Part two
Pros/What I liked about this mission: Sorry folks... really... I got nothing on this one.
Cons/What I didn't like: Strap yourselves in and pour yourself a drink, you're gonna be here a while.
Problem 1: Dragonsong CMPS 1, 2, and 4 all have a fairly tight connection to each other and if you ignore 3 paint a believable set of runs that occurs over the course of a week. This run has you doing some random task for Perry that has nothing at all to do with him getting his powers back.
I don't know, maybe the band is suppose to be playing in the club in part 4 as like the background music for the ritual that lets Perry become a dragon again? But why can only this band play that music? If you're going to have most of these CMPs be tightly connected and primarily make sense as one interconnected run, why in the middle of that do we have a run that seems to take place months later and have nothing at all to do with the over all plot?
Problem 2: Take a moment and think about this. What was the last run you went on that had THREE combats in it.
Okay I can answer that one for myself easily, it was Elevator Ride to Hell (technically that had four, but the two random police officers go down so quickly I'm not even going to count them) with a fight to get your gear back, a fight to rescue Izzy’s mother, and a fight to stop Sid.
Granted the second of those fights was completely optional and in theory we could have negotiated with those people rather than turning them into a fine red mist from a kilometer or so away with our miniguns, but if you take a Shadowrunner's toys away form them you can't blame them for being a bit trigger happy when they get them back.
Aside from that, I can't think of any other mission in Season 3 that had THREE combat sections in it. There's a reason most missions have only two combat segments in them and its because Shadowrun fights tend to take up a fair amount of time to set up and resolve.
Your standard Shadowrun mission is going to break down like this from what I've seen: half an hour meet the Johnson hear about the job. half an hour doing legwork, half an hour setting up the first fight to be advantageous as possible, half an hour for the first fight, half an hour for more legwork and getting ready for the second fight, an hour for the second fight and half an hour excess time/wrapping up.
Even leaving aside all the painful real life interruptions of this mission three fights in one mission for a perfectly ordinary mission that isn't suppose to be something grand like Elevator Ride to Hell was, in my opinion, simply too many.
Problem Three: Aside from three fights being too many, that first fight has NOTHING to do at all with the mission in general.
At least in Elevator Ride to Hell each fight was deeply important to the plot and the mission could not have gotten by without it (okay, we could have done without the two idiots but since I'm not counting that as a fight I'm not going to complain about here at length either) no idiot would leave your gear/the doctor he's trust alone without protecting, no idiot would leave their most important hostage unprotected, and of course no idiot would not keep his doomsday weapon right next to them.
In this case, that fight with the bounty hunters, it is completely unnecessary so who thought it was a good idea to include it?
Problem Four: Okay this is a problem with all of the runs I went on, but I figure it's probably at its worst here. The problem is a little something I want to call Globalization.
It's a fact of life that you're not going to get away from in the Shadowrun universe. Globalization is a economics term, but here is why it is problematic, most CMPs previously were set to give you a feel for a town/country and what its shadowrun situation were like over the course of four missions, like the four in London or the four in Portland.
In this set up, instead we were going to be doing four in every different city. Where Globalization enters the picture is that as countries fall by the waysides and AAA crops take over.... honestly most cities are going to become kinda samey to some degree.
In short, Globalization is wet blanket upon making the city each run takes place in feel different from the others. To its credit the first run at least feels noticeably different because it takes into account the one fact that I know makes Denver unique, anything you do in that city, you do it directly under Ghostwalker's nose, and if you piss him off he will just flat out end you.
But escorting Perry to a bar in Berlin did not feel any different than doing it to a bar in Seattle, and I didn't really feel like tracking down a band in Tokyo was any different than it would have been in random North American Continent city number 3 other than a lot more Japanese people hanging around which, big whoop people talking with a different accents and calling themselves Yakuza instead the Mafia, or Triads, or whatever.
In comparison to this problem let me tell you about times when cities had been able to establish there own feel. I only started shadowrunning around the time that my group was about to finish up Season 2, but I still managed to get a distinct feel for what made Denver different from most cities. It was Ghostwalker. Because of Ghostwalker, Denver was like a wild west town, the corporations were trying to establish power there but even they had to stay on their toes around Ghostwalker, and because of that Organized Crime was a lot more prevalent than in most cities.
Ghostwalker's simple presence without him ever saying a word to the team was what decided our groups course of action during Done Deal the last mission of Season Two, because our ZDF contact confirmed that Ghostwalker wanted the McGuffin we had, even if he was not making the best offer, we knew that even a team of experienced shadowrunners simply would not be able to stand up to a pissed off dragon and so we decided to knuckle under, sell out, and start working for the man (or at least agree to hand something important off to the man, and let the man set us up comfortably in a different city) because otherwise Mayor Top Hat & Scales would do a 30 P belly flop on all of us.
New York by comparison felt more like what you imagined what Shadowrun cities would be like. The Corporations were in control, and unlike the “Slap Leather Partner!” wear your gun more or less freely nature of Denver, in New York we had to go through weapon scanners fairly frequently just taking mass transit around the city (granted we had a technomancer hack them, but it was a problem we weren't used to having to deal with) and so it felt like our privacy was being invaded more heavily than in Denver.
Also the fact that New York did not have Ghostwalker at the top of its chain of command but an uneasy alliance of the MDC meant that honestly if the Neo-Anarchists had not decided to be genocidal dicks and had Elevator Ride to Hell been written completely differently, I probably could have talked my team into siding with the Neo-A's against the MDC since the worst it could do would be to send out tanks and helicopters as opposed to an actual dragon.
In short compared to Denver, New York wanted to be more oppressive, but chiefly because they were compensating for the fact that the city did not have a clear command structure were one side/faction had a true monopoly on force which would not hesitate to resolve issues with complete finality if people refused to fall in line.
I only did one quick mission in Chicago as part of the four hour block where I created my character, but even that was enough to give me something of a feeling for the mission, because in the middle of a perfectly ordinary store we found some FAB3 laying around.
If there's random anti-bug stockpiles of FAB-3 laying around then it will make using magic a much more interesting choice as much like with GOD kicking your ass if you start doing too much stuff in the Matrix, the FAB 3 will screw you over if you use magic too much. I'm not sure if that's true about Chicago missions or not (only did the CMPs) but you know what, it's interesting.
But honestly the Dragonsong series of missions, maybe it could have worked if you were still running them in fourth edition, but not in fifth. Even if the books had come out sooner the globilzation problem would still have been there.
To make the idea of four missions four cities really work the missions would have needed to be able to give each city its own feel, and that means not just cosmetic differences in the fluff, but concrete differences in the crunch. (For reference “fluff” is anything that describes the game's world while “crunch” is the game's mechanics just to be clear).
The only city we visited in Dragonsong that felt different in the crunch was Denver and that was because of Ghostwalker as I previously mentioned. Honestly now that we are shifting into a new edition it is going to make time to let cities develop their own unique feelings and natures once again, you can't simply dive right into it and expect it to work.
It's like person A was had said “We're gonna need some new CMPS for this year.” Then person B thought “Okay, well you know what, lets do a send up to some of the most famous cities that Shadowrunners have been to...” And wrote the missions. Except that after they were written person A came back and said “These a great, now let me just translate them into fifth edition...” Then much face palming was had by all.
Also not to nitpick, but how did Tokyo and Berlin make the cut for cities to have runs in, but not New York? You're doing the cities for season two and season for so why not season three?
Problem Five: This mission is simply too “adventure gamey” for lack of a better phrase. Shadowrunners should not be expected to take leaps of logic like how we need to let the cleaning lady into a room that we are currently in the process of illegally searching, so that we can look through her cleaning bucket/trash can for some clue.
That is what the GM said we were seriously suppose to do when all was said and done and we had time to sort out how the mission went. Also, I'm not sure how we were suppose to find out where the band got to if we had decided to go in guns blazing with lethal ammo.
If one of them happened to have the comm on them normally, but only didn't because we had left one of them alive... well that's a bit irritating for a very simple reason. With Shadowrun 5th Edition being so much more lethal due to Stick and Shock, Stunbolt and Stunball all having gotten beaten quite servery with the nerf bat, there really should be concrete advantages to being able to leave your foes alive, not just them being alternate solution, with a different one being provided with no effort if you hadn't done that.
Or to sum it all up quickly, this mission was too jam packed with too much stuff, a lot of the stuff it was packed with could have been jettisoned without loosing anything of value, Japan made little effort to feel like Japan (granted I've never had a chance to find out what Japan feels like in Shadowrun before but what missions do let you do that exactly Lognshot 2 went to Berlin once in T.R.O. 273 at least) and the trail of clues the runners are expected to follow makes no logical sense.
