Fireside Chat: Playing the Police

In my previous post I spoke at length about the benefit of thematic encounters in Shadowrun. Now I'm going to go over the various pieces of a combative encounter, as I run them, starting with the police. In Shadowrun the police should be a nearly constant presence, at least in the nicer parts of town, Runners should at least be aware of the police, if not afraid of them.

Let's look at the basic police stat line:

Police Officer: SR5 pg. 383
B	A	R	S	W	L	I	C	ESS
4	3	4	3	3	2	3	3	6

Solid, middle of the road stats. With a Pistols skill of 4, and when I run them, a Longarms skill of 3. Why Longarms you ask? Because every police cruiser in Seattle has a shotgun strapped between the two front seats. I give each patrol car a long barrel Defiance T-250, with Smartlink, and five extra rounds in a bandoleer on the stock. This, on top of the Area Predator V that every officer is given in the rules makes the police dangerous.

However, what it doesn't do, is make an individual officer a threat. Nor should it. Police travel in pairs, and their response escalates with the duration of combat. I like to run police thematically, as well as combatively. By that I mean the police show up when my players have made a mistake, and then they show up when it's convenient for the story.

Let me illustrate a typical police response in one of my games. The team is tasked with breaking into a mom & pop store, they approach the back of the building and promptly glitch the test to force the maglock. It's not a catastrophic glitch, so the door is open, and as the alarm is silent, the team doesn't yet know that they should be calling it quits. The alarm notifies a security company, not the police, think Brinks Home Security. This company accesses the cameras in the store, and sees the team, they promptly notify the police of a burglary in progress.

At this point we have to fudge the numbers a bit. In Seattle, response times vary widely. In Downtown, or Bellevue, police response is a matter of minutes, in Tacoma, or Everett, 5 or so minutes, in the Redmond barrens, good luck. When you plan police response keep these times in mind, however they aren't written in stone, and any team that comes to rely on a "window" for police response should be taught a very harsh lesson. I generally have an officer respond if the team isn't moving with the speed I feel they should. This can be a random patrol, or in the case of the example above, response to a call.

Let's get back to our example, the team has taken a few minutes slowly casing the store. They don't know that the alarm has been tripped, and as far as they are concerned they have all night. The first squad car rolls up, and parks with the headlights shining into the store. The officer opens the drivers door, and takes cover pistol at the ready. He can see some of the team inside the store, and has taken precautions. Given a professional rating of 3, and the nature of the call, he would have already called for backup on-route, and so the timer for more officers to arrive is already rolling.

Immediately the teams Street Samurai pops a semi-auto burst out the front door, as the team begins to frantically search for their objective. This action causes the officer to call in shots fired over the radio. I let police radio in 10-codes as free actions. This puts all officers in the area on alert, and speeds up response time dramatically. Remember, at this point you have only one officer on scene. He's not going to wage a protracted gun battle.

At this point, the officer has to make a choice. He can hear over the radio that backup is inbound, and his job is to now contain the situation. This is where the few points of Professional Rating really matter. Officers are going to keep their head, and operate as a solid unit. Furthermore, if any police drones are in the area, it's at this point that I'd re-route them to the scene to provide over watch, and to track the team, should they escape.

In game, we're talking a combat turn, maybe two. The officer is going to return fire while keeping in cover, and at least un-racking the shotgun from between the front seats. Even if the team manages to incapacitate, or kill the officer in the opening turns they know that other units are inbound.

This adds a delicious level of tension, as I've said, a single officer isn't a serious threat, but five, or six pairs of officers, working with drone coverage, are a serious threat and can rapidly take apart a veteran Runner team.

Let's assume the team kills the officer, and then decides to unwisely hang around the store, hoping to complete their objective. Within a minute (20 Combat Turns) multiple cars will arrive, blocking off the rear ally, and blocking the front of the store, with the officers using their cars as cover. At this point, if the team continues to stand and fight, I bring in drones, Lieutenant's, a police Decker, and Rigger, and whatever toys I feel are worth throwing at them. This generally means that the run has gone decidedly pear shaped.

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What do we take away from this? What's the lesson for a GM here? Put simply, don't be afraid to punish your players for their mistakes. Don't be afraid to make the police lethal, efficient, and dangerous. Remember, these are professionals, not mall rent-a-cops. In Shadowrun the police are your best weapon, especially early in the game.

Furthermore, don't be afraid to punish teams financially for making bad decisions. Unless you're working for a crime syndicate, nobody likes a cop killer. If a player develops a reputation for killing cops, and attracting too much police attention, don't be afraid to have employers refuse to hire him. Or, conversely, those that do hire him tend to be the seedier elements in the shadows.

I also like to remind my players that police have long memories. If players continue to resort to guns to solve problems, eventually the wealth of forensic and ballistic evidence will come together.

Have any great cop stories? If so, post in the comments!

Fireside Chat: Thematic Encounters

I'm in the process of gearing up for my next run. At present I have three players, two of which are veteran and one veteran role-player, who has no experience with Shadowrun. This has gotten me thinking about an are where a lot of GM's fall short. Playing the bad guys.

In other Role-Playing Games, like D&D and Pathfinder, the opposition is fairly clear. You have monsters, and they follow the usual cinematic flow of going from little, to big. Everyone knows the big bad guy at the end of the castle is the boss fight, and aside from a handful of traps, and maybe a hidden door or two, the bulk of the opposition is the monsters themselves.

Shadowrun is different. Both in the scope of the potential opposition, and the wide range of the severity of the opposition. This mean that you have to think about Shadowrun opposition in a completely different way. So, instead of viewing security as a challenge to be overcome our players let's look at security as a narrative device.

When we approach the idea of opposition in Shadowrun I divide encounters into two rough groups, the first being combative encounters, the second being thematic encounters. While most of your time will be spent planning the combative encounters, it's the thematic encounters that occur most often.

What do I mean by a thematic encounter? This is a tough one, as it's not a hard and fast rule. However, when you design an NPC, that you don't think is going to result in combat, that's a thematic encounter. Of course, sometimes, your thematic encounters turn into combative encounters. Every run has at least one thematic encounter. Most GM's call it meeting Mr. Johnson. However, I like to have a number of other thematic encounters. Think about every person you encounter in your day to day life. The barista that makes your coffee, the ticket taker for the subway, or the cabbie that gets you to work, the doorman for your apartment, and the homeless man on the street corner, All of these people have the possibility of being thematic encounters. While these encounters might seem trivial, but a good GM knows that their players live in an area, and that area is populated by other people. Those people can become regular sights, contacts, enemies, or friends. Over time, the group can come to expect these people in their day to day adventures.

I base my games in Seattle, and love to have my players live, and run out of a specific neighborhood. Areas of Seattle, like Tacoma, or Freemont, or Capitol Hill, make for amazing backdrops for Shadowrun. These areas, and the people that populate them humanize the game. It's one of the reasons I love playing Shadowrun over any other role-playing game. I love the people, the city, and the thematic elements that as a GM you can weave into the story. This is one of the reasons I always keep a folio of the people, the NPC's and the locations in my games. Over time, even across story arcs and characters the players in my groups develop an attachment to the areas and the people in the game.

When ever I talk about thematic encounters, and the power they can have in a game I like to tell a story about a tinker that I used in one of my long running D&D games. This tinker was a throw-away NPC, older human that would wander from town to town with a cart full of goods. I described him as a bit of throw away color in one of the villages my party stopped into, and without really thinking about it, described him again in the next village. This, while a mistake on my part, caught the attention of the group, and they began looking for this tinker in every village they stopped into. So, not one to waste a good story, I had him randomly pop up in villages and towns, or on the road carrying a vast array of stuff. Never anything too useful, but if you needed a ten foot pole, he was your man. Over time this tinker developed a bit of a mythos, my group couldn't believe that it was just a tinker, they assumed there had to be more to the story. This is the best part of a thematic encounter, your players become invested in the NPCs.

Let's turn this around to Shadowrun. You have a player, in a low lifestyle, on the edge of Redmond, they have a mild addiction to alcohol, and so they stop into their local Stuffer Shack on their way home. As a GM, I can gloss over this little transaction, doing nothing more then making a note that they've satisfied the addiction for the next few days. Or, I can use this as a thematic encounter. I can describe the store, the sales that are running, the girl behind the counter, and the homeless troll that's always sleeping against the side of the building. I can have a bunch of wannabe gangers loitering in the parking lot, and have them harass the character, to see what they do. Maybe I can have a Knight Errant officer in his car in the parking lot, see if I can't spook the player into going home instead, and triggering the negative effects of the addiction.

No dice need to be rolled, but this is a perfect way to build an environment, to show your players that they don't exist in a  vacuum between their lifestyle, the meet, and the location for the latest bit of mischief.

Hopefully this has shown a little of what you can do, in a storytelling perspective. Next week I'm going to go over combative encounters, and how I design physical, astral, and matrix security for my runs.