Evening chummers. Finished the first session of a 5e game I've been trying to set up for about a month now and thought I'd share, bounce ideas, and generally have something that will keep me convinced to work on things even when I don't feel like it. So to start lets introduce the team:
Nullsec: Hot-sim addict Technomancer living in a slum in Everett, the teams hacker with a grudge against corper spiders and hackers.
Impulse Drive: Glow-tatted up elf rigger chick with almost as much disdain for meat space as Null. Comes with her classic runner step van with an 1980's album cover style mural on the side when they aren't bothering for stealth, and The Dead Presidents Society; a pair of Rotodrones, the B's Rutherford and Johnson, Dalmatian Taft, and Steel Lynx Theodore Roosevelt.
Chiaki: Orc Street Sammy girl from a small time Yak family who when not running works in the family ramen shop. Likes to use a reinforced baseball bat more than anything.
Midnight Blue: Former UCAS scout-sniper, and the team's back up infiltration guy and back up transport if Impulse needs the room in her van for more drones on a run.
and finally we have
Mata: The (sigh) homeless, ninja, MysAd cannibal who wants to form her own League of Assassins. Look, I ain't gonna lie, this is not the first character like this this person has done. They're usually a good roleplayer, but they like dumb, ridiculous character types, so this only mildly phases me and the rest of the players. Best case they do something dumb and get axed, or they do something awesome and I get some new session ideas from it. Plus they're the only one that wanted to make an Awakened character since Blue is brand new to tabletop, Chiaki is new to the mechanics if not roleplaying, and Impulse and Null are huge techies and way into Netrunner.
So with that out of the way, onto the first session! (Mata isn't in this part by the by; her player showed up 30 min after we started with none of their spells picked and we were mid opening of the night's fight.)
So at around 5pm Seattle time, the crew gets a call from their various places of business or home from their fixer, Mr Black. As a free 2/2 contact, each player has him as a fixer, though they were and are free to get ones of their own. He had his first job for them, and the Johnson needed to seem them in an hour, abandoned office on the outer edge of Everett. The Johnson was an older orc working for the Yakuza, who'd been sent in to negotiate or rough up an orc and troll go-gang that had been getting frisky on their territory. After getting more resistance than expected, and not wanting to go back to the boss empty handed, he needed some unscrupulous types to go plug the offending gangers and make sure things stayed calm.
The team accepted, the sammy taking face duty, mostly as it seemed her player wanted to start hitting things fast, and at 20000 for the crew and 1500 each for the heads of the gang leader and his shaman, they were off to the also in disrepair Super Stuffer Shack up the street a few blocks, in the back of the rigger's van.
They pulled into an alleyway across from the dilapidated store front, the hacker marking the targets and their five buddies in AR after pinging their commlinks and guns. The rigger deployed her drones, and the twin heavy hitters hopped out the back and made for the corner of the building next to them to get a look through the front. With the B's covering the air, the combat begins with Taft the Dalmatian rolling down the street in front of the store and lighting up one of the orcs milling inside watching the big boss rant on how they'd be the next big thing in the 'Plex. Next came the hacker, who compiled a machine sprite and set it to buffing Blue's rifle, while the street sam booked it across the street, through the hole where the doors would have been and knocks the head clear off one of the two thugs on guard (I helped build that character's stats since the player didn't really know how to; I had not realized I'd made her a death machine, or my mooks are just pushovers). This was followed up by Blue capping the orc that had been trying to bumb a smoke off the now headless corpse, soon joining him on the ground.
Since the rotodrones had a higher initiative than the rigger, they spent the first combat turn doing mostly nothing since she was jumped into the Dalmatian for the whole fight. The remaining gangers got their go, and proceeded to ding the Dalmatian for a bit of boxes and a little stun on the cold simming driver. The actual named NPCs came next, with Jaw's the orc Shark shaman popping his combat sense and heading to engage the chick with the bat, while the big boss troll, known to the crew now as Bone Saw, charged out with his Krime Boss shotgun and almost wasted the sniper down to a full but not overflowed condition monitor (this was very not intended; had not thought about how strong that gun would have been when it got through, especially against the somewhat squishy sniper).
New round next with the sprite and techno attempting to brick the troll's gun, only getting about two boxes on it between a glitch and a data spike. The rigger continued clearing out mooks one Colt Inception burst at a time along with getting an order to one of her other drones, and the sammy clocked the shaman with her bat so hard it dropped him to almost his whole monitor, but he held on and avoided the rest of her attack thanks to the 5 he'd gotten on his combat sense buff. One final pass saw the sprite succeed on crit glitching the troll's gun, which proceeded to catch flame at random and spark in his hands. The one rotodrone with a pass left then dropped through a hole in the store's ceiling and hosed one of the mook gangers with it's own Colt Inception (rigger fragging loves the thing), before the turn ends fully.
That first round ended up taking most of the group's time, as we were familiarizing ourselves with this edition's rules and getting everyone settled into their roles, and with only three hours of time to actually play due to one person working nights, this ended up nicely padding out a run that was meant to finish in a session, and get everyone familiar with how things work.
That said, round two went a lot smoother. With not much else needed to do, the hacker decided to sit back and trid record the fight, while the sprite moved to buff the gun on one of the rotodrones. Blue ended up sitting out the rest of this fight as no one could really get to him, and even then no one had the skills to help him, so he stayed down for the time being. Impulse finished off a second ganger, and got orders to the still neutral rotodrone to engage the troll, who expertly dodge on two dice before pulling an axe and charging to the sammy, and whiffing spectacularly on her, at which point the rigger ended him with a burst from his Dalmatian's own gun. The fight finished up Chiaki taking down the shaman who in his berserk state due to his shark mentor spirit, could only really keep punching the mostly biowared orc woman. The last ganger got offed off screen after he tired to bolt, and the much faster street sam ran him down. Mission completed, we were treated to the sammy juggling the two leader's heads for the revived sniper, then later idly trying to take the whole team's reward, and finally the two tech nerds driving off to Bam! Burger for a feast and talk of their favorite sim MMO.
So that was session one. Mistakes were surely made, better planning from both the team and myself are needed, since I don't feel like being the guy who drops a player early in a fight every night, and we were so caught up in figuring out the various rolls everyone had we didn't try to get him up till the end of the run. Opinions, comments, whatever welcome. Work on session two and their first real run starts tomorrow; will need to introduce the team to their wayward mage, maybe send them out into the Snohomish countryside to look into magical nonsense in the woods, or run them around town with a hot-shot runner wannabe that thinks they're hot drek. Till then, signing out!
