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Rejecting the Premise in a Module
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8056935" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Nah.</p><p></p><p>[USER=21169]@Doug McCrae[/USER] is right. The issue is that the adventures in question expect you to keep going with a now-pointless mission, or work for someone offering you even less money, which is completely antithetical to the genre. The problem is the adventure design - RPG players are natural cyberpunks, in my experience. But quite a number of early Shadowrun adventures seemed to be written on the basis that the PCs were some sort of, well, suckers.</p><p></p><p>To be fair this did improve with later SR stuff. (EDIT: but see below)</p><p></p><p>What really highlights this as an SR/adventure issue, not a player issue is CP2020, where the same players didn't have any problems, because those adventures, when you got betrayed or whatever, the adventure actually accepted it, and accepted that you might ditch things then and there, or seek revenge, instead of merely seeking alternative backers.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Oh wow, still happening in 2019 huh? Goddamn. And yeah that's exactly it - the betrayal renders the rest of the adventure <em>pointless</em> - it's very different to the betrayals in cyberpunk books/movies/etc. - those tend to merely change the story, re-frame it, or whatever, but Shadowrun demands (literally, in at least one edition) that the players buy into this deal where Mr Johnson hires them to do something (rather than being more self-motivated cyberpunks, which admittedly would be harder on the GM, because SR is complex and doing stuff on the fly doesn't always work great), yet loads of the official adventures completely take a dump on that buy-in.</p><p></p><p>It's a really good illustration of how modules can be the problem actually, because a lot of the complaints here have been "Well players bought in to the premise, so they have to stick with it!", but these adventures just destroy their own premise, and not even really in a genre-appropriate "you knew the risks" kind of way which would allow for counter-betrayals and so on. One from the '90s even had a bit which basically instructed you to prevent the players from preparing for betrayal or engaging in counter-betrayals, basically with heinous railroading.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8056935, member: 18"] Nah. [USER=21169]@Doug McCrae[/USER] is right. The issue is that the adventures in question expect you to keep going with a now-pointless mission, or work for someone offering you even less money, which is completely antithetical to the genre. The problem is the adventure design - RPG players are natural cyberpunks, in my experience. But quite a number of early Shadowrun adventures seemed to be written on the basis that the PCs were some sort of, well, suckers. To be fair this did improve with later SR stuff. (EDIT: but see below) What really highlights this as an SR/adventure issue, not a player issue is CP2020, where the same players didn't have any problems, because those adventures, when you got betrayed or whatever, the adventure actually accepted it, and accepted that you might ditch things then and there, or seek revenge, instead of merely seeking alternative backers. Oh wow, still happening in 2019 huh? Goddamn. And yeah that's exactly it - the betrayal renders the rest of the adventure [I]pointless[/I] - it's very different to the betrayals in cyberpunk books/movies/etc. - those tend to merely change the story, re-frame it, or whatever, but Shadowrun demands (literally, in at least one edition) that the players buy into this deal where Mr Johnson hires them to do something (rather than being more self-motivated cyberpunks, which admittedly would be harder on the GM, because SR is complex and doing stuff on the fly doesn't always work great), yet loads of the official adventures completely take a dump on that buy-in. It's a really good illustration of how modules can be the problem actually, because a lot of the complaints here have been "Well players bought in to the premise, so they have to stick with it!", but these adventures just destroy their own premise, and not even really in a genre-appropriate "you knew the risks" kind of way which would allow for counter-betrayals and so on. One from the '90s even had a bit which basically instructed you to prevent the players from preparing for betrayal or engaging in counter-betrayals, basically with heinous railroading. [/QUOTE]
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