It assumes no such thing. I come from the school which holds that the truest and most valuable friends are the one who are willing to stand up to you. There are two possible outcomes here: either the problem player sucks it up, takes his well-deserved lumps and modifies his behavior, or he reveals himself as an unrepentant douche and storms out. I honestly cannot see a downside.

Possibly I did not choose my words as well as I might have. When I say "boot them from the game," I don't necessarily mean permanently, just for a session or two to drive home the point that their behavior is unacceptable. I apologize for any confusion which may have resulted.

My last group loved playing like this. It was Emergence and there were serious ideological disagreements and metatype hatreds on top of the greed, so things were tense. I hardly had to have Johnson betray them, I'd just have another faction make one runner a better offer and watch the fur fly. They were smart enough to not openly sell each other down the river, but stab each other in the back as untraceably as possible; gather as much intelligence on each other as possible, attack through intermediaries. The Maya elf shaman barely survived the hit by the Dientes Largos gang the Islamist cooked up along with Aztechnology, largely because neither enemy knew her mentor wasn't just a shaman but a damn powerful one. I don't think the elf actually figured out her mentor was an ends-justify-the-means blood mage... Anyways, the shaman countered by getting the intel to the Islamist's gang/militia homies that the Islamist gunslinger was really an adept. The gunslinger didn't know it herself, so she got all mopy and went on the Hajj to figure her shit out, leaving the campaign. And there was an incident before that where a previous elven face sold out everyone to Knight Errant in exchange for a position at Ares.

We loved it. It was Diplo with mirrorshades. It helped that we were all really close friends before we gamed together; I wonder if that not being the case is why people complain about traitor characters? It seems like a lot of the fun part of an underworld game to me.

The last game I GM'd was like that. Each of the characters had their own agenda and were working together because they saw that is was the only chance to make money and succeed.

Once character A blew up the character B's house and managed to convince everyone else that it was character A's enemy targetting them. The next few runs were the party trying to get this guy.

This sort of stuff was going on for four years real time and only stopped when I had to move town

It sounds like you all had fun, but for me, every time I read about these kinds of campaigns I ask myself "What the hell are these characters doing working together? Why? Are they all suicidal?" I can't even get past the concept of risking life and limb with people I do not trust, it is almost a guaranteed death sentence. When faced with this kind of situation what would you realistically do? Just walk away, live to fight another day. There is always more nuyen to be earned why take outrageous risk when you can make the same money elsewhere?

Mega and Khadajico, were these table games or online? The reason I ask is because unless there was a ton of player activity outside of your normal game meets, then its hard to believe that there would be much excitement at the table. I mean, backstabbing each other, setting up big hits, blowing up each other's houses...if this was all at the table and the players wanted some sort of secrecy before the "thing" happened, then I'd see a lot of notes being passed back and forth and a lot of players (assuming 4-6 players were playing) would just be sitting back and watching all the drama unfold.

Online/forum games, I get, but at the table?

Skype-emails between sessions to name a few ways. Just because you play at a table doesn't meant it can't continue away from it.

deek: It was a face to face game (6-10 players) with emails and chats between sessions ... I lost my email folder years ago but there must have been thousands of messages. Also before each session started (4 hours each tuesday at the pub) there would be 30-45 minutes of rapid exchange with each player grabbing me as he/she needed.

Faelan: I agree that sometimes there is the question of "Why the hell are you lot still together", We asked that question every so often and I think we had 4 character deaths (3 to the same player) and at least 3 retirements where the character said "Bye guys I am retiring / leaving". Which meant that there was a skill hole that needed filling and would allow a new character a place to slot.

I can intellectually grok how games like this might be fun but it is *so* not my group's style. I've got one player in particular who has a highly developed sense of fair play. That's not a negative trait, especially in real life, but it does make certain styles of gaming near impossible. At the first hint, meta- or in-game, that there was double-dealing going on between group members this player would pull out all the stops to resolve the situation. Before anyone says it, the player in question has no problem with deceit or double-dealing with antagonists; it's just a no-no within the group.

Sometimes the price of a stable long-term group of gaming friends is putting up with some quirks. If the quirks become disruptive like, say, if the entire rest of the group wanted to play a backstabbing game like Khadajico describes and the one player flatly refused, then we'd have a problem to resolve.

No worries. It is true that I was responding to the *seeming* flippancy of your wording and that I took 'boot' to mean permanent.

I know everyone has different experiences of friendship. I've been gaming with the same core group of people since 1990 and it's a long and complicated history. I excluded one friend from my SR3 game back in 1999 because we had an argument over the proposed power level of the game after a few too many pints at the pub. I ended up telling him that if he didn't agree with the premise of the game that he shouldn't make a character for it. He didn't, and there were long-term bad feelings that took a couple years to work out and get the friendship back on track.

I relate this anecdote solely to point out that had I posted about this problem on Dumpshock in terms of "I've got this player who won't agree with my campaign premise" with little supporting context, how is anyone supposed to give me useful advice?

I once played a game of D&D 2 edition in Menzoberranzan the Khadjicco describes. Great game and good times, the thing is the whole situation was setup for each player to have an agenda and we competed with each other to comeplte it. It included a lot of alliances, with very drow-like deception and diplomacy and betrayal. It was an amazing game, where the GM would very rarely intervene, rather than simply enhance player descritpions of the things they owned or their houses and check out rolls. 95% of all roleplaying happened between the players. The GM was constantly hearing secrets and loved it also.

Its very possible to do this in shadowrun... just not in a shadowrunner team -although betrayals may happen once in a while, they don't continue-, because you don't run with those you don't trust.

Now, in one of my games I asked, through an interested contact, to betray a Johnson. The deal the team agreed upon was to get a smuggler and deliver it to the Mafia. Said rigger had worked before for an Metahuman rights NGO in New York. Said NGO had paid for the rigger's -an elf- extraction from Japan when she was a kid, and asked her to deliver him, and his family, safely away form Denver.

While teh whole team gathered legwork to capture the guy, she made a double deal with some other rigger-smuggler contacts of her to get him out at some point. They agreed for a steep price.

The team got the guy and went to delvier the guy to the Mafia. Problem was the rigger never had a chance to slip away with him and she didn't want to blow her cover. When they got to the meet, she stayed inside the van while the team negotiated the delivery with the local mafia boss. She gave the rigger all the passcodes for the node in her van, and she mimicked that he'd taken over it. He shot the mobsters and the mafia boss, before escaping.

He managed to drive to the nearest police station and entered a witness protection program offering to sell all the intel about the mafia he had.

The team got divided:
The mystic adept tried to stay true to the deal to the mafia, even though it was "his team" in the eyes of the mafia the one taht broke the deal. He tried to unsusccesfully stop the van, instead of running away in the car the TM had hacked to escape. He was brainwashed /badly/ and now serves the mafia as a footsoldier and magical assassin, as in... yeah you're paying for your team's sins and will serve as an example in the streets.

The rest of the team heard what the rigger had done, and established an internal code of loyalties, in case of problamtic runs for teh moral code of one member. This reinforced the team members loyalty to each other.


It was fun, but certainly I don't see that happening often in a team and the team surviving.

Khadajico: That makes more sense (communication outside of the game). Call me a shitty GM, but unless its a question about updating gear/stats or "leveling", I'm really not interested in doing too much out of game with my players/friends. Granted, they don't really expect much, so that's kind of the "norm" I have played in. And since these are all long-time friends, outside of a face-to-face game session, we are not talking or doing much with the game outside of those sessions. Hell, most of the time, character updates are done at the beginning or end of a session so they don't have to worry about them in between games.

Its one thing to go into a campaign with an adversarial undertone. Its another thing to decide as a group to handle the "problem" in-game. I think the OPs issue is with someone that is just disruptive in-game and out of game and if its not dealt with first out of game, there's really no hope of him playing nice in game.

At the table, but there very much was a ton of player activity outside of the normal game sessions. Hell, I remember one time I couldn't even go to the pizzeria with my family without my phone going off six times with different people reacting to the latest events and moving their chess pieces. When people needed to do things on the fly, they'd pull me into the other room or pass notes, but a lot of it got dealt with via email.

Faelan:
I think part of the reason they stuck together is they were fairly sure nobody would do anything overt unless it was over retirement money. That's why the elf and the jihadist never got in each other's faces; they never had the evidence they'd need to confront them in front of the other group members. Also, they really did need each other's skills to get through the runs, otherwise I'm sure they'd have preferred to fly solo.