Character Advancement:
I have a group used to D&D. We play a couple sessions, we level up, get all kinds of new toys. While it seems Shadowrun is a little more evenly paced, I wonder how GM's use the pacing of character advancement. In SR4, these take place over the course of weeks and months. Do you usually tie this time period into your games i an interesting way? What are characters supposed to be doing in between adventures, seeing as adventures are pretty much their day job? If Each session takes place only a few days in game time after the last, it could take a seriously long time for players to squeeze new stuff out of their characters. It is of course easy enough to just let players spend points and get better after an adventure, but I am wondering if anyone has a useful or interesting way to implement these longer time frames. I suppose the same goes for longer-time tests like for availability, etc.
My last game session was 30 minutes of adventure wrap-up (payout and karma ward) and 2 hours of down time. There's no end to what the characters will be doing in their down time. Since learning a new skill is an extended test (1 week, or 1 month for skill groups) they will need that downtime. Some of my players have actually run into the issue of "not enough time" for all the things they want to work on. I use the 1 Day for extended tests actually means 8 hours of work (I thought I had RAW stating this, but a quick check on Extended Tests, SR4A 64-65, does not confirm or deny), so 1 Week Extended test is seven 8-hour days of work. I let my players double the time interval (for learning/increasing skills, attributes, building/repairing most things, etc.) so they can be working on two things in any given day (4 hours each). This way they can shuffle things around if they get a short run. If the run bites into either of the 4 hour slots then what ever they're working on gets pushed back a day.
The adept has 14 more days of her initiation ordeal to complete before she gains her first grade of initiate. She's also dealing with having a blackberry cat (RW) taking up residence at her place despite her being allergic to cats.
The mage has been researching magical groups, decided to start his own, only to realize he needs (or should have) the Arcana skill, so now he's started learning that.
The hacker/face is learning Pilot ground craft and coding his own stealth program.
And in addition to their studying, the adept has bought a weapon focus (through black market channels) w/ fake license and has to wait 11 days for that to arrive while the hacker ordered a black market biofeedback filter (met his first black IC last run and said, "oh, so that's why I should have a biofeedback filter." Ha!) which he'll get in 8 days.
If a player comes to me with a list of a, b, c, d, etc. And says I use contact z for a, and c, contact y for d, and contact x for b...then I'm happy to do some quick rolls and let them know the time frame.
However, it usually is never like this and there's some amount of role-playing with their contacts during this "phase" of the game. As such, so far (and since my game sessions only run about 3 hours due to scheduling and what not), the down time phases take up about 1 night's worth of gaming.
And on top of all that, the down time phase is subject to a "if nothing else happens between now and forever...what are your character's plans" clause. Then I write up a "so if all goes according to plan, adept - you'll have your focus by this time, and your ordeal is over at this time, hacker - you make another roll to learning piloting at this date and a coding rolling on this date, etc." Once I have that all fleshed out, I compare it to my campaign timeline to see where things go wrong and then at the next game session I can start with "So, you're starting to get excited because in three days you're supposed to get your weapon focus, when your fixer calls offering you a job for a week "vacation" in Hong Kong but you need to leave tomorrow..." Players are then free to choose what they want to do.
The biggest issue with down time, at least so far for me, is not "what are the players doing," cause there's always something, but more how to move things along so no one single player is dominating the time. And despite my best efforts, my players are pretty bad about doing any upkeep/work on their characters in between game time. But here's to hoping the mage gets me an outline of what he wants for his magical group before next session.
Starting Characters:
So the adventure I am cooking up pretty much pits the characters against groups of street thugs and will climax with them raiding a gang's hideout/squatted in apartment building. As my first time running a Shadowrun game, I wanted to steer clear of the more crazy stuff like intense astral combat, major Matrix networks etc, but will definitely include a couple moments where minor hacking and assessing might be of some use. My concern comes from looking at the example characters, which look like they were all created from the standard 400bp starting character build, and they all look pretty bad-ass. I like the flavor of the adventure I am making as a starting point in a local slum against a minor gang, but I also don't want the PC's to just blast through all the street goons I throw at them in a single combat turn. It's always easy to just throw more enemies on the table, but that seems cheap and boring. I figure I might bring the fight to a climax with a more heavily modified gang leader type, but still unsure about difficulty balance.
I pretty much agree with Zilfer here. "Best laid schemes" and all that. Last run my players (all relatively new, and with only 15 Karma earned so far in the campaign) had to deal with 3 heavily cybered MCT special ops and their on-site hacker (no magic). They way I built them I was getting pretty scared that I'd just totally wipe the group with them and noted that maybe I should just give all the special ops a -2 modifier all around to lower the build. But when the team got to the safe house and was about to storm it the group mage decides to take a -4 penalty and sustain Improved Invisibility on both the party adept and cybered gun-bunny (and he took 3 boxes of stun from the drain, so he had a total -5 modifier to everything after that). It ended up making for a good fight as two of the MCT ops had the gun bunny pinned down between the stove-top island in the kitchen (even dealing a light wound on one occasion with a blind fire shotgun blast through the island) while the adept was chasing the leader, slicing him in half in the end. Luckily (for the MCT guys) I had equipped them with lots of cyber audio upgrades so they could figure out approximately where the PCs were. The rest of the time the mage is astrally projecting, manifesting now and again to cause distractions or tell the other PCs where their target was (a kidnapped hacker they were out to rescue). Meanwhile the party hacker is outside back at their bikes "watching over" the mage's body (which made me laugh and the mage's player worried/scared when the hacker says, "I go full VR" hehe). The hacker then disables the roving LMG equipped doberman but then encounters loaded black IC on the MCT Fly-spy...which bites him hard (with no biofeedback filter at this time, hehe), but the hacker finally gets control of the drone.
In the end, I had the party tense and worried about the MCT team, with three of the PCs getting wounded (though the mage "did it to himself"), where initially I was worried it would be a TPK.
One never knows, really, how a combat is going to resolve itself and even gauging "threat level" can be difficult because one well placed shot, spell, hack, can change everything with the roll of the dice. And this is one of the hardest things to grapple with (from a GM point a view) if coming over from D&D (3rd or 4th editions) as encounters are built to match the party (generally, at least the mechanics are there and the DM is free to adjust up or down...but at least when adjusting they have an idea that the encounter is some number of levels above or below the party which informs the DM what to expect in a general way). But this is also one of the reasons I like Shadowrun, nearly every encounter is potentially lethal and it really requires both players and GM to think hard about the pieces in play.
Nuanced World, etc:
I'm coming from playing D&D, which in my experience seems to be a series of combat encounters underground from one to the next, which can be fun but lacks a little more nuance. The shadowrun rules for identification, weapon concealment, citizenship, availability and contacts all point to a ton of potential for more layered social and situational play, which I find really exciting. I'm going to have at least a couple more social situations in my adventure. I'm planning an early run in with a couple of lone star officers on the beat, who aren't looking for trouble, and will probably be intimidated by the number and armory of the PC's. Being D&D players, I'm excited to see if my players just off and waste them when they get close, which of course should have reverberating consequences down the line. I'm just wondering how others use the wider world and social/long term rules of the game in their campaigns. There is so much there, you can almost make the world react strictly based on rules alone, with a mix of good storytelling decisions to flesh stuff out. How much do y'all let the wider world of the game react to PC actions, legality, etc? What if a PC gets caught with a restricted weapon and is later wanted by Lone Star for having it (and for probably taking out the cop who discovered it)? I'm sure a lot of it comes down to individual GMing and how you want the story to flow, but I'd love some commentary.
Yeah, it's huge. Every time my players travel over ~5 km (it's arbitrary really) in the Seattle Metroplex via ground transportation I make them roll a D6 (if their traveling in a group, only one roll, if they're traveling from their separate residences to meet up somewhere, then each rolls, etc.). If the result is a 1 then "something happens." One time it was a traffic jam on I5 in Tacoma because some gangers managed to steal a military troop transport and get it onto the freeway before it was disabled and a stand off was occurring. This added time to their travel as they took side streets.
The last time was on the way home from the MCT safe house run. The mage got pulled over by Lone Star on the freeway (I'm still in 2070 in my campaign). I decided that the stun damage from drain was making the mage a little wobbly on his motorcycle, but the player doesn't know this. I ask the player what fake SIN he's broadcasting and all that. The cop says, "Have you been drinking," and I make a few rolls against the fake SIN while the cop's commlink is running the analysis programs. The mage says, "no, just heading down to get one though." The rolls come up clean for the mage so the cop just says, "Which bar?" the player answers, the cop responds, "Ah, okay. Have a safe night." And that's it. Could have gone down completely differently if the fake SIN didn't hold up or if the player was cocky, etc.
If you can get your hands on the old, 1st edition,
Sprawl Sites, it has a section of random encounter tables based on general neighborhood "quality" that the players are in. I'll break that out every once in a while if I can't think of something quickly. The encounters are "stats-light" and more like current "adventure seeds" in the campaign books (
Ghost Cartels, Emergence, etc.) so there's little to modify to make work for 4th edition.
