Read that post - a lot of good stuff there; especially toward the end.


As for the parallell discussion of players doing unexpected things: I pretty much always have some preparations made for the next thing I'm planning to run - at least a firm enough grasp to wing it for a session until I can get on top of things.

Therefore, even if my players manage to solve something much faster than intended - or if they opt out of a run - I can usually move on to the next thing.

With enough railroading, almost any game turns into a train-wreck...

I think that's perfectly reasonable and I love when players think of awesome things and we finish things faster than I expected. I usually only have a good idea of other jobs or the next thing, but it's rarely planned thoroughly. I usually end up winging it too. When this happens I'm up front with the players. I just say, "Okay, so I didn't expect you to get this far or I expected this to take longer, this next parts not entirely planned." Most players cut you slack or are understanding when they've turned down some runs for good in character reasons that they threw you a curve ball.

The things I'm bothered by is Irion saying that players never do unexpected things and that a good GM never has to wing it and claiming it's bad GMing to not think of every scenario that a player could possibly think of.

Which I realize is not what he started saying and maybe I'm overreacting, but being told I should have prepared more and I'm a bad GM tends to piss me off.

This is precisely the reason why the best course of action is to bring it before everybody at the game table before the game starts. Conspiring leads to nothing good, and a conspiracy without all the key players on board is like a ship with a good percentage, but not all, of the hull being water-tight. However close you might be, it still doesn't float. Honesty really is the best policy. Trying to be slick leads to animosity.

I almost never prepare a run. The run is completely designed by my players actions and motivations. The plot hooks I present are generally completely off the cuff, and built around the characters. Sure I might think about it during the week, but I almost never write stuff down other than names, if stats become important 9 times out of 10 I wing it. I've never had a complaint and most of my players really enjoy the fact that their characters leap to life because of the interactive nature of it. In my experience the worst GM's I have ever had are the ones who prep everything down to the smallest detail, because quite simply they don't know what to do when a player surprises them, or they have control issues. When it happens every week it grinds to a stop and someone who can wing it takes over. If you can predict everything your players will do, you are probably dealing with some players who are not the sharpest pencils in the pack.

Well... houses don't just burst into flames. Things start burning, and then they burn a little more, etc. So depending one when this becomes clear you might have a host of bad guys jumping out of the window - or not. If these bad guys were just waiting for you to shutter all the windows and then light a fire, then... well, they deserve no better. Enemies that simply sit in a room and wait to be killed, well...

In any case, whatever comes out will be severly weakened, I'll grant you that. However, unless it's a raging fire even Restance 10 will mean they will just lose the odd point here and there. Remember a raging fire reliably kills level 1 guys, quickly. Let's say, 2d6 per turn.

BUT that's hardly the point of this topic, sorry.



I'd actually love to have that happen. Just once, even. As it is, I prepare a run for one evening. It takes three. Go figure, it makes for little preparation, but...

Alright, I've had it that players didn't take the bait. Tough luck. Generally, as you say, being up front about it helps. Then at least you don't need to crack down on the trash-talking for one evening.



I think there may be some irony in there, somewhere? I'm not sure, honestly.

Now, Irion, correct me if I'm wrong:
You are saying your opinion is a bit of railroading is better than bad improvisation? I would disagree on principle, but there might be a case where it turns out more satisfying, at least if your players aren't dramatically anti-railroading. Or maybe if you're just not very good at improvising.

I've personally experienced a GM that arrived to the session saying: Alright... you said you wanted to do something different, some regular crime. Alright, I don't quite have that, but, let me just take a few minutes to think of something. Then he sits there for half an hour hacking stuff into his laptop, DURING the session. And THEN he delivers..., wait for it,... NOTHING! He doesn't railroad, at least. He wings things badly. He just let's us run in fricken circles. On another occasion this guy had us investigate a HUGE, DEEP tunnel underneath a house filled with blood-mage cultists for... I don't know, an hour of real time at least, before it became clear that it was supposed to be the cellar for the central heating. WTF. So this guy was maybe the worst improviser ever. But even so, the obvious decision should have been to not game with him under those terms. He actually apparently did better GMing in other groups. Did I mention he was also a challenged player? Whe used to call him Gmorg, he could, very well, play half-orc barbarians. Yes, he also played those in SR. And in Earthdawn. And in... you name it. Should I also mention that he is doing his PhD in theoretical chemistry? Yeah, talk about inconsistencies.

On the other hand, preparation doesn't have to take long. Today I spent 20 minutes off work (I forced myself to do this, I have to admit) to prepare a structure for the run that I had started to improvise last session. With that, and some basics, I got through the session, planted all my hints, and got the players to look in the right direction. Next session they can confront the BBEG, and finish the job. And these 20 minutes saved me from an entire evening of unstructured embarrassment. What did I do in those 20 minutes? I made a node chart, basically a flow chart for the investigation the runners had to go through. That's it. Every individual piece of gameplay was improvised, but at least I had structure, and SOME information what clue to place where. (The emparassing part will come when next sesssion I can't remember what I improvised this session. Obviously... yeah, that's a problem. )

In The Other Game(It's safe to mention D&D now?!), I create an entire world. Key figures, social spheres, geography, other parties, BBEGs, rival groups, guilds, etc... Set up a time scale of when certain things will happen, with loose notes on what sorts of actions advance, delay, destroy, or even incite these timelines. Now, I have this bad habit of thinking in tangents. Not circles, not rails, not tracks, but tangents. It makes it easier to improv, certainly, but having the basics down without pulling it ouf my hoop, like the BBEG's hair color? Yeah...

Mind you, each layer takes me an absolute minimum of 1 hour to create, but I think it's worth it.

For SR, it's both easier and tougher. The world is already there, with a soft metaplot I can reach for at anytime.

BTW tried calling the GM but he was busy.

He always seems to be busy lately so I've asked the other players if they think he's too busy/too stressed to run. I've found dealing with him increasingly problematic and I'm starting to believe it is all related and not just coincidence as I originally thought. I'm floating the idea of running this campaign (retiring my character) and taking over as GM if the offending GM is suffering burnout. It might make a nice segue and neatly sidestep any arguments of nuking the spirit.

- J.

That could work. We all hit the wall once in a while, and need to unload once in a while(while dual wielding Panther Cannons turret mounted to the back of the party troll who is also dual wielding Panther Cannons). ;P

I was running a Ghost Cartels campaign for about a year last. Until I got bogged down with work + university + family life and needed to take a break from GMing. Oh and they made several huge cockups which effectively ended the GC campaign anyway. Shame too, they got as far as Caracas too and so close to the GC campaign finale, but they totally alienated Riveros unfortunately...

- J.

Ouch. That's a shame. Getting that close?

The Jake, thinking about it, I believe you might be right. I've been burnt out and the railroading that your GM is doing sounds a lot like what I did. Also, I've seen it happen to two other GMs. I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't catch that sooner. Either way, good luck with things and let us know what happens!

Update:
Spoke to the GM and just outright asked if he's suffering burnout and if so, sing out before before he goes postal. I think he appreciated that.

He then bought up the subject our one of the players has been particularly vocal about not trusting his pet GMPC. He then said something funny "Which may not be such a bad thing at this point." (could he have been planning for her to be the protagonist??).

Anyway, since he bought it up, not me, I said (verbatim) "yes, well, I think a lot of other players won't be trusting her after last session. BTW, you do you realise that you completely hijacked the game with her at one point from the other players, right?"

After a good 30 seconds deafening silence he said "Yes. I will concede that point. Taken onboard."

Didn't say much more after that, except to say "I did warn you this could happen". But yeah. He knows. Whats more, he hopefully won't have his feelings hurt when we nuke said GMPC. At least something has been said out of character to the GM.

- J.

They were clumsy and making a number of bad calls. And I let them know that this was not a point for cockups. So, the campaign ended with one player dead, Riveiros cutting off support and being stuck in Caracas with the hunt on for them from AZT, IDEA and every crazed fool in the city. I said this is a good place to end it and just assume none of them made it out of the city alive. I didn't have the time or patience to keep running but basically they were wanted and several parties had bounties on them.

- J.

Great creativity from your players there!

When I design a run, as well as the bricks and mortar of the physical and matrix security, I usually think of a few exploits my players can use: the head of night security is an Urban Brawl fan, so they are not necessarily concentrating on their camera feeds during the game; the guy in accounting who has a gambling/BTL problem and can be approached for a bribe; the dock the factory product is shipped from etc. And then I watch my players create a plan to get in through a second story window and crawl through the air-conditioning ducts to the target lab ...

That doesn't absolutely necessitate pre-design. Where there's human factor, there's error. Where there's machine factor there's usually a number of opposed ratings. Some things are rather binary, but you don't absolutely have to use them.

Generally, in a mostly improv run, if I say "There are two guards", and my players say "We do some legwork/matrix search/hack their commlinks/whatever to find something to pressure them with" it's pretty easy to just pull something.

I wish I could get my players to do some legwork/make some calls. They seem absolutely averse to it.

So far, my group has only done it to get, and I kid you not, an instruction manual that they could have gotten themselves from the company's Matrix site.

On the bright side, one hella happy Hacker just made 1000¥ for reading the 2070 version of a PDF.

Wait, what?! Story, please?

Do they come from a SR background or from other RPGs?

The concept that you can just call a contact and make them do YOUR work is pretty much SR exclusive (at least to the extend it's used in SR).
It's been alien to me the first couple rounds too.

On the other hand we had a guy playing a really well connected runner in SR3, who had literally pages full of contacts, he spent a significant amount of his 1M starting creds on those. Things got out of hand quickly, because he could come up with a specialized contact for almost anything.

At that point we decided we wanted more legwork of the personal kind in future runs.

Some of them do, some of them don't. The ones who do should know better, though.

Heck, I even gave everybody Charisma*2 free contacts.

I'm lucky, my players have broken me of the need to interject myself into the party Ala the GMNPC. But we're also lucky in that we're friends at the table, and away from the table. Which means we all spend time together discussing the game, and other things. Which means it's a little easier for all of us to swallow a dose of humble pie when it'.

I realize not every one has the same lucky scenario I get at my table, and I wish everyone luck.

This the fault of the current system. It was much more deeply ingrained in the rules in earlier editions than the present one. And fluff too.

- J.

Maybe I'm just missing it - how so? It seems to me if you want info you need to find it somewhere. Obviously, the matrix is the first step, and it's alto pervasive to never go beyond it. This used to be harder, you didn't used to go into the matrix to get some dirt on your next door neighbour. But this is a realistic change. I still think a face character will want to work the personal angle, mostly.

What I would like to see more is runs solved by talking to people, by conning people, or other stuff that doesn't involve sneaking in and shooting. But we (strictly subjective) never saw that in SR3, either.

I do not know if that is actually all that accurate. We do MORE legwork now in 4th Edition than we ever did in previous editions. It is much easier to do so when everyone can use the Matrix and/or Contacts to get what you need, rather than relying upon your Face or Decker to do so for the entire group.

What do I look like, the story man?

*Sighs* Fine, when I get home.

Ahhh... the joys of being a Freelancer.

What, you're never off work, never have holidays, and have to pay your own insurance?

Just joking... a bit.

A higher percentage of the legwork in SR4 is data searches, though - at least at my table.

We've been playing shadowrun for over twenty years now, though, so legwork is an integral part to us all. The biggest problem I find is that my players have a tendency to always ask the wrong contact the wrong thing, and often skip their 'best' contacts for a certain field - it's pretty consistent when it comes to legwork in published runs...

In the past rulebook the fluff and modules focused very heavily on doing the legwork. You read about runs that went wrong, Johnsons that screwed runner teams, crosses and double crosses, etc. Legwork was your way of anticipating what was going to happen next and the system really drilled that in.

You got extra karma or you got screwed.

Now we're at a point where most of the adventures are summarised and don't really delve into the details of a shadowrun anymore because they're in a 3 pt summarised format over a few pages. Not that I mind this mind you - I like this format. But brevity comes at the cost of detail obviously, and the karma rewards are up to the GM.

I've not really read too many SR Missions books - which might sway my opinion on this - but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest if you're one of those groups doing more legwork than ever then it is a sign of your group probably being much more experienced with earlier editions. The players in my current group are very similar but that's often because they're a product of those earlier editions too.

- J.

Does setting up a food truck near a facility for a few weeks to get names, faces, gossip, and eventually a security badge (palmed, quickly cloned, then handed back "oh, i found this on the ground over there Bob") count? We were hoping to get a delivery request at one point in time for an easy pass into the facility.
This was a self created job, I think to get some tech upgrades the team wanted so time wasn't a huge issue.

Probably, yes.

And I can agree with that. We have ALWAYS done legwork. The rest is awesome PC fail.

Hmm...I haven't thought of that. Good point.

As for the SRMs, as well as the published full adventures, they have legwork. But come to think of it, even then it usually isn't as integral to the run as it was in previous editions. Often, it's just about getting more info on the people involved, and not about getting vital info for the job at hand...


LoL - Indeed

I have one player who took Etiquette because he's a die hard SR2 fan and still takes it just for those times he needs to do Legwork. And he's a total gun bunny.

- J.

Ok, I've never played Missions. But... how DO you get the vital info?



Er... I haven't EVER had a character that hasn't had Etiquette. And I haven't seen chars like that. I mean you need it to buy stuff. How would he ever have what he has if he doesn't even know basics about talking to people? Alright, in SR4 there is the whole ONLY telling your Fixer to get things for you thing. Hmm... maybe I'm old-fashioned, too.

Well, SRMs are designed to be short and doable for any group - often it's fairly 'straight' work, with most of the info coming from the johnson and each scene leading to the next. Other times it's mostly recon work, and not much (if any) contact legwork. There are some exceptions, though.

You'd be amazed how far you can get building a character that never (apparently) talks to another NPC apart from his fixer. I know I have.

Also if you invest BP into contacts, you can (literally) buy your friends.

- J.

Hmm, yeah, I can see that they need to be basic if they are supposed to be doable in one evening. But isn't that kind of boring? I mean... if there's nothing to really sink your teeth into...



Yeah, I have to say, I'm beginning to be old-fashioned. I'm usually not the one to wave red flags about the high-and-mighty roleplaying ethos and blah blah. Alright, I know you can still default on cha, so... do you get by without social skills whatsoever? I've even gone and taken the Influence group. For a hacker! There's got to be a little powergamer jumping around inside me somewhere screaming HOW COULD YOU???? (Alright, it's at 1, but...)

It's called Negotiations. Etiquette (at least now) is only used to "fit in" in certain situations.

Don't look at me, I love playing the Face. I'll build a street samurai/face, a hacker/face, shaman/face (current character). Whatever. I am never stingy on Social skills.

- J.

Sounds like a creative way to do a job ... if you have 3 weeks before you need to do the run!

Perhaps this was meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but that's really not what Etiquette, or lack thereof, means (anymore). It's about being able to fit in in a social environment and since it's now allowed to be general that means any social environment. You can have a ton of friends without ever having learned this skill. Also, skills are only relevant for difficult tasks - you don't need Pistols to pull a trigger and you don't need Etiquette to say 'Hello'.

Yeah, but you still roll it if you make your own calls to get an item. Or am I totally missing things?

I mean, look, if the fixer, as a classical NPC, rolls something like 6-10 dice to get stuff for you (I tend to default to double Connection for things like this), and you have to pay him his cut, then it seems actually better to have the skill yourself.

Edit: Ok, apparently I did mess things up. Well, frack.

Tell us a story, Gramps.

Ehh it was partially. It's more a reflection on my player. If I told him it's not used for that anymore, not sure whether he'd keep it or discard it. He might keep it if only for that fact he can then waltz into places and shoot someone in the head and not look too suspicious until he does the deed. In anycase, who am I to clarify the rules with him? That's the GM's job...

- J.

Funny you should say that. I'm rarely the GM for our group, but I am the most versed in the rules. I'm the one who owns all the books and the one that pushed the system to the other players. As such, I try and clarify the rules wherever I can. I've earned the title 'Dreamcatcher' for telling people why certain rules don't work the way they think they do, spoiling their fun by telling them why something won't work etc. I'm fine with that though. I have a thing about rules. I like to know them and enjoy reading them.

Look, I don't mind jumping in if I know what the rule is - particularly if it's going to sting us later on, but when I'm not GMing I'm happy for the break to be honest. But make no mistake, I'll throw on the "Asshole Player" hat (yes, we have a label for it) when it's needed.

- J.

A dryad mage with Negotiations, Increased (Charisma), and an Emotitoy can easily get near or above 20 dice.

Oh, no! Somebody brought up emotitoys! Run! Run!

Glad to hear this conversation was more positive then negative. Usually in any social akword or tension moment situation it is best not to act in the midst of the anger, annoyance, or whatever pessimistic emotion is going on. It is always better to give the situation some time for both heads to cool, calm down, reflect, and then speak to the offending party with a more optimistic heart motive.

There may still be some hurt feelings with the GMPC gets nuked. We're human and that is the nature of SR and other RPGs. But the good thing is that something has been said and that you have talked about the situation with the GM. Hopefully the next session is a lot of fun!