Does you crew wear masks? Do they get new footwear for every mission?Do they burn their clothes after the mission? Are they foolish enough to take souvenir? What steps do they take to contaminate their multiple crime seens?

Just curious.

Thanos

off-camera, my characters replace the firing pins and barrels on their firearms on a fairly regular basis. items of value that the dead guys aren't going to need get picked up for later sale, or use in later runs in the case of weapons.

sloppy? eh, possibly. the thing is, in real life, all the crimes committed in one area usually fall under one jurisdiction. in SR, there might be one jurisdiction for every single run my character does, even if he stays in the metroplex area for his entire career. and unlike real life, these jurisdictions have no reason to work together; working together means sharing information, and you never know what piece of information will give your competitor the edge he needs to beat you in the market next quarter--especially when it comes to info regarding shadowrunners.

I will be silent about my runners. They aren't... unnecessarily professional when it come to details.

because the idea that any weapon can be made in cased or caseless versions gives my brain indigestion. i started out with the assumption that my character's favorite weapon (HK-227) uses cased ammo, so i'm staying with it.

Just to get this thread way OT: Cased or caseless doesn't make much of a difference in the need for replacing firing pins. The G11 uses a firing pin, although admittedly it doesn't strike as hard a surface as a firing pin does with cased ammunition. Electrical ignition can be used with either kind of ammunition.

This is a constant learning experience for my runners and I award extra Karma when they strive for being more professional.

They are constantly thinking about using Mask spells, or just plain old masks, stealth outfits and gear, com-link system and sub-vocal microphones.

That's been one of the biggest draws to SR for me is the level of detail to which you can account for and still have fun.

My runners wear all black security armor all the time, and when they're finished with a run they go over the scene as best they can i.e. picking up spent shell casings, mopping up any blood, and checking their gear for transmitters and such.. just in case. Also, they usually try to cause as little structural damage as possible and they wipe off all finger prints... though usually they wear gloves.

P.S. im new here, and my name is pronounced Confusion.

Peace

In my games, most police and security forces are highly corrupt and not entirely competent. And they're nonexistent in many places. Caution pays off some, but most of the time things are fairly sloppy.

Our Shadowrun GM, with years of experience, does not reward stealth.

The first game we did with him, I had my decker carefully disable the external security. I had the cameras looping a nice nondescript feed, had the electric fence drop for 60 seconds, we all got in. Everything was fine until the mage saw a hellhound and unloaded an Uzi at it. (he panicked and forgot he was a mage)

The GM had an NPC 'minder' following us. Just to make sure we did not try to run away. This was the point when he opened up with a Panther... It turned out that he, and the characters he had rolled up for any player without pre-existing sheets, had not a single silenced weapon between them.

What can you do when the GM gives more karma for explosives (based on the number of mooks killed) than for shutting down a red security grid?

That sounds kinda like my GM Firewall

As for Professional vs Sloppy, I try to lean on the side of professional, but when your GM constantly overlooks everything for wetwork (with a stipulation of brutality I might add), it's kinda hard.

I'm running a couple of games. So far the groups vary. Deckers seem to be a bit smarter, they'll seek out and overwrite camera footage, security logs and the like. A few characters are smart enough to try and get maps and put on disguises. But largely it's still 'run in, grab it, shoot a bunch of people and get out before the star arrives'. Since I'm turning up the security forces on each mission, I think they'll gradually become more and more disenfranchised with that idea.

I find with the groups i run games for it depends heavily on the characters involved. I agree with the philosophy that deckers are the most cautious. but after all, its to be expected. The char spends most of its time with stealth and sleaze programs etc. and doing things without being noticed are what deckers do after all.

My favotrite from my table though was a ninja character who was a proper ninja character. Didnt so much as leave a footprint in the dirt outside anyplace he broke into. Scary.

Damn I wish I had the option to be a cautious decker. I'm the parties #2 gun and the default scout. Stupid thieves/riggers/mages.

To give the easiest answer, it depends on the charcter. Some have been ultra-careful, some complete whack-jobs that didn't take many if any precautions and others were cautious types that still took a calculated risk sometimes. Like I said, each PC is different.

I'd have to say that my favourites to play have usually been the cautious yet occassional risk takers- run and gunners can be fun for a bit but it wears thin after a while and uber-paranoids can also take the fun out of things. Although they can be good for a laugh sometimes depending on what extremes you take it too.

mfb has a point, the conflicting jurisdictions make a life of crime so much easier.

We try to take procautions such as having clothes and guns used only on runs and not kept in main residences. For example, my main character has a Colt Asp as her legal weapon but on runs that stays home and she packs a Colt Manhunter.

We also try to leave incriminating evidence of other corps when we hit a particular place. It may not work, but it muddies the waters. Likewise we've been known to hire hire runners to hit targets for no good reason to add confusion.
"Ok we know someone hit our Bellevue research plant, but why'd they hit the motor pool in Auburn too? what are they doing?"

Does this character also happen to be anti-social, or a hypochondriac by chance?

My characters are usually cool and calculating. For example, if he's doing a hit, he'll go up to the mark, talking with them like he's their good friend, then, when they're least expecting it- BAM! Down they go with either a bullet or an AZ-150 stun baton to the back of the head. Or, if subtlety isn't needed, a Remington Roomsweeper loaded with stun shells does the trick. I find that stun weapons work wonders, especially since people don't put much stock in impact armor.

As for disposables/untraceables/whatever, a good balaclava and some gloves usually do the trick, along with some silenced guns.

Mind you, a fellow runner with an auto-shotgun and a love of blasting makes all of that useless...

my runners just discharged a bunch of autofire in a c-class or better district. oh and they killed some LS beat cops. they will learn.

Our group seems to vary from one game to the next. Fairly often they're in the barrens so it doesn't even matter. But when it does... well, there was one time where the majority of the team knew the last member would be a liability on this kind of job, but were asked to bring him along, so they sent him in the other side fo the building making a lot of noise, then headed in through the back as quietly as possible.

Then there was the time the adept came up with a plan that depended entirely on nobody in the room happening to look his direction. That, of course, failed entirely.

I had a character who planned for the worse. He had a full beard and full head of hair. He kept multiple emergency kist stashed around the plex including ration bars, clothing, armour, a gun and some money. The bag also contained a razor and some hair dye so that he could quite radically change his appearance.

I had a list of standard gear I would buy for every run, and either dispose of or fence afterward. This gear included mobile phones (the pay as you go sort for complete anonymity) pistols, armour etc.

Characters on our team commonly carry a ski mask or balaclava. They'll often have a spray bottle of bleach to mix with any blood of ours that is spilled, particularly if the magician doesn't have the Sterilize spell. Some will have a cell phone that is only used with a single contact, so that contact can't trace who else the character talks to. Occasionally the heat gets so bad that a character gets plastic surgery on their face and changes their name, possibly even discard contacts depending upon the situation.

Characters will scrub out the astral signature left from spells, either themselves or with a nature spirit. Sometimes a magician stays behind astrally to do so while the rest of the team carts away his body. (Usually they remember to pick a meeting point before they separate.)

We treat Lonestar as having many dedicated and skilled officers, and that as a corporation they choose to track down cop-killers with a vengence. This policy boosts morale of the officers and leads to higher productivity.

The team has one "friend in high places", but she is taken by mantis. They can not depend on her to get them out of a jam.

They always plan on sneaking in, but never depend on doing it successfully.

How do my characters run? Well, first they lift one leg, quickly put it forward, then other other, then the first, etc.

Works really well.

My players usually devise incredibly insightful and creative plans to sneak in that take me by complete surprise. Then they screw something up and shoot the hell out of everything. Example: This week I had them trying to kidnap some the kid of a Yakuza guy who was getting too big for his britches. They scope the place out, do matrix and astral surveilance. They find out how many gaurds there are, get a partial floor plan, etc. The night of the run, they have the decker plant a fake pizza order, have the mage cast invisibility on the Assassin and the Katana-Adept while decker/techie waits in the van to intervene as needed and the face goes to the front door with the pizzas and successfully talks to gaurd into answering the door (really good fast-talking roll). Then the assassin and sam can't get the backdoor open. They knew the house had security, but hadn't thought in terms of maglocks, so when they find out, they are stuck. Now, the gaurd is distracted and while they don't have an electronics B/R, the decker does. Do they get him? No. They break a window, set off every alarm in the house and within 50 seconds have proceeded to lay waste to the place.

On the previous run, the 1st Missions run (the one with the meet in the park), they got a bunch of yellow construction tape and pretended there was a gas leak in the building. Then they got into a firefight...

I had a team that ran Shadowrun Missions #2.

I gave them a list of all the info their decker contact got, including, floorplans, guard duty roster, and security procedures manual, among other things.

I made of point of going over the list twice, adding emphasis on the Guard Duty Roster and Security Procedures Manual.

All they asked about and looked at was the floor plan

Needless to say, out of a total of 40 boxes of physical damage between four players, 28 were filled in.

And then we add stun damage.

The funniest thing was the ambidextrous adept, running away from the troll guard, blind-firing behind him with two pistols, while wounded, stunned, and running.... and still managed to give the troll a Serious Wound by the end of four shots with the pistols.

Recent run for my players went swimmingly for them. Thouygh the sniper ended up with the fright of his life when a pair of guards they`d missed on their surveilence sweep (they were hitting a loading wareshouse, just the one big open building and lots of mostly open space) opened up on his position, Including a guy carrying an LMG. It was then he realised he was sitting ontop of what looked suddenly alot more like a Petrochemical storage tower then he`d first considered when he`d climbed up there. I`ve never seen a more desperate display of athletics from a sniper to change position. heheheh.

My runners usually do a check on the background data the Johnson gives them, the target/s, and the objectives. They also use stealth but are not afraid to apply copious amounts of violence. They see stealth as a force multiplier but if necessary, brute force can be applied.

Standard equipment are 2 different loads for pistols( or other ranged weapons) -one very lethal(APDS or AV) and 1 non-lethal(capsule) and formfitting armour with rigid one-way face plates. Other equipment are usually along the lines of full stealth or maximum force.

Plan for everything, expect plans A, B, and C to fail. Plans D, E, and F to be useless, and for the rest of the team to throw them all out on a whim.

So I guess you could say we Improvise or Zen our way through it. Definitely... Oh and Murphy Law RULES.

Cheers

QM

I have to agree. Stealth-mode is fine, blowing everybody away is fine, but nothing beats casing the joint for five minutes and then "winging it" with whatever gear you can scrounge up along the way.

What? Nobody leaves calling cards? Moons the security camera? Gives the corporate secretary your phone number while you extract her boss? Does nobody here get a thrill out of living dangerously?

I leave calling cards. They're decently large and have a tendency to deform, though.

~J

Sure I live dangerously. The 13 speaker surround sound stereo I financed with my last run (that no one knows about) might damage my hearing, sounds pretty dangerous...

Yeah, I guess you could put me squarely in the "foolhardy" column.

Bah. I play a street sam, and I could count the times I actually got to shoot things so far without even needing both hands.

Should things eventually go to shit, I guess it'll be a good thing he's around, but the cautious approach means his job for the most part consists of going into places first to make sure no one is going to shoot (so the more fragile members of the team can show their faces) and heavy lifting.

He usually makes sure to bring a couple of good books to a run, and has started to learn Electronics.

My players have a habit of coming up with an insanely simple plan and then getting it to work. When I'm designing a run where they're going to have to destroy an office in a 10 story building without destroying anything else in the building, I generally think they're going to break in and plant a bomb. I never think they're going to build a trebuchet. It's gotten to the point where I have to come up with ridiculously layered runs because no matter what I do, they'll come up with a way to get through half of it in 10 seconds and stall for hours on the second half.

Which makes me wonder... did your players actually take "Siege Weaponry" as a skill? Or are they taking the +4 to their undoubtedly high TN for defaulting to Intelligence?