Author: Brandon Fincher

Just came from seeing the live action GHOST IN THE SHELL, and holy moly. You guys have to see this. It’s like the makers climbed inside my brain and took pictures. Even if the movie isn’t perfect, it’s worth watching if the only thing you get out of it is all the visuals.

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!

Hi Guys, I’ve got some combat related questions that I’m hoping some of you can help me out on.

Ran my fifth session of The Sprawl last night and I came away from it feeling that the Action phase was a bit of a mess when it turned into combat.

For some context, the mission was basically a kidnapping/extraction job and the team had decided on a time and relative location on where they’d attempt to grab the target. As you might have expected, things didn’t go exactly according to plan. To make a long story short, the ensuing fight involved two cops, six gang bangers (several of which were heavily cybered), and a teenage target attempting to flee the scene. Once the target was apprehended, the team threw him in this repurposed military vehicle they ride around in, and a chase ensued with three motorcycles.

Dealing with that many combatants against a three person team felt a little overwhelming to me as far as keeping things cinematic and interesting, and a result of that was several of the combatants didn’t get very involved with the PCs until others had been dealt with.

So, do you guys have any tips for pitting your PCs against a larger group of enemies? I’m reluctant to condense it all into a small scene as I want to give the combat oriented characters a chance to shine and to drive home the danger of combat. I was also afraid about shortening things up into a quick narration would result in a short session. I kept things moving within the fiction and didn’t get too hung up on harm clocks for the enemies or the specifics of their weapons, but I just feel it wasn’t a terribly interesting combat situation. Are there any tips out there for prepping a combat situation without really knowing when/where/how the characters will engage in this fashion?

Once the fight became vehicular, I also realized that I had no idea how to handle car combat. The team had a Driver, and he was plugged in via Second Skin, so with that in mind, should the damage taken to the car be reflected on his Harm Clock? The gangers on bikes were armed and taking shots at the vehicle, blowing a tire out at one point, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with it mechanically. Sorry if this is covered in the book, but I wasn’t able to locate it.

Last thing I was wondering about was whether or not you guys had any tips on how to keep your Hacker engaged during a combat situation. After receiving advice from you guys here in another thread, I had talked with my group and concluded that hacking enemy cyberware was not worth the headache, so aside from hacking the police vehicle’s communication system so he could shut a call for backup down, and failing on a spoofed request to get the cops to respond to another call, he wasn’t sure what to do. In hind sight, I probably should’ve encouraged him to hack the motorcycles during that phase of combat, but hadn’t thought about it at the time. If you guys have some general suggestions for things a hacker can do during combat I’d love to hear it.

Sorry about the long post. Any advice on this stuff would be hugely appreciated.

Let’s talk about Hacking, shall we?

For those who have run a mission, what sort of moves do you require for Hackers who want to hack every little thing they come across? In particular, what sort obstacles do you put your Hackers up against when they’re attempting to interact with things that aren’t directly connected to a building (with an implied system set up)?

For instance, I’ve got a player who seems to like the idea of hacking Communication devices, Cyberware, vehicles, you name it. The moves in the rulebook seem a little more focused on the Hacker attempting to hack a facility network, but what would the structure of getting into a Communication device be? How about a pair of cyber eyes so an enemy can’t see?

In the case of a Coms Unit/cell phone thingy, they’d obviously have to make a Login move to see if they can crack whatever protection the phone might have on it, right? Would your average Coms Unit or piece of Cyberware have ICE running on it? Would a Coms Unit just have a series of service nodes that required Manipulate Systems rolls to interact with (turn off the unit, send a message through the phone, reroute calls, etc) and a Data Base that you’d Assess or Research?

(Sorry about this long post, but I’m sort of working through my thoughts, so thanks for bearing with me)

Finally had a chance to try out The Sprawl tonight and had an awesome time doing so. Huge thanks to Hamish Cameron for making such a great game. I loved it and my players loved it and we’re already talking about our next session.

One obstacle we did come across while playing tonight involved time management. We played for 3 hours, but we barely finished the Legwork Phase of the game. Very little time was wasted with fumbling over move rules or anything like that as I made damn sure I was familiar with the mechanics and the game manual to find anything we needed if questions came up (a few of which did). I’m familiar with PbTA games (well, mostly Dungeon World), but I’m comfortable enough with that aspect to not have it be an issue. I mention that so I can clarify that none of the time management issues we had were the byproduct of rules hunting. I had hoped we’d have the entire mission completed in that time span because I’ve now watched Adam Koebel do it and I’ve read here about how you guys have run one shots, so it didn’t feel like too much to expect.

My first instinct is to assume I spent too much time describing things, as it’s something I enjoy doing when I GM (sometimes to the detriment of the game). I feel like it’s possible, but in hindsight I kind of doubt it as I can think of plenty of things that only got the quickest once over. Then my mind goes to the possibility that the thing that took so much time was my willingness to frame and RP scenes for everyone’s individual legwork moments. Every player (of which I had five) had something interesting that they wanted to do and they all involved meeting with contacts to one degree or another for some information. In most games, this is just how it goes and I’m content in taking this time, and I actually cherish those moments so I don’t think anything of it. Those games are also not usually intended to be one offs and time isn’t really an issue.

I don’t have a ton of GM experience, but I feel I’ve played enough over the years to have a few tricks up my sleeve for staying on task and keeping the narrative moving forward, but the design of a game that is supposed to thrive as a one shot is foreign to me.

I realize it’s tough to give me specifics about where I went wrong, but do any of you have any tips on how to make sure you get an entire mission completed from start to finish without having it feel like I’m rushing over the good stuff?

In case anyone is interested, here is the mission I wrote/ran tonight.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qp5hOaTTAJ9D_CKwTNxADHaFn5wknDWjs-BH_uOlVTg/edit

Hi Guys!

I recently ran a sort of Session Zero for The Sprawl where I had a conversation with my players about Cyberpunk as a genre, did some world building, established some tech rules, and did character creation. Great time so far, and we came up with some really neat info stemming from our particular custom Corporations. If you’re lucky enough to have a group who enjoys world building, I highly recommend taking the time to do this because it really helps with player (and MC) connection to the setting.

I haven’t ran my first official game yet, but hope to within the next week or so. In preparation for doing so, I decided to throw together a spreadsheet I could share with my players to simplify the rules a bit by breaking them into general categories. I also have a tab for PC info, and Corporate Clocks, but those might be less useful to anyone not running the game.

If you cursor over specific cells on the spreadsheet you’ll notice I added notes for quite a few things that will save new players and MCs from having to open up the pdf or book, which will hopefully save us some time.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JeY9-xww85RwQybuTP9C_4bw1is6-aqSl0Ky74Qapqg/edit#gid=1368915328