Rules Encouraging Teamwork or Soloing

[GMMichael]

Shadowrun comes to mind in encouraging solo activity. Three different character roles and typical activities can only be done or are mechanically significantly best done by solo specialized characters. Decking, Astral projection, and piloting. Most every character can fight, talk, and investigate, but only magical characters can go astral. Most anybody can use a computer or use a vehicle, but only deckers or technomancers can go fully into cyberspace and interact enough with AIs to effectively hack in Shadowrun, and Riggers are designed to be specialized cybered up driver/pilots a significant step above any non cybered specialist. Deckers and Riggers can be built to be part of a shadowrunning field team but they often work best staying out of the field and just doing their specialied roles remotely. In older editions before drones were a big thing riggers were basically designed to be getaway drivers who stayed in the car.

How do Shadowrun players feel about this? I don't know: maybe they expect to watch cool scenes that focus on their allies. Judging by the changes @Umbran brings up, the designers want to move in a more teamwork-friendly direction.

Do you actually see this happen? The only occasions when I have is where the rogue reckons he needs help. I've played most of my D&D with free spell choice, and the magic-users generally want to hang onto their spell slots for emergencies.

I see it happen when I'm a magic-user. Probably because I don't play MUs to be a fireball-flinger. Combat is for the lunks.

Facing rules (characters on a battlemap face in a specific direction) are teamwork supporters. If you form a line facing one way, you're depending on the rest of the line to keep you from being flanked. Or, standing back-to-back with an ally provides a comparable level of security that a solo character would have if facing didn't matter.

 

[Umbran]

How do Shadowrun players feel about this? I don't know: maybe they expect to watch cool scenes that focus on their allies.

Having played a lot of Shadowrun, no, this wasn't an opportunity to watch cool scenes - the rules and resolution for Deckers were tedious, and the result was slow, with lots of picayune dice rolling.

The published adventures had these not as "scenes" but protracted excursions into digital dungeons for the solo Decker character. More than once, I've seen GM's tell the group that most of them didn't need to show up to play, because they'd be running the Decker's run the entire evening.

Meanwhile, a PC who had invested heavily in being able to do the computer thing typically found themselves physically fragile and ineffective in physical combat. They very much didn't want to go where the firefight was happening, because all they could do was cower and get shot.

Most groups I know wound up banning PC Deckers, and instead instituted NPCs to handle this separated action.

In my experience, the Astral Projection thing for spellcasters wasn't as bad - it was typically used to scout the location the rest of the group was entering and to run magical cover for the group, so it was usually at least immediately tied to the rest of the PC action. And when a mage wasn't in Astral Space, their spells usually made them big guns in physical combat.

 

[Voadam]

How do Shadowrun players feel about this? I don't know: maybe they expect to watch cool scenes that focus on their allies. Judging by the changes @Umbran brings up, the designers want to move in a more teamwork-friendly direction.

I played a bunch of older edition Shadowrun (a lot of 1e and 2e, but some 4e too). My experience is that none of us in the groups I was in enjoyed sitting around for long drawn out stretches watching others do things that our characters literally couldn't even see. We came to play as a group, not to sit and watch others play.

Decking was an involved system that took a while to resolve.

Astral could be a quick scouting ahead to pop back and say what was magically in the immediate area, or a full multi-part quest to scout out a complex, learn magic, summon and bind a spirit, and/or to engage in astral combat. As a cybered up bodyguard I have literally spent an entire session where my character was in a room with the other characters while the mage did astral stuff. No in game action happened for the rest of us, the whole session was resolving the astral stuff.

Many character types can be specialized to be fantastic in combat in different ways, cybered up characters, physical adept magically enhanced characters, combat mages, shamans. Even orcs and trolls can generally be combat effective in some ways while specializing in non-combat stuff. A troll politician who specializes their stats on charisma over increasing baseline troll strength can be devastating with an axe and take a hit decently. There are many ways to make a diverse group of competent combatants specialized in different ways in a Shadowrun group.

Shadowrun pays off in a lot of ways for specializing though, and so to be a good decker you want to put in a lot of character build resources to max out those abilities including online combat with AIs, which means not a lot left to significantly develop physical world combat stuff. Baseline people without significant physical world oriented combat character build development are really fragile and can be chewed up in fights quickly and are far inferior to fellow PCs who develop significant combat abilities. Someone who split their character build development between multiple areas (say combat and decking) usually mechanically came out as just a bit above baseline and significantly far behind specialists in both their areas.

In a number of ways the system mechanically rewarded having some frail otherwise crippled specialists do their solo thing while others focused on combat and the group activity.

In the last campaign I played in we explicitly agreed to have no deckers as PCs and we each made combat competent characters in one way or another.

It is good to hear that the newer editions incentivize having the decker with the group and integrated with the actions of the rest of the group instead of remotely in a room solo.

 

[John Dallman]

Having played a lot of Shadowrun, no, this wasn't an opportunity to watch cool scenes - the rules and resolution for Deckers were tedious, and the result was slow, with lots of picayune dice rolling.

The key is to follow the precedent of the original cyberpunk stories, like Nuromancer, and have physical and digital intrusions happening simultaneously. For that, it helps a lot if the decker's player isn't detail-orientated, so that the GM can run it narratively. When this works right, it can be excellent fun.

We were a bunch of experienced shadowrunners, who'd gone to Hawaii for a holiday, but found ourselves being offered a job.

In the secret hideout of the Hawaii Liberation Front, the first thing that anyone noticed was that the overnight outdoors lookout wasn't answering his intercom call from the cook asking what he wanted for breakfast. The cook could not get an answer from the security office, so went along there, and found one of the two deckers who monitored security overnight unconscious in his chair, due to several narcoject darts, with no idea of what had happened when he woke up. The other one was missing. The lookout had been killed by a single arrow. There was nothing on any of the security cameras, door monitors, or any of the other security systems. . The McGuffin was missing from the safe, but everything else was still there.

The local standard of shadowrunning ... wasn't very good. Our decker had managed to loop all the cameras, bypass all the door reporting, and generally given us free run of the place. We'd opened the door into security and shot both the deckers with narcoject. We realised we could lay an excellent false trail by taking one of the deckers with us and marooning him on a different island in the Hawaiian chain. By the time he gets back in contact, his story is unlikely to be believed.

 

[Umbran]

The key is to follow the precedent of the original cyberpunk stories, like Nuromancer, and have physical and digital intrusions happening simultaneously. For that, it helps a lot if the decker's player isn't detail-orientated, so that the GM can run it narratively. When this works right, it can be excellent fun.

Doing that was a pain the patoot, and required jumping back and forth between contexts on a round-by round basis, and doing it ALL THE TIME. No, thanks.

I like their new approach better.