Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: James McMurray on <02-28-11/1604:24>
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I'm writing an adventure for my group and I'm seeing conflicting ways on how to handle legwork.
- A lot of older adventures I've seen online have separate thresholds for Data Search or the appropriate skills.
- The 2nd season of Mission adventures (the only ones I have access to) use a single Connection + Connection roll to see what a contact knows followed by a Loyalty + Charisma + Etiquette roll to see what they'll give away from free.
- SR4A says to make the check using the contact's skills followed by an extended Charisma + Connection test if he has to ask around. There's no roll for getting them to give you most information freely.
Can someone give me an example of how the more recent Missions adventures do it? I'd like to make the information obtainable (since otherwise it doesn't need to exist) but would like people to have to use more than just an Agent with Data Search to find out anything about anyone.
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I don't know how missions handles it, but I usually do it on the fly.
If the info is important the group should work for it. If the info is trivial then it shouldn't be hard to get. If the group is floundering and doesn't know what to do then maybe a contact remembers hearing rumors that some other guy knows something. That sort of thing.
Since legwork can be one of the biggest roleplay aspects of the game I tend not to make the dice rolls the biggest determining factor. But that's just this one man's opinion.
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I found the first run for season 3 of missions (it was free, too) and it uses the same system as season 2. It's pretty quick and makes sure that contact ratings are useful, so we'll be using it.
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In the up coming season of missions there will be two thresholds one for a person to person search and the other for using the data search. The data search thresholds often being higher since it is easier to get a large dice pool that you can get a lot of successes at so as not to make the test too easy.
The other thing that the season 4 missions will be doing is sometimes making some information not available via data search or by contact because the information just isn't there to be found
Hope this helps