Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: Reiper on <10-22-14/2239:43>
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I'm trying something new this campaign that I'm GMing, and hoping for some additional ideas.
I've made the teams paranoid in the past, but it is usually them being paranoid against the Johnson, or a contact, or the suitcase they are being hired to carry across town, you know, simple things. This time I want to make it between each other.
How do you go about doing this (if you've done it in the past?)
Currently some of my team members have secrets that the other players (not just characters) don't know about. I purposely did this to prevent accidental meta gaming. And I am setting up a private room on our member server where I can whisk away players for personal communication between the character and another NPC in private (which may or may not offer them side jobs or rewards for swiping something additional, or planting a stealth tag on something or someone, or possibly giving them money to fail the mission).
Are there other things you guys have done in the past to do similar things? If so, a) what did you do, and b) how did it work out?
I want to make sure it stays fun for everyone (I'm making sure everyone ends up getting private chats throughout the campaign so nobody is felt left out) but I want to have some distrust set in with the teams in both RL and IC since meta knowledge tends to seep through from time to time even without realizing it, but I don't want the table to end up getting really pissed at each other and ruining the campaign.
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I gotta say, this is either a very good or very bad idea.
I'm not sure which, I can see it going both ways, but it sounds interesting for sure.
Good Luck with it !
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Communication. If you want to play this kind of game, you have to really make sure each player knows that its going to be like this. Basically you're going to screw with the players at every turn, have players screw with each other at every turn, and hope they will like that. Most often, they wont. If you're players are all on board, then go for it.
My advice is open secrets. Pass lots of notes. Pull players from the table. Ask to see character sheets often and pretend to write things down. If you do that enough players will get edgy. Most of the time, make this about nothing. But a few times, make major things happen with the players in these secret meetings. The complete seeming randomness of when things are important will really keep them on their toes.
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Communication. If you want to play this kind of game, you have to really make sure each player knows that its going to be like this. Basically you're going to screw with the players at every turn, have players screw with each other at every turn, and hope they will like that. Most often, they wont. If you're players are all on board, then go for it.
My advice is open secrets. Pass lots of notes. Pull players from the table. Ask to see character sheets often and pretend to write things down. If you do that enough players will get edgy. Most of the time, make this about nothing. But a few times, make major things happen with the players in these secret meetings. The complete seeming randomness of when things are important will really keep them on their toes.
Oh, I definitely plan on keeping it edgy. I enjoy doing random dice rolls, and most of the time getting them pulled into the private chat will be harmless. They may get a job, additional info, or other things and I'll let them handle giving that information out if needed.
One thing that I can see happening is a contact offer the job to a player at 30k for the team, and then the player gather the team and say the pay out is 25k. Of course if a teammate is screwing over their teammates even without them knowing it, it could bite that player in the butt down the line.
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I'll warn you straight up, you're letting yourself in for a hell of game-mastering. It seems like a fun idea, but I've seen this sort of thing DESTROY groups, permanently - as in hard feelings ten years later. It'd be better to run a game where the players hating each other is built in, like Paranoia, rather than one like Shadowrun where professionalism is the core group binder.
That being said... there are two ways. One is to have the group all together and watch as internal dynamics split them apart, the other is to split the players into two groups and set them at each other.
For the first, occasionally pass notes to players that are sometimes innocuous, other times saying things like, "You notice that [character] is fiddling with something in his pocket." Call random players off to have private conferences. Have groups of NPCs conspicuously avoid shooting at one player or another; works especially well if the mage is being obvious and yet not a single bullet is going their way... If you all have smartphones then using the messenger to send notes, having your reply and send alerts be Shadowrun-style sounds, would DEFINITELY set them on edge - they might not know who's sending what, and who's receiving what, but they DO know it every time you send out a message that's only meant for one of them.
Or for your girlfriend who's bored on her late shift at the pizza place. Or for fellow game-masters congratulating yourself on how mean all your players are to each other...
For the second, it's more organic if they're both dedicated crime folks, but at a low level, like gang, small Seoulpa Rings, or minor yakuza/mobsters that have been sent to a troublesome area to 'redeem themselves and recover the area' without offering any support beyond the initial push. These work great as player-run games; if you get a street map and mark out areas of turf and let them decide what to do... maybe have minor shadowruns thrown one group or another's way.
If you wanted them to be competing groups of shadowrunners, that'd be harder; if you had one of them be mostly corporate and one anti-corp...
But yeah. This sort of thing can lead to hurt feelings, angry words, and group breakups, so I'm not endorsing it. But you're a big boy and it's your table, and if you know your players can handle it...
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I did something like this once, and it worked really well. To be fair, I only did it the once, and it was to introduce a character to the group. Basically, I had Mr. Johnson meet with this character privately and offer her a job. It was up to her to get a team, so she contacted the fixer that works with the rest of the team typically. Since she wasn't a fixer but rather an assassin, she tagged along. In the end, she got her big score and shared the agreed-upon price with the other players (which was a substantial difference in nuyen). The players had no idea that they had been shorted so much potential nuyen on the deal, and she kept it completely to herself. It worked really well for getting the team intrigued, because they'd never had a fellow player offer them a job before, and it taught them a lesson in negotiation (as in don't take the first offer they give you), while also working as a great way to integrate the new player into the team.
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Give one of your players the note "if you smile you get 1 karma, if you smile and laugh well you get 2, if you tell anybody wants on this paper you loss 3 karma"
then when someone asks a question later look at that player and say "it up to you" or "what do you think" and then run with their responce.
by the time you get to the last person it will have driven most of them nuts. And that last guy will be out of his mind by the time its his turn.
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Give one of your players the note "if you smile you get 1 karma, if you smile and laugh well you get 2, if you tell anybody wants on this paper you loss 3 karma"
then when someone asks a question later look at that player and say "it up to you" or "what do you think" and then run with their responce.
by the time you get to the last person it will have driven most of them nuts. And that last guy will be out of his mind by the time its his turn.
That is so brutal, wow.
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Internal friction could also be incited by external stimuli. While all the characters may have a common end goal (completing the run and get paid), each player should be tempted with several lesser goals that, while not directly fatal, at least runs counter to one or more fellow runners interests. Those "side quests" could be presented by the players vast network of contacts, that either request a task for information/help regarding the main plot or alternatively contact the runner on their own behalf offering them a reward for a small, but not 100% innocent task.
Side quests could include:
one of the characters contacts is very interested in the groups weapon-specialists new state of the art rifle. While he of course wouldnt ask the character to steal it for him, he has no qualms about asking the character to place marks on the rifle and forward all video feeds, heat build up, and overall performance levels. Alternatively exchange the rifle with fancy cyberware/drones/etc.
The contact knows the main purpose of the run the runners are on, he wants the character to steal/plant something at the site, but only if the character promises 100% discretion, even concerning his team mates. For fun, another players contact hires another character for the exact same thing.
A low loyalty contact wants a simsense recording of the run, promising 100%discretion of the runners. Sadly one of the other runners get acces to the recording afterwards, while most of the team mambers have been blurred enough to be unrecognisable, a poor job has been made on himself
One of the characters enemies, either from a previous encounter or through a flaw (like enemy duh) has decided to leave little hints at the character wanting to betray his party. For instance the character with the highest notoriety find a bounty of himself on the matrix, either posted by a username looking a lot like his party member. Or alternatively he would stumble across rumours that a party member has accepted the bounty on his head.
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I'll warn you straight up, you're letting yourself in for a hell of game-mastering. It seems like a fun idea, but I've seen this sort of thing DESTROY groups, permanently - as in hard feelings ten years later. It'd be better to run a game where the players hating each other is built in, like Paranoia, rather than one like Shadowrun where professionalism is the core group binder.
I did something like this once, and it worked really well. To be fair, I only did it the once, and it was to introduce a character to the group.
This, combined, is the key - to do it, to set it up and run it, but to be aware that being ready to pull a gun on your teammates at a moment's notice is essentially detrimental to the game. Set up a story arc in which the PCs - you had better know their motivations by now, as well as which buttons to push with your players - have somewhat conflicting motivations. Players F, G, and H care about and want to help the ABC people, and is willing to take the cash hit, while Player K needs that cash, dammit, or else XYZ happens to their PDQ - or XYZ just gets closer to happening, because they can't pay off That Guy. That starts setting up tension - a difference in options. Push it gently into becoming an increasingly important issue - especially if you can continue to make it the ABC People on the one side, and That Guy on the other. Eventually, though (if you're doing your job right, sooner rather than later) you need to allow the tension / paranoia to be resolved, and here's the kicker - it has to be resolved in such a manner that it binds the team even closer together. That Guy turns out to be the one turning the crank on the ABC People, because he knows that F, G, and H are tightly involved, and that K works with them, and if he impacts K's bottom line, he can put K into his pocket for good.
Or push it a bit further - make it so that K is forced to drop into That Guy's pocket. There's your paranoia; you have F, G, and H wondering if K is going to do something bad to them because he's taking orders from That Guy, and K is wondering if F, G, and H are going to pre-emptively whack him because he's so indebted to That Guy that they're, well, paranoid. You can back off on that, push it from game to game. Take your cellphone into the bathroom, call up the player of K, and the first thing you say to him/her is "This phone call is in-character. I am That Guy. Act appropriately." And then RP over the phone with K, forcing him to either try to conceal the contents of the call from the rest of the team, or else to get all 'go ahead, I don't care' on them. This works really well if the bathroom is some distance away from the gaming area, so that they can't hear you talking. It works ESPECIALLY well if you can get K to 'blow up' and shout some, because then you can come out and ask "I heard shouting, what was that about?"
But again, all this needs to be resolved in a way that binds the group together better. The rest of the group offers to help K get out from under That Guy's thumb, or whatever. But every party-stress idea needs to wind up with a 'stress makes the binding tighter' kind of event.
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Remember that you need a good signal to noise ratio; that is to say, you can't have TOO many meaningless messages like "smile and nod if you want a karma point", and you can't have TOO many messages that implicate the teammates.
I'd say divvy it up between three types of messages: the clearly meaningless ones, like "Will you get me a soda?", the paranoia-inspiring, like "You see an ork eyeing you from across the room, but he disappears into the crowd," and the real signal, like "Your chummer just pocketed a credstick."
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This got me thinking back to how some GMs have run groups v/s others.
It wasn't that they turned us on each other, but that if only certain people passed certain tests, they gave the results out on sheets v/s just telling the person out loud. That way the rest of the group, OOC, didn't know what the 1st had found.
I can remember a few examples from over the years.
1. SR1: Decker finding Paydata & trying to keep it secret from the rest of the group.
2. AD&D1: Mage disbelieving illusion & then being the only one to know what enemies are real v/s fake.
3. AD&D1: Warrior being charmed & acting out of character.
4. AD&D1: Rogue being off alone & ambushed with only 1 other person in range hear/see anything & then get close enough to do anything about it.
5. AD&D1: Fighter/Mage discovering the invisible Imp on the shoulders of Mage & realizing one of party members is actually Evil.
Just little things like that, not every GM does that, but I found the experience very interesting, mildly frustrating but over all enjoyable & a challenge to deal with as you then loose actions trying to deal w/ the unknowns or spread the knowledge to others, etc etc.
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In my current campaign there have been several instances where characters have had additional missions to what the group is up to. One of them revolved around a dagger that is still making the players paranoid. It went like this.
The characters were hired by a Mr. Johnson they have worked with before to deliver a dagger to a contact in the Orkish underground and they will get a package in return to bring back to him. The infiltration specialist is asked to help her contact out and bring him a dagger (it happened to be the one they were delivering.) They make the delivery and the contact insists that she deliver the package (another dagger) in person. She keeps the dagger she was given on her as they go to meet.
They show up and gives him the dagger turns around and hands the other dagger to a third party who in turn used it to assassinate Mr. Johnson in front of the party, and about fifty other people including a mob boss. In the chaos that ensued which included the restaurant they were in burning down the infiltration specialist pocketed the dagger her contact wanted and delivered it to him.
A month later her contact calls her frantic wondering if she had stolen the dagger again. It seems that the dagger went to a Vory collector who was just murdered and the dagger stolen. The Vory are on the war path and blaming the Mafia (after all they were meeting someone who had the dagger before so they must have an interest in it). Everything cools down and the group thinks things are blowing over.
They are in a secret storage room of another contact and find the dagger is there now. This contact has been acting very erratically recently.
Now whenever a knife, dagger, or such weapon shows up the first thing they ask is "Is it that dagger?" I think they are convinced it will be the implement that ends the world. Who knows they might be right in a way.
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In my experience, this setup never goes well. It is a very fine line to walk, and I personally have never seen it work out well. But that could just be me and my friends, since we vastly prefer working together over working against each other. Just to be cautious, I would run the group through a session of Paranoia first, to see how they handle the general concept. How you do it is up to you.
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... I would run the group through a session of Paranoia first, to see how they handle the general concept. ...
I loved that game in High School. We had a long running 15 Player campaign, in which everyone was down a clone before we even got Outside.
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Alternate between playing Shadowrun and playing Diplomacy. It will make the Shadowrun games seem downright cordial.