This week’s Shadowrun game went well … Just a simple, quick, in-between adventure in which the PCs are hired to retrieve a briefcase from the apartment of a contact of one of them, then place the briefcase in a specific locker at a bus station. The reason the contact can’t do this himself is because he got attacked by people wanting the briefcase back and had to flee, injured. All this is happening late at night.
So, they head to the apartment. The rigger decides to take his wheeled drone, mounting a grenade launcher (loaded with high-explosive rounds, not the smokes he also has) and an assault rifle on it, and so the group of three plus drone takes the lift up to the floor where the contact lived. He gave them the code to the door, but as the street samurai and the magician are deciding who will go and open the door, the rigger just decides to roll his drone up to the door and shoot it with the grenade launcher …
BOOOM
… and the grenade sticks in the door.
Sam and magician: ”WTF?!”
Rigger: “It doesn’t explode? Does it have a timer or something?”
Sam: “Why didn’t it explode? Is it still dangerous?”
Rigger: “I’ll shoot it again!”
The second shot missed — yes, really, from only a couple of metres’ range — hit the wall next to the door and bounced down the corridor before rolling to a stop a little way away.
You know, launched grenades have a minimum range of five metres, within which they don’t explode. Well, the players didn’t know that. They do now.
The magician goes up to the door, still wary of the grenade, punches in the code, and everybody enters. The place is trashed but they soon recover the briefcase from its secret hiding place, pile back into the van and head to the bus station.
By this time, the rigger’s player has kind of zoned out for not entirely clear reasons (but see below) so he doesn’t participate at all when the other two discuss how to deliver the briefcase, and whether there are any bad guys lurking in the bus station. The magician does a quick astral reconnaissance and discovers there’s an elf hiding under an Invisibility spell, leaning against a pillar right by the wall of lockers, so that gives them an answer about possible bad guys.
As the sam and magician plan to sneak up on the elf and taser him into unconsciousness, the rigger’s player suddenly takes an interest again. After I quickly explain the situation to him, he immediately seizes the moment as well as the briefcase, loudly proclaiming that it’s very simple, and walks into the bus station with it. He goes up to the locker, puts it inside, and shuts the door.
At this point, the elf and his two buddies who are hiding among the ten or so waiting passengers are about to spring their ambush. But because they failed to notice the sam and the magician as shadowrunners too, largely because of the rigger’s bold move and the sam successfully blending into the crowd, the elf gets a surprise stun baton to his guts (the sam just managing to hit him despite the Invisibility spell).
The rigger takes his phone and punches the police emergency button. He then asks the magician to point out the invisible elf (because the team’s magician can see him due to his astral perception), his player loudly repeating it several times because the magician’s player didn’t answer him right away. It took me several tries to get it through to him that, because they’re all in combat, neither he nor the magician can just do all kinds of stuff instantly.
None of the three PCs then notice the elf’s two team mates before these draw their guns and open fire on the PCs. The rigger gets hit and decides that running outside is the best option. Meanwhile, the sam keeps attacking the elf with his stun baton while the elf casts Ice Sheet over the floor in order to make his escape — tripping up the sam when he gets hit by a shotgun blast that he tried to dodge. The magician tries to hit the fleeing elf with a combat spell, but fails.
Because the rigger is now running away, one of the enemy PCs shoots him again on the assumption he’s going to get heavier firepower. This brings him to one box below a Deadly wound.
At this point, we stopped because two of the players had to leave to catch the train, but not before the rigger’s player started telling the other two about how they had screwed up this very simple run. “All we had to do was drop the briefcase in the locker! Why did you attack that elf at all?!” Well … maybe because they figured he would try to hit them when they brought in the briefcase?
TBF, he had a bit of a point, of course. They didn’t know for sure there was an ambush, nor whether the elf was there to trouble them. I still don’t understand the rigger player’s reasoning for phoning the cops and then getting out of there when his buddies are getting shot up, though. Because it was not as if he decided to go out so he could, say, get his drone for fire support — he made it very clear that he wanted to be out of the area.
The rigger’s behaviour in all of this probably has to do with his player’s RL mental health problems, which is why he didn’t play much for the past year. At least he seems to be getting back to more normal again, but he’s clearly not there yet :( Thinking about it after the game, I think I’m in the (for me) unique situation of having a player with the Impulsive flaw while his character doesn’t have that. Usually so far it’s been the other way around, so that the player had to be reminded to act impulsively instead of thinking things through.