Last session my players were tasked with pulling a B&E job in a AAA neighborhood on what amounted to a fortress guarded by Red Samurai. I had put the run together on the fly and for a moment thought that I'd set up a no-win scenario for them. There was talk of just giving the down payment back to the Johnson and saying 'We can't pull this off. Sorry.'

Then one of them had a lightbulb moment and a plan came together that used everyone on the team to the best of their abilities. And it was awesome.

So, how many impossible things do your players do before breakfast each day?

SR3:

Survived a blood demon by feeding it with the riggers APC loaded with ammo and explosives, then rode off into the senset on stolen Dobermann drones.

all for a 'freebie' for a contact / friend !

Get in a fist-fight with a cyber zombie as a matter of principle.

Extracted a VIP who never leaves the "corp only" levels of an archeology which we were unable to get into without getting into a firefight. VIP had to be unharmed, even psychologically.

Can't hit him over the head. Can't drug him. Can't scare him. Can't end up with him in a firefight.

Party ended up spending the entire downpayment hiring a cabal of mages to implant a suggestion in his head to "visit the archology's hat store" whereupon we had a PC impersonate him, while the face got him to wear a face-covering hat, preyed on his own paranoia, used the duplicate as a distraction to walk the VIP out the front door.

GM had no idea how we could even possibly pull the extraction off when he started.

Told the street sammie that yes, that dress did make her look fat.

I'd have just drugged him with Laés. Chemically-erased, neural-structure rewritten, means no psychological harm. As far as he knew, he went to sleep two days ago and woke up here.



I'm willing to bet that whomever did that got closer to their maker!



In my game...

My players managed to achieve what I believed to be impossible in the field of fucking up gimmies.

Like the time they turned what would have been a brutal, combat-heavy truck hijacking in broad daylight into a simple electronic bait-and-switch... And then managed to turn that into a sail up the coast from San Fran back to Seattle, searching for the shipping container that was thrown overboard at sea because their hacker pulled a bonehead and fucked with what she ought not have fucked with.

I have a theory: I call it the inverse scale of difficulty and competence.

A milk run is easy. therefore the players feel little need to put their all into it. therefore they're more likely to be bored. therefore they are more likely to pull something stupid for kicks and screw everything up when it goes wrong.

A serious challenge is hard. Therefore players have to think their way through the problem. Therefore they're engaged. Therefore they are less likely to pull something stupid for kicks.

Not universally true, but I've found that the easier the mission is on paper the more likely it is my group will find a way to fail it.

Nope, that would have caused neurological damage. He had information that our Johnson wanted, we had to avoid shocking him, in case he forgot stuff. Laes would have been too risky.

I have to agree with fueldrop here. Tell someone "escort this truck full of stuff," and the run will inevitably go to shit for lack of professionalism. Tell them they need to infiltrate a moonbase and hack it, and everyone is business.

In my first 4e game the team were being hunted by Tir Ghosts (the stealth bunny had left under bad circumstances, you know the usual). They holed up in a safe house but knew the Ghost teams was incoming. Knowing that their big problem was the damned stealth suits they rigged paint bombs (simple charges and waterballons with paint), as soon as they got movement they fired them decorating the opposition and taking advantage of their surprise and shock at loosing their advantage to flatten them.

In a 3rd campaign the sniper used a Barrett and AV ammo to take out the main rotor on a coptor containing 20 Japanese Imperial Marines with one bullet. The same sniper while drink did knee cap an opposition runner who grabbed him from behind. the best bit being he drew and used the muggers own gun.

It is certainly true that the tougher the run the better the plans get.

A psy-ad beinging told he had two troll samurai on him-thinking he'd back down and talk- declared "I don't have them on me, they have me on them" and proceeded to have a string of great rolls that took them appart.

The fixer I was RPing said, as a note of color commentary, that he'd pay good nuyen for 'the nose off of that motherless son of a festering goat Johnson!'.

So the team arranges to meet the J to turn over the product they were bringing to him. Once the credit transfers are approved, the samurai's player gets a big shit eating grin on his face and says to me 'I pull out my bolt cutters'.

Fixer got his nose, J learned a lesson, and runners hid out in the Tir for two months until the heat died down.

Ah-hahahahahahahaahahaaaaaaah!

What the hell did the Johnson do to piss off the Fixer bad enough to say that?

Shorted a runner team -and- stole what they were sent to get for himself, and blamed the fixer to both the runners and his bosses.

Oh man, that guy was either stupid or had the biggest balls ever recorded by man. Like, basket-ball sized.
The only person you don't want to piss off MORE than a team of runners is the guy who every runner in the city owes a favor to. A good fixer rarely needs more protection than the fact that he's a fixer, and anyone screwing with him had better be prepared for the consequences (EG a dead man's switch contract on whoever fragged him for a staggeringly high fee going out to every runner in the city, a quiet word to his friends in the police, calling in that favor your mother in law owes him to make your life a living hell...)

Many fixers don't have that sort of pull. If your fixer is that well connected, then you'd have got to be that damn good to be on his go to list.

That kind of fixer you are describing is more appropriate for a runner Face turned Fixer. He knows where the bodies are buried, he has people who are tight with him (his old crew, presuming they survived), he has forgotten more contacts than most people have contacts, this is the guy Johnsons piss off at their own risk. But you have to remember that a guy at his level, that Johnson is most probably a high powered Hans himself.

Any Fixer worthy of the title has at least basic precautions in place in event of their death, a bare minimum of two runner teams on speed dial, and an emergency stash of cash to deal with someone betraying them (money well spent, as a Fixer's rep is his life and word needs to get around that anyone backstabbing him is in for a word of hurt, even if it's just getting the local gang to go and rough him up in exchange for some spare firepower.)

Hence why he sent one of his go-to runner teams nose shopping.