As I mentioned in the other thread I started today, my group and I are fairly new to Shadowrun. I had picked up the SR4A book at GenCon a year or two ago and had tried running a game, but it always fell through because of the people I was running for. Now, I've gotten a group of 3 runners and I'm running into a bit of a problem.

Since I'm still new to the game, I'm having a REALLY hard time judging what would be an "appropriate" encounter for the group. I know that SR5 has the concept of "professional levels", but that doesn't really give me any sort of guideline as to what I can do to design an appropriate encounter for my group. It also doesn't seem to matter much for critters.

The last few combats I've run were mostly to try to intro some of the combat mechanics beyond "point gun and shoot" and "cast Toxic Wave at everything over there". The most recent combat was against a few modifications I had made to the Wolf critter type to make Dire Wolves and Toxic Dire Wolves, since the runners were going to be in a toxic background zone. I nearly killed my Street Sam with two attacks, because somehow he only rolled 4 hits on a damage soak test against 8-10P damage with 22 dice.

Anyone with any sort of advice as to how I can try to design encounters so they're not either a complete pushover or causing the risk of death if more than one encounter happens? Especially with how hard it is to heal up?

As a side note, for those of you who've played around with SR5, when it comes to First Aid, when it talks about using the First Aid skill along with a medkit, how does it make sense that if you have no ranks in First Aid, you can still default on the test, but in the section where it talks about using First Aid to heal damage it says the maximum damage you can heal is your First Aid rank in boxes? Why would someone default on a First Aid test when they can't heal any damage? Why not just let the medkit do its own thing and actually try to heal some damage?

I would start by eyeballing the size of opposing dicepools. If npc has about the same amount of die to attack as players have defence die it would be average. If npc has higher it is hard, if lower it is easy.
This for all directly opposed pools. Attack vs Defence, Perception vs Stealth, social skills, hacking skills and so on.
That said, using tactics other than point & shoot can make a huge difference. Npcs standing still and shooting is easy. Same npcs using cover, smoke grenades, suppressive fire, gas grenades and cutting light while themselves having equipment to deal with it is just nasty.

Cover, suppressive fire, called shots, electric damage, (gas)grenades, leadership, lighting and enviroment. Npc hacker just controlling cameras, lights and doors to help guys with weapons can make a huge difference.
Use situational modifiers. Are pc acting right, dressed right? Is the npc happy, sleepy, cranky, suspicious?

For that street sam, remember you can use edge to reroll bad rolls when you really need it.

Remember that combat is noisy and leaves marks. Guns can be linked to bullets, blood can be tracked, spells leave astral signatures that can be tracked, in most places there are cameras do pc have distinguishing marks? Did they cover their faces and clear their tracks? Did they think these things? Do you as a gm want them to?
One thing to make challenging encounter would be if after the run when they think they got away they are found by one of those things I listed. Not prepared, relaxing, spread out, maybe away from some equipment. How will they deal with it? Do this only if you and your group are ok with it, it can come of as massively dickish, but some do enjoy catching those curveballs, so to speak.

EDIT: Because fights are dangerous and gather lot of attention from pretty much everyone in the general area my group tends to think that if fight starts something has already gone wrong. Unless we are paid to do so of course and even then prefer to choose when, where and how to fight if possible. To gather every advantage we can.

good advice above

I'd add in only to say, start low and work up .. you can then see first hand how your players respond

mooks -> gangers -> hired thugs -> mafia trained goons -> police forces -> KE-> RRT -> seasoned runners
the difference between them all ? level of training, equipment and tactics :

gangers will charge head on and use intimidation, trained goons will use fire-arms and cover
KE will use the above and effective fire control.
and the top end paid hitmen will use various tactics and measures to counter the players

lastly, some tips

1) place hints so the players can gauge the level of enemy and act / prepare accordingly rather than try to carry 100% of their gear for all eventualities
i.e. news feeds of SWAT getting killed by well equipped gangers
or
the floor littered with casings but NO blood from the raging spirit
(indicates it's immune to bullets from the dead guys already there)

2) Reward and encourage tactical play, use of cover, and COOL stuff
try to use it yourself against them, so that they follow your lead, making them survive longer.
or at least learn for the NEXT character

3) don't be afraid to kill, but only if they are behaving utterly regardless to the current situation (charging KE head on etc.)
SR is meant to be lethal ..

Good advice above.

Try to run npcs more than collection of stats. Npcs lower on professional scale can act stupid, overconfidant or cowardly. Ganger seeing couple of his buddys mowed down in seconds? Might run away if it is possible. Or if from their perspective things are going well yeah they might deside to show off for their buddies. Maybe they run across pcs earlier and now it is personal.
Creating memorable characters is difficult but played well they can create richer gameworld.

When I GM I tend to think what would make sense in the world. What level of skills people would have, do they have nonstandard abilities for good or bad. As long as this makes sense within world. Occasionally this can mean that direct confontration is really bad idea. My worlds are not designed around players. But hint and give opportunities to gather info and find stuff. Describe what they see as a hint to how hard npcs are. I find it ideal when players play smart and careful but not full on paranoia. Surprices happen, you never can know all. Again for good and for worse.

I heard about once case where gm wanted to show that charging in gung ho is a bad idea. Gave players premade characers, had meeting with johnson and so forth. When players charged in without any prepwork there was a nasty surprise and fight to the bitter end. Then he said:
Your instructor turns off the screen and says: "This is what happened to previous team. I hope you can do it better."
And then it was time for the real characters and run.

Though If you and your players arent happy with how games are going the most simplest but often neglected way to solve the issue is to discuss with them what do they want and expect from the game. It might be that some have different ideas than others and some friction comes from there. Point is for all to have fun, it is much easier when everyone is on the same page about the game.

Thanks for the responses so far.

I think I may need to switch over the types of enemies I'm using for this "learn the combat" type stuff. I was using critters, which, while nasty, don't tend to use a lot of the same tactics something like a group of gangers would (minus the sapient ones, obviously).

I did sit down after the last combat encounter (that almost killed the Sam) and discussed the game with the group, and we may have come to another realization: The team is very specialized for being such a small group of runners. We have one decker (who's allergic to grass), one sam, and one mage who likes Toxic Wave a lot. In their last adventure they also rescued a young NPC technomancer that they're taking under their wing and can potentially double as a face down the line, after she's a bit more established in the group.

The defense dice pools between the sam and the other two players are vastly different, so if I "challenge" the sam, it's "really damn lethal" for the others. If I scale it back, the Sam's just dodging everything and I think the player'd get bored.

I may need to contrive a way for them to need to pull back or evac from what they were going to do in this run. This run had pretty much just paracritters interspersed with grunt zombies until they got to the end, where there was a possessed paracritter housing a Force 6 Toxic Spirit. I'm starting to think that this may be less "challenging" and more "TPK-inducing".

Maybe yeah change the opposition. To me the most common opponents shadowrunners usually face are gangers and security guards, while critters are rare. Some corps might have them as part of higher threat response team, but they would usually have handler. Remember out of combat uses like using basic dogs to track.

If sam is clearly the most dangerous enemies could focus on him. Minuses from defending against several attacks can rack up. Couple that with burst fire or shotguns and defence gets challenging. Maybe have one or two npcs try to suppress the others and rest focus on sam. Again, tactics change a lot.

I get the impression that you run combat heavy scenarios. If that is sam's best area are others getting their time in spotlight too?
Some astral tracking, assensing for important information or something similar that gives mage time to shine. Invisible enemy mage others cant do much about? Dispelling time.
Cameras everywhere and doors slaved to host? Time for decker to pull weigth and do his/her thing. Know there is a fight ahead? Set up enemy's weapons, gear with enviroment like doors, elevators, communications. Laugh when everything enemys tries to do fails.

It depends on group and individual tastes, but to me it is more statisfying to outsmart, outhink and outplay the opposition. Hacking, infiltration, social challenges. Shooting your way in is possible but risky. Instead one sneaks and/or talks his/her way in and sabotages something(Accident from spirit is nice for this). Then hacker intercepts the call for maintainance and send your guys in. Mechanics overalls, toolbox and sparepart crate hiding equipment go in. Do your thing and leave.
We actually did this and things went quite smoothly. Teamwork with time for everyone to shine.

Quick infiltration tip: No one pays attention to janitor, cleaner, pizzaboy etc. Or that delivery van.

I don't exclusively run combat-heavy scenarios, but I sort-of designed this one with a combat focus to try and give the team a bunch of chances to see how things like multiple attacks, defending against successive attacks, vision modifiers, and the like worked. The last run I had them go on was more spotlight on the decker and info-gathering than the others, and I plan to do one where the mage can showcase his abilities and stuff. I try to work in things for all three of them to do in each of them, along with little specific hindrances (for example, the current run is in a toxic zone, so I introduced the background count mechanics from the "errata".) I'm also using each of these to get the group used to the mechanics overall and to teach them how different this game is versus our usual stuff (D&D, Pathfinder, etc.)

Another part of the problem is that I need to find a way to keep the group from splitting up before entering a place like a compound. When I did the last run, where they rescued the technomancer, the only one who initially went into the building was the sam. I could've ambushed the van, but I didn't want to seem like a dick, so instead I sort-of bent the Matrix rules around a bit and just made the exterior walls of the compound a signal inhibitor, so they needed to actually be inside to do anything Matrix related. The mage was still able to give astral overwatch and guidance via manifestation, but I'm just not sure if they're being too cautious or if I'm just not providing the right incentives or motivations to get everyone in together.

Ok. Most of the stuff I red was combat related so maybe I read too much into that. Introducing and learning new things one at a time is good.

Wards can stop or at least slow the mage. Using them requires caution though, there is fine balance between having to work around them every now and then and feeling useless when everything everywhere is warded. Earth blocks astral travel too so underground whatever with ward at the door should make mage at least think other options.

For motivations distance increases noice so decker can face high penalties if acting far away. Mage needs line of sight to most stuff to work and manifestation doesnt count for that. Also is the sam character fine with him taking most of the risk alone with no one to back him up?

It has always been kinda problematic for mages, deckers and riggers that they often require jumping out of their bodies to do their thing. Having the body guarded and/or in safe place makes a lot of sense.

I'm finding the game world fun to imagine but tough to build since playing in a fully populated campaign world requires detail.

It's very close to real life. Interpersonal relationships which naturally defer to and are subordinate to national/international identies are complex....

As a long time GM in SR in general, I find it best that you go for designing adventures based on what should be there rather than what would be an equal challenge. I'm all for challenging the players mind you, but a big part of that is not in combat. Combat in SR is still deadly, not as bad as 2.0, and 1.0, but still deadly--so if you get into combat it is not always the PC's that will win (even against mooks).

This is actually a really salient problem I have with Shadowrun as a whole. The premise of the game is that diverse groups of specialists need to work to overcome problems, so the character creation rules reward specialization. But if you take that to the logical extreme then only one player is ever playing at a time, while the other characters marvel in awe. Now, a well designed adventure can rotate between characters doing their specialties, but I've found that aggressively working with my players to soften specialization means that more people are having fun more of the time.

I don't know if that will fix your current predicament, but when you make the next batch of characters consider encouraging everyone to have 2-3 specialties and a wider spread of gear. It has consistently translated into more fun than the extra 2-3 dice in the pool, and it's easier for the GM to make balanced and interesting challenges. In the mean time, design encounters that have challenging matrix, magic and physical components that need to be addressed _at the same time_ and let each specialist work their magic.

I was talking with my roommate last night (he plays the Sam) and I think this is what we're going to do. Once I figure out how to get them out of the situation they're in without either just THOR-ing them or handwaving their departure without finishing the job, we're gonna sit down, talk it out, and see if we can redo character creation with less specialization. The specialization wouldn't be quite as bad if we had a larger group, but with only 3 players it does kind of show, a lot.

Tactics > Stats

Mooks - Tactics < PCs
Mooks + Tactics > PCs
Mooks + Tactics < PCs + Tactics

So very true...

No Rpg has ever (thankfully) addressed the problem of specialized characters and skills. Most are designed to have the spirit of acharacter and his/her world and create a statistical model around that.

If that's not are priority you will have just a bunch of individual craracters completely self-absorbed into their own egos. No strengths, no weaknesses, no personalities and no principles.....

Not taking into account the many strategy/war games mind you....

Another weigh in on the Build What Feels Real approach.

I find one thing curious is the desire to demonstrate that SR isn't D&D or Pathfinder but wanting to keep the Party Together. Shadowrun in my experience is one of those games where you don't often have to or want to keep the party together. Sure it makes sense that the Sam is the guy that goes in, but that's his professional delineation, the Mage and the Decker may want to or have to go with him but it's not always an ideal plan. The decker can supply "offsite" support that can by far improve the abilities of the Sam without having to be in the line of fire. The mage may require a more active and actual physical presence but that comes down to planning and execution on the team's part on the run. Runners are not so much an SAS or Commando insertion team but closer to the kind of special ops employed by intelligence services and displayed in things like Mission Impossible or A-Team (just two quick examples) or indeed GITS.

But its not a situation where you go shopping for a class of person you need for a day or a few days either, Just to put them back in a 'box' so to speak. RPG's in general are about discussion and development of individual and group integrity.

The adventure stills needs to have involvement to be develop. By players and GM's alike who are equally part of the game at large and require experience interacting with each other for the process to be a sucessful.

or one is only speaking metaphorically about the rules and the efficiency of the game....