[Shadowrun] Help with a little sandbox tool

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silva
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[Shadowrun] Help with a little sandbox tool

Post by silva »

Made this little tool for running sandbox style campaign. The idea is to make the players go look for runs to pay their bills, instead of having the GM come up with his "run of the week". If the players fail to find a run for the month, they can still look for gigs to pay the rent, but these worth lower than runs and generate complications faster.

Page 1 is a big relations map for noting down interesting people and hooks ( and some suggested names and entities for the group to use). The page 2 is more sketchy at this point. I think Ill dig my Sprawl Sites and Johnson Black Book to fill it better. (thanks Stahlseele for the suggestion!)

Any feedback appreciated. :wink:

Front page:

Image


Back page:

Image
Last edited by silva on Sat Mar 14, 2015 6:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Orca
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Post by Orca »

So if the nominated person (it's just one member of the team not each, right?) doesn't get 4+ hits on cha+job finding skill then the job pays about the same as lifestyle with minimal to no allowance for bribes, medical expenses, repair costs, expended/lost materials or ammo etc. let alone a profit to improve characters with.

I suggest some form of total successes from the group rather than having just one person find all the jobs - maybe their successes add dice to the face's pool - and aim at more than one job/month being the norm or increase the payout. IME expenses are a substantial part of the payout.

Also there needs to be a section in this for players to try to advance their own goals. Purely reactive is a dull game after a while.
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Orion
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Post by Orion »

This is a really interesting idea and a pretty good start. I'll ignore the fact that you're trolling us by stealing the layout and some character names from Apocalypse World. I appreciate the location list. I do wonder about some of the gigs, though -- it might help if I could get a clearer idea of how "Magical Healing" could be the basis of a session.

Once you iron out the mechanics, you could improve this by adding a third page with a dozen more roles, and random gigs for journalists, gangbangers, private investigators, underground doctors, mobsters, businessfolk, and the like.
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Post by silva »

Orca wrote:So if the nominated person (it's just one member of the team not each, right?) doesn't get 4+ hits on cha+job finding skill then the job pays about the same as lifestyle with minimal to no allowance for bribes, medical expenses, repair costs, expended/lost materials or ammo etc. let alone a profit to improve characters with.

I suggest some form of total successes from the group rather than having just one person find all the jobs - maybe their successes add dice to the face's pool - and aim at more than one job/month being the norm or increase the payout. IME expenses are a substantial part of the payout.
Nice ideas. See, as I understand the group has 2 options for finding actual runs:

1) Through their Fixer. Its the "safest" way, as the Fixer has better skills and if he fails/glicthes it wont affect the team. The downside is that he should charge a fee (depending on Loyalty maybe ?) for each job he finds.

*edit*: reminding myself to add the "Fixer fee" table. Suggestions apreciated.

2) Through themselves. Except if they have a Face in the group, this is not recommended, as the fails/glitches could generate complications. If they do have a Face on the group though, it could be as you described: a teamwork test having the Face as the main actor.

About the expenses, how would you do it ? I dont like to micromanage and fear this could fall on this problem. On a first look, I think I would state that all expenses are covered by the Johnson automatically.

Alternatively, I could simply increase the pay for different "play levels". So the team base charge (which right now is the average of all members lifestyles) could be modified by the following:

Street level: +0% (in this level of play the team should be struggling to survive and pay the bills, so giving too much dont sound advisable as it would take out the importance of gigs)
Professional level: +100% (here begins the actual upgrades-oriented play)
Prime level: +200%

So, for example, a 3 member crew where their lifestyles are low (2k nuyens), middle (5k) and high (10k) respectively would be:

Street: 6.000 + 0% = 6.000 for each runner
Professional: 6.000 + 100% = 12.000 for each runner
Prime: 6.000 + 200% = 18.000 for each runner

(we just didnt decided what makes you upgrade from one level of play to the other... I think it should be based on Rep/Street Cred, but didnt came up with anything yet *edit* reminding myself to insert table for leveling up the group levels of play. On the fly suggestion: Rep 0-2: Street, Rep 2-5 Professional, Rep 5+ Prime)
Also there needs to be a section in this for players to try to advance their own goals. Purely reactive is a dull game after a while.
Agreed. The News & Rumours section is supposed to work as "flags", where the players fill in events, themes and hooks for the GM to follow. But these are not supposed to be players personal goals and plots.

I have no idea how to implement these. What do you suggest ?
Last edited by silva on Sun Mar 15, 2015 3:50 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by silva »

Orion wrote: I do wonder about some of the gigs, though -- it might help if I could get a clearer idea of how "Magical Healing" could be the basis of a session.
The idea is not for gigs being the basis of sessions, just their complications. And even then only the apropriate/interesting ones:

"Hey chummers, I tried to heal a badly wounded ganger to earn a little jink, but I failed and the boy died. Yeah, those bikes you hear in the distance is the gang coming for us. Oops."
Once you iron out the mechanics, you could improve this by adding a third page with a dozen more roles, and random gigs for journalists, gangbangers, private investigators, underground doctors, mobsters, businessfolk, and the like.
You know, my original intention was to insert a TON more names, locations, gangs and small business, but in the end I preferred to keep everything on a single sheet for usability sake. Thinking again, though, perhaps I could carry all the color to a dedicated 3rd page (inserting a TON more as you suggests) and let the original 2 pages only to the relationship map, Crew info and Downtime mechanics. What do you think ?

*edit* reminding to myself of a neat idea I just had - creating specific complications for each gig.

Ie:

Decker:
1 - Datasteal / traced
2 - Snooping / discovered
3 - Courier / hunted
4 - Programming / vilified
5 - Host security / infiltrated
6 - Hardware repair / impoverished

Street Samurai:
1- Assassination / discovered
2 - Bodyguarding / vilified
3 - Gang Busting / embattled
4 - Inimidation / ?
5 - Bounty Hunting / discovered
6 - Stuffer Shack robbing / wanted

Face:
1 - Fixin´ / vilified
2 - Companionship / entangled
3 - Info Brokering / shut out
4 - Conning / embattled
4 - Swaggin / indebted
5 - Pimpin' / wanted

etc. Again, suggestions are welcome!
Last edited by silva on Sun Mar 15, 2015 4:52 pm, edited 9 times in total.
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Orion
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Post by Orion »

Adding pre-set complications for the gigs is a great idea, and it addresses my big question about "how is X gig relevant to play?" However, you ported some over from apocalypse world that make no sense. You're tracking actualy nuyen and lifestyle costs, you can have "impoverished" as a gig complication.
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Post by Orca »

Re the thru fixer/by team member choice: A fixer who is taking the heat is presumably going to charge rather more than the standard 10% finder's fee. On the other hand, how often are glitches going to come up if you have a dice pool of 7+? Very, very seldom; you could run multiple game years like this and never get one. This might actually be another issue - you've got all this glitch result stuff which is never going to come up.
Silva wrote:About the expenses, how would you do it ? I dont like to micromanage and fear this could fall on this problem. On a first look, I think I would state that all expenses are covered by the Johnson automatically.
If your group is OK with abstracting things a bit this should work. As in, you don't offer a 200 nuyen bribe to the receptionist, you just try to bribe him (as opposed to fast-talking, threatening, mind-controlling etc.) and you can't offer him more to make a difference in the chances.
Silva wrote:Alternatively, I could simply increase the pay for different "play levels". So the team base charge (which right now is the average of all members lifestyles) could be modified by the following:

Street level: +0% (in this level of play the team should be struggling to survive and pay the bills, so giving too much dont sound advisable as it would take out the importance of gigs)
Professional level: +100% (here begins the actual upgrades-oriented play)
Prime level: +200%
Also doable I guess. At street level your income is going to be consistently less than lifestyle+expenses with a single job or a gig so expect players to Greyhawk the corp HQ if you do it this way.
Silva wrote:Agreed. The News & Rumours section is supposed to work as "flags", where the players fill in events, themes and hooks for the GM to follow. But these are not supposed to be players personal goals and plots.

I have no idea how to implement these. What do you suggest ?
First you need a section where you say 'OK, downtime. What are you guys up to now? If you have nothing to do then you're catching up with family and friends.' or something to that effect.

Second you need to know how much time is available for this. I suggest knocking a week off for each job the group takes this month, to a minimum of no time free at 4 jobs or more.

Adjudicating exactly how the players personal plans work out is too open-ended to be discussed on a quick chart like you're putting up. You could fill multiple rulebooks with this sort of thing after all.

Last, you need some sort of bone to throw those insufficiently self-motivated to have plans. I suggest a quick roll to see if they gain a point to put towards a new contact or improving the loyalty of an existing one.
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Post by silva »

Orion wrote:Adding pre-set complications for the gigs is a great idea, and it addresses my big question about "how is X gig relevant to play?" However, you ported some over from apocalypse world that make no sense. You're tracking actualy nuyen and lifestyle costs, you can have "impoverished" as a gig complication.
You're totally right on this. Perhaps changing "empoverished" for indebted ? This way it implies you botched the job and now must repay it somehow to the contractor, be it in favor, cash, swag, etc. What do you think ?

By the way, about your last idea, I'm coming up with a fuckton of names here. I'm trying to come up with Anglos, Latin / Aztlaner, Amerindian and Japanese names/nicknames, as I think these are the main ingredients of the Seattle cultural soup.

And I'm also including more companies and places as well. Expect Hisako-Turner, Zeta-ImpChem, Erika, and Zurich Orbital Gemeinschaft Bank to make an appearance. Oh and Eagle Security too. ;)

P.S: Orca I'll answer you later, ok ? No time now. Thank you very much guys, your input has been invaluable!
Last edited by silva on Tue Mar 17, 2015 7:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ice9 »

Re: Low payouts and low chances of glitching, you could kill two birds with one stone by giving the option to look for "risky" jobs.

Risky jobs probably (2/3rds chance, maybe) have a complication (and if you glitch they have multiple complications) but they pay substantially more: +50-150%, perhaps. This would make them very appealing at street level, and still tempting at professional level.
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Post by silva »

Fokking great idea, Ice. [insert a karate fist here]

Consider it stolen.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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Post by silva »

Orca wrote:Re the thru fixer/by team member choice: A fixer who is taking the heat is presumably going to charge rather more than the standard 10% finder's fee. On the other hand, how often are glitches going to come up if you have a dice pool of 7+? Very, very seldom; you could run multiple game years like this and never get one. This might actually be another issue - you've got all this glitch result stuff which is never going to come up.
Thanks for perceiving this. How would you do it then ?

Perhaps a nice solution is making the test threshold higher, but dictating that a miss is just a "success with a complication". More or less like this:

Find the Job test: roll Charisma + job finding skill (threshold 5)

1 hit - failed
2 hits - failed
3 hits - found 1 job, with 2 complications
4 hits - found 1 job with 1 complication
5 hits - found 1 job
6 hits - found 1 job
7 hits - found 2 jobs
etc.

And here we have to insert Ice9 idea too - having the option of increasing run difficult for more jing, at the cost of increasing likelyhood of complications.
If your group is OK with abstracting things a bit this should work. As in, you don't offer a 200 nuyen bribe to the receptionist, you just try to bribe him (as opposed to fast-talking, threatening, mind-controlling etc.) and you can't offer him more to make a difference in the chances.
Yup, thats pretty much this.
Also doable I guess. At street level your income is going to be consistently less than lifestyle+expenses with a single job or a gig so expect players to Greyhawk the corp HQ if you do it this way.
Yep, thats the dea.
Silva wrote:Agreed. The News & Rumours section is supposed to work as "flags", where the players fill in events, themes and hooks for the GM to follow. But these are not supposed to be players personal goals and plots.

I have no idea how to implement these. What do you suggest ?
First you need a section where you say 'OK, downtime. What are you guys up to now? If you have nothing to do then you're catching up with family and friends.' or something to that effect.

Second you need to know how much time is available for this. I suggest knocking a week off for each job the group takes this month, to a minimum of no time free at 4 jobs or more.

Adjudicating exactly how the players personal plans work out is too open-ended to be discussed on a quick chart like you're putting up. You could fill multiple rulebooks with this sort of thing after all.

Last, you need some sort of bone to throw those insufficiently self-motivated to have plans. I suggest a quick roll to see if they gain a point to put towards a new contact or improving the loyalty of an existing one.
Ok, first things first: the assumption as described by the document is having 1 month as the base time unit. Within this you can have 1 run (or none, if ) and, optionally, an unspecified number of gigs (which may reward a maximum of you lifestlyle cost, if you roll 4 hits). I left it open to abstraction on purpose, as some players may prefer to have a gig occupying just 1 week of a given month, while other may prefer to see it as a couple hours of most days of the month.

Ok, that is the framework where we must insert the personal goals/issues. Your idea for taking 1 week sounds good. About how to structure this, I think the relationship map is a good start already. At least for tracking down the entities which show up in each player life. Perhaps having another page divided in columns to track each player goals and issues would be a good idea. The bonethrow is also nice. The reward could be karma too, or more and better contacts as you put it.

Thoughts ?
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Post by silva »

Going back to this idea from Ice9...
"Risky jobs" probably (2/3rds chance, maybe) have a complication (and if you glitch they have multiple complications) but they pay substantially more: +50-150%, perhaps. This would make them very appealing at street level, and still tempting at professional level.
... I think there should be a metric for defining "difficulty" levels. The core SR5 book cites the opposition highest dice pool. Perhaps we could use this. Ie:

Normal jobs: highest opposition dice pool < or = players
Risky jobs: highest opposition dice pool > players

Would this be a good metric ? :confused:
Last edited by silva on Fri Mar 20, 2015 11:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Orca »

I'd assumed that you'd look for jobs and if nothing came up you'd get exactly one try at a gig per month (which I'd further assume would take up 1/4 of the month, same as a single job; simplifying a month to 4 weeks for these purposes). If that's not how it's working you might want to clarify that.

Difficulty levels aren't really related to opposition dice pools IMO. A bunch of goons in armor with longarms, grenades and a mage on astral overwatch are a serious threat, a disorganised pack of ghouls led by a physical adept is likely a lot less - even with better dice pools to claw people to bits. Then there's the way some jobs are less likely to lead to a physical confrontation (the real difficulty level IMO). Sorry, this is another place SR5 dropped the ball & yes both those examples are from gaming experience.

Making the job test scale less would help, yes. Not sure about your exact figures but something like that.

Ice9's idea sounds like a fine one to me too.
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Post by silva »

Orca wrote:I'd assumed that you'd look for jobs and if nothing came up you'd get exactly one try at a gig per month (which I'd further assume would take up 1/4 of the month, same as a single job; simplifying a month to 4 weeks for these purposes). If that's not how it's working you might want to clarify that.
Honestly, I began thinkin this way (gigs only available when you cant find jobs) but then I thought it could be more interesting if gigs are available even when you get a job, for the extra money, complications and sheer color they can bring.

Im still not entirely certain, though. What do you think ?
Difficulty levels aren't really related to opposition dice pools IMO. A bunch of goons in armor with longarms, grenades and a mage on astral overwatch are a serious threat, a disorganised pack of ghouls led by a physical adept is likely a lot less - even with better dice pools to claw people to bits. Then there's the way some jobs are less likely to lead to a physical confrontation (the real difficulty level IMO). Sorry, this is another place SR5 dropped the ball & yes both those examples are from gaming experience.
Makes sense. What metric could be used then, to represent difficulty ?

The advantage of dice pools as a metric is that its simple enough. Say, during a default mission the gruup would see opposing dice pools around the same level as them, while on a "risky" job the group would know that the opposition would have, on average, highers dice pools. But as you said, its very relative in the end. Any ideas apreciated.


*EDIT*

Here are the 2 pages of the tool in PDF form, for those who wish to take a closer look. This is an update version, with more names and places, etc. and the latest ideas on the "Downtime" section. Ill be doing a separate version with much more names and places, as suggested by Orion.

Page 1: http://www.4shared.com/office/s7iaplmIc ... front.html

Page 2: http://www.4shared.com/office/5ROLpJfIc ... _back.html

Feel free to try to change it as you wish. I use Adobe Acrobat. If you manage to improve it, let us know. :wink:
Last edited by silva on Tue Mar 24, 2015 7:00 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Ice9 »

silva wrote:The advantage of dice pools as a metric is that its simple enough. Say, during a default mission the gruup would see opposing dice pools around the same level as them, while on a "risky" job the group would know that the opposition would have, on average, highers dice pools. But as you said, its very relative in the end. Any ideas apreciated.
Not sure there's a simple way that will be very accurate, but maybe rate it on a few factors:

Opposition Skill (Dice Pools): Much Worse, Worse, [Roughly Equal], Better, Much Better.
Opposition Numbers: Few (<= party size), [Average] (based on existing runs, dunno off hand), Lots
Opposition Coordination: None, [Basic Communication], Focused Tactics, Hivemind
Opposition Surprise: Unprepared, [Generally Alert], Prepared for Your Type of Intrusion, Prepared for You Specifically

With the bracketed options as "average" difficulty. Then shifting any of these favors up or down modifies the overall difficulty.
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Post by silva »

You breakdown is very useful, but too complicated. I still think dice pool is the best metric, even if it just work as a loose guideline.


On another topic, I was thinking about the "Find the Job" roll and I think it should be based on Rep somehow. The most obvious solution is making the threshold [6 - Rep], so a team with Rep 1 should get 5 hits to get a job, while a team with Rep 5 would only need one hit.

Attempting to find jobs different from your league/level would incur +4 or -4, so a Professional team trying to find a Prime level job would have +4 to the threshold, while the same team looking for a Street level jib would have -4 to the threshold.

Thoughts ?
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