And now what I liked, what I did not like, and how to improve what I did not like....
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The Pros/Things I liked: The mission meeting (well fake mission meeting you went to before being knocked out) takes place in Terminal, which means the players are perfectly in character to bring all their heaviest gear with them even if they don't get to use it straight away. This was a big selling point for me as I had just recently shelled out around 100,000 New Yen so that I could finally afford the Gnome Pod and provide myself with an additional 20 hardened armor not to mention an even more powerful gun than the one I was currently shooting!
Also, if nothing else, this being the final mission the set up for the final battle is suitably climatic as you are fighting the big bad guy with a weapon that could kill off a lot of the city on top of the tallest building in the city (or at least one of the tallest buildings) and the bad guy even is capable of turning into a lizard of some sort (drake, lizard, what's the big difference?) if you give him a chance.
Once again it is worth stating that this mission unlike Done Deal (the last one in Denver) manages to lay out a situation that does a good job of explaining why exactly the runners are changing cities no matter the outcome as opposed to doing a big favor for Ghostwalker only to have him passively aggressively break up with us during Everybody is Your Friend, as happened with our group.
The way that corporate rewards were done in this mission where they actually just gave you outlines of what you could and could not get was probably far better than the principle of giving you some particular item as had been the case for all the other runs we'd been on in New York.
The Cons/What I didn't like: Well it happened again, strap in people this is gonna be a while.
To start with if I find myself playing one more mission which begins with me waking up with no idea what is going on and without my gear (and I hear that Now for Something Completely Different used to be one of those runs also!) do you know what I am going to do?
I am going to find out who wrote it, then I am going to take that person drinking. I am going to take them drinking and see to it that they have a huge night on the town and completely and utterly 100% plasterd.
Then when they pass out in my car I am going to check them into a no questions asked hotel. After that I will strip them down to just their underwear (and bra if a women wrote the adventure) before tossing their possessions in the trunk of my car and leaving them with no idea just what the hell is going on and where their stuff is.
Except that while waking up with no gear and no idea what was going on, was a playful diversion in The Hungovered (as your gear is one cakewalk of a fight and one room away from you), in here the run really insisted in rubbing it in your face, right on up to the point of having you fight bad guys who are armed with your own weapons while you have only a couple of crummy pistols at best.
Whose bright idea was it that this run should penalize the runners by making it so that the better they've been doing and the better the gear they have, the harder this fight is going to be? Shadowrun has enough situations that benefit mages already, (next time I see a mage forced to check his foci at the door to some fancy club it'll be the first time) did we need one that so utterly rammed home the shaftings of being a street sam?
Also in the Hungovered, the person who captured you was someone who had really and truly earned our trust, to the point that even when he pulled a gun on us, we thought he had just been mind controlled to fight against us rather than hating us. In this mission it's a Jonson we have never worked with before who just hired us... pre-getting knocked out us should probably have been at least relatively cautious of him since it's not the first time we've been betrayed.
So once again it bears repeating, it is, and will always be a stupid, stupid, stupid idea for the villains to have just magically (and I mean magically as in “I don't have to explain it, it's magic” not even as in “force 8 stunbolt” kind of magic) managed to defeat the runners. It is especially immersion breaking when when the villains themselves clearly don't have a chance against us given the ease with which we mopped them up once we actually had our gear back.
This once again gives us the exact same problem we had back in TRO 2.7.3 where the mission difficulty is front loaded.
In theory difficulty should be like climbing a mountain, you start low and build your way up. This one was like skiing down a hill, start high and only go down from there.
Now lets talk about the next big problem I have with the mission, the villains.
Sid, you have a location that has technological Bullshit defensive measures that will annihilate anyone who comes near. You have a woman who has access to these codes. You want to set your super weapon up on top of this building so it will be protected by the super special defensive measures..... WHY THE HELL DID YOU NOT BRING THE WOMAN WITH YOU? ITS NOT THAT HARD TO THINK OF HONESTLY!
If you have a device that generates an invincible shield, do you put the power supply for that device inside or outside of the shield it generates? The problem with all of this is that why he did not do this is obvious, because if he had done this basic logical action, then there would be no run as there would be no way to get close to the MDC building without being blown out of the sky or into tiny chunks.
If you find yourself in a situation where the villain has to act like a complete idiot or else there is no way to beat him, please go back to the drawing board and rethink things for a bit.
I tell a slight lie because there a couple possible ways to have stopped Sid even if he brought Dominique with him and honestly they all would have made things far more interesting.
One idea is that you need to have a technomancer/hacker get fairly close to the Ares helicopter that Sid has stolen, if he can get in signal range of it somehow (even linking through repeater drones which may be too small for the building to care about) then he can hack it.
Sid can't turn the anti-air guns on it to shoot it down, you have it fly over to the runners, and then the runners can get in and fly up to him for a showdown.
Another possibility is that clearly the MDC can't have only one person who has the codes to it, it seems more likely that Dominique was just the easiest person with those codes for Sid to get leverage over.
But who else could we possibly find who is certain to have those codes and be in New York?
How about Damien Knight?
The runners worked with a fake Mr. Damien Knight back in Mission 7, it cold make for an interesting counter point if they could see the differences (or similarities) between Damien and his double. Likewise, by having the PC's work with Damien Knight, you could actually create something of a major emotional moment by having Izzy get to see her parents reunited/get to see the man she has just discovered is her father when all the shooting is said and done.
The mission is full of missed opportunities like that for cool things to happen which ultimately didn't because there was no call for them to happen.
Another thing that I was prepared to do was that after we rescued Dominique and needed to get her out of the terminal to safety was to have us (and Gumbo in particular because he's the best at facing) become impromptu rabble rousers, who would stir up an angry mob of my NEO-A brothers and then lead them on an assault against the police blockade.
It'd be sort of like Warrior From the Lost World, except that the good guys would driving Megaweapon! But that never happened because apparently us choppering out of terminal works just fine despite the massive crack down it is under, I guess that's another side effect of the magical bullshit codes that Dominique has.
Speaking of my NEO-A brothers... yeah it's time to complain about that.
Do you know what the last major NEO-A attack on the corporation was in New York that the runners heard about /witnessed? I'm pretty sure that I do, it was in Knight at the Opera (if I am wrong please correct me).
Do you know what is was? A bunch of people dressed like clowns interrupt an opera and throw the 2070 version of glitter-bombs which also happen to contain tiny microphones so that they could find out what the rich people said about the 47% when they thought they were alone.
It was an attack that was ultimately harmless and about standing up to the man by trying to interrupt something that really only rich people and their bodyguards were going to be attending.
Do you know what the lat major mission with focused on the NEO-A's was? It was Food Poisoning. Food Poisoning a mission where our NEO-A contact flips a shit in guilt over feeding people poisoning grain that was poisoned in a way that even corporate laboratory testing could not notice, so it's not like Peace Man had any chance at all of finding this stuff out. But still Peace Man felt incredibly upset over it.
So.... HOW THE FUCK DID THE NEO-AS GO FROM THROWING GLITTER BOMBS AND PLAYING ROBBINHOOD WITH TRUCKLOADS OF GRAIN TO BEING MOTHERFUCKING BIOTERRORISTS?
I may just have rose colored glasses on because Longshot had a NEO-A affilation from Everybody is Your Friend up until the end of this mission (and not just because he was leaving New York, they ended up sending a "cleaner" after him) but if there was suppose to be some subtle darkening of the NEO-A's character between the early missions and this one, I sure as hell did not see it.
Okay, they acted like dicks who did not trust the runners in Firestorm, but you know what, everyone acted like paranoid dicks in Firestorm, so with no “control group” of reasonable people to measure their behavior against that's not a good measuring stick one way or another in my book.
Which conveniently brings me to the next big problem with the mission, the affiliation request that you get if you're a member of the NEO-A....
You're told that it's now your job to help Sid.
In Shadowrun you're expected to do a lot of horrible things for various amounts of money. If you need proof you only need to look at Burning Bridges where the entire run is based around you needing to do the horrible thing of blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge.
But this mission, asks you to do a really REALLY REALLY REALLY horrible thing, for no money. Okay yes there is the NEO-A reward for completing the side mission, but to get that you also have to give up on the money that Dominique would pay you, not to mention forcing all your party members to give up on all the money that Dominique would pay them, and well you can guess what happens to runners who decide that they'll decrease the entire team's take in order to line their own pockets.
Equally importantly, if you agree with Sid then you throw away the last major fight of the run and screw over getting any kind of cathartic resolution to the run.
Lets assume that the run is being made by a team of all NEO-A members, who don't have moral objections to working with Sid. But if they did, then the run would just end there when they arrive on the roof with the Doomsday weapon firing.
It should not be that easy to release a major Bio-weapon in New York City.
If you were going to tell some runners that they should trust Sid and work with him, then you should have come up with an appropriately climatic fight where you have to defend the Doomsday weapon against a raid of NYPDINC SWAT teams either ground troops, or choppers or whatever, you know make you feel like you're one of the bad guys in the first Die Hard movie.
Have them shut down power to the entire building/area/whatever in order to disable all the bullshit security weapons (another Die Hard reference YAY) so that they can get close enough to make you need to defend with firearms/vehicle mounted weaponry.
But all of the above bullshit does not even touch the elephant in the room of this situation believe it or not!
Fulfilling the NEO-A side mission on this run requires you to trust Sid.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU EVEN CONSIDER THAT POSSIBILITY?
Sid already “fake hired” you for one job locked you in an elevator, somehow knocked you out, and then was going to use you and the rest of your team as the fall guys for one of the worst Bio Terrorist attacks in human history.
If he's already shown that he's willing/planning on selling you up the river to the police/ MDC, why should they not expect him to do it again the first chance he gets?
There is NO FUCKING SLIGHT that you can commit against a shadowrunner, not steal his gear, not shoot him, not actually capture him and send him to jail, that is worse than being their Mr. Johnson and stabbing them in the back.
Because the other stuff I mentioned is about just doing your job as another runner or as a police officer, betrayal and breaking the bond of one's word in a society where nobody is very big on formal contracts should be a very big big taboo indeed.
Any Mr. Johnson who does that should get his pants sued off.... and by “pants” I mean “face” and by “sued” I mean “shot” and by “off” I mean “repeatedly”.
Why do the NEO-A's expect you to work with someone who treated you like that?
I get that Sid is a leader of a splinter group of super violent NEO-A's that recently arrived in town. I get that he acquired a major Bio Weapon from whereverthefuckistan. I get that he's managed to stir up the entire Terminal and bribed some local gangs into doing his dirty work. I get that he somehow managed to gather together a badass enough strike team to successfully capture a girl who probably should have had bodyguards like WOAH though if that team ever shows up in this mission I didn't notice them. I can even close my eyes, clench my fists and sort of buy the fact that he somehow through some bullshit method managed to knock us all out by creating the super duper best-est ambush in the world, maybe he had a technomancer hack the elevator that we had walked into then made it speed up really fast and slam it into the ground.... oh and for some reason Mastermind was with us in person instead of just rigging Arnold from a van somewhere and thus should have been perfectly safe.
But what I CAN NOT BUY/ACCEPT IS THAT HE HAS TOTALLY OVERTAKEN THE ENTIRE NEO-A ORGANIZATION TO THE POINT THAT HE CAN BOSS AROUND THEIR AFFILIATED FIELD AGENTS!
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More stuff to follow soon just over did the 20,000 character limit...