Shadowrun Missions Living Campaign > Living Campaign GM chat
Looking for ideas: How to keep Lightning Ball from "winning" SRM?
Marcus:
There very easy way to stop that nonsense. Just put some non-hostile targets in there. Force them to take collateral damage losses and they learn knock the nonsense off. How are your mages hitting 30-40 initiative is more interesting to me. In general tech should achieve higher initiatives more often, they just have stuff that adds. If you wanna discourage this stuff, just have some folks bring some tech character who can show those jokers up. Approve some sum 2 ten three A nut busters and the balance settle back out.
Senko:
I have to say something sounds wrong in those scenarios unless your mages have a lot of karma. From the sounds of it you’ve got magic users with extremely high initiative, magic, drain resistance and multiple initations. Is this right and if so how badly are they minmaxed to get that?
The simplest way to counter it aside from hostages or the horror of background count would be narrow corridors and melee enemies. It doesn’t do them any good to avoid an allies square if the opposing fighter is attacking with an axe or martial arts rather than firearms. Send in some minions to soak the initial response then open the doors and melee attack the mages face.
Still id like to hear more on these super powered mages because even to some relatively inexperienced at gming it sounds like something is not right there.
Marcus:
So if you have the true cheese mongers, you run elf with max cha and will so lets say 7 base +4 from cha boost 11+5 will =16 if your really cheese and boost will too to hit 20.
Then force 13 lightening ball is F-1 so needing 12 hits the pre-edge your roll 25ish dice, with 6 exploding. average says taking a little bit of drain, a little bit lucky and your taking none. For doing a lot of damage. They would be more effect to be a little more subtle, that killing everyone kinda numbers, Just sloppy imo.
Or meta-magic centering would also work.
Stainless Steel Devil Rat:
--- Quote from: Marcus on ---There very easy way to stop that nonsense. Just put some non-hostile targets in there. Force them to take collateral damage losses and they learn knock the nonsense off. How are your mages hitting 30-40 initiative is more interesting to me. In general tech should achieve higher initiatives more often, they just have stuff that adds. If you wanna discourage this stuff, just have some folks bring some tech character who can show those jokers up. Approve some sum 2 ten three A nut busters and the balance settle back out.
--- End quote ---
Sustained/quickened imp reflexes coupled with Adrenaline Surge adept power
Anyway, not looking to make people fail a mission or anything... just looking to actually challenge. Making it not so automatic to be fully stat and initiative buffed (see my involvement in the "Can mundanes see magic" thread) can help, but it really won't solve anything. Even if a mage only gets 2 passes, that's one more pass than it takes to kill everyone with a lightning ball :]
I'm really thinking I'd like to explore what kinds of things are allowed to be done in SRM. My organized play background is just Pathfinder Society, where not only is that a game with a "Weak GM" paradigm but the GMs are also very strictly not allowed to alter the scenario as written. SRM is much more vague on providing info about the opposition, often even lacking #s entirely.
In the case of a group of high karma/prime runners playing a non-prime runner mission, how kosher is it to just add in say an NPC mage with the Reflection metamagic? That'd go quite a long way towards toning down "nuke them all on initiative score 42!"
Stainless Steel Devil Rat:
--- Quote from: Senko on ---I have to say something sounds wrong in those scenarios unless your mages have a lot of karma. From the sounds of it you’ve got magic users with extremely high initiative, magic, drain resistance and multiple initations. Is this right and if so how badly are they minmaxed to get that?
The simplest way to counter it aside from hostages or the horror of background count would be narrow corridors and melee enemies. It doesn’t do them any good to avoid an allies square if the opposing fighter is attacking with an axe or martial arts rather than firearms. Send in some minions to soak the initial response then open the doors and melee attack the mages face.
Still id like to hear more on these super powered mages because even to some relatively inexperienced at gming it sounds like something is not right there.
--- End quote ---
I think it's mainly just that they're the Shadowrun equivalent of high levelled characters. 100+ karma at the minimum. Hence my interest in the possibility of just cranking up the opposition to handle higher than starting level shadowrunners. Obviously that'd be a route to be managed carefully if some prime runners are teammates with fresh-out-of-chargen noobies.
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