From: [f--h--e] at [amd.com]
Reply-To: [f--h--e] at [amd.com]
Errors-To: [flashlife control] at [amd.com]
Subject: Flashlife   V2 #6
To: [f--h--e] at [amd.com]

From: Carl Rigney (moderator) <[flashlife control] at [amd.com]>


Flashlife  Fri, 3 May, 1991   Volume 2 : Issue 6

Today's topics:

  Getting Players to Think (Phyllis Rostykus)
  Instilling teamwork (Christopher Gulledge)
  Re: Instilling teamwork (Carl Rigney)
  Limiting techno-mages (Laurence R. Brothers)
  Re: Hi-Power Mages (jonathan)
  Re: SR: Tech level 2 (Carl Rigney)
  APDS ammunition (Roger Leroux)

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Date: Wed, 1 May 91 17:37:00 PDT
From: [p--l--s] at [amc.com] (Phyllis Rostykus)
Subject: Getting Players to Think

I like the idea of giving the players problems that need brains to figure
out, and if they use violence, then they'll blow the job.  Simple as
that.  I don't think you have to kill the players to show them that they
blew the job.  Some ideas if you have to have the standard snatch-and-grab
scenerio might be having sound-sensative triggers that destroy the
objective, a dead-man's trigger in one of the NPC's hands that actually
works, have the person-objective be a Patty Hearst type, or basically
anything that will destroy the objective if the PC's use weaponary
indiscriminantly.

I think that the hardest part, though, is the GM's part, coming up with
scenerios where the characters have to think means coming up with scenerios
that can accomidate a multitude of ways of thinking.  There *cannot* be
only one *right* way to solve any problem, there has to be a multitude of
ways, otherwise it discourages the players from trying to think.  Instead
of thinking, they'll be trying to guess what the GM wants them to do.

Or just toss the 'criminal activities' requirement and you have a heck of
a lot of possibilities. Shadowrun is supposed to be made for 'stories',
think up some interesting stories, or just read a good mystery or romance
or fantasy or action-adventure and think up a run or something based
loosely on that.  They don't all have to just be folks that go out and
steal things, and the information that they need to solve things can't be
found on any computer system.  

Hire 'em to do P.I. style work, taking 'pictures' of a certain rendevous
and have the rendevous blow up into a murder that they need to solve to
get paid.  Have a voice-less mermaid walking naked through the city,
trying to find her true-love, with a huge black pearl as reward.  Start
with a bodyguarding assignment that turns into a shopping spree/random
shooting gallery where MOST of the folks that pop up are unassuming,
regular citizens alarmed by the chromed punks slabbin' folks.  The
'runners have to think through how to protect the body without gettin'
themselves geeked.

Maybe they could stop a saboteur trying to re-creat Euro-Flight 329
because one of the group's family or lovers is going to be flying on the
plane.  They can't just stop the one incident, they have to trace it to
the roots.  Or maybe they *can't* stop the incident and they trace it back
for revenge.  'Runners are people, too, with pasts that sometimes they'd
rather bury, and lovers who can turn into liabilities.  If they're so
chrome that they can't be reached that way, what about introducing NPC's
as allies and then working it so that the NPC becomes a really good buddy
of the PC's and then using the NPC instead?

As far as team-work goes, if you know the various capabilities of the
players, design a scenerio for them to use all their capabilities.  Make it
impossible for any single one of the people to do it on their own.  It
means some research into what your players can do or want to do, but that's
probably the most straightforward answer to the problem.  

When I get into a completely new world, I've found that I'm much more
comfortable running a character that is a complete newbie, someone that's
built to ask questions and learn from all the folks around him.  You might
treat all the PCs as newbies and give 'em an experienced 'runner to learn
from.  Run something where one old, gnarled 'runner is in big trouble
(from having killed too many Corp guards?? :) and is hiring a bunch of
wet-behind-the-ears 'runners to help deal with those coming after her.
She's hiring them because she can't afford anything more.

She could be someone that'll help 'em out and call out the quiet types and
do the leading at first and maybe show 'em some of the pitfalls and some
of the more common approaches to the jobs available.  She could encourage
thinking and new ideas and such, and give them a bunch of interesting
contacts.  Then you've *also* got someone that you can use as a handle to
the P.C.'s in a scenerio where they can't just go in with blazing guns.
Maybe even someone that the PCs will care enough about to *figure* stuff out.

-- 
Phyllis Rostykus     | "Looking down on empty streets, all she can see are 
..!sumax!polari!li   |  the dreams all made solid, are the dreams made real."
[p--l--s] at [eld.amc.com]  |  - "Mercy Street" by Peter Gabriel 


--------------------------


Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 22:50:04 EDT
From: [t--na--s] at [jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu] (Christopher Gulledge)
Subject: Instilling teamwork

Any suggestions on how to get a team to play like a team? They sit,
they brood, they mull, and when it comes time for a plan they stare
blankly. Not because they cannot think of one, but because they refuse
to say their ideas.  The strategy and tactics discussion is led and
consists of one person, and she knows that she has no concept of
tactics and strategy.  The saddest part is that at least three of the
other players have very strong grasps of the subject, they just decide
for whatever reason not to use them.

This may be a subset of the last question so if it is just kind of
ignore it.  Anyway maybe if they see themselves on flashlife (two of
them read it) they will get embarassed enough to say an idea. Nah,
it'll never work. One is the one who already tries and the other
wouldn't say his ideas if he knew how to end world hunger.

I'll quit babbling again. Thanks again for the ideas. Oh, just a side
note.  If you want a wonderful source of ideas, watch mission
impossible. Tone them down some depending on their aptitude and
reasources, but some of the plots are great.

Thanks again,

Thanatos


--------------------------


Date: Fri,  3 May 1991 11:11:11 PDT
From: [c d r] at [amd.com] (Carl Rigney)
Subject: Re: Instilling teamwork

As near as I can tell, teams are made the same way coal is - lots of
bits and pieces fall to the floor, get put under tremendous pressure,
and a long time later transform into a team.  I've never found a
mechanism for rushing the process, and at least with the players I've
had it takes a long time.  They characters have to get to the point
where they trust each other like they trust themselves, and know each
other well enough to know what the others will do in any given
situation.  It helps a *lot* to have players who like one another, as
well as the PCs liking one another.  In the real world you can also
build teamwork through training, but training is usually skimmed over
quickly in games because its seen as dull.

I'm convinced that the *major* difference between successful and
unsuccessful shadowrun teams is their degree of teamwork and thinking
(and planning) and what I call "situational awareness" - being aware
of the environment and its possibilities.  The latter takes a good GM
as well because it lives or dies by consistency and detail - are there
fire hydrants on every block and what color are they painted?

--
Carl Rigney
[c d r] at [amd.com]

"What's going to kill us is something we overlooked. Something stupid.
Something we should've asked about but didn't." she says.
"Like birth," he mutters under his breath.


--------------------------


Date: Wed, 1 May 91 09:32:50 -0400
From: [q--as--r] at [puddle.bellcore.com] (Laurence R. Brothers)
Subject: Limiting techno-mages

It was mentioned that mages start getting technological with "analyze
device" and similar spells. I have a simple solution for that.
No "analyse device".	[ Likewise --CDR ]

This and related spells are inconsistent with the explanation of astral
space and assensing, and since astral space is the power source for
magic, it doesn't make sense to have spells which have anything to do
with mechanical or electronic devices. 

I also think that magic has something integral to do with both
life and intelligence, so if any bioware/nenotech AI's are developed, it's
conceivable that they could handle magic somehow.

Now, there's nothing to prevent a mage from having one fewer high-power
spell and getting electronics-6, by the way.

Laurence R. Brothers ([q--as--r] at [bellcore.com])
"There is no memory with less satisfaction in it than the memory
of some temptation we resisted." -- James Branch Cabell


--------------------------


Date: Wed, 1 May 91 15:27:41 EST
From: [d--ch--n] at [wpi.WPI.EDU] (jonathan)
Subject: Re: Hi-Power Mages

Tracker sez:
> Number-crunching and mages can really make a game unbalanced. When
> their spell locks are making them become Samurai, and they use
> 'Analyze Device' to try and program, what is everyone else left to
> do?  In my campaigns, I've initiated two methods of control, one
> slightly more vile than the other.

(First method limits the "power" of Astral Space, deleted for space)
(Second method uses Narcojets loaded with stimulants, also deleted)

There's a much easier way to handle this problem...  Don't let yer
mages get ahold of the monster spells and spell-locks to go along.
In the campaign I've been running for the past year, there have been
less than 5 spell locks, and none of the mages have come *near* an
Increase Attribute spell.

But what do you do when the characters have already gotten out of
hand?  There's a solution to that as well...  A mainstay of cyberpunk
literature is the ups and downs of life.  Perhaps your mages are at
a high point right now -- lots of spell locks, heavy-duty spells,
nuyen for more, etc.  Shadowrunners always piss someone off...  What
say your mages bug someone who desires some revenge?  An Astral attack
against a spell lock or two will make life a pain.  Next time your
players are in Astral Combat, have one of the opposing mages (make
sure she's within line of sight of the player's body) use Toxic
Wave (woops, Acid Bomb), Fire Bomb, Fireball, or some other Physical
spell with Area and Damaging Manipulation effects...  It'll not only
hose the character, but also whatever's around, like hermetic
libraries, credsticks, spell locks, fetishes, other characters, you
get the idea.  Turn to Goo makes a mess of furniture, btw.

Another really nasty idea is the drive-by attack, but this time use a
few whiz kids.  Say one of the mages is tooling along at 100kph or so
in his mod'ed Westwind 2000 and some whiz-kid hits the car with a
Wrecker spell.  Can you say accident in the making?  One more use for
juvenile delinquents is to have a mage's place robbed...perhaps the
kids have no idea what all those ritual materials are for, can't find
anything else worth stealing and decide to scrag the place.  Oops, say
bye to that Rating 6 ritual circle and assorted other things.

The final option is to just kill the buggers off.  Give the characters
enough rope to hang themselves and they will...  Then you can start
out with new characters at a lower power level.

Hope this helps,

jonathan


--------------------------


Date: Fri, 3 May 91 18:35:38 PDT
From: [c d r] at [amd.com] (Carl Rigney)
Subject: Re: SR: Tech level 2

You always get two free contacts.  I meant to point that out as a note
in the original posting, but forgot by the time I got through
formatting and arranging.

Personally I give the characters as many contacts as they want so long
as they name them and give me a short description to go off of; helps me
populate my campaign and you *want* the PCs to know lots of people - it
leads to lots of plot-hooks.  Buddies, gangs, tribes & followers still
cost, but recently I do something else entirely.

--
Carl Rigney	[c d r] at [amd.com]
"Its not what you can do so much as who you know."


--------------------------


Date: Wed, 1 May 91 11:36:50 PDT
From: [rleroux 1] at [sol.UVic.CA] (Roger Leroux)
Subject: APDS ammunition

Don't know if this topic has come up before, but we need to know.

APDS states that it is +1 power, -1 armor. To my mind, this means that
your 5M3 bullet is now 6M3, and that the 5/3 armor it's being shot at
is treated as 4/3. This seems fairly stright-forward.

However, one of the alternate GM's (who's a police officer) who knows
better about the *real-world* effects of APDS ammo feels it shoud be
different/more powerful, or ignore armor, or something different.

The question I'm asking is - Given that we don't necessarily want to kill
anyone automatically because of whatever we're firing at them (I mean, if
the characters can use it, so can the opposition), and given the ever
present game-balance vs. reality syndrome of RPG's, is APDS ammunition
as it stands (given the assumption in the first paragraph) reasonable?
Have any of you changed it or had problems with it? Not using it is not
really an option, since the GM in question likes the mega-powerful critter
firepower and destruction type stuff. (i.e. Rather than send 10 ordinary
critters at us, he sends in one which is as tough as the 10 ;).

Roger Leroux
[rleroux 1] at [sol.UVic.CA]


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End of Flashlife
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