Hey all,

Out of all the games/missions you've played over time, what plot or game elements made certain jobs the "most fun?"

Some examples: betrayal, puzzle-solving, gumshoe-work, intense combat, etc.

On the flip-side, what plot elements made certain jobs the "least fun?"

Just curious. Brainstorming for a new game.

Explosives.

Geez, don't ask something too specific or anything.

For me, it's less a matter of specific content types than pacing and variety. I'm one of those finicky players that both likes options and has ADD, so my answer to multiple-choice questions is usually "yes". That said, I love brain games ("here's an objective, go for it") and political scheming, but only as long as it doesn't become a grind. Sitting around waiting for something to happen and spending too long bogged down in any one thing are both huge buzzkills for me.

Of course, your mileage may vary. If you're planning to run a campaign for a group of players, I'd highly suggest asking them what they're interested in doing.

Everybody loves explosives, though. Nobody doesn't turn into a cackling MAD BOMBAH at the thought of blowing something right the fuck off the face of the Earth.

So remember, when you're short on material, 'splosives.

Paracritters, or Infected.

or.. Infected Paracritters.

Combat is of course a staple, because everyone loves good old fashioned violence, but its mileage varies depending on both your players' tastes and your own ability to keep things fresh. The trick is to make combat rewarding - make the players feel empowered, but still challenged.

Legwork can be fun if your players are up for solving a mystery, but I find it's mostly a means to an end, a supporting component of other, larger activities.

Exploration can be time and effort consuming to prepare, but can have an epic payoff. "Level design" is difficult to do well, and you need to be able to convey important information clearly and quickly, either with visual resources like maps, or through organized and easily imagined verbal descriptions of areas. Yet when it works out, I find it really enhances player immersion and allows for very organic storytelling. Letting the environment show the players what they're dealing with can be far more exciting than telling them via GM-speak or even NPC interactions.

Betrayal is hard to do right. There's a very thin line between the runners not trusting their Johnsons and the players not trusting their GM. There's also the problem of rampant paranoia - if your players get burned too badly or too often, they start refusing to take risks and that closes doors in terms of storytelling and mission structure. Intrigue is well and good, but ensuring it crops up in the proper time and place can sometimes be tricky.

As corny as it sounds, I find that the biggest source of payoff for my players is roleplaying. If you help them to really bring their characters to life, everything else tends to fall into place. You might have greater or lesser amounts of various story and mission elements in your campaign, but at the end of the day what matters is cooperatively creating a fun and enjoyable story together as a group. Whether you accomplish that via Black Trenchcoat paranoia and professionalism, or machismo-fueled Pink Mohawk explosiveness, the Rule of Fun is ultimately the entire point.

~Umi

Burglary and exfiltration undoubtly are the most typical Shadowrun, and yet there are my least favorites type of mission by far. Players all too often try to pull out the "perfect plan" that will allow them not to leave a single trace (what I call the "Mission: Impossible syndrome"). And this means hours and hours of discussion, search and planning. The gamemaster cannot even accelerate things, since the players are rising the bar themselves as they try to prepare for every possible event they can think of.

I like investigations, but it can sometimes be tricky for the employer and the runners to agree on how things should be carried out and how much should be paid. The employer obviously cannot be very specific on what he expects the runners to find, otherwise he wouldn't someone to investigate. And the runners don't know how many time it will take and how risky it will be.
Also investigations often lacks a climax. So I usually try to set two parts mission up that are like "find this information so you can do this thing": locating something and stealing it, or identifying someone and abducting him. Players tend to worry less on the "perfect plan" after a few hours of game, during which they may already have hit the bad guys' radar, and it clearly is going to be the gun blazing climax.

Honestly, most of the really fun things weren't things that I planned or plotted out. Usually it's things that the group makes awesome.

We had a game where most of the session centered on a motorcycle race between gangs with the teams driver/mechanic behind the wheel. It was all about the street cred and trying to catch the other racers in the act of cheating. Everyone got on board and was involved in either making sure their team member won, or making money/contacts in the underground racing scene. It was just something that clicked with every character in a different way.

Other fun times. Stealing 16 pallets of beer and then the team using that for bartering or to smooth their way in many encounters for the next couple months. It's amazing how much better a deal with a gang goes when you show up to the meet with 24 packs to hand out beers to anyone that wants them (they had a pretty good relationship with the gang leader, but this got them in with the rank and file).

Getting the job done in a way the Johnson completely did not expect is always a lot of fun. He said to sabotage the competitor's product, he didn't say that it had to be at the competitor's factory. And stuffer shack's security is a lot easier to get around.

Bounty hunting was pretty fun. Especially since the hacker was the only one with a legal SIN and who wasn't afraid to put his face out there to collect the bounty. So the player got to concoct elaborate stories of how a body 2 weakling with no combat training (he had pistol 1, based on his experience in miracle shooter) and an IT day job was able to track down and capture an armed ork gangster with multiple murders using only his legal taser. He apparently had a lot of luck just riding the city bus and having wanted criminals that he recognized get on and sit next to him.

I'm going to have to remember that one next time I have the chance to use it.

Explosives make the mission either exciting for the PCs, or hilarious for the GM.

Probably the favorite campaign arc back when I ran 2e that resulted from a bad thing that happened during a run. On a run against what turned out to be the Seattle Humanis Policlub, the position of the team's decker was compromised while he was fully jacked in and virtual. The team thought he'd been killed and his body snatched for evidence. They discovered that he'd actually been captured and was being kept constantly in VR, and mounted a series of runs to locate their pal and wreak vengeance on the Humanis goons.

At this 20+ year remove I don't recall all the details, but what made this memorable and fun? First was that the players really were in the driver's seat for this one, telling me what they were looking to achieve. As players do, they also found creative ways around the obstacles I put into their path. ("Wow, the ground and water defenses look pretty tough. Hey, wait, our rigger has lighter-than-air skill - let's hijack a cargo dirigible and make an air assault.") There were some moments of big drama, like finding their buddy's wasted body hooked up to IVs and a host of strange computer gear. And, of course, the opportunity for some good old-fashioned righteous vengeance, getting to really pull out all the stops and unlimber the heavy hardware because sweet mother of chrome, they were sending a message.

And who doesn't like beating up on Humanis? They're like Nazis, and unlike a lot of things in Shadowrun, you can do some nice, clear-cut good vs. evil bits with them.

You attached four pounds of high grade explosives to what?!?

My favourite moments are usually when black coat and shades meet pink mohawk, having been on both sides of that combat. Then again, I like blurring the line with things like a rover 2605 with concealed armour, and a concealed reinforced turret.

As for actual plot, my gm just finished his first run so I don't think its indicitave of traditional plot. It just happened to be "the vory tell you to kill all of the halloweeners, including the escaped aztechanology over cyber/bio upgraded soldier, and his leopard shifter lieutenant. " so yeah.

Oh, that had to be good. Who doesn't love a chance to unlimber the heavy artillery from the deck of a cargo blimp and rain death and fire upon Humanis literally from on high? Do you remember the details of like, what sort of heavy artillery got unlimbered?

That was SR2, so that would've been back in the '50s... I think I may have a witness/survivor mention that to my players, off-handedly, sometime in the 2070s, as one of the memorable times when Shadowrunners cut loose and got away with it.

At this remove, all I can remember is that there were at least two Vindicators and a Panther involved, with most of the shooting being on the ground - they were busting in to rescue their pal, with the additional mayhem being a secondary objective. And right this moment I'm remembering that the former company man in the team had a Buddy (think loyalty 6 contact) named Dustup, who brought in a panzer (what you'd today call a t-bird) at one point. Maybe for the extraction?

Hehe, my players was like this (I, as the GM was slightly distracted with another player... heard something from the side):

Player: "Ok, and then i place the fif-mumblemumble C12 blablabla... ok. let's detonate it"

Me: "Ok, five kilos of Rating 12 Explosive... pretty heavy, that will be a damagecode of..."

Player: "No it was fif-mumblemumble"

Me: "FIFTEEN? Now that is just insane overkill. Ok that's like..."

Player2: "No, it was FIFTY Kilos"

Me: "FIFTY?"

Player: "Yeah, you know, i just used all my detonators and placed all of it in a Market-trolly and rolled it into the house (small, wrecked Apartment building)"

So yeah, i think the damage of that crap was like 95D (third edition), so it took easily the house with an earth-shattering kaboom. damaged many surrounding buildings and killed/ maimed countless people... fun times. And yeah we had a guy start game with an Ice-Cooler full of Rating 12 explosive... i am not sure if it even was THIS guy *g*

Also for the mumbled part: German speaking, easier to mix them up: fünf, fünf-zehn, fünf-zig

Like I said: explosives make the best plots!



Also, I just thought of another one, one that players can have a lot of fun with.


Have a Johnson hire them to make someone's life a living hell, without killing him, harming him, or putting him in danger of either (so no getting him imprisoned, because he's likely to get hurt or killed in prison.)

Why? Revenge. It could be for anything. The guy could be a schmuck who terrorized the Johnson when they were teenagers in high school. He could be a shithead who likes to seduce girls with self-esteem issues, record himself fucking them and then crushing them and splatter it all over his blog. He could just be the asshole who called Knight Errant and drekked up the Johnson's epic party.


Either way, the Johnson has a job that requires relatively little work on their part and promises a steady trickle of nuyen. All you have to do is keep making the jackass's life miserable in whatever creative way you can imagine, screwing with him once a week or so should be enough.

This is a classic "Pizza run", which I first saw in Joe Clifford Faust's book "The Company Man". Which the writers of Shadowrun had clearly read, as it's where the company Seretech (featured in some of the early 1E fiction) and the term "dogbrain" come from.

Of course, what starts out as a "level one disruption" may turn into something much, much more complicated...

One of my favorite old time plot pieces also involved explosives. We were hired to retrieve a magical item of some type, or destroy it if we couldn't. It was being transported in a convoy from one secure location to another. The security was extreme, and I failed to find a good way around it. But we had the route, so we put 50 kilos of plastique under a manhole and blew the whole truck to hell on it's way past.

I as a GM love anytime I get to screw with the heads of my players. Like getting them to completely screw themselves, but in a survivable way. (If you kill them, they won't learn nuffin!) Especially if they realize they have nobody to blame but themselves.

There is an Eclipse Phase adventure out there for convention play, where almost all the tables I've seen run the players ended up having their characters voluntarily commit suicide. 'Real' suicide, as far as Eclipse Phase goes, no possibility of ressurrection, no mind backups, just gone. And afterward the players would gush about how much fun they had. Would love to be able to do that in Shadowrun.

As a player, combat is good, but give me stuff that really makes me think or emote. Love that stuff.




-k

I love it anytime I get some real PC <>NPC interaction going and not just "Roll Etiquette" and see what happens.

We have had some real emotional rollercoasters where the crew are working for a mad scientist "for the greater good" despite him actually creating a weaponised zombie virus and testing it on the town (not SR, but could easily have been)

to one of the PC's contacts (his wife) being a plothook and coming back as a recurring villain (Vampire) and seducing one of the other players and then seeing where the rivalry kicked off.

We have had some fun combats where heads have been asploded and demolitions gear has been prevalent, but it's always the little interactions that I feed off
and can throw back into the game for the Players to feel more involved ..
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The inverse is also true, in that it creates my least fun environment

no interaction with other PC's let alone NPC's .. any kind of in-team backstabbery just kills it for me. I know it probably can be well done, but I prefer teamwork in games where specialists can excel over others.. or where selfish acts can very easily mean another players characters death.