Ran a session tonight that ended up being a bit of a mess and I’m hoping someone might have some suggestions on how I can get better at a few things.
First off, my players seemed to be having a heck of a time formulating a plan for this mission and it was exhausting trying to balance between throwing them a clue and avoiding feeling like I was being too involved in the decision making process. Any tips on how to guide your players into the path they need in as efficient and non-interventionist a way as possible? It was exhausting to see them flounder the way they did and it immediately made me think that I was doing something wrong.
Second observation from tonight’s game is that I had no idea how to run a mission involving the infiltration of a corporate facility. Once my poor players finally reached a plan, which ended up to be paper thin at best, we found ourselves inside this MegaCorp complex where they needed to locate a person and get that person out. Sounds simple enough, but because they really had no idea what they were looking for, we ended up having to dungeon crawl an office building. Trust me when I tell you, going from floor to floor of an office building is about as fun as watching paint dry. I’m not sure if that’s enough information to go on, but do you have any suggestions on how to make an office building interesting?
Last problem of the night involved the matrix. Man, I was really struggling making this stuff fun. The Hacker was doing his best to interact with things when he could, but I was coming up empty handed on how to make a boring corporate security system an interesting thing worth describing. If your Hacker makes the effort my player did to get involved and start messing with things there are only so many ways you can describe things, and in all honesty, I was having a hell of a time even envisioning what a corporate facility looks like.
Sorry for the bellyache post. This is the first time I’ve ever really ran a game this bad and I’m anxious to try and figure out just where things went wrong. I can’t help but think I underestimated the amount of prep I should’ve done for a mission like this, but the PBTA player in me says that can’t be right. Help!
I had a somewhat similar experience with my first session a few weeks ago. The players took what felt like a long time to formulate a plan. Every time the seemed ready to put something into action and trigger a move, someone suggested a new plan or questioned whether it would work, and back to the drawing board they went.
To prevent that from happening again, I’m going to give them the “Conduct an Operation” sheet. That lays out basic mission types and suggests three or four steps to be taken before starting the Action Phase. That should help focus their plan.
Question: Did you give the players the Mission Directive sheet? Knowing what they’ve been hired to do is a big help.
Short reply, simplify, generalise, narrate, assume. Put in a proper sentence, assume your players have professional skill levels and can cope with everyday things… narrate past those areas that do not have a direct impact on the target of the mission. Remove details not required for the 10 mins of action scene that are the point of your session. Generalise the journey, zoom in on the climax. You may think its fun but your players may be in a bad mood or tired. Times where I have had a group paralysed with indecision was because they were all tired and no one wanted to lead, or I gave them too much info or too many decisions. Find a movie reference, use it as a stereotype, give them some imagery to work with then twist it to your story as it happens, not before. Stereotypes are your friend, everyone understands them. My2c (eg movie, ‘Sneakers’ maybe?)
How much cyberpunk have the players read/viewed? If they don’t have much idea of the fiction then trying to run an infiltration on a corp is going to be fraught with issues..
If the plan is to extract someone then they should be planning a way in and a way out after locating the subject and that’s about it. Getting stuck in boring discussions isn’t fun.
I’d try to start something in media res almost.
How about “we’re going in via the back door, what security is there?” Cue hacker for a short scene to disable security They’re in. Now finding the target. Check the database for his location, cue hacker again for a shortish scene. Get to the target, complications? Does s/he want to go? security patrols, Exfiltrate the building, cue hacker for dealing with the security again. Complications – does the hacker find paydata, are they tempted to take that – complications arising.
Leave the building. Get Paid!
I put together some examples of security, database and environmental systems for arcologies and stuff and you can find those at:
drive.google.com – Free Sprawl stuff – Google Drive
Chris Stone-Bush That’s a good suggestion on the Conduct an Operation sheet, Chris. I’ve given them handouts for just about everything else, but that’s something I could’ve really used last night.
They did have a list of Mission Directives, but I’m not sure there was enough info listed out for them to really formulate a plan. The mission directives were…
* When you take the job, mark XP
* When you decide on how to infiltrate the location, mark XP
* When you deal with/bypass CorpSec, mark XP
* When you complete the extraction, mark XP
* When the mission ends, mark XP
Maybe I should elaborate on those next time because there’s really not a lot to go on.
Kevin Flynn Yeah, I think that’s a big part of where my mis-steps were. Getting caught up in the minutiae and not just narrating them up to the spot they need to be to grab the target. I think I may try prepping a facility like this in the future with a list of potential complications and maybe some appropriate rolls for dealing with those things instead of trying to conceptualize and communicate the entire complex. Your comment about “no one wanting to lead” was definitely what I was observing last night and there were several very real moments of indecision paralysis going on.
Nigel Clarke I’d say that the three players I was running this with last night actually have a pretty strong understanding of cyberpunk to one degree or another, but so much of cyberpunk fiction has nothing to do with infiltrating corporations, so an appreciation for the flavor, aesthetic, and setting didn’t help like I’d have hoped for.
I feel like they had a plan to get in and out, but not so much on what they needed to do when they were there, and that feels like my fault. I should’ve just given them tons of info every time they did anything in legwork, but my base instinct on this seems to be to trickle info out as is appropriate to the fiction.
As for the matrix, I really need to figure out a way to have the steps involved for interacting with things down pat before next session. We were also clueless on how to handle ICE in the game. I mean, we know about the moves for fighting it, turning it off, etc, but I guess I wasn’t sure how to handle narrating ICE’s behavior in the system and what it would do when the Hacker botched a roll. I was also unsure about ICE vs Hacker combat. I’ve got some reading/note taking to do…
I own the game, but admit that I haven’t played. Your description sounds like it’s missing the “legwork”. Like, if there’s something they don’t know (target location, existing security, entry points, etc) then they should be doing cyberpunky things to gather this information before they even start the mission proper. The answers to that legwork would be your way of guiding the players and allowing them to make useful plans. Maybe?
Jason Smith What you’re saying sounds correct to me and I won’t argue that the Legwork phase ended up being pretty lacking concerning the things they attempted to learn about their target/location. I found it to be difficult to facilitate this stage of the game without giving them a bunch of clues (there were definitely several instances of me laying out the things I thought they needed only to have them flounder on how to act on them). Last night may have just been an off night for all parties involved.
These kinds of games are difficult. We aren’t all cut out to be successful criminals (or experts in fictional future security protocols).
What session was this Brandon Fincher? If it’s still early, which I think it is, your players are probably still finding their feet. Mine are. After the last session (which was our first) we talked a bit about how things went and I think everyone, myself included, has a better handle on things. As you said, it may have just been an off night.
Your mission directives look fine to me. They tell the players what their characters need to achieve without telling them how to go about it. That should have been OK.
I’m running my second session tomorrow, which is the Action Phase of the first mission. If we get to another Legwork Phase I will definitely give them that Conduct an Operation sheet. As I said, I think that will help players plan.
Chris Stone-Bush I’ve played six sessions total so far. I ran one mission for my local group that ended up being two sessions long. I also have a big group of friends who I play online tabletop with and this was the second mission for that group (each taking two sessions, so four total online). We’ve probably got another session left in this second mission.
Despite that sounding like a lot, we’re definitely still getting our feet wet and it’s taking me a while to really get things figured out. This year is really the first in my life where I’ve consistently GM’d games, only ever having experience running one-shots and small arcs in the past. I’m getting better, but I’m definitely hitting some growing pains.
Having had some input into the game regarding the cyber bit I’d suggest taking a look at the flowcharts that I did so that you have some ideas for various options that can help with the narration especially regarding ICE.
Nigel Clarke Thanks Nigel, this looks like it’ll help a lot.
Nigel Clarke I see you’ve put some thought into the structure of various systems, but can you maybe give me a little insight into how you’d narrate the interaction of the Hacker and these systems? Is your approach simple and clinical “You come to a locked corporate building node, roll login.”, “You locate the point in the system where the door lock you wish to override is controlled, roll manipulate systems” or do you handle this in a more fictionally interesting way? I guess that’s the decision I’m having trouble making as it’s proving to be difficult to describe human perception as it pertains to a system in the matrix. The fastest way is definitely to just list off the various components of the systems and as the hacker interacts with them call for the corresponding roll, and maybe that’s the best way to do it, but a part of me feels the matrix should be more interesting than that, I’m just not sure how to make it so.
I’d do something like, logging in you navigate you way to the external access points to the X Corp building. The doors are alarmed, you can see the glowing red symbols showing up. The CCTV cameras are connected inside the building so you are going to have to break in to disable them. There’s t.eeh main cable trunk pulsing with datastreams, the way in! Traversing the data pipe you come to a router. Theres a firewall as well so you’ll need to find out what ICE is in place. carefully you probe the ports on the router one by one until you find one that you can compromise. Once into the router you can start to attack the firewall. Examining the various scripts once you’ve logged in and compromised teh router you can see that the ICE is fairly standard and with care and very slowly you can slide past the firewall and the ICE protecting it and you are in to the main system.
I did this for a living so have plenty of experience in taking something fairly mundane and jazzing it up for a cyberpunk game.
Brandon Fincher
“I guess that’s the decision I’m having trouble making as it’s proving to be difficult to describe human perception as it pertains to a system in the matrix.”
Did you ask your players what it looks like inside the Matrix. particularly the Hacker?
They might think it looks like anything from abstract light constructs to a partially rendered representation of the real world. Maybe it looks different depending on whatever skin you download for it or how your brain interprets the signals. Bottom line is, when in doubt about description, ask the players a loaded question and let them fill in the blanks.
As a fall back I’m always partial to the Matrix being a low poly representation a building: A house, a castle, a prison, a hedge maze, etc. even if it is very simple and small. That make it easy to describe login gates as doors/portals and ice as traps/guards, etc.
Omari Brooks Yeah, I did ask him at one point what it looked like, but I think you’re right. I should be hitting him up more to get his impression on what a given system might look like. That might free me up to worry about the things he’s going to be interacting with.
Seems to me like a classic situation of lack of information/resources. Either you need to be more generous or you need to point out the obvious. Point out what key pieces of the plan they are missing and give them some ideas on how to get it if need be. You may need to suggest they play playbooks they understand. Nothing worse than watching someone play an infiltrator who has never seen any heist media before.
steven swezey Yeah, that’s a thing I’m still working on as a GM. I have no problem describing a scene in great detail or dealing with action, but when it comes to something like The Sprawl, where a part of the challenge for the player is being able to assemble to tools to put a plan into motion, I haven’t quite found the sweet spot. However, I will say that I kept presenting them with suggestions on possible avenues of investigation, but it just wasn’t enough. I suppose next time I might make suggestions on the things I think they need to do the actual job. A part of me is resistant to that because it feels like I’m spoon feeding them, but I may have to give it a shot until they’re comfortable enough with how the game is played.
Hi, just thought I would weigh in because I think you might be having a problem with presenting problems and opportunities. You worry that if you hand out the information then you railroad them and I think that’s a dependant on the type of information you give the players.
Don’t say ‘You think there is enough clearance to hide underneath the vehicle as it rolls past the entrance’ which clearly signals you expect them to take that path and you then confuse with ‘There is also a gap in camera coverage on the back fence’.
Instead say, It’s a big facility that you need to get into…what do you do? if they look into payroll records for a crooked guard then they make a roll. If they co-opt a helicopter make a roll. If they express courier a disguised drone in to explore make a roll.
If they say, I’m looking through telescopic cybereyes for a way in don’t say there are 10 options…say instead ‘make a roll, 10+ you can see guard patterns and there is a rookie who doesn’t even look at the back door during his shift. Do you want to do anything with that info?’ 8? Well the guards don’t have the latest equipment or training but there are a fair few of them, at least you have a fair idea what to expect. 5? Jesus, they look like their prepping for war games.
Either way you aren’t giving away clues in a miserly manner waiting for the big payoff, instead you are collaboratively building a narrative where you constantly go to the player for an immediate call to action.
If you have a slow, boring matrix scene you want to spice up don’t wax poetic about the polygons, say…you’re in but …holy shit was that a stream of code testing your trace? What do you do?