exactly the kind of situation I want to avoid as a GM. Screwing you as a player just once in that fashion creates a headache for me forevermore because I've created a precedent for you to cover your tracks in minute detail. How's that fun?
(And how would the team know they're being triangulated, anyway? )

Compared to the leap of logic required to believe there was a shadowrunner team on the north wall and it was run by players, agreed. (How the heck we got there, I still don't know but that's where we are so I'll run with it.)

So now you're at the north wall, you're enforcing radio silence, and one of the players is busy accusing the GM of metagaming, cheating, and asshattery.

What do you do next?


Edit: Given the radio silence, does that mean the tacnet and drones are off? Or are they on but magically undetectable? I'll just go with magically undetectable and get this session over with.

The moment one of my players tries this, I calmly take their sheet and check over their ammo listings, and I will leave it to the rest of the party as to what ammo he's using, or what foci he brought, or what armor he's wearing, or whatever he happens to be complaining about. If they don't want to run it that way, I will sketch a quick d6 table and roll a die to determine what he's complaining about, in full view of the group.

This is a textbook example of a player who isn't in it for the story - he's in it to win it. Not necessarily a player I want at my table, as I prefer the Tau mentality of gaming - for the greater enjoyment of the party.

Cry?
Move on from there and salvage the night
Finish the session, then sit down with everybody and talk about expectations etc?

I'm the GM, and I'm comfortable with my corruption re: absolute power. My players know I'm not out to screw them unless it would be really, really entertaining and I reward as judiciously as I punish.

If the player's making a straightforward metagaming attempt to maximize his deeces while accusing me of the same, I'll consider a bovine intervention or Surtyr(sp?) trap as a proper escalation. I'm not going to worry about this penny-ante +1 die crap when I can just rocksfall the problem - and the group knows it up front.

I get the feeling this wouldn't happen in your game though in the first place.

It's very true. I haven't run games at cons (though that may change next year, depending on how I'm feeling in a few months), but I prefer a straightforward GMing style - we're here to have fun, not for me to 'defeat' you. It dosen't mean I'll pull punches, but if I'm runing a R6 table then I'm going to assume the array of suckers players before me have been around the block and know the basics.

So now we're at "Metagaming. It's fine when I do it."

A few posts ago you were arguing that the devices would have been turned off and the GM needs to go with the party and now you're supporting bovine intervention when you're behind the screen.

Whatever...

I think I already mentioned, but since someone asked: real runners *wouldn't* be broadcasting from multiple Signal 6 devices. It was a joke. However, if they *were*, you can bet the NPCs would notice that something was up!

I don't know about your logic there, suoq, but the conclusion is correct: metagaming *is* fine when the GM does it. It's the GM's job.

We've tried. We don't appear to be getting anywhere. We still don't know how we decided there were players, they're on the north wall, and their running silent except for the tacnet and the drones and all the wireless sensors which are all, for some unknown reason, undetectable. Somehow we've gone from joke to it's actually happening in game. Whatever. We're there now.

We're trying to leave the north wall but now we're into the "If I was the GM, this would never happen to me" phase of the discussion.

Eventually, it will be time for the next event slot and I'll sign a bunch of unsuccessful log sheets. I feel bad for the three players who got screwed out of a decent adventure but they need to move on with me and leave the other two behind if they want to finish the run. Maybe they're waiting for me to just kill Cain and Doc Chase's characters, but I'd prefer to kill the character for something the character did, not the player.

A situation was provided in which I found a hole in which the plugging of which would be to the players' benefit. Thought experiments like that are what I do to pass the time.

You provided a situation in which plugging the player would be to mine and the players' benefit.

I spend most of my time behind the screen. As I said, I'm not in it to screw the group, because there's no advantage in it for me. I'm going to make the assumptions that the group knows what they're doing re: the basics, and I'm going to reserve my superweapons for those players who want to make the game not-fun. As I said, I don't need to play with penny-ante metagaming. I don't need to change armor on the fly, I don't need to swap ammo loadouts, and my request for info on what they're firing only factors into the resistance rolls should the rounds hit and I can describe the scene further. If a team fails one of my runs, it's because something major happened, not because I decided that it should be ED-209 around the corner rather than Ed the Janitor.

Well, Missions does tend to be more flexible, but a lot of 'living' convention games have that problem where altering the adventure to any major degree is expressly forbidden by the campaign rules. The RPGA is notorious for this - I've seen entire game sessions invalidated by RPGA HQ because the judge decided to even just alter one encounter.

And reacting vs railroading - you're just describing the difference between freeform vs structured roleplaying.

Neither is inherently "wrong" or superior.

Freeform can be fun. You certainly don't have to prep nearly as much. You get to tailor the game much more closely to player actions. But you can be JUST as meta-gaming in this style as with structured. A GM can just as easily decide on the fly in a free-form game to have his guards wear non-conductive armor after finding out the players are loading Stick-n-Shock.

Freeform also does have difficulty in generating those huge epic arching storylines. Ultimately I don't personally like it as either GM or player for extended campaigns, because it always ends up feeling kinda shallow to me. There's often no depth of story to me, as I KNOW the GM is just making up stuff as we go along, and we're not actually building towards anything.

Freeform also tends to work best if all the people involved with the game were expecting it to be part of the game.

I have had a Missions judge who right off the bat when we sat down to the game told us he doesn't understand Missions, nor the adventure, so he'd make something up. Quite frankly, I didn't particularly enjoy the game, partly because I had the thought in the back of my head the whole time, "this isn't what I signed up for". And ultimately I might have been just playing a non-Missions game because the rewards he gave out at the end were definitely not allowed by the campaign. (Deltaware implants anyone?)

What made it worse is that I'd driven a couple hours to play that game. It was the one Missions game at the time that I could not seem to get into a table for, and there was literally nothing else at that game day that I was interested in playing.



-karma

The tacnet does not need commlinks with signal 6 to work, especially in the early stages of the game.
Signal 2, gives you a 100M of leeway, Signal 3 400m. That's probably more than plenty for the initial setups.
The wireless sensors and the drones also don't need to be running giant "look at me mode" Most of the sensors, don't use signal at all.

And signal 2 is not undetectable. But it might not show up as an anomaly

Certainly a couple of 2 strength signals does not say " inbound shadowrunner team.. threat level Magenta, unleash the drone barghests.

They can be in hidden mode. Its not undetectable, by any means, but its not the beacon it would be if they were running in active or passive. They can still have their signal strength at 6.

To move on from there, in this example, I'd simply tell the arguing player that I don't want to argue about this right now. That if he wants to talk about this after the session, I'd be happy to do that. But let's focus on what is going on in game now, whether you agree with it or not.

Now, if that ends up with a problem player each session, that's another thing. It also depends on the group. I play with close friends and sometimes we disagree or argue or get mad at one another. But, we get through the session, even if someone pouts the entire time and the next session its all behind us.

It's a scenario that was given. If you're so bent out of shape over this theoretical, change the theoretical. I prefer to poke holes in this Twinkie of a scenario to see if the creamy filling is inside.


How is this a problem? Metagaming, like many other things, is subjective to the player and the GM. You gave a scenario in which not only was the player metagaming, he was being a dick. I explained how I deal with dickish players, and the obeservation was made that I probably wouldn't have said dickish player in my game.



To be quite honest, if you're killing a four-hour slot arguing with a player over what ammo he wants to use, make a judgement call and move on. It's not a difficult decision to make, here. If he's going to get pissy, he knows damn well where the door is.

I just find it humorous, because the original "signal 6" example was merely a joke to poke fun at Cain's insistence that gear with a rating MUST apparently have ALL ratings at the same value.


-karma

I don't care where the situation comes from, I just roll with it.

Of course.. if an r6 emotitoy has a signal 6...

Then every school grade kid in Seattle has a signal 6 thing. Security guards would see so many signal 6's they'd actually never assume it was a shadowrun team.
Think of emotitoys like cabbage patch kids, or those STUPID shaped rubber bands.

… That's why it's a joke. Jesus. That's the whole point: Cain said that anything with a rating of 6 has Signal 6. Nevermind.

Nice example in my own experience the few times I have seen something like the the GM was infact cheating. The most famous among my friends was when they killed the great Red Dragon 3 or 4 times over yet it was still up and fighting because the GM wasnt tracking hit points at all because he was going to "win".

That's why the intent is important.

GM doing it to stroke his own ego or "punish" the players = Bad.

GM doing it to make the game more enjoyable and fun = Good.





-karma

...I've actually seen an "unkillable red dragon" game before, but not because the GM was meta-gaming. It was because the GM was a novice at the game and interpreted "Stoneskins: 9" as the dragon having 9 Stoneskin SPELLS cast on it, so she rolled for how many stoneskin layers EACH spell granted and then added them all up. The players were kinda frightened and confused when the 30th or so attack hit the dragon and it still wasn't taking damage.