Oookay, technically my second real game, but anyway...

Again, Aku was DMing. I don't know if any of the other players are Dumpshockers or not.


Because we were having confusions about implementing Kagentenshi's Decking revision, thanks largely in part to not being sure what everything cost, I'm playing a Decker who's moonlighting for a Sammie ATM. The fact that we don't actually have a Sammie is just another good reason. Heh.


Okay, so the game session starts out with our Fixers contacting us by the 'usual' methods. I intercept the telecom call heading to my machine while dipped into the Matrix, everyone else uses actual, physical cell phones. Silly others.

Being told to show up at a pub, we do so, naturally. What worries me is that we have the same dwarf adept from last time - new name, remade as a Native American, same attitude about being "fasionably late", etcetera. Fortunately, this time she showed up on time...

The mission: Extract a scientist from a no-name Corp.
The hitch: We have to get his 'special needs' daughter and his wife, too. (More on this later.)
The real bitch: We have 24 hours to pull it off.
The pay: 5000 ???

Okay, so we hold on there. He wants us to put our lives on the line, using a plan the extractee himself has concocted, with not enough time to buy or plan anything, and he wants us to do it for beer money?

Myself and the Sammie both quote a price that is immideately double the starting offer, 10% up front. Meanwhile, we start discussion the specifics of the run, while J says he can promise us 8K now and 2K up front, if we want more, we'll have to wait a few minutes while he checks with his superiors.

So planning is done. I'm favoring a mission where we hopefully don't have to fire a shot. Meanwhile, Johnson says he'll bump us up to 20K per person if we also get back with the truck's cargo. My plan:

Gear up everyone in cheap plastic raincoats with hoods up and ski masks, and non-leather gloves.

Step 1: Waylay the truck. 'indispose' it's drivers and guards.
Step 2: Take the truck to the loading dock, indispose the guards there. Pack the family.
Step 3: The paid-off gangers wait until the truck rolls out to start their diversionary attack on the corp. (Go-gangers that have a habit of doing stuff like that already, so it would hopefully seem like nothing but horrible timing to the corp.)
Step 4: Take the truck and family to a pre-arranged location where we have another truck waiting. Offload the cargo and people.
Step 5: Half the team takes the new truck to the bolt-hole to wait. The other half takes the company truck, which should have had it's security - panicbutton, GPS screams, etcetera, disabled on the snatch, to a chop shop.
Step 6: Get whatever cash we can out of the old truck, wait for the heat to die as directed by Johnson, and deliver the whole shebang.

It is at this point that the Sammie's player, apparently upset that there won't be any big explosions or chaingun massacres in the plan, informs Johnson that there won't be any call for 'her contractees' (This player was a real gimp, the person at the meet was very obviously a sammie, but kept trying to insist she was just another middleman for the real bruisers,) skills, and bows out.

At this point, I'm incredulus. The pay scale is per man, not for the mission. Who misses a chance for easy money? If your skills won't be needed, you just sit back with your greased up gun and look tough and get paid. And the player has effectively wrote himself out of the story and the game!

So, by this point, it's rather clear that, being the only person with a plan, my character seems to be the 'leader' of this shin-dig. A new player enters the arena, apparently a dark elf Rigger. Says his name is Alex, and he's an EW specialist. A rigger. Great. This'll make everything go perfectly. We agree to the plan, and I use my secondary lifestyle location as a planning haunt.

So, we retire to the planning haunt, give everyone two hours to do what they need - shower, change out of your good clothes, pack your guns... Y'know, the usual.

And then it all starts going wrong. As we left, I gave Johnson my disposable cell number, and asked him to please give it to the woman who left.

Well, I get the call. I'm going out of my way to give the player an "In" back in, because I think it totally sucks to be sitting there watching while everyone else is playing.


I get some load of crap about stealth not being her contractees' skills - still holding to that pretentious drivel - and that, and I quote, "If you want my contractees back in, you agree that any backwash from this job is your responsibility and your sole responsibility."

At which point, I'm incredulous. How do you expect that to work? Corporate teams coming for their own back don't exactly stop and ask who's willing to take full and sole responsibility.

Annnd the other player says that, if corporate reprisals come, 'her contractee's services will not be available.'

At which point I tell her to frag the hell off, since a Shadowrunning team dosen't need fair-weather Runners. In, or out.

Out was chosen, so I hang up the cellphone. I'm incredulous, and my character is pissed.



Annnnd then the planning meet, where we discover exactly what our Rigger can do.

He can steal other drones.


[conspicious abscence of other capabilities.]



In retrospect, it should've been a big clue that he asked if one of us could give him a ride to the safehouse.

That's right. He spent the whole Million on cyberware, a drone deck, and a drone that lets him EW finesse other people's drones into being his drones. He has Rifles six, but coulden't even spare 1K for an AK-97 and some ammo. He had 496 left over from chargen.

At this point, I think we need to call Johnson, politely return our deposit, and go find somewhere else to be for awhile.


But wait, it gets worse. While being OOC about the situation, I said our rigger was a one-trick pony, and our real muscle had pussied out.

Which managed to get the Sammie's player all in a furious uproar at me, started handing out 'warnings' to me, and basically got all up in my face. So I excercised OpenRPG's ignore function, and started asking the other two players if they OOCly thought we had a chance in hell.

I mean, we all called our Fixers, trying to get everything from guns to a roll of police tape or a road barricade. No dice at all. Not on 24 hour notice.


Eventually, the DM takes pity on us, and has my fixer call, saying that the run is on hold indefinately, because the cargo run we're trying to intercept has been called off.


So, here's the situation. We have roughly 6000 liquid between the three of us. We have a rigger who can steal anything with rigger adaptations remotely, but can't do a damned thing else. Note: He's a drone rigger, not a drive rigger.
We have a Dwarf PhysAd who has explosive arrowheads and is willing to perform suicidal stunts like leaping ont a moving truck and killing it's driver.
And we have a Decker with wires 2, an SGL2, a Predator with SL2 and a heavily customized Ingram Smartgun.

Thank god I designed Skate with the fact that she might have to bust open a can of whoopass in the physical world. I've got Athletics and Stealth skills.



So... What are we gonna do? I think we're well and truely boned. We may/may not find more players before next session.

Find yourself a decent group. Possibly take the GM with you.

If you can only play online, then you might want to consider Dumpshock-only games. If the player doesn't want to be laughed off the boards, weird things like that won't happen.

Wierd things, like the nutso sammie, or the Rigger without a gun to shoot?


Personally, I'd have done without either. I can see the challenge in running that rigger, though it tweaks my metre in the "suicide" range.


And yes, a Dumpshock-only game sounds good. You people at least seem to have your fingers on the pulse of how to not be lunatics...


Well, the kind of lunatic that works well in a group, at any rate.

Depending on game power level, your group possesses enough firepower. Judgeing from the payscale, it should. The rigger can drive if the truck in question is rigger-adapted. Not that unlikely. And he still eliminates the threat of enemy drones. Do NOT try to find yourself a LoneStar Strato... you where warned.

If the sammie wants out, fine. Don´t try to get her back in. Never. We had this problem in a sequence of real-life-games (knowing each other well!). The working solution was deciding that "char walks out" = "player leaves for the day". There are ingame reasons for declining a job, but those are only valid if the gm knew beforehand. THEN you either play another char or still don´t play that day.

Yeah... Stealing a Lone Star Strato-9 was one of my first thoughts, but it seems to be a bad idea...


The problem is that I think our group just dosen't have the manpower or resources. We have to steal to the truck to get the good payment... And for that matter, we have to steal the truck anyway if we need to get out, because nobody has a vehicle bigger than a craptacular courtesy car they got from their lifestyle.

You didn´t say much about the truck and assisting go-gang.

Unless you know better: If your rigger spend everything on EW gear, he should be able to block all comm gear the truck may possess. So you only have to deal with one or two guards riding shotgun. Doable.

On-site security is another matter, but unless those are heavily augmented, you should do fine.

The matter of playable char concepts is indeed problematic. Especially in small groups, you should not play dedicated specialists. And don´t get me started on a sam not being able to do stealth. That is a core ability. The EW specialist at least only tried to walk a fast way to power. As soon as he steals the missing equipment, he will do fine. For starters, have him buy a black-market AK from his starting money. Will help with the truck aquisition.

Ryu: The go-gang is, from what my character's Fixer told, a nonissue. They're basically joyriders who raise a little hell now and then. We can't even contact them.

And apparently, all our rigger has is a single drone. We don't know where he keeps it, since he spent all of his starting money, down to 496 credits, on the drone and cyberware.

And the sammie, apparently, is a slaughtering sammie, who can arrange for loud bangs and trucks to burn, but, quote, "quiet isen't her thing."....

x.x

ok, a few quick things from the GM:

1st I think the "difficulty" of this mission is being blown WAY out of proportion, atleast, initially. I've been (trying) to make first runs nic,e easy, get the team working together style runs. apparently, since the last two missions have been called off, that isn't working too well lol....

2nd because of the planned easyness of the run, i think 5K EACH (this payment wasn't split among memebers, it was for each of them), which is the equivalent of a middle lifestyle for a month, for one quick evenings worth of work, they then demanded 10K, and i came back with 8 being the best i could do, they still wanted more. So thats when they got the addt'l objective.

One thing shadow didn't mention, was that the extractee's had to be kept for "a few days" while a pick up is arranged. Yes, it should have been arranged before hand, but it was a nifty little trick that should i decide i wanted to make some more booming, i could.

It was also going to be useful for the new objective, because the stolen goods are something that the corp WOULD want back.

Basically, because of the bitchin about the payscale, they turned what was going to be a VERY easy run, into something, that epspecially without jayne, would have been VERY difficult, even without some oddities...

also, on the rigger, I admited him as an emergancy catch since they needed one, with the catch that the character wont have full and final approval until after the run when i get a chance to actually look it over comepletely;when he did send me the sheet, i did question the lack of gear, but he said he knew it and was fine. perhaps i should dictate more to my players, but if they think they have a playable concept, i'll let it go

That's why we demanded more money, Aku.

Basically, the J wanted us to commit a string of felonies for the rent money. To say nothing of prosperty, that was breaking even. He wanted us to move without time to plan, plot, or prepare, on a run that, in all liklihood, was going to be a major frag-up because the plan was provided by the extractee himself, then arrange to hold him and his family in a secure location.

How are we supposed to do that? I don't think any of us have any secure locations, and stealing the truck was always the plan, because none of us have a vehicle.

Would YOU commit a minimum of grand theft auto and three counts of felony kidnapping for 5000?


Maybe you should think about what you consider an 'easy' run. Easy runs don't involve words like "corp", they involve words like "gang", "escort", "courier", and the like.

Or so I think, anyway. Regardless, I wasen't the only player who thought it was a ridiculously low amount of money for the potential risk involved.

Well, since ShadowDragon has decided to take this public without the GM's notification, I'd like to clarify a few things to his post. Before I begin however, I would like to take a moment to thank ShadowDragon for beating up on Aku's game without even telling him. For the record, I really hadn't intended to play. I couldn't come up with something that I actually wanted to play, but Aku really didn't want to run with less than five people, and I couldn't find another to take my spot. For the record, Aku is a first time GM of any system, and I've been trying to bolster his confidence in his abilities. Since ShadowDragon has taken it upon themselves(I won't demean either sex by calling ShadowDragon a man or a woman) to utterly shatter that confidence, I'll do what I can to shatter their over-inflated opinion of themselves. I'm sorry to everyone that doesn't like posts with personal feelings in it, but ShadowDragon decided to slam people that ShadowDragon expected to game again with in public without so much as a notice about it. So a bit of my bile for this person is undoubtedly going to slip in.

First, I am the aforementioned Street Sam who, as ShadowDragon put it OOCly in the game while we were playing, "pussied out" of the deal. And while ShadowDragon does paint a clear picture of what happened, they left out a few details that do affect the appearance of his story. First, ShadowDragon was the only one at the meeting who got to see the datachip that contained the Johnson's plan for the run(the scientist that we were extracting actually came up with the plan, but to keep things clear, we'll call it the Johnson's plan, so as not to add more people tot he conversation. Second, SD kept that chip for the entire run, during which, SD ALONE made the plans for the run. Tyren, the person that was representing my character at the run, made it pointedly clear to everyone, in no uncertain terms, that the reason she was pulling out of the run, was that her people weren't needed. ShadowDragon's character had every chance then to say "Hey wait. We might need a good shooter in case things go wrong." But he either kept silent, or waxed endlessly(and believe me when I do say ENDLESSLY) on their perfect plan.

Second, ShadowDragon decided to make their plan without actually taking stock of who and what ShadowDragon was working with. It wasn't until after ShadowDragon made the plan, then accepted the deal, then called the johnson asking for another gun that Shadowdragon began to ask the others what they could do. SD had one person who lost their connection at the beginning of the game, but I know what they had intended to play, Alex, the rigger/EW specialist, Kachina, a dwarf Adept, and ShadowDragon's character, which I have thankfully forgotten. When SD finally took stock of what SD had to work with, ShadowDragon proceeded into a 35 minute insult fest, both IC and OOCly of the characters, the game and well, pretty much everything but themselve and their perfect plan. I told SD that they had put themselves into the role of team leader, and that leaders don't whine about what they do and don't have, they make do with it and do the job if they accepted it. SD then put me on ignore for the rest of the game so they wouldn't see any posts from me, then went back to his tirade about the characters and the players. It was at that point that Aku decided to close the game for the night and come up with a new run for next week.

Also, SD's opinion of the characters could have been voiced the week before the game, when SD was online during the character submission meeting that Aku had, but refused to attend. I knew about Alex, Kachina and Peaches(that's the person who dropped due to connection problems.) then, and worked up plans for a street sammy then. But SD hasn't attended one of the three character meetings prior to the game. Little wonder then, that ShadowDragon doesn't know who's playing what until the game starts.

Lastly, in response to comments about my SS's lack of stealth capability. Does my character have the stealth skill? Yes at base level 5. But they typically operate in full military camoflague, with a clearly specialized UCAS military rifle(I took the Distinctive Style flaw because she leaves a very visible trail) SD's plan made no mention whatsoever of eliminating video surveillance of any kind around the strike area, let alone covering the team's tracks. Not to mention a decent Hunted Flaw with the UCAS military. My representative at the meeting said repeatedly that there were exposure concerns. SD's response was, "So? You're getting paid good money."

SD wanted us to go in quietly, and get out quietly. Living to spend the Nuyen however, didn't seem to be factored in. To understand how reversed thinking SD's plan was, contemplate this. SD suggested that we should find a Lone Star patrol cruiser, kill or incapacitate the occupants, take their uniforms and weapons, and use them to facilitate a roadblock to stop the target vehicle so we can extract the scientist. Moreover, he wanted to do this in the same 24 hour period(you know, when the Star assumes they have the best chance of finding their stolen property and missing officers.) that the run itself occurred in.

Wow. Way to completely and 100% misconstrue everything there, spectre.


Oh, and for the record, I never heard a damn thing about character creation sessions. Either I was forgotten about when they were happening, or offline, or both. I was under the impression that this was a blind jump for us all.


I never did anything to ever bash Aku. Aku's a good DM. He listens to his players, and that's the most important thing of all.

The only person I'm slamming, BTW, is you, you overblown bag of hot wind and vitrol.

Shall we go through your post then, dissect it, and utterly destroy you? We shall.

Well, as long as you all had fun ...

Well well, it seems that no matter what you do, you can't get rid of grime. Since I'm not a shrink, and don't claim to be one, I'll just focus in on only a few points. No sense going over everything all over again, especially seeing as you just get more vile with each word.

ok, before this gets toooooooooooooo out of of control, the character meetings occured at the normal game time the previous week, whether shadow was MIA during that time, i dont remember (we all know how good my memory is) and i knew that a decker with some combat skill would be useful, so that got approved during the week at some point. I guess i'm going to have to be more heavy handed in the coming week or so on making sure characters are going to mesh, as it seems, for the most part, generalized isn't in the party vocabulary book lol

@Aku:
I do consider that kind of payment sufficient for an easy milk run. And as I said, if nothing special was known about security, ressources were indeed sufficient to complete the job. One must practice working around obstacles.
More money, more problems. Done and done right.

@Spectre
I suggest that correcting beginner mistakes is more important than playing out your chars reaction. Especially if you are only playing to help the gm out.

On stealth: Aku was very kind if he allowed military camouflage as "distinctive style" - UCAS military urban camo is our gear of choice for commando operations. Good to know you can do stealth, as I had the displeasure of having a real distinctive style adept without stealth on the team - fortunately only once.

@Shadowdragon
For what little my wishes may be worth, I request a more civilised way of discussion.

@Ryu
Hey, he started it. I didn't say a bad word about anyone in particular until he flew up in here and dropped a vitrolic napalm flame-bomb on my head.

The DS is more for the gun "Hey, i know who carries THOSE guns) rather than the camo.

And think you for the vote of confidance on my payment. i can understand their hesitation not knowing what the "special needs" were, but it did ttell them that she was a functioning person (so it'snot like the daughter was a vegatable, or couldnt walk, or anything like that)

Ryu, as a rule, I try to wait until the game is over for the night before I make any comments to anyone about anything that happened in the game. One, I don't want to accidentally metagame information that my character might know but theirs don't. And two, I don't want to spoil other people's fun. Aku got a reasonbly positive raiting from me. He needs some work(what new gm doesnt?), but he's got his mind going in the right direction at least. He's not afraid to try things to keep the game going. Even if he falls on his face, he's moving in the right direction: forward.

As for what happened to my character, I was 100% comfortable with not running that night. I knew full well that Tyren waving a red flag was going to pretty much end my involvement with the run. I was planning to spend the night doing asst work for Aku(creating maps in bitmap paint, doing rules searches for him, basic gruntwork stuff) But when i sw SD getting more and more viral with his posts, I felt a need to try and step in. The people he was badgering and insulting were my friends. People I'd gotten into to the game. I don't leave my friends hanging.

Well, I know what the 'special needs' are, at least OOCly. I was more concerned with the whole "hijacking, kidnapping, and doing it on the territory of a corp that's at least big enough to have Extraterritoriality' part being too dangerous for 5K.

Spectre: You're not the goddamned DM, you're no fucking body to start handing out "warnings."

You're not the Dean of Shadowrun Gamer Affairs. You're nobody. You have a problem with my character's IC reaction, tough shit. That's why it's called "in character." You have a problem with an OOC comment, you should bring it up in a polite way.

You mean like you're doing SD?

I have the overwhelming desire to get both of you in an arena and provide you each with poison coated halberds (as many as you can carry).

i feel that same way, and i'm the GM lol

Oh my god, stop flaming...



You both seem to be at fault; although Sprectre, you are kinda being overly defensive? I did not read SD critizing the GM (Aku), and you seem to be taking on another persons battle while construing SD as the devil... This is going nowhere.

Herald, that would require me having an active feeling about SD. I have the same level of emotion for him that I do for a maggot on a trash can I see on the highway. But like I said, he's bashing friends.

You're a bad liar. He's bashing you, and you can't take it. Deathmatch time.

=Spectre= You seem awfully worked up over SD telling Dumpshock how he thought his run was a frag-up to not have any emotion for him... And to be fair the story reads like fiction, it is so perfectly flawed; I woulda loved to be on that team...

EDIT: After the flame-war started I stopped reading posts and skipped to the bottom, is =Spectre= the Rigger or the Sammy?

spectre is the sammy, AFAIK the rigger isn't a DS reader

The sammie. Not reading that part was a good decision.

Edit: Damn. Not fast enough.

/me plays the Star Trek fight music.

I'm the Sammy Super. Alex is the Rigger.

My problem isn't that he is presenting his opinion on the run. It's what he said about the other characters that, by his own admission, is his first time meeting or hearing about. I know Alex's player. We played for seven years straight in a former OpenRPG Shadowrun game. He's naturally tightlipped about his characters. Just his own quirk. But he's always been capable in the game. I don't think he'd make one that can't function in a team now.

So wait, why is =Spectre= even mad? He walked off the run, he was hardly even involved in the fiasco?

Spectre is the sammie who left.


And, umm, poison-coated halberds? That's new.


Anyway, I never criticized Aku, I never said the run was a frag-up. Well, the Run is. The game, I thought, at least, was fun. Here, we have the ultimate dysfunctional team, trying to figure out how to pull off something that should be easy, but looks like a suicide mission.

Bleh. I like halberds, but poison is overdone.

Bardiche are nice, though. As are pon-de-vec.

Since someone else pointed this out, I feel I should make it clear. I'm not here defending Aku. But Alex, Kachina and Peaches, the three other people in the game, are all my friends. Moreover, they're all here because I told them about the game. And neither Alex or Kachina are on Dumpshock. Peaches might be. That's who I'm here for.

Then maybe you ought to sit down and let your friends determine whether or not they need defending, mmmkay?

but when a friend doesnt know they're being...discussed... (since they don't read the forums).....

You were both at fault, and you both let hte situation snowbal... Oh well.

Try to it better next time?

Wow. Next week on When Players Don't Have Lives ...

This one is too juvenile for me to even begin to comment on: both sides. Me for seconding Herald of Verjigorm's suggestion.

Aku: have you considered working with another on-line group that maybe doesn't include these two until they're capable of speaking civilly to each other?

I'd just like to point out that the word is

vitriol.

You may now return to your regularly ridiculous bashing of each other when the easy solution (even easier online than IRL) is to just not play together.

well, my opinions aside talia, the rest of the group has ties to one player, so if i make themb oth sit out i've got a feeling the other players would sit out as well, and it's no fun playing with myself (well, it is, but not in a Shadowrun context...)

Well, Aku, if you need an E-Group I probably hook you up with some friends of mine.

well, it would have to be a chat style (preferably on open) not PbP, i'm just worn out on pbp between what i used to do on rpol.net and the one game i have going on here, i'm just not very good with it.

LOL!!

Ahh, now that is out of my system.

ShadowDragon8685 has a point to what has been said thus far about a bunch of unplayable characters. Maybe a few nuyen, guns, drones/vehicles down the line. A Sammie that is worried about exposure, to the point of walking from this job? I am curious about any job that fits =Spectre='s needs? Seems like you didn't want to play and took the first excuse presented to bow out. It also sounds like you want the power of the GM (self appointed assistant GM?) without any real responsibility.

The good news is, it looks like the characters were planning ahead, hoping to coast through on the labors of the rest of the team until they got the few things they lacked at chargen. The problem is, it looks like the whole group decided to be parasites and there is no host in sight.

If the other players had skills, resources to help pull the job, why didn't they speak up during the planning stage?

=Spectre+, if you want to play NPCs, why not play one that advances the plot instead of disrupting the game with one? (Right it was in character because of your PCs flaws that made it unplayable in your opinion.)

Tisoz, I said it before. I asked Aku if he wanted to play Tyren. He asked me to. I would have been cool with being forced with the group becasue Aku agreed that she negotiated a decent price. But I didn't want to lay him up for even more NPC work. So when he asked me, I figured sure, why not.

And again. I bowed out of the run. I've done it before in other games, fully realizing that it can and WILL put me out of play. That's why I was prepped with grunt work for Aku so he could keep the game going. I don't look at it as anyone's fault. Roleplaying doesn't always mean you get what you want. Did I want to be in the run as a player? Yes absolutely. Am I willing to break character and metagame so that as a player I can get what I want? No way.

Right now though, I need you to differentiate between my Street Sam character, and the Fixer NPC who gets the work.

It's the Fixer, who sneaked the UCAS trained and cyberized Street Sam out of government hands and into the Seattle underworld, along with about a dozen others scheduled for retirement(My Street sam is nearing 40 years old) It's the fixer who managed to crack the security files on UCAS black ops projects to find these people in the first place, that is worried about exposure. And my Steet Sam isn't a discrete piece of work. Yes, she has stealth. But discretion and her are kind of like a camo netting over a tank. Sure, for the simple "I don't want to be seen right now" it works fine. But SD was making a lot of proposals for not just stealth but misdirection and manipulation. We aren't just sneaking by people, we're talking our way past them. That's a big difference.

As for the rest of the group, I know that the player who got bounced due to con issues was planning on playing a ganger style Street Sam. So next week, SD probably would have had a gun for the run if he really needed it, which was why I wasn't overly concerned with being involved in the run. I was more concerned with Aku getting his feet wet. The poor guy's had four game sessions so far, and not one of them has resulted in a completed run. And Kachina's bow might seem useless, but I have played with these people for a very long time. They know what they're doing in regards to character creation. And they tend to surprise you with how they use things(after all, a minigun carrying troll loaded with EX-explosive ammo only fears one thing. A person with one White Phos grenade and good aim).

Since this conversation started, I decided to pull the Street Sam I had out of the game, going for a more discrete version that's more used to running Seattle than some backwater country. I'm hoping that this week, we'll be able to finally let Aku get things rolling up to his speed.