I was having a conversation with a friend on AIM about shadowrun. He told me that he thought that our shadowrun group would play very in a very "conservative" manner, with respect to engaging the enemy. People would tend to hang back, be cautious, and use either rules-based numbercrunched strategy, or overall positioning based strategy.

I replied, "That's because it's Shadowrun. If you charge out ahead everyone shoots you and says 'Tango Down'. I mean, like, there's a reason that a few snipers can pin down a platoon for hours. Because no one who is intelligent is going to jump out in front of everyone without a lot of support. Do you actually see other SR players striding boldly forth as if they were Neo? I'm genuinely curious."

My question to DSF is to what extent do you feel that your players behave in a cautious or strategic manner? Does your combat unfold in a slow, deliberate, and planned manner? Or do people just charge in and rely on their init boosts to let them shoot everyone first? How dangerous are the encounters that are designed for the group?

Thank you very much for sharing with me.

My group plays pretty smart for the most part, although they do rush things sometimes. They have the skills and firepower to keep things even... again, for the most part. Every once in a while they get in over their heads though.

They never use mil-speak though: "Blue Dog, this is Papa Bravo. Send in the feather duster. I repeat, send in the feather duster."

My group can only seem to be "tactical", when one of my characters briefs them on how to be. We only have one guy who is cautious, but cowardly is probably a better word for it. Aside from that guy, we have fairly high character turnover rate.

They never learn...

With the changes that were put in with 3rd edition initiative, that "charge in and rely on high init" doesn't work as well. But, I've done it once, relying on a very good sniper for support.

The group I currently game with is more of a gangbanger style. Some run, some shoot, no tatical planning.

The last Cyberpunk group I played with was extreamly tatical. But we where a combination of ex military guys and wargammers. Mil speak was common. We also did a lot of hand gestures when sweeping buildings.

Usually my runners are pretty cautious. They would much rather avoid a fight then have any fight at all. But I can't go calling them cowardly, they find the heaviest fire power they can reliably conceal/bring along and when they think the s&@! will hit the fan they make sure to shoot first and ask questions after they are well away from the scene.

I missed the questions

Depends on the characters we are playing in some respect, but basically we are tactical. Now that doesnt preclude a tactical charge when the situation warrents it. But we do engage the enemy on our terms 90% of the time, usually with an overwhelming advantage. As for that other 10%, well, you cant always pass a stealth roll =). But its rare for a team of skilled shadow operatives to not act this way, youll get shot. Fights tend to be one sided in the players favor, but thats part of the nature of the game.

Tactical. They use the terrain, cover and delayed actions extensively to achieve the objective with the least amount of risk.

We always use a battle mat (www.chessex.com). As a general guideline (97.2%) we don't kill characters unless a battle mat has been placed. We place toy cars on the mat as vehicles, we have a couple houses to place, some plastic 'rock piles', and carved erasers for dumpsters and other terrain.

I am amazed when anyone tries to run a Shadowrun combat without a playing mat, because I don't know how you can use tactics without it.

I run the opposition as using tactics or not, depending upon who they are and their level of training.

In the past, it's generally just been the party and their opponents blundering into each other, then standing and shooting until one side or the other were dead.

In my current campaign, however, we just had one extended combat when the player characters charged into a situation very brash (like usual) and then as things began to get bad for them (outnumbered, enemy gunman using cover and aiming) they got wise and tried using the same tactics. That gave me a lot of hope for this campaign.

It really depends on the day and the player. If someone is having a rough day and just wants to blast something (or if they think their troll can't be hurt) they'll wade in.

If the group has taken the time to sit back and prep the run strategy, they'll usually stick to it until situations force a change.

We've only played 2 SR sessions, but this is the general way things have worked in other games.

In my mind it usually makes a lot more sense to just dash in and start mixing it up in most situations. Your typical combat runner crew will have the advantage in combat pool (dodging ability), initiative (number of actions), skill, and quickness (ability to cover ground), so a slow engagement will often favor your opponents by minimizing your strengths as compared to theirs.

Though this is a lot less clear-cut than it was in SR2.

~J

Well, the best fights in shadowruns are the ones you don't get into.

The fact of the mater is that most fo the time you are sent in to get item "x". You achive your goal and get out without getting caught. Now, seeing as you are taking "x" from a company, or group you are costing them resources. Now, when you enter into combat you will most likely cost them more resources and put yourself in harms way. Now when combat is unadovoidable, you need to hit hard and fast.

I'm going to have to disagree, here. SR3 has a lot of coherency issues, but it's still generally pretty clear that tactical realism was generally left in the corner to cry itself to sleep and adepts that can walk into a lobby a la Neo were intended to be commonplace (at least commonplace for runners, anyway), and that's just the style of the game. Certainly, there's more lethality in SR than, say, DnD, but a lot of absurdly unrealistic things can still happen (and are, at least half the time, intended to happen). If Doc Funk were here, he'd probably be saying the same thing with more insults.

Though I will also say that from my limited experience with SR2, it's been reined in somewhat, as Kage pointed out.

I'd say, for the most part, our group is fairly good at infiltration with decent stealth skills, magical backup and matrix assistance. But the problem I have noticed is if we unexpentantly run into a guard and fail to grease him before he can call for backup, it gets ugly fast.

Does anyone know any tactics that could counter this? I have seen jammers in the book but as of
yet have not tried them, dont even know if they would work in this case.

Don't fail to grease him before he can call for backup.

~J

Thanks

hey, my physad could take those girl scouts.

my physad does what Neo would do if Neo had SUT training. he's fast, he's very hard to surprise, he's an incredible shot and a very good melee combatant, and he can take a six-round burst to the chest without slowing down. so, when he kills half of the people in the room in the first round and gets the other half to concentrate their fire on him, it's because, well, that's his job.

The rules don't make it hard at all to play a tactically savvy group. What they do do is clearly separate real life tactics from Shadowrun tactics. In real life, moving at most twice as quickly as any one of three opponents, I would never try a tactic that I might if I, say, could run three times as fast, reacted about four or five times as fast, and was able to get typically three to four times as many solidly aimed shots off as they could.

Real-world tactics do not take Move-By-Wire into account.

~J

Hence my "action" game comment.

that's what the guys i game with normally do. we use the rules to their best effect, spanking the bejesus out of most bad guys. then, in-character, we describe that spanking as being the result of our characters' tactical savvy.

I wouldn't they're master strategists, but my players usually err on the side of caution.

It happens that the sams, adepts and combat mages in our group are played by males and we all are ex-military and we're all in the same team that tried out our country for our country's WCG representation. So moving tactically AND using SR3 game mechanics are second nature to those guys. I can't even pull the reaction based response time trick (you know, the one that bases the amount of time you got to make a decision is limited by your reaction or something like that). By the time, I lay out the pieces on the map , they already know who is going to do what.

The time that I've managed to injure them are rare, and invloves brute force most of the time.

We try our best not to act like fataly stupid N00Bs but it happens. Usually when some one gets tired of missing, then we start playing grenade hot potatoe indoors. Or when the oppoenets wont drop with anything less than building destroying over-pressure.

my group seems to be fairly tactical most of the time theyll have a plan and follow it .....well follow it untill the first initiative roll then the blood seems to go to there heads and they becoume stupid.

Perhaps starting characters cannot help but keep facing enemies with equal or better skill and abilities. However, a veteran team could and should outcast most opposition. I can understand the mentality of pitting yourself against a "worthy" force as a sort of challenge but how many runners think that way?

Runners shouldn't. GMs should.

GMs should but players who are role playing well (those that run for the money anyway) should refuse such runs.

Look, the very first thing that I was taught in the army was that combat has no rules, and if you are smart, you'll stack the deck, look at your opponents hand and have an ace up your sleeve that the opposition doesn't know about and even with these "sure things", you should still cheat some more.

So in effect, any runner who faces a superior force is not only unprofessional but deserves to die.

Our group has:

1 Sam/1 mage who are tatically minded and try to do the most legwork possible/planning.
1 mage who is an outright coward. I'm not even sure why he's running in the first place ...
2 sams who tend to sit back and follow the plan
1 min/max PC who tries to get attention, from both the other players and the GM.

So, consider the sort of fun we have, with that sort of group

Setting up fairly rigidly-defined scenarios and challenging players to defeat them can be fun, but it's one of those things that I've very rarely had the opportunity to be a part of. The single most important thing to me about playing an RPG is the story and how the characters interact within it, so it can be taxing to do the "tactical" thing. Just depends on the mood of the group, really.

When I'm GMing, I tend to try and stress combat tactics when the need arises, but with the way I like to game, that might not happen very often. When I'm not GMing, I'm usually the only person in the group who bothers to think that way (or at least I was, as I haven't actually had the opportunity to sit down and game with a group in well over a year at this point).

Back in Dallas, the guy who used to do the majority of the GMing was so not interested in a methodical, tactically-minded approach to shadowrunning, though he was an awesome storyteller and games were very fun for all of us regardless. Of the two of us who tended to play the "physical security" types, the other guy in the group tended to pull very John-Wooish moves during combat; doing extremely silly action-hero things that worked out because the GM thought they would look neat or they played out well, whereas I would probably not have the patience for that kind of thing if I were GMing. Anyway, he often got all the glory, I tended to just plain lay down the smack (and in plenty of instances, got smacked).

There were times early on when I would frustrate this GM by neutralizing an attack nearly single-handedly. He couldn't lay down a rigid plan of attack and play it out in a map. I just have that kind of mind, he doesn't. But sometimes I'd take the reigns during combat. Other times it became a matter of fudging it to make the plot come out the way he intended. Both were cool because the game was almost always fun for everyone, to the point that groups and campaigns would stick together for several months on end.

I miss those days.

We're usually pretty smart about things, but there are always those genius plans that turn out to not, in reality, BE genius. It's all fun and games until you hear someone yelling, "RUN, niggaz!"

Depends... does your group plan for 2 hours and then start a bloodbath and lootnanny as soon as they get through the door?

Arethusa, while I agree that the system isn't perfect I'd say it does okay. It doesn't have to be perfect for us-my group that is. we make our combat realistic through good playing.

No die roll saves you from a hand grenade shove in your mouth, when your outh is duct taped shut. Sorry. I don't care if you have that really cool new cyber skull. Unless it's a smoke grenade, say good night Gracie.

We make our combat gritty, and cool at th same time. We try to capture the essence of what we think the game should be-a combination of military experience and a number of movies goes into this. Maybe it's not always perfectbut we get by.

This is also not to say we have no spot for the silly or the mundane-we've had Trolls having shotgun duels at five feet, and our share of gun fu where it fits.

The big thing for us is that the game is fun-sometimes that's planning a game out like we were characters in heat, or real criminals. Where six to twelve hours of real tactical planning goes into a ten minute fight scene, in a six hour game.

Other times we like it silly-I run what I call OmniDome, which is where we take a map, roll initiative and place oursleves on maps. Then we kill each other. Last man standing gets one point of Kama. No one actually dies in these, and these are outside continuity as it were.

I think the game provides us with jut enough-personally we don't always need more. Or want it. If i wanted a true strategy game, I'd play Go, Chess or Stratego.

I play Shadowrun because it's more than that.

Has anybody here ever played under the Downtown Militarized Zone rules? I found the books in a used book bin but I haven't played them yet. However they seem intensely tactical.

. . . also from my own tests against myself they're so lethal and bloody they make normal SR look like that other game. Reaction Arcs can be brutal.

If I wanted a combat sim, I'll go play Ghost Recon/Sum of All Fears. One shot one kill.

Fragging computer problems...

The group I play with in real life has an interesting way of going about it. We spend two hours, on average, comming up with a plan for the run and covering as many possible details as possible. Five to ten minutes into the run something always goes wrong, we end up abandoning the plan, and the rest of the run is a maddened scramble relying on us making it up as we go to get the objectives completed and get out alive.

However, the group did successfully follow one plan. It was in response to a Johnson choosing not to pay. He got the pleasure of a powerbolt, 12 Vindicator rounds, 10 AK-97 rounds, a high-explosive rocket, and a white-phosphorous minigrenade striking him at the same time. We don't appreciate not getting paid.

My group has gotten more tactical in recent games. This past one I through a much heavier group than they're used to going against...and it ended up being last man (err woman) standing with everyone else unconscious or dead. Fun things that happened in mid fight - grenade linked underbarrel grenade launcher under a truck at the feet of an invisibile mage who has turned his armor on (causing the area to glow slightly visibly). Ex-mage. Also, a sniper shot under another truck seriously wounding a guy from his feet with a sniper rifle (a Walther)... Lessee...a Panther cannon shot against an angled mirror at an outside door (somebody about to come through the door got a SERIOUS wake up call) that obliterated the mirror... It was kinda cool to have two semi-professional groups going at each other. They seemed to like it as well...or at least so they say.

I'm not sure how tactical it is, but especially in games like SR, I sorta metagame a little bit and try to listen to the GMs description of the area the characters are in, or pester him a bit for details, so I can guesstimate:

1. What kinda things around me are going to screw with my Target Numbers. and..

2. What kinda things around me can I use to screw with other people's target numbers if I'm going to get shot (or whatever) at.

I rarely run into the "one shot/one kill" broo-hah-hah in Ghost Recon, etc, largely because I never shoot once (unless it's with a dedicated sniper, which I don't use as often as most people). I mean, as long as I'm holding down the right button, that assault rifle or smg I'm using will continue to spray little chunks of metal death at my enemy -- so I do so 'till he staggers, then for a little bit longer, just to be sure.

One shot per kill might be unrealistic, sure. But when you pump a fourth or a half of a clip into someone, "hyperrealistic" game engine or not, I'm willing to go ahead and place my bet on the shooter, not the target, winning that brawl.