I have a player in our group who plays internet-based manager sims at work. While I havn't gotten to try any of these out really (damned websense), I don't know how fun they'd be. He mentioned a few like "Earth:2025", "Utopia" (or something like that), "WeBL", and "Dolphin Email Games". The only one I've gotten to check out was WeBL but I havn't tried it out. I was just wondering if anyone else has played any of these?

My player's idea was a Shadowrun game where you would play a fixer, and you would manage a stable of shadowrunners. You as a fixer would have attributes you could raise and skills you could use for various tasks (his mentioned ones were : (weapons, vehicle, electronics, etc..) Aquisition skills, Negotiation, Etiquette, and some others). You would have contacts that you would use for getting gear or finding new runners, as well as getting info on other fixers or getting jobs for your runners.
The runners (according to him) would have "dumbed down" ratings, representing their capabilities (combat, matrix, vehicles, drones, social, travel, etc...), and also a rating that would determine their "cut" or profits. Runners would be randomly generated as well, but with higher rated runners demanding higher "cut".
After you worked your contacts and located a few runners to put together as a team, you would get randomly generated jobs from your contacts that you would send these runners up against. The jobs would have ratings (like vehicle, combat, matrix, etc...) that would represent the minimum skills required for a team to accomplish the mission. These rating would be "hidden" and given a scale like (none, easy, intermediate, hard, etc... Each job would pay a nuyen amount, or a contact or piece of gear.
New contacts would be found through other contacts, and gear of different sorts which you could buy would give bonuses to your runners' ratings when used.
You could manage as few or as many runners as you wanted, and send as few or as many as you wanted (within reason) on a run. The point of the game would be to become the most powerful fixer in North America. The capability to go after other fixers and possibly eliminate them was also a central feature, meaning you would also have to hire and equip runners that would act as bodyguards. As the runners you managed completed runs, they would receive points that could be used to increase their ratings.

edit: I forgot, there would be a random factor to run success also.

He also explained to me that you as the player would be allocated a certain amount of turns per day, and that actions (talking to contacts, buying gear, doing runs, etc...) would require a certain number of turns to do. (So say if doing a run costs 8 turns, and you only had 7, you would have to wait until tomorrow to do it.

So I don't know if this would be doable in the least or how one would go about doing this, but from what I understand these games are browser based. I just thought this was a cool idea so was wondering if anybody knew anything else about stuff like this or had any ideas how it could be done.

That's a cool sounding game. I ran something similar to that for a series of solo adventures for a friend once. Be nice to play something like that myself though.

That sounds really cool. I'd play it. I have no idea regarding how to go about making it, but I'd play it. Another cool idea would be to have it centering around a corp and using the corp raitings. You could acquire points in various ratings, hire SRs to do dirty work to increase you ratings, spy, acquire special bonuses, use fixers regularly or not, etc.

Heh, that'd be cool too. I wish I had the skills required to set up something like this. As it is now, I wouldn't even know where to begin. The friend that told me the idea was equally clueless as to how something like that would work.

The hard part of good software is not the
IF A>B THEN X
type stuff, any code money can do that is the game design (the rules that determine what the code you have to write does) that is difficult...

Well whatever, Nobody here would know how to do that either!

edit: here, as in where my meat body is...not dumpshock

When I was a meatbag I spoke as a meatbag
I understood as a meatbag I thought as a meatbag;
but when I became a personality engram I put away meatbagish things

Good software design has some similarities to writing op orders...
The head honcho guy writes what he wants to happen, then all the smaller honcho guys implement it...

Same thing in software design, you have a 'vision' then you go through each part and fill out the math and though behind it...