User:Niven

Niven

Reddit Username	[1]
Timezone	PST, so GMT-7
Country	US
GM Level	0

Characters

• Mystic Murray, giant ghoul mysad, tilting at every windmill the Sixth World has to offer.
• Ardent, burnout technomancer face, former diplomat trying to rebuild his life.

GMing style

Philosophy

I'm here to have fun. We all are.

That's kind of all I've got for overarching game philosophy.

Declining runs

I'd prefer you metagame and not apply a character to runs that your character wouldn't approve of. Remember, despite all the backstory and notes written on the wiki, you have a lot better understanding of what makes your runner tick than I do, so I can't always catch these problems (though I'll do my best.)

Derailing runs

I'm fine with derailing runs, but if you know from the outset that your runner will probably attempt to thwart the run's goals then please tip me off in advance. For non-premeditated run derailments I trust my players and myself to handle the derailment, but that it will likely involve talking through things OOC to get a sense of where everyone's at and how to handle it without ending the runners' careers.

Realism in Shadowrun

Well...

There are literal actual dragons flying around, tanks turn their occupants into spaghetti sauce when they hit a tree, combat chainsaws are a real weapon, computers are both trivially cheap and absurdly expensive, drugs can turn you permanently insane, some people can just send emails with their brain--this setting has a thin veneer of realism over a dense core of comic book logic. I don't feel particularly limited by realism. To me, Shadowrun is a crazy universe where lots stories can all coexist. To this end, while I'll try to have everything make sense, I'm going to prioritize Shadowrun's internal logic over IRL internal logic. This often means that I'll approach the setting working backwards to justify the decisions and things in the established lore over figuring out how things should logically work from the group up.

Seriousness

Realism and seriousness are obviously different. The former is an approach, the latter a tone. My runs tend to be less serious by nature, but my runs are also more of a grab-bag of "what sounds interesting" rather than a tonally consistent whole, so watch the tone/theme section of any run I post carefully for more detail. I'll try to communicate what tone I'm going for in the post.

Failure and consequences

Because this is a Living Community where I usually won't get the chance to explore the fallout of player actions in the long-term, I will try to make sure meaningful consequences are applied during my runs in the short-term because I can't necessarily go back later. On the flip side, assumed competence is a thing. If you fall out of a plane, I'm going to assume you picked up a parachute during the flight, and I won't make you play out the trip back to base once you hit the ground (unless you aimed for a zero-zone or a toxic wasteland on purpose). As for fail states, I'll try and offer the players some leeway in order to prevent "run over, you lose, nothing more can be done" situations, but if push comes to shove my runs almost always have fail states, even if they're obvious in advance and difficult to achieve by accident or poor rolls. At the very least I try to be transparent about these fail states in lower-difficulty runs.