Shadowrun
Shadowrun Missions Living Campaign => Living Campaign and Conventions => Topic started by: Fade on <06-23-14/1417:35>
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Come on by and play some Shadowrun in Denver! Literally less than a quarter mile from Cherry Creek Reservoir where The Big D first showed his scaly snout. We will be running the CMP series "Company Men."
Even if you don't get in a slot, come by and we will have GM's on standby if we get enough for extra tables.
Tacticon is running August 28 - September 1.
For more information, please visit www.denvergamers.org
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I'll be there to assist GM duties for sure!
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It's too early for me to make any promises, but I'm going to do my best to be there. :)
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I plan to be there, and I'm signed up for all four events.
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Just got back from Tacticon, where we played entire Company Men series (CMP 2014-05, 06, 07, and 08). Here are my observations (which include some minor spoilers):
- There is a nice variety of missions, going from one where the best solution is to go in and out without firing a shot, to one that's basically impossible without large amounts of explosives.
- The policy of not turning anyone away is paying dividends. We got several new people to try out Shadowrun after their other games didn't go off, and we may have gotten a few new converts. Also, wo of the people in my gaming group were able to come out to the con at the last minute, and were able to jump into adventures despite only having generic tickets, which was very cool.
- This is the first time I've seen a Connection Rating 6 contact handed out, and he definitely felt like a Connection 6 contact. By the end of the series, assuming the runners were successful every time, he has become a mover and shaker in the corporate world.
- The biggest downside was something that might just be part of a typical shadowrun - the excessive amounts of planning. In some missions, it was unavoidable (our team with no decker, face, or mage had to work hard to get the resources we needed to have a shot at success). However, there was at least one mission where we could have gotten the same result by forging a few documents (15 RL minutes, tops) and sending in the face - all the other prepwork (cloning keycards, seducing NPCs, etc) was completely unnecessary. I'm thinking about running Ashes in a few weeks, and it will be a nice change of pace.
- As a rule - pregens suck. Even the beginner box pregens aren't great. One of the missions would have been nearly impossible without a decker, and we got...Gentry. The guy isn't even smart enough to fill his Renraku Tsurugi Cyberdeck (3 program slots) with more than 2 programs (Baby Monitor would have been VERY helpful). Sledge has a 3 Intuition and no Perception, which meant he was blindsided by just about everything - not good for a combat-focused character. For comparison, I ended up giving people a few characters I had created as an experiment (a former DocWagon team that got their SINs burned after a failed extraction of a high-value client), and the difference in effectiveness really showed.
- I haven't seen the modules, but it seems like the GMs had to do some quick improvising to fill out needed details. After all, if you're going into a secret research facility, and can somehow get all the way in without setting off alarms (which was REALLY hard), there should be more to steal than the one item you were sent for. Likewise, the adventure with the relay station had every single group looking into taking out the cables connecting it to the grid, instead of going into the station (fortunately, the GMs had already planned for that).
- The payouts were a bit better than the 10k average, which is good given the difficulty of some of these missions. However, I think GMs ended up handwaving issues with Fake SINs in order to make the missions worth doing. If you need a fake SIN of 4+ to have a shot of talking your way through a place, and there's no way to completely eliminate the records after the fact other than having a minmaxed decker format the host, then Face characters (and anyone accompanying them) should be spending as much as they earned to replace those Fake SINs at the end of the mission. At least one group negotiated to have the Mr. Johnson provide them with fake SINs for that very reason...
My favorite moment at the con was calling my custom Smuggler contact - the Man with the Van. He's a guy who doesn't have a big network - he just wheels and deals out of his van, hopped up on Long Haul and looking around with crazy eyes. Despite that, he found exactly what we needed and delivered the goods to us. By the end of our negotiations with him, my wife asked if there was any way her character could get the Man with the Van as a contact. Big kudos to our GM for making the Man with the Van as flavorful as any of the Season 5 Contacts.
My second favorite moment was watching a player with the Gentry pregen managed to get us all the way into a secure facility without setting off alarms...then completely hosing the host controlling everything (in a Format C:/*.* sort of way). As a bonus, he convinced his Tir Techno-Terrorist to set off a distraction (involving high explosives) as we were fleeing the facility, giving us just enough time to get away.
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Sounds like it was a lot of fun - I wish I could have gone this year. Maybe next year. :)