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Hi everyone. Long time reader, first time poster. I'm starting up a monthly IRL Shadowrun game. I will have 5 or 6 players. Most of them are novice or moderately experienced RPG players. This group played a successful GURPS Hellboy game before this, and one of the players is also in another RPG group. My wife and her sister will be playing in my game, and while both of them are seasoned lifelong veterans of PnP RPGs, only my wife has played Shadowrun before, and that was 1 campaign a long time ago. I'm a pretty experienced GM so I'm not worried about GMing, although I may pop in here for advice from time to time. What I'm asking you guys is for advice on how many BP I should give these players for new characters. Right now I'm thinking 300 but you guys are way more experienced with the newer versions of the game than I am. I haven't played Shadowrun in over a decade, and the last time I did I ran a relatively successful game with a lot of players. That was 3rd edition though. I bought the 20th Anniversary book last year and I've read most of it so I have a decent baseline of what's up in general. I want the new players to feel powerful and flexible, but I also don't want to give them too many options. Partly because I don't want to overwhelm them at chargen time. I also don't want my wife and her sister to feel too constrained as veteran players. I want the party to feel like they can take on most runs, but if they're going to poo poo all over my best laid plans, then I want it to be because the players outsmart me, not because their characters are godlike. I've already told everyone that we're sticking with skills and races from the base book. I want to keep it simple. No half-dragons, no vampires, no werewolves, none of that crazy poo poo. Just basic runners. There are plenty of options in the base book to keep things interesting without them going nuts on min-max-ware. I'm also limiting debt, and I've told everyone straight up that if they use debt as a drawback they will be hearing from the collectors on a regular basis. I'm also not allowing hackers/deckers. I told them that I would either minimize the need for hacking or handle it some other way (NPCs). Thankfully nobody has objected to this. I'm also taking some great advice from this thread and nerfing mages a little. Stun spells are going to have a little more drain and the same with summoning Spirits. I want mages to still be powerful but I don't want the party to lean on them for everything. Can you guys remind me of any other crazy stuff I should restrict? I don't want to go crazy on restrictions because I really don't expect this party to min-max a lot. I do however want to make sure that the game doesn't evolve into an auto-win flowchart every session. Thanks in advance. 
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Apr 8, 2013 21:37
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OK thanks for the suggestions everyone. I read the last couple pages and I'll ban Stick n Shock ammo and form-fitting body armor. I'm also a real stickler for drawbacks and I've told the players that if they take things like monetary debts or addictions that I will not let them ever forget about them. I really like the idea of banning addictions that don't really have any truly negative side-effects. I'm probably going to limit drawbacks even further and say no more than 3 total drawbacks and no more than 2 ranks per drawback unless it's something hilarious like Gremlins 4. 6 players is a lot and it's gonna be no fun for anyone if I have to spend a lot of time dealing with everyone's gambling debts and addictions and hosed up personality quirks. Role playing drawbacks is cool and fun and interesting but I also don't want the group to devolve into an ersatz dysfunctional family. Someone is thinking of playing a Mage and fortunately for me, all they know is that mages are powerful, stun spells are good, and spirits are also good. They don't know just how good they are yet though. This player won't minmax but they're also pretty smart, so what's the thread consensus on nerfing mages? Just multiplying drain by 1.5 or 2? Should I limit the level of the foci they can get or increase the cost? Or should I just not worry about that and make sure that every run has some form of magical resistance for them to deal with? I'd prefer not to do that option because as has been discussed before, it doesn't make sense for every run to have oppositional mages. Instead I guess I could just increase the number of mooks and make sure that all mook leaders know to prioritize the mage as the primary target. Right now I'm leaning towards increasing drain on stun spells by 1.5 (rounding down) and increasing the number of mooks and making sure they always go for the mage as soon as it's obvious to the mooks that a mage is involved. Does that sound fair? Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Apr 9, 2013 |
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Apr 9, 2013 15:20
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Mystic Mongol posted:This sounds like a recipie for sadness--forcing characters to choose between having fewer points, and having to defend 8.75% of their points total on a regular basis without making them the only thing going on in the run. It's not like I'm gonna make people roll for addictions every 5 minutes, and I'm not going to have debt-collecting thugs intervene in the middle of runs to harass the person in debt. I know better than to be annoying about it but I also want to make sure that I hold players' feet to the fire in terms of taking drawbacks. Those points aren't free. quote:Howabout option two: All players get all 35 points for disadvantages ANYWAY, and if they want to can choose some disadvantages to give their character, character. Then, if it turns out a specific disadvantage is less, "Interesting," and more, "Infuriatingly crippling," then they can freely ignore / change it. Most players will choose disadvantages anyway, and you'll see a sharp downtick on point filling meaningless disadvantages, like five point addictions to chewing gum. After thinking about it some more, I think I'll just do this. I trust my players to not be minmaxers and I think with my emphasis on role playing they'll probably take interesting drawbacks that I won't have to babysit or ignore.
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Apr 9, 2013 16:32
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Vavrek posted:There's a rule introduced in SR4A, which was posted in this thread some weeks or months ago. Emphasis mine: Oh snap I missed that! OK cool that seems to balance things out. I'll stick to that. Thanks for pointing it out.
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Apr 9, 2013 16:55
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So I guess the IRC channel for this thread is dead? There's only like 4 or 5 people in there. 
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Apr 9, 2013 18:19
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Bigass Moth posted:Here is the entire annotated will: Thanks for posting this. I never read it and it's fascinating if extremely long.
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Apr 14, 2013 19:13
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ErichZahn posted:So SR4 is supposed to look like that awful future predicted by consumer optimism and TED Talks? But if you're obscenely rich then everything will be just fine! 
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Apr 15, 2013 17:32
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Nyaa posted:I wish more GM these days would run a Shadowrun setting that isn't about a group of criminals working infinite side quests for Mr.Johnson for money. I prefer to let the players drive the story and do pretty much whatever they want. Then they have more fun because they're not being pushed or pulled a certain way by me. If you want to steer players away from being ice cold criminals, make their actions have consequences. Make it obvious that their life of hardcore crime will eventually lead to an early death or worse. Make their karma come back around on them and have them lose things or people they care about. Maybe then their quest becomes one of vengeance against a particular corp or corp executive or something. Then they're at least doing some good even if it's for selfish reasons.
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Apr 17, 2013 17:51
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Nyaa posted:Oh, okay. I guess I just had really bad luck finding a gm with your kind of setting then. I had joined like 5-6 game and all of them are like "Meet Johnson, do criminal side quest, get money." Just purely being bad guy and boring. Play with better people.  Seriously though, have you tried running your own game? If you tell your players up-front that you'd like them to put their heads together to determine a common goal besides "grind mafia quests for money and upgrade our gear" they'll probably do it. You could even tell your players straight-up that you'd like to run a game where not everyone is a hardened criminal. You as the GM have a certain amount of unspoken influence over the players because while the players make all the important choices, ultimately the GM determines what those choices are in the first place.
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Apr 17, 2013 20:01
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Nyaa posted:I would prefer to be the one playing than gming, but yes I did run a diplomatic mission where the players manage to resolve the incident with Well in my current game I didn't let anyone be hackers (mostly to save time and keep things flowing during runs) and I'm planning on handling hacking through NPC hackers assigned to the team whenever they need them. I'm coming up with a bunch of different one-off NPC hackers for the players to have with them for just one mission each and they're a lot of fun to make up. Some of them will be really cool and some of them are designed to troll the party. There's nothing wrong with the GM having a character as long as it doesn't have too much unspoken influence over the actions and decisions of the party. Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Apr 17, 2013 |
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Apr 17, 2013 21:11
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and without violence.
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I'm going to be running some compound/building infiltration missions in the coming months and I was wondering if any of you have any good sources for either satellite images of prisons or shipyards or warehouses or anything. Additionally I'd like to be able to get some floorplans/blueprints for players to use. I have a nice color printer and I'd like to give the players some handouts if they negotiate and/or hack well. I'm not going to be using any pre-made adventures other than On The Run and/or Food Fight for the beginning of the campaign. My initial idea was to just print out some google maps satellite images for whatever type of compound I'm using for the mission but I have no idea where to start for detailed floorplans. Any help would be appreciated.
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May 1, 2013 16:10
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Thanks for the tips on getting satellite photos and floorplans guys. I'll burn everything after each session just in case.
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May 2, 2013 15:27
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Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is the most common way in the newest 4EA rules for fixers and other covert contacts to get in touch with runners? Everyone needs to be off the grid and encrypted, right? So are there encrypted phone/commlink channels or encrypted email accounts? Private message boards? How am I going to get the team's contacts in touch with them safely and securely? Back in 2nd edition we had people do short phone calls to set up face-to-face meetings but that was back in high school before the internet existed IRL. These days (in-game) with everything being wireless and more easily traceable things like phone calls seem less secure. Also I'm glad I didn't allow any hackers in my current campaign. Holy crap there is so much confusion and variance in personal preferences for how powerful hackers should be. My team's hackers will all be NPCs assigned to the by the fixer for each mission and they're going to do legwork and carry a gun and that's it. I understand that veteran players who like to play hackers want to be more than legworkers with guns, but as a GM with new players that would just be nightmarish. Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 14:36 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 14:34
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Quick rules question since I can't seem to figure it out from the core book. I'm trying to plan ahead for a possible scenario in an upcoming game: The runners are supposed to hijack a truck full of supplies like food and medicine and stuff. One of the party members is a mage with Stunball. The trailer of the truck has 2 security guards inside. Once the trailer door is open, can the mage throw an indirect Stunball in there to knock the guards out without LOS? Like, could she target one of the inner walls and let the stunblast go out from there? Also, will Stunball damage crates of food and medical supplies?
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May 10, 2013 02:13
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Mystic Mongol posted:No, a stunball is an area direct spell, which means it targets multiple opponents that the caster can perceive in a tight radius. If you want to hit people grenade style, you need an indirect spell... like fireball, or blast, or toxic wave. Thanks! Looks like the rest of the party will have to try to draw fire or distract the guards while the mage tries to draw LOS. Teamwork! Glad to know that Stunball doesn't blow up food. That would defeat the whole purpose of the mission.
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May 10, 2013 04:03
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Quick rules question about recoil: The book says that every bullet fired after the first during an Actio Phase gets a -1 dice pool modifier. So if a character uses both his simple action during a single IP to fire a semi-auto pistol twice, the second shot gets a -1 modifier. If that character has 2 IPs and fires 2 more shots during his 2nd IP, do those 3rd and 4th shots get additional -1 modifiers (-2 and -3 respectively)? I only ask because the way the SMG example in the book is worded confuses me. It says that if a character fires 2 3-shot bursts, the first burst gets a -2 modifier, and the 2nd burst gets a -3 modifier. Are those cumulative or is it always just -1 for each additional instance of firing during an Action Phase?
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May 20, 2013 16:55
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Is anyone else going to GenCon this year? I'd love to play some 5E games with some other people from this thread.
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May 23, 2013 17:16
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Sorry for the double post but it's been a while since the last one. How do you GMs deal with people taking 6/6 contacts? My new game is going to start tomorrow night and I have 3 people with large number contacts. I didn't restrict contacts and I don't want to screw them out of the BP they spent on them, but I also don't want them to be able to get whatever they want whenever they want. The best thing I can think of right now is just time. Even people with worldwide contacts need time to call those people and arrange things. Then there's the dice rolls. What are some reasonable dice pools for 6/6 contacts trying to get info or gear for PCs?
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May 25, 2013 02:34
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I need some help coming up with mission types for my players. I currently have: Combat Mage Face Weapon Specialist Generic Combat Monster Troll Drone Rigger Infiltration Specialist My main problem is coming up with missions where everyone (or at least most of the players) has something to do. They're mostly new players so I want their first handful of missions to cover the various common mission types in Shadowrun. Next session I'm good. I have them making a choice between hijacking a truck and doing bodyguard duty for a VIP. Both of those work fine in terms of having something for everyone to do. However one of the things I'm struggling with is putting together a B&E mission. Basically the Face would meet with the Johnson, the Rigger would do some recon, the NPC hacker would do some of the legwork (maybe one of the other party members would hit up contacts too), and the Infiltration Specialist would put on his Chameleon Suit and solo the extraction while everyone else sat in the van and waited for anything to go wrong. That would be boring for half the party. I get kind of the same vibe for a counter-kidnapping mission. It seems like the exact same thing would happen and the combat-oriented people would get bored. Any suggestions?
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Jun 3, 2013 21:10
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Toplowtech posted:Complicate things (but don't over complicate). These are some good ideas. Thanks. The team hasn't gotten too deep into the underworld yet so I'll keep this stuff in mind. If the team chooses the truck hijack mission they'll get involved with some gang warfare and as a result some of your suggestions should work out well.
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Jun 4, 2013 14:07
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Mordaedil posted:Arguably, the gun should signify its owner. Bingo. This is exactly what I do when making a new character or NPC. And I don't just do it with the gun. I do it with everything. Guns (if any), armor (if any), commlink, car, clothing, hairstyle, colors, the places they hang out, the music they listen to, everything. Reducing the game to "this is always the best pistol so don't ever buy anything else" is one of the least fun things you can say to a group of players. It's better to pick sub-optimal yet characterful gear than to minmax everything on everyone so everyone is identical except for their hair and eye color. I mean if you and your group want to play that way, great. Good for you. I'd rather have a group that roleplays unique characters with unique gear even if it's not the best.
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Jun 10, 2013 14:59
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Mendrian posted:Let's say hypothetically we have two pieces of equipment. One is objectively worse than the other - they cost the same, for instance, and one just does less damage. You're not hearing us. Sometimes a strictly inferior weapon is more characterful. This is because weapons consist of more than a damage value and a price tag. There is nothing wrong with people taking sub-optimal gear if it is characterful because this is a role playing game where people play characters instead of just rolling dice and comparing numbers.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:27
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Mendrian posted:The problem with all this 'character' argument is that it adds needless layers of system mastery to an already complex system. This is a really weird argument. There are only 6 players in my group and I know what gear they have. Those are the only pieces of gear I need to know about until they buy more stuff. I have the stats of their gear on-hand when we play. I don't have to do any "system mastery" at all. If one of my new players says to me "Hey I want to buy an SMG but I'm not sure which one I should pick" then we'll sit down together with the gear list and discuss it before or after the game. Also, as a GM, I don't give my NPCs optimal gear either. For the exact same reasons. Real people in the real world do not walk into a gun store and say "Hey can I get a list of all the Damage Values for all your guns so I can compare them to the relative prices and perform an elaborate cost/benefit analysis of each and every one of your items for sale?" Most people buy guns for tons of different reasons. Some people buy guns because they like the way it looks. Some people are won over by advertising and marketing and buy whatever it heavily advertised. Some people like older guns. Some people are collectors. Some people add a bunch of unnecessary gadgets to their guns because they like to customize things. This is how characters (both PC and NPC) behave. Personality is a thing that exists. People are nor beep boop robots. Additionaly, any GM worth his/her salt should be able to balance NPCs and encounters against the team's relative threat level. If your team is a bunch of hardcore role players who take really lovely but really characterful weapons, don't put them up against a dozen Red Samurai and then tell them it's their fault for not taking optimal gear when they get killed. Put them up against things that will be a decent challenge for them but not overwhelming. This really sounds like a non-issue to me, but then again I've been playing PnP RPGs for over 20 years.
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Jun 10, 2013 18:08
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TheAnomaly posted:See this? All of this is wrong. An inferior gun isn't a character trait, it's an inferior gun. Go ahead and name one book or movie where a character had an "inferior gun" that stopped them from being able to do what they were trying to do. Scaramanga carried a one shot golden pistol and the only man who beat him was Bond. Beowulf carried an ancient epic sword, and when it broke he grabbed the older more epic sword off his enemies wall and went to town with it. Inferior weapons are bullshit design, period. You are clearly a powergamer and you should really stop telling the rest of us non-powergamers that we're doing things "wrong" because this game allows both powergamers and non-powergamers to do the things they like. If you always want to use the best guns, go ahead. My group of players sometimes uses sub-optimal equipment and I'm a good enough GM that I don't put them up against things they can't handle and then blame them for not taking the best gear. That's something only a lovely GM would do.
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Jun 10, 2013 21:49
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Interest check: My group's next session is going to be a Halloween-themed one-shot. My idea was to throw them into the Shadowrun version of a Scooby-Doo episode. The team will be hired to investigate a creepy old haunted mansion. Along the way they will encounter, hopefully not kill, and eventually team up with the Scooby-Doo gang who just happen to be another team of runners working for a different, non-conflicting employer. I have most of my ideas for this one-shot written out in a Google Drive doc. It's 4 pages long. Does anyone care enough to read the whole thing and give me some feedback or is that the stupidest thing you've ever heard? edit: Hopefully it is understood that this run will be for drunken good times and not serious-business at all. I don't normally do stuff that's this silly. Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Oct 18, 2013 |
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Oct 18, 2013 21:45
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OK here it is, copy/pasted straight out of my notes: This is going to be a one-shot. The overall idea is to pull the party into the Shadowrun version of a Scooby-Doo episode. It’s supposed to be light-hearted and fun except for the ending. Here’s what I have planned out so far: The face of the party is a former high-class brothel madame (don’t ask). She still owns the brothel and receives a small income from it while she’s off running the shadows for a personal purpose that’s not important here. The plot hook is that one of her brothel employees had to quit suddenly. She put in her 2 week notice a couple days ago but then ended up coming to brothel and getting her stuff and quitting the very next day. The employee has requested an “exit interview” with the party face. This is to explain her situation and to ask for help. When the face gets together with her employee, the employee tells her the following: She had to quit because she fears for her personal safety. Her grandfather, her only living relative, died recently. She never talked to him because he was a creepy weirdo. She cut off communications with him a long time ago. Apparently her grandfather bequeathed her his mansion and a large sum of money in his will. The money is great because she doesn’t have to work anymore but she doesn’t want the mansion. It’s outside of town in the hills and is creepy and weird and she doesn’t even want to see it much less live there. Since her grandfather’s death she’s been getting constantly harassed by total strangers via her commlink and e-mail. Most of these messages are offers to buy the mansion from her. At first she was happy to be getting the messages from people because she thought it would make selling the mansion easier. But soon people started leaving messages with her that were WAY too enthusiastic and is started to creep her out so she stopped taking calls and messages about it until she could talk to a realtor to broker a deal. The final straw was someone coming to her front door uninvited and asking her if she’d sell the mansion. She slammed the door, called Lone Star, and moved out the next day. She’s currently staying in a hotel but she’s still getting commlink messages and e-mails and is afraid that people will track her to the hotel. She didn’t ask to stay at the brothel because she respects the party face and didn’t want to put her business in danger. The party face/madame runs a very safe and clean brothel and the employee was happy to work there. She respects the party face very much and that’s why she didn’t want to involve her but now she needs help badly. Recently, her harassment has not been strictly limited to people wanting to buy the mansion. She is now getting angry messages and even threats from people about things that were bequeathed to them in her grandfather’s will but have not been received yet. Since the employee is the only living relative, people are contacting her trying to figure out where their stuff is. This is odd because she has also received thank you messages from people who have also received money from her grandfather’s will. This leads her to believe that bequests of only nuyen went through due to account triggers based on her grandfather’s death. However physical items are another thing entirely. Someone has to send those out from the mansion itself and a lot of people haven’t received them yet. Those people are apparently just as creepy and weird and anxious as the people offering to buy the mansion. The employee will ask the face if she can get her a fake SIN. The employee wants a new life free from harassment and just wants to hide for a while until she can put together a plan for selling the mansion and washing her hands of this whole situation. The employee has never done anything illegal in her whole life, not even stealing soy-candy from Stuffer Shack, so she has no idea how to get a fake SIN herself. Also, prostitution is legal as long as the brothel has a license in my version of Seattle. It is a regulated and relatively safe industry, at least the licensed brothels are. The employee will also ask the face if she knows of anyone who can investigate the mansion for her and see what’s going on over there. She wants all of this harassment by weirdos to stop forever and wants to get back to a normal life. When the party starts calling contacts during the legwork phase they can find out the following: - The grandfather was non-magical but was heavily into the occult. He collected lots of old magical items. - The people who want their bequeathed items are getting desperate and/or pissed, because now, less than a week after the grandfather’s death, they are hiring teams of runners to go to the mansion and get their stuff. Previous attempts at approaching the mansion by normal have been resulted in nobody coming back. These bequestees (is that a word?) are now hiring professionals. - Only one team of professional runners has made it to the mansion and they are all dead except for a lone survivor who is now in a psychiatric ward. The team can go visit the survivor if they want to but it will be faster to just have a hacker get the data from the ward’s database. The team has an NPC hacker on call. - The grandfather had a butler that nobody has heard from since the funeral. So the basic idea of the story is very Scooby-Doo. The butler did it. He killed the grandfather because he was tired of waiting for him to die naturally. The butler got a huge sum of money from the will but not enough to buy the mansion for himself, which is his goal. He kept all the most powerful and evil magical artifacts from the grandfather’s collection. The less powerful and less expensive ones got sent out the right people because he only wants powerful things. He wants unpowerful things away from him. He’s not a magic user himself but he’s using a lot of these items to artificially summon and control spirits. The spirits protect the mansion and its grounds while also lowering the value of the property low enough that he can buy afford to buy it with the bequest money he got from grandpa. The butler’s motive is just power for power’s sake. He’s an old man who’s been a butler most of his life and has grown tired of serving people and now wants to have power and control over others. He hates himself for having been subservient most of his life and is now basically outwardly projecting his own self-loathing. His short-term goal is to own the mansion so that he can have it all to himself, and then he’s probably going to kill everyone who tries to take the magic items that were bequeathed to them. Then he eventually wants to build an army of spirits that he controls and invade Seattle. And he’s going to get away with it too if not for our meddling shadowrunners. OK so next I want the party to run into the original Scooby-Doo cast, but in the form of runners. Ideally I’d like to have the runners park their vehicles outside the mansion grounds and walk their way up the hill(s) to the mansion proper, while investigating the grounds along the way. If the party drives their vehicles too close to the mansion they should get divebombed by a spirit that somehow magically shuts down the van and then flies away. Also, it will begin raining and storming as they approach the mansion. In the process of getting to the mansion I want them to come across a blue van with a picture of a sunflower on the back. This is the Mystery Machine but I will not refer to it that way, nor will it actually say “Mystery Machine” on the side. I want all of these Scooby-Doo references to be subtle to the party. I want to see how long it takes them to figure out that they’re in a Scooby-Doo episode. Anyway, the van is locked and they cannot get in without doing severe damage to the van itself. The party probably won’t try to do this. They’re not loot-hungry hack-n-slash types. Next, I want them to come across Fred and Daphne somewhere on the grounds. Fred is actually a Japanese human street sam named Furedo. He has bleach blonde hair and wears loose fitting blue jeans and a white long-sleeve shirt with a small red scarf around his neck. He has one of those big wide hats on like those dudes in Big Trouble in Little China and I can never remember the name of. When the party finds Furedo and Daphne he is openly carrying a katana on his back and has a pistol in a holster on his hip. Daphne is a magical adept who wear form-fitting dark purple tights underneath a black cloak. She is a tall elf woman with long red hair and a barrette in it. Although her real name is Daphne, she will introduce herself as her street name, Daylight. If asked why she calls herself Daylight when she always wears dark clothes, she’ll reply with something like “because most of Seattle never sees me”, hinting that she’s stealthy. She is. Because she’s basically a ninja/phys-ad, but also with small concealable guns that she hides under her cloak. She has edged weapons too but they’re small and concealable as well. Whenever she gets involved in a fight she pulls whatever weapons she needs from the cloak instantly and then flings the cloak into the air anime style. The party will learn from Furedo and Daylight that their van broke down while they were driving through the area. They were on a road trip to Seattle from Canada and got lost because the storm messed up their GPS or something. This is part of what I need help on. Do I try and explain away that they got lost and broke down, or do I just make them a rival runner team that’s also trying to investigate the mansion for another interested party? After teaming up with Furedo and Daylight, F & D will contact the other members of their team to join up with them. Originally they had split up to secure the area before heading to the mansion to investigate. The first member to rejoin the group is someone that Furedo and Daylight will refer to as “Val”. This is basically Velma but “Val” will be short for “Valkyrie” which is her street name. Val will be a dwarf woman with short black hair and some high-tech goggles she never takes off. The goggles are rectangularly shaped. She is wearing visible dark orange body armor and has a huge rectangular metal backpack on her back. This is where her guns are stored. Essentially I made her a Gunzerker from Borderlands. In the event of a fight she will reach into her backpack and pull out a pair of SMGs or pistols or shotguns or whatever, depending on the situation. She also has a ton of extra ammo in the backpack. She’ll have Ambidexterity and Firearms 5 or 6. Sometime during the run I want to have her involved in a fight and have a spirit or something knock her down. I’ll make her goggles fall off if the fall and then she’ll yell out “MY GOGGLES! I CAN’T SEE WITHOUT MY GOGGLES!” Val, Furedo, and Daylight will refer to their mechanic, who could not figure out how to fix the van after it broke down (if I use the breakdown scenario), or after it got attacked by spirits. This is Shaggy. He’s going to be the team’s rigger. Right now I have his street name/nickname as Shivers because the party will say that while he’s an excellent rigger, he’s always scared of everything. He also shakes a lot because he does a LOT of mind-altering drugs. Shivers has a guard-dog drone named Shroom. This is Scooby-Doo. He is called Shroom because on the back of the dog drone is a mushroom-shaped sensor (much like those on the backs of modern radar planes) that he uses to sense threats around him. I’m not sure how Shivers should be dressed yet, or what weapons he’ll carry, if any. Probably a shotgun since that’s kind of the standard for riggers. Shroom is sort of a bronze or copper color with a black nose and big black spots on his shoulders. Shivers’ main method of fighting is hiding, diving into Shroom, and fighting that way. He also has other combat drones in the van that he can control remotely if he’s within range (and not dived into Shroom). Anyway, the two parties will team up to get into the mansion, explore it, find magical items that can hurt spirits, use those to kill some spirits, then find evidence that the butler did it, then find and confront the butler, who will have a bodyguard of spirits. Ideally the party will defeat the butler, subdue him alive, tie him up, then call Lone Star before leaving the premises. The Scooby-Doo gang will then go into the usual spiel about how they figured everything out and what the butler’s plan was all along. Of course if the butler is still alive and conscious he will spout out the classic line about how he would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t you meddling little shits. Also I want to have a Scrappy-Doo analogue in there somewhere. Maybe it can be a summoned familiar for the butler. I want whatever the Scrappy analogue is to suck and be easily defeated by the party. Basically it can be like an ugly annoying minor demon or some lovely little spirit that goes “Tata tuh TAT ta taaaaaaaaaa!” and then gets killed immediately. ------------------------------------------------------- If you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading all that! OK so hit me with feedback of any kind. Names, places, things, possible enemies, suggestions for how to do the mansion portion, any enemy encounters I could have of the grounds before getting into the mansion, magical items to hurt spirits I the party could find, any other Scooby-Doo-ish things I could do.
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Oct 20, 2013 03:00
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Everything Counts posted:Seems to make more sense for Scrappy to be on "their" side, like he usually is. Like, say... One of Shivers' smaller drones that he uses in combat situations should be obviously-patched-up, repaired by hand many times after getting into situations it was too small to handle. It has some sort of propulsion malfunction, so it's fast but constantly makes annoying noises. He calls it Scraps and everyone should hate it. The party will hate it if Scrappy is on their side but that might be a good way to troll them. I'll think about it. Thanks for the funny suggestion! This is a one-shot in the middle of an ongoing campaign. We're just putting the campaign on hold for A Very Special Shadowrun Halloween. The characters being played will be the same ones the players have been using this whole time. They're low on magical support and the players are not stupid violent aggressive assholes so they should be OK.
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Oct 20, 2013 04:20
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