Anybody thought about how you would design a move for hackers fighting with counter hackers.
Anybody thought about how you would design a move for hackers fighting with counter hackers. The book mentions to design custom moves if you want that to be a thing…the player who wants to play a hacker was thinking it operates similar to Mix It Up…but uses Cool instead of Meat.
Thinking of a caper up a space elevator.
Thinking of a caper up a space elevator. I want a custom move to show why flechette ammo exists (in part). Perhaps the +’s from ammo types is a bit too fiddly. Breach / explosive ammo might just make it that you always get at least the 7-9 result. The main idea is that it’s somewhat risky to shoot anyone, but firing at 4 guards with autofire is especially dangerous.
When you fire a gun with non-flechette ammo in a space station, roll + number of targets. Add +2 if the gun has breach or explosive ammo, +1 if it’s AP ammo.
10+ Catastrophic depressurization! Pressure doors will slam shut to isolate the area now in hard vacuum.
7-9 Slow leak! You just have a little while to plug it, don a vac suit, or get away.
6- You luck out, all is well.
My print copy of The Sprawl (Noon) just arrived yesterday.
My print copy of The Sprawl (Noon) just arrived yesterday. Arrived in perfect condition, binding seems well done, but unfortunately, the print isn’t great quality. Looks like the printer was low on toner or something, wide light grey bands down the middle of the pages. I’m torn, because I don’t want to wait another 6 weeks for delivery of a replacement. :-/
Hello again all, hoping for some enlightenment on something.
Hello again all, hoping for some enlightenment on something. Is there anything in the system for enemy NPCs to have hit points like Dungeon World?
New to the game, looking at the rulebook and wondering:
New to the game, looking at the rulebook and wondering:
If a normal run is a 2-3 cred wager, and restocking ammo or rebuilding a deck is expected to cost at least 2 cred, and you’re not guaranteed to win that wager, how is every run not just a cred death spiral?
Or do people choose to play loose with the costs of keeping your equipment up?
Ran the first session of a short campaign last night.
Ran the first session of a short campaign last night. It went OK lots of moving parts for fairly new players to RP but overall pretty good.
Questions: We had a tech with hacking skills and a hacker any tips on running joint hacking sessions? Secondly it was a find and recover mission but the Hunter gets such an advantage in this respect I found the legwork part super short. Is there a way of making this more challenging or should I expect to just skip to action very quickly because they are just good at those mission types. Finally it was 5 players so one of the corporate clocks got very high very quickly and so I threw that in the mix which pulled half the group away from the mission in hand. I’m assuming this is OK as long as you get them back on track… Perhaps the side mission move would have been appropriate here?
As I read the book I had a file of questions I intended to post here for clarification.
As I read the book I had a file of questions I intended to post here for clarification. Many of them got cut off when I found the resolution in the book but here are some of the leftovers. Thanks for any thoughts.
Does the HELP move have a 10+ outcome? The Soldier’s ‘Steady Presence] move seems to think so.
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Can a party Techie (with the Splicer speciality) be the group surgeon – if so does it warrant a move?
Can there be better examples of how the Techie [Customiser] move works? It feels too arbitrary.
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Matrix Programmes: Can two programmes with the same name be used and stack?
While the back end of the book says [intel] and [gear] do not carry over, does it make sense to throw unspent [gear] out since one could feasibly get more stuff in a downtime scene off camera?
This applies to going under the knife since you’re unlikely to undergo surgery when there is a mission underway (surely).
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Is there an endgame built in to the rules or is this limited purely by the fiction? Since the game starts out with the players having some heat from the corps, and there are many mechanisms that drive the corps to retaliate in some fashion – is there any mechanic that represents a hopeful outcome? (I’m saving enough for retirement/i’m saving up to pay off the debts of my daughter so i can get her out of labour camp 4/I’m just trying to get this heat off me so I can start over)
Which leads me to ask what does cred represent in terms of living costs (give or take) – so if someone was aiming to “save up for retirement” what’s a suitable target
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Are corporate moves done in the MC moves time, when the corp clock moves or just when the fiction calls for it?
Cheers.
Just finished watching Dark Matter, a show about amnesiac shadowrunners waking up on a space ship and doing missions…
Just finished watching Dark Matter, a show about amnesiac shadowrunners waking up on a space ship and doing missions while they try and figure out who they were. Had a few thoughts on how to adapt The Sprawl to run it, and thought I’d share.
Originally shared by Jamie Frost
Just finished binging the first season of Dark Matter. Took an episode or two to push past the “I’ve seen every one of these character archetypes done better elsewhere” phase, but once they got past that and everyone started to get some depth it was actually a pretty good show. Also seems like a pretty great setup for a game, though I’m not sure what system to use for it.
I almost want to say The Sprawl, just set in space instead of in a city. You’ve got megacorps, a team of badass professional scoundrels working shady jobs for whoever pays the most, socialization outside the crew is pretty much restricted to contacts and contracts, and everyone has someone after them. Augmentation isn’t really a thing (for the most part), but it’s a close fit otherwise. Only thing is that there are a couple of important facets of Dark Matter that I think would need to be addressed in the mechanics somewhere.
First, everyone has a secret, something about their past that gets revealed at some point during the game. When that secret is revealed, it creates complications for the entire crew and occasionally comes with some kind of boon. The Sprawl’s Directives could work here; you get XP when you explore someone’s past, super simple. But I think there needs to be more to it than that, since uncovering a secret always says something about the world at large; I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but in Sprawl terms a couple of characters named new corporation-level factions and a couple of others got the equivalent of free augmentations.
One idea for how to handle it: each character has a countdown clock for their secret, which advances when you learn a new fact about it. When the clock is filled up, things come to a head, and you get a free advance. Simple and dirty, but I think it works?
Regardless, when a secret is fully revealed, it sets the theme for an entire session, because it inevitably gets the secret’s keeper entangled in something they can’t handle as well as they think and the team needs to come and help them out. This seems like the sort of thing that the table just has to buy into as a group, I think.
The other thing that needs representation is mistrust. Between missions, especially when missions go badly, scenes play out where at least a couple of crew members have found reasons not to trust one another and they need to work through that. I think the easiest thing to do would be to invert or reframe Links; in the Dark Matter hack, your Link score with someone goes up when you find something that reinforces why you shouldn’t trust them. When you hit 4 and roll over, your downtime scene is about that distrust boiling over into a confrontation, and what you do to get past it.
Directorial note: downtime scenes should be longer for this hack, I think. The character conflicts are actually more important than the jobs in the show, so they should be given appropriate weight.
I think that about covers it. Thoughts?
Big Bad Con is happening October 14-16.
Big Bad Con is happening October 14-16. This con is where I first played an in-the-works version of The Sprawl run by Hamish Cameron two years ago (he might remember a monofilament whip slicing a security SUV in half while speeding down the highway…)
I’ll be running the only session of The Sprawl on the program, Saturday 10/15 from 8:00 p.m. to Midnight. Any Bay Area/Califorina folks should definitely check out the con. There’s a huge selection of great RPGs, LARPS, and other events.
So who’s had a bad or bland session, and why?
So who’s had a bad or bland session, and why?
I’m pretty green in terms of running PbtA games, and our last mission felt a little bland/linear in the Action Phase. My PCs had driven a boat up to a mission site, where a large container ship was docked, which contained what they were trying to steal (Basically, running a modified Master of Puppets mission). The Pusher’s hardcore ex-military believers were flying helicopters over the shipping companies’ office building, strafing it with gunfire and trying to largely distract the guards. So I pretty much narrated them into the ship, below deck, they find a dead ship guard (show the barrel of a gun). Probably should’ve started with a much harder move much earlier, have them get pinned down by a crime syndicate sniper, the same group that had send people into the ship after the same objective. I guess I’m not used to the idea of always making a move when they look to me, and making that move harder, giving them less build-up before things hit the fan.
This was after around 2 hours, or 2.5 hours, of legwork, and the action phase took less than an hour? So maybe I was a bit out of it, probably should’ve taken a 5 minute break and thought about what they would run into, based on things already established (this crime organization was a threat from the legwork phase, etc). After I get their plan, just stop for 5-10 minutes and think about where I can, very early on, start applying pressure. What do you fine folks think? Anyone else run into things like this? I’m maybe a bit more used to building out a sandbox / random encounters and having that stuff throw itself at the PCs, or used to things that are a bit more freeform, so perhaps I’m overthinking how to use MC moves to make things complicated / nonlinear at the very start of a mission’s action phase.