So in our game last night, while planning how we were going to do go about our current run, I made the obligatory stupid joke suggestion. This usually involves parachuting and nets. This time it involves heavy artillery and a 500 year old battle strategy. But on this occasion everyone loved it, and now we're going ahead with it. It's going to be ridiculous mayhem and probably result in multiple runner deaths.

The job is to take out a hacker/rigger who's turned on our employer (and has always been one step ahead). He's now hiding out in a motor home at an executive trailer park. Our plan? We're going to rent our own motor home and broadside him, old-skool naval warfare stylie. A grenade launcher and autocannon at the ready, and a modified wall on the van and we're ready to go. I am NOT confident of success.


This must happen to other people though. What's the stupidest plan you've still gone ahead with?

Everything my group has ever come up with. No exceptions.

The stupidest plan I've ever had the privilege of seeing go off was my players storming a novacoke lab in the Barrens, and deciding to summon a spirit of the air to come with.

Things got really fun when a few million nuyen worth of drugs got turned into a cocaine-laced tornado inside a warehouse.... and that was on the -plan-.

So if you took the coke laced whirlwind out into the streets and it was attacked by all the junkies, how long would it take or them to snort up all of it's Force?

*gets out chalk and board and starts scribbling down formulas*

It got worse. They flew it through Toruistville.

They probably thought it was part of the Tour.

They still sing about it I hear.....


Frosty the Blow Storm

Was a jolly hyped up soul

With a crack/pot pipe, a broken nose and two eyes made of novacoke.

Frosty the Blow Storm

Was a street legend they say.

He was made of blow, and all street punks know blow is what you use to play.

My group made use of "The Bus" once.

Once.

There must have been some magic in the white stuff of which he was composed

For crazy drek broke out all around after it went right on up their nose.

Ohhhhh...

Like a city bus?

or something else?

Sorry if I do not get the reference if there is one, please expand upon this.

Forgive me, but I'm not seeing the stupid part. It's unorthodox, to be sure, but as long as he doesn't see you coming (I'm assuming the "modified wall" mean camouflaging the gun ports), it should work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship

Well, if it's an executive park, then one problem they're going to have is driving an extremely slow vehicle with extremely poor handling, weighted down with a reinforced wall and armaments into a secure area. Seems like it'd be easier to call in a drone strike instead of taking the Winnebago in there. Perhaps not as much stupid as just overly complicated with a higher risk of failure/death?

Wait, do you guys have a rigger? If not, sub in a spirit strike? Either way, runners aren't putting their lives directly on the line..

*Clap, Clap, Clap* True Artistry, Sendaz. Awesome...

This one might actually work, but it would likely be simpler to just call in a drone/spirit strike.




CanRay's The Bus is a city bus which has been modified into a fuel-air explosive. He worked out the dimensions of the bus and the optimal fuel/oxygen mixture (IIRC the bus had an enviroseal 2 to make sure it could achieve a perfect fuel/oxygen ratio.) When readied, The Bus would immediately mix its fuel and oxygen, then detonate a shitload of C-12 as the detonating charge for the FAE mixture.

The result is an entirely leveled city block.

You do realize it'd be far easier and almost as effective to just load up with several thousand kilograms of AMFO, right? With the chemistry skill, a shop and a lot of time, it's not even really that expensive.

Yes, and you'll have the UCAS FBI, Lone Star, Knight Errant, the Tir Ghosts, whatever law enforcement the NANs have, all beating a path to your door if you try to buy the stuff to make ANFO. Your only hope is that they get distracted enough shooting at one another for you to slip out in the chaos.

Whereas fuel-air mixtures are much simpler, generally necessitating only one component, and even if the heat is on high, it's not like they can track every motherfragger buying gasoline.

Actually, since most cars in the 6th world appear to be electronic, gasoline purchases are going to be noticeably rarer than today.
They can probably eliminate most of the vintage car collectors fairly quickly.
That narrows down the field a lot.

Sorry, I tell the story a lot here.

My group had a Irish Republican Army in Exile contact who made bombs "as a hobby" (he was actually a Fixer for his "Day Job".). The group should really have known that "his bus" that he always referenced was bad news when the rest of the IRAiE members were scared of it. That's right, the Irish Terrorists were scared of a bomb.

So, they decided to use it as a distraction by detonating it near Council Island in Seattle. It was only after the IRAiE Fixer happily told them it was on-the-way via autopilot that he informed them that it was a city bus that he converted into an air-sealed Improvised Fuel-Air Explosive Bomb.

Luckily, it was "disarmed" by some very handy work by a Lone Star officer with a shotgun when he noticed the driver was a blow-up doll wearing a hat.

"I did some calculations. We'd have taken out half of downtown Seattle with that bus." was how one of my players put it a few weeks later.

Ah yes, the IRA in exile. I'm not 100% up on the politics so I could be dead wrong, but don't they hate elves? (Unlike most racial Jihads these guys are actually justified, what with the elves kicking them out of their country and all. Maybe a bit indiscriminate, but at least they actually have a legit complaint against them.)

In other words, these are EXACTLY the kind of people who're responsible enough to own this kind of bomb .

Define "stupid"?

There was our team's plan to rob a bank owned by Lowfwyr that involved (among other things) dosing the entire Hong Kong business district with warp and dropping drones onto the roofs of adjacent buildings.

Worked like a charm, though we got ripped off and set up by the Johnson afterwards.

...
The Johnson decided that it would be a good idea to piss off a bunch of professional criminals who had just proven that they were willing to risk the wrath of the most powerful great dragon in the world (He has a megacorp. that makes him the most powerful GD, reguardless of whether or not there's someone with better magic), and consider turning an entire district of a crowded metropolis into a maelstrom of chaos and the subsequent heat from every law enforcement agency in the city 'acceptable'.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have us a Darwin award. There was a stupid plan afoot here, but it wasn't the Players. This Johnson was dropped on his head as a baby or something.

i stand by my point:
stupid plans that work are not stupid, good plans that don't work are stupid!

Yep. I hope their revenge was swift and brutal.



Stupid plans that work are not stupid, right up until the point when the double-crossed Runner team supermurders you in bed and steals your identity.

Yeah. They hate Elves. The Fixer is an Elf in the IRAiE, as well, which should tell you how tough a SOB he is. My group loved him as a contact.

"When we heard that we needed a bomb for the job, your name was the first to come to mind." "Good ta hear, laddies." "Now, it's against the Tir..." "Ireland?" "No, the other Tir." "Bah, hate them too. We'll do it."

My group blew up a building, not once, but twice, by filling the basement with natural gas and then setting it on fire (once with spirits, once with C4).

Well, there was the time we had to rescue a dude from the basement of a building full of gangers in the barrens. Our plan was gas the building, breach (through the hole we blew in the wall - coming through the doors was exactly what they'd expect us to do), extract our guy from the basement, and book it out of there. Then word comes from the J, "They're going to execute your target in the next two minutes." What do we do? I look at the rigger.

"So, you said the armor on this van would protect us if we went through a brick wall, yeah?"

He was very fond of his van, and even more fond of boasting about its capabilities.

"A reinforced brick wall, in fact."

"Okay, then that's how we're going in. Smoke grenades through the windows, van through the wall, breach the floor and extract our guy from the basement, and book it out of there."

I was shocked that our guy made it out of that basement alive. The rigger got to play the Ride of the Valkyries as we accelerated up to the wall. We were lucky the building didn't come down on top of us.

Heheheheheheeh. I would've blasted DragonForce or Motorhead or something, but still, awesome.

I hope the damage to the van was paid for by Mr. Johnson.

Nice to know I'm not the only one that has an elf character like this. Any chance of something about the IRAiE coming into print in the future?

As for stupid plans... I can't think of any offhand that my players have come up with. (It's been ages since I've been around a game table.) I'll offer this bit of commentary from an MMO that makes me think of these kinds of plans, though.

"We have a plan-"
"A suicidal plan."
"-a bold plan..."

one time, i had my Troll saying:"i have a plan!"
general tone of answers of the different players AND GM:"oh god no"

Load-Bearing Walls should not be entrance strategies. They should be exit strategies. We'll see. It just makes sense in my mind that the IRA would still be around. "Stubborn" and "Irish" are Synonyms.

That's why, whenever we can, we negotiate for our fee "Plus reasonable expenses."



Yeah, but this thread is about stupid plans.

Mr. Johnson may or may not consider "we used our truck as a battering ram" a reasonable expense.



It worked, though!

He thought his target was going to die and all his nuyen were going down the drain, and yet we managed to pull it out of the fire - that's the definition of a reasonable expense.



The wonders of what you can do with a little improvisation (and quite a bit of edge)!

the Johnson screwed the plan at the last second, thats gonna cost extra no matter how you spin it, covering the cost of a Van is probably cheaper than charging him extra for rushing the team unexpectedly.

There was also the psychotic addict street sam I had in my game for a while. The group forced him at gunpoint to start carrying a narcoject rifle instead of his AK, because the body counts were getting too high.

Next run they sent him in first to stun the guards. He strolls up to the first one, produces his rifle, and says 'I HAVE KAMIKAZE IN THIS!'

Proceeds to pump all the guards full of enough combat drugs that they die of massive coronaries on the spot.

But a coctail of Bliss, Warp and Nova coke is so much more fun!

I like dosing people with Shade. Enjoy getting eaten on the astral plane sucker.

Works best on mundane supremacists...

It gets people out of the way, plus the 10 stun damage at the end is a nice twist of the knife.

Eh... Yeah, I suppose that is pretty reasonable. Getting a "game over" notice, calling the hired help to tell them it's game over, then having them snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (or a hostage from the jaws of a gangland execution,) with under 120 seconds to spare? Yeah, outright replacing the van would seem reasonable.




I hope at least the rest of the group all had to laugh about his ingenuity in producing a body count.

Do stupid plans by NPCs count?

Yes, yes they do.

So, some background: I was playing Shades, a jill-of-many-trades with a heavy emphasis on hacking. Yes, it was SR4. The group at the time consisted of me, two Free Spirits of Fire, and a katana guy.

We were scrambling to track down a big bad nasty motherfucker who had tricked us thoroughly into delivering to him a little girl. We rescued her from a real black research facillity, but he wasn't her real uncle, he'd killed him and stolen his identity, and was evidently trying to sacrifice her to bring something nasty into the world. Through herculean hacking efforts by yours truely, we tracked his car to a chop shop in Puyallup which had sold it wholesale to someone in Shanghai, with an expected profit of 2,500 . With it, went the only leads we could pursue immediately, so I came up with an idea to occupy us while we were otherwise waiting: I encrypted the chop shop's entire computer system with strong encryption, and data-bombed it. It would have taken an average hacker most of a day to fix the damage I did, more if he was really unlucky, and he probably would've charged like 5K for it.

I sent the owner of the chop shop, which was a small operation which was paying protection money to both the mafia and the yaks, so we knew they weren't actually under any protection, a message telling him he could pay us 2,500 (not coincidentally, the precise sum of money they expected to make in gross profit from the car's sale,) on a certified credstick by a courier to a dead-drop near the crime mall, or he could choose not to do so and spend more nuyen than that hiring a hacker to fix it, which would also likely cost him an entire day in which he could not conduct business.

So, two options
1: Pay
2: Don't pay.

If you said
3: Respond with WWI gas warfare, you would be the owner of the chop shop! And also an idiot.
He sent a gas bomb full of chlorene and phosgene gasses (AKA White Star,) to the dead drop instead of a databomb. Two of the members of the group were literally immune to it, and katana boy ran out with his gas mask on to check, before we could send one of them. He took some hurt, that the spirits patched up in like, six seconds.

Well, that's personal. That's not only stupid, it's an attack. We decided to be merciful and burn his shop and all the potentially saleable cars on his lot to a crisp before he or his employees arrived in the morning. Somehow, I bet that cost waaay more than 2,500 .

Maybe Silly Plans would have been a better title. Stupid plans implies failure, whereas stupid plans can work but are, shall we say, not the most straightforward way to complete a task.

One thing which makes this particular plan even more silly is that our personal expenses have already far outstripped our potential pay. If we, for example, have to dump the autocannon (which is likely) the guy who bought it will be down on the job by a few thousand.

Nah, it should be "stupid."

Because it's any plan that makes you think, "It’s because you’re not bright enough, stupid gryphon. Stupid, stupid gryphon. Well, death is inevitable anyway, so dying for the right reason is... Just as final. Stupid gryphon."