[Angel_Heart]

I'm beginning a fresh SR campaign for 6 new (or mostly new) players to the SR universe. However, I want to try something different with them than what I've only dabbled with in previous a campaign. In previous games I ran pretty straight-forward runs for my teams, not much variation in the options, or the consequences, of what happened in the aftermath.
   Then one day I read about the Witcher video game series. Never played any of them (and won't be able to for quite some time yet). But the reviews kept mentioning how Witcher became famous for the choices and consequences that would follow players from beginning to the game's end. This concept was very intriguing to me.
   So some time ago, back in SR 4th Ed., I started dabbling in runs with options, with choices. The team would learn the truth about what's really going on in the job and would have to choose between usually two options:
   (A) Finish the job as originally intended; or
   (B) Help a different, new client, usually achieving an entirely different outcome with potential consequences.
   Example: The first run of this kind I wrote was about a mid-level corp exec. who's wife ran off with his kids. Normally such a person would go to a private investigator after using law enforcement to try to find said wife and children. However the players never questioned why someone would hire a shadowrunner for this instead of going to the appropriate authorities.
   The team found the wife and she revealed that the husband was an abusive molester. She'd reported it before to the proper corporate authorities but the issue was always swept under the rug. She didn't comprehend why (it was due to the husband's connections with management), and eventually she grew tired of it and took the kids and ran to drop off the grid and mooch off some dumb, young, ork sailor enlisted in the UCAS Navy stationed up at Everett Naval Base (Seattle).
   The team grabbed wife and kids, listened to her story, and now they had a moral dilemma to face: (A) Honor the original job and get paid; or (B) let the wife and kids go and not get paid near as much (she was offering money, just not as much as the husband) but also take a rep hit. Fair exchange though would be bonus karma for doing the right thing [unbeknownst to them at time, since the Great Ghost doesn't really boom over to us in loudspeaker in real life saying, 'Do the Right Thing and be rewarded greatly!'].
   The team decided to be true to the job and returned her to the husband. Thus Choice #2 came into effect. One of the teammates mentioned the wife's story to the husband, and husband replies with another set of lies and a proposition for the team to merc his wife for a bonus 10 grand. LOL, my players, well at least this one in particular, being a moral deviant, walked over without a moment's hesitation after telling the husband "Hold on, I'll be right back," and immediately settled the husband's wife problem. He returned with his hand out and said, "Where's my money?"
   The other players: "WTF did you just do?!"
   The Kick Artist: "Made me some more money. What? Why you acting like that?"
   Anyway, point is that it was all very interesting from the outside-looking-in to see the players wrestle over the moral consequences of their actions. It really showed me what's going on mentally upstairs in some of their minds. In this new campaign I'm creating I'm looking for exactly that. I don't want just simply a bunch of straight-forward runs (some are fine, but not all). The shadows are supposed to be dark and seedy, coming with sometimes vicious consequences following the trail of players' decisions.
   So what I'm looking for are ideas of similar runs/events that I can halt my players with as they wrestle with the options and potential consequences that follow, as they lean one way or another in their choices.
   One thing I read recently was about grabbing a bounty hunter's target. A second client intervenes and offers the team extra money to turn over the bounty to him and not the original client. So the team either keeps their rep intact and honor their original contract, or they get greedy and earn more money. The idea was great to me.
   So if anyone of you reading this has got some good ideas, or stories you want to share that I could glean some ideas off of, by all means post away and share them with me! Thanks, -CJ

[Rooks]

Alternatively you can do garbage in garbage out from data trails to produce the opposite intended effect make a Rating 1 SiN that fails the test actually succeed

[Lorebane24]

Can GiGo do that?  I'd always used it for things like swapping the functionality of a guns trigger and mag eject.

[Reaver]

There are lots of things you can do even with "simple runs" that throw a moral question in a run.

1: The players are hired to sabotage a food product line of a Corp by adding in "something extra" to the Vats. The Players learn the "something extra" causes Pancreatic Cancer. Do they add it to the vats, knowing they are condemning thousands of people to a painful death by Cancer? Do they add something else, thus still fulling the spirit of the job, if not the letter?

2: Players are hired to "extract" someone from a rival corp, only to find out that the NPC does want to go, as his family would suffer reprisals from the current Corp. Do they still take him? Do they also take the family?



There is no shortage of little moral hooks you can throw at your players, if you think about it. And some can even be insanely convoluted!

Hired to find a runaway kid, only find out the kid ran away because of abuse, but the kid is also an arsonist sociopath who as killed several SINless by burning them alive...

Hired by the Mob to track done a mobster turned Rogue, only to find out that the mobster was ordered to kill a family and walked away....

Hired by a rich Corp Executive to track down his long lost illegitimate kid, so the Executive can finally meet him, only find out that the executive suffers from a genetic disorder and want the kid to harvest his organs for transplant because the executive's system is too weak to handle synthetic organs...


Oh the possibilities...     

[Red_Cap]

If you really want to amp up the roleplaying aspect, link the moral question directly to a PC via their backstory.  Send them on a run where the target is someone from their neighborhood, or they're extracting test subjects and one of them is a friend or relative who disappeared recently.  It takes a cold blooded bastard to turn his sister over to a corp for experimentation.

[Glyph]

Reaver touched on this a bit, but one thing to keep in mind is that moral dilemmas are more interesting when the right thing to do is not obvious at first glance, nor are the consequences.  The target could be someone who left because he found corruption... or he could be an embezzler, just like the Johnson said, and he's hoping the group will buy his sob story.  The group could grit their teeth and do a repugnant job for the sake of their rep, only for their rep to take a hit anyways, when people say they are nothing but low-rent thugs for doing wetwork so cheaply.

[PiXeL01]

I gave my runners a run while they were hired to burn down a drug lab under a gabg’s Hideout. They discovered the gang were actually sheltering squatter families so if they were to burn down the warehouse they’d leave hundreds of people including many kids homeless in winter.

[farothel]

The introduction story in the orginal 4th edition core rulebook (not the 20th aniversary one) has a story with this kind of decisions in it.  I quite like that story.

[Angel_Heart]

The introduction story in the orginal 4th edition core rulebook (not the 20th aniversary one) has a story with this kind of decisions in it.  I quite like that story.

Regarding the Original 4th Ed. CRB story, I don't remember it. I haven't seen my 4th CRB since... uhhh... heck, it must have been 2010? 2011 maybe? Right now it's sitting in a box, in a barn, a couple of states away on someone else's property... that's the one with the troll shooting lightning while holding a shotgun, some partially-masked elven chickie sam, and a goofy looking dwarf hacker (back when deckers dropped the decker name in place of hacker) trying to dress like he's got some swag?
   You'll have to remind me of the story, then I might remember.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Shadowrun is all about choices.  Sometimes the choice is easy: save the schoolbus from falling off the bridge.  Sometimes it's difficult; keep the gizmo for yourself, or turn it over to the evil cult leader.  Always, it should have consequences.  'Rescue the girl' can turn into a quest into a magical hell while a stubborn teammember refuses to admit that he could have made it not happen by simply not rescuing the girl, or at least turning her back over -- and consequences can result, including inside the team (but, fortunately, not within the player group).

When considering your runs, consider the choices the runners might have; always put a few in.  A gadget that would be really useful for one of the characters, but which the run is about; a guy whom everyone hates and doesn't trust, but whose intel might save their lives.  Then start thinking about consequences: keeping the gizmo might lead not only to a street cred hit, but also people coming after the PC; accepting the contact's information might result in him coming back to them to get him out of trouble, or even doing so again and again.