Sorry for the thread necro but this seems like the right place.
EDIT: I cleaned this up to be a little more coherent and include more things I liked so it doesn’t sound as negative.
I just played this mission (run by jamesfirecat) and I want to give a few brief comments:
1) I thought the first two scenes were really strong. I liked the characterization of the Prince, the way he was dismissive about money (which made me sad that he was so stingy, it didn’t work for me for him to offer me a pittance to go get in the middle of a gang war). Admittedly he is better than SRM-10 Twist and Insult (9,000 on TR 6) but not by much. I did expect more from someone called a Prince.
2) I liked the scene at the restaurant. My team channeled “Blues Brothers”. It was hilarious as the Ogre, Fomori, and Naga made a mess of things, being rude to customers and playing with their food.
3) I disliked how none of the gangs really cared about the outcome of the gang war enough to offer significant payment. I expected one side to say “yeah, we’ll pay you 5,000ny to go and fix this for us”, and that never happened. To me, that broke the immersion of the situation. I felt that the gang leaders didn’t actually want the situation resolved (especially the Shooters or the Spans who have no motivation besides loyalty). I think a good move would have been to total up the loot gained by defeating them (and then dividing by 10 for “hot price”) and offered that as a reward to work for the gang. It’s not increasing the payment any (since you could normally just beat them up and take the money), but I think it would be a good touch for immersion.
“I would like this resolved, I can only pay you 5,800 total (which is why I never hired shadowrunners to win this gang war), but I’d like it resolved to my satisfaction”. Remember the PCs are only hired to *end the gang war* so they can double collect from a gang and the Prince.
I did like how james addressed this, which was to take the money that wasn’t offered by the Prince (due to low negotiate roll) and give it out to the gangs to make them pay you for ending the adventure in a specific way (return Smiles to Redfeather, etc). That way the runners didn’t get more than 10,000 and people actually cared about the outcome. I think that would also have been a clever thing to put in the debugging section.
4) James ran with the magical mind-control plot. When we found out we got her alone, dispelled the spell, and asked her what was up (to make sure she wasn’t consenting and it wasn’t a different sustained spell).
Unlike in James’ group which had an elaborate plot to trick Stumps, mine was more violent. Fueled by the rage of NPCs using “Mental Magic Spells"
http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=4035.0 (which is legal but wasn’t when the characters were made assuming they were ever illegal), and some moderate rage at mind rape (literally), my character set forth to kill the drek out of Stumps.
Tempered by the idea that “hey, it’s shadowrun, sometimes I’m paid to do terrible things, this can just be another terrible thing I get paid to do once a week for the right price”; I had our face text him a new deal, he pays us to look the other way, and we look the other way. Specifically our offer was:
Nothing: We kill you
Bronze package: We beat you up, take your things, but leave you alive
Silver package: We leave you and your gang alone, and go on our merry way
Gold package: Silver package + we will stop Redfeather and fix the situation
Platinum package: Gold + we’ll go get you more elves to mindrape, because we’re amoral mercenaries who do whatever the job of the week is.
He decided he would pay us nothing, ate 2 SnS bullets and a pair of force 5 stunballs, and then took a nap. I don’t even think the rest of the team had to do anything. The pair of stunballs wiped out all the rest of the gangers too, so mission complete!
Everyone got to do stuff, and that was good, but I wish Stumps had been a little less cartoony “I will not pay you to keep my secret!” and more reasonable “Yeah you got me, have 10,000ny to slay my enemies and keep this quiet”. I don’t think it is unreasonable at for him to say “screw you, I’m in my hideout with all my friends and we out number you”. I think that makes perfect sense coming from a guy who sees what he wants (Smiles) and takes it by force to reject another’s offer of force. I think this was a really consistent characterization. I would have appreciated more direction to the GM in this case however, such as money he could give try to bribe people with, or what his end goal was. Why did he even do this in the first place?
5) I just want to comment on the Shadowrunner Union and pay in missions in general. This is not specific to this mission, nor is it critical of any one writer. The shadowrunner Union is real, Union rules say you have to take 7 days to do any run, regardless of how long it takes. Thus if the Johnson offers to pay 5,000 for 24 hours of my runner’s time, he/she/it is actually paying for 168 hours (since I can offer no less). Unfortunately this means a job that is reasonable at 200ny an hour is laughable at 30ny an hour.
When the Johnson wants to pay my character to solve their problems and put his/her/its life on the line for 30ny an hour it makes me laugh, cry, sigh and then accept. I laugh in their face because I used to be able to take disadvantages that pay better than the run! (Day Job was allowed in Season 3 and gave 1,000 a week for 10 hours of work, or 5,000 for 40 hours of work).
I cry because it make me sad that chromed characters who need the nuyen to buy better implants and improve don’t get the resources they need. I play a mage at the moment so I’m fine with whatever (more karma feeds me more magic and more initiations) but while 30 karma for me is 2 initiations, for them it’s +1 intuition or raising a skill to 4. They really do need the money.
I sigh because it’s a constant problem, that runs pay too little. I finally accept because if I say no, they aren’t gong to magically have an appropriate (2,500ny per karma they offer) amount of money, if I don’t accept, I don’t play. This is a problem with Missions in general (if you don’t accept, you don’t play, even when the pay is terrible, the job is smothering babies, and you learn half way through that it’s Damian Knight’s baby and he’s coming after you!)
I personally think a minimum of 10,000ny a run to is needed to get my character to pay attention to a Johnson. That should be their staring offer which gets negotiated up to around 2000-3000 per karma reward. That level of payout really incentives the character to risk their life and take a week of their time. Remember, if a character could get a legitimate job for the same price and not risk their lives (mages/hackers/street sams who don’t have psychotic tendencies that make them a workplace liability), why would they run?
Finally, I think shadow running should pay a bit more and rely less on “you can loot things” as an excuse for low payment. It’s unprofessional and this isn’t D&D, I’m not slaying orcs for their AK-97s, I’m solving problems for rich people with talk or ultraviolence depending on the week.
