Just this last game, we had to hijack a medical supply truck. While the GM had just stumped us for a second on how to break into the truck after knocking out the driver with a stunbolt, we outsmarted him briefly on how to restart the truck. He had ruled it had turned off because the driver's hands had left the biometric sensors on the steering wheel. The hacker was ready to do his magic when the mage and I piped in with a new idea. Couldn't the mage just grab the unconscious guy's hand to restart the truck? It wasn't like he was dead.

The GM for lack of a better description went "...." before saying "Um, there's a password too..." thus making us actually have to hack the truck's systems. Still had to chuckle that we thought of something he had never considered.

At my table, whenever a player came up with a way to foil the GM's plan, that he didn't have a counter for, he'd give a karma for outsmarting him, and state that it didn't work. It felt like a good compromise between going off the rails too much (thus making the gm have to do everything on the fly), and rewarding creativity.

He did give the mage one karma point for outsmarting him but still stood by his declaration that the hacker still needed to hack the truck. I think he just wanted everyone to be able to do something.

Wait... What??? Every GM doesn't make it up on the fly? I have too nearly every game.

I was going to say. I run on the fly as well, beyond having a few decision-tree style 'if the players do -that-, the npcs will do -this-' things written out. Shadowrun's too chaotic to try and run on rails.

Agreed, but that sort of goes for every game I run.

Typically what throws me off is when they do what is generally expected. I line up an ambush, for example, and they go right down the alleyway where it's supposed to be. Or the secret is locked in an offline storage device, and then they decide to get all technical and make the right skill rolls to crack it anyway. Where do they get off do what I plan on them doing? The nerve...

But if a run is planned for a session, and the PCs say "We don't accept it. Let's fly to Hong Kong instead", that's a bunch of planning for that run wasted (making those aforementioned decision trees, research on the setting to be able to improvise things in the city and so on).

I certainly didn't expect the group to use a Chuckwagon to sell Soycaff.

And in the Star Wars game I play in, no one expected one of the Jedi to start up a t-shirt selling business. She manages it on the Holo-net now, and it actually makes her quite a bit of money.


Unfortunately, my Shadowrun group doesn't tend to go too crazy. Though they did once use a F8 fire elemental to dispose of bodies. I was proud of them for that one.

I started having the meetings with Johnsons at the end of sessions, just to address this. That way I don't plan a run until after they've accepted the job.

My first group had a few. They were hired to sabotage a break into a factory a sabotage a new soda before it was released to a test market, so that a rival could hold onto their market share. They looked at the factory security and went, "Screw that. We'll sabotage it at stuffer shack." They then spent a day or two cruising around the test market area and spraying the tops of cans with a mixture of salmonella and rat feces when no one was looking. I think they did vending machines too. They figured that they didn't need to sabotage the whole batch just enough to get some really bad blog reviews from sick drinkers. My entire planned run got scrapped as soon as they started talking about how to aerosolize rat droppings. I would have been irritated, but it was so amusing.

I actually create about 50% more content for a given mission than I expect to get to. I plot out the start, important mid-points, and the ending sections, but how exactly the team gets from one place to the next is up to them. Naturally this means I need to be able to pull up things on the fly, but I keep a collection of "random encounters" ready which can be custom tailored instantly to a given situation.

So far, I've found my team (which is still relatively new to the system and tabletop gaming overall) does pretty much what you'd expect them to, but they do get rather entertainingly off the rails a bit from time to time, so it's worth it in the end to have the flexibility built in, even if just because it speeds up the improvisation and feels less off-the-cuff because it does have some forethought put into it.

That said, if there's one thing they consistantly surprise me with it's their capacity for underestimating their own power. A couple of chump goons start spitting lead at them in the Barrens, the human sneak instantly clambors onto a rooftop and starts running away wildly, the minotaur bruiser hefts the ork face/mage over his shoulder and starts sprinting full out down the street, leaping over traffic, and the mage casts a strong Influence on the goons and has them throw their guns in a dumpster. By the time the spell effect ends, the team is hiding in an abandoned building nearby and are setting up a (to them) desperate ambush, complete with booby traps, the sneak clinging upside from the ceiling above the main doorway, and a quickly upended sofa wearing the minotaur's trenchcoat to act as a crude decoy.

They're learning, slowly. The more I drop (to them) scary situations on their heads and force them to fight, and the more they come out relatively intact with their foes littering the ground around them, the more they seem to be coming to grips with the dakka at their disposal.

~Umidori

Not sure if this goes here or in the GM's blindsiding the players article. My players thwarted me and didn't even know it.

They were hired to break into a bank and steal a safety deposit box. They were told explicitly that they were not to open the box or in any way examine the contents of the box. I figured they would ignore this and scan it or something. The box contained financial records that with some leg work could be traced back to a group of politicians using funds embezzled from a national bank to fund a coup in Slovakia (or one of the countries in the region, I don't remember which). It also had all the banking information for accessing some of the funds (the safety deposit box was a transfer point, the politicians' guy dropped the account information there and a guy from the rebel outfit picked it up). Just the money in the accounts, even without the blackmail information was worth way more than they were being paid. The Johnson was counting on making them suspicious by repeatedly making them swear not to look in the box and refusing to say why. The Johnson was figuring that they would steal the money and then blackmail the politicians or sell the information to someone else and the Johnson had a plan in place for making the information go public when they did. But they didn't open the safety deposit box. Even after the Johnson didn't show up for the pick-up and they weren't paid for the job. They thought that someone had taken out the Johnson and started trying to get information to find the Johnson to bring the people responsible to justice. I was baffled, as this was the same group that had previously interpreted "rough this guy up to teach him a lesson" as attack him at a bar, rob him, and shoot him up with an overdose of drugs.

Isn't that what the phrase means?

Come on, CanRay, you always do that!

This sounds like a Story. Please, tell?




Well, that was clever. I imagine you threw the Food Fight scenario at them at least once just so they didn't get away completely without shooting someone, but that was still clever.

Did they take home some of the stuff that they hadn't sabotaged? I totally would have. I'd have like, bought one Stuffer Shack clean out. If someone's asking you to sabotage it, that means they know it's good enough to demolish their stuff.


Later on, you could maybe sell it for profit through a fixer... Or just, yanno, enjoy for yourself.



Wow... Those are some unusual Runners. Not many groups of Shadowrunners would actually go looking to avenge Mr. Johnson if he got himself geeked.

Does Mr. Johnson know that they're looking to avenge him? He might actually consider having some street-level runners 'kidnap' him so they have someone to 'rescue' him from.





Well, that is some pretty rough treatment, to be sure...

Our GM once stranded us in the Redmond Barrens with no means of transport and whole whack of gangers out looking for us. I think he was expecting us to hold up in one of the abandoned warehouses or try and appropriate a vehicle from one for the gangs or something. For sure there was definitely gonna be a huge firefight involved. And, knowing him, some devil rats too.

What we did instead was raid a nearby scrapyard for a relatively intact car, but one without an engine. We all piled into the car and then the mage summoned a very powerful air spirit to push the car from behind while one of us steered. We managed to avoid all his clever little traps that way.

*chuckle*

Well, my group has managed all of one session so far... fraggin' real-life interference... but I do think I floored the DM slightly. After carefully deflecting all our attempts to get clever during our 'infiltration' (and waste lots and lots of time, in hindsight ... it was a rock concert so loud we probably could have blown the entire rear of the building off without anyone much noticing), we eventually just used the rear entrance like he more-or-less expected us to.

And then my troll brick rushed through the door, critted the guard by the door clean across the room, and proceeded to completely ignore any and all attempts to shoot him (I think two shots out of... thirty-some?.. managed to connect, and pinged off his armour like they'd been spitballs), finishing the other guards off on his second and third initiative passes. Well, aside from the last guy, whom the DM ruled passed out from terror while pissing himself.

I'm not sure if he's simply not used to even moderate min-maxers like me (I like me some high-powered characters, but I can't claim to be very good at it...), or if he's not familiar with Adepts, or even if he was right and those guards really did suck that bad.

Dive for cover!

It mostly pissed of our other teams players who felt they had to do all the hard work.
To under armored Ork Mercs it seemed the sensible thing to do when you face a restaurant full of mobsters drawing automatics and opening up...

Then chuck in a concussion grenade when they reload!

First game I GMed.

The group was hired to steal a prototype held at a warehouse. To distract the guards, they got a Chuckwagon and painted it in the Starbucks Colours, and sold "Midnight Serenade" and "Chocolate Thunder" soycaffs at a "Discount" as they were "Experimenting with new products".

I think you can guess what they did from their names.

Bwahahahahahaaah! Nothing quite like chemical warfare for fun and profit.

I'm guessing that Midnight Serenade was sleepy juice, and Chocolate Thunder gave whomever imbibed it a case of the explosive runs?

You got it.

Pity the people who drank BOTH. They sold the stuff down three or four blocks of warehouses to security guards all over the place.

Hahahaha, damn. They should've coordinated with other teams of runners and interested parties to hit warehouses all up and down the affected zone. Would've disguised exactly their interest... And reaped a lot more rewards.

It was their first attempt at Cyberpunk/Shadowrun as well. As it was, they made a good bit of cred from the soycaff sales alone.

In a Serenity game I was (or is it called Firefly?) our Preacher decided to take up proctology.

I (the cook) and the Engineer decided to cobble together a still.

GM was not amused.

All because we felt poor, despite the fact that money was entirely value-less.
(No really, we made more money off that one booze brew than ALL of the cargo we hauled around)

Almost, except for the whole killing him with the overdose. What's the point of intimidating someone, if you're going to kill them? They argued that the target might not have gotten the message, but the next guy definitely would. I couldn't argue with that.

I was just confused since they flip-flopped from casual violence against strangers to insane heroics for someone they barely knew. Sadly, two of the players broke up and the game felt apart before they really ran into all the complications.

The problem is you seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a difference between the two.

"Go rough up this guy" translates into "I'll pay you to have fun".
"We can't find our Johnson" translates into "He'll pay us and we'll have fun if we find him".



~Umidori

Maxim 38(?): Just because it's easy on you, doesn't mean it can't be hard on your clients. Or, getting paid is nice, getting paid twice is better.

Really, every Shadowrunner should have a copy of the Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries just hardchipped into their datajack or image-link.



Why did you even bother hauling cargo, then? You should've become a flying microbrewery/microdistillery, stopping on agricultural worlds to pick up the ingredients an' fixins, and selling it at the places where lots of folks who are long on credit and short on lawful virtues find themselves dreadfully thirsty.




Ahh, see, there's a distinction between the kind of overdose that results in a DocWagon call and the guy getting nailed with DocWagon expenses, and the kind of overdose that results in the ghoul chow being especially narcotic. I was assuming the former, it was the latter.



Umidori explained it perfectly:



Shadowrunners are basically children, and crime is their playground. They want to make money, because of course, money buys you a place to sleep and food to eat (boring,) but also buys you shiny new crime toys, like a brand-new pimped-out gun, or a sightly-used military attack drone with all its armaments in place that fell off the back of a transport. (Yay!)

They don't have to arrange the financial details in advance to have fun, it's just good business sense to do so. But not a lot of them have all that good business sense.

Agreed! Although, I miss The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates.

Don't all players do this every session?

Me too. What a pity. They should've just worked out a licensing deal.

Honestly, IP laws are getting insane.

No. Sometimes they start in Hong Kong.

I had a Star Wars character that was also a male underwear model. A Trandoshan male underwear model. With his own line.






-k

In a D6 Star Wars game (WEG Second Ed R&E) we were playing the GM decided to strand us on a planet just before an orbital bombardment. We were in the rebel base when it was hit. It was pretty much reduced to rubble, but there was a ruined surface-to-ship defense cannon a few miles from base. Two of us were able to scrounge our disabled ship for parts and fix the cannon, but the GM didn't really care because he didn't think anyone took the skills to shoot the cannon. My character's back story involved him actually being stationed at one previously and he had the skill for flavor, so I could fire the thing. I argued that since the Star Destroyer wouldn't be expecting any combat, it would have the shields offline. GM agreed, but said I could only take one shot before they could get the shields back online and pummel us into the ground. Also having taken the Starship Engineering skill, I made a called shot for the power plant on the Star Destroyer. I rolled and the wild die exploded multiple times, leaving me with a roll in the low 30s. Managed to barely roll high enough to hit it. GM was LIVID. Then he had the other ISD hit the site with its turbolasers. We barely made it out alive and they sent a spec ops group down JUST to hunt us down.

If we're going into other games, another Star Wars D6 story...

Our GM had stripped our weapons and technology heavy master combat monster (Legit gotten, it was the Players *FIRST* character that had been played for about a DECADE!) who said, "Screw it. I strip down to my skivvies, get some thermite, and teach those sea-going ships what happens when you have a big hole in the bottom!

He also took out sentries with the boot knife he's had since character creation, and never used until then. It was a total reversal of character for him, but also very appropriate.

Well, I'd love to contribute for Shadowrun, but my stories have mostly been told in other threads and it's usually stuff my players did to screw with me. ^_^ I'm like you, I've only played twice as a player; although that's changing finally. Last week was my Skype group's meet-n-greet and we officially start play next Friday night.