Soon I will make a post about my actual life...

[roflcopter_down]

My GM has found the achiles heel of my character. It's really simple, too. Close quarters combat. For those not in the know, my character is an archer. Archery doesn't really happen in tight, cramped spaces. If he doesn't have enough room to draw he can't shoot. So my GM has lately been putting lots of close quarter combat into the game. Of course, he's not doing it out of cheesey evil GM rage, though it's fun to accuse him of that. It's just that fights break out in the damndest places. Locker rooms, hotel staircases, that kind of thing.

I honestly don't mind. It forces me to think creatively about a situation, and I've actually had to make my character buy a gun (OMG!). This is what happens when you minmax a character so terribly that you start taking down helicopters that the GM specifically placed there to make you think twice about starting some shit. I don't know. It was flying low and I had an arrow handy. On a related note, I think Rob is going to make it so my character can't buy any more white phosphorous arrows. Oh well. I can improvise. Honestly, it's fun to just have a challenge with this character. My character basically has the cyberpunk equivalent of Batman's utility belt. That reminds me, I need to stock up on shark repellent arrows.

I think the one complaint I have about Shadowrun is that my character keeps getting lit up in the pre-fight foreplay just before initiative. Last night there was a really big fight that my character was dying for the entire duration of because he got tagged by a coked-up Romanian with an AK-97 full of armor piercing ammo. Since my character is the quiet combat guy, not the brick house combat guy, this left my character about to die but not in the worst condition so our healer went to the technomancer first. I sat that entire fight out, which was pretty disappointing. This is the second huge fight I've missed in this run, and one that was significantly plot important. I wanted in on this one. There's always the next one, hopefully. At least I got to do some stuff after the fight, like figure out how to finish off the rest of the guys. I'm still a little peeved that I couldn't figure out how to level the building with the severely limited supplies I had.

And please, don't think that my Shadowrun game is all about combat just because that's what I'm focusing on. That's just what my character is about. I designed this character to be a combat freak. I think there's a very big fallacy that states that games with a heavy combat element lack plot. This is an especially prevalent opinion of many people who prefer a politics based game like Vampire. People feel that combat and politics are mutually exclusive, but if the news has shown us anything it's that they are often inseperable. Our game is about a 300 year old family feud wrapped up in a crime syndicate that stretches from Seattle to Ukraine. There are few things more political than feuds among the Vory. We view it through the eyes of hired muscle who does the dirty work of the man who pays us, and some of that dirty work involves fighting. The action is crazy, almost ultraviolent, but done in a way that is closer to a Quinten Tarrantino movie than anything else. It never takes precedence over a convoluted mash of moral and political gray areas that our characters have to face. While it sometimes is equally important to the plot, it never overpowers it. Most often, a fight will create more plot.

Comments

[sethimothy.livejournal.com]

Shadowrun is fun times. And it's great you have a GM that, for better or worse, is willing to challenge you.

[roflcopter-down.livejournal.com]

This guy has been running a Shadowrun game for almost 20 years, so he knows what he's doing. I'm not the first munchkin he's come up against, that's for sure.

[katimus-prime.livejournal.com]

YAY, CHALLENGED!
PS, is an AK-97 a future AK-47?

[roflcopter-down.livejournal.com]

Yes! It is sometimes called the A.K.A.-47, because every picture of it in the Shadowrun books looks just like an AK-47 in spite of the text saying that it's TOTALLY FUTURISTIC, GUYS!

And indeed! Challenge is awesome! I'm still disappointed in myself because I couldn't figure out a way to level the building with that I had. I may have to re-evaluate myself as a psychotic criminal mastermind.