Our last mission terminated in everyone getting KO'd after collectively failing our will saves. Our PCs all wake up locked in a hospital room 3 months later not knowing what happened, but everyone having ill effects of whatever-happened-to-us during those 3 months.

Note, this campaign has little to no magic in it (no mages, period. Phys adepts are the only thing allowed)

Here's what everyone woke up with:

Rigger had been forcibly removed from his vehicle by unknown means and had gotten some form of dumpshock, now he has a -2 to all mental based checks for an indefinite time.

Our Street Sam now has an uncontrollable rage and the urge to tear people apart with his bare hands, which he has to do at least once a day else he'll turn on his team mates. Also received an inexplicable extra +4 DP on all social tests on Dwarves, Elves and Humans, with a -4 for Orks and Trolls.

The Face got affected with a perma-boner and a need to 'slake his thirst' with elven women (too specific if you asked me). Also has to do it at least once a day or he's literally distracted to the point of uselessness.

And sadly our elven lady sniper, er. Seems to be expecting. It shocked all of us really. (The face had then proceeded to ball up mumbling 'I didn't do it" till we all escaped)

After the game I had asked the opinion of another GM about our game that day and he remarked that what the Face and the Street Sam are afflicted with seems a lot like a Geas, which if memory serves, is supposed to affect only characters with magic, which there are NONE in the team.

Any thoughts? because we are thinking of taking up this argument the next time we have game. Or at least any suggestions on how to counteract all this madness because I have a strong feel that our GM might make us stick to this..

Look into PAB programming and reprogramming is my off-the-cuff suggestion for IC stuff.

OOC, talk to the GM. If none of the players are having fun, talk and see what he wants out of this and his goals. Games are meant to be fun and if he's the only one having fun, it's not a good game.

Your Face and Sam are more likely to have a Mania (Augmentation, ~p.160).

What in the nineteen frozen hells did you do, to piss your GM off that badly?!?

He had one your character's raped? Really? And he didn't talk with you guys about it before hand? This guy sounds like a creep. What rules he used doesn't matter. Talk to him out of character.

Gonna check it out, thanks. We do enjoy his games a lot, but this had to be the biggest WTF he's ever served us. But we do intend to ask him his motivations.


Quite possible. Looking that up, thanks.


I wish I knew! The only thing I can think of is all the minmaxing a couple of our teamies do.


We don't know if that's what really happened (we hope it isn't the case) but the player himself didn't care too much. Our GM did say he would have never done it if the player was female though.

It sounds like a pointelss power trip from the GM more than anyhting else, a sort of 'wow i screwed them so good i'm a powerfull evil GM [insert evil laugh here]'- or at leats it's the impression it leaves me.

One thing I would try for the characters with urges is to experiment how those react to VR satisfaction - if the result is positive, it can be a fairly safe way to deal with the problem.

But first and foremost I would ask to the GM out of game what the heck is the point of this shennigan.

One of the mistakes I made when I first started GMing was trying to control the direction of the plot. I wanted certain things to happen because I had a set story in mind. GM's need to let their players have control of their characters. You can't just say something happened to a player's character. You need to give them a chance to make some rolls.

If I were one of the players in that group, my first reaction woudl be to think long and hard if I wanted to REMAIN in that group.

If the answer to that was "yes", my second reaction would be to bust out HeroLab, and make a new character.

Because all of that, above? Without discussing with the players at all? Is pure bullshit.

Compulsions with absolutely no chance to resist? Oh I know exactly what that is! It's called Drop bear, thor shot, orbital cow or roll a new character syndrome.

I don't think a "Hey, so what's up with all this, buddy? I don't want to ruin some big twist ending or whatever, but lots of us aren't very comfortable with this weird new direction. We promise not to metagame about it, if you promise to just honestly tell us what's going on and why you think it's awesome" type conversation is beyond the pale, here. I know we're only getting one side (so I'm not suggesting anything stronger), but I would...yeah. I would at least talk to your GM, OOC, and try to just figure out what's going on.

You wake up in a "hospital"? Is this a hospital-hospital? Or a high-security-corporate-research-facility-medical-ward-with-no-windows-hospital?

Because if you've been the playthings of mad corporate science for three months, this all makes a lot more sense...

~Umi

So, the way I see this:
You woke up in a hospital with a huge amount of time passed. That screams "surgery" to me. Has anybody checked on their essence value? Without a mage, this can be way hard to tell.
If you got something implanted: Maybe it is a datajack or sim module sporting a personafix BTL? This would explain the sudden compulsions - they literally added something to your very mind. PAB programming could do something similar and also needs a rather huge timeframe. Both also means that every character got the same treatment, but just a different version of it, which kinda feels plausible to me.
Also: Maybe the sniper is not really pregnant, but rather just thinks she is? A mind that has been tampered with could produce a lot of these symptoms.

A cyberware scanner is mandatory, I'd say.

Anyhow: Somebody's toying with you. Find out who, and quickly. Do the unexpected, whatever that means. If raised paranoia is appropriate, check whether you have been implanted additional monitoring cyberware - could somebody be looking through your eyes? A check for data feeds and wireless signals can reveal that very easily.

You're in a hospital. Who else knows that you are there, who runs it, is there any data or witness? If empty, trash the place until somebody shows up. I'd refer to that as throwing an in-character temper tantrum. It's what I'd do

A GM of mine once threw me in a somewhat similar situation and I was very uncomfortable with it. Since then I have learned, gotten more enthusiastic towards mysteries and, well, implanted my characters with omega contingencies a GM can hardly take from me

So, if you are very uncomfortable with the general situation of the game, a talk to the GM could help, as suggested before. Or, maybe, think of the scenario as a challenge. Rise up to that challenge! GM wants to play crazy? Can do.

Maybe it's an adorable 8 pound bouncing baby bomb.

Thanks for the suggest. Though the Sam isn't gonna be able to use this 'cause he went and chose the Simsense Vertigo neg quality.


Seemed to be a regular hospital, albeit a small one. Just the door was locked and there was one elf nurse keeping an eye on us. Broke out very easily, no one stopped us. Sniper even took her with us after we konked her unconscious.


Damn straight. Time to push that paranoia button.

a little crunch note: If you're rewarded with negative qualities (and that's what happened), but it's not your fault and nothing you did caused it, then crunch-wise you've actually been rewarded negative karma. You should demand some equal compensation. Just for the sake of character advancement.

if your GM keeps you going with his bad GMing (unless he can prove to you, that everything fits together in the end), then I would counterstrike. Buy loads of explosives, blow up everything he describes. no more face-to-face conversation, only VR.No more following the plot, but investing 24/7 in finding out what happened to me. Etc

Your characters are trapped in some kind of BTL - VR simulation. Free your mind.

Relevant

The last sentence makes it COMPLETELY ridiculous. If he doesn't like male players playing female characters, then he needs to get over it. Doing that to their character over that is just abusive and petty.

Going through my head just now

It may be offtoic, but I'm really surprised by some of the reactions in the thread.
I mean, what has happened is a pretty slow day for me, as a player and as a game master. I mean, the party goes to sleep and wakes a bit messed up. They didn't have to live through the experimentation, the whole thing may probably be reversed... That's a bit amateurish move to my taste (by the very reason that player usually go 'wtf?!' don't know what to do), but nothing horrible. I had a daemon impersonate a player character and the player was playing him the whole session without knowing. The big surprise came only at the end of the game. And that's just the first example that comes to me, not the most complex thing I did or had experienced.

Playing an RPG character I'd like to make the choices of what happens to him. IF, the GM starts intervening, I will ask: Why did this happen and is this reasonable within the setting we agreed on at the beginning?

For the given example the answer has to be minimum something like "you all got knocked out. a megacorp you really pissed of a few months ago found you and snatched you. Because you are deniable assets they put you into their PAB programming experimental facility." Followed up by an OOC explanation of how they found me, while I'm a professional shadowrunner, working 24/7 not to be found. I don't like "because I'm the GM-decisions" that yre not backed up by reason.

I must say, that's some low level of trust between players. As Joker would say, 'Why so insecure?'

Playing with actual people is by definition surrendering part of you authority over your character, especially in the conventional games where there is no translation of game master rights between players. The easiest example is any form of mind control, a totally viable in-game instrument, which would choose what the character does for you. In case of Influence, the character may even like it. And I'm not even going into the semantic of combat, where a lot of things happen to characters against their players' wills. For example, they are getting killed.

If the circumstances made combat inevitable and the opposition is overwhelming and has reason to kill me and I didn't prepare accordingly, then death is my fault (or the dice's) and I'm OK with it.
You're saying it's a low level of trust. You're damn right. Can we trust the GM to be reasonable and not make "because-I-am-the-GM-decisions"?!

If I don't trust the GM or any of the players, I won't be playing with them. The same goes the other way - if my players don't trust me, there will be no game. Not only because I won't do it, but because even if i try, it will fail.
And have yet to meet a GM to do anything just because he's a GM and can do things. Every time something not too pleasant happened or some mistakes were made, there were reasons, for the most time well-intended reasons like making everyone happy.

I don't quite get the extreme reactions either. If you don't have some faith in your GM and will jump down his throat everytime something unexpected happens you're really limiting your game. If I understand correctly, this just happened, and sure it could turn out terrible, but it might also be part of some awesome plot. I think I'd try to see where this is going before judging too harshly. And then slam the GM for his bullshit IF it turns out to be rubbish.



If you're assuming that finding out what happened is NOT the plot, then your negative reaction makes more sense, also your ideas about campaigns are very different to my own.

While I would be very reluctant to play in this scenario (Modifying my character without a chance to resist is a big no-no), I can understand from a GM viewpoint if you were given a chance (IE the will check) then failed... though having everything rest on one roll is almost as bad as not letting me resist at all. Did you take precautions of any description that were ignored or overlooked by the GM when he did this?

My main problem would be that the effects seem to be poorly balanced: the rigger (In my group our rigger is also the group armourer, so that may colour my opinion) is taking a -2 penalty on all his matrix checks, his Armorer skill checks, and his checks to repair/modify his vehicles and drones. That is huge, and potentially character breaking.

The street sam is now a liability, as he basicall has to either get wetwork jobs on a daily basis or become a serial killer.

The face just needs a little nookie on a regular basis. find him a whore-house that gives regulars discounts and he's almost gotten off entirely.

The sniper will be out of the game soon. You can't lie on you belly for hours waiting for your target to come into your kill zone with a baby on board, let alone scaling buildings to get to a sniper roost or even general sneaking around. maybe not too bad now, but very soon she'll be unplayable.

You are absolutely right. We should badger him for something to compensate. Hopefully we'll find out more next game 'cause he ended it in a cliffhanger on purpose.

I have to watch this now


We couldn't have avoided it if we had wanted to.

Before the whole hospital thing, we had just come back from stealing a truckload of explosives from Ares (a ban on all splash weapons had been enacted by Lone Star, and Johnson wanted some before it became too hard to find) we had headed to the Sam's safehouse to dump it all temporarily when we saw his safehouse had been broken into and a large crate was in the middle of his floor. The crate had 3 things in it, a folded shot gun, a flashlight and a gold ring.

Some hilarity with the gold ring later (turns out it WAS the One Ring from LoTR infamy) with our Johnson on the line hearing us fight and stuff, he stops short and suddenly says that he needed to leave, cya guys later and all that with a shifty/scared tone. Then we got hit by the will save which we all failed and woke up all nekkids in that hospital room.

I still want to give the plot some time to unravel before we jump to conclusions.

definitely

on-topic-wise, i truly do think your group is in some kind of virtual reality. seems to be the very thing that could explain such shifts in personality along with the new addition to the group

Caveat: The chance to resist needs to be acceptable (ie- If the party has at best a 3 Willpower, no Threshold 15s.)



Again, this one is the kicker. There is absolutely, positively no excuse for doing this to a character. ESPECIALLY when saying that you wouldn't do it if the gender of player and character matched. This can and should elicit a punch to the junk.

Uhm, yeah the sniper has the least issues.
The Sammy is essentially dead
The face is dead in runs that takes more then a day

If this was some sort of shenanigans I would have hinted at it by now, in the VR example, surrounding displacing or an odd object glitching.
In the mindwash example, well I wouldn't do that, ever.

My question is this: Why play Shadowrun if you're going to remove magic*? Magic is a part of the Shadowrun universe.



* == No, adepts don't count. They're just street sammies that don't need for their augmentation

Some people may want to play a Cyberpunk game, and like teh Shadowrun rules, but don't want the whole Shadowrun experience.

I don't happen to be one of them, but I can certainly grok teh idea in principle, at least.

Well, gamewise magic is present in the universe, just that in terms of mechanics the team doesn't encounter it much at all.

Though the real reason is that our GM hasn't gotten a hang of handling magic and matrix yet (he used to run D20 modern, Shadowrun is still fairly new to him) We do want it but we're willing to wait till he's ready.

I want my changeling shaman dammit

Roll SR chars properly use % dice and on a 00 you get to have magic

Immaculate conception! Our saviour shall be reborn!

--



The sniper's is the easiest to fix.

*Shakes fist* Curse you, Occam's razor!

If I were to rate the penalties based on severity from most to least....

Serial Murderer
Sex Addict
Dumpshocker
Immaculate Conception

Until I read your post this is pretty much exactly what I was thinking and was going to post as such.

Not only surprised, but shocked and a little upset. It's like people consider their characters precious flowers that the naughty GM should leave alone. My Roleplaying experience must be very different to some. As an example, we've played through what was effectively the film The Thing, twice, and Aliens, all while supposedly playing Cyberpunk.

I once had my favourite character attacked by alien vampires. That was unexpected, but you roll with it. I ended up bargaining with the devil for a mansion and a chain of herbal tea shops. All the other PCs died. We've also done a mission where all the PCs have amnesia, and a mission where we all ended up in prizon, and while escaping it turned into a 28 days later style rage apocalypse.

My point being, and my advice to the OP, just get on with it. You said you normally enjoyed the GMs games. You'll probably enjoy this one too. Roleplaying is about storytelling and this may just be the most kick-ass story he's ever come up with. You try and find out what's going on while roleplaying your new ailment and laughing at all the hijinks it causes when your face tries to sleep with your sniper and she shoots him (inevitably).

Fixed

Every 24h you must go wookiee or you do it on your mate does not make for fun roleplaying.

Also in 2070, the sniper could just extract the thing* and continue growing it in an artificial womb, if she wants to keep it for whatever reason

* It might be a chestburster for all we know...

The GM is obviously aiming for Squick. Not to be confused with Squee which is definitely not Squee.

Roll for sex, odds for male, evens for female...
Roll twice for a serious congenital medical condition, two 00's in a row and you have one...
Roll two d20s for eyesight...


~Umi

I thought d20 was a dirty word here

... no chance for sexual dimorphism? Some simulation THIS is ...!

Go play GURPS, Pax. Then you can be a non-gender identified spivak elf cyberninja assassin, rather than just the Shadowrun-standard lesbian variety!

~Umi

Yeah, but is he a pyjak?

How Rude...

Punch-Monkey says what?

~Umi

Oh dear ghost no. If our sniper shoots him, he'll really be 'cured' of his affliction permanently

I'm not sure with the rest of the team but I'm willing to roll with it (since its been determined long ago likely no magic is involved lul) sides, I got lots of countermeasures now if things DO really get ridiculous

Next game is this Friday night.


Welp, I didn't think of that.

on that chestburster idea... it could be symbiont bioware. perhaps she gets to alpha-test the new research from Ares (you know, the corp that tends to work with bug spirits a bit too much). a genetically engineered parasite could do all sorts of crazy things. lets hope its not magically active.

in general, it sounds to me like the GM took things a bit too far, but having Very Bad Things happen to runners who get captured is sort of expected. the stuff in this case sounds very random and strange though. any Corp with 3 weeks access would make better use of PAB and cortex bombs, and either get themselves some sleeper agents, or a mission they cant refuse at very high risk with your lives as the payment.

the random seeming results though.... my best guess would be toxic shamans, perhaps a possession tradition. 3 weeks is a long time for ritual magic after all.