I will soon be starting my players through the "Ghost Cartels" arc. Is there any hints or insights anyone can offer me on how to do it better, what things might work better than others, or mistakes to avoid?

Thanks is advance!

Don't do drugs.

in case your team will have a Rigger, plan on some heavy logistics, there's a lot of unplanned, fast travelling. Was our biggest problem...
also, like in every prepared adventure, there's some more or less heavy railroading written into it. I was only a player, but one thing I remember:
That's how we avoided the big shoot out in the parking garage.

In case your guys don't have chars yet, you can give them some advice:
-A face will rule a lot of scenes, a versatile team in general should be prefered
-A char with gang and/or Asian background will have lots of fun.

You need at Least one Tank/Tough Guy
The Campaign is quite.... "Bullet Heavy" (well our GM plays it that way)
and its not a "Beginners Campaign" so the chars should be at least of Medium Experience( >50Karma)

with an experienced Dance
Medicineman

Oooooooooh! We are beginning characters. We will have one small run under our belts before we begin this. Maybe I can drag out the small run and put some "filler" runs in to boost up Karma. Add lib a few things.

I'm not adversse to ad-libbing. In fact, the way my players go all over and off of the planned route, I have to be at least a bit prepared to ad-lib. Just don't know Shadowrun NPC's well enough to ad lib encounters. Meh, what the hell, I'll learn as I go.

Good plan! I'm planning on doing Dawn of the artifacts if the last book is ever coming out. also, Ghost Cartels will involve travel, and with that comes new legal systems and needing new contacts. Be prepared to flesh those out. Mostly. Don't Do Drugs.

Don't Do Drugs.


UhOh, My Char does Drugs and he has latent awakening (We're still in the Beginning of the campaign)
So I guess it's goning to get----interesting for my Char....
@Troyminator
my Advice would be to add some Runs and be very generous with Karma (8-12 per Run) so that the chars can "Level up" a little faster
before you get to the "Tough points of the Campaign" (I don't know for shure (and I don't want You to spoil it to me)but I think Hong Kong is very Tough.My GM has a Sinister smile whenever we talk about it.... ??)

with a foreboding Dance
Medicineman

Keep in mind that this REALLY depends on the builds in play and the size of the runner team. 3 generalists who are trying to split their pools to cover as many areas as possible will struggle with or be forced to flee scenes where 5 min-maxed specialists might waltz through things. Frankly, my group absolutely steamrolled ghost cartels with 400 bp sheets, so I guess this must be a YMMV thing. Not every team has a rigger with a vehicle he affectionately nicknamed the "Fraggin' Wagon," after all.

Hong Kong is our groups normal stompiing ground. I like it a lot. AS for the Ghost Cartels Campaign, we are in it know. It is a lot of fun (though I am not really into the Gang character that I have been playing. I don't really care for that mentality). We have several character arcs that are taking place within the framework fo that campaign.

The entirety of Ghost Cartels will be so much better if the entire group plays Mercenaries 2: World In Flames before the game starts.

Everybody pays!

"Hey, it's the 'Runner that got shot in the hoop!"

"I'm gonna grow me a pink mohawk and be a big-time shadowrunner!"

"The entirety of Ghost Cartels will be so much better if the entire group plays Mercenaries 2: World In Flames before the game starts."

I misread that as Mechwarrior 2: Mercenary and didn't know if I should be elated or heartbroken that it wasn't.


-Tir


...Still have the CD somewhere, along with the game-destroying scratch down the middle of it. Dammit.

An easy way to do NPCs--I do this with groups at home or at conventions, for whenever the players wander off somewhere outside of the NPCs I have statted.

If the NPC is decent--they get a small handful of dice -- generally 6-9.
Good -- full handful -- generally 10-12
Freakin Awesom -- two handfuls -- 18-20.

This technique accounts for skill, stat and all modifiers. Yes, it calls for a lot of fudge factor, but overall it makes for a fast game where I'm not accounting for every single +1, -1. I do all of the accounting on NPCs which I actually have stats written for, since I can prep for the common modifiers.

Old school? I think GC is new school.

YMMV?

I was thinking "Old School" as in Wiz Kids rather than Topps

Your Mileage May Vary.
Rules As Written
Rules As Itended
In My Humble Opinion
In My Opinion
As Far As I Know
Away From Book

Read The Fragging Manual.

Shut The Freak Up
Out Of Character
Waste Of Money Brains And Time
F'ed Up Beyond All Recognition

WOMBAT: I resemble that...

It goes SNAFU (situation normal, all fucked up), FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition), Charlie Foxtrot (Clusterfuck)

The walled city can be tough you might want to look at that section carefully.

Yeah, after thumbing through the Ghost Cartels stat blocks I would say that a lot of the grunts are a naster than I would have guessed from when we ran through many of those missions. I don't think my GM softballed us, mind you, but my group managed to avoid most of the unnecessary fighting and had mind control spells and amounted to a personal drone army when we did fight. If your players are the sort that prefer to keep fighting until all opponents are downed then Ghost Cartels will likely either break that habit or break the team.

Yeah. The thing is:
The Gun Adept regularly rolls 12-15 dice for shooting.
The Face routinely rolls 10-15 dice for social skills.
The Mage can roll up to. . . . . .I can't remember, but it is a shitload of dice for damage spells.
The Street Sam. . . . well he missed the last session, but I remember he rolled a lot of dice.
The Infiltrator/Hacker was the most "realistic" character. He had decent pools that didn't seem, to me, overwhelming.

And the top three characters have edge pool of 3-6.

That reminds me. Do I understand the edge rules correctly in that when you use Edge, you roll as many edge dice as your total pool (i.e. 6 dice if you have an edge pool/score of 6) as many times as you have pool?

That seems a confusing question. Let me restate: If the Face is trying to blow the socks off a roll and he uses edge (with a pool of 5). The first time he uses Edge for the session, he rolls 5 dice. A while later he wants to use Edge again. Does he still roll 5 dice or is down to 4, then 3 the time after that, then 2, etc.?

<Edited for grammatical correctness>

If you write as well as I've seen you brainstorm, you are a waste of neither Money, Brains, or Time!

Check my Sig File for my writing.

Well 10-15 dice is about average for an area within a PC's 'specialty'. PC's should be able to chew through grunts and moving targets fairly quickly. It's part of the game. If you want to see broken characters for damage output take a look at some of the "trollbow" builds floating around. Also, every character is going to have a weakness. Your street sam might be rolling 20+ dice to shoot someone but he's in real trouble if a mage casts stunbolt on him and he needs to resist with a willpower roll.

Just as a point of comparison, lets look at

As for the edge question, yes each time you use edge you get to add the full value of it to your pool. The big balancing factor is how often you allow it to refresh. I refresh edge any time the PC's get paid, which seems to work fairly well.

They want me to refresh it at the beginning of every gaming session. As we only meet once/month and play for (depending on the start and end time) 8-12 hours, this sounds reasonable to me, but I don't know what the hell I'm doing!

I think that basing it on sessions or even real time will result in a much more high action over the top feel to your game. Personally I would refresh it according to the needs of the story. They should be careful because they want to have it available for the climax of the story, where as if you give it to them every time you meet it is going to become very much a superhero style of game. If that is what you like, and your players enjoy it that way more power to you, but I know my players would get bored with that style of play. Ass kicking is fun when it means something, if I have special magic mojo all the time well it ain't me doing the ass kicking.

Well those sound like pretty normal dicepools for characters specializations, heck my combat face rolls that 10-17 dice for both shooting and social skills, as well as melee and throwing grenades.

Yeah, those aren't really unusual numbers for a team of career runners and a fair number of the Ghost Cartels NPCs can match that. It's also important to remember that common bonuses and penalties can vary wildly from role to role, which makes comparing some pools an apples to oranges situation. For example, an Elf Face can roll 9 dice in social skills without having augmentations or even soft-capped skill groups or attributes. But that's not really wildly unusual given the sheer number of social dice modifiers that are present in the game. Meanwhile, a character's total Infiltration pool is often a fairly static number but that is deceiving given that a lot of the best infiltration aids work not by adding dice to the skulker's pools but rather by penalizing observers. Which, incidentally, is probably why there's umpteen million ways to gain cheap Perception dice pool bonuses. It's tough to penalize an infiltrator so patrolmen need to have big honkin' dice pools to keep up with the arms race.

And don't forget: it's really dangerous for a shadow runner to only be a couple of dice better than their opponents. Surviving a run is often a matter of engineering things so you can make as few rolls as possible with as good of odds as possible, particularly in combat since wound modifiers and repeated defense penalties can swallow up your dice pool advantage pretty easily. Unless you have a truly ridiculous amount of armor anyone anyone with 8+ dice and decent recoil compensation and an automatic weapon should be taken pretty dang seriously, and drones can hit that plateau pretty cheaply.