I'm home, bored, my radio station just got sold, and I have to be back at work in less than 12 hours.

Therefore, you get the product of my nuerotic boredom.

When I joined the boards, I posted a topic, asking about info for St. Louis, stating I am planning to run a game soon. I finally have all my players and all characters made, here's a quick rundown.

An as yet unamed male Ork. Large, with dreads, a cybereye, skull, 1 arm, and an eyepatch. From the Carribean. Was on the bad end of a double cross and nearly died, used contacts to find a place to hide. St. Louis. Is buddies with Solomon Greene, the "independant" contractor the group starts out working for. Has three hookers as contacts. Has them all addicted to smack, which he gets from his drug dealer contact (cy, from Bringing out the dead) and uses them as informants on other criminals who use their services. Is Psychotic. (think Mr. Blonde from Resevoir dogs)

Archer Zane, a human bounty hunter with skillwires. Dresses nicely, all the time. hides his skillchips as cufflinks, which he fiddles with constantly. Has, as a knowsoft, a St. Louis phonebook, the kind used by the phone company, with unlisted numbers listed.

Blacklock, Dwarven Decker. With Bad Rep. Got his last team killed when he tried to be Vindicitve on an old enemy. Dark Secret.

Lauren Busch. The resident newbie. Elf. Her Father, August Busch the V, is human, and xenophobic. Had her locked up in a convent. recently escaped, on the run from the Church and her dad. and yes, Busch, as in Anhueser Busch, the beer people with gadoodoles of money. Hunted flaw.

John Marriot, late of Scotland/ UK. Involved with the IRA. Assinated a member of Parliment, sent to U.S. to cool his heels. There's an IRA contigent in St. Louis.

An unamed Elven Irish Rigger. Also involved with the IRA, who, in my game, hate elves. Interesting conflict.

Another Elf, Jorge, from the Vallejo. Left Cali after his job with renraku went south. Turned into a security riggger, and also uses his ware to run lightshows and dj at a couple of clubs.

So that's the basics of my starting, street-level-ish, style over substance, campaign.

Just thought I'd share.

I've been on this board for years and haven't found or been able to form a local group. :jealous rage:

Where do you live?

Very close to St. Louis, Missouri, in a wonderful little German-esque river/rail town named Washington.

Linkage!


*edit*

and could you have picked a more depressing bible verse?

Look at how long I've been a member and I just finally got a group together last night.

The Abstruse One

The problem is, I've run for most of these folks before and the games, I don't know... fizzled... after one or two short sessions. I've had the hardest time keeping interest going.

For this campaign, I've changed everything, the way I write, the way characters are made, the "feel" in hopes of giving my players a long, fulfilled gaming expereince.

Getting a physical group together is really hard. I've only seen it done a few times.

It seems that usually the simplest way to have a long term group is to use IRC or something. I think that at this point I feel much more comfortable with IRC SR than with in-the-flesh SR.

Sorry, wrong term, my fault. Datasoft.

*blames above reasons for confusion*

Every time I tried getting my TT group to play, they balked at it because of the different rules. They are used to WW and D20 rules. "Too complicated" they cried. Wah. Good luck to you on this one.

I've almost convinced my d20 group to play with me. Of course, since a couple of them can barely grasp the concept of d20 I'm not sure how well it will go over (that and the fact that usually the only part of the character they flesh out is the type of weapon carried).

Amen to the difficulty of getting together SR groups. On my own side of things, I can usually find some people who would be willing to play if I would gm, and that's what I'm doing right now, but I would kinda like to be a player too...

oh well.

[edit]
actually to be more accurate I AM a player in a campaign, but I am the only player in that campaign (just me and my gm). But that's gonna end fairly soon and then I suspect I will be gming for a while, i.e. the whole summer and then either a continuation of the summer campaign or gming a new one come fall, possibly for the entire year. (What happens when you have cool people that you enjoy being around that are interested in playing SR but don't know anything about it and need to learn. So they won't be gm material for a little while)
[/edit]

I'm actually kinda lucky, my group are experienced gamers, who have put together excellent characters, all fitting with the theme of my game. They are interested in story, pacing, roleplaying. They're a good, good, good group of people to game with. Our main problem is coordinating schedules. And killing our games with humour. It happens far too often.

That's why d20 is evil. It's corrupting the youth.

We should make everyone at Wizards drink hemlock.

Yep. Revitalizing RPG's in a whole new generation can only be bad for the future of roleplaying as a whole.

Yay! My topic has turned into a somewhat elitist discussion of the state of gaming in the world today, ending with a poisoning of "enemy" game designers!

Can I call myself a dumpshocker now?

Please??

Vive la Revolution!

~J

I'm disappointed that no one got my Socrates joke. What is this place coming to?

Meh. I got it, it just didn't fly.

You have gotten better at intellectual jokes (!

JaronK

Acknowledging it would have made everyone at Wizards look better in the end.

Remember, Socrates could either have left Greece (or was it just Athens?) and in doing so admit he was wrong or hang around and drink hemlock.

Course, it's late and I'm being needlessly flippant.

Lil' bastard was right though. If he'd said otherwise, we likely wouldn't remember him today. He's one of my heroes, really. Is it a bad thing one of my heroes was killed for being too damn annoying?

JaronK

I must be in the minority when it comes to "in the flesh groups". Our group is seven people strong of which five of us gm, we meet every monday night and have great fun. Guess i'm just lucky!

Man, the guys I game with suck. We meet maybe like, twice a year, play pre-generated D&D scenarios with pretty much just roll play and no roleplay. And we get sidetracked constantly. Last time, we spent a half hour talking about a spell that could cook raw meat. Although, it was a pretty funny conversation.

I tried to teach one of the more serious ones Shadowrun, but he was like "It's too complicated!" when he couldn't figure out the magic rules.

One of the ways I handle that is by starting with dumbed down rules. I just take it all on myself, and slowly immerse players into the rules as we go. The first session, they tell me what they want to do. I explain what skills are used, how combat pool works, etc. From then on out, I slowly give them more and more responsibility for the rules. Keeps the "sticker shock" associated with the Shadowrun rules in check.

I must be lucky. I've got a reliable group of players, including one guy who's been GMing and playing SR for all three editions.

I've recently started a gutterpunk game (BeCKS 200 karma) set in the Barrens with:

Wrench - a troll mechanic/wheelman who happens to be slowly building a sports car (It'll have wheels the minute he pays it off - he just installed the passenger side door.)

Jackrabbit - a Japanese elf hacker with aspirations to becoming a decker. First she needs to get her hands on a deck...

Meatgrinder - Washed-up ork Arena-Brawl athlete. Rumored to have been dumped due to drug use.

Tommy - Human Raven conjurer, who also happens to be Meatgrinder's pusher, due to a large debt he's trying to pay off to some large men.

Goldenboy - Ares Goldenkid, hung out to dry for reasons he doesn't quite understand. Currently suffering from culture shock in the barrens. Has aspirations toward becoming a rigger.

Apparently I'm pretty lucky, too; I've got a really reliable group (hey guys!).
I'm running a high-school campaign BeCKS ~120 karma. The characters all go to the same school in Renton. The students are:

Francis "Bubba" Dubbs - Country-boy troll and football star. Family is NAN-sympathetic.

Dorian Flannagan - Nerd slowly awakening as an Adept. Adopted by a middle-class family of trolls.

Lyten (can't recall last name) - Very young otaku. Placed himself in high school, though his supremely-high INT could probably put him there legitimately.

Alexis "Lex" Tirlas - Elf awakening as Unicorn shaman. Her dad works at Fed-Boeing.

Lucas Case - Ork ganger scrub awakening as Adept. Trying to finish high school and keep it real with the Crimson Crush.

Franklin "Fate" Anthony Edwards - The rich kid of the bunch. Wants to be a rock star, has a lot of Face-type skills.

since this is still being discussed, my first session with my group is Saturday.

My players are going to start the evening tracking down a certain "Doug E. Fine", a small time pimp. Fine's in debt to my groups employer, Mr. Solomon Greene. Fine took out a 50 thousand dollar loan to expand his business into btl chips. However, a local drug baron, Cy, got wind of the deal. Pepper, one of Fine's girls and a customer of Cy's, worked out a deal. She would steal the chips and then she and Cy could use the money from the sale of the chips to finance a drug run from St. Louis to Little Rock. Cy could provide protection until the heat blows over from her betrayal of Fine. If he survives the fact that he's in debt to Greene with no chips to show. Pc's will discover the fact and then get to track down Pepper.

Pepper steals the chips and uses a contact in a local Triad, the Red Dragons, to find someting to sell the chips for. The Dragons have just stolen a crate of ak-98's from a Vory (russian mafia) shipment at the Mississippi docks. Pepper decides to sell the chips for the guns, and then sell the guns for money. She sets up a deal with a local Mafia man, Marcus Biggio.

However, the 3 way deal is going down on turf belonging to another gang, the 8 Golden Buddhas. They plan to break up the deal, since they aren't getting a cut and the deal was set up without permission. They also have a grudge against the Red Dragons.

After that happy little cluster-mess-, the plot is for Pepper to abscond with the chips and her life. She'll then place the chips on an auto-bus, and buys a ticket for a second one. An Auto bus, in my game, is a drone/rigged bus with no actual driver on board. They make one way, non stop trips along major roads. They're smelly, cramped, cheap and some are dangerous. Not a fun trip. The PC's will have a chance to either intercept Pepper or determine where she is, and hopefully which bus she hid the chips on. Then it's a matter of stopping the auto-bus, getting the chips and before they can leave, a highway gang is going to see "easy" prey and try to rob the bus and everyone on it.

After that, it's back to St. Louis, where one of my PC's 6 point hunted flaw kicks in with members of the Order of St. Sylvester closing in to gather back one of god's "lost children". Then a simple matter of gathering Mr. Fine, the chips, and presenting both to Greene, so he can decide how to recoup this 50 thousand dollar loss.

Depending on what goes on, Pepper could be a recuring character.

I have terrible luck with SR groups...

I used to be in an online one, but due to..."Complications" of rather personal nature, I ditched. You know who you are, and you know that it'd be a good idea to keep thine mouth shut.

Now I'm trying to get into Kagetenshi's game. All I need is for him to finish making that bike using R3 (*winkwinknudgenudge* ) and I'll be all set there.

As for real-life groups, I don't know quite enough people from the real world who'd be interested. That's what I get for being such a recluse in the meatworld...

I think Orange is over by Beaumont almost to Louisiana on I10.

I've been a member of Garland's group through several games (SR, ED, L5R, D&D, Trinity, Fading Suns, and others I can't recall right now) for the last 5 or so years. We've had a very stable lineup (in terms of attendance, if not personalities ^_^) over that time--our current group has been fairly constant (no lost players) over the last two years. In that time we've had multiple campaigns lasting over two years real time. It's a great group that I'm proud to be with.

You guys are the greatest!

Maybe they should get Prof. Plumb, Ms. Scarlet, and Col. Mustard to do the dirty work.

The most people I've been able to get together for SR is 3 max. Two of us are into the roleplaying and the 3rd is just a D20 munchkin. The rules complication is a serious detractor. I've had several people interested but once they learn about the rules complexity they turn around and run.

I think it´s unbelievable so many of you don´t even have a group! I used to feel sorry for myself because my team only get together like once or twice a month. Make an effort guys, you really can´t settle for online gaming. (I don´t mean that you don´t make any effort, I´m just telling you that my opinion is that a RL group is worth fighting for.)

Seing each other in real life makes for better roleplaying, and makes you such good friends. My group is split between cities, but it´s only 8-10 metric miles to drive. I guess that´s a laughable distance to you americans . We got to know each other through a roleplaying club in our home town when we were kids, and we´re still best friends. Isn´t that the way it usually is? Maybe not.

Aren´t there roleplaying clubs in american cities? You know, a basement somewere were 20-30 members can come and go as they please. Painting their warhammer army, playing Magic or using the windowless back room to play roleplaying games? In sweden we have a nationwide roleplaying club that any group of kids can start a branch of, and it´s almost as big as the sports youth clubs. 50 000 members and 2000 local branches in a country with a population of barely 9 million (please excuse my braging). Now this club has members that don´t play roleplaying games but only does card games, computer games or whatever. But there´s a common interest in games. I get the feeling that there´s no real community for gamers at large in America. Just the Warhammer Club, the White Wolf Club, the WotC Club and so on. Is this true?

I feel really lucky now. I'm playing in a stabil real-life group, 5 players and the GM, and we're playing once pr. week. The campaign has runned since september and the engagement is still high. The characters is made by either priority or 120BP ( when the game started only the GM and two of the players knew the rules).
But I'm really surpriced so few who has group, even the one I'm playing with now, is the only one I know who plays Shadowrun.

If anyone's interested, here's an abbreviated recap of the first adventure, in more detail.



The night started with a simple request from the group's employer, Mr. Solomon Greene. Retrieve Mr. Doug E. Fine, a local skin pimp, and the 50 thousand he loaned from Mr. Greene, or the product he bought with the money.

After phone calls to various peoples, the group tracked Fine down to a bar on the East side called "Red Toby's". Red is known for being a skeevy place, and the resident mage, Raven, discovered this when she investigated the place Astrally and found others wanting to "play".

Our resident bounty hunter and spy guy, Mr. Archer. then vistited the club and was able to plant a tracer on Mr. Fine. After a brief confrontation, he removed himself from the club, and set up a meet with Fine and one of his "products".

At the meet, the group suprised fine, and had a little talk with him. They found out Fine had spent the money on something called "Better than Life" chips or "BTLs - Beetles". They're like a movie that allows you to feel what the actors are feeling, except the emotive highs are "better than life". However, those chips had been stolen from Fine by a girl named Pepper. Fine professed no knowledge of where Pepper went or what she planned to do. However, he did say she had no way of fencing the chips, that she was saddled with something she couldn't sell.

The group left Fine in the capable hands of Bones, a Troll friend of one of the PC's, nick named Danny Boy. The Troll, btw, is getting a new couch.

The group made more phone calls to contacts and also the Decker, Mr. Blacklocke, aka Footstool, dived into the Matrix. A combination of info revealed that Pepper was planning a meet off of Grand Boulevard. The turfs belongs to an Asian Gand, a Triad, known as the Eight Golden Buddhas. However, when Blacklocke called his person "inside" the gang, Lucky, he found the 8GB's had no knowledge of any meet.

The group tracked down the warehouse and outside saw a grey caddilac parked outside the building, with an Italian flag on the bumper sticker. Blacklocke, using his trusty cyberdeck, found out the car belongs to Marco Gognitti, a local Mafia made man. A quick check with a man inside the mafia showed that Gognitti was "a little man with a big mouth" A quick conference in Mr. Archer's car followed, and the group came up with a plan. Holding their collective breath, the group went in, guns blazing. They found Gognitti, Pepper and members of the Red Dragon Triad trying ot make a deal. However, the resistance inside turned out to be heavy, as a crate of Russian marked Ak-98's, the latest in Soviet bang-bang, was being used as collateral for the trade. It's a beauty of a gun, complete with undermounted micro-grenade launcher. Quickly gathering their wits, the group laid down well aimed gunshots and one flashpack and concussion grenade later, the group almost hand the situation in hand. Until a white panel van crashed into the warehouse and members of the Eight Golden Buddha's began pouring out. The group chose that time to find Pepper, trying to make her escape. A quick scuffle later, and she was in the trunk and the group was on it's way, as the cops closed in. 4 blocks later, the trunk lid flew open as Pepper tried to get away. However, she was running on a bum leg with a deep bone bruise and Capt. Jerry quickly caught her. One shotgun negotiation later, and Pepper was back in the car (in one piece) and the group was headed to a safe house.

Pepper refused to reveal the actual location of the chips, as she believed they were the only thing keeping her alive. However, the group sensed a kindred soul in Pepper, in a way. Capt. Jerry made a call to Mr Greene and filled him in on the details and then made a proposition. Based on the guts it took to steal 50 thousand dollars worth of merchandise, use a Triad to set up a meet and then try and sell the guns to the mafia, Jerry advised Greene it might be a good idea to bring Pepper on board. A few questions later, and Pepper went from being target number one to the newest employee in our little criminal family.

Her survival assured, Pepper revealed her emergency plan. The chips had been stashed on an auto-bus, headed to Kansas city. Auto busses are large, smelly, lumbering machines, run by remote. The lack of drivers reduces the cost of running the busses, however, they are not a safe or enjoyable form of transportation. In this case, you get what you pay (cheaply) for.

The group left Pepper tied to a chair, well, duct taped, and took off after the auto bus, which had just left. A little creative wizardy later, and the bus was forced to pull over due to a lost signal. While certain members ransacked the bus, other informed the 13 passengers that the bus was out of service, and it would be in their best interest to walk home. With the chips secured, the group bid the stranded passengers goodbye. Raven dropped her spell and much to the passenger's shock, the bus took off, back into the night.

As the group headed back into St. Louis, the were stopped as the car was bathed in bright white light. With a terse "stay in the car", Raven hopped out and confronted her past in the form of Dr. Hugh Walker, a Jesuit Priest, tasked with hunting down Raven for reasons not revealed to the group. Raven and Walker had a tense confrontation, after which Raven was left to confront a celestial being, which looked like an angel. Was it? Ruminations continue. However, Danny boy, with his tattoos of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Savior on his body, simply couldn't bring himself to fire on the being and stayed in the car, when others moved to help Raven.

After the fight, the group took stock and headed home to treat themselves. They also taught Mr. Fine that it is never good to renig on a loan and left him taped to the front door of Red Toby's as a warning.

A tidy package, or is it? Did Marco Gognitti survive? Why was he dealing for Russian guns? What will the repercussions be between the 8 Golden Buddhas and the Red Dragon Triad? What about the stolen shipment of Russian Rifles? And what is going on with Raven? Who painted racist slurs on Captian Jerry's door?

These questions and more, next session.

I live in Sacramento, CA and I have been running physical shadowrun for a little over a year now. But to do this I have to contantly be on the look out for new players.

The trouble with a weekly game is trying to co-ordinate all the peoples lives, especially since gamers often have odd work schedules (i work nights and weekends, other group members work regular 9-5's).

What you MUST do to keep a group going is plan things at a time when you can make it EVERY WEEK. Not bi-weekly (to much time betwee games) but every week. Even if only 1 player can play, don't cancel the game. You can just do a solo run with that player... I find denny's is great for that.

In conclusion... if your in sacramento email me, I have a game that goes every wednesday, and I am always looking for new players

I used to have a group, but not any more, and actually, I think it's better that way. Ya see, my last GM was a BGMFH (Bastard GM From Hell). Why you ask? Let me give you some examples:

All players were illiterate by default. It doesn't matter whether the character is a street samurai, musician, mage, or even a decker or rigger, you couldn't read or write. We were also started with SR1 rules, but using the SR3 Companion. Also, silencers were nerfed up the wazoo. They were, literally, useless. The GM had ruled that all the silencer did was make the shot inaudable several blocks away instead of a mile or so away.

He tried to avoid killing PCs off, but he made their (and our) lives hell. He also had Seattle building a very, very large wall around the MetroPlex to keep the riffraff of the Barrens out, with security checkpoints and everything, also to make the PCs lives hell.

That campaign ultimately stopped about the point where our Street Sam (who sort-of worked for Saeder-Krupp) got a put on his head by his employer for going and getting more cyberware, out of his own funds, without clearing it with them first. We tried another campaign, but we eventually broke up due to Real Life getting in the way.

I haven't found a game since, but that's partly due to lack of time and transportation on my part.

I second your last post LaughingTiger. Playing once a week is a thing of the past. Id love to do it, but even if I and all my players could make time for it (yeah right) I would have to give up all other interests to prepare a new session every week. I already have perionds (rather long and frequent) were I read nothing but Shadowrun books, and spend all my online time on dumpshock. If we played every week I would seriously fear for my sanity. (Im serious)

We're almost neighbors! I'm from Bonne Terre, about 60 miles south of St. Louis. Small world, huh?