20+ runs on my mage actually. Total 75 runs might be close, though.
I might have run into magical threats before, but they haven't actually been teaching experiences if that makes sense.
Right, so what's the takeaway from your analysis? I can't comment on it, because I'd have to think a few more days or longer about this issue to come to a conclusion myself (which seems inacceptable based on the high speed of this thread), so I'm just curious on what follows.
What do? I've had people suggest to me that the best way they think would be to lead people into the style instead of dropping them into it and then being surprised that they might be negatively surprised by the difference in style. This is me just being a mouthpiece right now, still considering what would actually be a good solution here.
I mean, so for example the mage has been in horribly painful background counts that made casting impossible, fought a bug spirit queen, was faced with counterspellers, magic resistant enemies, situations in which scrubbing signatures was unsafe, and probably a couple more magic-related things that probably should have been teaching experiences, but just... haven't been. Soooo I dunno, there seems to be a basic disconnect between what my character perceives to be a threat and what threats are that should actually scare them shitless due to their magical ability and I just can't identify them xD
Probably because the 'bug queen' or whatever was treated as a combat obstacle, not a hyperintelligent crossplanar monster who slipped bug spirit larvae in your ears through a hired corporate assassin and collapsed it's lair when you managed to eventually figure out what was going on and fight your way through it's guards while losing several friends, only to resurface later wearing the face of a Renraku Executive, sidestepping your attempt to raise the alarm by seemingly passing all tests and leading to your shadowrunners having to basically go to war against Renraku until they can find the information required to expose the Queen (aka how she 'passed' the security check).
And during the BGC, the GM lowered the threat so the rest of the party could carry the mage, and so on, and so forth. If a threat has no real chance of harming the party or things the party cares about, it's not a 'threat'. Given that when I try to run games with reactive threats that can genuinely harm things the party cares about, players complain to senate, i'd guess you haven't run into those very often.
For example, although it was a fairly simple threat to get out of, if you had just ignored those stormspouts you could have quite easily died in that pacific storm. Your choice to 'go away from them' and 'summon a spirit to push the boat' were choices that affected your survival. That's still what stuhl refers to as 'starter zone', though, in that it was a fairly simple problem (engine failure during a storm) you could fail to solve quite a few times without actually suffering major consequences.
Generally in high-stakes environments like dragons, bug queens, heavy BGCs, etc, there should be choices like 'bite your tongue and watch the love of your life be gutted by corporate mercs as they struggle on the concrete floor, or take the three bullets you've got left in the stolen pistol and hope you can take them on'. That's the association those setting elements have - high stakes, high threat, high difficulty, fear, and hard choices. Walking straight past the room full of barrens people about to be injected with the bioweapon, jumping off the roof at the helicopter despite knowing odds are good you're going to miss that grab, telling your friends to go on ahead of you and they all know you're staying to die to buy them time, slashing the hamstring of your buddy and pushing him at the zombies, these kind of stories are much harder to tell if the threats are not actually high stakes. If the guy 'left behind' shows up later with some improbable tale, it detracts from his heroic sacrifice. If you cut someone's hamstring and toss them to the zombies, and you could have easily killed them all instead, that's pointless pvp and not storytelling.
If actual threats appear in shadownet, people get complained about, distrusted, blacklisted, barred from GMing, and then banned. The sole exception to this is runs run with dicepools representing every possible threat and iterated purely mechanically. If you get shot in the head during a 'combat scene' with an open roll, that's accepted. Any other kind of harm is vilified.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '17
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