[at best tangentially on-topic about GMNPCs, really just all about double-crosses in current adventures, especially
Missions]
QUOTE (The Jake @ Feb 21 2012, 05:22 PM)

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.
It's a trend that's certainly fading away a little bit, in part because I think we've moved to
Missions so much as just about the only total package, finished, ready-to-run, adventures...and because
Missions are still, first and foremost, designed to be run at conventions.
When you're writing an adventure for a group of 6-8 strangers to run with a GM they've never met before, and you (as the writer) have no idea how well the players or the GM really know Shadowrun, and you know they've got four hours to (start to finish) do the whole thing, and you know they've paid money to play (so you want them to be sure to have a good time), and you know they're playing at some crowded convention hall (so often the subtleties of character action/role-playing are difficult if not entirely impossible), and you know that there's a wildly varying ratio of decent to awesome to overpowered characters (so it's hard to gauge a difficulty level), and you know that the shit always hits the fan sometime during a con so the GM might not even have enough time to read things over first...you've got to kind of
trim some fat, and you've got to worry, first and foremost, about making a simple, straightforward, adventure that it's hard to screw up.
In a way,
Missions are freaking awesome because it's cool to write an adventure that you know folks will play. Your top priority can be "fuck the details, just
be awesome," and some really fun stuff can happen that's cool and cinematic and over-the-top like a sweet action movie.
In a way, though, they're also really, really, tough to write because an awful lot of what makes Shadowrun
Shadowrun sometimes gets left out. I'm six adventures deep in writing for
Missions, and I have yet to touch the inevitable Mr. Johnson double-cross, just because I don't think there's enough time to work through a suspenseful Meet, a supposed milk run, the sinister reveal, a bitter double-cross/ambush, survival/escape/laying low, and then some sort of satisfying resolution, all in a four-hour window. What's more, I don't think there's time for all that without
completely railroading the snot right out of people. So I can't speak for all
Missions writers, but I know I, personally, have just made a point of not even touching the idea with a ten foot pole.
So it kind of sucks, sometimes, to be missing that classic Shadowrun "hook" in so many official adventures. As much as I miss it, and the paranoia and attention to detail that it instills, I'm not sure how to wedge it into a four-hour
Missions gig and still make for a cool adventure. There's legwork info in every single adventure I've written...but every single time I've, personally, run them? No one's even made an attempt at it, in part because I'm sure they don't feel they
have to (and, by and large, they're absolutely right).
I miss double-crosses.
[/tangent]