Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: Onion Man on <06-28-11/1527:17>
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Okay, so over the last 20 years I've gone from only running mods out of books and from websites to writing my own to doing mostly improv, and I'm curious about other GM's and how they go about running their campaigns.
Normally (I've run more D&D than anything else), what I arrive at a table with is an area map, a "dungeon" map, a backup "dungeon" flowchart for if things go way off the rails (illusion of free will), and a stack of 4x6 notecards full of encounter snippets, stat blocks, puzzles, and loot. For the most part I don't even bother pre-writing boxed text, after all I most likely made it up and I'm very likely to remember it and there's a good chance that it'll need to be improvised to fit whatever the players have done to go off the rails.
I've always found that space sci-fi and highly nautical games are the easiest to implement the illusion of free will, particularly the old West End Star Wars, but it seems like most anything can be broken down into a node map with path costs and the less flavor text I write up the easier it is to move a scenario from the woods to the sewers to a cliffside to an abandoned factory without stumbling on anything.
What's everybody else do to keep things moving and keep their players interested without doing dozens of times more prepwork than if your players would just be predictable?
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in writing my own adventures, I make a note of the basics and see where the players go
players will always think of that one thing a GM overlooks
even in written mods, I try to give free reign. I ran Bad Moon a few years ago, and the players insisted on tracking the Yakuza smugglers. I let them.
I have done the path break down, and learned to keep it simple as possible
it can help to dole out various jobs like rules checker, initiative tracker, and so on
bottom line, expect the unexpected
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I tend to focus on the overall plot of a run. Things like the timeline of events, major npc agendas etc, because as previously mentioned, the hell if I can guess where my players will take things. Know your world, know NPC motivations and you will seldom be caught unprepared.
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I remember the first time I really GMd something of my own creation. It was the best lesson in futility that I ever learned. I watched as the friends I had played with for years rode roughshod over the game I had lovingly crafted over months of dreaming as if it were the most natural thing in the entire world. During that game I threw out pages of preconstructed scenes and places and created a new world on the fly. I learned something that day that I had learned in school years earlier, do it all the night before.
Now, the only solid thing in any Run I write is the meet. After that I might think of a place or to that I guess my players may go and think about what should happen there just in case but anything other than that is for the players to decide. When it comes to Precanned adventures I treat it like surgery, the players get to divert when they want to but when needed I just stitch them back on to the main atrery and let the natural flow take 'em the rest of the way.
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i have a little red notebook and a little black notebook. Red is when everything is happening as i expected and black is full of ideas that i thought of to help get it back on track. lots of page holders in the black one. Also i am on black notebook number 3
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i tend to write loose outlines for a mission, and then fill in details on the fly, and use opposition from a stack of premade goons adjusted for the situation. a few paragraphs is usually enough.
it works fairly well. in general, i like to give vague clues every so often, gradually revealing a larger picture that becomes a dangerous run late in the campaign. its kind of frustrating to have those clues ignored, which usually makes the eventual confrontation that much more dangerous. seems my players never bother to investigate the weird stuff i put in the world either (like a magically active ares symbiont implant that looked like a larva, they just sold it to aztecnology).
i also have a policy of reducing the risk the first time a player does something stupid, and pointing the risk out to them. if they do it again, they were warned and get a consequence. this is useful when dealing with players who are new to the game (or even new to the edition in some cases).
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My notes for the last couple runs I have made an overview of what is the plot.
Then I make any special notes about the main scenes.
Then I put down twist #1
Usually followed by twist #2
I then leave the rest of the page blank for the moment.
I then do a scene by scene layout with a detailed description of the area for when the characters get there. (and they usually do eventually get there)
Next I work out major NPCs and write up their motives and stats etc.
Usually about this time I have thought up a couple more twists or possible additions and add them to page one.
I write the meet in detail and then just descriptions for other scenes, and I name people and places ahead of time because I find I am terrible at making up names off the top of my head. (I had a couple of NPCs who got named frick and frack because I had to come up with names off the top of my head.)
Then I work the rest of the adventure fairly free hand as things go.
I also generally write up the legwork section so I know what the characters can find out about what is happening and how easily.
Then when the game starts I just roll my eyes when the players head off into left field and improvise and see where it takes us.
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My general GM method is pretty much the same for all games, but it works extremely well for SR. I give mild attention to the details that the players will know from the get go, as this is what they will plan their ideas around, and I focus roughly 80% of my attention into the unknowns that the players will encounter.
For example, in SR I will grab a blueprint and do a mild detail of the security system available at the location. Then I focus on things such tracking bugs, tails, enemies, ect. that will come into play. Most of these are things that you can bring into play no matter where/what the runners decide to do. I find this lets me keep the game moving and challenging without making the runs cakewalks when they hit everything right and it lets me just ignore things if they are having a rough time.
The only real thing that I do to speed things up is pre-roll NPC rolls. I've coded a die rolling program that I use and I roll about a dozen rolls for attack dice pools that grunts will use commonly, two dozen if its a very long fight. I note the number of hits in each roll. I'll usually do this in a 7 point spread so that I'm ready if the grunt is wounded or has a few bonuses.
I cannot begin to express how much this speeds up combat. Even my players are like wow, that was fast.
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In my Shadowrun games, I just come up with the story of what is going on in the city/world. For the players, I take as much of their backstories and use that material to make things personal for them. But as the 'macro' story develops, it may or may not weave in and out of the character's lives since I let them do whatever they want. Luckily, with the mission-based style of Shadowrunning, if I need them to encounter a part of the larger story, I'll make it a part of a mission.
But for the most part, I really feel that I'm there to facilitate the fun for everybody and I've been very lucky to have excellent (even if not 'expert gamers') players that really get involved in this story we're telling together.
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I am very involved in character creation for my games and it has two benifits. I know what the character does and why he does it. The first sounds simple but I have had quite a few characters created with an idea in mind that had to get recreated when it got to me for approval because it was, let's say, off target. The why, however is the main thing. Because when you know where you come from you know where your going. Finishing unresolved business, scratching that unscratchable itch, being better than anyone at what you do, or finding a way out at last. It makes runs transitory things and the characters true goals for his character clear. It gives the GM the seed for what hero, anti-hero, gladiator, truth seeker you have and to see it sprout you just add tremendous amounts of adversity to unlock it.
I consider this to be the core of gaming being on the same page about the characters and what they are about. One thing that gets lost in running the characters is the question of 'cheating'. The characters in game are not able to cheat ever. Any advantage they come up with being fair or unfair is never cheating. It is the nature of the game itself to find a ways to pull the wool over the eyes of your opponets, turn the tables on them, and put them down like dogs. The characters are rewarded hansomly for making it happen. The players are a different matter. Using outside game info, bad accounting practices of gear, money, etc, and flat out working the GM like your Reggie Miller at the Finals. This 'cheating' is what robs games. When you have issues about this crop up in your game find a systematic way to root it out and keep it on track. Sometimes you really have to bust a someones bad habits to make the game fun for everyone again. Cause if the GM ain't happy ain't no one gonna be happy.
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Create senerio, come up with bad guys, give players rope, and let them hang themselves.
8)
Just kidding...sort of. When I run my own personal games, I tend to set it up to almost a "choose your own adventure" kiind of thing. I always hated it when GMs tend to focus on getting us through a module and or trying to force the players to do something. So, I simply came up with a more dynamic and free flowing kind of adventure.
Instead of coming up with only one "adventure" I have several on tap. They get to pick and choose. And how they accomplish their objective depends on them. I only come up with the possible opposition and have them react how I think they should, trying to adapt to the runner's actions. Im also fond of letting them do whatever they want...but there will always be consiquences and rep is important; it will determine what kind of jobs the runners will be offered, good OR bad.
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I tend to have a very bare-bones outline of the scenario as a whole with a few detailed NPC that I feel are likely to come into play, I don't invest a lot of time into any one scene/encounter since its hard to predict just where a player is going to steer the game. I might have a guess from knowing the player/character combo, but its always a losing bet.
Once in a great while I will have sort of a set piece planned out if I think there is no other place for a showdown, but again that is rare.
I have been doing a larger set of story arcs in my current game and I also keep notes on how if at all it links into the big bad for this leg of the campaign.
As far as keeping my notes I like a small notebook with a combo of lined and graph paper, great for quick maps and condition monitors.
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My players are infamous for getting attracted to some shiny object and getting themselves sidetracked or worse, they follow the most obvious red herrings until it completely runs out then try to pick up the trail of the same red herring again for a week. They're a fun little group to plot for.
That being the case, I almost never have a "this path to the ending" setup. I MAY have two or three possible paths written out, but that's more for my amusement and reference than any expectation they'll follow them, or even get close. My process for creating a run is fairly straightforward because of them
1. Basic Plot Outline. Exactly that, the plot just like I was going to write it as a story.
2. Select/Create NPCs for the run.
3. Timeline. What every major NPC will be doing, where and when. The timeline assumes NO PC interference. It's a "perfect world" time table for the events of the run. Ideally, the timeline will change throughout the run as the PC interfere with events. For my groups this is usually the most important step.
4. Incidental Encounters. Red herrings, side missions, unrelated obstacles and GM amusements (strange things that have nothing at all to do with the run and maybe even the game itself).
Sticking just to those four, I can come up with, flesh out and be ready to run with something in just a few hours of typing. It's flexible enough that if the PCs wander off on some side mission or get themselves fascinated by some decoy, they can either drag themselves back on track or be put back on track fairly easily, and it still maintains a real possibility of complete and utter failure, since the "bad guys" plot runs concurrent with whatever the PCs are up to because of the timeline.
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I'm with the Cat on this one.
I've been gaming--and mostly GMing--for 30 years now. One of my pet peeves is the "illusion of free will" problem. I know that giving true free will is a total pain in the butt for a GM to pull off, but from a player's standpoint, a game is just not satisfying if my actions don't have any real consequences. Whenever I'm playing a game and I realize the GM is just herding the party into whatever scene he has predestined to happen, I just figure I could have stayed home and read a novel instead. Why not if my input doesn't really matter and the GM is going to tell me whatever story he wants to tell anyway, right?
I've run plenty "illusion of free will" scenarios over the years, and I've outgrown them. Even though giving players true free will takes more work and fast thinking on your feet, it's worth the effort. They will feel satisfied that they really accomplished something, and you will look back on the game with fond memories of how they handled your scenario.
The military says that a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy. (Actually I think that wisdom comes from Sun Tzu.) The same is true of a GM's well-crafted scenario. The players will always come up with something you didn't count on, and you need to be able to adapt.
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The military says that a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy.
Murphy
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The first casualty of any battle is the plan.
That is true for both sides.
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If your version of "Illusion of Free will", resembles herding or funneling, you're not maintaining the illusion. The key is for your path to be mutable, not for circumstances to push the players towards a path.
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If your version of "Illusion of Free will", resembles herding or funneling, you're not maintaining the illusion. The key is for your path to be mutable, not for circumstances to push the players towards a path.
Never been a fan of the funnel. I equate the game as the players own tv show. They make the decisions of what show they are on and I just run the silly universe around them. They get half way through the run and decide they can't turn over the extracted target to get tortured its their picnic. Being a Shadowrunner is the ultimate in self employment experience and I like being suprised by their next idea than riding heard over them. Only time I go against this is when I walk in a room and one of them has the books cracked open and just figured a way to revamp their character for 2 more die bonus. Growth in game is great, outside game chasing points
is just stupid. Play your character out and it never let's you down. Win, lose, or horrible cautionary tail it was your story. Never seen a build a better dice pool guy who wasn't so busy being everything he wasn't anything.
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The first casualty of any battle is the plan.
That is true for both sides.
I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable. From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things. When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting. When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back. The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.
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The first casualty of any battle is the plan.
That is true for both sides.
That's exactly why I gave up trying to "plan" things out and why I always tell my players "go do this" and let them go and do it; however they want to go do it.
I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable. From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things. When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting. When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back. The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.
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Personally, I think how I plan for a session varies a bit depending on the type of run it's going to be. I like setting the characters up with an objective, giving them a starting point and letting them go from there.
However, if the run is going to involve breaking into a secure facility I want spend time prepping the security for that facility (probably putting in a weakness or two that the characters might be able to exploit if they wish). It will be up to the characters to decide how they do the job, so there is plenty of decision making opportunities for them.
If its a more investigative scenario I want to spend my time figuring out the motivations and potential actions of the NPCs and making sure the clues are where they will find them, and that there aren't any holes in the logic of the story. Then I can let them go about putting the puzzle together how they choose. If it runs off rails, knowing the goals of the major NPCs gives me what I need to decide how they might react.
Having stat blocks for NPCs I think they might mix it up with is also pretty handy, as well as maps of major locations. I can throw together a stat block on the fly, but I'd rather not waste time or brain power doing that at the table.
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I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable. From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things. When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting. When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back. The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.
I love the way you said that! I just might post it on my wall for inspiration while I'm preparing games.
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I think forcing players down a set path is a very bad idea and not a good way to gm under any circumstances. If you want the characters to do certain things you need to develop a storyline they have a personal stake or interest in. It's a great idea to give players incentives to do what you want and it will make things much easier for you as the gm. There are many ways to do this and in my experience in my group, our gm's(including me) can usually guage what will be of interest to the players and they usually go along with it out of free will.
However, we never give up our free will as players and will do whatever we want to do in the game even if it isn't part of the gm's plans. The gm will usually figure out a way to coax us into doing what he wants and if not, it's easy to recycle your material and put it somewhere else in a modified form. Aka in dnd an icy dungeon may become a castle in the plains somewhere else with the roughly the same content, it doesn't need to go to waste.
I like to have a large collection of npcs available for battles that I didn't plan or meetings etc. It's a great tool to have a wide variety of npcs which can influence the players into doing what you want if you are very set on it. An example of this is Mr. Johnson lays out a run for the group and you felt sure they would accept, but they didn't and now you're stuck in a tricky situation. That's when you can have other npcs intervene such as a fellow runner has a random encounter with the group and you can have him discuss runs and try to get the players to mention the run they just turned down. Then he could mention he heard there is a safe with some very mysterious contents at the site of the run the Johnson offered. Then the players have a personal interest and will probably contact the Johnson.
That's just one example and not even a great one. But using npcs as a tool to get the players involved in what you had planned is a great tool.
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I think it was Eisenhower that said plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable. From the GM side of the table I think that would mean that you need to know as much about the situation as possible, but be aware that your players are going to do strange and unpredictable things. When you expect them go sneak in the back, they will go in the front door shooting. When you expect them to throw a grenade through the front door, they will try to sneak in the back. The GMs job is to know what is inside the front door, what is inside the backdoor, where the muguffin is, and to be able to improvise if they decide to come through the window instead.
This is absolutely correct. I am currently GMing a weekly Shadowrun session through IRC, and the current job involves a jailbreak. I planned on giving the players the choice of either storming Lone Star HQ to free those men or to intercept the transport that hauls them off to Wynaco; while you can guess which one I intend for the players to choose, I will still give them a choice.
Since my own scheduling is rather restrictive of how often I can play or GM, I use planning and improvisation in equal measure. You could say I'm cheating because the pace of my games is quite slow. ;D
If I were to run this same scenario at a live table, I would need a little extra planning. Explicit descriptions of the scene, and otherwise putting statistics within easy reach.
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I just did my first run last night and I would say it went very well. This was a big moment for myself as last night was the only thing I have ever GM'd. I will say that I had to pull quite a few things out of my hoop when the group started getting creative
Long story short I built the first run as an "Emergency" run for a fixer who need to bail out a different team who was surrounded by LoneStar up in a building in Kansas City. I gave the PC's limited information about what to expect and I gave them a way to talk to the other team inside that were all NPC's. After that the world was all sculpted in my head and everything they did and tried to do was like reading a novel. Not knowing which way it was gonna go next. We all know where the story starts and we all know where we think it will go, but it was really thrilling for me to be a part of it all. It was like they were playing a game of my design but at the same time I was also playing against them. It was my world but they "lived" in it. There was a very dynamic flow to things that isn't easy to describe, but I liked the fact that we all opperated inside what I would call realistic choices based on the way we thought the world worked.
After last night I can honestly say that I will always always always run a free will type. Just remember to be creative as your team is. It's totally ok to tell a team that this may not be a good idea but let them do it anyway. Challenge them and let them challenge you.
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Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".
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Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".
There is a balance here.
Some GM's let the PC's decide the story in it's entirety. The GM runs the world as a whole, and events may occur that the PC's hear about indirectly, however the PC's themselves can drive the storyline almost completely.
The absolute reverse is the strict storyline campaign, where the PC's are linearly led from scene to scene, with little room to pursue their own goals
and then there is the vast gray area in between, where a GM may have a set storyline in place, but allows varying levels of player-freedom in order to have character choose their own ways and means, but have certain set scenes with PC involvement.
All options are perfectly valid campaigns. It's not an exclusive job for the GM to provide the story-framework. It's the GM's job to adjudicate conflicts (PC/NPC/environment etc) and help everyone have fun.
If the PC's want to drive the storyline themselves that can work too ;)
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I quote Voltaire (the singer not the other one)
"The Klingons and Romulons pose no threat to us! 'Cause if we find we're in a bind...WE'LL JUST MAKE SOME SHIT UP!!!"
Yeah, been forced to do that waaaaay to often. But' its fun.
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Okay, so over the last 20 years I've gone from only running mods out of books and from websites to writing my own to doing mostly improv, and I'm curious about other GM's and how they go about running their campaigns.
Over the years, I have gone through the exact opposite transition that you have. Same steps, opposite order.
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Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".
I'm getting into video game design, and this is probably one of the biggest problems that I hear people talk about in the industry - do we force them down a specific path? or do we let them do their own thing, evolve their own storyline? Trying to decide how much "player agency" you allow is basically a question of: if I allow the players to wander wherever, how entertaining / realistic will their surroundings be, if they are not prefabricated? Obviously, this is less of an issue in Shadowrun than videogames where you have to have each environment mapped out extensively, and you can come up with ideas on the fly. The other issue to take into account is: how naturally and unobtrusively can I lead them down a single-path type of story? Video games that deal with this problem well give an illusion of free choice, but then come up with such a compelling reason to go a specific direction that the player doesn't think twice about it.
Pretty often, I can get the players back on their pre-defined track by something as simple as someone leaving a note on their door to arrange a meet-up. Sometimes I have to go as far as kidnapping one of their favorite NPCs, or the bad guys threatening some other aspect of their life.
My Shadowrun group usually "behaves" if the storyline is interesting enough. My D&D group decides to burn down towns at the drop of a hat, try to topple thrones instead of retrieve the treasure from Dungeon B, etc. I chalk this up to Shadowrun being better at conveying a story than D&D, so the characters generally have something invested in the outcome.
I'm going to stop rambling now and go have breakfast :)
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Interesting. All this talk of free will and sandbox play has got me thinking: whatever happened to telling a story? If you're the GM, you have the responsibility of crafting the storyline. That's your job in this exercise. So while you should definitely be flexible and able to accomodAte your groups creativity, in the end you still have to provide a framework. Otherwise your just asking "what are we doing tonight Brain?".
I'm getting into video game design, and this is probably one of the biggest problems that I hear people talk about in the industry - do we force them down a specific path? or do we let them do their own thing, evolve their own storyline? Trying to decide how much "player agency" you allow is basically a question of: if I allow the players to wander wherever, how entertaining / realistic will their surroundings be, if they are not prefabricated? Obviously, this is less of an issue in Shadowrun than videogames where you have to have each environment mapped out extensively, and you can come up with ideas on the fly. The other issue to take into account is: how naturally and unobtrusively can I lead them down a single-path type of story? Video games that deal with this problem well give an illusion of free choice, but then come up with such a compelling reason to go a specific direction that the player doesn't think twice about it.
Pretty often, I can get the players back on their pre-defined track by something as simple as someone leaving a note on their door to arrange a meet-up. Sometimes I have to go as far as kidnapping one of their favorite NPCs, or the bad guys threatening some other aspect of their life.
My Shadowrun group usually "behaves" if the storyline is interesting enough. My D&D group decides to burn down towns at the drop of a hat, try to topple thrones instead of retrieve the treasure from Dungeon B, etc. I chalk this up to Shadowrun being better at conveying a story than D&D, so the characters generally have something invested in the outcome.
I'm going to stop rambling now and go have breakfast :)
It is a hard balance to run a story where many things are flowing along a timeline and the characters involvement is required. Also you want them to do it their way and let it be their story. So the GM is really shadowrunning in a way. He is making a plan, adjusting it on the fly during execution, ultimately accomplish his goal without being caught, and strike again in the future. It depends on your perception I guess.