NOW GAMEMASTERING IV

Murphy's laws

Throughout my numerous years of gamemastering Shadowrun (although I quite say, like Blackjack, that I've gmed for 4000 years) I've been searching ways to make my games more interesting. One of the most important "fun factor" of any game his the problems the characters have. I've found that players usually like to be in deep shit in games. A safe plane trip from Seattle to Tir Na Nog is boring, now if you add a couple of terrorists who want to hijack the plane it gets more interesting. The most fun games are often those which follow Murphy's laws, which can summed up by: "If it can go wrong, it will."

Don't leave a whole scene thrill-less, add something unexpected and bad in boring moments. If your players have the habit of trouble coming their way every time nothing of interest happens, then don't put anything, that'll freak them for sure. For example, the runners are doing legwork to find some information. If it gets boring (don't ruin a great roleplaying scene! I said boring, not slow) throw some shit to them: they can be attacked by the Halloweeners because they're on their turf, or at least asked to go away, they can have to dodge police officer, or anything else your devilish mind can come up with. Just be sure that if something can go wrong, it will.

The same can be used against carefully made plans (warning: don't overuse this, you don't want your players to stop making plans, enough of them don't already). If the players have made a plan for their run, but some aspect have been overlooked, make sure this aspect have a great impact on the run. Never, ever let a run go perfectly as planned, always have some random elements thrown in. That doesn't mean to make sure nothing in the plan works, but just that some aspect of it might not go on as planned. This is those random elements that make shadowrunning a thrilling experience.

Improvisation

To use Murphy's law efficiently you must improvise a lot. Using a written adventure cause problem for this, it's hard to do something different than written and still remain coherent. This is essentially the reason why I only write a quick synopsis of my games before playing, which usually doesn't even include the end (I can't usually be sure of the last part of the story, it always depends on how the players act) and take notes as I play.

This way, I can always change the story as I go along ("What I just read changed my mind, Ehran the scribe won't be a protagonist this time around") and I can make the npcs react lifelikely (is that a word?) to situations. Nothing is set in stone, everything evolves with what the players do, the story therefore is very nonlinear and make the players feel very important, they feel like they do affect the situation.

It is much easier to implement Murphy's laws in the game while improvising. Often, the shit that happens to the player affect the game as a whole, changing the situation, changing the perception the players have in front of the situation. Therefore, you must be willing to change some things as you go along. If you don't want, you just have a written adventure in your head, which ain't much better. For example: "Hmm, the players found out too fast that Harlequin was responsible for this. I'll change it so its actually Ryumyu who manipulated them into thinking that." By being adaptive, you can make your game better, after all don't forget that your playing to have fun and that you're making an interactive story, it isn't a novel which can't change.