Inspired by the running list of things you're no longer allowed to do in Shadowrun, and by the noob GM legwork thread!

Sometimes players come up with such strange things, or miss such obvious ones, that the result is basically art.

Tell us the funny.

1) Spend several days setting up surveillance equipment to monitor a cargo ship at the docks, then listen to the GM describe how for days dockworkers are coming in from off-camera to load things onto the ship. And then never once stop to think about how that information could be useful.

2) Decide that they need to steal a keycard from some poor wageslave so they can bypass the security door to enter an office complex, then spend a few hours watching the building and then following a random worker back to his apartment. Once they make it to the apartment, two of them sit on a motorcycle in the adjacent parking garage, down from the target's car. When the target goes to leave his apartment later in the evening, they switch on the motorcycle, pop a wheelie, and speed past. The ork on the back chops the guy in half at the waist with a dikote combat axe. On the plus side, they got the keycard.

3) Plan a full assault on a moderately fortified gang compound in the Barrens, just so they can find out who hired four of the gang's members to shoot up a bar. Asking nicely would have worked, too.

Sounds like a very...excitable group you've got there

Retreat in the face of overwhelming force.

Push in the face of a retreating enemy.

Enter the target.

Not enter the non-target.

Stay the hell away from explosives.

Follow instructions.

Randomly pull a supressed SMG and murder Joe Bob the maintenance man during a stealth industrial sabotage run. Seriously, the guy didn't even spot the runner or anything.

Spend their Ill-gotten gains. (They buried their wages (Untraceable credsticks) in a sealed lead suitcase down by the docks until their resident hacker could find out what was wrong with them. 1 year later, they're still down there.)

Take the the prisoner outside (out of the Faraday cage building, uncommonly perceptive of the players)

Let some of the witness free. (To run into a crossfire setup by other parties. Very clever players, using their natural paranoia)



Thing is, most of my rewards ARE trap/hook free.
The players haven't figured that out yet.
-Tir

Legwork.

Edited for double posting. Also, magical recon.

Not doing legwork or magical recon. Then finding out that the blood mage they were going to wrap up and turn in to the DIMR for 1M¥ isn't there, because the blood spirit they tracked is free. And has his own aspected domain. And possession. And a security door that he keeps open but concealed for just such occasions.

keep the new drug stashed away, until the market value has trippled or even further. I would have given them at least 7 times the money they sold it for depending on their patience.

My players always seem split. Half want to plan,sneak and work out multiple backups. The other half believe in fate,luck and personal ability.
This usually means hours or days of planning and expensive purchases. The cocky half of the team just wait nervously for something to go wrong so they can pull guns and "fix" the problem.

"We have an inside man, we've planted the scripts in their node, the stealth gear has arrived, the diversion is set and here are our 3 escape plans."
v.s.
"How much damage would I take if drove the van in lobby at this speed?"

Actually find out that their Contacts are good for more than just what they think they are.

Krunch is actually a University Professor of Parabiology. Klub is an expert on infrastructure, specializing in all the fiddly little bits that make up a building and it's wiring.

Not ask questions.

I had a group (this is SR3) that the hacker had tracked down a Fairlight Excalibur in a showroom, and was planning a full heist. She convinced the rest of the team to come with her, and get a cut of the profit. She even went so far as to hire additional muscle for support when the Star arrived.

Halfway through the heist, they trip an alarm. Star shows up and the runners all hear a muffled explosion.

Runner A: "What was that?"
Hacker: "Just the backup, it's fine."

Several minutes go by, more explosions. The runners call in their ride, a rutheniumed chopper with spirit support for concealment and guard. (They thought they'd have a great story to tell...)

When they reach the roof, the "backup" are a bunch of people they know--a combat mage and three Heavy Weapons guys with rocket launchers. Below them, several squad cars and two swat vans were charred wreckage from AV Rockets and Lonestar was calling in snipers and military reinforcements.

End of the run, they got away with an Excalibur, several lesser cyberdecks, and a two month vacation in Fiji for plastic surgery.

Buy contacts.

Come up with character backstory.

http://www.weregeek.com/2011/02/23/

The campaign I've just begun this happened TWICE and both of them the whole team was killed. Seriously, one of them by the way was just a random group of gangs passing by the street shooting at people. If they decided to simply take cover, they would be fine, but the magician decided that going kamehameha on their asses would be fun, and he killed 80% of the gangers, just to be killed by one bullet and drain...

But as Garou said above, legwork (he used to GM to us, but now I'm GMing to the rest of the group and THEY DON'T DO LEGWORK).

As part of a larger story-arc, a Mrs. Johnson attempted to hire the PC's to assassinate another group of shadowrunners. I was sorta assuming the PC's would tell her to go to hell, but instead they took the job. They went to the other runner's hideout, filmed the successful hit (all while using gel-rounds) on the other runners, drug the unconscious team to a safe-house, bargained with them in order to cut-off one of their fingers (for proof).

Then they meet-up with Mrs. Johnson, and presented all of this evidence (with a really nice edge-boosted Con roll) and convinced her that the job was done. They get the money, and promptly geek Mrs. Johnson's 2 bodyguards, and take her captive.

Great fun was had by all, and I was forced to re-work a bunch of the plot to adapt to this.

I don't think my GM expected my character to join Deus.
SR3 and I had 1 box left before "dying" and my hacker/rigger PMed Deus saying, "let us escape and I'll come back to you." I took this minimech that was part of our reward, payed off my debts to the face (I'd bored some 40,000 from him for my drones) and found my way back to the research compound and became a Deus Slave.

In another game (SR4) we stole an oil tanker and the GM didn't expect the mage to summon a spirit to "Control Weather" and cause a hurricane (in Seattle!). It did mean that the cops couldn't use air support to bring us down, which was fine by us.

Oh, and on Yet Another Job, the crew was hired to off themselves (the Johnson didn't know who exactly the Stray Dogs were and hired us to kill them, not knowing we were the Stray Dogs).

Take advantage of some partying, stoned, and drunk go-gangers to extricate their target, only to have them wait, not leave someone on a stakeout to monitor them, and come back to find everyone gone without a clue to follow them on.

I am honored!

I hope to be able to post after Saturday night.

There have actually been sessions where I had been stumped ahead of time so I just tossed some simple run idea to them, then let them give me the ideas for the opposition as they worried out loud of how I was trying to screw them over.

Actually, I can post now.

last session I told them that I would work a little encounter up to get them used to how combat works. Go in, blow the ghouls to hell, discover that they were the incorrect targets, go blow the insolent gangers to hell, then start the real campaign.

They turn the throwaway encounters into a MASSIVE roleplaying thing on how thier characters meet, put in some legwork, and a whole lot of stuff that I was making up as we went to meet their needs.

They blow the crap out of the ghouls and devil rats (which I expected) and then the face got a HUGE number of successes facing down the ganger boss (who only got 1 success to resist). So the gang up and leaves to relocate somewhere else.

I thought the whole thing would take 1 hour (blow crap away and get on with it). It took almost 4 hours. Most of that, TBH, was us trying to figure out how combat worked. It doesn't matter how many times one reads through the rulebook, putting the rules into play for the 1st time is always a bit confusing.

Ouch - depending on what they did with her afterward it's the sort of move that can be very harmfull to their career. Johnsons aren't exactly fonds of runners biting the hand that feeds them (especially since it will the Johonson's own hand in that case...).

Unless said Johnson is safely dead or thoroughly held with blackmail, I'd expect her to spread the word of their lack of loyalty - as far as I can tell from what you told there was no cross from her, only a job the runners found unsavory and cheated before betraying her.

Which is a complete breach of shadowrunner ethic. If you take the job, unless the Johnson is crossing you, you're supposed to deliver and leave him alone afterward.

They were told by the powerful free toxic spirit that they'd have to surrender their weapons before he'd let them go down into the basement with the incredibly heavy steel door and large bar. Apparently he didn't want "his guests" getting hurt. I expected them to tell it to go fuck itself but instead they handed over the weapons and walked one or two at a time right into the waiting jaws of a horde of ghouls. What I'd hope would be a fairly easy fight to teach a new guy the basics of SR combat turned into a major clusterfuck.

In the interest of brevity, I didn't mention that the Mrs. Johnson in question was one of the primary villains of the story-arc, not to mention that she was trying to hire some shadowrunners to KILL some other shadowrunners in order to tie-up a loose end. First rule of assassination and all that.

Sounds like a classic case of too dumb to live. Sometimes the only appropriate response is, "Make a new character."

OK, it's a weird case, but when writing a story, I didn't expect Nas, my Elven Wheelman, to pull a bootlegger's turn and play "Chicken" with a Spirit of Man in the shape of a 1949 Mercury Eight.

Nah. Worst case scenario they burn Edge to survive. But they made it through the fight, it was just a lot tougher than I expected. Turns out they were more scared of the free spirit than I expected, even though we were using stick-n-shock as written back then.

Ok. So my players were tasked with recovering a contact and the package he had brought with him. The whole airport was shut down, under assault by hostile spirits and very dangerous, hostile metasentients of unknown origin. After informing my players that their extensive recon showed an adult human and a child hiding in a food storage area on the big two-level passenger jets that they knew their contact was aboard when the whole thing started, I did not expect one of them (the one with no demolitions skill, I must add) to mount a cutting charge on the alluminium skin of the plane on the outside of said compartment in an effort to rescue the pair. The player in question was shocked and upset when I informed him that his explosion killed both the woman and her daughter. 18P to the plane's unarmored skin. Penetrated. Double the area of the blast on the far side...
Yeah...

When I was GMing, the players had a tendency to plan like crazy. It worked out well for them, but it took a while.

It went a little like this

http://www.weregeek.com/2010/02/24/

I have never, ever, ever had the players follow one of the printed adventures.

On the Run: Done it two or three times, and each time the team hands over the disc to the Johnson and skips the second half of the adventure.
Predator and Prey: Baser Instincts. Team discovered that the all of the rampaging paracritters have been trained by the villain of the piece. Rather than break into the zoo where he lives, and get reamed by a bunch of crazed paracritters as the adventure seems to think they should do...the team comes up with a cover story and invites him out to lunch. They took the villain out to lunch. I repeat: they took the villain out to lunch. Ambushes and counter-ambushes followed and hilarity ensued, but still.

It's gotten to the point now that I just don't expect them to do anything according to my sketched out plan. My current group of players has a disturbing habit of calling the cops. Example: team stumbles on the path of a bug shaman in the midst of some nasty ritual preparation. Do they decide to go after the shaman? Nope. They get just enough evidence to convince LoneStar that they aren't prank callers, and then hand it over to LoneStar to let the big boys take care of the problem while they had to the bar for drinks.

Sigh.

See, I plan on informing my players of any relevant bounties on big scary monsters early on in the campaign. My players would go for the gold, to the point of not retreating. Of course they once disabled a truck with an arrow, so maybe they'd make it through.

i had the players do a hit the other week, they did all the leg work and found out info on the target, got his plans for the next day, where he lived, all that jazz.
then they decided to split up to scout the two areas that they thought would be good for the hit. the characters with a bit of brains all went to his house, and the two characters that were quite trigger happy went to the shops that he might be going to.
turns out that he was at the shops checking on some last minute things, the two trigger happy guys failed their tests to see if he had any one protecting him, and decided that becuase he was on his own that they would just do the hit now. long story short the mages looking after him make a couple of copys of him and tell him to run, and they chase the wrong ones down. very funny, but i wasnt ready for it at all

Man, fuck "shadowrunner ethic". It's more like a guideline anyway .

Back on topic, I would have to answer the question with "Legwork". Granted, the players were beginners, and I may not have been clear enough on the nature of the game, but very few of the players asked any questions about their missions unless I prompted them to. Oh, they'd do some legwork when the mission was "find this person", or "investigate this for me", but they never did think outside the box enough to ask around about Mr. Johnson himself, or to do any legwork they weren't explicitly hired to do. They never even negotiated their payment!

"No campaign survives contact with the players" by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.

I know that he didn't actually say that, but the principles are the same.

I didn't expect my PC to start breaking the rules of the underworld.
I didn't expect them to try to "teach a lesson" to the fixer who had just clearly explained why acting like they did was a bad idea.
I didn't expect them to "ambush" the veteran streetsam instead of the fixer.
I didn't expect their ambush to be "I stand in the middle of the alley with a pair of tongs".

At that point, I did expect the unfit ork hacker to try to rip the streetsam's piercings with the pair of tongs.
... But I didn't expect the streetsam to cut the hacker's arm off and fill his condition monitor in one blow.

I did expect the hacker's teammates to get him out of here.
... But I didn't expect them to have their Long Haul crash right then.

Long story short: I didn't expect my team to become the #1 public enemy of the Sprawl's underworld half-way in the campaign.

That is just... Awesome...

Didn't expect the Troll Street Sam with enough RC to not notice full autofire to completely miss while hosing down the room for 3 straight IPs. Didn't expect the Face with 1 IP and only moderate combat skill to down two targets in his turn immediately afterward with his Sakura Fubuki. (Troll got zero hits, Face got all 5's and 6's, same dice)

After having my group worked on slowly moving through and clearing the building, I didn't expect our Throw Adept to charge into the last uncleared room to retrieve his "lucky" knife immediately after downing a guard. He ate a Lightning Bolt, didn't get a single hit on the resistance test and had to hand of god it to survive. (He is now Geased to have that knife for his powers to work right)

Not take a panther cannon to club Penumbra.

Not get away with sneaking it past the metal detectors under a trench coat, claiming it was a 'funny hump'.

Not shoot the Johnson in the face. He didn't double cross them. He just got a panther round to the face. Why did I agree to GM all that time ago again? My players are retarded and so am I. And the stories we play. It's all Grand Theft Shadowrun, and Exalted: Shadowrun edition.

I don't see how the above would be anything but awesome .

Me either. I once built an Exalted character (never got to play it) that would mind-control some random shmo and masquerade to the party as this puppet. All his mind-effecting powers he could use through the puppet, so it's not like he'd have been useless. But when he gets blown away my character just finds another puppet.

"But you DIED!"

I now want to run Grand Theft Shadowrun...

SR: A-TEAM? hmm, a troll version of MR. T...

I, as the PC once did something the GM did not expect. I played the group's face and the run was very high threat. So the GM wanted to make me feel happy and put a social scene for me to shine right before the climax, which, for her irritation, I solved with a tranq patch and no words.

I set up a run for two people, at a health spa to pick up some stolen data files to be smuggled into an area they were among several 'tourists' taken hostage by NAN terrorists- "You're sweat lodge is an abomination to the traditions of our people" sort of thing. And before you say anything wearing a loin cloth and sneakers when three guys are aiming AK's at you.

I had a whole plan and lay out about where they were taken to and thought they'd escape in the night and take out the terrorists so I worked out the response tiems for the people waking up in the compound etc.

Then the two delinquents slipped out of the holding cells/converted barn, offed 2 guards and booked in a hotwired pickup!

Shoot first, ask questions later:
GM: "ok guys. You have successfully infiltrated the orphanage, sleeping children are everywhere. The office is to the left. It is likely that the man there will have information on your target."
Player: "I want to torch the orphanage."

SR sessions, way better then any VK test...

I am ashamed at how long it took me to get that. I haven't seen Blade Runner in far too long.

It would probably have helped had i bothered enough to look up the actual spelling

Oh yes, Voyte-Campfff.

in a Denver missions game the team was hired to take care of another Group of Runners .... so ... through a Great Con Roll ended up hiring the other group of runners to go on a wild Goose Chase (I KID YOU NOT) Pizza Delivery