Last night ran Shadowrun for the first time in over four years.
Of course most of the evening was character creation, 4 players (all having last played 4 years ago or longer), phys ad, mage, cover-ops (nearly stock from SR4A), and a sammie.
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Food Fight Adventure Spoilers, heh*
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It was getting late, but they were all "mostly done" so...out comes the map and I'm reading the flavor text to Food Fight. My (terrible) Morning Talk Show Host voice kicks in as I read the Stuffer Shack aisles' contents verbatim. The players picked up on certain items that their characters were interested in and off they go. Based on the description of the shifty nervous npc in the ice cream section the "significant-other observer of one of the players" leans over to me and says, "I can tell right now who the bad guy is," and points to the mini in the ice cream section. I smile and nod, "he is acting strange."
They all notice the two rocker/ganger kids shoplifting the petfood. The mage approaches them as they're making out and says, "let me pick up the tab for that." The girl leans over (her boyfriend continues hugging her and kissing her neck) and says, "what ever you like, jack."
The elven woman comes in with her crying kid. They make it just past the mage and the ganger kids.
Then the explosion. The people in the front half are thrown several meters back (I just randomly determined how far by a 1d6 meters for those "real close" and 1d6/2 meters for those "middle close" and left the two players in the back alone...but shocked).
As the PCs are just coming to their senses, the two bad guys come in yelling. Initiative.
The physad and the sammie are fastest, tied. The physad crouches down and begins to search for the kid. The Sammie picks up a large pack of powdered nutrasoy and begins calmly walking down the back aisle.
The mage casts improved invisibility and notices that the other three PCs are getting 3 IPs per Combat Turn while he only gets one. Next game I'm expecting a "tweak" in character design to remedy that issue.
The covert-ops specialist begins to hack the Stuffer Shacks system...then realizes he doesn't have Hacking ("Oh, that's a part of the Cracking skill group, not Computers...") so he just rolls [frag, I forget, it's Hacking + Exploit...there it is] Exploit for hacking on the fly. The System starts to detect him but not at threshold yet.
The two bad guys just walk a bit further in on the first pass (delaying actions until the next pass).
Pass 2.
The physad finds the kid, but the kid's knocked out so no need to keep him quiet. So she activates her Strength boost ability (if you can't tell, I don't have my books with me so I'm just passing over finer details). The sammi throws the bag of nutrasoy into the air and shoots it, showering down the fine flour-like partlcles causing a momentary "soy-invisibility shield" between him and the bad guys (and narrowly missing the invisible mage crawling on the floor, hehe). The bullet ricochets off the roof, hitting random food stuffs (rolling randomly on the food fight tables, natch).
The mage keeps crawling. The special-ops hacks deeper into the Stuffer Shacks' system (doing much better since he had the time to adjust skill points and buy that Cracking skill group, hehe)...almost there (but so is the SS system).
The bad guy mage enters in through the torn up store front.
The ugly bad guy shoots at the sammie. Sammie decides not to go on full defense. With the bad lighting, the nutrasoy in the air, and the aisle cover...grazing miss with some food splatter. The other bad guy fires off a few rounds from his AK in surprise of gun shots at nothing in particular.
Pass 3
Physad wants to rush...but realizes can't get there since run speed is broken up by the three passes. So continues to move foward, crouching low. Sammie fires off two shots. First one misses. Second one...bam! final DV 6P and knocks the baddie on his back.
Mage gets farther towards the back (probably enjoying the thought of getting increased reflexes spell and sustaining focus). Special Ops hacks the Stuffer Shack without setting off alarms (with Security level access no less).
The baddie mage casts Confusion on the Physad, -2 die baby. The other two baddies move in a bit more.
And that's where we stopped as it was now midnight on a work night (at least for me).
Some may not like letting players change their characters, but for a group very little experience with Shadowrun (and almost no experience with 4th edition), Food Fight is the perfect little mini adventure to allow the players to say, "I'm going to do this" the find out how much they suck at doing it and deciding if they want their character to actually be bad, average, good, or expert at that thing. It's not covering everything, of course, but it's a great start.
Where I dropped the ball, at least where I've realized it, is not enough flavor text on the AR environment. Not enough Snorkel ads screaming "squeeze me! drink me!" and what not.
....until next game
