I've been running Shadowrun games for a years now and I always play with a guy that metagames to an annoying level. I want to finally teach him a lesson. My plan is to run a 2050 setting game involving the "rise of a humanitarian organization in the Barrens". I won't call them the Universal Brotherhood. I know any SR player worth his salt would immediately assume insect spirit and act accordingly, but I want to use this run as an object lesson about metagaming in general.

After baiting him to assume insect spirits, does anyone have any suggestions on how I can switch out the actual threat in a way that would be most disastrous for him? Be eeeeeeeevil.

Don't do any such thing. Either just talk to him, or deal with it.

And if talking to him won't work...

Either make the humanitarian organization a front for an organ legger operation. They use their services to find those unfortunate souls who have no ties and relatively healthy bodies. Or the org is a front for a corporation using metahumans as test subjects for some sort of crisis simulation on a UV host.

I like the latter, have the metagamer suddenly wake up inside the simulation without realization.

If he insists on using his knowledge to meta game preparations, I suggest doing what I do. Every time he wants to make a decision based on metagaming, ask him to do an appropriate knowledge check with a reasonable threshold. If he fails the check simply tell him that his character wouldn't know that and wouldn't know what to prepare for.
The simpler solution of course would be to talk to him.

This. IT would be better to openly penalise his Karma awards, than to be passive-aggressive about it.

On gthe off-chance you've already tried that to no avail, and you really feel you MUST bait-and-switch him, do not do it in a way that reinforces his perceived NEED to metagame.

Don't replace the evil he expected, with "something worse". Replace it with something LESS EVIL. Maybe, sure, there's Ghouls involved ... but they're decent-minded (despite their disease's dietery imposition). And the charity really is exactly that, a CHARITY ... a way for these Ghouls, who're also mages and/or adepts, to churn a "cash for karma" mill. Possibly put in a free spirit or two (or more), too. Have them be bankrolled from, or even BY, Asamondo.

They do good deeds, they get to feel better about themselves, they generate goodwill in the community, and they get a pile of bonus karma on the side. Win-win, all around.

Until the PCs get involved. And assume bug spirits. And tear the whole charity down, looking for the horrible evil nasty thing THAT WAS NEVER THERE. Instead of insect shamans and partial-merge monstrousities ... they find widows and orphans, cowering and crying. They discover that THEY were the bad-guys this time around ... that wile paranoia can be a survival trait in the shadows, inrestricted paranoia just gets people hurt, and makes the world that much worse of a place to live in.

...

IOW, if you bait-and-switch him, don't try the "one-up" approach. MINDFUCK the guy, instead. Much more effective. And also, potentially much more FUN.

I need a ghoul driven charity now!

you could just have it be an actual humanitarian organization. i mean, he doesn't have to die... realizing that he's just caused thousands of innocent people to suffer and possibly die because he decided to bomb the "universal brotherhood" or some such thing will probably leave him feeling pretty sheepish.

bonus points if they hired him (and the rest of the team) to defend their facility, and he decides to sabotage it... costing the rest of the group a payday and putting their lives in danger in addition to making him feel like a world class heel for being responsible for causing so much suffering (make sure to drive this home... he won't likely think in terms of what suffering his actions caused to faceless NPCs without it). extra bonus points if one or more of his contacts were affected by it in some way (possibly having contributed financially, or knowing people who were dependant on the organization for food or shelter, etc)

but yeah, talking to him about it seems the best place to start. generally, most player problems are best solved by talking to the player.

Make the operation a legitimate humanitarian organization. Our hero is actually unwittingly hired by evil forces who want to use the runners' skills as a means to ultimately infiltrate it and use it as a vehicle for nefarious purposes. The evil forces (bugs?) keep lurking around the facilities which could allow the runner to make the hasty inference of association between the goodies and the baddies, but the inference would be just that... hasty. I think that is fair play with your player so you are not metagaming (also possible to do as a gm) yourself and still allows you the sweet vengeance of a lesson well taught ... but ONLY if the player springs the trap himself. I can see hear the sirens now as the ambulance rushes to revive the innocent albeit socially awkward humanitarian worker who happened to wear thick glasses that tragically made him look conspicuously buglike.

Booyeah. You took the words out of my mouth.

I know many players that abusively metagame. I will recommend them to play your game to the point you will never run a game from the sheer annoyance. When you talk to them, they will just say "deal with it".

Aside from All4BigGuns' inane latter suggestion, talking with your player is very important. If the player still doesn't change from lack of understanding or just disrespect, you should cut him loose as a player. GM-player relationships are just that, relationships. Some work, some don't work. You can resort to doing in-game evil acts on teaching him a lesson or just using GM-caveat for your pleasure of retribution, but in the end you are stooping to your player's level of metagaming, and not allowing yourself to grow as a good GM that entertains and is fair.

Cutting a player loose is 'dealing with it', though
Which is why I wouldn't call the suggestion 'inane'.
So, my answer to someone telling me this would be "I am trying. This is why I am talking to you. The other option is not playing with you anymore. Can we find a middle ground?"
Apart from that, yes, being unpredictable can help. Don't use book-canon. Create your own on that basis. Keep the players guessing. It will make the other players thank you as well.

The evil option is, ultimately, a failure in communication.
(I must admit, I loved Pax's proposal )

I once did a rewind game where the Universal Brotherhood was run by a secret society of demon hunters looking for cannon fodder for Armageddon. The bug spirits were introduced as a granola cult the PCs had some interactions with (professional and personal - they had a Johnson and several contacts affiliated). The UB noticed the arrival of the Bugs and started "demon" hunting and recruiting. Homeless people looking for a new start began disappearing into their training and indoctrination camps, thinking the end times were coming. I couple of PCs investigated - I edited the original UB intro (which never actually says they are bugs), and added some material from the real-life UB web site, and gave it to the players when they dug deep. It worked pretty well.

My players don't tend to blatantly metagame plot items. They make guesses, then second guess themselves, because they know I like to put a spin on things. I find it raises the sense of expectation and dramatic tension when they are actively interested in what the heck is actually going on.

The Universal Sisterhood, openly affiliated with the UB, but smaller with only a few branches set up like covens. Most of the branch leaderships are really witches/wiccans, but they are completely clueless about what the UB really is and are themselves a completely benign organization. Drop a couple of red herrings for the player, like maybe he glimpses something that could have been a bug spirit, or if he glitches something he mistakes a vanilla spirit for a bug spirit. After a while they get hired to protect a "special summoning" ceremony (one of the wiccans is going to perform an ally conjuration and they are worried that Humanis or something is going to interrupt them), and afterwards they will have a "special reward" for the players (in reality some nice piece(s) of 'ware/gear that they've come across, but aren't interested in and are going to give to the players instead of sell/fence because of all their help). Let the metagaming paranoia ensue.

Just avoid the meta-game. Make your own stuff up, and make their knowledge of future events pointless. Let all the meta-story be background noise that has nothing to do with the actual game.

This can't be too obvious as a setup. The organization has to APPEAR to be up to something, in order to make the PC properly suspicious. The ghoul idea is good in that they're hiding something, but they aren't actually *doing* very much which would trigger him off.

The setup also has to be an interesting adventure by its own right. "Hired by the orphanage to guard the gate" maybe doesn't cut it

What you could do instead is make the charitable organization (maybe said organization is legitimate, maybe not) a cover for something else; a political bid for power, or some kind of "good" men-in-black scenario. Hidden inside some of the buildings are top-notch guys, sometimes doing some dirty work, and they're looking to expand. The PCs are first invited to do some interesting, if suspicious jobs. Then they're brought in closer to the organization, and get peeks of what's going on deeper. Then they'll be invited to join as part of the permanent, reliable list of special agents. That means if the player doesn't bite, you have a new Johnson who actually works for good, the PCs are invested in, and is holding its own part in the corporate wars. If he does, he's just made a permanent, effective enemy, who is interested in him personally.

Have him destroying the Universal Brotherhood by 2050, then have him destroying the Renraku arcology mainframe by 2051. Then have Dunkelzahn or Lofwyr visits him, asks him plainly how did he know about the futures, and whatever his answer him, eats him because he is "too much of a threat for his plans."

Actually, as far as canon lore goes, preventing the Universal Brotherhood story arc from happening could have catastrophic consequences. It's only when they learn the Invae showed up so early in the Mana Cycle that dragons and immortals realize the Ghost Dance accelerated the cycle and may allow the Horrors to arrive earlier as well. This is the reason Aztechnology knows about bug spirits infiltration but don't tell anyone about it.

So, if someone is to stop the Universal Brotherhood at its very beginning, the few surviving bug shaman will keep low-profile with limited resources, the dragons and immortals will learn about them several years later than they did in the original timeline, all the while Aztechnology will continue to prepare the coming of the Horrors without anyone interfering.
It would end with Ryan Mercury getting drunk on the Inauguration Ball and having sex in a limousine with Carla Brooks because Nadja Daviar turned him down, Dunkelzahn not preparing the Dragonheart artifact and not dying, holding the Office of the President of the UCAS for a full year instead... before Verjigorm comes in to kill him and destroy the Mall.

Exactly why I picked them. Adding things like them beign a magical grup, getting funding from/through Asamondo (if gthe timeline is right), etc? All additional layers, which a metagaming player could interpret very, very wrongly.

It's a matter of showingt he players something, so that THEY think they're seeing one thing .... when in reality, whatyou've shown them is nothing of the sort. And doing it in a way that involves zero actual lies - just, letting them make their own assumptions, and not disabusing them of the incorrect ones.

Honestly, if I ran into a "charity" run by ghouls funded by Asamondo, I would assume something bad even if I wasn't metagaming. I mean, that's like finding out a soup kitchen is being run by Humanis. And even if I didn't unearth any kind of wrongdoing, I wouldn't think "Oh, I assumed something bad and wound up hurting innocent people, instead." It would be more like "Well, I didn't find out what they were really up to, but at least I stopped this evil organization from giving themselves good PR with this facade."

What I'm saying is, bait and switch is one thing, but if you are too blatant about making a group look evil, then the PCs will either assume that the organization was secretly evil and they just didn't find out how, or they will shrug when they find no conspiracy, because hey, ghouls/humanis/etc. are still the bad guys.

I agree with the people saying talk to the player, instead. But if you have to do a bait and switch to punish his metagaming, then do it so the metagaming alone will cause him to make an incorrect assumption. If you show bug spirits hanging about, or ghouls seemingly operating an organlegging business, or squatters mysteriously disappearing, then all of the PCs will logically assume something bad. And when it turns out they were wrong, they are less likely to think they were too paranoid, and more likely to think they were being dicked around.

Well the difference between Humanis and a group of ghouls is that one of them choose to become inhumane monsters.

I imagine Humanis does run soup kitchens. Metas get extra saltpeter in their OJ.

No they probably just turn metas away entirely. Or route them to "the back dining room" - where some helpful Attitude Adjustment Specialists give them a quikie Re-education Seminar, complete with baseball bats.

No, those mutants who "know their place" get helped. It's just the uppity ones that need re-education.

Indeed. As far as metas have to exist, begging and groveling in the dirt for scraps is the best place for them.

I think you should drug the player.

Ambien walrus will help keep him from metagaming.

First of all I'll jump on the bandwagon and say that you should make sure to talk to the guy before you initiate this kind of plan. If you've already done that, and he's failed to "get it", go ahead.

With that said, I'd suggest that you make it a point to design your own stuff, and leave the established canon and metaplot etc. as background noise. Basically make the world your own, effectively making his metagaming more or less useless, because he never knows which parts will be real in your universe, and which will not be. And even if something's real, it's by no means certain that it is in any way connected with your game.

As for the the charity group you consider, I'll echo the idea of making them an actual charity. And then tie them in with a bunch of different power players. Some politicians, some very rich filantropists, the Mafia, the Yakuza, and maybe a local branch of Aztechnology. As suggested you might also throw in a couple of Ghouls, who just happen to work there, i.e. as night guards and unskilled labour. Add a shady character to the staff list as well, and have the guy have a little side job pushing drugs to the people that use the charity. Maybe let Aztechnology use the charity as a testbed for some products, not all of which might be entirely safe or thoroughly tested yet. Maybe one of the filantropists are connected with a Humanis group in some way (as in he's friends with a couple of members, and have been to a couple of their events, but don't share their views...). As for the politicians, they can be as shady and corrupt as you want, and maybe one of them are connected with a bug shaman who also works at the charity once in a while doing some quite legitimate work. But despite of who's bankrolling the place, keep it a genuine charity, and let the media and all of the "investors" go nuts, if the player(s) go in and blow the place up.

If you set things up so that the player will have to go in and abduct one of the staff members or something similar, you could have the aforementioned bug shaman at work the same day, and start throwing ugly stuff at them, as he tries to protect his colleague. Also, you might have some of the homeless have a go at them, as the targeted staff member is a well liked individual, and some of the people there get pissed when he or she is assaulted by some violent thugs...

Basically, give them a good chance to misinterpret stuff at every turn, unless they dig deep enough to realise that the shady looking things that turn up initially, is related to the backer, and not the charity itself.

Have fun, but make sure to give the players a chance to play catch on, if they are smart enough about it, and don't just jump to conclusions

True, the ghouls all probably chose to be infected.

Great suggestions, everybody! Now the tough part, choosing the best suggestion.

I should have mentioned that I have spoken to him about it to no avail, and also that we have the sort of friendship where the massive mindf**k I'm planning would be appreciated and enjoyed by all parties involved.

I'll be expecting storytime for the turnout