Often times, while GMing, I get the feeling that I’m simply staying the execution of villainous NPCs by placing multiple roadblocks between the runners and the NPCs’ specific location. If the runners know that they have to kill Mr. Bad, they’re gonna try to get to Mr. Bad as quickly and easily as possible and, when they finally find him, they’re going to blow him away. And with good reason. After all, this was the goal set up by the GM. The runners are simply doing what they’re supposed to do.

But such quick kills; even if they’re delayed by henchmen, shifty contacts, or bad planning; make for very poor drama. A major downfall of the rules of Shadowrun, and many other role-playing games, is that they turn confrontation between a bad guy and good guy into a “Take him down before he takes me down” situation. There are 10,000 effective ways to kill someone in Shadowrun, and there are an equal number of ways to get yourself killed. Unfortunately, there are very few ways in which a bad guy and a good guy can meet, fight it out, and break away with NOBODY getting killed.

Most good movies which involve the forces of good pitting themselves against the forces of evil involve numerous close-calls, running battles, and partial defeats, while still giving the characters a chance to physically meet and do battle. In Shadowrun, we are usually forced to carry out these minor battles in the forms of skirmishes between the PCs and a wide array of NPCs working for the main bad guy. The runners usually don’t meet Mr. Bad until the very end, at which time either Mr. Bad bites the dust, or the runners do.

I’ve found that ability and skill balancing between PCs and NPCs does little good to help promote more dramatic confrontation. GMs can play with Mr. Bad’s stats and the rules governing autofire all they want, but at the moment of truth the person who rolls an 8 while firing his assault rifle full throttle is going to win the fight. While your Doom style players feel this is just grand, us less destructive (and often less annoying) players and gamemasters tend to like a little more drama.

Ditching all the rules and handling things through pure role-playing is one option but, as I and many other have found, it is often a rather effective catalyst for staring numerous arguments between the GM and players, resulting in violence in the real world as well as SR. Thus, it’s usually a good plan to hold onto the rules, no matter how flawed or detrimental to extended conflict they might be.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t play with them a little bit. During dramatic conflict (or any conflict for that matter) the modifier is the GM’s best friend in the world. By astronomically boosting target numbers you can create situations in which a lot of shots are fired and a lot of spells are tossed, but nobody actually hits anything, thus perpetuating the conflict. In my games I often go into ‘hi-mod’ mode, during which all modifiers, or often the target number themselves, are doubled. My players usually don’t have a problem with this, generally because high modifiers for them also means high modifiers for the NPCs. They know that if they can’t hit anybody, nobody can hit them. Generally, I don’t double modifiers or target number required to resist damage, adding another factor to the extension of the battle.

Using the “hi-mod” system allows for the creation of extended conflict not only because nobody gets hurt, but because the fight must often be broken off because the everybody runs out of ammo or fetishes. This also keeps the use of missile weaponry to a minimum, because nobody wants to fire a 1,000 nuyen APM that’s not going to hit anybody. In fact, sometimes an actual truce is called, and the fight is “scheduled” to continue next time everybody meets. Not that Mr. Bad is likely to stick around and wait.

While this system does much to extend conflict, the kill still goes to the person who gets a lucky roll, be it a target of 8 or a target of 18. In the next installment of Blackjack’s Corner (I promise it’ll be there), I’m going to discuss how self-sacrificing role-playing can add to the drama of conflict situations and elevate it above a rule based system of perpetuation. Stay tuned.