HeySeuss

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

Sigil Pub Crawl.

@Rin

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

I want to do a comedy crossover RP in the Free section, where you play as the very first character you ever wrote back when you were a 13 year old shithead on Neopets or whatever.

So in my case, my character would be me. Literally me. Used my name as his name and my face as his portrait. Except according to the bio I had purple eyes and telekinesis.

I'd love to see just how bad we all were when we first started participating in this retarded-ass hobby.

@pugbutter

Drizzt Do'Urden ripoff. :(

Discord and The Guild/RPing

I don't think Discord negatively impacts RP's. We still have RP's that fizzle out and that existed before Discord. It's easy to blame, but I honestly think realtime chat capability improves the community.

Player Criticisms; everyone's responsibility or just GMs?

My advice is basically to not be a dick. I think I'd like feedback if it wasn't dickish, even from other players and not just the GM. I know I have comma problems and feel like it'd be nice to have someone just tell me what is up from a readability standpoint. I think the worry with these sorts of conversations is that certain personality types relish the opportunity to make someone feel inferior, and that's a bad dynamic.

All the same, feedback is good. It's just that feedback cannot cross the line to where it's some sort of mechanism where the critic feels validated by the pedagogy. The person offering criticism should need/want to see the other person improve and see worth. If it's just some dude getting off on how awesome he is by handing down lessons to others, playing that sensei role from mom's basement, it's a shit dynamic.

I have no idea how to offer that criticism. It's not an easy conversation to have. I know when I've told someone that they are not up to the standard for an RP, I've felt all kinds of crappy for saying it out loud, but felt obligated to on behalf of my other players.

tl;dr: Critics should be humble as fuck.

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

I've stopped pitching ideas of my own for fear of not being able to follow through on them for a variety of reasons. It's like I have a really good idea, but execution is increasingly harder to do.

Shadowrun: Moldbylur

Outsider

---

The plane a suborb, not a semi-ballistic because those were spooky for the Awakened, but fast enough; four and a half hours in a cramped, supersonic jetliner with a cabin so narrow that it had two seats to each side of the aisle only.

A quick scan of the other passengers confirmed sararaiman types for the most part, and he'd dressed in a casual turtleneck and suit arrangement that was fashionable and made him blend right on in with the 'locals' who were engrossed in their augmented reality interfaces for the most part. Spreadsheet shit, probably, and one dude that should have gotten a subvocal mic implant as he talked business, though just about everyone had the means to tune him out thoroughly, except the stewards.

Chopsticks in a regulated breathing-heartbeat-muscle relaxation routine managed to make the time go by just fine. A cursory check of the astral showed a greater than usual number of awakened, but that was to be expected. Still, as far as he could tell, corp hermetic mage types or similar. The whine of the engines dulled in the astral, where the glows came up. There wasn't much spirit activity in a plane cabin, but there was a view below, through mist and energy, of the landscape on takeoff and during approach for landing.

Iceland had a very different look and feel to it, a new and unfamiliar vibe. He was sensitive to the rhythms of the land, even if he was no shaman, and the first footfall felt heavy. The trip to Reykjavik from Cheyenne was a straight shot; from the Sioux Council to the Trans Polar Aleut Nation. But while Reykjavik was part of the NAN, Iceland was its own cultural entity, and extremely alien. The Sioux passport got him through with a lighter scrutiny than outside the NAN, but it wasn't like they gave each other handsigns or whatever crap the vids portrayed it as. The customs agent was not blonde, but she was blue-eyed and definitely Nordic, and so were a lot of the others.

--

The last three days were spent in a small resort town soaking in things on Iceland like the hot baths; mud up to the neck and a little bit of booze, the devil drink was socially disapproved of in Cheyenne and the rest of Sioux lands. It wasn't merely an exercise in relaxation, but a good excuse to get a sense of the locals, the land and the really fucked up day-night cycle. It was cool to see the starry sky from geothermally-cooled pool and otherwise get bearings. He was treated like an outsider, but it wasn't so bad -- Frisco, when Saito ran the place, and even before, growing up, was fucking hostile, down to the Hell Night on Liberation Day, when the Chinese gangs sniped at Japanacorp personnel and the corps sent out security goons to collect metahuman ears.

The place looked nautical, which sort of reminded him of Frisco. University types, the usual Nordic bunch. But he didn't really stick out -- no feathers in the hair, no warpaint, and he went with a pair of jeans and a good, warm coat to keep the freeze out. He could pass for someone doing their postgrad here, a little older than some of the other students, but plausible. College bar, according to research pulled down from the grid, not some hardened runner joint. Chopsticks wasn't complaining about a daylight meeting in a fairly innocuous part of town with some university types.

He'd never gone, though both his parents had. It looked a bit like the Silicon valley his mom inhabited when she was alive, a place full of garage-hackers punching out software for the corps on contract, dangerous bleeding edge stuff. They partied, but not wildly and dangerously, because a lot of the local University types were on their way to employment...probably with S-K, the big one around here.

Through the years, he'd learned that wired reflexes could be installed with a switch to take them offline, and street sam that had that switch swore by it, because the alternative was to live constantly wired, a slave to your reflexes. Throwing people over things before you even realized you reacted, keeping the back to the wall to avoid being surprised into knee-jerk action. What he had wasn't the same way, but he'd all the same learned to appreciate the magical equivalent of learning to do that, to let it all go. So he sauntered in, rather than rolling with some sort of ethereal grace and stick out like a sore thumb; dangerous runners and college bars were incongruous.

A bunch of runners were meeting here, sure, but that didn't mean they had to stick out more than they already did.

So he ordered the local piss and had a seat near the street sam with a nod. They all had dossiers on each other, but that didn't tell the whole tale. The brutal scouring of humanity left him cold on the instinctive level. The dossier info was basic, but first eye contact was instructive, even as he forced a semi-friendly nod. He'd come minimally armed to this, because it was supposed to be a nice, civilized meeting, but he found himself wondering if he'd come underarmed. With corpsec types keeping an eye over the place and the local cops showing strong signs of S-K influence, he didn't want to push the envelope.

What Are You Listening To?

Because, fuck yeah, Al Green.

Shadowrun: Moldbylur

Also, as a thought, we should probably come up with contacts lists. Granted, Chen's contacts are on West Coast/Plains North America, but it might be useful to come up with a short and to the point template (three lines) to identify the contact and explain their use to the GM.

Shadowrun: Moldbylur

A dude that is really good at punching people.

@Tessaract

Gotta have at least one guy that does silent takedowns.

Shadowrun: Moldbylur

C H A R A C T E R S H E E T

---

_{Gordon Chen Good-Crow | 33 | Human (Amerind/Chinese)
"No artificial additives, omae!"}

Alias:

Chopsticks

Appearance:

Average height, average build, indeterminate ethnic-mix of a few different things. He blends in well enough in Seattle and can pass for Asian or Amerindian pretty easily either way. His clothing tends toward jeans and brown leather work boots, and a fringed brown leather jacket. As Amerindian chic is a look that draws little comment in Seattle, he manages to pass off as a Salish-Shidhe native among those that aren't astute enough to tell the difference, and those who are tend to be other natives who aren't going to tell others the difference. He wears his head in a messy shag that can easily be combed down into corporate respectability, and that's the thing with Chen Good-Crow; he likes to blend in.

Background:

A mixed-race physical adept born to a pair of Berkeley grad students who were both in the engineering and computer programming field, George was raised primarily by his mother in the Free State, who worked for Ares, one of the few non-Japanese Corps in the region. During his teenage years, his mother was fried by Black IC (it was wired matrix back then) and he moved in with his uncle Jiang. During this time, he managed to get into trouble, as a teenager, with the JIS occupation forces, spraypainting grafitti or something of that nature, and he was duly shipped off to his father, a Sioux government-employed programming and security expert in Cheyenne.

Despite being surrounded by very techy parents all his life, he was identified in Sioux nation as having awakened capabilities and he was raised in the ways of the Sioux, which embraced magic to a much greater degree than Japanese-Occupied Frisco ever would. As he grew older, as was the case with any Sioux citizen upon turning 18, he was inducted into the Sioux Defense Force. As a physical adept, once his capabilities were assessed and tested, he volunteered to serve in the Wildcats, the Sioux Nation's special operations unit and border patrol, a unit highly different from its peers in that it integrated shamanistic magic into its arsenal and concentrated on asymmetric warfare methods, particularly as the Native American Nations, which the Sioux were a part of, was surrounded by larger, dangerous neighbors with more developed economies. Platoons of Wildcats operated in a variety of places doing a variety of jobs, particularly during the events surrounding Crash 2.0 in 2064. He doesn't discuss this. It's not common knowledge in the runner community. Braggers tend to be floaters.

Years later, Chen Good-Crow returned to Frisco, after serving his stint, and became involved in the runner world when he hooked up with some of his old buddies from Chinatown. He went SINless and he was part of a team, working for, largely, the Triads. Their last run was a setup; they were being paid to extract a specific person by another corp, but that specific person turned out to be a plant that Mitsuhama was trying to put into Telestrian Industries, whom the team was employed by. While the run was successful, the Mitsuhama agent made things very uncomfortable for Chopsticks' team as they were suspected as complicit in the plot that was primarily the doing of the Johnson, whose family was held by Mitsuhama, and the Telestrian exec that the Johnson conned, who was trying to tie up the loose ends. The team was put into a position of having to bring down JIS heat on them while clearing themselves of the setup; the upshot of it was that they were a little too high-profile to keep working in the Bay Area as they were on the radar.

As General Saito's regime, the California Protectorate, was collapsing, he got involved in work outside of Frisco itself that still required good 'community' connections with both ends of the pipeline. He spent much of 2068-69 doing runs on behalf of elements in the NAN moving weapons and tech from Pueblo territory into Triad hands in Cali, though he avoided the city directly. He suspected an Ares connection, but never dug too deeply -- the pay was good -- and he never asked the Triads what they were going to do with the weapons, even though he damn well knew there was a war between the Triads and the Yakuza in Frisco and LA. Occasionally, some more direct action type operations happened, as well as snatch and grabs. The pay was right and he took it, using his ratlines into the Free States to ship people out -- they were either looking to get out of the Free State or another corp was looking to take advantage of the chaos to take talent from the Japan Corps. Out of a sense of national pride, he didn't feel comfortable working with the Japanese, despite approaches.

When the dust settled, with the heat on a little too heavy for him in Cali, he decided it was time to disappear into Salish-Shidhe lands for a quiet year, letting the heat die down while taking small jobs. All the same, he was contacted there by a Johnson that wanted him to work in Seattle, and is working to put together a team of runners that can carry out this sort of work.

Skills:

As a physical adept, Chopsticks isn't easy to see coming. His reflexes aren't cybered, but he can react in the too-fast ways of some adepts. He doesn't have augments for spurs or something like a street sam, he's able to hit hard, and he is particularly good at counterattacks. His hand to hand is 'elevated' and he is a believer in the element of surprise. He can see in the Astral and engage threats there physically, but is perfectly adept with a firearm. A Street Sam with the right mods is going to be faster and stronger, but not nearly so discreet as Chopsticks can be. As he likes to put it, "No artificial additives, omae!" Unlike a samurai, people don't see him coming. He's not tottering around scanning things and singing "If I only had a heart!"

He speaks Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Lakota in addition to English. Native Japanese tend to get a snotty attitude about his accent though. Too Bay-Area. Most of his experience as a runner is in courier work and extractions of corporate personnel, a sort of forced career move of researchers and other useful personnel assets.

Beyond that, not that he advertises, he was a Wildcat, he's run with some of the toughest hombres in the North American special operations community and holds his own. They're rough, they're tumble, they're not Red Samurai -- chrome out the yingyang is not the Sioux way. Push comes to shove, he's a warrior to the bone and a damn fine shot that doesn't -need- to rely on a smartlink.

Also, he is a really good snowboarder. You never know when that might come up.

Equipment:

- Ares/Colt M1911A1 reproduction with custom work done to it. It's a popular gun out West, so Ares still makes them, albeit with modern materials and modern-velocity loads.
- PDA
- Earpiece for the phone.
- Display for the PDA in his glasses.
- Pretty nondescript street wear, some very discreet body armor.
- Custom fighting knife, made to spec. Weight, grip, blade length and shape all custom.
- Shock gloves.
- Basic fake SIN for "Michael Clear-Skies" of the Salish that gets him around in the most basic fashion. It won't hold up to a deep check.
- Sig M230 (SiG License version of the M23 Colt). Includes a SOPMOD kit, along with Daniel Defense (Ares Subsidiary) RIS and modified adjustable stock. Shadowland may claim M23's are cheap ganger stuff, but what do a bunch of deckers really know about firepower? For when the shit hits the fan.
- Similarly, a multicam plate carrier with various attachments for a SHTF scenario, because it's kind of obvious tactical gear, and even if runners make it chic he avoids. Even in a high intensity situation, he still generally wears a t-shirt and jeans with the web gear.

General Nonsense:

Chen is new to New Reykjavik but has a basically good reputation in the shadows. His biography is not just out there for the reading. He doesn't take jobs with the Japan corps and stays away from wetwork and anything that smells too funny. Wildcats, current and former, tend to shut the hell up about their unit by tradition.

Notable event: While snowboarding and smoking weed near Mt. Shasta, Chopsticks and a Frisco buddy ran into Hestaby, who was very taken with the homemade snowboards. She wasn't wearing a nametag or anything in human form, but it's still a cool story. Few are the people who have snowboarded with a Great Dragon. Or at least, that's what he claims.