User:Zene

Style Guide

Hi, I'm Zene. I guess this is where I ramble about my thoughts on GMing? I dunno'. Here's a bunch of words I guess.

General Stuff

• Please do not apply characters who would decline the run. While potentially realistic, it's ultimately a waste of time for the rest of the players and myself. Assume that if your character wouldn't do the run, their fixer wouldn't pass them that run to begin with.
• Subverting a run is fine. Characters are free to decide they want to oppose or backstab or anything of the like. Players are also free to DM or whisper me to inform me of their character's intentions to keep it secret, and I will try to accommodate them.
• The Johnson is not your friend. They have their own agenda and may, if they believe they should or they can get away with it, stiff you or sell you out. They may intend you to fail or your job might have consequences they didn't tell you about. This doesn't mean every, or even many, Johnsons will do this - just that it is a potential risk in your line of work.
• The fixer is your friend. A very large part of their job is doing the initial investigations to make sure the job seems legit, and trying to cover you if something goes wrong. You are an investment. The more loyal and capable they are, the more they'll do to keep that investment.
• Failure is always an option. There will always be hurdles to accomplishing your goal, but there will always be ways to attempt to get past them. If you have ideas I didn't that make sense, I'll adapt the run to support those.
• Consequences are always on the table. From start to finish, what you do leaves ripples in the world, and it will respond to you and your choices. They are not inherently tied to failure, and succeeding in ways that would bring consequences - such as the attention of law enforcement or the ire of corporate management - according to the world will do so. Major breaches of etiquette with a Johnson might still lead to doing the job, but your rep will suffer anyway.
• Death is almost never a consequence. This is all ultimately a shared story. Death does work well for some endings and might make sense in-world... but for the most part, concluding a story with "and then they died, the end" is boring.
• Johnsons (usually) accept good faith attempts. If a runner team feels they might not be able to complete a run's objectives or would risk too much doing so, they may back out. The consequences of doing so can be limited by informing the Johnson, having partially completed the run objectives, and detailed information on what opposition prevented completion.
• The target's existence doesn't require you. Any opposition you might possibly encounter from the objectives will be set to fit the situation, not the players. It's up to the characters to identify what they might be facing beforehand and think of a way to handle it. Conversely, if the characters have a way to invalidate the opposition, it will not suddenly evolve to counter their strategy.

Silent Escalations

All runs I host may escalate in the background due to the presence of certain characters. How this works is as follows:

• Relations and reputation matters. Factions that particularly hate a character or were significantly wronged by them will be attempting to track them. Factions that like a character, especially while in their territory, will attempt to impede this. With a higher Street Cred, people are more likely to stick up for a character, while a higher Notoriety will have them more willing to sell the character out. Contacts who are loyal, especially fixers, may be able to pass on warnings before the runner even had the chance to notice. Contacts who are disloyal may accept offers to trade information on a character.
• Hits are not arbitrary. This will actually be rolled, based on legwork from the organization. Methods of resisting being traced (e.g. Blandness, Erased) will weaken this, while qualities that make being traced easier (e.g. Distinctive Style, Glamour) will strengthen it. The amount of negative reputation scales how much effort they're willing to put into this, which can result in them giving up before they ever find you.
• The interference will be targeted. If a character is attacked, the attacking force will be based on what capabilities they know about. Better successes on tracking them, as well as wider reputation, will scale this anywhere from a generic force to optimized, direct counters to them, depending on how powerful the faction is. (A street gang isn't going to be able to pull out an HTR-grade hitsquad, for example.) Team members may be collateral damage, but they will not go out of their way to affect runners other than the target.
• Failure is always an option. If a run is escalating due to third-party interference, it is decided before session start. Legwork and discovery are just as capable of catching on to this threat as they are to the actual run's opfor.
• Wanted characters are wanted. Having this quality means you are considered to have a generic 'bounty hunters' faction who hates you, and with strength depending on the value of the bounty. Proving oneself particularly intractable to forces appropriate for a bounty value may result in the bounty being dropped or raised, depending on the issuer and reason for issue.