One aspect of this game I’m struggling with is keeping the Legwork phase from becoming just a series of rolls. I make sure to keep things in fiction, but I feel like there isn’t a lot of opportunity for roleplaying and interaction between characters. The Mission phase is the most important part, but I’m looking for ways to spice up Legwork.
How do you all keep the legwork phase interesting and cool?
You could always introduce a twist around this phase. Make it personal, for example – rival runner shows up during initial swipe, either after the same target, or inside the targets security. Corporation PC is in debt to gives side goals. Childhood friend, oblivious to the stakes involved, walks into the soon-to-be death trap.
OR make the one roll situation a color scene. Show them the office life, the tired secretary meeting her boyfriend outside the doomed office, security guy discussing take your child to work day tomorrow… Make them human. Show the stakes.
Guns_n_Droids gives good advice. In addition to that, take the time to find out exactly what the characters are doing.
If a player says “I snoop around the Matrix to research the corp.” Ask how? Ask where they’re logging in? What does that physical area look like? What does the matrix there look like? Where are they looking in the Matrix for info?
The point of these questions isn’t to allow or deny the action or trap the character in some way, it’s to add colour and make The Sprawl feel real.
Every time a character hits the street, that’s a role playing scene with a contact. Every time a character investigates something with assess or research, they have a chance to add to the picture of how their character interacts with The Sprawl through their actions.
Consider Blade Runner. The first half of the movie is Deckard’s legwork phase. That’s mostly roleplaying. The action phase starts when he enters JR’s apartment an triggers the conflict with Roy.
Rewatching Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic is what prompted this question. Both of thise made me realize I needed to try and make Legwork more interesting.
When I get a chance, I want to watch those (and the other movies in the inspiration section at the back of the book) and parse them all out as Sprawl missions.
The hardest thing might be deciding which can version of Blade Runner to use…
Hamish Cameron
That sounds cool, yeah.
To make it personal and colorful, don’t forget the contacts can ask for a service or a favour as payment instead of a cred. It becomes very funny when PC do not choose “their price is fair”.
Leg work is all about digging for facts. More often than not that means talking to people, on the net or in person,
Those people have their own motivations and goals too. Plenty of opportunity for interaction
You also have to concieve the Legwork phase as a Noir fiction. In such a fiction, the protagonists explore various facets – let’s say classes – of the society and become aware of their vicissitudes.
The PC directives (like Compassionate or Interliked) will help you to enhance involvement of the characters and make them react to their environment.