[Mmurphy]

I had not GM (or played) ShadowRun for a while so I decided to buy 'Bloody Business' to get ideas and to catch up on recent events in the history.  I decided to run the first job (disrupt the comlink).  After reading the mission, I liked how it was setup.  The last time I used a published mission (years and years ago) it was written in the 'they will go here and do this, or go there and do that'.  This one was very open world, so on with the mission:

The players (3x of the players are female and 1 player is male--all playing female characters):
Human Adept: Close combat and Breaking and Entering skills
Human Mage: Dog Shaman, mostly support spells
Elf Hacker: 'B' priority resources so not the best deck
Elf Adept: Ranged combat

First game took about 4 hours to play and the group got their mission and started to ruin Agatha Shale's life for a week by planting drugs in her car (they had a police contact that knew someone in 'vice' who was behind on arrest quota's that week).  They were about 3/4 of the way through the first stages of Agatha Shale and still only on day 1.  I was feeling good about the scenario (I know, mistake)!

Next game session.  While the Hacker and the ranged combat phys ad were getting ready to meet with Knight Errant for the drug bust, the B&E phys ad and mage went to Matthew Miller's apartment to 'look around' and see if they could discover what OCD drug's he takes.  The mage went in astral and the phys ad broke in.  The wife was home but in a back bedroom on the phone so they entered.  A bit of looking around later, the wife gets off the phone and starts to come out of the bedroom so the phys ad hides in the kitchen cupboards (the ones on the floor).  The wife comes out and starts to putter around.  After 15 minutes, the wife's lover enters the scene.  A frumpy 29ish old female.  The mage assesses her and finds the 'lover' is in an abusive relationship and is about 2 months pregnant (I have to add a little drama).  The two go into a back bedroom.  As the phys ad gets ready to leave the cupboard, I have a devil rat attack.  I was not expecting the devil rat to do anything, once it took a single 'box' of damage I was going to have it run away:  the dice had other opinions.  In the most epic of dice roles (I roll all dice on the table in front of everyone), the rat did 5 damage and the phys add reduced it to 1 box.  However, I had forgotten the phys ad had combat junkie.  The ensuing fight was epic, the rat did another 2 boxes of damage and finally the phys ad pulled a colt L36 and, without a silencer, shot the rat (8 boxes of damage) the rat ran.  the phys add kept pumping bullets into the rat (missing) and then rolls to see if she can stop the combat junkie.  I grant her +4 dice because the rat ran away.  Critical Glitch!!!!!  So the phys ad proceeds to shoot the wife and then shoots the 'lover' (she was not aware the lover was pregnant).  Building security then guns her and the dog shaman down (dog will not leave a friend so had to help).

So, it was a failure as Horizon's security was aware that they are/were being targeted and the phys ad died falling off the exterior of the building as the mage was levitating her down and the mage got shot (with gel rounds). 

[TheWayfinder]

Doesn't sound like you did any mistakes, as far as I can tell.  Maybe it didn't want to go the way it did, but, like you, I have the dice rolled in front of God and everyone, and someone else rolls my dice, so I ground the game in it's own reality.  I really hate to fudge die rolls, because it makes the game feel cheap.  And sometimes, s#it happens.  It happens even to the best characters.  The Devil Rat got lucky, and was facing the right person to disrupt the whole thing.

[Beta]

Weird dice luck, having a combat junkie doing infiltration .... I guess my big question is how the players felt after the whole thing?

[Mmurphy]

They were crying so hard due to laughter it was almost sad, I think a few of them even fell out of their seats.  I have found that players tend to remember the epic failures much more than the successes. 

The group I have is very good and we decided to go back to ShadowRun because of the 'threat' level.  They wanted something a bit more dangerous.

[witchdoctor]

That reminds me of my first character with Shadowrun, this was in 4A and I rolled up a hacker and our group was hired to infiltrate a Neonet facility to get a prototype of some new matrix protocol. We do our leg work get fake ids, get ourselves added as employees in the system. Building was using signatures as an extra layer of security, face and I were on infiltration and signed in, not knowing we flubbed it, and went on with our lives. I go to the person I'm impersonating's desk and log in while the face goes downstairs to make the grap. Face gets made and since it was my first time playing Shadowrun I go after him as I hadn't realized the threat level in Shadowrun is insane compared to D&D, my hacker gets grabbed and interrogated. Our GM was nice enough to offer to let me keep my character if I burned an Edge but I declined as I needed to do some tweaking of my hacker anyway and I learned a valuable lesson about the sunk costs fallacy.