[deepomega]

About to start a new campaign and all my players have switched up to Prime runners. I'm trying to do my best to balance the NPCs they find with their new badass status. Anyone have any suggestions for managing this? Previously, I'd tried to have "extra" NPCs I could add in or remove if the fight seemed unbalanced but this seems like a less than satisfying challenge if the players are Prime.

[witchdoctor]

As I recall Prime Runners weren't really intended to be used as PCs but you could try using Spec Ops as the baseline mook they would be fighting against, you could try justify this by having them be given jobs to hit Big Ten facilities that would be considered important enough to have Spec Ops like Firewatch considered worth the investment to have guarding it.

[Klice]

I'm pretty new to GMing, so I don't know how people do it normally. The last NPCs I created was purely to please myself and they are supposed to be powerful, so I tossed stats pretty freely, without really following any creation process. I was still trying to make it coherent.
What I'll do for NPC supposed to be reachable is look at the stats of PCs and making the NPCs slightly better if they are less than the PCs, or slightly weaker if they are a lot of them at the same time.

I don't if the high grade grunts they give in the corebook are useful ? Or do primer runners roll them over ?

[Jayde Moon]

'Prime Runners' is an absolutely legitimate campaign type.  And yes, if you haven't run them before, it can take a bit of tinkering before you get the balance right.

A few bits of advice:

• Start easy, learn as you go - It's a campaign, right?  So there will be several sessions, probably several missions, and lots of opportunities to pick fights.  So let your Prime Runners just clean house in the beginning and as they move on, up the difficulty.  When you tell the story, make it obvious that these guys are going against chumps at first.  It will set you up to tweak your difficulty level AND in the beginning it can be fun for your players to feel like CHAMPIONS.
• Avoid the temptation to change your world - It can be easy to feel like you HAVE to challenge your players and so the enemies are always crazy Spec Ops or Group Initiates... but that can cheapen them.  Remember that the world is filled with low-level goons and just because the PCs are badasses, that doesn't turn the rest of the world into badasses.  If you do that, you might as well just run a Regular Campaign, because amping everything just makes it all the same, relatively.  It's A-OK for the opposing forces to be chumps, but change the parameters of the run.
• Yeah, change the parameters of the run - Maybe the opposition is going to be chumps, but the Johnson specifically wants you to not kill anyone.  Or you get a hefty bonus if you can do the job without being detected, at all.  Or they know they have only 30 seconds to get in and out.  These guys are Prime Runners now, not rookies who just rush in to every situation guns blazing, and when they do it needs to be violent and FAST.  This can also really give your utility characters a chance to really shine.
• Tactics and more tactics - Bad guys who use tactics suddenly become a lot harder to take out.  Get to know the rules in the book about called shots, what qualifies as an unaware attack (you Street Sam is NEVER going to do so well against a hidden sniper using APDS), Small Unit Tactics, Interrupt Actions, etc.
• Dicepools as a measure of power - Finally, Dice Pools.  Ultimately, this is the 'measure of power', right?  Supposedly you base Karma awards off of it, after all.  Even Dice Pools and number of enemies is going to make for a serious fight and one that the players have generally as much a chance of losing as of winning.  So unless it's mega boss fight, you don't want to go bigger than that, ever.  75% of what your players are rolling can make for an interesting fight with a pretty good certainty that your guys are going to win, but remember there are no hard and fast numbers, because
• You experience is going to be your greatest asset - This goes back to the first one.  Balancing encounters is just something you'll pick up on more as you get more experience.  Don't be afraid to mess up, scale back if you need, to, retcon outright if you make a mistake.  Focus on the story and you usually can't go wrong.

Good luck!

[deepomega]

This is exactly the kind of advice I was looking for, so thanks! I think nobody really minds an "easy" run as much as I do as GM, and I have to just keep that in mind as we play. Better to have it "too easy" but interesting in plot/theme/etc. than to worry about balancing every damn dice pool.

[farothel]

Tactics and more tactics - Bad guys who use tactics suddenly become a lot harder to take out.  Get to know the rules in the book about called shots, what qualifies as an unaware attack (you Street Sam is NEVER going to do so well against a hidden sniper using APDS), Small Unit Tactics, Interrupt Actions, etc.

In this section there's also cover.  So your prime runners have dicepools up to the whazoo, but if all of a sudden they are caught in a harbour where the opposition stands behind steel containers, these dicepools are going to get smaller quite quickly.

And even though a lot of security is going to be not as good as your runners, remember that quantity is a quality all of it's own.  If your runners are outnumbered 5 to 1 while the enemy is behind cover, the fight is going to be a lot harder for them.

[Darzil]

This is exactly the kind of advice I was looking for, so thanks! I think nobody really minds an "easy" run as much as I do as GM, and I have to just keep that in mind as we play. Better to have it "too easy" but interesting in plot/theme/etc. than to worry about balancing every damn dice pool.

Yup, entertaining isn't just about dice rolls.

[Glyph]

I'm pretty new to GMing, so I don't know how people do it normally. The last NPCs I created was purely to please myself and they are supposed to be powerful, so I tossed stats pretty freely, without really following any creation process. I was still trying to make it coherent.
What I'll do for NPC supposed to be reachable is look at the stats of PCs and making the NPCs slightly better if they are less than the PCs, or slightly weaker if they are a lot of them at the same time.

I don't if the high grade grunts they give in the corebook are useful ? Or do primer runners roll them over ?

NPCs should generally either be weaker than the PCs, or circumstances should favor the PCs, or the PCs should have an avenue of escape if they want to run.  The problem with making NPCs the same level as the PCs is that 50/50 odds means the PCs won't last long.

I do agree that NPCs should be created free-form, with stats that make sense for them, rather than going though the whole character creation process.