[Tabletop Gaming] Shadowrun: GM-less Follow to Greatness?

Hey, chummer, I see someone new betrayed you this week!

A couple of weeks ago, @niduroki had a rather on-point rant about how and why the Shadowrun 5th Edition mechanics are kind of crap -- and he wasn't wrong. For all that the setting is incredible, the SR mechanics have been in a degenerative slide since -- 2nd Edition?

I think there's a good argument that puts the failings in mechanics right there in 2nd.

Regardless, it occurred to me that I already owned an RPG with mechanics which were more than suitable for capturing the feel of a Shadowrun game without any of the overhead of the Shadowrun 5th or even 2nd Edition mechanics.

Follow.

As anyone who has been reading my articles on RPGs and specifically GM-less RPGs knows, I'm a great fan of Ben Robbins' work.

This is how Follow describes itself (in fact, it's the text from the opening page of the book, intended to be read aloud to new players and to old, just to make sure that everybody is on the same page to start.

Follow is a game about working together to achieve a common goal. Slay the dragon. Cure a disease. Overthrow a tyrant. Get your candidate elected. We’ll pick a quest together to decide what kind of game we want to play.

Can we stay united and succeed, or will our differences tear us apart? We’ll play and find out.

Follow isn’t about us coming up with the best plan or a clever solution. It’s about seeing what these characters do, for better or worse. We may even intentionally make bad choices because they seem like decisions our characters would make.

But even if we do everything perfectly, our quest may fail. As players we can push for the outcome we want to see, but we cannot guarantee it. Our story may surprise us, and that’s part of the fun.

If that's not a fair description of every Shadowrun game that has ever happened (and I can see you in the back holding up your hand ready to shout out "the Hero's Journey;" we'll get back to you one day), we've never seen a fair description of every such game.

Cyberpunk in general often seems to be about protagonists (not necessarily heroes) who make decisions which are bad for reasons which make sense to us as the audience, capturing some of the flavor of noir styling. SR takes more than a little inspiration for that in the way it presents its hybrid cyberpunk/fantasy setting.

The Quest

Follow starts the experience of gameplay with everyone picking their Quest for the group. The funny thing is, you can use each of the four default quests in the context of SR. It sounds strange, almost unbelievable, but this is one of the strengths of F as a game – the trappings of a story are not necessarily dictators of the core of that story.

Let's go through each of the four starting Quests and see how we might could spin them.

the Colony

Build a colony and make it flourish.

This might actually be the most challenging of the opening Quests to restate in SR terms. How often do you build a colony, an outpost, an expansion in SR? After all, aren't most of the stories about tearing down things, about destabilizing things?

Absolutely. But that doesn't mean those are the only kind of stories that are interesting in SR.

Let's take a broader view of what "colony" means.

What if instead of some sort of remote place where people are moving to live, we think of colony as "a new company?" That would be different! Shadowrunners deciding to try and make a go of it, establish themselves as a power in and of themselves, maybe get themselves off the street altogether? This would be a story about self-improvement, about trying to make the community a better place in the face of overwhelming pressure to do otherwise.

I see a lot of potential there.

If we bring this metaphor to the list of challenges listed in the Quest, we can get some really interesting things going on.

Surveying the region? Well, nothing says "getting ready to challenge the dominant powers that be" like getting an idea of what the business is going on nearby are doing. Learn about the neighborhood. Figure out who the local gang leaders are.

Pick a good spot to build? Whose turf do we want to encroach on? It's going to be somebody's turf. Do we have good coverage, not just broken line of sight to avoid snipers but connections to the Matrix, running water?

Survive harsh weather? That sounds like the local gangs or businesses that already have a foothold don't like you and things are getting spicy.

All of this is applicable to a different kind of SR story. And that's where we start!

the Dragon

Slay the beast that terrorizes the realm.

For SR, this can be a very, very literal translation of the implied typical fantasy "go hunt the Dragon" story. Of course, in this game, in this setting, that Dragon very well may be President of the United States or the CEO of your local big business, and very well may have resources and contacts with perfectly pleasant and wonderful people whom you do business with on a regular basis.

Is this an assassination? Is it a character assassination? That would be a fantastic approach for an SR story, pursuing not the physical death but the social death of a power player in the community like a dragon.

Of course, you don't have to be as literal as all that with the Dragon, either. Maybe your Dragon is the local Renraku affiliate and you really want to bring them down. Consider the things which are given in the Quest write up as things that could make your Quest difficult.

• No more sword can slay the beast.
  Maybe you need to really go after the social angle hard, or you'll need special weaponry to get through the corp's magical protections?

• Some oppose us. They fear angering the beast.
  Sounds like every group you end up talking to in SR. "You probably ought not do this run; you'll just piss them off!"

• Some oppose us. They worship or revere the beast.
  If it's Aztechnology you're hitting, some of the employees may literally worship the beast. Or hidden insect spirit hives. Or ...

• The beast is hard to corner. It can travel far and fast.
  And all its resources are in the Matrix. A quicksilver AI? A highly migratory hacker-team? Assassins with free passage across national borders?

This is good stuff. These are the kinds of inspirations that can keep you really grounded, putting together the ideas with your group of what kind of experience you want from your game.

the Heist

Get the loot and don't get caught.

I feel like this one is almost too easy. Three quarters of the cyberpunk RPGs that I've ever played in for my entire life (and there's been a few) have centered around a heist of some sort. Breaking into a place, stealing stuff, and then trying to get out alive – most of the time when your Johnson has betrayed you in one way or another – is a staple of the genre and move certainly of the RPG representations of it.

That's definitely not to say that it's a bad formula!

F is nice because one of the parts of each Quest is determining what each character wants from the quest and wants from another character at the table (but which they won't give). Immediately, you have dynamics built between characters about characters which are going to drive things at the table.

I'm just going to drop the example 6 things from "What I Want from the Quest".

WHAT I WANT FROM THE QUEST

• Wealth. Get enough to quit, live the good life, or pay off debts.
• Revenge. Stick it to the people we’re stealing from.
• Fame. Make a name for ourselves on a big score.
• Secrecy. Keep our criminal life hidden. Don’t let our families know the truth.
• Principles. No innocent people get hurt.
• Caution. Let’s not take stupid risks.

If most of the architecture of an SR adventure hasn't popped into your mind just from reading that list of wants, I'm not sure I can help you.

Of course, you don't have to only steal money. It's SR! Information is as good as gold. Hidden grimoire? Insider knowledge of corporate trading? The design for a new piece of cyber where? Taking the entire team on a magical trip inside a sleeping businessman's brain to shake out what he knows? (You might have some inspirations from elsewhere for that one.)

the Rebellion

Overthrow our oppressors.

And we go from one of the most common SR stories to one which is not nearly common enough. The SR setting is full of oppression, and not just corporate oppression – the national governments are equally dirty dealing and have their dirty little fingers in a lot of dirty little pies.

Maybe it's time someone did something about that?

But it doesn't have to be a State; you can keep things corporate if you like.

Odds are good that you are starting to see something that is more implied than stated, that F provides opportunities for you to take your playgroup from one story, one narrative, to another – from establishing a "colony" of a new micro-corporation run by them to stealing the trade secrets of one of their competitors to taking out one of their best researchers in order to cripple their ability to do business to overthrowing them entirely and possibly salting the earth where their headquarters once stood.

Characters

F insists that you play at least two characters. At the beginning of the game, you are directed to create a major character and a minor character.

Your major character has both what they want from the quest and what they want from the character of the player on their left.

Your minor character is supporting cast and you should probably make it someone who is connected to one of the main characters across the table from you. There is nothing more complicated than trying to role-play with yourself in two different voices and keeping the rest of the table involved.

Trust me, take it from me. I know.

You'll notice that I haven't talked at all about defining what the powers of an individual character are, what cyber tech they have, what spells they know, or any of the usual expected stuff that comes with the overhead of running a complex, mechanical cyberpunk game.

That's because they don't matter.

That's not to say they don't matter to the character or to the player, but the description of what the character can do only really matters to determine what the content of the scenes you play which describe the characters dealing with the outstanding challenge and each other.

The capabilities of characters come out in scenes. Not tests of what they're able to do, but as justifications for creating certain kinds of scenes. If the current challenge is "sneak through corporate security in order to disable the motion detectors for the rest of the team," each of the players at the table is going to be able to frame a scene with one or two others describing what they're doing. There's no test to see if you can do what you're doing; it's assumed that you're as competent or incompetent as you want to be.

This is going to be difficult for some people to wrap their heads around. But when it comes to SR, this is probably one of the best ways that you can deal with the vast disparity in power and effect that characters and the setting can have. Your Decker can literally be right in the action, not slowing down anything else going around because they have to spend time cutting the black ice. When they frame that scene, they'll do so in a way that lets them interact with a couple of other characters – whether that be on the radio, describing how the hacker is opening doors and breaking ice to let them get in, or maybe it's a team hacking job, running simultaneously with the physical penetration.

Your physical adept and the team gun-bunny can have one of their "will they/won't they/you guys should just get a room" arguments while mowing down corporate goons in their individual ways.

The Rigger can juggle four drones at once, telling people what's going on all over the facility and stealthily sneaking through the vents at the same time, even while making sure to be distracted by watching over his sister inappropriately.

Characters in F aren't slaves to numbers on a page. They aren't even slaves to succeeding in a traditional sense. You can certainly narrate a scene in which your character gets involved in more complications. You can even get involved in scenes where characters die, deliberately. (More on that in a little bit.)

Challenge Draws

You're probably wondering, "if I don't have numbers on the page that make a difference in how successful I am, why am I bothering to play out these scenes?" Unless you're one of those deep immersive role players in which case high-five, brother!

The reason is straightforward:

After every player has made one scene for the challenge, then and only then do we find out if the group succeeded or failed at that step.

To do that, we draw stones from a pool. White and red.

We start with an empty pool and then put one white and one red stone into it.

Everybody takes two red stones.

If your main character is unhappy about what the team is done or how they've done it, hold one red stone in your hand. If your main character actually wants the quest to fail, hold two red stones. Otherwise, hold no stones.

Everyone decides in secret and reveals at the same time. However many red stones are revealed, put them in the pool.

Then everybody takes one white stone and one red stone.

Now we put it to you personally, as a player, do you think that the team did what was necessary to succeed at the challenge? If you do, hold a white stone. If you don't, hold a red stone.

Whatever you end up picking, that goes in the pool.

Grab the pool, give it a shake, then pull two stones. Order matters!

Are you starting to see why it's important what your character is described as capable of doing without quantifying it? It's the decision of everyone at the table as to whether things seem to have been successful enough to move forward – or at least to have the chance to move forward.

And then comes the randomness: the outcome gets described.

Describe the Outcome

Stones are shown in the order they were drawn: the first tells us the impact on the fellowship and the second determines if we won or lost.

• WHITE, WHITE
  win the challenge

• RED, WHITE
  lose one character, but win the challenge

• WHITE, RED
  lose one character and lose the challenge

• RED, RED
  a character betrays (or is betrayed by) the fellowship and is lost, and lose the challenge

Yes, in F a character can be mechanically directed to betray or be betrayed by the group – and that's binding. It's actually less shocking that the mechanics can direct that someone was lost, died or whatever, but we're used to mechanics deciding whether or not characters live or die. We're not used to systems directing betrayal.

But betrayal happens all the time in cyberpunk literature. Someone turns on the group, the group decides to leave someone behind, abandons them, deliberately shoot them to slow down their pursuers, lobotomizes them with magic so they can't give up the secrets – you name it, it gets done.

And then the group as a whole, all of the players, decide how that plays out. Maybe a minor character decides to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the group, leading to their eventual success. Maybe a major character decides to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the group, to no good end.

And maybe it just all goes to Hell.

The Johnson (played by the guy on your left) sells you out. Your sneaky mage decides to cut a deal with an Air Elemental and not tell anybody. Your sister decides that she can't be part of watching you destroy your life on the street anymore.

Do you feel me?

Three times this will happen during any given quest. Three challenges need to be overcome or failed. The bodies can pile up quickly or not at all. It's hard to say.

Character Elimination

Sometimes your character dies. Sometimes it's your main character, sometimes it's your minor character. Sometimes it's during a scene when you feel it's right for the character to leave the spotlight (and, yes, that is a valid choice at any given time), and sometimes it's during the wrap up for a challenge when you find out whether or not success has evaded you and at what cost.

Betrayal is always looming.

But that's okay! Because even if a character is eliminated from the game, a player is never eliminated from the game!

If you lose your main character, your minor character becomes your main character.

If you lost your minor character already, you can introduce a new character who was joined up or you can ask someone else to give you their minor character. If you lose your minor character, you don't make a new minor character. Numbers can dwindle. The party can shrink. Terrible things can happen.

Because losing a character isn't a massive impediment, players have a lot more comfortable freedom for sacrifice stories. You can have moments of redemption as someone who has done terrible things gives themselves up for the good of the party. You can have moments of deserved suffering, as characters who have done terrible things in the pursuit of the quest get their comeuppance.

It's okay. You don't have to stop playing.

It's character elimination, not player elimination.

This is actually kind of a big deal for SR, not because it tends to be a story about sacrifice but because so many of the cyberpunk-genre source stories are about betrayal and about how betrayal changes groups and individuals. We don't see a lot of betrayal in SR which originates within the group. Betrayal happens to characters in SR but they rarely engage in it, which is a little strange given the source material.

The increased complexity and weight of creating a new character is always a really strong pressure to try and keep a PC in the game. Even when it would be more emotionally rewarding or more intellectually rewarding for them to go. This is a much broader problem found across the industry and not specifically a criticism of SR, but as the editions have rolled on, that pressure has grown greater and greater.

F lets us step away from that – in a big way.

Burn It All Down

And what if you decide, in the course of play, that your character really doesn't want the quest to succeed? What if they decide that instead of wanting the respect of the person on your left they want to see them dead, preferably painfully?

Sure! The stuff on the sheet is just a guide. Change it. If the character changes, the sheet changes. The player is in charge of the character, not the other way around.

What if you want to reject the challenge? What if your character comes to believe that "we are going about this all wrong?" That's fine. The challenge was set when it was chosen, reflecting that is elemental truth. The characters don't have to believe that. Characters can decide otherwise. Of course, deciding otherwise doesn't make it so in that case. Characters can be wrong. Characters can be wrong and desire contradictory things!

That's okay.

Maybe you decide that killing Dunkhelzahn is a terrible idea! Maybe he's a cool dude, even if he is a Dragon, and assassinating the president ends up not sitting with your character well. Cool! That's why you get to vote on outcomes.

What if everybody decides that killing Dunkhelzahn is a bad idea? Also cool! Proceed with play as planned. Maybe you'll fail, and you'll feel okay about that.

Maybe you'll accidentally succeed. Maybe someone else will succeed despite your best efforts.

This also plays into the themes of SR and cyberpunk in general. Characters can change. Characters can decide that what they're doing is wrong, but still be trapped into going along, at least at some level. Events are in motion and they can be at odds with the desires of other people in the group.

There are very few systems which allow for that kind of play. F is one.

End of the Road

Once you've done three challenges, the quest is over. You either succeeded or you failed.

F borrows one of my favorite kinds of mechanics, seen in both Fiasco and Happy Birthday, Robot! The idea of going around the table and narrating what the characters' experiences are like after the events that just happened. It's one of my favorite moments of those games because it lets you do one of those Coen brothers epilogues, jumping from character to character, seeing what kind of mess they got into or what kind of glory they've covered themselves in – or what their legacy might have become.

I find those really compelling experiences.

For SR, that's a great way to follow the characters and set up for your next run, if you want one. Maybe the character decides to hang up their guns and try to live a straight life. Maybe they go back to their wage slave days, dreaming about the summer as they spent on the street. Maybe it's just a moment of silent reflection over a corpse crumpled in an alley.

After that, this story is over.

Epilogue

We are not stuck with crappy mechanics for games, especially for games with amazing settings. There is a variety of mechanics available in the world, some of which are radically different in their assumptions than those which irritate us or frustrate us. They approach the problem of role-playing and conflict resolution from angles which may have never entered your mind.

Some settings really deserve that kind of mechanical infrastructure.

Shadowrun is definitely a game that deserves better than it's received, in a lot of ways. It's full of story-rich bits from cyberpunk, constant references to classic fantasy tropes, and amazing subversions of both of the above.

We should get to play those things. We should get to play with those things.

I think that Follow is a fine tool to allow us to do that. Give it a try. See what you think. If not for Shadowrun, for something – because I'm sure that you can find a use for a game like this in your life.

• Follow
• Google+ Community for Follow discussion
• Shadowrun
• The Shadowrun Wiki, for all your history-eating needs