Shadowrun

Shadowrun Missions Living Campaign => Living Campaign and Conventions => Topic started by: Onion Man on <06-26-11/0337:02>

Title: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <06-26-11/0337:02>
Not to say that the experience hasn't been all around fantastic, I couldn't really ask for a better environment for me to be creative and assertive, but at the same time here I go.  The only run that has presented any real challenge hads been the scramble, which doesn't really include much random but includes a LOT of decision theory, which just isn't quite the same.

I recognize that designing a scenario for a completely unknown group of protagonists is a challenge that swings very quickly from underwhelming to impossible, but my voodoo touch mage has yet to face a serious challenge and has gained what I'll describe as a "ton" of karma for 3 days of gaming (9 runs, 7 and change karma each).  The advancement has been awesome and tons of fun, but the challenge has been mostly created by having a built in negative synbiosis with nojose's character and occasionally being the antagonistic foil for the group.

A more experienced player had suggested at the most recent table that we increse the table rating from what3ever it normally is to 4.  For saqke of time we couldn't do that on the fly, but the run was something of a gimme.  Lots of fu8n and rewarding, but missing that integral challenge element, (already spoke with the GM about it, would talk to9 Bull about it but he'll almost certainly read it here).

Again, tons of fun, but not terribly challenging.  With any luck and personla initiative we'll bring some con play back to the Milwaukee area soon, but it would be really nice to have some sort of enhanced challenge rating for players that have Tony Hawked the system a little bit.  Nojose and I combine to form something of a Pun-pun.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: A.A. Salati on <06-26-11/1842:01>
How did these turn out?

CMP 2011-02 The Prize of Failure
SRM 04-02 Extraction
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <06-27-11/0101:01>
Prize of Failure wasn't one of the 10 events I participated in.  Without revealing too much about it, Extraction was a blast, and earned me a gift card, but wasn't exactly a challenge.  It was pretty much resolved with one big stunball, but we had two runners in my group that are using 'soon to be forbidden' builds.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: lurkeroutthere on <06-27-11/0533:18>
Ok i played a few tables with you and i'll just say this, If you are going to A) both play one of the most overpowered archietypes in the game and then B) Not bother to learn the rules of said archietype (things like what background count does to your spirits and sustained spells) it is hard to take you seriously when you say the runs need to be more challenging. Some of it is the GM's didn't hammer you with astral threats for walking around constantly possesed by a loa, nor did they use the one remaining drawback such possesion still has even with channeling that being that you cannot speak.

Even having said that I still had fun playing at the tables we sat together (for the sake of full disclosure this is Lifeseeker/Galen) and your still far from the most annoying possession mage I've dealt with, you didn't for example tried to get involved in every roll made at the table because you had access to task spirits, but magic has always been a bit of Dynamite in rock paper scissors in fourth edition and possesion mages just take back what few drawbacks it has. Things that challenge you will wipe others or require the GM or take time away from other players to hit you with the universe constraints your not self observing.

Just my two nuyen.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <06-27-11/1702:03>
Good to hear from you Galen.

Can't speak while possessed, got it.  I'll stick to text via the comlink and be sure to buy AR gloves before he gets played again (can you use just one AR glove?)

The last table of the con we turned the table rating up and things were much, much more challenging.

Between the rapid assembly of Jolly here on the forums and four days at the con, my rules knowledge has gone from nearly zero to somewhat terrified of being knocked out while possessed and having my spirit of man go ape all over Re:Pwn using me as a sock puppet.  Still shaky on some things (plenty of things, but now equipped with a stack of books instead of pdfs and completely sold on abandoning D&D for SR4, way more fun, way less time consuming, way less gotcha.

Honestly, I didn't realize how overpowered possession traditions were until partway through Friday, a lot of the folks here were describing the build as sub-optimal and the veterans from my local group had me convinced that a combat juggernaut was pretty much necessary (no idea where they got that idea).  I wasn't even looking at self possession as his main action when I was putting it together and was sort of steered into it via comments.  I was originally looking at someone who was more interested in having spirits possess opponents and featured objects to manipulate the world around him with self possession only as an oh frag contingency.

In the interest of not being "that guy" and with the fact that I'm not terribly likely to make it out to another big con with all the things going on in my fleshy life, Baron Jolly is staring down the barrel of an early semi-retirement.  Not sure what I'd put together for the future, but playing something grossly overpowered is only fun for a while before it becomes meh.  I might have to pick your brain about technomancy in the near future though... my horribly incompetent rigger is presently on the run from the Black Lotus (rest of the group doesn't know about it) and has no real plan of returning to Calfree if he even survives the rest of our run in Lagos (he's from Kowloon, Lagos doesn't seem so bad to him).  I still half expect him to break hi neck falling out of the van or to slip and fall in shallow water or just be stunned out and sold to the Local Boys.

Edit: Oh, yeah... and in several of those missions I could have just as well said that all Jolly did was stand around and there still would have been a nearly identical result.  I doubt that the next character I bring to a con will have much of anything in the way of combat skills, utility/helper characters look far more in demand than combat juggernauts.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: DireRadiant on <06-27-11/1832:26>
Glass cannons.

If you want to get hurt do something stupid. Eventually you'll get hurt.

It's a tricky balance for the Mission GM, in your case, what can hurt or challenge the possession mage yet not kill the Hacker, TM, and Dronomancer? Something that confronts the group that challenges the possession mage is very likely to kill the rest.

In any case, establishing full control of the environment and the security feeds, even with the short triggering of the glomoss, meant the KE Astral Sec Mage, the KE HTR team, and pop up HMGs did not go to work pounding some poor spirit infested fool flying ten feet off the ground with his hands in holding onto hand cuffs. Not to mention the patrol cars running you over as you try to balance an entire family in your arms.

The reward for reasonable planning and execution is not getting hurt. You did a reasonably good job going in it seems arbitrary to have a fight start for no good reason.

There's also the fact it's a 4 hour slot. Really 3.5 hours. Pacing is a challenge, if needed, we could have squeezed a nice firefight at the end, which would have had even more firepower available to play with.

If you really wanted to get hurt, you should have gone more out of your way to mess up the mission. :)
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Dr. Meatgrinder on <06-27-11/1911:20>
Much as I hate background counts, I see them becoming more common in Missions.  A BC will make the scene much more challenging for most magic-types (unless they have at least Cleansing, if not Filtering, metamagic) without hosing the non-magic characters.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <06-27-11/1914:22>
See, now any of that would have gone miles and miles towards feeling a challenge (not a player challenge, mind you, a challenge to the character) even if it had been easily overcome without going into a messy or time consuming combat.  Really any check against steamrolling the mission would have been awesome.  Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't have minded at all if Jolly had been hit by some sort of urban response APC full of KE or Horizon personnel after some of the more outrageous successes... after all, there are consequences to stunballing an entire corp Gala.

Then again, I can see where that might (would) have resulted in some undue punishment for the other runners involved.

Really, I had no idea what to expect out of Missions and I'm glad to see it's not as "competitive", for lack of a better word on the tip of my fingers, as the Living campaigns were for D&D.  I have way more fun making someone memorable than I do rolling lots of dice and getting away Scot-free.

I think what I'm going to do is talk to Bull about tweaking Jolly back toward my original concept of an object/corpse possessor to bring him back into a more normal power scale (and of course actually have the time to pore over the magician rules) before bringing him back to an event.  Otherwise he'll probably just get back-burnered and brought out for things like the scramble, where being a voodoo sock is more flavor and less rules.  At least until he can be properly retired and go villain (which I suspect will be a more appropriate role for a voodoo sock in future missions anyway).
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: nimrod_funk on <06-28-11/1424:26>
Are they still doing Tourney's at Origins? That might be a better more challenging in general game than something like a Mission. I never really saw a mission as being "challenging". Missions to me were originally just adventures that would give a unified campaign across locales. It's been a while and I've not had the time or energy to run SR 4 after my last campaign came to an end.

A tournament might be a better game for players to be challenged no so much by the game but by the decisions they make. Something similar to the old RPGA tourney's of yore. My favorite being "To find a king" but that was during the times of leaded minis, transformers, Go-bots, Pee-wee's playhouse and VHS. 

"HEY look! It's the Dungeons and Dragons Ride"...........
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: DireRadiant on <06-28-11/1525:44>
Origins doesn't have a tournament event currently. There is a tournament event at Gencon.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <06-28-11/1531:58>
Oy.  It has to be at the one con that I have sworn not to attend until it returns home, to Wisconsin...

A tournament or grand prix type event would be awesome... not sure that 272 tickets would really be enough to warrant a grand prix though.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: squee_nabob on <06-28-11/1639:18>
Remember spirits cannot use machines or the matrix. I think that means you can’t use AR while possessed, or get tacnet bonuses, but I am not 100% sure.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: UmaroVI on <06-28-11/2143:20>
Honestly, it's really hard to balance Missions combat for any possible group that might show up. It's also pretty hard to balance against a particular player without screwing over other people, eg, if BC 4 suddenly pops up to stop a Channeller from making the street samurai cry themselves to sleep, it also makes the unarmed combat adept go from iffy to useless.

I honestly think it's best to not balance Missions around the assumption that the combats must be a challenge to every group; some groups might be able to stomp on the combats, but they might have more trouble with other parts of the game.

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't play SR or SRM for the 'tactical' combat and neither do any of my friends. There's plenty of other ways to challenge players. For example, in Ancient Pawns, the group I played with roflpwnt the combats - but we felt challenged by other parts of the adventure such as the time limit, avoiding having to roflpwn people we liked, the jacking, stopping people without injuring them, etc.



Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Critias on <06-28-11/2359:21>
One of the things we write into every scene of an adventure are options for how a GM can ramp up the difficulty.  One of the problems with GMing at a convention, though, is that it's very, very, difficult to ramp up the difficulty because you're not intimately familiar with each character and what they can/can't handle.  It's a whole lot easier to play "on the fly" with a regular weekly crew where you know how good folks are...so even when we put options in there, it's pretty tough for a GM to utilize them sometimes (especially if it's one uber-dude and everyone else shows up with starting characters).  It's hard to get the right balance.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: KarmaInferno on <06-29-11/0048:47>
Remember spirits cannot use machines or the matrix. I think that means you can’t use AR while possessed, or get tacnet bonuses, but I am not 100% sure.

Well, spirits can't use the Matrix for sure, but mechanical devices and should be doable if the spirit (task spirit, most likely) has the relevant skill.

The tricky part is how to get data back out of a machine in a form a spirit can actually read.

:)



-k
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: nimrod_funk on <06-29-11/1133:28>
My thought has been as a GM as long as your not playing Paranoia it's about the story more than the combat. Combat is all good and well but I try to get my campaign players to be more "adaptable" to many situations with they're points than focusing on combat monsters. In reality any organized syndicate, government agency, or corporate body has the resources to wipe out a player eventually. They have the resources to make your life hell, and slowly bleed you to death or just organize a space based laser accident on your location. Combat should only be part of the jist. Really all your doing is throwing down dice. What fun is that. If it's a war game sure I enjoy that. Role-playing is more about the story and the fluff than game mechanics. Your essentially telling a story and the players are making it happen. Unless the players do something really stupid I just tone down the combat or threat. Shadowrun is easy to Munchkin. That's what I liked about Cyberpunk, the lethality. Knowing that combat is dangerous, and combat kills. You try not to get into gun fights because bullets are very good at shredding and coring out flesh. I think that's one thing that Shadowrun has always lacked, lethality. You could always fudge this. I knew one Cyberpunk GM/writer (Charlie Wong) in Boston who would cut all combat stats by four in snapfire combat. Your scared, full of adrenaline so your prone to miss and make mistakes.

That's why at Texicon I was so pleased with the game. It was a really good story. The combat wasn't too tough but a really cool idea. I felt like "Damn I wish I had thought of that" and it took the players from "Oh crap what do we do now" to figuring out the puzzle. For me that's what roleplaying games should be about. If you like lots of combat and swords and sorcery play AD&D 4th ed or Exalted ect. A good story is where you find it.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: squee_nabob on <06-29-11/1151:02>
Challanging combat and roleplaying are not mutually exclusive in all systems. HERO system is one that combines them well because talking is free all the time, and it is in genre for Super Heroes to trade witty banter, make difficult decisions, and fight all at the same time.

In shadowrun, combat is designed (from both a mechanical and genre perspective) to be short, brutal, and solved with overwhelming violence from one side or the other. You cannot have a back and forth shadowrun combat, where the outcome is in doubt. This is due to the offensive and alpha-strike nature of the combat engine.

Role-playing is more about the story and the fluff than game mechanics.

Even if I agreed with you (I feel the statement is too general to agree with in totality), It is not unreasonable to expect good mechanics. A group of children playing make believe can have awesome stories (see Axe Cop), but what separates them from RPG players is mechanics.

Onion Man played a channeling voodoo mage (one of the most high powered combat archtypes in the game), and thus was not challenged by anything. That’s understandable. That’s not the GM’s fault, but the Missions system for not helping all characters to be in a similar power bracket (12 Hardened armor > 12 armor for example). This problem has been hotfixed by banning future possession mages.

A bigger issue is vast discrepancy of 400BP, 0 karma characters. You can build 2 characters who are both “faces” but one may throw 20 dice at everything, and the other throw 17. The 17 dice face then becomes an assistant to the 20 dice face all the time. With 2 hackers it is even worse, as the other hacker just increases the chance for an alarm to be triggered. When you add in how bad the sample characters are, there is a huge difference between 8 built characters and 8 sample characters. This large imbalance is what makes building shadowrun missions very hard. There is no simple solution and gradual improvement is necessary. Don’t blame the player for playing a character that might have been acceptable at his home table, and legal in missions without realizing how overpowered it would be at missions.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: nimrod_funk on <06-29-11/1351:18>
I've never been a big fan of Shadowrun's mechanics. It's always been the world, the detail, the plot, the writing, and development that made Shadowrun interesting and fun.

Personally I found the best cleanest system for combat and rules to be Interlock by Mike Pondsmith. The Hero system while infinitely adaptable and configurable, the combat that I played was a little slow and arduous.

Shadowrun has always been cinematic in nature, which is what makes it fun. Less so on the realistic. (Personally I like building complexity in detail when I'm building terrain, not gaming.)

That's just me though.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: squee_nabob on <06-29-11/1402:02>
I agree on the cinematic nature of shadowrun being the biggest draw. A good shadowrun is like a heist movie. The PCs gather information, plan, and finally execute a mission while dealing with complications along the way.

The chance to do that over and over again is what keeps me coming back. Sorry if my last post sounded a little aggressive, rereading it I think you touched a nerve accidentally.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <06-29-11/1901:33>
For me that's what roleplaying games should be about. If you like lots of combat and swords and sorcery play AD&D 4th ed or Exalted ect. A good story is where you find it.

I've all but abandoned DnD4e.  Before PHB2 it was a simple, elegant class-based system with fast mechanics and high heroics.  PHB2 (and all the builder books) power-creeped it way too much, and PHB3 put the power creep way over the top.  Between the power-creep and the hybrid class system (why even have a class system if you're going to hybrid the classes into homogeny?), WotC has done exactly what I expected them to and killed the game by killing the system.

AD&D2E was by far and away the best of the D&D systems.  1E and Challenger were too simple and vague, essentially a talk story with an occasional (and often nonsensical) die roll, 3.x was competitive algebra, 4E is back to being a talk-story but with more mindless dice rolling than ever before (and a horribly restrictive set of rules for hombrew, GSL is way more restrictive than OGL was).
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: John Schmidt on <07-10-11/2323:19>
My opinion goes like this...

Four hours, get yourself bogged down into a single combat and that is time you are not going to make up down the line. Cranking up the difficulty is like asking to run over your allotted time.
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Walks Through Walls on <07-15-11/1747:52>
Onion Man was the CMP Moving Day one of the missions you played at Origins?
Title: Re: One beef about Origins
Post by: Onion Man on <07-16-11/0202:49>
It sure was.