Hello and thanks to the Forge.  Because of this place I have the words to talk about what's going on in my game.
    I am running a 3rd ed. Shadowrun game set in Seattle of 2054, so bug spirits are just starting to rattle around and the arcology is still under construction.  The PC party consists of a street racing IRA rigger, a hairless physical adept, a sewer haunting rat shaman, and a dispossed corporate runner (read well rounded, low profile street sam).  And our last session didn't go anything like I had wanted.
    The party was hired to extract an employee from a security company that specializes in breeding paranormal and awakened animals for use as guard beasts.  The employee has received a more lucrative offer from a rival corporation but her current employer had her locked into a life-time service deal.  So the players put together a dummy corporation with themselves as owners and employees (through business world contacts) and set up a consultation with the extraction target employee under the guise of purchasing para-animals from her company. 
    Unbeknownst to the players, the security company has pierced their false identity scam because the ex-corporate runner submitted a retinal scan during the consultation process which led back to his true ID.  Armed with this knowledge, the security corporation sends a hefty squad of guards into the "off site consultation" the players had set up as an ambush to extract their target.  The players proceed to mop the floor with the guards and place the extracted employee on a flight to Denver per their hiring contract.
    My problem is that the story of PC's being bad-asses who whup corporate security guards has been told to death in Shadowrun.  It is not interesting or engaging on any level above a first person shooter.  The story arc I wanted to bring about was to begin with the PC's being captured in this ambush and forced to make some deeper in character choices while being tortured by the security corporation.  (Will I tell my captors who hired me and destory my street rep, or will I watch them vivisect one of my teammates)(When I have an opportunity to escape alone, will I take it, or walk unarmed back into the facility for my friends).
    This conflict between the story I wanted to tell, and what the PC's were able to do; I think it's a conflict between the Narratavism goal of a story arc set in motion by the GM and filled with PC in character choices versus the Gamism outcome after the crunch.  I feel an obligation as a GM to tell an interesting story with the players and at this point in my life that involves more than the mastabatory carnage that I often read about as the hallmark of Shadowrun play.  But I also want to be fair to those players who have each invested their time and effort into a character that is really good within their respective fields.  I feel that to pre-ordaine the outcome of conflict in favor of railroading my players into a story deeper than "you kill security guards" is disrespectful of their efforts to make characters for an inherently Gamism setting.
    After the session, I spoke with one of the players who has been running Shadowrun for a longer time about what we can do in game to bring players towards telling a more involved story rather than running tactical game play.  We came up with four ideas:

1. Make imperfect characters.  Your mother's in critical care for degenerative spine disorder and all your resources go to keeping her alive.  You owe a personal debt to the triads and they demand that you kill your Yakuza lover.  I think in Sorcerer you call these kickers?  Is that the right word?

2. Give players responsibility for describing their NPC contacts and locations that the characters frequent.  We hoped that by making the scene setting a more group storytelling activity it will draw our players into the creative space as pro-active to the story rather than passive recepticles for it.

3.  Use the madness meter from Unknown Armies but allow the players to fill it out in reflection of their character.  UA is the game I have run the most in my life and I think the madness meter is a great tool for in character role-playing disguised as a crunchy bit of game mechanic.  By putting that stat on the character sheet, characters are reminded of their past actions, current mental state and warned of future actions.  I don't know if I read it here or at RPG.net but a poster wrote that what you see when you look at your sheet will pre-dispose you to resolve conflicts in a particular fashion.  On both D&D and Shadowrun sheets, the first things you see are to-hit stats and combat pool.  By placing the madness meter on there, it opens the mental debate on what to do.

4.  Make characters as a group.  This will keep players from wimping out on #s 1 and 2 so long as the GM can positively reinforce charcter imperfections.

    Thanks for reading this long post.  Any comments on the story telling v. fairness to player ability or 4 things to get players invested in story telling would be appreciated.

-David

Well I think you're right that there were some conflicting goals at the table, but not where you might think.

This conflict between the story I wanted to tell, and what the PC's were able to do; I think it's a conflict between the Narratavism goal of a story arc set in motion by the GM and filled with PC in character choices versus the Gamism outcome after the crunch.

David,

Fred's right.  What you are describing and the terms you are using (ie Narrativism) don't seem to be matching up.  Answering his questions will allow the folks here to help you more.  However, one of the things you said set off some alarms with me, so I figured I'd comment.

The story arc I wanted to bring about was to begin with the PC's being captured in this ambush and forced to make some deeper in character choices while being tortured by the security corporation.  (Will I tell my captors who hired me and destory my street rep, or will I watch them vivisect one of my teammates)(When I have an opportunity to escape alone, will I take it, or walk unarmed back into the facility for my friends).

Hey Valamir-
Quote:
2) If, on the other hand, what you're really interested in is having players deeper character choices to generate more engaging play, then I recommend jettising any notion of a "story arc set in motion by the GM" and instead concentrate on creating powerful dynamic situations that are loaded with thematic weight and then just set your players loose to see what they do (with absolutely no preconceived idea for which choice is better or cooler or more interesting).  That is actually a step on the road to narrativist play.

  What I want from my "story arc set in motion by the GM" is what you identified in that very same sentance as "creating powerful dynamic situations that are loaded with thematic weight and then...set your players loose..."  but without the buzz words.  My hope in running the capture, torture, escape adventure was to do exactly what I've quoted from your reply.  The value that such a pressure cooker situation can give to play isn't in the player making the right, cool, or badass choice to lay it on the line for their teammates, but to give an opportunity for the characters to alter their relationships when there is a real alternative and temptation to go either way.  Because I'm telling the story to give that tempation, I hoped the play would become more engaging from the players considering, weighing, and choosing.  If that's what you meant by "set piece opportunities to display certain characteristics," then I'm in your first category and I'd be interested to hear how that's different from situations loaded with thematic weight.
   I am the third GM from among this group of players and during prior play all of our characters have been brutalized on physical and psychological levels (some might say this is an inescapable Shadowrun trait).  Because of being kicked around, the party has gone into a reactive manner of play where characters aren't looking to further their personal short or long term goals but rather just to get through this job and the next job.  Regardless of what happens in the capture, torture, escape adventure, I thought it would draw the characters together enough so that they would share some of their characters' goals and start pursuing them as a team rather than waiting for me to throw another chance at them to kill security guards.  
   Thanks for the detail of Participationism.  As a way to save wasted prep time when the PC's zig instead of zag it sure looks like a pragmatic approach but it breaks the fourth wall of storytelling in a way that I'm not comfortable with.  As is illustrated from the sitution in my first post, maybe I don't have the ability to lead my players into story arc/thematic situations without their out of character cooperation, but my discomfort with Participationism is going to make me try harder at the former rather than show my hand to the players.
Dave

Cool.

Here's a couple of points that often get glossed over in RPG texts and discussion but are crucial for capturing the kind of play you're after.

1) there is no such thing as a character.  They don't exist.  Characters aren't real...they can't have goals, they can't have preferences, they can't have desires.  PLAYERS are real.  Players CAN have goals, they CAN have preferences, and they CAN have desires.  Players can also have all of those things FOR their character.  So I, as a player, can have a goal for my character, but this is by far NOT the same thing as my character having a goal.  Too many game texts and too much game prep assumes that "My character wants" and "I want my character to want" are synonomous.  They aren't.  The first is a myth, the second is reality.

The key lesson here is that you will never obtain powerful dynamic situations loaded with thematic weight (change buzzwords to taste) trying to hook the characters.  You have to hook the players.  My character may not want what I want.  But they will always want what I want them to want.  Therefor your appeal has to be made to be made to me as the player.  Engage me, and I'll find a way to ensure my character is engaged.  So yes, set up situations where there is alot of stuff going on...but do so with the full awareness that that situation has to appeal to the human beings around the table not the characters on the paper.

2) Following from this then is a vital message about the 4th wall.  Its already broken.  The shear fact that an RPG requires players to simultaneously be the author of their character's decisions, the actor portraying those decisions, and the audience witnessing and appreciating the decisions and portrayals of other players means that the fourth wall is already well and thoroughly penetrated.  Combine this with the need for the GM as a human being to reach out to the players as human beings in order to engage their full interest and committment to the story and that fourth wall is in tatters. 

Here's the thing if you build an impenetrable 4th wall, then players may well be engaged and committed to their own characters because its their own characters heads they're living in.  But they'll find it difficult to impossible to achieve that same level of engagment and committment to the other player's characters or the situation established by the GM.  In order to get highly thematic, powerful, meaningful play you have to have players who are not just committed to their own characters but to the characters of the other players, the effective portrayal of those characters by the other players, and to the setting and situation evolving in the game world as well (ideally every bit as much as their own).  Thing is, if I, as a player, am going to be committed to seeing, enjoying, and supporting the play of the other characters and willfully engaged in the situation...then I'm already thinking outside of the 4th wall no matter how much I try to pretend I'm not.

Point being that once one sees the 4th Wall is already well and truly permeated in order for good roleplaying to happen, one can recognize that a few more crossovers won't cause devastation and collapse...and that opens up a whole wide world of amazing game enhancing techniques.  Techniques that most traditional RPG texts will explicitly tell you NOT to do...but which most successful GMs and play groups use all the time -- even when they're pretending that they don't.  Techniques that get even more powerful when we stop pretending we don't use them and start to use them deliberately.

3) You said a couple of things above that are actually quite profound...perhaps more profound than you realize.  You said "you're not comfortable with..."  To which I say:  of course you're not.  Familiarity breeds comfort and we are naturally discomforted by things we aren't familiar with.  But don't mistake discomfort for dislike.  Sometimes we get in a rut and the only way to get out of the rut is to make some drastic changes...changes that initially make us very uncomfortable but which in the end can pay off in ways unimagined.  Note I'm not at all saying "go forth and begin to use Participationism, it is the greatest" (I'm not all that big of a fan of it myself)...but I am saying, don't dismiss the various techniques and ideas you read about here just because they're way outside of your current comfort zone.  There's alot to be said for expanding your comfort zone to include techniques that today you'd never think about using.  Almost all of us here have had our roleplaying paradigm redefined (several times) over the last few years.

Hi David,

Welcome to the Forge.

D wrote:
What I want from my "story arc set in motion by the GM" is what you identified in that very same sentance as "creating powerful dynamic situations that are loaded with thematic weight and then...set your players loose..."  but without the buzz words.  My hope in running the capture, torture, escape adventure was to do exactly what I've quoted from your reply.  The value that such a pressure cooker situation can give to play isn't in the player making the right, cool, or badass choice to lay it on the line for their teammates, but to give an opportunity for the characters to alter their relationships when there is a real alternative and temptation to go either way.  Because I'm telling the story to give that tempation, I hoped the play would become more engaging from the players considering, weighing, and choosing.  If that's what you meant by "set piece opportunities to display certain characteristics," then I'm in your first category and I'd be interested to hear how that's different from situations loaded with thematic weight.

Thanks Alan and Valamir for those meaty posts.
    I think you hit an important issue that I wasn't getting with running for this group concerning hooking the players rather than the characters and my misread of it has contributed to the "battle with security goons for money" feel to our game because all I was looking at was their character's desire for wealth or street cool.  Both the Participationism  sit down before session and the "not dead but worse" techniques aim at players rather than characters.
    The words are still bugging me though because I sure thought I was Narrativism-ing my way along here by setting up scenes of impact for the PCs.  In both of these pre-ceeding posts, Narrativism was mentioned around play that the GM sets up and then lets the characters loose upon:

Quoting Alan:
His job becomes setting up one initial situation, then letting the players do anything they want to it -- for the whole session, ignoring any hopes for torture or rescues or whatever.

Quoting Valamir:
I recommend jettising any notion of a "story arc set in motion by the GM" and instead concentrate on creating powerful dynamic situations that are loaded with thematic weight and then just set your players loose to see what they do (with absolutely no preconceived idea for which choice is better or cooler or more interesting).  That is actually a step on the road to narrativist play.

Alan-you're writing about a singular event while Valamir uses the plural.  The latter was what I thought I was doing by picking events like, capture, ambush, escape.  I want to be able to use the language of GNS so that my thoughts can have traction with the wider forum so I'm going to stew over the Narrativism essay for a day or so before I post again.  Our last session before the summer is tommorrow, I'll post an update.  Thanks for working on opening my skull.
Dave

There are alot of Narrativist friendly techniques that can be used in play.  A common one is Aggressive Scene Framing.  Garden variety scene framing is pretty common place.  Any time your players say "we want to head for the Renraku Headquarter's building to launch our raid" and you reply "Ok, after a 45 minute drive through moderate traffic you see Renraku HQ looming ahead" you're scene framing.  Aggressive scene framing takes that a step further and fast forwards right to the juicy bits.  For instance if you were aggressive scene framing you might say "Ok, you've hacked your way past the front line security and have stealthily made your way to the 25 floor, so far everything is going smooth as glass...but suddenly you hear an alarm sound in the building...you're pretty sure you didn't set it off, but now building security is starting to come to life"  See how you've skipped all the boring stuff and got right to where the drama is...just like a movie cut.

There's a fine line between Aggressive Scene Framing and Railroading.  The key differentiator is to leave the thematically important choices up to the players while pruning away (i.e. skipping over) choices that aren't thematically important.  How aggressive you want to be depends on how many non thematically important choices you find interesting and don't want to skip over.

You COULD do the ambush, capture, escape sequence as Aggressive Scene Framing.  But the key there would be to not presuppose that the players were going to hit each one of these in order...that would be a railroad (if the players aren't aware that they're being railroaded, that's most likely Illusionist play.  If the players are aware they're being railroaded and welcome it because they trust you have cool things in store that's Participationism.  If the players are aware they're being railroaded and resent it...that's just dysfunctional.  You can immediately see how easily Illusionism becomes dysfunction if the illusion get's pierced and the players don't like what they see.

So how would you do those scenes without being railroady?...well here's one (and only one of many) possibilities.

The players have made the decision to pursue the dummy corporation idea, perhaps you've had them make some combination of business / corporate savvy skill checks to determine how good a job they did.  Or perhaps you have them make some combination of negotiation / diplomacy skill checks (insert appropriate Shadowrun skill names) to hire someone to set up the dummy corp for them if they lack the expertise.  Failure here indicates they screwed up somehow.  Instead of saying they failed to set up the dummy corp you say they successfully set up the dummy corp but the bad guys saw right through it (creative interpretation of failure is another technique especially suitable to Nar and some flavors of Sim).

Now you aggressively scene frame...skip over all the boring "we try to contact the mark" stuff and go right to "ok, you've arranged your meeting with the mark under the guise of looking to purchase a supply of genetically engineered guard animals.  You're about ready to complete the extraction when suddenly your perimeter alarms sound" (of course you can assume they set up some perimeter alarms...they're professionals right...skip over the boring "I set up 3 motion detectors and 6 cameras" stuff and get right to the fun bits -- tailored of course to the bits that your group finds boring vs. fun).

You then go on to say "Damn they look like corporate goons, how'd they find you?  You know you can probably shoot your way out, but your mark is unprotected and relying on you for his safe extraction.  In a firefight of this magnitude you're almost certain he won't make it".

Bam...you skipped right to a thematically meaningful choice:  "this guy trusted his life to us, do we sacrifice him to save our own skins or go peacefully and hope to find a way out later."

The key here is to be prepared that the players may decide "screw this guy, start blasting".  THAT'S their thematically charged decision...when push came to shove their own life was worth more than their honor or the life of their mark.  THEY made that choice...YOU don't get to make that choice for them...YOU just get to enforce the consequences.

At this point have the mark go down riddled with bullets or gasping on toxic gas that the cybered up players are immune to.  Don't care if the players make short work of the goons...their mission is a total bust, they got the valuable property killed and now you can set about trashing their street cred.  Its entirely possible that the hiring corporation will want their advance back after the players total breach of contract behavior.. because of course you gave them a big advance and encouraged them to spend it on their favorite big guns and cyber gear knowing how much fun it would be to hang them with their own rope later...now they've got two major corporations after them...all because they decided to shoot instead of surrender.

At this point you keep those "capture" and "escape" ideas on the back burner...we call that the Bandolier of Bangs...cool thematically charged decision points that can be tossed in as appropriate but which you're well aware may never get used and dedicated to not forcing them just because you spent time and effort coming up with them.  Maybe the group will get captured by the corporation which hired them and you can just change a few names around and use the capture idea that way.  Maybe many sessions later you'll put the group into a similar situation and having learned their lesson they'll surrender this time and you can take that capture idea back out and dust it off...or maybe never. 

For now you turn up the heat, keep the pressure on and start to look for opportunities to offer players more thematically charged decisions.  You want a player to have to make a choice between betraying the group or saving his own skin?  Sure you had planned the circumstances around that choice to be while the character was being tortured as a prisoner...so what, circumstances are malleable, its that choice that's key...its that choice that's the Bang.  Simply find a new set of circumstances that will allow you to present that same choice.  Not hard to do.  In this case you can have one of the corporations hunting the group approach the individual (preferably through an NPC contact the character is already inclined to trust) and offer to cut him a deal...amnesty in exchange for giving up his friends -- for added fun maybe they've kidnapped his sister (or whatever NPC the player is vested in).  Bang...there's your choice...betray my friends or let my sister die.  Thematic choice...whichever way he decides is equally cool with you and you're prepared to run the game forward in either direction. 

Now you're cooking with Nar.

Is that helpful?

Okay, I'm going to give advice by stepping into what I perceive as your position, and then stating what I would do. This may or may not help you at all.

I want to run a game where the PCs are captured, and in the course of being tortured and trying to escape, they must make hard choices that drive towards thematic play.

What I do is, I sit down at the table and say "Okay guys, here's the deal: you're a crack team of shadowrunners on a run gone wrong. You've been captured by a corporation, who want information on who hired you, as well as to set an example for anyone screwing with them. This game is meant to explore the hard choices people make when put into a confined and dangerous situation. Now, is everyone into this? You all are? Cool! Let's start making characters."

A couple things...

First, Ralph has a great example of how you *can* do it. But that doesn't mean it will always work with your group. For me, I see Shadowrun as a game which primarily supports Simulationist play, rather than primarily Gamist, and those who like that sort of play (like me) will be just a bit disgruntled, if not openly rebellious, about the idea of you skipping straight through the preparation for the meet, and roleplaying through the conversation between the runners and the mark.

Now, that's not to say that Ralph's idea must be scrapped with such a group.. Just modified. Framing a "scene" can come right in the midst of an ongoing scene. So the PCs are right in the middle of the meet, and at what appears to be the dramatically best moment... THEN the alarms sound.. Or the lookout sees someone coming.. or bullets come screaming into the middle of the meet.. Or a red dot appears on the mark's head (this last one's my favorite, personally). You summarize the situation and the possible choices for them the same as Ralph described, and BAM, there you go.

Secondly, even though you summed up the situation as "You can either go guns blazing and risk the mark being killed, or you can go peacefully, and see what you can do later", it's quite possible your PCs will choose a third path.. And once again, you've got to be okay with that. It's quite possible that they'll manage, through gutsy maneuvers and a little luck, to save the mark and make good on their escape. It's equally important to never assume the outcome is either/or. What's important is you set up a thematically challenging situation, and they make their choices, which will tell you, and them, what's important to them.

By the by.. I had an almost identical situation come up once. It was a rather... out there WEG Star Wars game. The other PCs and NPCs in our team of intrepid heroes were incapacitated or badly hurt, but my PC, a massive tank of a creature named Corwin, was pretty much unscathed. Suddenly we found ourselves surrounded, weapons drawn on us, and Corwin was the only one capable of doing much of anything. I could have died heroically, or possibly have even escaped, but if I'd have fought, I'd have risked the deaths of characters that had come to mean something to me as a player, and as a character as well. I agonized, torn between honor and valor telling me to never give up, and honor and love telling me not to risk my friends. I didn't feel forced, and I frankly loved it.

I surrendered.

  I'd like to briefly speak up for the Gamists here.  I think that the main reason to use a system like Shadowrun instead of a more Narrativist enabling system (Prime Time Adventures maybe?) is for the fun of exploring the performance of different character builds in different situations. 

  If you want to focus the campaign on the choices that the characters make (personal safety vs. getting the job done, etc) then it makes perfect sense to skip most of the firefight and say 'You can kill all the guards, but your target will die, or you can surrender'.  However, if one of the things a player was hoping to do was explore how effectively they could build and use a street samurai, they're going to be dissappointed.  It's also worth noting (as you found out :) that players can be suprisingly resourceful and effective.  In D&D, for example, in a match between the party and an enemy party with exactly the same classes, levels, and equipment, my money is always on the players.  This means that if you want to allow players to explore the system like this, you can't phrase your Bangs in terms of whether or not they win or lose a fight (or rather, you need alternate Bangs depending on the outcome).  For example, you could use your capture and torture Bangs if they lose the fight, and if they win, use a different Bang (for example, the researcher doesn't really want to go to the company that hired you, he wants to go somewhere different).  They still get meaningful character choices, it just doesn't depend on the outcome of a fight.

  I don't know if any of your players are playing Shadowrun from a Gamist perspective.  If none of them are interested in exploring the system like that, I think it's worth considering switching to a lighter system.  On the other hand, if some of them are interested in that kind of exploration, you should be careful to avoid scene-framing past the parts that they would find interesting.

Steve