Mercer píše:
Favorite Run: As a GM. This is going to be a long one.
Back when my group played a lot (at least a couple of sessions a week, +10 hours a session, before marriage, kids, careers, etc) I hit upon the idea of the group taking on a lot of smaller jobs during a dry spell. Basically, the group had told their fixer they'd take any job that came up and I started giving them set-ups out of the old Sprawl Sites book. The group ended up taking three jobs that had various things that needed to be done over the course of a week, and which together would pay about what one of their normal runs would pay. In no particular order they were trying to find a kid, do a willing extraction on a corp exec at a party, and something else that I forget.
The willing extraction was the most straight forward job. They were supposed to impersonate waiters, infiltrate the party, and get the exec out before anyone knew what had happened. All they had to do was register with a particular temp company, using whatever fake IDs they wanted, and they would be assigned to the party. It was all worked out. What wasn't "worked out" was that the exec was planning on using the runners as a distraction-- security would be on to them and in the ensuing fracas, the exec and his bodyguard would quietly slip away. Further complicating matters was that the runners never registered with the temp company, because they were so busy racing all over town doing their other runs that it simply slipped their minds.
No one thought about it until they were getting into the van to go to the party and realized they didn't have their waiter uniforms... because they had never registered with the temp company. The looks on the players’ faces were priceless. But the group figured, to hell with it, they loaded up their guns and figured they'd do it the old fashioned way. Meanwhile, the Johnson for that run (the exec that was planning on double crossing them) figured they must have smelled the cross and bugged out.
The party was at a fancy hotel in downtown Seattle. The party hits it in a commando-style raid, blasting away with Stunballs, tasers, concussion grenades under the ice sculpture; basically taking the set up where they quietly spirit a target away and treating it like the landing at Normandy. They spot the exec and one of the sams runs at him screaming, "We're hear for you!"
The Johnson freaks, thinking these insane killers spotted his double cross and have shown up to exact street vengeance. So he and his bodyguard run like hell up the stairwell to the roof, where the helicopter he was planning on escaping in was waiting. The group rolls right over the security at the party and chases the Johnson, thinking I guess that they were helping him escape. They get to the roof and the Johnson is loaded into the helicopter while the bodyguard fires at them to keep them back, and now the runners think the bodyguard is betraying them and kidnapping the Johnson, so they open fire in return.
The bodyguard is wounded, but makes it into the chopper which begins to lift off. The group, all sams and mercs and one mage, don't really have anything that can drop the chopper. The dwarf spies some window cleaning gear, grabs the cables and runs for the chopper, which is starting to float out over the side of the building. The guy playing the bodyguard-- who was new to SR-- wasn't sure what to do, so he runs forward and uses his mono-whip to try to lash the rear prop off the helicopter. (At this point in the game there was so much confusion that everyone was just shouting actions, with no coherent plan at all.)
The monowhip gets wound up in the rear prop, which explodes. The helicopter goes into an uncontrolled spin 23 floors above Pine Street. The dwarf merc dives off the side of the building, holding the window-washing cables in one hand and grabbing the helicopter's wheel in the other and screams, "I got it!"
The NPC rigger botches his crash test, and the helicopter goes into the building across the street. (The Matrix had just come out, and I guess we were all hungry for a copter going into a building.) The dwarf merc lets go of the helicopter at the last second, and begins to plummet 23 stories. The copter explodes while the shaman races to the building edge and casts Levitate on the dwarf merc. (We calculated how far the dwarf had fallen over how many phases, and he was at the 3rd floor when the shaman snagged him.) The shaman then has to shunt the dwarf merc onto a balcony to avoid the flaming wreckage of the helicopter which then fell in the middle of Pine Street.
The group, suddenly realizing that not only did they not extract the exec, they also killed him and god knows how many other people, beat feet. Unable to get out of the hotel, the group holed up in a hotel room and managed to evade capture through the use of Physical Mask, Control Thoughts and some quick hacking by a decker contact.
I had been holding it together pretty well at this point. There had been a lot of general hilarity at how things had played out, but it wasn't until their fixer called them (a couple days later in the game) that I started to lose it. Through all of this the players had been thinking they had monumentally screwed the pooch, never suspecting that the Johnson had planned to screw them from the start (and this was from a group that always expected the Johnson to screw them). So their fixer calls them up and says essentially, "Jeez, I don't know how you guys figured out that guy was using you as patsies, but no one is ever going to try and double cross you again!"
When the players started to realize what had actually been going on throughout the entire running gunbattle, the table exploded with laughter. I thought I was going to pass out. It was one of those colossal screw ups that could never be planned, and turned out about a million times better than anything I had imagined going into it.