[Rallen12]

I have a issue that follows me in every RPG i GM:

I can't seem to find a balance to battle encounters

either the encounter is way to weak or way too strong

for example my players have a party made of a mage two sams and a decker

i have alot of problems making battle encounter that actually challenge them

So perhaps i make an encounter of about 3 lonestar officers, they dealt with them just fine like it was nothing

So i decided to up my game a little and the next one was a force 6 spirit and 4 lonestars each one having a hellhound to command, let's just say it didn't go well.

The worst thing is i find myself alot of times having to bail them out, because i feel like it is my inability to make challenges.

How do you as a GM or if your a player how does your GM find proper encounters?

[Agonar]

One fast way to do things is to just adjust dice on the fly.

Say you want a challenging encounter, and there's only 3 Stars harassing the group, but after the first shot is fired, you realize that the party is doing way more damage than the enemies have armor.. or they are rolling way more dice than you are defending with.  Add 2-4 dice to their defense tests.  Add a few points of Armor.  Or, a 4th Lone Star officer pulls up on a motorcycle as back-up, a little late for the original Call.

If, on the other hand, you realize that you are doing way too much damage to the party, then take a few dice away.  Without telling the group, reduce the armor of the enemies by a few points, drop the damage code of their weapons by 1.

There are a whole lot of tweaks you can do on the fly like that.  Also, if an encounter is too tough, but the group has managed to put down a couple (or the majority) of the threats, maybe the remainder throw their guns down and surrender.  While some people may face severe repercussions by Corporate masters, they aren't necessarily getting paid to die needlessly.

[Black]

Re: How do you balance encounters?

Poorly.

It can be difficult to find the right mix for your encounters with shadowrun.  For example, Grunts can be weak, but then put them in some armour and the encounter drags on for ever.Spirits/Dragons/Mages etc can be easily overwhelming, but then a lucky shot and its over.

Here a few simple steps/rules which may assist.

1) Know your team.  Who do you have available and what are they equiped with?  No/hurt mage and no heavy weapons?  keep magic/spirits at a minimum.

2) Plan how you want the encouter to go.  Think about as if your were writing a scene for a movie/novel.  The custom the encounter to match.  Plan the environmental modifers ahead of time. 

3)  Grunts are weak, but armor will make them much tougher to take out.  If your team doesn't have heavy weapons/magic, then the encounter may drag a bit.  So, in my humble opinion, be careful not to heavily armour your grunts or make them retreat easily.

4)  If you want to force a player retreat... overwhelming numbers of low armoured grunts backed by drones.  Spirits in that mix may just ace your players, so becareful when adding magic to the soup.    Large numbers of grunts are less likely to kill your players while making them consider retreat.  Powerful enemies are more likely to kill your players because players are always far less likely to retreat unless its obvious to them that victory is out of the question.  Low number, powerful enemies look like challenges, endless grunts look like work.

5) No ambushes without warning.  Not dice roll warnings (too random or not random enough, but mostly because it doesn't give the player that extra , but something they could notice but may have trouble guessing what it means.

6) Try testing the enounter with bought successes when desiging the encounter.  This should give you a rough indication of the average encounter's challenge.  If the number of successes would result in hitting and damanging more often then not, maybe tone down the encounter. (though it depends on the enounter in mind).

7) encourage the players to think smart and use their spells and gear in unique ways.  If they plan well, then let them walk over the bad guys, they deserve it for thinking ahead and being prepared. 

[SnackerBob]

I've noticed that you seriously upped the ante on your second encounter. I'd expect a 4 person Shadowrun team to mop the floor with 3 LS cops. Slowly up the NPCs until you find a balance.

If your NPCs are dying too quickly, make them smarter.

[Michael Chandra]

Also, position: Stack up some negative modifiers and let the enemies use cover to drag out the match. Also, they should split up against AoE effects. That Spirit should come from behind and try to Fear a player, for example.

[Crunch]

Don't be afraid to have a few options built into encounters either. I'll often build an encounter with an idea of what to do if it needs a little extra kick to keep things interesting.

[Mmurphy]

Don't worry so much about balancing the encounters, sometimes the characters need to learn to run or work a different way out of the encounter.  Your job as a GM is simply to describe the scene around them and let them work out what to do.  If you already know the outcome, what is the point of having them do it.

If the encounter is 'too easy' then let them win easily.  If the encounter is too hard, then they should run away and find another way to accomplish their goal.  If you make every encounter balanced then the players will start to use this during every encounter. 

Off-Topic:

This last weekend I was at my local gaming store and they were having a 'pathfinders' game (2x of them).  I ended up having to listen to them for about 1 hour (playing a table top game next to them).  I recall thinking that the 'Role-playing' game they were doing was just a non-computerized game of World of Warcraft.  Go here, do this, then go here and do that.  Rinse and repeat till you are done.  No thought process, just following a pre-generated map.  I played a single 'Missions' game at Gen-Con this year and I got the impression that these are the same things.  We were lead to each 'clue' and no matter what, we could not deviate from the path, we would end up at the same place in the end (the plot points may change, but the end was the same regardless).

Back on topic

Don't pre-plan everything knowing what will happen, just let it happen.  If they do some surprise move that finishes the run quickly (like finding the runaway with a spirit using 'search' power) let them finish quickly, avoiding everything that 'should have happened in the middle'. 

   

[Michael Chandra]

Many Missions game are built up with the option of alternative paths, but yes, usually you'll end up at the same point. This is quite reasonable, since otherwise the thing would become huge and GMs aren't supposed to just improvise complete story segments since that could significantly impact the difference between different characters who have played the same adventure.

If you want to play it as homegame, there's far more freedom and you can throw all kinds of alternative stuff at people. But even then, a homegame starts with a big path choice: Either you take the Run or the session ends.

What Mission did you play, by the way?

[SnackerBob]

But even then, a homegame starts with a big path choice: Either you take the Run or the session  ends.

I've noticed this in the "Debugging" sections since 2nd. Do a lot of groups actually say "I know you out a lot of effort into creating this, but Fuck off!"

Having only looked at a cursory glance at "Back in Business", though, I see that runners get a magic Three 'runs by near happenstance. It's like some Magical Force is pulling everyone towards the same goals there. I would like my Deus ex Machina to at least be implanting nanites in their systems, thank you very much.

[Michael Chandra]

I actually heard a story recently about a group of players that went "we want 10k each, period", so they ended up walking away from the table. It's a violation from the player-gm contract, haven't heard of many people doing that.

As for Back in Business and Chasin' The Wind: It's part of the game, really, part of suspension of disbelief. You get offered 3 quick runs in a row, partially because you're obviously already in the area, partially because they want to introduce the different plotlines. After that nearly every Mission exists of a single run, or two runs that reasonably follow up on each other. If you really dislike such a way of introducing the plotlines, just skip Mission 0 and drop them in Missions 1 and 2. At worst they find out there's a few things and people they haven't heard of before while they could have, and they miss out on some easy mass-contact-loyalty. Same goes for Season 5: Just skip the first Mission.

[SnackerBob]

Eesh. Aside from starving out the PCs and invoking the inevitable complaint of GM opposition, I can't combat that.

And as for the second... Well, we pay for Missions, right? I am willing to cough up for more actual Missions that explore things organically rather than a Mission that slaps 3 Shadowruns together by happenstance. Or put 3 milk runs in the same Mission to get all the parts in place. I don't know, I'm just another bit of the vocal community.

[Michael Chandra]

I understand the criticism. I simply do not share it. But like I said, it's only the intro-missions that do this. If you don't like it, don't get it and don't play it. You still got the rest of the season to work with, even if you cut out part of the story.

[SnackerBob]

I definitely understand. I get why Missions are the way they are, but a tenured team could feel railroaded or a suspension of disbelief. I don't mean to be antagonistic here, and I've heard great things about the Missions stuff in general. I just don't want to put down $6 and find that the mission is going to upset my group. If/when I get one (see previous thread on THAT issue). How does one even know if a Mission is worth paying for until they pay for it?

[Michael Chandra]

Read the reviews, or ask people for their experiences. The first six missions of Season 5 have all been played at conventions already, so there's plenty of people around who already played some, if not all, of them.

But yes, Missions is basically a lower-power campaign which is supposed to be easy to step into and easy to run within a 4-hour timeslot. This means that more experienced players might feel a bit constrained when strictly following the format. Of course if you don't care about having official characters, you can just turn it into a homegame. I turned SRM04-3/5/7/11 into a 7-session homegame where I edited it to take place within a month, adding a feeling of urgency and "the entire city is going up in flames" to the story. I added my own storyline to it, which in the case of Election Day made sure it had a better flow and the players wouldn't balk at the first job due to conflicting loyalty. Even added an element from Storm Front in, one of the players still resents their Fixer/Johnson for not telling them they were being sent to hand Jeffries over to Urubia...

And if it makes you feel better: It's rather obvious in hindsight that part of the reason you're hired is being at the wrong place in the wrong time. If you weren't already doing a job near location X, you wouldn't be offered a job to go to X. Call it Fixer Networking, "I got a rush job, get me a group that's nearby, don't care if it's boozing or doing another job". To me it's no more than logical that in Chasin' The Wind you get those 3 jobs in a row, since it's bad weather and not many nuts would be out there in the Containment Zone at that time. With Back in Business, doesn't one of the jobs come from being arrested due to accidentally running into a riot, and they were looking for some useful deniable assets already? No way KE would break up that riot that fast if they weren't already trying to find some scapegoats to pressure into doing their dirty work.

[Pollution]

Well, my thoughts on Season 5 so far are pretty skewed by the fact that a single grenade makes a fight end in about 2 turns at the most with my group (not 2 initiatives, 2 passes).

The enemies are either REALLY tough, or really weak.  Again, grenades are a bit OP, but that's been discussed before.

So far, I've run 4/5 Sprawls Wild games and we're enjoying it immensely.  Worth the money.
Firing Lines, from what I've read of it is also worth it.
If Missions were $3.00 like last season, absolutely worth it.  but $6?  Not so much IMO.  I'm a bit disappointed with the price point this season.  It's too high IMO.

The're REALLY good, don't get me wrong.  It's amazing that I can run my group of scatterbrains (myself included) through an entire run in 4-5 hours.  Every week is Karma/NuYen earned, and you feel rewarded for playing.  Not like the games where you'd play for 6 hours, go home, wait 2 weeks, go back, maybe finish up and get 4-5 Karma for the entire thing.  I feel like these are well balanced in the Rewards vs. Time/Energy respect.  I just hate the price point at this moment.

Oh, and if anyone tells you there's nothing for a Technomancer or Decker to do, they haven't run Copy Cat or Ashes yet.  Anyone with Cyber is a target for a Hacker.  ANYONE.  (My Techno player Res Spiked the Big Bad from Copy Cat's cyber eyes until they bricked....fight went WAY smoother then I thought it would.)