Checking interest in a play-by-post RPG

The Game Room
1

I’m looking for 4-5 players interested in participating in a play-by-post RPG using an extremely simplified and modified version of the 4th edition Shadowrun ruleset. It will not be necessary for players to own a copy of the rulebook, or have prior familiarity with Shadowrun. Previous experience with pen-and-paper RPGs is also not necessary.

For those of you unfamiliar with Shadowrun, it’s a near-future science fantasy setting. A cataclysmic event has woken dormant mystical entities, causing everything from mutations approximating typical fantasy racial features (orcs, elves, dwarves) to overt displays of magic power in a select few individuals. The services typically performed by governments have been taken over by corporations. National citizenship has been replaced by corporate employment. Technology is advanced, but not so far as to be unrecognizable from modern tech.

Shadowrunners, or “runners,” are agents who get their hands dirty with jobs no regular 9-5 card-puncher can do. Sabotage, kidnapping (and rescues!), bodyguarding, hacking, spying, and corporate intrigue are daily reality for the best runners. Double-crossings aren’t just common; they’re typical for you. Your employer wants the job done, sure…but if you happen to disappear when the job’s over, all the better for deniability, and the bottom line. Your name won’t show up on any official accounting sheet, and you’ll be denounced publicly by the same agencies that hired you. It 'aint easy, but that’s how you like it.

If there’s enough interest in playing a campaign, I’ll start a thread to make a list of players and alternates. I intend to create the campaign with a lot of short, action-packed missions with a clear beginning and end to each. I’m looking for players that are interested in cooperating to create an intriguing story, not necessarily competing to create the most legendary hero of all time.

My posts as the DM will be narrative in nature, and dice rolls will be made behind the scenes, not transparently. A single game thread will be created in which posts that contain public knowledge will be posted. Private messages will be for information or instructions that are not public knowledge. Players will be given an “agenda,” in which meeting specific goals unique to your character will result in karma (experience) rewards, but the agenda will not necessarily be known to the other players, and a player may have an agenda which conflicts with another player’s agenda. I’ll be working together with each player as they create their character, to develop an interesting and challenging agenda that helps create tension and drama.

If this seems interesting and fun to you, or if you have any questions about it, let me know! I’m hoping to get a small group of very active players, who will post at least once a day on average, with short breaks of a day or two in between missions if everyone wants. I expect it’ll take a few days to get a player list, and a few days after that to finish character creation and get started.

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So far, two spots have been reserved for Jules Andre and Mahaloth

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Color me interested! Although I’ll ask- will this all be missions, or will there be downtime / RP-ish stuff as well?

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The missions will have specific objectives, but how you complete them is up to the group. Compare the missions to chapters in a novel, or episodes in a TV series. I intend to do my best to encourage heavy RP, while keeping enough action to make everyone feel interested and included. The “break” time in between missions will be downtime, in which players can spend their experience points and engage in non-combat RP.

5

Mr. Johnson has instructed me that this is something I might want to look into.

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ArrMatey! and Hoopy Frood, would you like me to reserve spots for you? That would make 4 total player reservations, with a maximum of 1 more open player spot. After that, I’d be happy to make a list of alternates.

7

Sure, sign me up.

8

I’ll play or be an alternate if all the spots are full. With the apparent sudden-death of the other SDMB play-by-post RPG, I would love to play something else with dopers.

9

I’d love to play too, if there’s still any room.

10

Autolycus and Omi no Kami, there’s one open slot left. The spot will go to **Autolycus **unless he’d like to be an alternate in order to allow Omi no Kami to take the spot.

As of now, the list of confirmed players is
Hoopy Frood
Jules Andre
ArrMatey!
Mahaloth
Autolycus

and the alternates are
Omi no Kami

I’d be happy to take a few more alternates before making the game setup thread.

The game setup thread will include instructions for character creation, and background to introduce you to the game world. The setting is cyberpunk/cyberfantasy, and the posting style will be almost entirely narrative, with out-of-character posts extremely limited in the game thread. A separate thread will be created for OOC posts, which is where stuff like questions about game mechanics will belong.

I’ll be working closely with each player as they create their character. You’ll have full control over character generation, with some guidance from me to help get you started. If you’re familiar with Shadowrun, try to resist the urge to create your character with the sourcebook rules, and instead follow the character creation thread.

I expect to have the game setup and character creation thread posted by Monday night, about 9pm Pacific time.

Some basic info to get the game creation started -
The players form a Shadowrunner team with prior history working together. Characters will all know each other from previous runs. Your team has already had some success with minor runs for small corps, and is starting to move up in the (under)world.

The only exception to this is that one player will be a “company” man. The company man represents your employer, who the rest of you have no previous experience working for. The company man will not be working against the group, but he’s there to make sure the rest of you don’t double cross the employer. The company man should be prepared to roleplay at least a rivalry with the group, and possibly even have an antagonistic relationship with the rest of the group at first. Shadowrunners may seem like vermin to this character, scurrying away from the light of honest work. The company man (or woman) is proud to make an honest living, but he’s no pushover. He’s chosen for this position by his employer because of his loyalty and ability to take care of himself. Shadowrunners will tauntingly use the term “wage slave” to describe this character.

The group will be limited to a single character with the “magician” perk. Taking this perk will allow the character to cast magic spells, and should not be taken lightly as it severely limits other aspects of character generation. This character will be quite powerful, but can not be the Company Man. The GM will be more involved in the creation of this character than the others, as it will be a slightly more difficult character to create for new players. The magician will use overt magic in combat, and it will be the biggest defining attribute of the character. Magic is real, but overt displays of it 'aint exactly common. You’ll be feared and distrusted by the people around you, and you might find it difficult to feel empathy for them. You’ll be part of the runner group, but somehow detached emotionally from it. The player with the magician character should be prepared to create his own motivations for joining the group, whether it’s to hide from their past, get revenge on someone specific, get rich, or gain power, to name just a few examples.

The remaining three players will be Shadowrunners. While all of the characters will be proficient in combat, the runners are the fighting core. They will be comrades and brothers in arms. These are the types of people who take a bullet for a friend, and trust each other implicitly. This doesn’t mean you should create shallow meat-head characters out of them, just that you should be prepared to cooperatively develop a backstory for the three of you which explains your comraderie. Your skills can vary widely, but you are all competent fighters, maybe even exceptional. Be prepared to roleplay a character who is proud of their place in the world, and revels in the sneering and disgust of normal people. You belong to the underclass, a counter-culture where survival of the fittest isn’t just a phrase in some book. You’ll likely have gang tattoos or cosmetics identifying you to your peers. People (like the company man) will wonder why in the hell someone would purposely choose your image and lifestyle.

Hopefully this is enough info to get the discussion started! Use this thread to discuss among yourselves and figure out the roles you’ll fill. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask them here. The game setup thread will have much more information for you to create the specifics of your character and provide some background information about the world, 'cause it 'aint like it used to be.

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I’d really like to be a phys. adept, specializing in stealth and melee. However, if someone else is jonesing for that role, I’ll grab the decker role, mainly because I’ve never played it and often wanted to try it out.

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I’ll take an alternate slot. Good luck, chummers!

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You may not be familiar with newer Shadowrun roles. Deckers (hackers) aren’t the only characters who run in the Matrix anymore. The Matrix is becoming self-aware, and reaching out to particular individuals for an unknown purpose. These net-wizards are called “technomancers” and can access the Matrix through sheer strength of will, without using a deck. If you’re interested in this, shoot me a PM so we can hammer out the details.

Just be aware that the Matrix will play a very small role in this campaign, and you will typically be limited to accessing it during times when the rest of the group is participating in some kind of action scene (so no players feel left out while you’re the center of the story). There will be a very limited number of situations in which accessing the Matrix will become a major plot point, and no situations at all where it will be strictly necessary. For this reason, it’s advisable that only one player take the technomancer perk, or invest resources into decking.

Also, the “adept” perk is different from the “magician” perk. The adept perk will not be limited in this campaign, unless I see everyone trying to take it. If you decide to be a physical adept, I would encourage other players not to also take that perk, and would consider limiting it if more than one additional person wants to take it. Variety is the spice of life!

Anyway, specifics of character creation will be addressed more thoroughly in the game setup thread on Monday. Hopefully it will clear up some of the questions the players not familiar with the sourcebook will undoubtedly have.

SCSimmons, you’ve been added to the list of alternates. Thanks for your interest! If the first mission seems to be going particularly smoothly, we might find a way to add one or two alternates to the regular rotation of characters.

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I’ll be the Company Man. The rest i’ll flesh out later.

15

Sounds good!

From the looks of things, ArrMatey’s Physical Adept (or Decker, or Technomancer) will fit very nicely into one of the three Shadowrunner slots, and Jules Andre will fill the Company Man role. That leaves two more runner positions, and a magician/runner. If anyone would like to play a different role, send me a PM so I can adjust the campaign to fit.

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I’m fine playing either the mage or one of the two standard runners. We probably want a street samurai and a stealthy/scout type. The physical adept would probably be a good stealthy scout type, depending on how the newer rules handle it. I know in the older versions, physical adepts usually did one thing very well, but would typically get their asses handed to them by a sammy in an full open fight. The trick was to hit the sammy hard before he knew what got him. But maybe in the newer versions adepts have more versatility then they did in the past.

So basically, I’m fine filling in with whatever role we need for a good balance of skills.

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Hm. Go ahead and contact me about this ‘technomancy’ thing. It sounds interesting, but I’d rather know some more details about it (and how it interacts with the game-world) before I sign on.

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The magic-user slot sounds interesting. I have no experience with the system, but I am a somewhat competent DnD 3.5 player. I figure I can handle it. I think. Maybe.

Although, I’ve also PMed Omi no Kami asking if he/she wants to play really badly. If that’s the case, I might be fine with being first alternate. It would give me some time to learn more about the system and environment, maybe make me a better contributor. No response yet though.

19

Mage would be nice.

Honestly, I’d be fine with any of the other roles, even the boss/monitor guy.

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We have 3 players interested in playing the mage/shaman, but you were the first to mention it in the thread. Mahaloth sent me a PM at 1:47 yesterday afternoon (a few hours before yours and Autolycus’ post) expressing the most direct request to play the mage, though, so I’d like to let it go to him(her?) unless the other players object.

As far as your other comments, I don’t like to classify characters according to the book archetypes so much. There is no such thing as a “street samurai” perk, for example. A player might object to that particular label, but love the idea of playing a heavily cybernetically enhanced warrior who might be losing his humanity.

Cyborgs (like the street samurai) are still the kings of combat, and are generally the center of the action during combat scenes, but that role is not undisputed. Physical adepts can put up an impressive challenge for them. The cyborgs are more glamorous and easy to spot due to all the obvious enhancement, but this is not always a good thing. Physical adepts can make it through airport security (without having to kill everyone that gets in their way), for example.