Tonight was the first time since I feel I've gotten a good handle on the Shadowrun rules that I've GM'd a game. I learned a few very important things from this adventure I'd like to share with those newbies seeking advice and for the old hats to laugh at me about. For the record, I ran them through Food Fight, then through a little search and capture mission for the mob.

1) Most gunfights are over in 6 seconds or less.
2) Heavy pistol rounds may bounce off a troll tank, but a shotgun slug will cut him in half.
3) Static in Food Fight is a sitting duck.
4) When someone draws a gun, the PCs immediately want to roll inititive regardless of any sort of plot or planning.
5) Troll tank + mace from 2nd Ed that does (Str + 4)S + Clubs: 6 + Titanium Bone Lacing + Unarmed Combat: 6 = three skulls caved in, one KO'd gang chica, and one Coyote shaman shoved through a plexiglass door with several broken ribs.
6) It doesn't matter how much you twink out the Yakuza hitman with Betaware, he's going to die if the PCs use basic strategy, get surprise on him, and hit him with the afformentioned mace.
7) Going first in combat = staying alive.
Getting surprise in combat = killing everyone before they can draw their weapons.
9) Letting the face/Cat shaman get Bonus Attribute (Wil) = Shaman taking very little drain
10) The players really don't care what color the bottles they shoot when they miss are, they just want to know they did damage and broke things.
11) A Deadly powerball = lots of broke things.

The Abstruse One

Was the troll tank in armor? Because a real "tank" of a troll usually survives those

Everyone in Food Fight is a sitting duck... it's half the fun. The other half being the exploding food packets.

The guy behind the counter got lucky and the troll got very unlucky. 15 dice and only 2 sucesses against a TN of 5. Any food only exploded twice. Everyone kept hitting their mark. It also brought up a good question for me. Influence lets you plant a suggestion. Can that suggestion be something like "Hand your gun to me"? I allowed it just because otherwise the Body 1 Cat Shaman/Face would've ended up with his brains all over the Chocolate Yum-Yum Bars, but I'm going into the serious adventures next game (Mercurial, then Harlequin, then Missing Blood) and I was curious.

The Abstruse One

Unless they're hard-core trained in the classic combat tactic of "Geek the mage first!"

But hey, Food Fight was meant to be a basic encounter. More of a fist-fight than a gun fight. Having the runners turn up adorned in combat armour and packing milspec heat ain't going to be a challenge for them. Plus why'd they just nip out for munchies or to answer the call of nature like that. (Actually, having them ambushed when doing the latter is a great way to literally catch them with their pants down). Hmm, then again you could always even the odds by having a Lone Star SWAT team popping in for a chokky bar and tripple-thick slupple-soy slushie en route back to the station after a heavy threat response call out...

PS> Hope you have fun with those scenarios Abtruse, they're some of the best written.

Trick is to never look like a mage. no matter the game.

Indeed. If you're going to dress in robes and symbols or wear antlers around, you'd better be a multiple initiate with many quickened spells on you.

~J

How true. On the other hand, the difference between the Mage the Adapt and the Sam is sometimes the weaponry. My personal rule of thumb.
If you're in a tense situation and one of your opponents is not pointing or holding a weapon, They should be your first target.

Following that with if they are holding a shotgun

The question is, how would the gangers be able to identify that this person is an aggressor rather than a random bystander? Unless they have reason to suspect magery, it makes more sense to go after the armed people.

~J

Well, shaman are easy to spot during magic, hermetics a good bit different and the ones to really watch for are the psychics. they don't chant, they don't use crystals (usually) and they just sorta stand there while wierd shit happens around you.

You also want to watch out for those super-fast ninja dudes with spurs. They get into melee with you, and watch out. Pistols and shotguns aren't really all that effective when someone's up in your face stabbing you in the eye.

As I said. If in a throwdown situation you see someone with no weapon evident it means;
A: They are a magician of some sort.
B: They have mad HtH Skillz.
C: They are so confident in their ability to out Quick-Draw you that if you don't kill them they will get four actions this turn and nobody wants that
The best camoflagued mage I ever saw was initated four times with masking, carried a Ruger Super Warhawk and had an obvious Datajack.

D: They weren't prepared for a fight, didn't want a fight, and had nothing to do with the fight. On most runs, a business suit and frightened expression usually indicates this one.

~J

You shouldn't have, assuming it was close range.

Or any other range, thanks to the choke rules.

~J

The Cat Shaman/Face is just some really nice-looking Elf in a nicely-tailored suit flirting with the elf behind the counter with no initiative boosts. Therefore, he went off last. When gangers started getting dropped, the first people they went after were the ones with the guns and the big huge troll who just broke Zany's nose and knocked her clean out with one punch. They weren't worried about the guy standing right in front of him with his jaw wide open...until his cufflink started glowing blue and the gang leader got an overwhelming desire to hand over his gun.

BTW, buy all combat spells at Force 6. Anything less and you won't be geeking the mage with 7 Wil.

The Abstruse One

I remember Food Fight! Never had so much fun watching a buncha PC's wreck un-believable havock in a mini mart!

Course, when the Combat Decker splashed a full cup of scalding hot Soykafe into the face of the Gang Leader, I nearly bust a gut.

Really, there's not much reason for mage to not simply pack the same armor and weaponry as all the other team members.

There's always the style inherent in having your Mage tote a LMG.

~J

Bah. There is no style in treating an LMG as a glorified assault rifle.

Yes, magic duels tend to be tough. Here are a few ideas for killing mages using magic. You'll need the manabolt spell for astral combat, at force 6 or higher. In physical combat, powerbolt works better, but an elemental manipulation works best of all, because regular spell defense doesn't affect it. Throwing all your dice into spell defense and shooting the mage works, of course, but here's a better strategy: throw all your dice into spell defense, summon a spirit, and have it confuse the mage. The attack him, either with magic or close combat. Finaly, using the possesion metamagic technique to posses the mage is always good for a laugh.

I actually didn't like Food Fight. I thought it was a great idea but the threat level is too high for total newbies and the extra dice rolling for exploding food effects puts too much strain on the newbie GM.

When I ran Food Fight for some newbies I had already had some GMing experience and I found that the gangers with SMGs could have killed the party like 5 times over. I had to keep telling the players, "Well, based on what I rolled, he would have killed you now, but since this is our first session, and the point is to teach everyone the basics of the game, we'll just say he missed."

I always thought these random gang members seemed somewhat heavily armed, too. Most robbers carry highly concealable pistols, i.e. light pistols. If the gang is looking for mayhem it would seem a lot more likely they'd find some shotguns, heavy pistols, or street sweepers, but not SMGs.

And why is their skill with some of these weapons 5? That's really high. Shouldn't they be untrained?

All in all I felt that Food Fight was just difficult and confusing for newbies.

I had a group of 4 players, two of which were total newbies playing the samurai and the other two semi-experienced players playing the Decker and Face/Shaman, both of whom have very low physical attributes. It took them one and a half turns to decimate the crew, and they would've done it faster than that if the shaman hadn't called off the troll tank so he could finish the last guy off himself with a Force 6 Powerball. Also, the first attack went to the troll tank (who has a very nice reaction) who cold-cocked Zany with a single 15M stun punch (high strength and titanium bone lacing), taking the SMG out of the action.

I think it's funny the decker is the one that took out the katana-toting Sam wanna-be. That guy rolled HORRIBLY for his attack.

The Abstruse One

I ran Food Fight once. It was getting hairy for the newbie PCs until the psycho decker found the cleaning products ans started lighting things on fire, and chucking them, well everywhere.

If you want to play flamewar, keep it to the approprate thread. Or just don't bother. Either way.

The Abstruse One

I thought the smiley would point out how serious the suggestion was. And I do not recall flaming you. I used no profanity. I suggested using the same idea you suggested to counter your suggestion. I simply tried pointing out a flaw in your idea, to which I guess the GM is then supposed to invoke his right to make his own rules.

In short, thanks for trying to come up with a creative solution, but it is a flawed solution. Some others showed how to cope within the existing rules, not resorting to taking a sketchy description a few have about spirits and stretching it into a blanket statement. No flames were intended by me, though I can't say the same for your responses.

I also felt the need to make the joke here because it is a valid, widely used tactic. Not a one trick pony or whatever else you called it. Any magician capable of commanding it and realizing how it works is going to use this potent tactic.

I've played Food Fight once, and I've run it once (actually, when I ran it, I didn't have the adventure on hand, so I got a chance to tailor the opposition to my group, which was good). When running the robbery-gone-bad, the most entertaining moment was when the Dwarf combat mage wouldn't look up from his troll-porn magazine, then turned it around to show the centerfold to the ganger yelling at him, shocking the poor gang-banger long enough to blow a hole in him with his heavy pistol. When playing Food Fight, the most entertaining bit was my Dwarf newbie Sam (I'm an experienced player, but the character wasn't an experienced 'Runner) remembering why it's bad to take on someone with a Katana when all you have is a knife.

Zany (the ganger chick) is now currently sitting in the basement of the troll tank's apartment chained to the wall as part of a harem he's planning to build. MAN did we have a ball with that run. I may do it again later on just for the hell of it

The Abstruse One

That's just fucking sick. I can't believe you find that funny.

I concur with arethusa.

That's pretty twisted... but how is it inherently worse than killing her on the spot? The last time I ran food fight, the gangers pretty much all ended up dead.

I take it you're running an amoral campaign.

That's more sickening but slightly less f*cked up than some events from the last group I was with. Trust me. You don't want me to relate the stories.

The gang was probably pimping her out. Isn't that one of the ways gangs make money?

If she'd rather be dead, there's probably ways for her to kill herself. Taking the chain and choking herself.

On second thought, tisoz, you barely deserve a response. I can't fucking believe you're rationalizing kidnapping, slavery, and rape.

...

It's definitely something that could make for good material in Shadowrun. Dark, gritty, unheroic; of course, it's also necessary to avoid letting the excuses the characters make convince the players.

~J

There's a line between the character finding this shit amusing and the player finding this shit amusing. It is the latter that I find wholly, deeply, unacceptably, intollerably fucking disgusting, and I imagine the few who have posted in agreement feel about the same way.

It's like that woman who was kept as a sex slave for seven years under this guy's bed. Right-o, old chap.

Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way. Maybe he's playing a character so morally bankrupt that even he hates him. I've noticed that most players don't have their characters do things that they themselves would find sick. And that really cramps the style in some amoral games.