Author: Roman Pearah

Watching the Roll20 game, and in my own experience MCing The Sprawl, I’ve noticed that the Access move (and the Research too, I suppose, but it comes up less often) can be a difficult move to resolve satisfactorily. More than any other moment in play, it’s the move that seems to bring some tension to the table, because the player feels that they are entitled to more than just “you cannot determine that” or else what good was their hold?

So what’s your opinion. Is the hold a guarantee of an actionable answer and the MC has to make the magic (fan of the players and all that)? Or is it the player’s responsibility not to ask a question they should know better isn’t going to produce the goods? Or maybe it’s somewhere in between.

I think the Roll20 group really had an epiphany here in their discussion of the tensions they were experiencing with the game. In my opinion, they nailed it and I’m looking forward to the next mission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmSM0EBEsNY

I’m currently in the early sessions of what I hope will be a long-term Sprawl campaign. I’m facing a challenge that is a classic one in party-based RPGs: how to get the PCs together for a mission without it feeling contrived.

It’s made somewhat more awkward given the context of The Sprawl, where we’re encouraged to regard the PCs as competent professionals and to view them as replaceable “by the next mouthy punk with too much raw talent and bloody ambition and not enough smarts.”

The PCs haven’t taken any steps to form a sort of gang or A-team (they’re actually somewhat suspicious and hostile towards each other sometimes, which is cool), so once a mission ends, and it’s time for another mission, there’s no great fictional reason for them to work together as the same team. I don’t want to always just have them show up at the same “inn.” Furthermore, I really want to avoid the sort of unbelievable fiction where the employer wants this specific team because why would they? Again, they don’t need you, much less you all.

So, I’m looking for some good ideas about how others keep these loner pros working together across multiple missions other than the obvious fact that it would be hard to run a session otherwise.

I’m curious how most of you MC the +inaccessible partition tag. Of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is Johnny Mnemonic, but in any case, my players were asking if this means that the piece of cyberware in question would always have all data stored on it be inaccessible to those without the code (making it somewhat like a flaw for general personal use, but an asset for getting certain jobs), or if it just happens to have the capability for such. And if it’s the latter, do you typically think of it as all or nothing when in that mode? I realize this is up to the fiction, as with most things, but I’m curious about a) the intent when that was added to the rules and b) how most people regard it.