User:John

User page.

My Characters

Pycnidium

Face & Mage (Low run count, medium power level)

A dryad burned by Horizon and turned back to the streets where she was brought up. She is friendly, personable, but somehow, almost surreal. The prescence of a professional face with none of the practiced poise.

Doggie Bag (UNAPPROVED)

Muscle (Low run count, low power level)

The lump of ochre flesh which formerly composed a corporate middle child. A recently infected Dzoo-Noo-Qua from a family of EVO Giants, the party boy who liked to play street now a limping monstrocity. Doggie Bag is tight lipped and cold, equal parts desperate and self-loathing.

GM Style Guide

Run Refusal & Sabotage

While I am not entirely opposed to inter party conflict or run refusal, for the purposes of running games through a public community, it is more trouble than it is generally worth. For all of my runs, even if this information is not known in character, I will designate the type of job (Wetwork, Theft, etc.), and what the feel and employer is like (Good feels or Hooding, Corporate Turf War, Cold-blooded Black Ops, etc.). If your character is likely to object to the run's main objective and premise, please include that in your application, and understand that this is generally going to push me towards not considering your character. With that said, my preferred runs lean more into the "punk" aspects of cyberpunk, and you should expect consistent hooding runs with good feels attached, so I doubt this will be much of an issue.

Approach to the Sixth World

I generally enjoy presenting the bleak cyberpunk future as a fertile canvas for meaningful rebellion and change. The roots of the genre and setting are laid in practices of meaningful resistance, nonconformity, and individuality. While corporate allegiant runners and plots are certainly setting crucial, being anti-corporate is the soul and main message of the genre. As a consequence, my runs will generally be presenting bright moments in a difficult reality, and will often operate under an assumed anti-corporatism (and a corresponding support of the various peoples oppressed by them). I like to take the setting seriously, to create verisimilitude ("immersion", if you prefer), but this does not preclude funny moments and casual gameplay, it precludes things that are contrary to the setting and themes. There is plenty of room for silly and fun moments, but they should reasonably exist in the shared canon.

Difficulty & Opposition

I am generally of the opinion that opfor should have their design centered around loss-prevention and efficiency. It is not the goal of most opposition to kill shadowrunnners. In many cases, stopping runners is not even worth it for corporations, as it costs more to hunt them down than it would to recoup lost items and personnel. I enjoy presenting problems which are potent, but have ready weaknesses to be exploited. Runners are not your average criminals, and their littany of tricks should work against all but the toughest of corpsec (HTR & Spec Ops, generally). I prefer presenting a fair scenario to be understood and broken down, rather than using 'gotcha' or 'cheese' tactics to get cheap wins against the PCs. I will, overall, be very transparent about danger and opposition during and especially before the run.

In this vein, I am careful of taking overly powerful PCs, it is important to fit a character's power level to the level of the run. I will consider this to the best of my ability, and reserve the right to disregard an application I see as unfit for power level reasons.

OOG Concerns

I will generally try to adhere to a reasonable standard of quality for player experience. My priority is on things like content warnings, fair play & clear communication. I will usually make my run picks decently well in advance (24hrs, if I have the time), and include some fairly detailed description of what kinds of things the run may entail which I feel are necesary for player to know (even if their characters might not know it).

However, I am usually a low-prep GM. And while I am very comfortable improvising and working off of the couple pages I do write for myself, playing on Roll20 has one unique disadvantage to this playstyle: Assets. This may lead to slightly janky drawn battlemaps here and there or some Theatre of the Mind combats. But, I think that preserving my own free time before the game, and the player's agency within the game, is more important than always having a nice VTT map. Please be patient with me, I am almost always trying my genuine hardest.

Burning Edge

I am generally of a mind to be fairly lenient with burning edge (using the Not Dead Yet ability). Burnt edge is always going to allow your character to be playable by the end of the session, and I would generally say that other consequences are going to be kept relatively minor. In some situations, burning to survive may have your character be unavailable to assist with the rest of the run, depending on the situation. We may also need to negotiate briefly to plan out the details of the situation, for things like this, the group can simply take a short break that we will use to discuss. I am very flexible, and greatly in favor of allowing players to keep their characters in relative running shape for use in the next game.