On 8/21/06, snicker@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<snicker@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> I try very hard in my gaming not to "react" to players actions by
throwing
> more nasty stuff just because they out-thought me. But this guy damned
near
> ruined the campaign - not because he was blowing away all the enemies -
but
> because no one else was getting a chance to ****ne. I don't remember
what I
> did to resolve that - but I know that character ended up killing that
> particular game.
>
> So what munchkin stuff have you had to deal with?
>
> Snicker
>
>
>
My first SR game suffered from a similarly dominant pair of players -- a
driving-focused rigger who managed to afford (or con the GM into) an
armor-plated RV that eventually ended up with a well-disguised,
top-mounted
heavy turret; and an absurdly over-powered troll who was to Mr. T what T
was
to Murdock, only much faster. Since their characters ended up working a
day
job together as a semi-legit front, they pretty quickly began to handle
the
missions the GM sent us on almost single-handedly.
Rather than buff up our meat targets (which would have left characters
like
my eagle shaman well behind), our GM took some steps that I thought were
fairly clever, and which were certainly effective. To get around the RV's
firepower and relative safety, he simply moved our harder targets to
places
the RV couldn't go -- boardrooms, secluded bunkers, the Ork Underground,
and
so on and so forth. When we were out and about, or hurrying away from a
run
gone bad, a simple traffic jam (that was probably our own fault from
earlier) nearly forced us to abandon the RV entirely.
He also increased our focus on diplomacy and problem-solving -- logic
puzzles, conspiracies to uncover, and people to meet in places where brute
force just wasn't a good idea. My eagle shaman had taken two rather
significant flaws that he capitalized on nicely, Amnesia and Hunted, which
meant that I had some very nasty people after me, and I hadn't a clue who
they were or why they wanted me. With a minimum of two groups of people --
my "old friends" and whomever we'd most recently pissed off -- after our
heads, secrecy, surveillance and tact became surprisingly im****tant. It
was
very hard to figure out who was trying to kill us at any given time, which
meant we could very rarely make a preemptive strike without plenty of
legwork ahead of time.
After we had started "hiding" behind the troll/tank combo and had settled
down nicely, we suddenly ran into a problem that I think a lot of GMs
neglect to use because it's (a) complicated, and (b) is called "cheap" by
a
lot of players. As our notoriety increased, Lone Star and other security
organizations became a real concern, especially away from our primary
safehouse. Even that eventually was flagged as "suspicious" by LS, and we
were forced to spread out and start using the RV. And when our GM threw in
a
"Clean Up Seattle's Slums" campaign -- a joint operation involving Lone
Star, Seattle's police department, and a Cross task force (that particular
corp had pushed for it as a "community-conscious" PR move) -- the troll's
tendency towards random violence was fairly well reined in. Of course, we
had a couple of runs for other corps embarassing C.A.T., so it's not like
it
was entirely bad for business... but it wasn't always business where the
smash-and-grab technique would have any chance of working.
I will say, though, that while controlling overpowered or over-protected
characters is im****tant, constantly countering them is both unrealistic
and
unfair. After all, all these techniques and gear work like that for a
reason, and not every enemy will have prepared for a troll who can
single-handedly slaughter an entire goon squad or in your case, air cover.
A
little creativity on the GM's part, though, will find times and places for
those tactics to be simply inappropriate.
appropriate.
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