OK, nothing much of interest happened since today was just chargen day, but still. I have three players: a rigger, a technomancer/face, and one playing the radical eco-shaman out of the book. Should prove interesting.

Interesting group! If you can give them approperiate challenges, I predict tons of fun in your future.

What are you planning on running for them?

Food Fight, maybe, as an introductory scenario. I have a run in mind, though, and I wouldn't mind a bit of critique:

The technomancer's fixer calls him up and says a Johnson is commissioning a job. Every two weeks, a bonded courier comes into Seattle on the express maglev from Kansas City. He goes to Renraku's regional headquarters, stays there for 45-90 minutes, then returns to the train station and catches the next maglev back to Kansas City. Ms. Johnson has recently learned that the courier carries data, nothing physical, and she wants a copy. The maglev makes one stop, in Salt Lake City, and that's where the PCs will be inserted onto the Seattle-bound train. Ms. Johnson will provide all necessary documentation: burnable SINs, passports, travel papers, and, of course, train tickets. The PCs must obtain a copy of the data without, and this is the important part, without the courier being aware of it. Like all intelligence, if the enemy knows you have it, it becomes worthless.

The courier travels alone, because Renraku believes no one knows about him. He's met at the train station by four plainclothes Renraku security officers, so the PCs have to get the data before then.

Thoughts?

Sounds good. Things to consider. Does the train have any security of it's own? How is the couriers data stored? In headware memory (ala Johnny Mnemonic) or carried in external storage.

May I use this idea in my game? Although I may have to change it up a bit. My PCs are a mage and an adept. It's made for some interesting sessions.

The train run sounds like a good idea. Food Fight, cool as it is, might not be as appropriate - the trouble is, it doesn't look like any of your players are super combat-oriented, so a combat-oriented run that, say, the street samurai and adept gunslinger would breeze through, might be fatal for your group - unless the lesson you are trying to teach them is "Know when to run away.".

Just this. And maybe this.

Oh and this.

The train is just a regular passenger train. It might have the equivalent of an air marshal (rail marshal?), but isn't fortified by any stretch of the imagination. I think I am going to have the courier carry the data in headware memory. The rigger has a commlink (which I've ruled has a retractable cable that can connect to a datajack), but isn't a hacker, and the hacker has no commlink, being a technomancer. At the least, it should make for some wacky hijinks.

And by all means, feel free to gank my run. Every good crime story needs a train caper.

Okay last one for real: this is a thread from a long while back that has a lot of great ideas.

Also just because the train isn't all that secure doesn't mean there wont be opposition. The runners might not be the only ones on the train after the courier.

And just imagine all the places you could hide data when you could fit entire volumes in a single button on your sleeve.

lol. That was the exact same group I started SR4 with. I was the troll eco-druid.
Tell me, does the rigger plan to moonlight as the sam using a customized cyberarm?

No, although the rigger is the only character with significant personal combat capability. He's got Agility 6, Automatics 3 or 4, and an Ingram Smartgun X, plus Wired Reflexes I. The technomancer's walking around with a taser and a Viper, but he's only got Agility 3 and Pistols 2.

The Train scenario sounds great!

Food fight may be suitable, despite the low-end combat abilities - just be aware of their capabilities so you dobn't accidentally kill one of them.

Also, a combat oriented rigger can easily make up for the lack of a street sam, imo.

The rigger is definitely combat-oriented: he bought a Doberman and a Roto-Drone and outfitted each with an Ingram White Knight. He won't be able to take them on the train, of course, but I'm intentionally making the train job a little bit of a milk run. Ms. Johnson is looking for a regular team to work with, and this is basically the audition. If they do well, it will mean more work from the same source in the future.

edit: Quick question: does a technomancer automatically have DNI to his own devices? Specifically, does he need any other hardware to make use of a smartgun system?

Technically only if you have the smartgun complex form from unwired. But it doesn't make sense to me that technomancers have to have a complex form when hackers don't need a program running, so I tend to require that players subscribe to it lik any other device. It's your call.

If your players are big into puzzles over action you could go with a different tack on the base concept: the "data" is actually biological; the 'courier' is a carrier who has been infected with a virus whose genetic sequence is the message. He isn't even aware of this and is just a salaryman going to a Seattle clinic for his regular rejuvination treatments that he 'won' in the raffle that all top performers are entered into. The rejuvination treatments are legit but also keep the courier from knowing that he's even a courier.
PCs have partial info and have to face the rest of the info: either know courier but not data format; or know data format but not courier ID; or know unknown courier is carrying unknown data but know the general scenario (rejuvination treatments as cover) so they have to both locate target and figure out how they're carrying the data without knowing it.
Mage could detect low-grade illness from viral infection with a good assense roll
Hacker could locate schedule matching info
Hacker/rigger subvert train security systems to help with search, etc, and discover physical clues of illness (fever, possibly vomiting as clues of virus data packet if they don't know about it).
Small blood sample is enough to retrieve a copy of the virus once you know what is going on. The actual retreival is the easy part, figuring out what to do is the tough part.
Many many options.

Yeah, I gave one of my players such a build. She relies on accuracy by volume, but considering she has Wired Reflexes 1 and can spend 1 Simple Action to tag an enemy for full-auto LMG hosedown from her drone and still pump a couple of shotgun rounds the other way, things can get scary.

First run today. I went with the train job and, as usual, my players (down to two, since one opted out after all) took it in a direction I didn't anticipate at all. I thought they'd work on a way to put the courier out and do the run in plain sight. What they actually did was forfeit the offered pay (5,000 nuyen apiece) to have their fixer arrange for a second team to sabotage the train's air system so that it would pump knockout gas into the train cars at a prearranged time. Then, wearing respirators against the gas, the technomancer proceeded to hack a whole bunch of peoples' commlinks to make it look like a large-scale robbery (total haul: 15,500 nuyen, or just over half again what they were offered to begin with), after hacking the courier's headware to get the data.

After completing the objective, both characters removed their respirators, tossed them out the window, and let the gas knock them out to maintain their cover. Knight Errant met the train at the station, of course, and interrogated the passengers, but both characters manage to con their way past the detectives doing the questioning (the drone rigger rolling two hits on three dice) and deliver the data the next day. They finally met their Ms. Johnson, who treated them to a lunch of real meat and veggies rather than soypro and allowed that while their handling of the job was less discreet than she would have preferred, she was willing to hire them again in the future.

Total rewards: 15,500 nuyen (of which the technomancer kept 10,500 and gave the rigger 5,000; the rigger having not been party to the hacking, he doesn't know about this) and 4 karma for each character (1 for surviving, 1 for completing the objective, 1 for creative planning, and 1 for an easy, low-risk run).

Nice, that was pretty clever of them.

I love it when the players surprise you with a solution you never imagined.

Sounds like an awesome run!

Awesome! Thats a great plan. Do your players have lots of experience with SR or just watched a lot of heist movies?

Neither of my players have any previous familiarity with Shadowrun; I don't know how many heist movies they've seen. The rigger's player, at least, has seen Ocean's 12 and Ocean's 13.

OK, I'm now up to four regular players: the elf drone rigger and dwarf technomancer, plus a tiger-shifter street doc, and a black magician free spirit.

An amusing incident occurred at today's session: the technomancer, who is turning out to be insatiably greedy to a degree that will doubtless prove deeply unfortunate for him, went to one of the ritzier areas of Seattle, picked out some guy who seemed a likely mark, and proceeded to hack his commlink for cash. Techno's player said he wanted to probe the 'link; I explicitly asked him if he meant to hack on the fly, but no, he wanted to probe it, in VR to get the shorter interval on the extended test. He sat down in a public cafe, and slipped into VR. I told him that your body goes limp when in VR; he went with it anyway.

I'm sure you can see where this is headed.

I let him hack the 'link and get 500 nuyen. Then he came out of VR... in a hospital, with a doctor shining a penlight in his eye. After apparently slipping into a comatose state in the cafe, someone had called an ambulance. His bill for treatment was 1,000 nuyen.

I don't like to screw my players unduly, but when they do something blatantly stupid I think I would be remiss to not put the screws to them a little.

If he's being blatantly stupid, then I think he deserves the repercussions. Being out 500 nuyen for X hours work to slow hack a mark's commlink I think is a good way to make 'em pay. I don't know if your players read here or not, as I've got a simple idea to make it really bad if he tries it a second time.

"If he's being blatantly stupid, then I think he deserves the repercussions. Being out 500 nuyen for X hours work to slow hack a mark's commlink I think is a good way to make 'em pay. I don't know if your players read here or not, as I've got a simple idea to make it really bad if he tries it a second time. "

@Spellbinder
Actually, I think I am the only player of his that reads here. I almost never GM myself. But I think he got off relatively easy, since at the time he didn't have a SIN, fake or otherwise. Our GM (Tanegar) could have had him wake up in a prison hospital since he was SINless. But I thought it was a good teaching lesson.

Also, it could get really tedious for the rest of us if he goes around hacking everything.

So you might want to send suggestions via PM.

Free Spirit? I have no idea what you are referring to. It's all just a dream.

I'd love to hear more about your groups runs. Besides hacking everything, what has the group been up to?

For the train job, was he hacking commlinks to get access to accounts? Did they steal anything physical. You can have further complications when someone does a follow up and traces where the money from one of those accounts went. Or from a street cam that happened to catch a few frames of the train going past and shows two people still conscious so that KE knows it was someone on the train or a KE counter terrorism team higher up might send them a casual warning not to pull heists that can be mistaken for terror attacks, it's a ton of paperwork. A few loose ends coming back to haunt them can be very educational for new players. Obviously, you don't have to be a dick about it, just enough of a threat to make them cautious. A virus that wipes there systems or their fake SINs being erased. Just ideas, if you were planning on running a more "mirror shades" game than a "pink mohawk" game.

Last session, I threw them an extraction run, as a follow-up to the train job: Renraku scientist involved in cutting-edge biotech research is appearing at a science & industry conference, Johnson wants him abducted. The PCs hatched a reasonably cunning plan and did some good legwork, and I'm currently coming up with wrenches to throw into the works during the execution next session.

During the train job, the only things stolen were the paydata and a bunch of nuyen. It was a cross-country train, Kansas City to Seattle by way of Salt Lake City (the PCs' insertion point), so no street cams. I am trying to steer the game towards the "mirrorshades" end of things, but I'm open to a little bit of mohawkness.

OK, the run went off more or less without a hitch.

The Scenario: The paydata from the train job indicated that Renraku was working on something new in biotechnology. Ms. Johnson's employers (who have yet to be revealed) wanted to know what, and they planned to get the information by extracting the scientist supervising the project, one Dr. Trenton Smithfield. Smithfield is a virtual recluse, residing in an ultrasecure Renraku enclave north of the city and hardly ever leaving it. It so happens, however, that the Northwest Conference on Biotechnology is coming up, and is the only public event that Dr. Smithfield reliably attends. The PCs are hired to extract Smithfield from the conference and deliver him to a waiting black-bag team in the Redmond Barrens.

The Team: Mike Lawson, dwarf technomancer; Hideki Chosokabe, elf rigger; Sam, tiger-shifter magician and street doc; Random; free spirit.

The Plan: Recon reveals that Renraku has reserved three rooms on the northeast corner of the 18th floor of the hotel where the conference is being held. Lawson hacks the hotel server to acquire the room directly above the corner suite. The plan is that an entry team composed of Chosokabe and Sam will rappel down from the 19th floor and enter the 18th-floor corner suite, presumed to be Smithfield's, subdue Smithfield and his bodyguards, then lower Smithfield to the ground and escape by road. During the course of further reconnaissance, this is revised when Lawson and Sam, posing as a couple of married medtechs, schmooze Smithfield prior to the kidnapping and succeed in scoring Sam (who is female) an invite up to his room.

The Execution: Sam seduces Smithfield, slaps a tranq patch on his neck, and alerts the team that their target is ready for transport. Lawson rappels into the room, straps Smithfield into a harness, and lowers him to the ground. Sam and Random, who had been posing as Lawson and Sam's bodyguard, exit the hotel normally, Sam taking pains to create the illusion that Smithfield did not want to be disturbed. Lawson uses the admin account he planted in the hotel server previously to delete all security footage of the team, and the team absconds to the rendezvous with Ms. Johnson's black-bag team without incident, where they are paid the agreed-upon sum of ¥40,000 (¥10,000 apiece).

Once again, my players defied my expectations. The original plan was looking like they were going to exit the hotel in a running gun battle, and drive to the rendezvous site under fire the whole way. During the preparation phase, however, Sam's player took the initiative in approaching Smithfield during the conference and engaging him as a fellow scientist. She earned his trust, and ultimately conned her way into his room, where she tranq'd him while he was distracted by her... feminine wiles, shall we say? On the way out, she successfully conned the guards into thinking that their boss was sleeping it off, which gave the team the time needed to make their escape quietly.

Karma awards: 6 each for Mike, Hideki, and Random, 7 for Sam.

Obligatory anecdote of hilarious failure: Lawson, preparing to hack the hotel's security provider's node, tried multiple times to compile a sprite to help him. The Dice Gods did not smile upon him. First, he tried a Rating 6 sprite. He rolled 3 hits, the sprite rolled 3 hits. Lawson took 3S damage. Trying again, he rolled 3 hits, the sprite rolled 3 hits. Lawson took 2S damage. Lawson rests for several hours to shake off the stun damage. Third attempt, he dials it back to a Rating 5 sprite. He rolls 4 hits, the sprite rolls 4 hits. Lawson takes 4S damage. On the fourth attempt, for a Rating 4 sprite, he finally gets one that owes him 3 tasks.