Prenn Registered User
Posts: 4864
(1/24/04 12:45 pm) Reply
Re: Campaigns Gone Bad Due to Bad Decision Snowballs.
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is just not the same.
The first post is the only one on topic.
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Re: Campaigns Gone Bad Due to Bad Decision Snowballs.
You have a point there Prenn.
How about an update then.
The bugbear that got the long term prison time (The one that killed all the guards and tried to use the forklift) decided to just make another character.
The mob sniper decided to make an other character as well. An actual sniper instead of a "Made Man" (From the Digital Burn book.) with a sniper rifle. (At least now I can stop using that book for anything. )
The gnome is upset that he was suspended from his magic school for awhile because of criminal activity but he got over it.
And as a side benifit, Since two people were making new characters the Hacker-that-wasnt decided to go back to his usual 'brute character' type. He wanted to play a Smart Hero Hacker but donsnt have the first clue as to what a hacker does. He seemed to forget that Physical Security and Matrix Security are two different things. Turn off the drones patrolling with the security guards and they will notice. That was just one of his dumb ideas.
Honestly, I avoided running when he was around if I could. And when he was around I tried to avoid having anything important for matrix work. More than once he didnt get all the information out of the matrix and told the group that was all he could find. Made for some rather difficult adventures.
Re: Campaigns Gone Bad Due to Bad Decision Snowballs.
Okay, here's a campaign gone bad due to bad decisions made by the players.
It was a Shadowrun 2E game.
The party consisted of a Wolf Shaman, a hermetic mage, a physical adept, a decker, 2 street sammies and a detective type character.
I'll call the street sammies #1 and #2 to keep them straight.
I took the campaign idea for the game I was running from an old Shadowrun novel. I forget the name of it, but it was one where the runners in the book get ahold of a highly secretive piece of info (plans for a weapon or some other tech or government secret or something like that) and pretty much every corp/government agency out there comes after them because everyone wants to be in control of whatever the secret was. The runners in the book eventually upload the info to a satellite and broadcast it all over the place so everyone will have it and the various agencies will stop coming after them.
Well, none of my players had read the book so I decided it might make for a fun game to put them through that scenario to see what they do.
I set it up as they're breaking into a corp facility to get what they think is a basic data grab, the johnson didn't tell them what they were really snagging.
Strangely enough, the players didn't think it was odd the high level of security around what was supposed to be "routine" info they were snatching. Been a while, I forget what I had told them they were actually going after.
Street sammy #2 gets shot up pretty badly on the way out of the facility, and here's where the first bit of the "snowball" got formed. Not a big thing necessarily, but still, a bad "omission" so to speak. #2 got shot up so bad he went unconscious and dropped his 2 guns.
None of the other players mentioned picking them up, even though #2 blurted out of character for someone to do so.
The thing is, they were very expensive custom made guns that had a certain weaponsmaker's mark on them. So, the corp security guys took the guns and traced them back to the team.
I'll get to that in a moment.
So, after the escape from the facility, the team takes #2 to a street doc they know to get him stabilized and begin the healing process.
They leave him there and go to meet the johnson. Well, at this point, it occurs to them that even though only one of them got it really bad, they were all pretty banged up and security was tighter than they had expected. (Granted, I could've made the security much, much tougher, considering the importance of the info, but my reasoning is the corp with it didn't want to be too obvious about protecting something that big so as not to draw unnecessary attention).
So, when they meet the johnson, they get uppity with him and demand more money. He doesn't have more money, so they have to arrange to meet him the next day to get it.
This is where the snowball starts rolling down the hill.
They go to meet him the third time, and get even more uppity and demand even more money. The johnson, suspecting they might do something like this (and reasonably so I think) had brought some heavy muscle.
So, a firefight ensues. Also, enter the original corp's hit squad that had tracked the PCs to their hangout (which they never even thought of moving from even though a patched up #2 bitched about having to go back to the weaponsmaker to get new guns ***that didn't set off any alarm bells in any of them***).
Well, they manage to get out from inbetween the two attacking groups, the physical adept doing a brilliant bit of grabbing when he drags the johnson out with them. The johnson gets shot up bad, but manages to tell them what they've got (I forget what exactly the cool info was, something to do with revolutionary matrix tech).
Now, unknown to the PCs, the johnson's attack team had a mole in it working for another corp, as did the orignial corp's attack team, so that leaves 4 factions out to get them.
Now, here's some more snowball momentum. The PCs go back to their hangout to try and figure out what to do. They call #2 and tell him to meet them there as soon as the street doc finishes healing him. Well, #2 tells the street doc he need to leave; the street doc tells him he's not fully healed, so #2 spills the beans to him and then leaves.
Well, the street doc being as greedy as the next person, and owing money to the yakuza, tells them about what's going on.
Well, word spreads through the yakuza to get the PCs, and moles within the yakuza spread the word amongst the triads and mafia.
So now you've got 4 corps and 3 criminal orgs going after them.
The PCs, being the greedy little bastards they were, put out some feelers about how much they might get for the info they have. Long story short, 5 more corps and numerous government agencies get interested.
Finally, after a Tir Tairngire (elven nation for those not familiar with Shadowrun) assault team shows up, the PCs decide to vacate and take things on the run.
Well, the one thing sort of working in their favor is that each faction after them kind of wants to keep this thing on the "hush-hush" because they want the info. So it's not like there's any news bulletin out that would make normal folks/agencies keep out an eye for them. That was to change however.
More snowball momentum.
I've always been one to throw little snags at the players to liven things up when they think it's smooth sailing time.
So, enter a snag in the form of a state trooper pulling them over for speeding on their way to a new hideout in another state.
They could've easily just taken the ticket and been on their way. The cop had no reason to haul them in. However, the hermetic mage, in a fit of paranoia, blasts the cop as he walks up to the driver's side window of the team's van. The team then speeds off, arguing as they go.
Of course, they didn't think to disable the camera in the patrolman's car. So soon, a picture of their van is plastered all over the TV and regular law enforcement agencies are looking for them.
They, unaware of this as of yet, stop at a convenience store (about 6 hours later game time), where the van is recognized and the cops are called. Local cops show up, a firefight ensues, and now the convenience store's video cameras have about half the team on tape and their pictures go out over the TV as well.
So now they have even more trouble remaining on the "down-low."
Eventually they stop at one seedy little motel to rest for a bit.
Now, if it were you, what two things would you not have done in that motel room?
1) Don't take off your body armor to take a nap. Yet the detective type person did so.
2) If you're the decker, don't go jumping into the matrix without running some sort of masking/stealth program to disguise yourself while you're poking around.
So yea, blammo, the decker gets traced back to the motel room. 3 hours later, a corp hit team shows up and attacks. The first grenade through the window goes off next to the detective without any body armor. Practically dead. The hermetic mage manages to heal him up enough so he can walk though.
The team fights its way down to the new set of wheels they had acquired along the way.
They hop into the van and take off with the detective type driving while the others fling spells and shoot out the back doors to keep the corp types pinned down.
Well, for whatever reason, the detective decided to throw a flash grenade behind him as he drove. He tossed it out the driver's window and it exploded right behind the van.
This blinded everyone on the team but the wolf shaman and #1, including the detective type driving. How is that you ask? Wasn't he looking where he was going? Nope, I specifically asked him where he was looking when the flash went off, and he said in the rear view mirror. So, he had to roll to resist the flash as well, though I did give him a bonus for not looking right at it, but at a reflection. He rolled poorly though and so became blinded.
Thus did their second set of wheels end up a crumpled mess mated with the wall of a brick building across the street from the motel they had been in.
So, they climb out of the wreck and fight their way towards one of the vans the corp assault team had come in. They get in it and take off, with the detective driving again (why they let him I'll never know).
This time, they make it a couple of blocks away, though the corp team's helicopter is following them, shooting at them as they go.
A couple of the team PCs are yelling at the detective to drive this way or that way, and in one of the most bizarre hissy fits I've seen, the detective player slams on the breaks and brings the van to a stop and refuses to drive anymore until the ones yelling at him stop and apologize for ragging on him.
Street sammy #2 promptly shoots him and takes over the driving. We didn't see detective PC's player for a few weeks after that.
So, they eventually get away and go to ground again.
After about 4 more encounters, they get the idea to upload the info to a neutral site where everyone can see it, much like the runners in the original book I read did.
They choose the Swiss Geimenschaft bank's satellite relay to upload it to and find a place where they can do so.
So they trek there and break into the place.
Meanwhile, I gave all the various factions a chance to find the PCs, but the rolls I made were pretty lame, so only 3 of them figured out where the PCs were going.
The 3 factions hit the place at the same time to stop the PCs from uploading the info and grab it for their respective factions. A nice 4 way firefight erupts with the PCs caught in the middle.
Well, the decker was in the uplink room and needed 10 rounds of play time to finish the upload when the $hit hit the fan. Street sammy #1 is assigned the job of staying in front of the door to the uplink room and not letting anyone in while the rest of the team fights the enemy groups in the large rotunda area next to the uplink room.
Now, a little background is in order. The guy playing #1 liked ragging on the group physical adept about sammies being tougher and always liked to jump on NPC adepts for to kill them as part of his character concept.
So, while standing guard, #1 notices a physical adpet amongst one of the attacking teams. With no prompting from me, he up and leaves his post and goes to fight the phys ad, who was already engaged with the PC phys ad. #1 just wanted to show him up.
So, I gave the closest NPCs a roll to notice that #1 had come out of hiding (he'd been crouched behind some office furniture) and get curious about the door to the uplink room.
One of them made the roll and blew the lock on the uplink door, and a round later, we had a dead PC decker, and the enterprising NPC ran off with his deck, containing the info.
The NPC had a mage on his team that cast urban renewal, collapsing the wall/ceiling behind them and crushing the PC hermetic mage in the process.
The rest of the team died in short order to the remaining NPC teams (the wolf shaman had taken a good bit of damage from the collapsing ceiling as well). #2 killed #1 though, before dying himself. #2 had a very small tolerance for phucking up on the magnitude that #1 did.
We didn't see #1 for a few weeks after that as well.
I felt kind of bad for the PCs that didn't screw up or do deliberately stupid stuff, but I've never been one to rig things too far in the PCs favor when things go awry from PC stupidity.
Re: Campaigns Gone Bad Due to Bad Decision Snowballs.
Wow, that blows mine away. You even had two PC's quit playing for awhile. Talk about a snowball.
I managed to recover mine enough that the bugbear who's still in jail decided to just make a new character. The modern samurai actually got out by just getting a Bodyguard License. The gnome was only minor tresspassing. And the mafia man made a new guy as well because he decided he didnt want the -6 to his clout rolls for awhile. (Clout is a made man advanced class ability. They can call upon resources from the family with it. A -6 almost guarentees not getting much more than someone delivering him a walkie-talkie occasionally.)
Re: Campaigns Gone Bad Due to Bad Decision Snowballs.
Well, at least the two that quit playing for awhile wasn't due to any poor DMing on my part, though I still felt kind of bad they got pissed. I think mainly they got pissed at the player that wacked both of them, though maybe a little torqued at me because I didn't stop it, and actually found it kind of amusing. I mean, they both did sort of ask for it in a way.
Re: Campaigns Gone Bad Due to Bad Decision Snowballs.
There is one player that plays with us on occasion, he seems to be really sensiitve about things as well. When on of our players killed another he kept looking at me and sayin "Ok, lets rewind and start over". Everyone was playing in character so I let it go. Sure the guy that got killed was pissed but he just made a new guy and ended up more happy with him than his orignal character.
The sensitive guy sat out the next game session. Said he didnt feel like playing at the moment. Its not the first time he had done it so it really didnt bother us. He mostly came over to play Battlefield 1942 while we roleplayed anyway. (Oh, this is the guy playing the Modern Samurai)
He did it another time when I was doing a "Bible Black" based mission. (Those with some Anime knowlage can figure out how twisted that mission was)
)
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