Writing rules

From Shadowrun: Awakened

There are certain restrictions we must adhere to in order to ensure continuity and adherence to canon when writing material for Shadowrun Awakened. Also, these rules provide a basis for our collaboration, allowing everyone to express their individual characters, missions, and campaigns while never disrupting the universe at large.

For the most part, these rules exist to help people when writing missions and campaigns to understand where they can and can't go in their narratives. They reflect both technical constraints and stylistic choices based on our mission statements.

Rules for Character

Characters are the most important resource of any universe. We could have spectacular action in an expansive world and it would mean very little if we were lacking compelling characters. These rules are applied to non-player characters created by the SRA content team.

What is a Minor NPC?

Minor NPCs range from innocent bystanders, to security guards, to soft-spoken shop owners in the shadows. The important distinction of minor NPCs in a dramatic sense is that they never form relationships with player characters. A minor NPC may be able to engage in conversation or combat with a PC, they may buy or sell to a PC, but they never truly remember them.

A minor NPC may only act based on the character's: reputation, street cred, charisma, race, and other innate qualities. On a low level, this basically means that the minor NPC can look at all of the PC's character sheet, but there will never be extra data stored for them in a database at any time. Minor NPCs can be directed by scripting just like any other character, so they may exhibit some unique behavior versus other NPCs; however, that behavior is not based on a relationship.

Examples of a minor NPC might be:

• The ordinary joe walking down the street. You might glance at his face walking down the road, but you two have never seen each other before and will never see each other again.
• A nameless, faceless security guard. He/she may attack your character, but they do not do so because they know who your character is, they do so because they have been set to guard somewhere and you are not in their faction.
• A generic purveyor of illegal merchandise at somewhat well known gun shop. Your character may negotiate with him over deals, but they will not remember your character's last transaction because they have too many customers.

What is a Major NPC?

A major NPC varies from a contact, to an enemy, to someone you have to kidnap, to someone you have to assassinate. Major NPCs are different from minor NPCs in that they can form connection with PCs.

A Major NPC may draw upon all innate qualities of a character (reputation, race, etc), but can also maintain other information outside of that creating a history of their interactions. On a technical level, that means that a Major NPC is capable of looking at a character's specific mission results (reacting based on how the last mission turned out when assigning you the next one, etc) and may store information on a character's mission or campaign data that they can recall later to simulate a persistence of their memory of a PC and their actions.

Examples of major NPCs might be:

• All of a PC's contacts and enemies. Each of them has a relationship with your character and access to a place to store that relationships data. They will remember when you are kind or spiteful and they will react based on your total progress in the world.
• Mr. Johnson. The character who hires you for many runs over the course of a campaign will undoubtedly make decisions based on your performance.
• Main actors in a campaign or storyline, while they may not necessarily examine your mission performance, should build relationships with the PC over time.

What is a unique NPC?

All of your NPCs are, in a sense, "unique" in that you don't want more than one name, face, and set of qualities walking around out there; however, this category covers the "celebrities" of Shadowrun. While they are not all well known or rich within the universe, players will likely react to them differently. They should be used very frugally and should be well developed on their own.

Technically, there is no reason why a unique NPC cannot be major or minor. Maybe there is a secret area where Harlequinn hangs out an hour a day and will converse with the players simply to add universe flavor (a minor NPC as unique). Maybe one of the recurring characters in a campaign is Damien Knight (owner of Ares) and the penultimate showdown happens in his presence during which he explains he's been watching the player the entire time, recounting details from earlier in the campaign (a major NPC as unique).

Unique NPCs are a classification largely for the universe creator. You should have some NPCs about which a player can proudly comment "hey, I met ____ and he was just like I imagined". It is up to the creator how to use them.

Creating a Character

When creating a character in SRA, there are a few practical concerns in letting them into the universe.

Economy

In the case of creating a character who buys and sells things or otherwise participates in the economy, we need to ensure that any input, output, or exchange mechanism in the economy is well thought out and unified in its approach. Thus, if a story requires a character who performs some economic function, we may or may not need to create a permanent location for them to inhabit. Each character meant to perform a persistent economic function (buying or selling) must be tracked and the entire content team really has a stake in the character's inclusion or exclusion. Exploiters will be looking to make resources or transform them to skew the economy, characters participating in such functions must be monitored carefully.

Distinctiveness

Probably the greatest concern amongst making characters is ensuring distinctiveness amongst characters. The writer must decide if each character is rather interchangeable and disposable or if the character really needs to be unique. This attention to unique qualities goes for both minor and major NPCs since there can be many Johnsons (major NPC) who are sleazy, untrustworthy, vaguely corporate human males. However, we can really only have one parapalegic, male dwarven mechanic who specializes in buying and selling drones (minor NPC).

To track "Distinctive characters" (IE, a character who represents a unique idea that other writes should not trample over), we will devise some sort of persistent tracking mechanism. This collection of characters will expand as the universe grows and it will be challenging to maintain a proper record as time goes on; however, bookkeeping of characters will ultimately ensure quality amongst our expansive cast.

Rules for Open Play

When a PC is not on a particular mission and just out in the world of SRA, that is called "Open Play". During open play, the character may still participate in the world and interact with characters; however, the writing format for scenarios for the player shifts somewhat. The activities and challenges must be more generic and less structured than play during missions.

What Can a Player do during Open Play?

Open Play activities should be low-risk and short-duration. Obviously, the character can still be harmed or killed during this time, but generally open play activities should not see the character clashing with dangerous foes in enemy territory such as what happens in missions. Also, open play activities could be unrelated to the Shadows and just something the players can do to occupy themselves, perhaps even venturing into the realm of "mini-game" type play.

Some examples of Open Play activities might be:

• Chip BTLs, pop drugs, and hire joygirls (too obvious? GTA steal the franchise?)
• Parasailing around Puget Sound
• Street Racing for money against the usual brand of urban speed junkies
• Running a quick and dirty hack for some paydata a buddy wants
• Helping a friend with ritual sorcery
• Playing a game of wet-wired fast-draw at the cyber-western themed bar
• Hustling pool games in the billiard's parlor

Some may say that "item creation" or "training" could be open play activities. In many MMOGs they are something that players to entertain themselves; however, the the sleeping mechanic really takes care of activities such as this. Open Play activities require a certain player interaction, anything covered by sleeping is therefore not an Open Play activity.

What can a character get from doing Open Play?

Open Play activities are low risk; therefore, they should not offer very much monetary reward, should rarely offer karma rewards, and should never offer social rewards (no increases in contacts, enemies, street cred, or reputation). The player generally turns to open play when they want something "quick and fun" (5-20 minutes) and they are not necessarily looking for rewards (if they want the big bucks or lots of karma, go do a big mission or campaign). On the up-side, Open Play should almost never adversely affect reputation or street cred.

Rules for Missions

A mission is a single set of logically connected objectives that a PC or group of PCs undertakes for a single reason. This mission's goals may change over the course of the mission and there may be plot twists and turns; however, it should function, more or less, a discrete unit of play time that provides a satisfying session of challenges. A summary of basic Shadowrun missions is contained in the Writing the Classic Run article.

What Kinds Of Missions Are There?

There are two types of missions: major and minor. A Major mission is a mission in a campaign that is used by the campaign to adjudicate further progress. These are missions that offer decisions in the campaign and/or missions that can affect the player's total performance in the campaign if the mission succeeds or fails. A Minor mission is a mission in a campaign or a standalone mission outside of a campaign (one-shot) that cannot have adverse effects or true repercussions if a character fails. Major missions offer sizable rewards, minor missions offer some rewards.

The categories are meant to offer a differing level of return in the game. They allow casual players to have all the same choices in a campaign as a hardcore player, but without requiring them to play through nearly as much content. This restriction on the total number of missions and diminishing rewards for numerous missions is meant to limit the ability for players to "grind". Keep in mind, that characters are supposed to have limited stamina in the game and an in-game day is only going to be 6 hours (so even if the player wants to play 12 hours, the character cannot). The primary incentive in our game is to play content that encourages development of the player character, not power acquisition by the character.

Take an example of an average playing logging in for a play session. At the start of a play session, they should generally be in a campaign, starting a campaign, or looking for a good one-shot mission. To start, we would offer the player or the player would find, a major mission that would offer a good reward and potentially have effect on their campaign. The player would play this mission to completion (win or lose). At this point, satisfied at a single accomplishment, a casual player would probably log off. However, hardcore players, with more time they want to invest, will want to do more in the game. To satisfy them, we could then offer them one minor missions to play (which would be equal time, but less reward). After that point we would not offer any more missions for that session. At this point in the session, the player has probably been playing for 2-3 hours and only a certain percentage of the community will really be wanting to play that long. So, we have to force a certain amount of diminishing returns on the player, unless we will be giving ground to power-driven play. Thus, the player can only engage in "Open Play" activities that offer very little reward and virtually no karma.

How Long Should a Mission Be?

Missions times should vary from 30 minutes to 4 hours, with a tendency toward 60-90 minutes. Given the nature of major and minor missions, it creates a situation where the expected time of a major missions would ideally be exactly as long as the average casual session. By extension, the running time of a major mission plus minor mission should be exactly as long an average hardcore session. Naturally, the necessities of the story override any other concerns about time.

The first thing one should realize when they read "30 minutes to 4 hours" in the above text is that a mission in SRA is meant to deliver a longer and more varied experience than most quests in other MMOGs. Making 60 solid minutes of gameplay that include elements of driving, stealth, action, puzzle-solving, and socializing is actually a very hard task. A mission in Shadowrun will generally not be as simple as breaking in and stealing the McGuffin. There will often be information gathering and planning. There will be development of NPC characters. Inevitably, complications will be brought on by opposing factions and intervening circumstances. All the while, these challenges must be met out across the physical, virtual, and astral terrains of our world.

How do we keep missions fresh?

Just as with characters, there is a certain amount of effort the content team must put forth in order to keep the missions distinct. The key to keeping the audience interested in both cases is to "never do the same trick twice". In this case, we should never have a mission that causes the players to do the same thing twice; otherwise, it will feel stale.

In order to keep the missions distinct, we need to ensure that the content team keeps up on each other's plans and create a central repository for mission concepts. Now, this will be difficult for missions since there are far more dimensions on a mission than can be conveyed in an easy 1 sentence description, such as with characters. However, if the content team cannot manage such complexity, we will inevitably end up with repetitious feeling missions.

Rules for Campaigns

Campaigns are connected series of missions that offer varied paths through them based on performance and decisions made by the player. Campaigns are generally carried out in order to increase and/or decrease your reputation with various factions. As a character advances in the campaigns of a given faction, that faction will provide more and more of an identity for that character. Ultimately, we wish to express this identity by allowing the character to "join" the faction in some official capacity.

Rules for World Events

World Events in Shadowrun, in the way that they will be used in our game, are things that happen (either instantly or continuously) that shape the possible conflicts in the universe. They are generally not something you observe (IE, they are not the same as world events in WOW), but they are something that affect the world and creates opportunities for conflict. Both FASA and FanPro made a habit of creating world events by releasing supplemental sourcebooks detailing them.

Here are examples of "World Events" in Shadowrun that have happened thus far:

• Super Tuesday/Portfolio of a Dragon - The death of Big D, and the opportunities that followed. This really set the framework for all subsequent world event books.
• Renraku Arcology Shutdown - Description of Deus' takeover of the Renraku Arcology in Seattle
• Year of the Comet - The coming of Haley's Comet, Ghostwalker, SURGE, and the drek-storm that follows
• System Failure - The matrix crash due to AI shenanigans and the creation of Matrix 2.0

Why should we do World Events?

This is really held in one of the mission statements of the project:

• Capture the dark, nihilistic tone of Shadowrun
  • While having a sense of humor about it (as Shadowrun does)
  • Be faithful to the established fiction of Shadowrun while still telling our own
  • Tell stories inside of its framework

Nowhere do we need to pay more attention to this than right here while plotting world events. On the one hand, we want to do something because we want SRA to take on its own life, building on established fiction; this pushes us toward making our own set of world events. On the other hand, Shadowrun is still living and changing, we we will always have a backlog of ideas we could use just based on the current state of the universe; this pushes us toward leaving the world as it is and just making the most of it. In the end, it will really depend on what practical avenues creating a world event provides versus how many avenues it closes off and how much changing things "keeps the game Shadowrun".

Our current resolution is that we will introduce new and unexpected characters and conflicts into the game, building on presented material, and expanding in our own direction in a fashion similar to current world events. This direction will still leave the possibilities open for including foreseeable future Shadowrun sourcebooks and will provide original content even for long-time players.

What should we NOT do for world events?

There are certain limits to what we can do with our events, more limited than what say FanPro could really do. It is important that the scope of conflict in the game be limited to that the players can affect and experience. We still have myriad possibilities, there are just some things it would be best if we did NOT do:

• Permanently redraw national borders.
• Permanently destroy a Big 10 megacorp.
• Permanently create megacorp with the same power level as a Big 10.
• Threaten the safety of the entire world, Matrix, or astral space in an explicit and drawn-out manner (IE, if the threat to the world is being resolved by Shadowrunners, then it will be unrealistic; however, if it is not possible to be resolved by Shadowrunners it becomes inconsequential to the actions of the players. Thus, there is little justification in threatening the entire world/matrix/astral space).
• Permanently create technology far beyond the capabilities of current technology simply to "up the ante" or expand player capabilities in the game beyond current limits (IE, creating a super laser as a plot device could be alright if it were destroyed in the end; however, creating Wired Reflexes 4 just to give players a new level of play is right out).