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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8766911" data-attributes="member: 18">One thing I really like is when the players intuit or work out that there's more going on, even though it hasn't been revealed to them, from the shape of the pieces they do have, and the spaces in-between them. If you don't prep some stuff that's not necessarily going to come out, or not going to come out immediately, that can't really happen. And it can be gold for future adventures.Also, in my experience, anything deferred (i.e. not immediate) might not ever come out because plans might change, unless it's a railroad/nose-pull. You can plan some stuff to come out, but the PCs go in a different direction, or an NPC gets pushed off a cliff or whatever, and maybe it never does. And is that bad? Not usually. It is important to not overinvest in stuff that won't necessarily come out though.Sadly true. I was trying to to forget, because I like some aspects of Red.We're literally in the 2020s, and Mike and the gang are making the same mistakes they made in the 1990s writing about a theoretical future 2020. They're making mistakes people on the internet have been joking and complaining about since the very early 1990s. I mean, I remember having the "car thief" discussion on Shadowland.org in 1993, and even before then, offline, we'd discussed why are the rewards to irrationally tiny in SR? Cyberpunk 2020 wasn't quite as awful for this as SR, but it was pretty bad unless you just ignored what they were suggesting re: rewards.And so they make same mistake again? It's just silly. These are people with fancy equipment and specialized skills. There's never been a time in history you can get people like that for a pittance (unless you cut them in to a much larger deal as a share). Never, ever in human history. That's not going to change unless the market is saturated and supply wildly exceeds demand, and it isn't in any of these games! That's part of the whole deal of being an edgerunner (or shadowrunner). The market is not saturated. People are coming to you because they don't want the idiot gangbangers who you might be able to get for tiny money. The PCs are equivalent to builders hired on word of mouth (maybe cowboys but not cheap!), not itinerant laborers picked up off a street corner.I could see a different RPG, where you were absolute bottom-of-the-barrel gangbangers with no specialized skills, little or nothing in the way of equipment (maybe a panel van and a pistol), and it's a Great Depression kind of deal where you're just desperate for work, and that could be a wild game of its own, but they make you create these skilled, usually-intelligent characters with lengthy backstories, and fancy gear, and then they're like "Here's less money than it costs to rent your flat for a month to plan and execute an elaborate extraction and potentially get into multiple firefights", and like the only reason they can justify it with is the game is designed to not kill your PC. And it's like, sure, but my PC doesn't know that... If they don't want us buying too much equipment, make the equipment more expensive or otherwise harder to get hold of - don't shortchange us to the point where setting seems weird!Argh.Yeah I've seen that and like, if you're writing for your own pleasure, and it doesn't detract from the game, fine.But if you're writing an adventure for others to use, no, not fine. Annoying. Often downright confusing too. There was an adventure I read for some sci-fi RPG a few years back and they explained this hugely elaborate backstory that was hard to keep track of, and then it turned out like 20% of it even intersected with the actual adventure, and it was particularly confusing because there was a bunch of stuff in the backstory that it seemed like it would be good for the players to know, but the adventure at no  point delivered that info. I read it through like three times trying to work it out (possibly this was Aeon/Trinty, the original one). Like if it's totally unneeded and won't come out, either don't put it in there, or clearly separate it from the other stuff!Also sometimes it does detract from the game. With the above example there was stuff that was unnecessarily confusing and weird if you didn't know the deep backstory stuff. In fact I'd say White Wolf authors have been guilty of that quite a few times, especially when metaplot nonsense got involved.Metaplots: not even once.Fair enough - I'd say a couple of hours will easily be enough for something quite complex if you're inspired. If not sometimes it's better to just sketch out a little and see what comes up from the players, or work on it in small increments over a few days.Re: levers I don't usually list them as explicit levers, but every NPC I try to make a human (er... or being... you know what I mean) with flaws and peculiarities and obsessions and vulnerabilities and a past. Even if they're only a couple of sentences long I'm likely imagining stuff about them. When I think about times stuff hasn't worked out as well as I've expected it's usually because I've made an NPC a bit too perfect and/or insufficiently human. Like, they came from somewhere, they care about stuff, they have a physical body, all these things will impact them.</blockquote>

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