Hi, I'm setting up a Shadowrun 4 group with three friends. I'm a first time GM, and our SR experience is limited (I played some 2nd edition back in the day). Can anyone provide advice and tips?

Our first session will be to run through a oneshot with pregenerated characters to get a feel for the rules and ambiance. Can anyone recommend an available mission? Ideally the run would be short (being new to the mechanics will slow us down quite a bit), touch on a wide variety of rules aspects, and have a nice gritty feel to it. I'm leaning towards doling out the Street Samurai, Bounty Hunter, and Combat Mage from the Catalyst Quick-Start Rules to my three players.

In more general terms, can anyone recommend specific GM resources? Are there any can't live without helper programs to make play run smoothly? Any particularly broken rules that need a patch? Advice on group composition to that everyone in the three player team can share the limelight?

Based on a bit of SR 2E experience long ago, I'm strongly inclined to make Matrix related stuff the domain of NPCs unless a player is very interested in playing a decker. Am I short-changing our fun if I do this?

Thanks for any advice or thoughts.

There are no deckers anymore, there's hackers. They're much less "everyone else stop playing Shadowrun and go play an XBox" than Deckers used to be. And they're very, very useful.

If you are looking for short adventures... check the Catalyst website (Shadowrun Missions, Season 2).

http://www.shadowrun4.com/missions/downloads-season-2/

Bye
Thanee

Thanee,

Thanks, that looks very useful. I somehow missed the missions link when checking out Catalyst's website.

ShadowDragon8685,

Are hackers pretty fun to play in addition to being useful?

It seems that a solid runner team will cover more roles than we have players (3). If we can cover gaps through teamwork (e.g. everyone's decent at combat) that seems fun. Another possible approach is to provide semi-reliable NPCs to cover gaps, especially for less exciting/rewarding roles.

The roles I'm envisioning are:
- Mr. People (Face?)
- Mr. Magic
- Mr. Technology
- Mr. Transportation
- Mr. Muscle

Am I missing any? Over-emphasizing any?

My group will probably take cues from me on team composition, so I'd like to be able to recommend a reliable three person team. If they decide it'd be more fun to make the wired three amigos, I'll roll with that.

This is my personal preference, others may vary. For a team that can handle nearly everything themselves, I'd recommend the following.

1) Charisma tradition mage (mojo and face in one package). A couple of combat spells that they feel are necessary, then load up with the utilities (I like mass sense removal (touch) myself).
2) cybered hacker/rigger/tech guy: cars, matrix, doors, and eventually he can be a one man drone army general. Going with a command style rigger frees up points to be a better tech guy/hacker. Also means they can act via AR, instead of having to be in VR, which means they can be useful in a firefight.
3) Beefwall/muscle: the dummy that gets to haul stuff, get shot at, and dish out the pain with guns. He can also be a secondary driver, tech guy, sneaky guy, etc. Bonus points if he carries small drones for the rigger to remotely take care of tasks for him (such as hacking past that door, deactivating that maglock, etc.)

With a three person party, that's how I'd have them composed ideally I think. This is, however, all dependent on your players actually wanting to play these roles.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/lofiversion/in...php/t35587.html has a good list of better than the book, min-maxed archetypes that can give you an idea of characters and roles. For this party, I'd probably go with Spirit Medium, Mercenary Rigger, and Generalist/Spook.

There's usually overlap. Typically in Face/Magic, Face/Transport, Technology/Transport (especially since decking and rigging are all pretty much the same as hacking now), and sometimes Face/Muscle and Magic/Muscle (with enough quickened spells or adept powers). The most common team I see is Street Sam or Adept Combat Guy, Magic/Face/Investigation/Medic, Hacker/Driver, and Jack of All Trades that fills in the holes (this is where you get those odd combos like Face/Combat or Magic/Muscle with a Magicians Way adept).

Long, confusing story short, you'll typically have a four man team. Two people will be capable in a gunfight (with the others being able to not get in the way at the least), one will be a full magician, one will be able to handle the tech, one will be able to do investigations, one will be able to talk to people, and one will be able to do effective recon. Five-man team, you'll have an extra combat guy or two magic users. Six-man team, you'll have a sniper and dedicated tactics guy. If you're short, you'll drop a combat guy and the hacker will have lots and lots of pretty little drones for back-up.

The first rule I always give people is: Don't Panic. Players can, and will, gleefully mess with your carefully laid plans. So don't be afraid to wing it.

Shadowrun really needs a good intro adventure. Food Fight is good to showcase the system, but there needs to be a good, "this is Shadowrun" adventure out there. Personally, I used the first mission from Season one and just updated it to fourth for my most recent campaign. Worked well for us.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the pointers, you've been very helpful.

My preference is all mages, each with stunball/bolt, counter-spell, summoning, a gun & some skill and some specialized skill suite. Use agents to do hacking, which also allows the whole crappy computer rule morass to be finessed.

Note that this is not a common approach....

If no one's raring to play a hacker, it won't be terrible to have one of the characters with a hacker contact. The hacking rules are more straightforward, but they still require both the hacker and GM to have a pretty clear understanding of what that battlefield is like.

The book archetypes are universally agreed to be pretty terrible, so you might want to check out the link there.

The wireless matrix represents a pretty huge change to the way things work from previous editions, and it's going to be important to take that into account.

Hahaha, that's exactly what i was going to say. Note though that while "all mages" is indeed very powerful but not at all realistic or "shadowrun as it should be".

For a new SR GM, use an NPC remote hacker who is easily distracted.

The players have to keep him focused on the run.

It will really speed up the game since you don't have to run the VR hacking stuff and can use the hacker to keep the players on track.
And you can ease in to the matrix rules.

I'll just kick in that I felt the Anatomy of a Shadowrun booklet in the Runner's Toolkit box was really useful to me as a primer for how rules worked at the table in SR4, both in and out of combat.

Actually pretty much all of the contents of that box seem like they'd be potentially valuable to a GM (including a multi-session introductory module) with a fair amount of content for interested players as well, particularly if they like to use physical copies of stuff for reference.