Again, its not about just crushing everything you run up against, that's more D&D style. Shadowrun is more tactics. What can I do in this situation to improve my odds.
Maybe I just got one bad Missions, but the one I saw had you getting ambushed left and right by OP goons constantly with no option to avoid them. So, Shadowrun may not be like DND in the literature, but the Missions are totally DND.
Depends on the mission, the GM, and the players.
I had a blast in one Missions game where to pull off the job the team decided to pose as a corporate film crew putting together a PR piece highlighting the achievements of the facility we were tasked to infiltrate. Got high end cameras, film crew, appropriate gear trucks, hacked the local system to make us look legit, the whole nine yards. Whole team got to participate in various ways. Zero combat. By the end the facility manager was thanking us and looking forward to the finished film. Had no clue we'd... done things, to his facility, til a few days later.
While having a Mission that was well suited to this kinda thing helped, it was more having an enthusiastic and willing team of players, and a good GM that was able to roll with the craziness, that was most important.
I've played about half a dozen other Missions that similarly had little to no combat. Every single time it was really more the players coming together to pull off a perfect crazy plan, alongside a GM capable of adjusting to it. Every one was a blast to play.
This is not to say that combat isn't fun, far from it. But the game is what you make of it.
-k
...had one like that where the team's Decker and my Face completed the mission without so much as a single bullet being fired.
The original idea was just go get in and case the location for infiltration later by the whole team, so The Decker managed to get us onto the guest list to meet with our target for an interview. with my face posing as a correspondent for a corporate review magazine with her as my assistant. As we were on the lift, we thought, "heck we're already inside the noise barrier" there would be little difficulty tapping inot the matrix So we set "plan B" into motion with my face looking to distract our target so the Decker could insert the chip to upload the programme we were supposed to put on his system. Yeah it was a gutsy idea for if something had gone wrong, we would have been in deep drek as neither of us were really good at combat. When we get to the office and met our "mark' my Face begins to lay it on thick with lots of professional compliments after which she had to do a con test (got extra dice for the act) which ended up with him effectively "eating out of her hand". He was so "taken" that when she asked about getting a tour of the facility, to he gladly complied, leaving her "assistant" forgotten, behind in the office.
Once my character and the mark left the office, our Decker then temporarily looped the security camera, and slotted the chip into the computer to upload the programme. When she tried to loop the camera again to remove the chip after the upload is done, the attempt failed (though she managed not to trip any alert). She then contacted my character on her earbud about the situation after which my Face concocted a plan. When we got back to the office, I asked the GM if there was something like a cup of coffee on his desk He mentioned there a glass of water. As my character is winding up with her interviewing, she gestured and "accidentally' knocked the glass over so it fell behind the desk (requiring another con test). Profusely apologising for her clumsiness, she went to clean it up and on a successful palming test removed the chip without anyone else being the wiser She then shook his hand, apologising again, thanked him for the interview and tour, after which the both of us calmly left the office and walked out the building. As we headed down the street, my character tossed the chip back to the Decker and said, "mission accomplished".
Meanwhile the other members of the team were waiting at a pub down the street ready to work up a plan for later that evening based on our "surveillance".
Turned out to be one of the best "black trenchcoat' jobs of the Missions season for which both the characters got extra Karma and street cred.
