So Jonathan C's post in this thread got me thinking. So I am taking the opportunity to A. Show off my big brain a little but more seriously B. Discuss the Leg Work involved in our games, in hopes that it will spark discussion that may aid someone one who needs it. (Maybe even me!)

Leg Work plays a serious role in our games. I tend to like what I call TV show pacing-the set up is immensely important. Players discover information to flesh out the plot in a number of ways in our games:

• Surveillance: Nothing beats eyes on target, or actually walking the terrain. It's not always physically possible, so sometimes the next best thing is map recon, or drone recon. Or Astral Recon.
• Contacts: People know things. Sometimes even useful things. Sometimes sorting the useful out from the not so useful is a pain in the ass but often as not it's who you know chummer.
• Google: Or the modern In Game equivalent. Sometimes just looking crap up is overlooked. It's a lot like kicking in a door that's unlocked. Why not try the handle first? Especially if it doesn't hurt you. Sometimes what you don't find can be just as enlightening as what you can find.
• First Hand Knowledge: Some characters have been there and done that a couple of times. It's easier to take a vacation if you once knew a guy who took a a vacation. Knowledge skills and back ground skills combined with actual background can be helpful

One last thing I have at my own table is a house rule called Stroke of Genius/Luck". If a player rolls, unaided by Karma or Edge a six on every die in their poll I reward them with a "Stroke of Genius" (Or Luck.) This is the Eureka moment we all sometimes have when staring at the facts and for some reason we just connect the dots. It's pretty rare-in twenty plus years it's only happened a few times at my table, but ti's kind of a fun twist.

In the end part of what makes this all work is I am not looking to keep secrets from the players. I want them to discover what's going on. I want them to see the plot hooks, and bite!

Which, funnily, gives a benefit to having a smaller dice pool....

Otherwise, that all sounds really cool - I wouldn't mind playing at your table

I usually have to beat my players vigorously about the head and neck with such clues: "Why don't you ask your bloody contact?" Ragh.

Anyway, Paul, when's the big brain showing up?

What can I say? I time share!

So I guess you play this out? You don't just roll some abstracted thing, right?

What I would like is a simple roll first to do things like finding that one guy who might know something - for instance the barkeep that talks to everyone, or an old geezer who sits in his window and watches the road non-stop. Playing a task like that seems tedious, especially when the players are clueless where to start.

My players have gone from chain-hacking commlinks to forced interrogations in search of the truth, and then finally they actually did something really smart: They tried to buy something from the people they were looking for, i.e. they went over the abstracted availability system to find the one guy in town willing to sell, and then we played out the meet. I wouldn't trust this to work all the time, but the scenario was set up that this basically had to happen, it just hadn't occurred to me at all initially.

The only thing they consistently don't do much is call their contacts. Funny, that. The only contacts that get called are prostitutes or pimps . AND by the girl of the group .

The majority of it, yes. There's a few things that are just too passé or that are so mundane as to not be worth spending our time on. But we don't want a roll every single time, and we enjoy the process-but yeah we don't just sit around in some sort of circle jerk, wasting a bunch of time on useless interactions.

I dunno, it depends on the specifics. It's a roleplaying game, so the immersion is important. Sometimes, I have had to RP 'dead end' scenes; the players were just barking up the wrong tree. *shrug* It'd be worse to just say, 'nope, wrong idea; try again'.

I'd start out doing it "main stage" a couple of times, then after everyone's got a clear idea of what it's typically like, resolve it with dice rolls. It's interesting to play it out the first few times, until the players have figured out how they make it work for their characters. When they know the drill, turn it to dice and spend precious gaming time on newer stuff.

Doing it full play in the beginning is a good way to show off a character's style, and to show off some of the game world. Repeating it all the time would be boring, but never doing it would be missing out

This is a (the?) crucial player-education point. It should be beyond obvious that you need info, and that you can get it from surveillance ('casing'), contacts, research, and knowledge. It's the same as real life. And yet, they somehow never think of it.

Absolutely. But to me it's fine a line between showing the ins and outs, and player frustration.

Well, I think the key is chaining the clues in a suitable manner - maybe branching, maybe not. I use the "three clue rule", where at basically every stage three clues could be discovered (not slavishly, obviously), and each point to a different place or person who could give more info. I also inverse the rule so that - while maybe not three - there are always several clues pointing to every important stage on the way. This creates a nice information tree. However, my players were still a bit miffed when they had to go over three layers of hierarchy to get from society drug dealer over the middle man to the guys running the show, but I just don't think anything else would make sense. That is already a really flat hierarchy (of course there is still a guy on top).

They do know by now to ask the right questions - I think they ended up finding every clue in every location. Sometimes it took some time, though.

Now as to dead ends - well... I have this unfortunate lack of ability when making up names, and it's a really easy metagame to know that whenever there's a Jim, Bob and Mary that these are likely not important people. And sometimes the frustrating aspect of not finding a clue in a certain location can also be a clue in itself - as in: why isn't there? Who removed it? Or rather, how far does this person's influence go? But even better than dead ends are false clues, and it's really fun to watch their reasoning as they - painfully avoiding any obvious metagaming, except the aforementioned, and to spite me they sometimes require me to give info on those Bobs and Marys, too - desperately incorporate the false clue into their explanation scheme. One of them was unintentionally placed, but I'm going to do this more often I think. It's more interesting than dead ends, since they believe they've found more info, and have more leads to follow.

And then there are sub-challenges associated with the clues: For instance, getting into a high-class night club. And not just that, a really, really racist high-class night club that an ork doesn't even need go near, and you generally only get in with invitation. Stuff like that.

Anyway, this is a mystery/detective style campaign, there won't be a break-in to get the mcguffin from somewhere in the end, so basically all this clue hunting is the actual meat of the campaign. And it makes for a welcome change in pace from the usual planning-then-doing-stuff ritual that normal runs often end up with.

So, yeah, this is basically all leg-work, of some form or another, with some shooty bits, maybe.

So, just curious, since it's in the rules can they magically always buy anything in the books as long as they have the money and pass the extended test without a critical glitch?

Not only is there a roll to find and buy things like that, Availability Tests are Negotiation tests, and one of the key reasons a good face is awesome. People often overlook the fact that your adept face can get you a ton of neat shit, especially if you give him some money to wave around.

I find the trick is making sure it's genuinly usefull. If they spend a half hour working their contacts, finding out all sorts of interesting things, but in the end everything works out the same, than they'd feel like it's a waste of time. They have to feel the outcome was better.

Note that "better" is complicated in that many players like combat, and actually feel cheated if the face gets 'em around to much of it. And few mind an extra healing roll at the end of the night. Usually "better" has to mean more cash, karma, etc OR more fun, which is harder to quantify but should never be forgotten.


As for how to do it, I'm a fan of pacing. Think of TV shows you watch. You don't have to RP every conversation, or the entirity of every conversation. Rather you throw in a little summary and drop them in at the interesting part. i.e. *roll some dice* Sam didn't know anything, but you guys had some fun at the batting cages. *roll some dice* Ha! Looks like he did better though, so its on your tab this time. *roll some dice* You come up empty handed with Ethyl too. *roll some more* Jimmy blathered on about the Seahwks like he usually does, but when you asked about the warehouse he got all serious and *switch to role playing it out and finish the conversation or establish you've gone back to talking about the Seahawks or something*

Umm... pretty much. It's just mostly a time issue, and a money issue. If they do a teamwork test to get stuff then this basically means that all of them are busy with that "all" day. (It gets worse since we aren't even using 4A! So basically every extended test that isn't opposed is a guaranteed success, I only let them roll to find out how long it takes.)

Now do understand that these are not hyper-specialists. Our face is just bordering on being a real face. She might have some essence left for some pheromones if she takes out her breast implants :

I guess it could be abused, or at least make GMing THAT much harder. However, it has been my experience that even allowing everything often doesn't matter - they will still lack critical items when the time comes . Also, we have Cash-for-Karma, and I really don't give a lot of karma, so even if they make money on the side - which they can - they still won't have too much to suddenly toss around military hardware.

With published scenarios at least, esp. the 2nd & 3rd ed stuff where they gave you those legwork tables at the back of the scenario, where more successes = more info, that's usually the point where I find I can really integrate the published stuff into my existing campaign - using existing characters, relationships, etc. to track down the information, and making what could be condensed into a single roll, into an interesting scene in and of itself - just a matter of available time, really.

I'll very rarely give a player a roll on one of those legwork tables without justifying it with some ingame action (unless they have VERY specific existing knowledge or information has been touched upon preciously by chance), though conversely really appropriate ingame action or roleplaying will often result in uncovering the relevant information WITHOUT a roll.

Legwork often becomes the meat of the adventure, especially since the group I run is quite small (2-3 players), so information tends to make up for a lack of firepower. And even following up on red herrings and supposed dead ends have led to interesting unrelated encounters, depends how creative and inspired I'm feeling on the day!

I agree: to hyperbolize, legwork *is* Shadowrun, not shooting people.

Indeed.... I far prefer the legwork phase of the run over the combat phases (if there are any, and there often are). But then again, I like to talk.

And sometimes the two things aren't separate, depends on where the information's coming from and what they need to do to get it!

Well, at least it was not coffee. Those Coffee Ambushes can be quite brutal.

First game I ran...

They had two "New Flavours" of SoyKaff: Chocolate Thunder and Midnight Serenade.