Shadowrun
Shadowrun Missions Living Campaign => Living Campaign Discussion => Topic started by: jamesfirecat on <06-20-12/2108:12>
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Mission Review, Domestic Tranquility:
Back by popular demand, or at least somebody on this board asking for more, I bring you guys my next Origins mission review, and it just so happens to have been my favorite mission of Origins, read on to find out why…
[Spoiler]
Mission Quote: Listen, I’ve never met a pimp who wasn’t an asshole….
Meta Quote: Seedy, seedier, seedier, SEEDIER!
Plot: The mission starts with us getting called to the major elven kingdom in America, by one of the princes. Some of us have more or less instant gungazams when it is made clear that we will be able to bring just about anything short of vehicular weapons in with us thanks to some large diplomatic bags.
Even better than that (if such a thing if possible) it turns out that the place has surprisingly lax open carry laws in its public parks (even when there is a major political speech going on!) as nobody makes too big a stink over me bringing along my Ingram Supermach. It’s possible that this is because I showed them that it was loaded with nothing but stick-N-shock rounds, or it could just be that this the land of milk and honey, or at least yogurt and margarine.
Whatever the reason, it comes in handy when an SUV with the windows down to let people poke guns out of them drives up. They seem to be aiming not for the one of the princes (who is giving a generic pro-police anti-racism speech that just about anybody could get behind) but for a bunch of young orcs who are standing off to the side heckling the prince slightly.
The car was filled with female humans, and I not exactly being a fan of racists decide to beat them to the punch. I let loose with a spray of stick and shocks, it manages to temporarily disable the vehicles, along with its occupants. Then it gets “disabled” in a much more long term manner when the elven security mages toss a fireball at the van and turn it into a flaming wreck while barbecuing its occupants.
As the smoke clears (both literally and figuratively) the prince who originally hired us, races over and makes it very clear that he is pissed off beyond believe about this. So rather than the original errand he brought us here to deal with, he wants us to put an end to the gang war one way or another.
To help us with the job he says we should go have lunch with his man in the city’s underworld Mr. Horns, and to help us get around town he lends us one of his armored SUVs and his driver Mr. Johnson. Sadly while the vehicle is fairly well defended it’s no Party Van, though it’s certainly better than nothing if we end up getting caught in a crossfire.
The restaurant like all good places to eat is in point of fact a themed bar, and the theme is evidently “snooty elves.” This is made clear when the first waiter we run into makes it clear that he doesn’t have room to seat those members of our party who are not elves. Of course once we explain that we were sent hear by one of the princes to meet with Mr. Horns, he promptly, starts falling all over himself to show us to our table.
Mr. Horns give us a quick rundown of the four major gangs in the city, The Spans who are mostly made up of orcs, the Shooters who are made up of girls, The Dog Soldiers who are various metatypes but are mostly “back to nature types” and finally the Sons of Gimli who are not just mostly but like 99% made up of dwarves. The Shooters and the Sons of Gimli have an alliance as do the Dog Soldiers and the Spans. Things used to be fairly calm in the city but recently what seemed like all-out war broke out between the Sons of Gimli and the Dog Soldiers, and it soon spilled over into the Shooters and Spans also.
He let us know that evidently it started when the sister of the Dog Soldier’s leader got kidnapped by the Sons of Gimli, or at least that’s the rumor on the street. We thank him for giving us the talk and then we head out to get to work.
While overwhelming unrepentant violence is indeed an item in our toolbox, we tend to prefer to at least make a good faith effort at other approaches first. So we have the driver take us over to the Dog Soldier’s turf, which happens to be a seedy run down area on the outskirts of town, and it doesn’t take us long to find a few of them, or at least have them find us.
Gumbo manages to convince them that they don’t want to kill us, or at least don’t want to kill us right now. We have a run in with “Red Feather” (at least that’s what I recall his name being) the leader of the Dog Soldiers, who is not in a good mood. He explains to us in a speech pattern that is not quite littered with expressions like “how” “white elf” “peace pipe” and “great spirit bound by my forefathers” about what is going on.
Sure enough, it seems that his sister, Smiles like Sunshine or just “Smiles” was kidnapped by a bunch of dwarves recently. Sadly since this group is all about being back to nature and what not they don’t have any visual recordings of the event in question. However, those who were present (which include one of Red Feather’s lieutenants) claims that she seemed to go with them almost willingly.
At this point, there are two clear possibilities, either we have a Romeo and Juliet situation which would be really cute, or magical mind rape, which would be really disgusting. So we decide to drive on over to the headquarters of the Sons of Gimli and find out.
Of course to show that we mean well, we take the time to pick up a keg of beer from a high class local microbrewery. This plan becomes slightly problematic when we discover that there headquarters is a seedy bar, but we go ahead anyway. The bartender is less than pleased with us bringing outside beverages in for his customers for free, but he mellows out some when after crawling in (the door is only four feet tall or so) Gumbo makes it clear that he can have some of the stuff also.
Thus we get to meat “Stumps” the leader of the Sons of Gimli. It doesn’t take us long to figure out that they don’t know what all the fuss is about. Sure enough Smiles is with them, and she seems to be deeply in love with Stumps and happily shooting some pool.
This happy picture of two people from opposite gangs (and frequently at odd metatypes) lasts for all of about… five seconds, then we happen to do a little precautionary assensing just to be on the safe side. We get magical readings from two locations, Stumps and Smile’s neck.
We don’t want to jump to the conclusion that he has magically enslaved her because dwarves have a some sort of unquenchable thirst for elfen women, so instead, Hummer heads to the bar’s bathroom to summon up a good sized spirit. While that happens I shoot a few rounds of pool with Stumps and compliment Smiles on her necklace and ask where it came from.
Sure enough Stumps gave it to her, and when Hummer’s spirits rolls a greater number of dice on assensing than any other member of the party could we find out that it’s a focus for a spell, a mind control spell.
The only good news is that evidently there are no other mages in the bar, so clearly the other Sons of Gimli don’t realize what is going on. We resist our urge to just have our spirit materialize and cast dispel, instead opting for setting up a clever plan. That clever plan is that we set up a meeting between the Sons of Gimli and the Dog Soldiers so that Smiles and confirm to her brother’s face that she’s fine.
As for where this meeting will take place, we drive off to find the seediest warehouse we can. Once we’ve got that, we have Gumbo find us some deep weed so that our adepts can see astrally and set up a force 12 ward inside the building.
To his credit Mr. Johnson is a consummate professional and when he hears that we need to pick up some deep weed he doesn’t even give us a sarcastic “to set up a ward… right…” either. Once we’ve got that done, we decide that it would be best to make sure that the other two gangs also stand down after we reunite Red Feather with his sister.
So we drive off to the place’s seedy red light district (which is actually has genuine red lights set up over the place, good for them) and promptly we notice something interesting, no pimps. Instead, there are just a bunch of women who happen to be wearing red and black business suits which seem to be a cross between “naughty secretary” and actual street enforcers.
Gumbo approaches one of them, and admits that this looks like a nice set up they have here. It seems like the Shooters more or less take care of protection for the girls in this area and have some kind of patrol system (when they aren’t walking the street in a completely different sense if you know what I mean) that makes pimps unnecessary.
He starts to explain the situation and gets in touch with their leader. He lets her know exactly what Stumps has done, and she does not take it well to say the least. She agrees that she’ll have the Shooters stay neutral in what is about to happen next so long as we can get the Dog Soldiers and Spans off their backs.
Then we drive over to another seedy warehouse (which is only slightly less seedy than our seedy warehouse) where we see a couple of orcs standing outside doing more in the way of arguing than guarding. Gumbo decides that the best approach to this situation is to sneak up on them, join their bitch fest and see how long it takes them to realize it.
Believe it or not he gets away with it for a good sixty seconds or so before they catch on. When they finally do he convinces them to let us go see “The Duke” who leads the Spanners. He’s perched atop a throne made of various pieces of junk, surrounded by his “subjects” who are clearly not heading the suggestion about how drug pushers shouldn’t use what they sell.
Gumbo convinces him that gang wars aren’t good for anyone, especially if it escalates to the point that the princes decide to hire a less friendly team of shadowrunners, or even worse call out his own personal troops. He agrees that he’ll go along with it, so long as the Dog Soldiers are also standing down, since he’s not going to leave them in the lurch.
That properly sets the stage for the ‘peace meeting’ between the Dog Soldiers and the Sons of Gimli. We know that Stumps is only an adept but it’s still possible that he would have bought assensing so just to make sure that nothing goes wrong I take some precautions.
In this case said “precautions” involve me digging myself a small ditch outside the warehouse, and half burring myself in it with my Ingram Supermach, reading to watch the Sons of Gimli arrive and follow them inside, just in case an ambush is necessarily. They eventually show up and despite our suggestion that they could bring “a couple of bodyguards” he has six guys with him while Red Feather only had two.
Once he gets inside and reaches the room outside of our meeting room, he catches sight of the ward and immediately starts freaking out. Gumbo tries to convince him that as Shadowrunners we have to walk through wards all the time before we end up meeting Johnsons and other important people.
He eventually agrees to do it, but tells Smiles to stay outside and let the important people do the talking. Needless to say by this point it’s become clear that he knows that we know, and that we knows that he knows that we know, and that he knows that we know that he knows that we know and that… oh my god I’ve gone cross eyed.
So anyways Gumbo makes a grab for the spell focus, but Stumps is just a little bit too fast and pushes her out of the way. I promptly get to work and open fire on his guards knocking three of them out, and the remaining one is still hit promptly failing his “don’t taze me bro” check, effectively meaning I went four for four!
After that his remaining guards go down against my friends, and Stumps himself eats a very powerful stunbolt from Hummer almost killing him.
The “almost” gets rectified when our remaining team member manages to rip the spell focus away from Smiles. Her head promptly clears and she delivers a powerful kick to Stump’s balls. She asks us if it’s okay for us to let her kill him, and that’s more or less or less that.
Now that we’ve had the fake meeting, it’s possible to have the real peace meeting where Gumbo gives an inspiring speech on the subject of how if the four gangs work together, they’ll be able to really make something of themselves, and become the kind of organized crime gangs who hire butlers and on that charming and inspiring note our adventure came to a close.
Pros/Things I liked: I think that to get the maximum effect in my review it is best that I compare this mission to Swing Vote. There are more things in common than one might realize, it all starts out with the running team being sent someplace new to them, end up getting a lecture on the local politics, and then wind up doing a lot of facing before having a not exactly difficult firefight to wind things out.
But the key difference is that the way things play out. Because while Swing Vote was boring, this mission if FUNNY! Despite the somewhat serious subject matter, (a dwarf using his magical abilities to enslave a young (or at least what I suspect to be young, it’s hard to tell with elves) girl is pretty dark stuff) the mission was filled with laughs from start to finish.
Weather it was the way the way that the snotty elven waiter proceeded to fall all over himself to serve us, learning that mainly female (and primarily interested in serving as a protection force for prostitutes) gang known as the Shooters, used to call themselves the “Hooters”, the image of a shadowrunning team walking out of a fancy restaurant with our pockets stuffed with their complimentary bread since their actual cuisine (salad, and not very much of it) didn’t appeal to us, the way that the description of the various locations we ran into seemed to be designed to have each one be seedier than the last (a fact reflected in my review of the plot), or the fact that we needed to more or less halt the our mission midway through in order to do a drug run (yes we needed that deep weed for a valid purpose but the GM had fun rolling with it) everything on this run had a funny aspect to it.
Since the mission was so funny, I was more than willing to accept the fact that my Street Sam didn’t have much to do except for at the very start or the very end. All the NPCs we ran into were fun and most felt well developed, from the decrepit run down (SEEDY!) Orc Duchy to the streets of the red light district, and the mission itself kept moving at a good pace.
Cons/things I didn’t like: This was probably our own fault for letting Smiles kill the bastard before he was able to give us his “evil speech of evil” (the speech where the villain explains why in his own eyes he’s not a bad guy) but it isn’t very clear why Stumps decided to do what he did.
He ended up endangering himself and his entire gang just so that he could get some girl for a bed mate. Did he have some sort of unnatural desire for elf girls, did he just not think far enough ahead realize what would happen, did Red Feather do something horrible to him/his gang in the past that made him feel like revenge along those lines was necessary?
Compared to how well develop the rest of the characters in this adventure were, it would have been nice to get a peek into what made him do the things he did. Also, the starting pay offered for this mission (5,000 New Yen) is insultingly low in my team’s opinion. This is doubly true if you go for a diplomatic resolution the way that we did, and thus did not have and loot to fence to further finance ourselves.
I can’t speak for other teams, but ours tends to expect to get paid 10,000 per run, and often wouldn’t go get somebody a soy candy snack bar from a stuffer shack for less than 7,000. On the other hand this situation did lead to yet another hilarious moment, when Gumbo thanks to an assist by Hummer and a well spent point of edge proceeded to drop around eighteen hits worth of negotiations on the Prince’s head.
You can almost imagine the Prince’s eyes bugging out slightly with the realization that he just might be over his head when it comes to this negotiations battle. So he proceeded to cough up another five thousand to get us out of his hair. That sorted out that problem, but a team who wasn’t as good at negotiations as ours might have ended up without much cash to show for the run.
[/Spoiler]
And that's why I liked it so much!
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I will note that if you kept finding the Missions to be not challenging, a large part of that is on the gamemaster. It's an explicit part of Missions that the adventure should be adapted to the group sitting at the table, and since it''s usually easier to "scale up" than it is to "scale down", most Missions authors err on the side of caution. Most encounters are designed to somewhat challenging to a group of new and balanced (read, non-min maxed or munched out) characters with average stats and sills (i.e., dicepools around 10-12), but not overwhelmingly so. If you're mopping teh floor with everything you encounter before an entire combat pass has gone by, let alone a combat turn, it means teh GM wasn't tuning the encounters properly.
Sorry about that.
Bull
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I can’t speak for other teams, but ours tends to expect to get paid 10,000 per run, and often wouldn’t go get somebody a soy candy snack bar from a stuffer shack for less than 7,000.
...whereas I tend to think that getting a month of Middle Lifestyle for less than 24 hours of work is pretty neat. Hmm.
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I will note that if you kept finding the Missions to be not challenging, a large part of that is on the gamemaster. It's an explicit part of Missions that the adventure should be adapted to the group sitting at the table, and since it''s usually easier to "scale up" than it is to "scale down", most Missions authors err on the side of caution. Most encounters are designed to somewhat challenging to a group of new and balanced (read, non-min maxed or munched out) characters with average stats and sills (i.e., dicepools around 10-12), but not overwhelmingly so. If you're mopping teh floor with everything you encounter before an entire combat pass has gone by, let alone a combat turn, it means teh GM wasn't tuning the encounters properly.
Sorry about that.
Bull
Just to be clear on something Bull, I don't find the fact that I managed to have a run be "balanced" or properly designed and scaled to my character's skills anywhere near as important as I do that the mission be fun to play through. The group I normally run with with is made up of five people, so typically we have one GM while the other four run and we typically roll through most missions on TR 6 with combat getting finished up before we manage to get to use all of our initiative passes, let alone getting into a second turn of combat.
I do not see this as a bad thing however. Shadowrun combat is so alpha strikey, and heavily tilted in favor of he who shoots first (especially if he shoots firsts with stick and shock rounds) that honestly it is impossible to make an "even" fight in a Shadowrun. Also lets be fair, this is sort of the way I like it. These are people shooting at each other with high tech guns/mystical energy, combat should be brutal and being the first guy to start shooting should be a huge advantage. If I wanted to take turns exchanging gentlemanly slaps to the face until one of us ran out of hit points, then I'd play 4th edition D&D.
I did not especially enjoy Domestic Tranquility any less because it was a fairly easy mission for me (though Gumbo spent about six of his eight edge points on facing rolls) than I did T.R.O 273 which did include something that effectively was a "fair" balanced fight, which honestly left me feeling a little peeved over the fact that the fight started with me getting shot in the head by invisible guys (because if we'd had a better mage and a tac-net up we might have been able to avoid something like that.)
In short, in a system like Shadowrun, I'd advise you guys to focus less on making sure the combat is perfectly tailored to every team, because every team is different (mine once more or re-enacted the helicopter scene in the matrix to butcher 30 security guards with a minigun to get revenge for our murdered fixer) and focus more on making sure the various things the Shadowrunners are doing are fun and interesting.
Once again I can only speak for my team, but our favorite part of Inn-N-Out was the pre-"proper mission" mission where we had to act as waiters, and cooks at a resturant for a dinner full of cops. It was hilarious and fun because it was something we'd never done anything close to before, and it brought up a lot of interesting possibilities, including Gumbo having to resolve an argument over weather it was called a "magazine" or a "clip" and somebody decided to pull their gun out in order to prove their point and having to deal with a water spirit who tried to claim one of the restroom stalls as its new domain.;
So yeah, even though I'm a Street Samurai character, and one whose talents are almost exclusively based around shooting people (I can hide weapons; so I can shoot people with them, I can sneak into places; so I can shoot people in them, I have foot anchors to kick people with; so that I get more recoil compensation to shoot people with!) combat is not the main draw of Shadowrun for me, getting to interact with people in this interesting setting and do interesting things is what brings me back to the table and missions like Domestic Tranquility did a great job scratching that itch.
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I can’t speak for other teams, but ours tends to expect to get paid 10,000 per run, and often wouldn’t go get somebody a soy candy snack bar from a stuffer shack for less than 7,000.
...whereas I tend to think that getting a month of Middle Lifestyle for less than 24 hours of work is pretty neat. Hmm.
Well you have to balance that against the fact that you could get shot in the face.
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Back by popular demand, or at least somebody on this board asking for more, I bring you guys my next Origins mission review, and it just so happens to have been my favorite mission of Origins, read on to find out why…
Awesome. 8) Glad you had such a good time with it, man!
On the issue of pay vs. difficulty, Bull already mentioned it, but I, personally, kind of "lowball" the adventures as I write them, to make the default challenge/pay scale geared towards starting characters. If the GM has a bunch of hardened vets at his table, he can crank it up a lot easier than someone can crank it down, in my opinion -- so my default tends to be a little lower pay and a little easier.
In this case, your strong negotiations meant you got more direct pay from the Prince (good for pay), but it also means you had half as tough a fight scene at the end (bad for pay), and it kept you from having bodies to loot all day, to get there (bad for pay). One of the reasons the base pay is so low is because -- potentially -- the loot on this one is pretty high. None of these gangs have a whole lot of absolutely top-end stuff, but also none of them have top-end electronics to complicate what stuff they do have (no worrying about RFIDs and security hackers, like you might against lots of other bad guys in Shadowrun)...so if PCs get bloodier with it, they can collect an awful lot of combat axes, SMGs, AK 97s, Morrissey Altas, Cougar Fineblades, and on and on and on, depending on how they play their cards. They've gotta earn that loot, mind you, and then lose a cut when they Fence it, etc, etc...but the potential is there to get a decent payday either way (either a good Face earns you good pay, or you've got no Face and you likely get in a lot more fights).
And good job getting Enyo and the Shooters (who, yes, were called "The Hooters" in the original Tir book, I felt like a name update wouldn't be a bad idea) on your side. I'm glad that angle was able to work out for someone.
At any rate, I'm just glad y'all had fun. The main thrust of this one was to show the underside of the Tir (and Portland in particular), as part of the four-Mission Tir arc. I wanted to remind people that it still sucks there. It's not all Fantasyland and forested mountains, their cities have got the same grimy, seedy, underbelly as Seattle does.
I also want to point out that the main plot point -- Stump and Smiles, who got the whole thing rolling -- isn't carved in stone. I left it open-ended either way, so each GM could decide for themselves if he's a terrible magic-using date rapist, or if the Anglo Dwarf and the NAN-type Elf just found true love (but the Sprawl won't let them be happy together). I'm kind of curious as to how most GMs are going to play it, so it's cool to hear that at least one went for the "screw that guy, he was using magic" angle.
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...whereas I tend to think that getting a month of Middle Lifestyle for less than 24 hours of work is pretty neat. Hmm.
Yes, but you really work hard for that lifestyle cash!
And there's other expenses. Also, no benefits that a wageslave earning the same amount might get, either. Of course, they're working 8-8, 6-days a week. And that's a nice, cushy job.
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Union rules require that we take a minimum of a week per job, even if we do the whole thing in one day :P
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Union rules require that we take a minimum of a week per job, even if we do the whole thing in one day :P
And if you've read my review of T.R.O 273 you know how seriously I take union matters!
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Union rules require that we take a minimum of a week per job, even if we do the whole thing in one day :P
You realize one of the Corporate Court's mandates is the absolute destruction of labor unions in every way, shape, and form, right?
Up to, and including demanding that all members boycott any country that allows them?
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You realize one of the Corporate Court's mandates is the absolute destruction of labor unions in every way, shape, and form, right?
Up to, and including demanding that all members boycott any country that allows them?
Oooh, do you have a reference for that? I can have a lot of fun with that as a plot point.
(IRL, I'm a trade union organiser...)
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Union rules require that we take a minimum of a week per job, even if we do the whole thing in one day :P
You realize one of the Corporate Court's mandates is the absolute destruction of labor unions in every way, shape, and form, right?
Up to, and including demanding that all members boycott any country that allows them?
Of course it was, but we are shadowrunners. If you outlaw unions, then only outlaws will have unions.
See, makes perfect sense!
---Longshot, member of the Changling Shadowrunners Association Denver local 272 now currenty serving Neo-New York.
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Shadowrunner Unions... You know, I could see just that!
"Sorry Mr. Johnson, but your 'run doesn't meet the minimum requirements for our Union, so we're going to have to decline your offer. Also, your bid was so low for this kind of work, Tiny has to break your kneecaps for free."
"Nothin' personal-like, Mr. J. Just biz." *CRACK*
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Shadowrunner Unions... You know, I could see just that!
"Sorry Mr. Johnson, but your 'run doesn't meet the minimum requirements for our Union, so we're going to have to decline your offer. Also, your bid was so low for this kind of work, Tiny has to break your kneecaps for free."
"Nothin' personal-like, Mr. J. Just biz." *CRACK*
What happens when the RUnners Union calls a strike? Do all the corps need to put a hold on runs? Does the world become suddenly peaceful, though the wageslave on the street has no idea why all the crazy just stopped?
Or do they bring in outside help, and the runners need to make sure that the new guys understand how it is?
Could make for a light-hearted campaign :)
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Isn't this basically the plot to Grosse Pointe Blank? :D
I remember a "union of irregular operatives" over on the other forum a few years back...
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Sorry for the thread necro but this seems like the right place.
EDIT: I cleaned this up to be a little more coherent and include more things I liked so it doesn’t sound as negative.
I just played this mission (run by jamesfirecat) and I want to give a few brief comments:
1) I thought the first two scenes were really strong. I liked the characterization of the Prince, the way he was dismissive about money (which made me sad that he was so stingy, it didn’t work for me for him to offer me a pittance to go get in the middle of a gang war). Admittedly he is better than SRM-10 Twist and Insult (9,000 on TR 6) but not by much. I did expect more from someone called a Prince.
2) I liked the scene at the restaurant. My team channeled “Blues Brothers”. It was hilarious as the Ogre, Fomori, and Naga made a mess of things, being rude to customers and playing with their food.
3) I disliked how none of the gangs really cared about the outcome of the gang war enough to offer significant payment. I expected one side to say “yeah, we’ll pay you 5,000ny to go and fix this for us”, and that never happened. To me, that broke the immersion of the situation. I felt that the gang leaders didn’t actually want the situation resolved (especially the Shooters or the Spans who have no motivation besides loyalty). I think a good move would have been to total up the loot gained by defeating them (and then dividing by 10 for “hot price”) and offered that as a reward to work for the gang. It’s not increasing the payment any (since you could normally just beat them up and take the money), but I think it would be a good touch for immersion.
“I would like this resolved, I can only pay you 5,800 total (which is why I never hired shadowrunners to win this gang war), but I’d like it resolved to my satisfaction”. Remember the PCs are only hired to *end the gang war* so they can double collect from a gang and the Prince.
I did like how james addressed this, which was to take the money that wasn’t offered by the Prince (due to low negotiate roll) and give it out to the gangs to make them pay you for ending the adventure in a specific way (return Smiles to Redfeather, etc). That way the runners didn’t get more than 10,000 and people actually cared about the outcome. I think that would also have been a clever thing to put in the debugging section.
4) James ran with the magical mind-control plot. When we found out we got her alone, dispelled the spell, and asked her what was up (to make sure she wasn’t consenting and it wasn’t a different sustained spell).
Unlike in James’ group which had an elaborate plot to trick Stumps, mine was more violent. Fueled by the rage of NPCs using “Mental Magic Spells" http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=4035.0 (http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=4035.0) (which is legal but wasn’t when the characters were made assuming they were ever illegal), and some moderate rage at mind rape (literally), my character set forth to kill the drek out of Stumps.
Tempered by the idea that “hey, it’s shadowrun, sometimes I’m paid to do terrible things, this can just be another terrible thing I get paid to do once a week for the right price”; I had our face text him a new deal, he pays us to look the other way, and we look the other way. Specifically our offer was:
Nothing: We kill you
Bronze package: We beat you up, take your things, but leave you alive
Silver package: We leave you and your gang alone, and go on our merry way
Gold package: Silver package + we will stop Redfeather and fix the situation
Platinum package: Gold + we’ll go get you more elves to mindrape, because we’re amoral mercenaries who do whatever the job of the week is.
He decided he would pay us nothing, ate 2 SnS bullets and a pair of force 5 stunballs, and then took a nap. I don’t even think the rest of the team had to do anything. The pair of stunballs wiped out all the rest of the gangers too, so mission complete!
Everyone got to do stuff, and that was good, but I wish Stumps had been a little less cartoony “I will not pay you to keep my secret!” and more reasonable “Yeah you got me, have 10,000ny to slay my enemies and keep this quiet”. I don’t think it is unreasonable at for him to say “screw you, I’m in my hideout with all my friends and we out number you”. I think that makes perfect sense coming from a guy who sees what he wants (Smiles) and takes it by force to reject another’s offer of force. I think this was a really consistent characterization. I would have appreciated more direction to the GM in this case however, such as money he could give try to bribe people with, or what his end goal was. Why did he even do this in the first place?
5) I just want to comment on the Shadowrunner Union and pay in missions in general. This is not specific to this mission, nor is it critical of any one writer. The shadowrunner Union is real, Union rules say you have to take 7 days to do any run, regardless of how long it takes. Thus if the Johnson offers to pay 5,000 for 24 hours of my runner’s time, he/she/it is actually paying for 168 hours (since I can offer no less). Unfortunately this means a job that is reasonable at 200ny an hour is laughable at 30ny an hour.
When the Johnson wants to pay my character to solve their problems and put his/her/its life on the line for 30ny an hour it makes me laugh, cry, sigh and then accept. I laugh in their face because I used to be able to take disadvantages that pay better than the run! (Day Job was allowed in Season 3 and gave 1,000 a week for 10 hours of work, or 5,000 for 40 hours of work).
I cry because it make me sad that chromed characters who need the nuyen to buy better implants and improve don’t get the resources they need. I play a mage at the moment so I’m fine with whatever (more karma feeds me more magic and more initiations) but while 30 karma for me is 2 initiations, for them it’s +1 intuition or raising a skill to 4. They really do need the money.
I sigh because it’s a constant problem, that runs pay too little. I finally accept because if I say no, they aren’t gong to magically have an appropriate (2,500ny per karma they offer) amount of money, if I don’t accept, I don’t play. This is a problem with Missions in general (if you don’t accept, you don’t play, even when the pay is terrible, the job is smothering babies, and you learn half way through that it’s Damian Knight’s baby and he’s coming after you!)
I personally think a minimum of 10,000ny a run to is needed to get my character to pay attention to a Johnson. That should be their staring offer which gets negotiated up to around 2000-3000 per karma reward. That level of payout really incentives the character to risk their life and take a week of their time. Remember, if a character could get a legitimate job for the same price and not risk their lives (mages/hackers/street sams who don’t have psychotic tendencies that make them a workplace liability), why would they run?
Finally, I think shadow running should pay a bit more and rely less on “you can loot things” as an excuse for low payment. It’s unprofessional and this isn’t D&D, I’m not slaying orcs for their AK-97s, I’m solving problems for rich people with talk or ultraviolence depending on the week.