Developer Feedback from the BGG forums. These are slightly out of context, but they primarily will answer some lingering questions:
From Jay Schneider:
I'm the Design Producer for Shadowrun: Crossfire (Fire Opal Media is the design studio, Catalyst is our Publisher). To answer your questions:
1) There are 3 missions that ship with the base game but...
1a) You'll find that each mission has many variants and the variants can be combined
1b) They're balanced across the Karma levels
1c) There will be promotional missions in abundance occurring with the release of the game.
1d) Crossfire has the feel of a RPG with the mechanics of a Cooperative Deckbuilder. Missions = well Missions (or Modules in D&D). We expect (and will encourage) players to build their own.
2) Regarding Expansion plans, we haven't made any announcments yet. And announcements like that come from the Publisher, my counterparts and friends at Catalyst. Will it suffice to say the team has been and is still working?
-Jay
When Asked: Jay, could you clarify whether you can play this as two-players playing two characters? Or, if you have less than four, will players need to control more than one character? I've read conflicting reports on this. Thanks!
Different missions have differing number of players. IMHO in general 4 players is ideal, however we designed Escort to work extremely well with 1, 2, 3 or 4 players.
You could try to have a single player run more than one character. However, it would be hard. Really hard. Crossfire requires focus and running 2 cards would require an extremely experienced player. I'm sure we tried it with a designer playing 2 cards but it was the exception. Generally when down a person, we'd play Escort as it rocks with less than 4 players.
When asked: 1: How does the game handle differing Karma levels? Like a new player sitting in on a higher level group and playing a difficult mission?
Re characters with differing Karma Levels. You'll find each mission card has a scaling section. Here's an example - actual missions vary.
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Karma Scaling: Each runner gains the following Karma award or penalty based on how much Karma they have.
Karma in Upgrades Award or Penalty
0–10 Full Karma award
11–30 –1 Karma penalty
31–50 –2 Karma penalty
51–75 –3 Karma penalty
Each additional +25 Additional –1 Karma penalty
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This means that if the Mission awards 5 Karma for completion if one player has 100 Karma, they'll only receive 1 Karma for completion. There new player friend with 0 Karama would receive a full 5 Karma.
We found this system allowed players of very diverse Karma levels to play together in differing experiences from Power Leveling a single character to letting a single player catch up to the team. I think you'll find the difficulty holds with the rewards.
From Sean McCarthy:
Hey! I'm one of the designers. I hope I can resolve the confusion about playing with 2-3 players.
You can play the game with fewer than four players, and each player still only controls one character.
For a 2-player game, for example, I might be a Human Decker while my partner is a Troll Mage. We'll each also be given one of the other two role cards (Face and Street Samurai), because there are cards like Grenade that say "the Street Samurai chooses...", and the like. Someone has to make that choice!
I think the game is at its best with four players, because that gives you the maximum amount of cooperation and the most coordination problems to solve. There are more obstacles in play at once, and more possibilities to consider. But I still like it just fine with fewer than four. We playtested a ton of games with 2-3 players.
The Extraction mission involves escorting an NPC to safety through floods of obstacles. Since it inherently features the extra body and the extra enemies, it's particularly well suited to 2-3 player games, and we even added solo rules for it.
I think everything will become clearer once the game and rulebook are available, so I'm hoping that's soon!
P.S. If you were seeking a greater challenge, you could certainly play games where you control more than one character (like you can in many cooperative games). But I wanted to clarify that there are rules for playing with the full range of 2-4 players, and they work pretty much like you'd expect.