My players just finished a mission and now want to fight back. Upon completing the mission, what effect do you think that that would have on the corporate clock? how much would it go down, if at all?
My players just finished a mission and now want to fight back.
My players just finished a mission and now want to fight back.
I’m about to write a section in the upcoming mission book about this. Ultimately, it’s a question about the tone of the game you want. Can you effectively fight the corporations?
It’s a question that came up in both games of the Sprawl I’ve played. So it’ll be nice to see some clarification. In both games we had to run missions against the corporation’s archive to erase us from the system. We never got to this point but decided even after erasing us from a corp system specific people at those corporations remembered us even if the corporate records of us were eliminated.
With the scale of corps in cyberpunk settings I dont think erasing yourself entirely from them should ever be an option. But certainly erasing some of your most recent deeds to try to reduce your rating might be feasible. But the risk of missions like that is failure even partial failure might raise your clock rating instead.
It also somewhat depends on why they want to retaliate? Is it petty revenge for being screwed by a Johnson…than it should probabaly be an ugly hard mission that reminds them that in a cyberpunk world getting screwed is just part of the buisness.
If they did something awful specifically…then its about considering how you fight the man, and what your trying to prevent…and how your going to make it financially viable.
I think of corporations in The Sprawl as being massive, unstoppable behemoths. From the players’ perspective this has advantages and disadvantages.
Advantage: they can play both sides without worrying about it blowing back on them too hard. Their contact in Amazon Transportation doesn’t care that they showed up on Amazon TV blowing up Amazon Entertainment sets and running off with their cyborg stars; that’s not her department. As long as it doesn’t blow back on her, it’s not a problem. Of course, it blowing back on her can be a great mission prompt…
Disadvantage: whether you wipe out data, kill/blackmail/threaten everyone who knows you exist, or just vanish from the face of the earth, there’s always someone or some database or some cloud processing unit in the corporation that’s going to remember you, and eventually come after you.
Anyways, this is a long way of saying — I dunno, about 3-4 segments? From a pacing perspective your players want a break from that corporation chasing after them, and you also want a chance to push forward some different threats.