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And Now... a review of Now For Something Completely Different.

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jamesfirecat

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« on: <08-20-12/2230:54> »
Something Completely Different


Note: Before I get down to business on describing how this particular run went, I think that some things need to be spelled out clearly.

My guy who GMed this particular run spent a lot of time working it over and trying to make it as good as possible so my experiences may not exactly match yours.  None the less, here we go...

Mission Quote: “You know if you'd like we could take some time and explain how the Matrix actually works to you Mr. Dada...”  “Bah, I don't need to know how it works, I understand it conceptually!”

Meta Quote: …. (Sound of nobody saying anything)


Plot: The run starts like most runs when we get a contact from a Mr. Johnson who has a job for us.  So we head off to meet him at a place called “The Smiling Bastard” which seems delightfully appropriate name for a themed bar.  Sadly this place's theme seemed to be built about how New Jersey is land of terrible greasy hairstyles, and huge smoke spewing factories that nobody would ever willingly visit... much like it is today (I kid I kid). 

He happens to be delightfully English but apparently he screwed up the conversion between British Pounds and American New Yen, because all he's willing to offer us is 2,000 New Yen.  This is needlessly to say an insultingly low amount of money, but luckily once our face Gumbo drops and edged negotiations roll on Mr. Johnson's head he raises the price up to 8,000 and change.  That's still less than I like to work for, but on the other hand we're only going to be working for a single night.

Our job is going to take us back to the famous museum that we happened to have robbed back in Ready Set Gogh, which is holding a big event that the Johnson's employer is going to be attending.  It's our job to go there and effectively be undercover security.  The official security won't know that we're there during the event, though we will be provided with special passes to make sure that we won't get called out for bringing firearms into the museum. 

That isn't quite as nice as being proper undercover security agents (the kind who won't have to worry about getting fired on by the real security staff if we whip out our guns to attack any intruders) but it's the best deal we're going to get for this job.  To further the theme of us being undercover security, our hacker Mastermind becomes an undercover Spider by hacking their node and giving himself admin access since clearly these people can't be trusted to keep proper track of their own nodes.

Our plan for the event is that Gumbo and our somewhat charismatic adept Hummer, will be walking around the place, talking with the various people there and making sure everything is kosher while Mastermind passes out in the bathroom to do matrixy stuff while I the street samurai Longshot stay in there to keep him company and make sure nobody tires to gank him while he's unconcious.

In an effort to be proactive we have Mastermind look up who could possibly be inside the museum and cause problem.  One obvious answer that pops up is that the janitorial staff has access to all sorts of  power welders that could do plenty of damage in the wrong hands.  So just to be on the safe side Gumbo decides to pay them a visit, and after bluffing his way into their portion of the museum he talks to them a little and notices that they only seem to be going through the motions rather than doing their jobs with any real energy.  He thinks that they might be up to something so he says he's going away and then ducks behind a corner and does the old stomp on the ground increasingly softly to make it sound like he's leaving.  Okay he does something more complex than that, but that's what it amounts to.

As he's watching them from behind some pipes there's a sudden small explosion and it causes the lights to go out.  Likewise the lack of power shuts down the place's node the security system which means that metallic shutters to slam into place over all the exits.

A moment later, a man with a shock of white hair steps out of the crowd and announces that he is from the Mini-Bosses, and that we are all welcome to their happening. 

Then all of the statues suddenly come to life and start dancing about.

Needless to say, the security and the fancy upper class people who are present for the event instantly start dropping monocles in their glasses of wine in shock and wondering just what the f*** is going on.  Mastermind operating through his favorite anthroform drone Arnold T (Talos) Muderbot threatens the guy and tells him to bring all of this to a stop at once. 

One intimidation roll later we discover that this guy only has one IP pass.  In fact we're the only ones in the room right now who have more than one IP pass which means that conversations are a bit awkward as it takes him about three times as long to speak as it does take us to.  Eventually however he agrees that maybe things are getting just a bit out of hand (as the alternative is getting a face full of stick and shock bullets) and tries to stop the statues from dancing. 

Except that when he tries to stop them nothing happens, and cries out that “Mr. Dada” isn't behaving according to plan.  A quick burst of S&S from Arnold towards one of the statues shows that the stuff just bounces off rather than having any serious effect as it would on normal spirits. 

That leaves us with two big problems, one of them is that we're trapped in here with a bunch weird spirit possessed statues, and the second is that we've got a whole bunch of other people trapped in here with us. 

The second takes priority but luckily Longshot brought some E-Ex ammo for his supermach and a long burst from it creates a hole in the metal plating big enough for people to crawl out trough.  Aided by hummer's commanding voice we manage to get the other patrons to exit the place in a fairly calm manner before returning our attention to the dancing statues. 

Since they are evidently immune to stun damage our only choice seems to be shooting them up with E-Ex and other such attacks that would utterly destroy them.  Luckily the white haired guy has another plan, and says that we can take some mystical drugs he has on him (side effects include dry throat, temporary loss of hearing or vision and being stoned the F*** out of your gord) to go tot he astral plains to talk with the free spirit named Mr. Dada and convincing him to stop all this foolishness. 

We're tempted to just try fighting the statues but a quick call with Mr. Johnson confirms just how valuable those statues are and that he would much rather not see them destroyed if at all possible throwing in another 3000 New Yen (total not per person sadly) for us to find a way to stop the statues without destroying them.

So we decide that the time has come to turn this run into a trip and take the pills. 

Not so long later we find ourselves... somewhere having a conversation with some sort of strange spiritual creature that has decided to take the a form which we will have an easier time comprehending and trusting. 

In other words the form of a now prime runner that we used to work with.  He lets us know that before we can contact Mr. Dada, we need to pass some tests, the test of the past, the test of the self, and the test of the future. 

We decide that given that we’re now in the metaplanes where you can never be quite sure of what is going on, the idea of trying to pick a fight with this mystical being has “bad idea” written all over it so we'll just have to do what it wants. 

I suggest that we should probably do the test of self first since whatever we learn about ourselves should help us deal with the other two tests. 

A moment later we.... a moment later I find myself standing in the middle of a barren beach where clocks melt and ants devour a bird.   There's no sign of anyone else nearby, until I hear someone calling my name form behind me. 

Looking around I find myself face to face with... myself.  Or at least a really ugly version of myself with extravagant eyes grown to frog like proportion, and looking run down and tired. 

The “other me” says that it is my very own inner killer, implanted on me by Aztechnology (my character (a gnome) was a vat grown Aztechnology experiment in creating super soldiers that could pass for children if the need required it) like a corporate trademark placed upon my very soul. 

I promptly inquired if being my inner killer it can by defeated by shooting it (since I was holding it when I took the special pills I still have my Ingram Supermach in the metaplanes or at least some kind of spiritual version of it that works just as well) since something like that would probably be too easy.

It responds by telling me that guns are how I express all of my feelings in this world that firearms are to me as a paintbrush is to an artist.  I agree with this fact, but I am still far from sure that being in the metaplanes and all I can solve this problem so simply. 

He mocks me telling me that just because other people might have deep philosophical quandaries in the metaplains don't mean I deserve to have them.  I glower at other me and tell him that as he's supposedly an evil version of me why should I trust anything he tells me? 

So then dark me starts to bring up the black and spiky Ingram Supermach that he is armed with to center it on my body.  I of course was waiting for something like this so I deny him the opportunity of a surprise round. 

We roll out initiative and I manage to get 22 base 15.  This is followed up by me having no clue in hell what I am up against, deciding that clearly when in doubt use more gun.  The downside is that my gun is still loaded with E-Ex from opening up the museum door instead of S&S which means I'll be at a disadvantage against a spirit, or really anything with a lot of armor. 

The upside is that I'm still going first and starting things off with a full narrow burst taking advantage of my Supermach's HV capabilities.  I roll decently on my 24 dice (being alone I no longer get tacnet) and get 9 hits, but since I have no idea what “evil me” is capable of, I edge the roll to re-roll 15 dice and surprisingly manage to get my hands on another 7 hits. 

He only rolls three hits on his dodge which means he gets to eat 29 P and explodes in an especially violet fashion. 

A short while later I find myself back at the same “somewhere” as we started with all of my other runners showing up a moment later.  Most of them seem fairly calm but Gumbo is rather freaked out and wants us all to confirm that we're really us and not some sort of evil spirit doppelganger.  He seems to accept our promises that we’re really us and then we decide to do the test of the past next.

We find ourselves in some sort of strange sunny glen with a large tomb in the middle of it.  We approach said tomb and try to open it up, but even with all four of us working on it together we can't budge it an inch. 

So as we sit back to catch our breath and ponder just what the hell is going on, four people in old timey robes show up.  They walk over and pose around the tomb one of them seeming to trace their shadow on the tomb completely ignoring the four of us.  So despite the fact that we call up to them/rub up to them, use our shadows to block out their shadows, they ignore us complete tracing their shadows and start to wander off.

We using the peerless adventure game logic of when in doubt interact with all the objects on the screen in every way possible, decide that there are only two choices, we can either follow after the people and see where they go, or we can try and repeat whatever it was they just did on the tomb. 

We decide to go with option two and a short while later hear our mystical guide asking us why we're doing what we're doing and what importance it would have to Mr. Dada. 

We bullshit him around a bit before coming to some fairly reasonable conclusions.  Chiefly that that to Mr. Dada while humans are temporary and die off, the art lasts forever.  He agrees with us on this one, and we decide to take the test of the future now. 

A moment later we find ourselves in some kind of bizarre node and guess what, we're all technomancers now!  Except that other than Mastermind we're all horrible technomancers who can maybe do one or two minor things effectively (all Longshot can do is Encrypt or Analyze) so we're more or less just floating there waiting to get our cyber asses kicked. 

So basically a lot of technomancery stuff happens, one of them is that he finds this node that has some ice and a spider on it.  He edits himself admit account and makes it so the spider can't find him.  But he can't do the same for the rest of us, so he decides that there is only one thing to do. 

He and his rating 12 paladin sprite (summoned with a point of edge to help) decide to surprise matrix kung fu the spider into sleepy land.  After doing that he changes the nodes settings so that no one can do anything on the node unless they have admin access. 

As the ice only has security level access, that leaves it helpless.  We explore the matrix a bit more and eventually find what we were looking for the “words that define the future” which is some famous artists manifesto having to deal with a new art movement. 

We then explain in turn how we had to break with tradition to get where we are to our mystical guide and he ticks off another cosmic check box for us and says that we're now clear to go meat Mr. Dada.  So we find ourselves in the middle of a large field of wheat and head for the only building nearby a large farmhouse.

Sure enough, Mr. Dada is inside, and he's upset over how we've deprived his happening of an audience.

Through the strange screen that he's been using we can see that the statues are still dancing, and that they're slowly destroying the museum as they do.

We argue with him about what we've learned, about how new art can only be brought into the world based on old art.  Even his  happening couldn't possibly exist if he didn't have the statues (old art) to manipulate in the first place!

We throw in how if he moves the happening to the parking lot outside of the museum we'll see it to it that it gets all the coverage he could possibly ask for even having Mastermind hack some news  feeds if necessary.  He agrees and we go back, lead the remaining museum guests back outside, and let the statues dance to their hearts content.  It's  a good feeling to know that we've helped bring some new art into the world... thought not as good as knowing that we'll be getting paid by Mr. Johnson before too long.

« Last Edit: <08-20-12/2244:56> by jamesfirecat »

jamesfirecat

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« Reply #1 on: <08-20-12/2232:13> »
And now for a more complete break down of Now For Something Completely Different...



The Pro's /Things I liked: There were many things that I liked about the metaplains adventure of this rp.  It was indeed, something completely different.  The test of the self was especially effective because we were playing this shadowrun via google plus for talking to one another and AIM for private messages, and none of us were in the same room as one another.

So once we hit the test of self none of us talked, instead we all just sat there and received and replied messages from our gm.  The only sounds we were hearing from the other players was the “click click click” of us them typing on keyboards and them rolling dice. 

Even if this was not intended (indeed honestly I can not imagine how you could accomplish anything nearly so effective if  you were playing the game face to face with everyone sitting around a table) it was still such a wonderfully environmental moment that I feel it needs to be spelled out.  This mission was new and different, and as the saying goes, a change is as good as a holiday sometimes.

The Cons/Things I didn't like:  While I found the test of self quite an interesting experience and the trial of the past was just fine even if it was nothing but a bit of adventure game fluff, I didn't especially mind that because it went by before it could overstay its welcome. 

The future section however...  Well not only does it give you all the fun of being completely useless if your character is not adept at using the matrix, but you get to see how the people who are good at the matrix have to take suboptimal actions in order to try and make up for the fact that they have to drag you along.   

One suggestion that one of my fellow runners came up with for how to deal with this problem would be instead of having the non hackers turn into shitty technomancers, they should instead get turned into various kinds of sprites. 

For example Gumbo our face who has incredible defense from getting most of his body minus his head replaced with chrome should turn into a paladin sprite.  Longshot who is incredibly good at shooting people should have gotten turned into a fault sprite. 

Hummer our charisma focused mage would probably have turned into a... well I don’t know because I don't know the matrix that well honestly but you get the idea.

But that's just a minor patch over a very big problem.

The big problem with this adventure is that I feel it's afraid to embrace what it is truly about.

It comes across like it's not sure what it wants to be about, its half about being undercover security and half about weird metaplanes adventures. 

I think that if you want to make an adventure about runners having weird adventures on the metaplanes... make an adventure about runners having weird adventures on the metaplanes don't dance around the fact, railroad them right into it.

My suggestion would be that the runners get contacted about a job meet up, they go tot he meet up, Mr. Johnson tells them that their company is working on an important project with a free spirit, but the spirit recently stopped working and vanished off to an obscure corner of the metaplanes, so now he needs runners to go on a vision quest to get in touch with the spirit and find out what is going on/bring it back to work.

 BOOM! 

This way the runners would not waste half an hour scoping out the museum's security to know what they will be working along side, half an hour chatting it up with party guests, half an hour responding to the happening starting, which combined with the half an hour you burn meeting with Mr. Johnson adds up to having already spent/wasted half of the traditional four hours an adventure is suppose to run for before you get to the metaplanes. 

So with that suggestion made let me lay out my own theory/brief outline for a run I suppose I would call “The More Things Change.”

Assume the set up is what I mentioned above with Mr. Johnson saying you need to get in contact with a spirit and giving you some drugs to help you along with a vision quest.  You take them and then find out that before you will be allowed to visit the spirit in the present, first you must seek him out in both the past and the future because this is the metaplanes and mystical bullshit is our stock and trade.

“The past” that the runners find themselves in is more or less a steampunky version of Ancient Rome as someone used to living in the 6th world would imagine it to be. 

In shot the chariots have are pulled by literal iron horses with strange mechanical dodads and the carriages also have huge built in steam boiler thingies on them that can be stoked to make them go super duper fast, there are stone carvings for organizations like Vnited Vestal Virigns or Mars brand Javelins and of course there are metahumans of all types.  Magic still works as normal, if a runner is a melee based fighter then there is no change needed and if they prefer firearms then their weapons have become complicated steam and clockwork powered automated crossbows whose stats remain exactly the same.  Technomancers/riggers can bring their drones, which now look like clockwork versions of themselves but otherwise still effective as ever.

In this particular setting the runners instantly find themselves getting contacted by the middleman for some senator who wants them to spice up the latest round of coliseum games with the promise of getting to meet the senator personally when the time comes for payment. 

Said senator should be heavily hinted at/spelled out to be the spirit in question actually possessing someone so it should not be hard to get the runners to agree to do it since being contacted by yes men who serve powerful people to do bizarre jobs is what comes naturally after all. 

The game in question that the team should end up competing in is probably a no holds barred chariot race which quickly proves to be more about destroying the competition than outracing them.  One semilong and dramatic running battle later the runners should be the last chariot left standing and win.  When they shake hands with the senator after collecting their money they get warped through time to the future.

The future should be as be legally distinct from how Star Trek depicts the 24th century if you get what I am saying. 

While runners probably felt more or less at home in the brutality of ancient Rome they should be rather disquieted by this future setting.  The machines no longer run on the matrix but instead require you to access direct physical control panels, everyone is happy clam, smiling and trying to help and as they have moved into a post scarcity society they do not have any money that themselves runners could rob them of. 

The general feeling that we want to have the runners be subjected to is that the future has made them obsolete and not by gimping their characters and giving them an all but unusable skill set the way that the future section of Something Completely Different does, but instead by making it so that their skills and abilities are unnecessary/unneeded.  The future has passed them by and people who specialize in preforming dark deeds are not needed in this bright and shining future.

Let the runners wander around for a bit seeing how all the various races of metahumanity live together in harmony and spirits and AIs have been granted the exact same rights as normal human beings and indeed the current president of what is distinctly NOT a Federation is a spirit who cliams to have been alive all the way back to Ancient Rome.

Then based on how firepower heavy and combat happy your running team is there are two distinct ways that the run can go. 

For more discrete teams you can let them come up with a plan for how to break/sneak into a fancy press meeting in order to have at least one runner get into physical contact with the president since this will be enough to achieve the necessary requirements of the test.

The other one is that you can have a bunch of cybernetic lifeforms that are legally distinct from the borg show up who are immune to/adapt to become immune to the energy weapons that everyone in the future uses, but not to the good old fashioned kinetic/razer sharp blades/powerful bludgeoning weaponry of the runner team.  Big firefight and day savings ensues which leads to the runners receiving commendation from the president, they get to shake his hand, and they have passesed the test.

Then they go meet with the spirit, talk things out with him, convince him to go back to his work with the corporation, leave the metaplains behind them, get paid the money they were promised  and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

I'm not necessarily saying that “The More Things Change” would be a better run than “Now For Something Completely Different” but I feel like it would at least be more honest to the themes and give the runners more time to feel like they're experiencing a “real” past and future rather than just snapshots of them.

Granted on the other hand one could just as reasonably argue that “The More Things Change” is taking a artistically motivated high concept story, and reducing it to Bill And Ted's Excellent Shadowrun.  But hey, “The Hungovered” proved that you can get a good shadowrun by taking the basis of a comedy moving and inserting Shadowrunners into it. That one was about people waking up with no idea what is going on, this one would be about whacky shadowruns taking place in various different time periods.

Either way my point still stands that Now For Something Completely Different would be a stronger run if the Mr. Johnson who hired you sent you straight into the metaplanes without a lot of who hah in between.  You could get hired by Jasper Jay (the leader of the Minibosses) who says that a bit of performance art has gone awry and now stone statues are running through the city wrecking the place and the only way to stop them is to go on a mystical journey.

 It would give you time for either more adventures in the world of art (we've done classical, surrealist, and futurist.  Next up, you're all going into a goth themed artwork you're all turned into werewolves, vampires, and talk about how depressed you are!  After that you have to jump into a famous first edition of Action Comics Number One (or the 2072 equivalent which will not be copy written) and help Superman stop Lex Luthor (or vice versa, you are shadowrunners after all)!  Then you need to jump into a piece of folk artwork and win some money off of a couple of dogs through a few rounds of poker.

Once again I seem to be taking the concept and running with the general concept in a way that is more Night at the Museum than anything approaching highbrow, but in my opinon no concept however so clever is worth a damn if it isn't fun for  the players to enact.

In closing it's not so much that this is a bad adventure,

I do however think that it is somewhat far from a perfect adventure: it just does a poor job budgeting its time (that or it expects the runners to play for more than four hours, which even if you aren't doing it at a convention still starts to eat away at your mental fortitude and thus how much you can enjoy the run) that it does not in an way understand how the Matrix is suppose to work (this is more excusable since in point of fact NOBODY understands how the matrix works but it could at least understand the game mechanics of how some players don't even want to make a vague attempt at knowing how the Matrix works and instead just want to wish the hackers and technomancers a happy virtual playtime), and that it seems to take itself a bit more seriously than I'd expect a Shadowrun with a title stolen from Monty Python to do so. 

If the runners are going to be sent to various different mystical planes of existence based on famous works of art, there's no reason that they can't be famous works of art the players are more likely to be familiar with. 

The one caveat I have to the above statement is that the test of the Self, that really was just perfect in the effect it had upon me as a player and I wouldn't change a thing. 

Okay I lie, I'd change one thing.

How does the mission honestly expect a matrix specialist to defeat their doppelganger spirit? 

Most technomacners entire skill set is either hack it, or send a a drone to shoot it, unless the mission is far more liberal about technomacners being able to take drones with them into the metaplanes, then it would seem like they don't have a chance in hell of winning that fight. 

One possible patch that my GM suggested is that players who have defeated their own personal daemons are allowed to join the fight with those who are having trouble one pass later (actually my gm just let the technomancer defeat his doppleganger by hacking it). 

This of course is not a perfect solution (it turns the theme of the challenge from one of being able to conquer your own personal daemons to the importance of having friends, especially friends who are better than you at combat) but it beats having the mission grind to a halt so the technomancer can run through the test a couple hundred times until by an incredibly unlikely dice roll their random arm flailing actually hurts an evil spirit. 

Another possible patch is having the entire test be done more or less without die rolling much like the test of the past, and simply see if /how the character can deal with this manifestation of their own inner faults and flaws.....

Hey wait a moment, I just came up with another great idea for a shadowrun! 

The runners get hired by a father who recently lost his daughter while he was vacationing in the town of Mute Mountain, he believes that she's been kidnapped by an evil cult there that worships the horrors and plan to sacrifice her during the next full moon/correlation of the planets which is X number of days away. 

So then the runners have to drive out to the town, and at first glance the place is deserted, but then a strange white fog rolls in...

The sad thing is that I'm not even kidding I would play/write that Shadowrun.




« Last Edit: <08-21-12/1853:11> by jamesfirecat »

lurkeroutthere

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« Reply #2 on: <08-22-12/1118:19> »
At least you didn't play the pre-patched version. SCD won the "most hated mod" award at the cons it was run in it's original incarnation.
"And if the options are "talk to him like a grown up" versus "LOLOLOL murder him in his face until he doesn't come back," I know which suggestion I'm making." - Critias

No team I'm on has ever had a problem with group think.

UmaroVI

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« Reply #3 on: <08-22-12/1238:30> »
Yeah, having played the pre-patched and post-patched version, the post-patched version was better.

I liked this adventure less than James, and the main points I disagree about are:

I think the puzzle with the tomb was a terrible idea. It felt like it escaped from a not-very-good 80s adventure game. Ever played one where there's a puzzle you can't solve logically, so you just try every inventory item on every object until something happens, and when it does, you're not like "duh how did I not think of this," but rather "that was a terrible puzzle?" It felt like that. I didn't feel like we figured it out so much as that we played [Verb] the [Object] until something happened.

I gotta bitch about this. In all the artwork and artistic movements referenced in this adventure, guess which one is conspiciously absent? Dadaism. There's references to surrealism and futurism, which were related, and to a Baroque and a Realist painting. It's especially odd that Mister Dada lives in a Realist painting rather than, you know, a Dadaist one.

lurkeroutthere

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« Reply #4 on: <08-23-12/1459:41> »
I'm just a dumb IT major who needs a ruler to draw a straight line. All the art stuff went skidding over my head. I know that makes some people cry bitter tears but I always figure if it's looked back at in a thousand years at all it will be cataloged in the same class as the Gaga/Madonna movement in music.
"And if the options are "talk to him like a grown up" versus "LOLOLOL murder him in his face until he doesn't come back," I know which suggestion I'm making." - Critias

No team I'm on has ever had a problem with group think.