[Djinnocide]

I'm having a great time running Shadowrun. It's my first game GMing and I really feel like I'm finding my voice and getting good at thinking and acting on the fly as a game master. However, I've got one player, who I've been friends with and gamed with for a long time now, who has taken the role of the party Decker and he's having a really hard time of it. I knew this would be a challenge, and I knew that this would be something that might take a while to sort out, but it it's just not getting any easier for him. I've made volumes of cheat sheets for him and revised those volumes again and again, but he rarely bothers referencing them in-game. Often times, he describes what he wants to do "I want to shut this helicopter off", but with little or no idea how he goes about doing something like that and if he can't figure out how to do what he wants to do he gives up on his role as Decker and tries to solve the problem using either social or physical means. I think the number of options and the complicated rules for Decking are too much for him and he appears unwilling to take time away from the table to improve his understanding of the rules.

I've suggested that maybe he make another character, but he insists that it's just something that's going to take time and that he'll get it eventually, but I've been using kid gloves up to this point and I'm afraid that when we get to a point where he needs to do some serious hacking (infiltrating hosts, getting paydata, and fighting/defending against IC and Spiders), he's not going to be able to handle it.

So, do you guys have any experience dealing with something like this? I actually considered fudging some rolls on tonight's game and just have his character get killed, but I'm not sure I can get him to roll up another guy, or if he does, it might just be another Decker. Help me please!

[Insaniac99]

First, I don't think you should ever fudge rolls to kill off characters.  There are always better ways to handing things.

There is a lot you can do from behind the screen to help him get a hang of the character, Ask him like a flow-chart "Okay, you want to shutdown the helicopter, do you want to brute-force it or stealth it?" and guide him tot he right actions and rolls with quick A or B questions.  As the GM you should know the rules well enough and if you made cheat sheets it shouldn't be a problem, after a bit it will become rote for the player to be able to say "I want to take down the chopper stealthily, so that's hack on the fly and I roll this many dice".

[Djinnocide]

You're right about the fudging rolls to kill a PC. I wouldn't do it, but I certainly considered it.

I'm afraid doing too much hand holding is going to feel like I'm playing the character myself, but if he's unwilling to take the time to learn the rules I don't have many options.

[Insaniac99]

You're right about the fudging rolls to kill a PC. I wouldn't do it, but I certainly considered it.

I'm afraid doing too much hand holding is going to feel like I'm playing the character myself, but if he's unwilling to take the time to learn the rules I don't have many options.

It's not playing the character, it is being a tour guide.  You ask the destination, offer a couple routes tot he destination and then tell them how to follow the route.

[Csjarrat]

Might be worth just getting him round on his own and running a pure matrix mission to demo how it works. It's a less embarrassing format for him to learn rules than in front of the team and wont take up valuable game time off the others. But yeah, if still he cba to learn the rules, he should really just play a street sam or combat adept.

[Ren]

I run a SR4 game where, after a few missions, with a character not starting out as a hacker, a player decided he wanted to develop in that direction. As neither of us knew the matrix rules well, i decided to design a few matrix tasks for him, from the easy "you have to monitor the communication of a person on site for a few hours" to the hard "you have to hack into a node, look for data, copy it, edit it, then leave without trace, in a given amount of combat turns (with extra difficulties)", then i sent it to him in e-mail. He had to look up the rules, and compose an action-to-action report on what he is doing for each task. I only let him develop into a hacker after he understood how he had to approach these tasks.

It was a great excercise for both of us, and we learned much from the process. If you are in the lucky position of already knowing matrix rules, so much the better. And sending the tasks in e-mail, he has time to browse the rulebooks, and is not embarrassing at all, as the others don't even need to know about it. And if he can't or doesn't want to solve these tasks in some time, then there really isn't much to do, and he has to leave decking to one who has the understanding or the will to learn.

[Djinnocide]

There's some great suggestions here and I appreciate you all taking the time to make them.

For my particular problem, I think the best bet is going to be for me to try and do more hand holding until he either learns it, or I get used to the idea of this is just how it's going to be. I think Insaniac's suggestion of working out some sort of multipurpose flow chart is going to work best for my player's particular needs. Now it's just going to be a matter of figuring out the best way to lay something like this out. My gut tells me that I should probably come up with a list of things he's most likely going to want to interact with, based on his current understanding and his actions so far. I imagine something like this would be helpful to other beginning players/GMs so maybe I'll post it up once I get something written out.

In the meantime, if any of you have any suggestions on how you'd personally lay a cheat sheet of this nature out I'd love to hear it.

[Critter]

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BydyttBwxV1qMG43TGdscm1uQXc/edit   - That's the one I use. Granted, I didn't make it but its really helpful.

[Djinnocide]

That's a great cheat sheet, but I think my best bet will be to come up with as comprehensive a list as I can for catagories of objects he's going to want to control/interact with (i.e. Commlinks, Vehicles, Weapons, etc), then list the things he's probably going to want to do to said objects (i.e. Turn Off, Turn On, Damage), then list the official name of the Matrix Action,  Rolls he'll have to make, rolls that oppose those rolls (this will mostly be for me), the marks required to achieve what he wants to do, and the actual RAW effect of what's happening. I'm already working on a spreadsheet. God help me.

If some of you more knowledgable folks can think of some categories that I haven't listed here I'd greatly appreciate the help. So far I've got...

Commlinks
Files
Vehicles
IC / Spiders
Weapons
Traffic Signals
Light Systems
Appliances
Drones
Hosts

[RHat]

You know, I'm gonna as a simple question here, just to make sure I get how you're running this.  If you were him, and wanted to shut down that helicopter, what would you do?

[Djinnocide]

Great question, and one I should probably be asking myself more often when I plan out a combat scene, so thanks for that.

I likely would've begun by asking some freebie questions, the most important of which would be "Do I see any AR Icons in 100m?". From there I would've gone into some Matrix Perception rolls to learn what I could about the helicopter/pilot. If the pilot had any cyber augmentations that I could manipulate to give me the upper hand I'd try to get some marks on them or straight up attack them with a Data Spike. If that didn't work out, I'd have talked with the GM about trying to control the helicopter's flight system in some manner. Maybe just straight up smash the thing. If that didn't work, I'd see if it were possible to control or make the missile's that the thing was shooting pre-maturely detonate. I suppose that would've been done with some marks and perhaps a control device roll or maybe a spoof command roll if I already got marks against the helicopter earlier. Granted, this is me trying to distance myself from being the GM and put myself in the shoes of the player.

In defense of my player, he did eventually go that Hulk Smash route with some data spikes but that was only after some suggestions from myself and his cohorts.

[Csjarrat]

yeah, basically if you want to do anything to control a vehicle, you need marks on it (hack on the fly)
if you want to destroy kit, you data spike it (attack)

you automatically see anything broadcasting within 100m, but need to matrix perception to find anything that is running silent.
A military grade chopper is likely to be running silent and have a high rating firewall, as well as some ECCM (run it like a jammer of decent rating).
if it is military grade tech, then it should be quite a challenge for a decker to bring it down. obviously a civilian chopper wont be as well defended but should still be well guarded from hackers to prevent their subversion for terrorism/theft etc etc.

[RHat]

So...  Why not just get three marks on the helicopter and use Reboot Device, quite literally shutting it down?

[Michael Chandra]

It'd reboot. You'd have to first change it with a command I forget so that it won't start up again.

Of course a smart system has the chopper run non-wireless and only run the pilot's gear wireless.

[RHat]

Not quite, actually:

When you perform this action, you can choose a de-lay of any amount of time between the time the device
shuts down and the time it comes back online. Anyone
with physical access to the device can override this delay
by hitting the power button, which starts the boot process
and brings the device online at the end of the following
Combat Turn

A local pilot changes things a bit, but I'm not so sure how likely that is - for most purposes, remote pilots being able to jump into whichever copter you need them to works better.