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AtwasAwamps
2010-12-28, 10:13 AM
Okay, so, long and short...

I'll be running a Shadowrun game in the new year. Fourth edition.

I've gotten to pretty good grips with the material and have a story building in my head. But I've got a handful of questions for veterans:

1) As a Game Master, what are common pitfalls I need to avoid?

2) What roles should I make sure are covered within the group? What can they get away without having?

3) What are some broken (either too good or too bad) things that I should be keeping an eye out for?

4) Do you have any tips/tricks to make things go faster/smoother?

The Big Dice
2010-12-28, 11:28 AM
4) Do you have any tips/tricks to make things go faster/smoother?
MY protip for any new game going faster is, don't sweat the rules too much early on. You're on a learning curve, so just go with how you think it should work. Admit you made a mistake if it comes to it, but don't retcon because of that.

Trekkin
2010-12-28, 11:49 AM
As for broken, armor stacking, stick-n-shock ammo, and gas grenades come to mind as things that, for some reason, many players latch on to and never let go. In general, you can counter them with bigger guns, nonconductive armor, and respirators, respectively, but at least wait until they discover them.

Explosives can also get rather problematic. If they get to the point where the ready answer to any problem is a brick of C-15, it can make the game boring. Remember explosives detectors.

Roles :
A face who can do social engineering, find equipment, and talk with the Johnson
A hacker capable of defeating Matrix security and establishing a security net of your own (this latter part can be replaced with a dedicated rigger)
An infiltrator capable of defeating physical security
A mage who can hold off spirits and foil magical security
A street sammy or combat adept who does exactly what you think. This can be split among the other roles as you like.

Roles that WILL come up but need not be in the team's skill set:
A medic, ideally one who can do implantation and implant repair
A repairman, ideally with a Facility for almost everything modifiable that the team uses
A smuggler
A demolitions expert

It's easy to make up for any of the above roles with items, but the team will probably step on each other's toes least with something like a face/infiltrator, mage/medic, hacker/rigger, sammy/demo guy setup.

TheCountAlucard
2010-12-28, 01:39 PM
1) As a Game Master, what are common pitfalls I need to avoid?Remember that the opposition has easy access to absurd numbers of Initiative Passes as well. Even without fancy cyber/bioware or magic. The right drugs will do it, for instance.


2) What roles should I make sure are covered within the group? What can they get away without having?You'll want one very good social guy, one very good Matrix guy, and one very good magic guy. You can get around almost everything else as long as these three guys are present. Still a good idea to have more than just these three, but if you've got a really small group, make sure at least those roles are covered before everything else.


3) What are some broken (either too good or too bad) things that I should be keeping an eye out for?Ban possession mages. And railguns.


4) Do you have any tips/tricks to make things go faster/smoother?Don't sweat the small stuff; if it takes your group more than a minute to look up a rule, you can always skip it for now, and look it up during downtime.

Lost Demiurge
2010-12-28, 02:48 PM
Some advice, stuff I've learned from running the game...

Don't sweat over the small stuff. Don't plan out dungeon crawls. Give your players goals and objectives, but leave how they complete a run up to them.

For Example: A Johnson hires a group for a datasteal. A corporate scientist has data on his workstation that the Johnson wants. He doesn't care how the team gets it.

How is the team going to get it? Who cares, that's for them to figure out. But the Johnson has a file on the guy, with some information about his background, his home address, and the building he works in.

One team might waylay the scientist at home, hold his family for ransom and send him to get the data. Another team might infiltrate the building in the dead of night, ninja through the security and hack his workstation. Still another team might run an elaborate scam to make the scientist think his boss is gonna have him disappeared because he knows too much, then offer extraction and instead jack the data from him when he shows up "on the run" from "corporate hit men".

All are legit approaches! But it's not your job to pick which one they go for. Just have the Johnson give the goals, figure out what information they get when they do legwork, and figure out how the NPC's react to the PC's machinations.

It's a very different feel from D&D, and other games like it. Hopefully your group will enjoy the change!

Trekkin
2010-12-28, 03:29 PM
Demiurge has a point. Really, it's not so much an adventure as a series of puzzleboxes you hand the team. Link them, of course, and ensure that causality is maintained, but the players will hand you well over half the adventure if you let them; if you get them paranoid enough, you'll find them making multipage checklists of everything they want to do before they set foot in a corp building.

They will want bios on everyone who's ever heard of the target, the approval of the local mafia/Yakuza/Triads/Vory to hit the target, a traitor in Lone Star frustrating their response efforts, remote-detonatable charges in the local armed response vehicles, HERF guns trained on the target's signal apparatus, satellite overwatch of the entire city, cloned bodies of themselves in a variety of locations that can be "discovered" to throw off the trail, a dozen spirit formulae, a getaway van capable of outrunning a jet and out-diving a submarine, and the entire building under constant surveillance for a year.

This is when you give them a time limit. Try seventy-two hours; it lets them prepare without letting them get safe. Then, just before the run, pull a player aside and tell her there's a commcall promising her char, and solely her, double the money offered to the rest of the team if she'll do some specific task not covered in the original Johnson-provided briefing. Pull another player aside; the local don called and made his char an offer he can't refuse to do the same extracurricular task (not that he knows anyone else is doing it)-- and he gets his family/friends killed if he squeals to the rest of the team. Find a third, and let him know that cute girl working at the Stuffer Shack winked at his street sammy when he ordered lunch.

Obviously, this is all much better when woven into a coherent story, but the basic idea remains. Eventually, they'll be fatalist paranoiacs who've all got kink bombs implanted in each others' brains, wired to their own biomonitors, which makes it very fun when one of them dies.

a_humble_lich
2010-12-28, 04:35 PM
As for roles the list of roles that Trekkin gave is good. I'm going to go against the flow here and say that none of them are needed. It is perfectly possible to have a party without a hacker--in that case the party finds non net based solutions to their problems. And their fixer (i.e. the GM) doesn't give them jobs that require a hacker. And the same for any of the other roles.

Also, I highly recommend that every character be competent in many roles. Have one or two specialties and then base competence in two or three more roles.

Trekkin
2010-12-28, 05:18 PM
As for roles the list of roles that Trekkin gave is good. I'm going to go against the flow here and say that none of them are needed. It is perfectly possible to have a party without a hacker--in that case the party finds non net based solutions to their problems. And their fixer (i.e. the GM) doesn't give them jobs that require a hacker. And the same for any of the other roles.


Yep. I should have added that in my games, no one's Awakened half the time, and between contacts, smart adventure selection, and coping with their reduced tool set they usually aren't missed; the same can be done with Matrix specialists. That said, there's something you miss by not having more than cursory Matrix or astral play, particularly if everyone's still percieving physically: a boatload of Black Hammer-toting IC, spirits, and mundane security all rushing at the team simultaneously can be an excellent exercise in tactical resource management.

Incidentally, it's possible to do this even with the physical plane, although that usually means (for my groups, anyway) a team of either AIs or Full Immersion technomancer/hacker quadriplegics. This is when you let them find a UV node or resonance rift...or a system sealed off from the Matrix, causing them to all hack drones and motorized wheelchairs, and start a very unorthodox infiltration.

comicshorse
2010-12-29, 11:16 AM
As for roles the list of roles that Trekkin gave is good. I'm going to go against the flow here and say that none of them are needed. It is perfectly possible to have a party without a hacker--in that case the party finds non net based solutions to their problems. And their fixer (i.e. the GM) doesn't give them jobs that require a hacker. And the same for any of the other roles.

Also, I highly recommend that every character be competent in many roles. Have one or two specialties and then base competence in two or three more roles.


I really wouldn't want to try Shadowrunning without some magic. The possibilities of being hit by a trap or spirit you had no chance of ever seeing, not to mention being effortlessly followed around by an astrally projecting mage seem to horrible to risk

Dr.Gunsforhands
2010-12-31, 02:12 AM
I really wouldn't want to try Shadowrunning without some magic. The possibilities of being hit by a trap or spirit you had no chance of ever seeing, not to mention being effortlessly followed around by an astrally projecting mage seem to horrible to risk

I would agree, but there are ways to combat that eventuality with a little GM cooperation. Someone can get a loyal magical contact who can lend out spirits to watch your backs astrally, or your employer might hire a rat shaman to follow you around covertly and make sure the job gets done, or you could go out and buy some of that drug that makes you astrally project whether you're awakened or not...

After the first few runs, you'll learn to start tailoring the missions to the characters and the game style to the group.

Trekkin
2010-12-31, 06:52 AM
There are also mundane solutions to common magical problems.
For instance, if there's a mage on site using magesight goggles to watch the outside, bring a laser and fire it down the optical fiber terminus. Repeatedly.