Trust and betrayal in Shadowrun ?

[silva]

The "favorite game mechanics" thread reminded of elements of trust and betrayal that some games have, and is very common in heist/crime-based movies and stories, but is completely absent from Shadowrun.

So, how would you put it in the game ?

One neat thing I thought was adopting Mountain Witch idea of giving each player a personal hidden agenda that may be conflicting with the rest of the group, and reward them for achieving those agendas, through XP or in-story rewards or some other thing. But this idea doesn't look fit for long-term play of traditional rpgs like Shadowrun.

So, ideas ?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

People get betrayed by their employers all the time in Shadowrun. It's a fairly core assumption that if you're being handed a railroad, you're going to be scourged later to remove all witnesses. If you love to jerk the engine off the rails 5 minutes into the game for the lulz I don't see why it's not a suitable game as-is.

[Stahlseele]

Characters ALWAYS should have their own agenda in Shadowrun, no matter what any other character or the gm says or does. O.o
Doesn't need to be hidden either, if you can either convince the others to go along with it or if it does not interfere with their fun of the game at least.

The being betrayed by Johnsons is a big thing(TM) in the FLUFF of Shadowrun, that is true . . Well, at least in the Fiction/Novels . .
If you try to do that in game, prepare for seeing your game go down the drain really fast.

[silva]

Sak, Stahl,

I'm not referring to external betrayals (like the traditional Jonhson one), I'm referring to intra-party tension and betrayal, as seen on some heist/criminal fiction on movies and books.

[Stahlseele]

Wait so that DOES NOT HAPPEN in your games? O.o

I can't rightly say i remember a single game of SR i played in which not at least one member of the group tried to somehow fuck over another member of the group with the GM looking on in bemused stupefaction O.o

One of the reasons why i started to specialize in Combat Monster Trolls, because the others usually build more for style than efficience and i could thus usually simply shrug off anything they throw at me <.<

[kzt]

One of the reasons why i started to specialize in Combat Monster Trolls, because the others usually build more for style than efficience and i could thus usually simply shrug off anything they throw at me <.<

It works better if you have LS or KE do your dirty work for you....

But we very rarely had that kind of stuff actually happen.

[Stahlseele]

Are the people you are playing with year long friends/buddies or more or less strangers that actually only meet up with you lot to play a game in a game store or something?

In my group, we have known each other personally for about 15 years or so . . There's a good deal of antagonism going on between most of us. Usually it's good natured "let's see how that slimy snake gets out of that trap this time"
sometimes it's retaliation for (imagined) sleights done to them/their character by another player(s) character . .

sometimes it's just in character and they are all playing assholes.
money grubbing bastards and backstabbers the lot of them. Or white knights that don't like it when somebody else goes with a more mercenary approach to life in the 6th world.


Yes, having KE do your dirty work is better, but it lacks the personal touch that a gift from the Spikes confers. Nobody can actually prove me to be responsible, but seeing how i usually play Troll Combat Monsters and the Spikes are a Troll Go-Gang, they have their suspicions about me of course ^^

[Ice9]

Working at cross-purposes is a tricky balance to walk.

Actually, no, it's easy. I should say that working at cross-purposes without devolving into full-on PvP, or having the characters simply split up and never want to work with each-other again, is a tricky balance to walk.

In a one-shot heist, that's no problem. You have some tension, but everyone wants to finish the job. Then you get to the betrayals, some people end up dead, some are sold down the river and vow revenge, some ride off into the sunset. Makes for an exciting game - but not an ongoing series, because those characters aren't getting back together for the next time.

So - I think that if you want the possibility of serious intra-party conflicts, then you also want a campaign where characters leaving and being replaced is a relatively common thing.

[Stahlseele]

Inter Party Shenanigans/PvP is, strangely, the best way to get people to actually make use of the Sandbox and Role Play a bit . .

But yes, Ice is right, it makes Campaigns pretty hard to do properly.
If it works, it can be great fun though.

[TheFlatline]

Yeah as an ongoing campaign it's hard to PvP each other, because if one guy is the asshole and the rest get along, why *don't* you kick the troublemaker out and smooth things over.

Same with the asshole who inevitably decides to play Chaotic Stupid in a party full of non-evil PCs. It's hard to keep going long term unless you start to railroad the players.

[Dogbert]

Shadowrun, like d&d, is a team sport if the players have any sort of expectations about their characters' staying alive unless you want to play it like Fiasco, case in which why not just play Fiasco instead?

For the Shadowrun game I ran, I was rather explicit that the premise involved everyone being a reliable teammate (but then, my table has an explicit "no asshats" policy unless we're playing Masquerade or a similar game which is -specifically- about that).

I love Masquerade, and I love cloak&dagger, but player expectations are more important, and when the game is "you and me against the world," you'd be surprised at the number of players who do not sign up to be backstabbed by some other player.

[Koumei]

I really don't like PvP stuff, so I'm quite happy with SR not having "you need to work at odds and preferably just gun each other down at the first opportunity" as a thing. Not trusting NPCs is another thing entirely that is just part of the genre (and of course works better if you can't trust every NPC to betray you at some point, but some will and others won't).

But ultimately, you don't even need to build a special traitor mechanic into it like a board game or shitty indie product. If you let people have their own goals and motivations and roleplay according to said goals and motivations, then when people want that kind of "potential PvP" game, that's something that can naturally evolve and occur in a way that feels either realistic or thematic.

Whereas any mechanical reward just for screwing the party over will probably result in the players making an agreement to each do their over-screwing right at the start, before you even kick the first door down, by stealing each other's sandwiches or whatever, so you can all get your bonus and move on with relative trust of one another.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

In every RPG I've played with the players working at cross-purposes, its been players passing notes to the GM like we were in grade school, and the GM MTPing up the results. You couldn't actually challenge someone to danmaku or whatever, since player on player combat in every game I've played devolves into rocket tag.

To get me excited about the prospect of PvP, I'd expect a whole lot of inspiration from European board games, and minimal influence from the traditional evolution of RPGs.

[Whipstitch]

Even SR fiction is relatively light on internal party conflict aside from the occasional "I never liked that guy anyway" setup. The dickery usually comes in one of two forms:

1. Standard screwjob. Mr. J or your Fixer decides that for whatever reason it's better to have you or someone you care about greased rather than follow through on their promises.

2. Unintended consequences/unforeseen obstacles. You have not technically been betrayed at all, but you probably wouldn't have taken the job if someone hadn't withheld information from you about what the job entails in the big picture.

Remember, SR is a game about semi-pro criminals trying to get by in an amoral universe where Gandalf can reasonably be expected to throw down with the Terminator or the Baseball Furies. Wal-Mart has surveillance tech that'd make Big Brother jealous and the police have largely been replaced by minimally trained private security contractors. A John Carpenter or Paul Verhoeven movie could break out at any moment, so trusting your coworkers needs to be a reasonable option if you want the game to actually persist beyond a session or two with a single runner team since frankly there's already plenty of other shit to worry about.

[Koumei]

and the police have largely been replaced by minimally trained private security contractors.

Even the actual police appear to be a privately-run for-profit corporation, armed with full-auto weapons and high-explosive grenades. Admittedly, at the way things are going this seems entirely realistic, but I'm not even sure the world of Shadowrun actually has prisons, because just gunning people down saves on paperwork.

[kzt]

But you get paid every day for the people you have in your jail. Um, and that is whether they are really there or not...

[Ghremdal]

Or with all their organs intact.

Anyway, I had more success with intra party conflict with PbP games rather then face to face sessions. Though it bears mentioning that most of my players come from a DnD background, so their characters don't go to the bathroom alone if they can help it.

[Blade]

As other posters said, it's hard to get working in a normal Shadowrun game, especially in a campaign. The way I see it, it could work if it's on the scale of the whole campaign (a character plotting to get away with the McGuffin at the very end of the campaign, this way the campaign goes as planned and the player can do his plotting between sessions without disrupting the flow of the game).

It could also work in some specific occasions, like a target offering a very large pay for the runners to fail a mission. Some characters will want to stick to the missions, other might consider selling out and this can create a tension without turning in direct PVP too quickly.

But the Lupin/Fujiko type of betrayal that's quite common in the heist genre isn't very easy to pull off in Shadowrun. After a betrayal, next time Shadowruner Lupin meets Shadowrunner Fujiko he'll just beat her up, get her to tell him where the money is and kill her (or sell her). And even if she could manage to get away, Shadowrunner Fujiko would have a hard time finding anyone else to work with her. Since it's quite hard to solo a run, life would be difficult for her.

If you want that kind of stuff, you need to tweak the fluff and rules a bit. In Shadowrun fluff, (as in real life criminal circles) your reputation in the Shadows is important. If you're known as untrustworthy, people won't want to work with you and you're pretty much screwed. But you could imagine an alternative settings, where people don't rely on trust, but just on the idea that they're more clever than anyone else and so won't be fooled. And if they do get fooled, then it's their fault, and the winner deserves whatever he got. It's less realistic, but if you can get all the players to play in such a setting, it might just work.

You'll also need players to have good reason to need to keep working together. It can be attraction between two characters (the Lupin/Fujiko situation), or just that they're the best there is, and the only way they can achieve anything is by working together.

Then you need rules so that players will accept getting shafted and so that the players who get away with the loot doesn't suddenly get much better than the rest.

For the first part, the most basic way is "more karma when you're shafted". It's not so absurd and fits the concept of literal karma. The downside is that it might lead to the mage agreeing with the street-sam that the sam should take the money so that he'll have better stuff and the mage will have the karma he needs.

Another solution is to consider that the extra money the "winner" gets is is "fluff" money that will always disappear before the next session (it can be because of the character's gambling habit or taste for luxury, or because he spent it on his fluff pet project, etc.). Everyone (including the winner) just get to keep a lower amount of money that's good enough for update purposes, and the winner gets an extra karma to celebrate his victory.

That's for "enabling" the system.

The problem you'll then face is that each player will want time alone with the GM for plotting and we all know how splitting the party is awful. That's why you'll need a system to handle the plotting in a better way.

A way I could see it working is the following:
- The team plans the heist and play the heist.
- Once the heist is over, characters who want can try to get away with the loot. To do so, they roll Charisma+Intuition, giving them a "Back-stabbing pool".

The player with the lowest back-stabbing pool reveals his plan first, unless a character with a higher score wants to go first. He needs to start with "What you don't know is that..." and then proceed to explain the steps he took at different steps of the planning. If other characters could have done something to realize it, they can request to counter, spending one point from their back-stabbing pool to do so. The situation is then solved with an opposite roll. If the opposition wins, the plotter can spend one back-stabbing point and give an explanation to how he went around this. If he's unable to offer a decent explanation or has no points left, his plan is foiled, and it's up to the character with the second lowest back-stabbing pool (taking into account the points spent) to tell his plan. This plan can rely on what the first one has described of his own plan. Defeated characters can no longer use their back-stabbing points to counter.

If a character is able to tell his whole story without his plan being foiled, he gets away with the loot. So when there's only one character left, he automatically wins.

There are probably a few holes or problems with this system (I haven't given it much thought), but it should be fun, and add something without slowing down the "normal" part of the game.

[silva]

Thanks for the input, guys. It's pretty in line with my own experience, aka its almost impossible to do in long-term campaigns. The games where I've seen this work more or less well are games prone to short to mid-length campaigns. So perhaps one could apply that logic to Shadowrun.

What about this:

A cut-throat Shadowrun campaign would be all about the story (or a specific location) not necessarily the characters. So each player would create a character having in mind this character could die or walk away from the group at any minute. This char would be working with the team out of obligation or necessity, but his primary agenda would be personal (and possibly at odds with the rest of the group). Then, when PvP takes on and shit hits the fan for this character, he would walk away ( probably having betrayed someone else in the group) or simply die in the process, and another char takes his place in the group.

The end result is a sort of "troupe play" where in the long run each player has a "stable" of characters whose lives intersect each other players characters through temporary teams, marked by betrayals, rivalries or even camaraderie and friendships. The story wouldn't be about the characters, it would be about the locale or aspect that bind those characters, so it could be "Chronicles of the Barrens" or "Corp Hitters" or whatever. Perhaps XP is given for accomplishing personal goals, while money and rep are gained by accomplishing missions, so the players should reach for a balance, which ensure betrayals would continue happening some times.

Thoughts ?

[fectin]

If you want a competitive storytelling game, play Fiasco instead.

[silva]

If you want a tactical combat game, play Xcom instead.

[fectin]

...or just keep on using those that bandsaw as a hammer.

[Stahlseele]

Even if you have agreeable players that are okay with the game being about the GMs story and not about the characters they play, SR is still the wrong system for that.

[silva]

Stahl, didn't get your point. The game would continue to be about the group story, not the GM's. Only difference is that the story would flow from various different characters, instead of only one per player.

In other words, this change is orthogonal to how sandboxy or not the game is.

[Stahlseele]

If it does not MATTER if a character dies or simply walks out . . how is it about the characters then? O.o