This Vtuber Does Not Exist: Conclusions

Conclusion to the campaign retrospective

This is a final post in a series of three posts giving a retrospective for a Shadowrun campaign I have run around 2020. This post will summarize the lessons I have learned in this campaign, and my conclusions for the future.

As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary, and if you are looking for other posts, check out the blog map.

1. What went right

Let’s start with things that worked.

First of all, I really liked the campaign. After I got into the groove, preparing for the sessions was completely stress-free, and I immensely enjoyed the creative solutions players came up with, as well as the trolling they engaged in later in the game. World of Shadowrun was also very detailed, interesting to read about, and easy to run.

On the GMing side, this campaign helped solidify my thoughts on techniques like Just In Time plot compilation or Reductionist Magic. I also tested out some minor tricks, like using small paragraph-long newspaper articles for regular info dumps to the players about events that are happening in the world. Overall, this was very educational.

I really enjoyed the numerous phase transitions players had undergone in the campaign; I don’t think I’ve ever seen another campaign with this many. Seeing many of the AI-specific things (such as a rapid takeoff in power, or a D-SEA attack) was also very enjoyable.

On the organizational side, I was pretty satisfied with my discord bot solution. It didn’t end up working as well as I hoped (due to my laziness and google API being weird), but it worked well enough.

When it came to mechanics, I was told that AI are busted in Shadowrun before starting the campaign. I can now confirm this: they are in fact busted. Partly this was due to campaign-specific mechanics, but partly this is just inherent to Shadowrun rules. If you are going to run AIs in Shadowrun and you are afraid of a high-power game, beware.

Finally, it stands mentioning that this campaign actually concluded: a lot of games in TTRPG spaces never get to this point.

2. What went wrong

You may have noticed that I have been referring to the players simply as “players” without using names. There is a reason for this.

Because all of the characters were stuck in the same body, and were driven completely out of their element by the inciting incident of the campaign, they never really solidified into distinct personalities. This was further exacerbated by the skill sets of several characters remaining largely or completely unused. Because of how programming dominated the solutions to most problems, characters who didn’t at least partly spec into that field felt useless. This has led to several people leaving the group, though no hard feelings were had. I consider my failure to foresee this and plan around it to be the biggest failure of the campaign. 

A related failure was that roleplaying was relatively absent throughout the campaign, up until the last stretch where players adopted a personality of a wise old elder. Because I don’t care that much about roleplaying, I didn’t see it as an enormous loss.

A third adjacent problem here was that the time I have spent reading up on combat rules for Shadowrun was largely wasted, because every possible combat encounter was either avoided, or involved overwhelming force on the part of the players; in such situations, there is little need for detailed rules, because one side wins regardless. I was looking forward to running combat encounters in a system which pays attention to sensor ranges and explosives more than other systems - this, sadly, didn’t end up happening.

Newspaper articles were a great tool for infodumping and for making the world feel alive; I fully recommend them to any other GM. However, they also ended up being a chore, so I stopped writing them. This was primarily because I decided to write three of them per in-game week, and coming up with three different things to happen was very straining. Some kind of system of random generators might help here, or just deciding to only write about major events, or at less frequent intervals. A similar issue happened with the session summaries.

Trying to handle competent spell research without having a good idea for what magic can do was definitely a bad idea. This is bound to be a somewhat niche problem, because most characters in other games probably won’t be able to do novel spell research. If they will, then they likely won’t be able to achieve results far beyond what was previously possible. Nonetheless, the Reductionist Magic sequence is my attempt at dealing with this problem.

Overall, this campaign was a great teaching moment for me, and I hope some of the things I talked about here may be useful to other people. If you are looking for other posts on my blog, check out this list of all other posts.

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