You sit around for an hour while your hacker hacks. Also, you die. Painfully. Often.

You spend hours going over building layouts, security setups, and weapon choices. Within fifteen minutes, something goes wrong, gunfire breaks out, and half your party dies spectacularly. It's an awesome game.

My first shadowrun game ended after 15 minutes.

We tried to play 3e. The three players made some fairly awesome characters; I had an elf scout/assassin, there was a human who was mostly cybernetic (he had like 0.1 essence left ) and was a demolitions expert, and a French troll who was a mage and fought with a rapier. The DM made what we later found out was an awesome sounding campaign involving rock bands and murderous managers and all sorts of cool stuff. However none of us really knew the rules at all and we didn't get through the first round of combat before giving up.

>>3321129

That's too bad, sounds like it could've been awesome.

>>3321090
sounds great! hackers FTW

Well, Shadowrun, when things go wrong, they go epically wrong. From accidentally having your sack of grenades go off in a crowd of protesters to accidentally firebombing the entire team, a police station and the salvation army at the same time.

>>3321057

Shadowrun has kickass fluff (rs Shadowbeat, it's nothing but news andi nfo on the game world, as it uses a contious timeline most of it is still useful in 4th ed even if it is a 2nd ed book )

There's lots more of it than runs and retreating to the safehouses. Like spending the ill-gotten gains, and dealing with fucked-up life in the Sixth World.

Sometimes, though, the plan goes without a hitch, and those are the times that it all becomes worthwhile...

Shadowrun 3E here. Party was a cyberwared' troll with max strength, a human sniper, a dude who played Warhammer too much, an elf druid-slash-Eagle shaman and a drug addict punk rocker Mary Jane (the NPC hacker. Dont want the party sitting while your decker works? Make an NPC decker.)

Mission: Steal a unguarded ship. Later the party found out it was an empty, nuclear, fueless cargo ship; so they had to get some nuke fuel too.

First part was securing the ship at the harbor. Druid and Troll took the opportunity to loot 12k nuyen in generic electronic gear. Security went after them. Party held up until Lone Star showed up with their heli, firing indiscriminately at everyone.

Space marine went down; after all security retreated, he didn' hid into the ship like the rest of the group; Lone Star discharged so much lead that Doc Wagon had trouble gluing all the pieces in place.

Then the nuke fuel; due to some rollings, the decker presented them the options; they chose to buy some fuel that somehow was in the hands of drug dealers. After meeting for the trade (they were gonna pay with the stolen electronics), they decided to steal it instead, with the dealer's truck.

Lone Star came after them; in an attempt to stop the chase, the Troll and a hired Cyclops buddy his (a variant type of Troll) jumped on the chasing police car. Two cops killed, and they stayed behind with light wounds and a shotgun blast to the shoulder.

The party prettymuch stopped after that. Shadowrun 3is a very, very highly lethal game system.

My advice to OP: Return the SR 4e book ASAP. Find a good old 3e book. I have heard NO praise for the 4e crap.

>>3321813
To me, their only problem is that the core was completely replaced by something that looks like the current gen World of Darkness games >.>;

Here's the first run I ran with my current lot, who're mostly recovering D&D types:

Johnson says he represents an independent artist who had her designs for a new networking talking doll toy stolen by a corp who're about to run it off as their holiday special. They're to break into the mostly automated manufacturing plant before the production run starts up and replace the disk holding the production instructions with one provided by the artist. This disk alters the toy so that after a certain date (when the toy is widely sold) it starts talking about the evils of stealing people's designs. Being an independent artist, she can't afford to hire experienced runners.

First important part: if they start shooting up the security guards, the corp might get suspicious. They have to get in and out undetected. This is a good way of avoiding having all your PCs die straight off.

The run itself is full of them expecting to go around a corner and find a bunch of guards with guns. This never happens. They get in and out again with absolutely no encounters.

Of course, the players have to get fucked over, but again we don't want to kill them off for being so dumb as to believe a Johnson just yet. So the twist is when they later hear about large numbers of injured children thanks to a dangerous manufacturing fault in a particular batch of a Horizon subsidiary's new networking talking doll toy.

>>3321962

Exactly. Nothing against WoD, but seeing the first RPG I played being debased thusly (not only the system but the fluff) inspires nothing but rage in me.

Here's a slightly later one, once they got the hang of things: Johnson offers them ongoing payment on a sliding scale based upon how effectively they manage to keep the recently-completed local airport / sub-orbital launch facility from operating. The PCs think they're being clever in working out that Johnson has mob ties and they don't want interference with their smuggling operations.

Time for lots of sabotaging suppliers, the odd bit of demolition work, bumping off key employees, telling eco hippies they're murdering trees and so on. The players keep on thinking I'm going to have them accidentally drop a plane on a school or something, but no, no, they're expecting that.

The fun starts when one of their demolition runs goes bad, they get caught before they can set off the detonators and they end up having to leg it whilst being shot at from all directions.

The players are left wondering why the press reports all say that they weren't found until *after* they set off their explosives, and that they successfully trashed the main control tower when they were only after some fuel storage. They don't know whether to go to Johnson claiming success and asking for payment. And they also don't know how they were detected.

>>3322181

Explain the plot twist, please. This idea looks worth stealing.

>>3322437
Seconded

>>3322437
Ok. This gets a bit twisted. The PCs did get hints about some of this along the way, and they eventually worked most of it out.

They weren't hired by the mob. They were hired by a company who had a lucrative damages contract with the Evo-owned corp operating the airport. Thanks to changing market conditions, it's worth more to them to make sure they get paid the damages than it is to ship their cargo and sell it. Plus if the airport is being trashed enough they can just ship empty boxes and sell their goods elsewhere, effectively selling everything twice. The PCs get a hint here when they nick a truck filled with a bunch of boxes of 'machine goods' containing industrial offcuts and bricks.

Ah, but wouldn't Evo's insurance lawyers work this out? They did, but that's ok, because they're in on it. They'd sold on the damages contract insurance to a third party, and then placed derivative bets via a front company against the insurance. In the mean time, the sea port (prop. Evo) was able to charge much higher rates thanks to the increased demand, and the security contractors (prop. not Evo) look bad. Plenty of ways for the PCs to get their hands on data hinting at parts of this.

Even then, they wouldn't get away with it, except the construction firm (prop. Evo) botched the job and Evo need a way of having to replace the runway (built with materials that wouldn't last a year anyway) without admitting to a screwup. This one they can figure out by noting how much damage they do to the runway, which they thought was just because they used too much explosive. Or they can notice that the sucker they were hired to bury in cement a few jobs back was involved with the construction.

They get shot at because the damages contract comes up for renegotiation and they need to be removed from the picture.

>>3322627
As an airport worker, I should feel offended for some damn reason. But as an experienced runner, lulz

>>3322627

Holy crap. I've been wanting to actually play Shadowrun for the longest time and never been able to. A DM as good at it as you makes me weep a little inside knowing I probably never will.

Bravo.

>>3322627
BRILLIANT !

I made a shadowrun thread earlier. how do you deal with a GM who doesn't want his precious mary sue characters to die?

>>3323704

1. Get up from the table.

2. Leave

3. Find a better GM, failing that, GM yourself.

Find a better GM

Only way I've found is to pack area-effect explosives, and start lobbing them around when they show up. Blew up an entire mall foodcourt, perforated my eardrums, and nearly killed all my friends. But I'll be damned if and Elfy faggot's going to save my life!

>>3323704
Explosives , or very high level manabolts , or a Troll with a Ranger X Bow that has diecoated arrows tiped in cyanide

Dikote is strangely absent from SR4

>>3321813

I like the 4e stuff. They simplified a lot of mechanical stuff. Hacking is no longer as confusing as it was. I mean, it's still a little confusing, but the game is less so. I play because I love the feel of it all, but I tend to prefer much lighter mechanics than Shadowrun offers in rules as written.

I like SR4 for not having roving TNs and generally being cleaner, with less flipping between books to find the correct roll for something.

That said, I still have a list of houserules as long as a troll's arm.

>>3323769
out of curiousity, what are some of your house rules?

>>3323781
Lots of tweaks to numbers, adjusting modifiers, stuff like that.

Also changed the Initiative Pass order to 4/1/3/2. So people with 4 IPs go first, then everyone, then people with 3, then with 2.

Changed Stun stress track to come from Body, added a Mental Stress track from Willpower.

Changed healing times, and how magical healing works.

And changed Suppressive Fire rules.

4e sucks ass just because you can connect to the internet with your brain wirelessly. That's a huge fucking security hole and absolutely retarded.

>>3323881
...because there's no such thing as wireless security, right?

>>3323889

Not in Cyberpunk, that's for sure.

>>3323881
Actually, in addition to the houserule list, I prefer to play in more SR3 thematics.

I also use the SR4 ruleset to run classic cyberpunk style, no magic games.

>>3323769
>not having roving TNs

Holy fuck, no. Not having a fluid TN made SR4 into a nightmare to play because the only way to modify your roll ended up being adding more dice, and the game already fucking had enough dicespam with the 7-10d6 you'd be throwing on average in SR3.

>>3323881
>>3323889
>>3323892
Agreed. I'm one of those bastiches who think wireless simply don't, can't and shouldn' have the bandwidth or reability to carry Matrix signals left and right. Cellphone, SMS, GPS, eMule? Sure. Matrix? No.

Sides, wireless' insecurity comes from a few non-obvious things; the only protection trough the wireless doorwill be software, not hardware; you need a pre-modded router to hack into wireless, but you need phone network knowledge and / or electronics skill and kits to improvise a jackpoint, and the invader is mobile. All things being equal, a wire decker needs to be defended by the team while he does his work; a wireless one can keep walking around the building, do it while being pursued by Lone Star...

Speaking of it, SR4 did away with the whole electronic warfare system? (Flux ratings, Comm / Data / Simsense channels...)

Ah... my poor group of fools... I mean players.... *coughs*

Smash: Troll... that's it. No magic. No cyberware. No technomancer. No idea how to use a commlink. Imagine Bubba Troll gettin outa his pick-em-up truck with a shotgun and chainsaw and you get the idea.

SoSo: Tall stacked elf... who is also green. Green eyes, green hair, green skin, Irish, has a garden, grows all her own food. Thinks she's a ninja... is supposed to be a mage.

Sarge: Ex military.... something. Human rigger. Total coward who hides cowering in his panel van drinking Shlitz beer. LOTS of Shlitz beer. Usually shares beers with Smash.

S3K71ON 8: Technomancer who has trouble determining what is real and what is memory card. Got nailed hard in the crash and locked up underground for a looooong time. Is terrified of the dark and is also unfortunately the only intelligent person on the team. Think Murdock from the A-Team...

Lil'Bit: Eurotrash Gnome, has hue changing "mood" hair. Pretends to be a sniper on the weekends at the range. Wants to live in SoSo's garden.

This group of international Omega Squad members... has problems. Simple snatch and grab for the first mission turns into campaign spanning HAET rivalry with the mob as Smash and Sarge just had to walk back to the scene of the crime a week later to get information for their next mission. They could not beat a group of ganger thugs armed with clubs. Smash immediately sold out other team mates when confronted by the mob lieutenant and on the way out hired a mob hooker for the week. No one on the team has -any- social skills, and couldn't bluff their way out of a wet paper bag. If these guys were ever sent on a mission against... well... any... of the megacorps... *facepalms*.

I need someone to spraypaint "Before they made us they broek the mold." on Sarge's van.

It really depends on the mission. A lot is planning or investigative work - the combat and stealth (mostly stealth) is for missions. OUtside of it, you roleplay your rolls to purchase things, or to track down a bit of information. The most fun I've ever had was my third initiation and the roleplay that came with that on the metaplanar quest I went on.

Also, the way it plays out will depend a LOT on not only the players, but the way they've built their characters. The Awakened, except in certain circumstances, are likely to have more varied tricks than the cyber/biowared characters but won';t be able to take/deal out the same sort of punishment. At least not without big use of edge. That, of course, changes when you get up the range in terms of karma, but even then it never turns into dungeons and dragons 3.5