My Cyberpunk 2020 campaign ended last night in rather unexpected fashion. Well, the ending was planned - I'm transitioning to an OD&D Yoon-Suin campaign, though we'll also be doing a rotating-GM-style Microscope-created Shared World type project in tandem.
I tend to glaze over when reading other people's Actual Play blog posts, but I've done some short APs from the "Cyberpool" campaign here and here. It may be remembered that my players had a huge project underway which involved parachuting £200,000 of heroin into an inner city park, hiding it in plain sight in the form of an aerial DJ gig in front of an audience of 10,000 people. (They came up with this crackpot idea during a secret gaming session in my office in blatant contravention of regulations - we live this cyberpunk shit.)
There was another "grand theme" to the campaign, in which the PCs had become involved in a corporate-war-by-proxy between Gazprom and a Bulgarian IT conglomerate called STRELA, and one of the characters was about to throw himself full-pelt into this.
In the end, neither of these strands came to anything. In the final session (I think we've had somewhere in the region of 12 to 15) the PCs rocked up at the Cameroonian pentecostal church whose mysterious pastor, Father Philemon, is their erstwhile employer in the parachuting heist. They had, in true cyberpunk fashion, decided that their cut of the heroin money (10%) was not enough given their expenses (they'd already spent about £10,000 laying the groundwork for the gig) and they had decided they wanted the whole £200,000. In order to achieve this, they hatched a plot to smuggle a cell phone, jury-rigged into a primitive bugging device, into the church, and use it to gather information on the organization. Their ultimate goal appeared to be to set up a huge bomb under the church by entering the sewage system, thus killing Father Philemon and his cronies and allowing them to complete the parachute jump and keep the full amount of smack.
They didn't even get this far - after an altercation with Father Philemon in an attempt to create a distraction for planting the bug they were marched outside and told the deal was off. Things rapidly spiralled downhill and guns were pulled. 15 seconds of in-game time later and one of the PCs was dead (after taking at least a dozen bullets and two shotgun blasts) along with 5 of Fr. Philemon's gunmen, who were mown down by Patrick's assault-rifle-toting Somali teenage girl. The remaining PCs then fired a Light Antitank Weapon into the church and drove off.
I decided this was a reasonable point at which to End Credits, at least for Season 1.
From this we can draw two lessons:
1) In CP:2020, handguns and shotguns are all very well, but what you really want is an assault rifle when the shit hits the fan.
2) More importantly, I think our campaign demonstrates the messiness and Picaresque brilliance you get when you give players free reign. If I'd been plotting things out, there's no way the PCs would have ended up even coming up with the parachute heist anyway - I threw so many other adventure hooks their way - but once they had done, it would almost have been perverse for it not to happen. It would have been such a natural conclusion to the campaign - such a narratively logical, complete note on which to end it. It would have been climactic.
Instead, not only did the parachute jump never happen, the PCs plotted an entire level underneath it (kill employer; keep heroin), which itself didn't happen, because they ended up involved in a full on gun-fight which laid waste to all of their carefully laid plans in the course of less than 20 seconds of shooting.
If it had been a film or book, there's no way it would have turned out this way. But it did, and it was in its own way highly satisfactory: we didn't get a plotted ending, but we got an ending - and one that felt realistic. Life doesn't tie things off neatly. If you were going to compare it to something plotted, the ending seemed more like the end of Season 1 of The Wire: confused, slightly arbitrary, unexpected, and very life-like.
The conclusion being that it's important to stay true to your principles: when the sirens of plot and narrative come singing, plug in your ear wax of sandbox purity and keep on going. You won't be disappointed with the results.
This is similar to how my recent Call of Cthulhu campaign ended. I was running a published campaign -- Tatters of the King -- and the players soon went off the beaten track; since I was displeased with the overly restrictive plotting of the campaign as written, I was quite happy to let them roam as they wished and responded to their movements as best as I could.
ReplyDeleteThe ending turned out to be quite different to what the book expected, and was not very Cthulhuesque at all -- one player described the shootout in the Scottish highlands as more like Miller's Crossing -- but everyone had fun and we agreed afterwards that it was better to have done it the way we did than to try and railroad them into playing it out as written.
As the player whose character died last night - after shrugging off enough bullets to kill a herd of elephants - I learned that a Skinweave/Subdermal armour combo really takes the edge off getting shot. Well, to a point anyway.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it really was a satisfying end. Kelvin mentioned Miller's Crossing, and there has definitely been a Coen Brothers flavour to Cyberpool: a mix of humour, darkness, strange plot twists, bizarre characters and humanity.
Cyberpunk seems especially prone to this. I was a PC in a Shadowrun campaign once that ended totally out of the blue when we ended up shooting a cop and having to flee with multiple Knight Errant vehicles in full pursuit until we could lose them in a Z-zone. Two of the other PCs ended up getting killed by our employer, while the third got shot during the pursuit, called Doc Wagon, and ended up going to prison as a cop-killer. I got off scott-free (never captured or identified) and retired to Arizona.
ReplyDeleteI fits the genre. Everybody double-crosses everybody, and it always unravels violently.
Deletei agree; i havent really played the genre in years but it seems like both plans in society are generally a house of cards and before you know it you've blown up the house of the mayor of tokyo and committing yourself to suicide by cop
DeleteI do agree with impartiality and the open ended play style. My one complaint though is that players are always, always doing exactly the actions described in this post. They walk into a bar, they start a fight. They get stopped by a police officer, they start a fight. And it can be rather disappointing as a DM when you have some good ideas that you never get to because you are just playing the part of impartial computer simulationist.
ReplyDeleteI try not to have any ideas as the DM. It's a zen thing.
DeleteIn all fairness, the players are sensible enough most of the time. Just here, things escalated somewhat out of control.
One of the main reasons I enjoy roleplaying games is that all of that plot point and narrative need nonsense can go straight in the ashbin. Let the game unfold how it unfolds, let the dice fall where they may - and that's your story.
ReplyDelete1. yes, yay sandbox. I used to worry a lot that I had set up a situation and then the players would never get to see how it worked or what it meant or what this world was supposed to be. The OSR has taught me to stop worrying and feeling guilty about running 100% improvised sessions.
ReplyDelete2. I'm sorry to say that if I take a dispassionate look at my playing history, I am a horrible loose cannon. As in unlikely to get through a Firefly type mission briefing without grabbing the mayor by the moustache, killing the mafia boss's girlfriend and obliviously starting a game of catch-the-landmine. I blame dnd's dungeoneering environment for forming me like this. Sounds like I might fit right into your Cyberpunk group...
3. since Traveller, all game designers have had a massive hard-on for assault rifles, like they're the modern 2-handed sword and a pistol is a dagger. I don't really get it, from a genre emulation perspective - as game design, sure: the palette of weapons by power and concealability works fine - but I feel there's usually something unsatisfying about how it works out in play, when genre expectations clash and nobody ever goes down to a single shot from a pearl-handled revolver.
Cyberpunk works really well in terms of gun combat... until you factor in armour. Light kevlar will deflect any calibre bullet up to 10mm relatively reliably, which pretty much rules out most handguns and SMGs from doing decent damage if your opponents are prepared.
DeleteThen again, I suppose if you are viewing combat 'as war', you should be planning things so that your enemy isn't wearing armour when you fire the pearl-handled revolver at him.
Rules Question: how do you handle automatic weapons fire against multiple opponents? The player can choose to split all the bullets between a group? Is there any penalty for doing so?
ReplyDeleteBy the book - divide the ROF equally between targets, then treat each with a separate roll. (So if there's 30 rounds on 3 targets, you roll as if you are firing 10 rounds at each target). There's no penalty, although it doesn't seem quite so realistic not to have one.
DeleteI eventually settled on one to-hit roll per burst (some systems have you roll per bullet! There go all your probability calculations) and "unaimed" if you're firing on multiple targets (read: "spraying an area"), but now I think about it I should probably treat situations like drive-by tommygunning with a saving throw on the part of the targets to avoid getting shot.
ReplyDeleteJust thinking out loud, don't mind me.
I've got an image in my mind of a game where you play out plans first in a very compatible narrative engine, one that can allow you to play these things out roughly as expected.
ReplyDeleteThis would be the RPG equivalent of those bits of heist or spy movies where they go through how things are supposed to go..
Then you go back and find out what "actually" happens.
That way you can keep jumping off the main campaign trail in all these celebratory plans, and then come back to the messy results.
@Noisms- Out of curiosity what exactly did you go into a session prepared with, if anything at all? Did you just wing it the entire time (minus your NPC/Organization/Motivation/Plot Hooks tables?
ReplyDeleteI improve quite a bit as well, but I'm just curious to see if you handle things differently than I.
I had the necessary NPCs statted-up, with some random ones prepared too should I need them, and I'd worked out some of the locations where the main organisations were located (e.g. Philemon's church). But mostly I made things up on the fly apart from that. It's really not that difficult to wing things, especially when it comes to making maps of buildings or NPCs.
DeleteI've always wondered why so many RPG books suggest thinking of your game as a weekly TV series or other episodic fiction. Why would you not prefer thinking of it as the real lives of imaginary people? You get such surprising results, unlike when everyone is imitating the same old fiction plots again and again...
ReplyDelete