From:	Ben Hayes bjh10@***.edu.au
Subject:	SR Narrowing of focus
Date:	Wed, 18 Aug 1999 17:33:06 +1000

Thought I'd mentioned something that happened in our campaign a couple
of weeks ago. I think it was possibly the best atmosphere I've ever had
in my short roleplaying experience.

One of our runners(who always wishes to remain nameless but rarely
succeeds) is the son of a Shiawase exec, slumming it. He is somewhat
naive and roleplay's this to a tee(his pocket secretary's note to self
shadowrunning tips were up to 47 when we stopped counting). A couple of
months ago, he decided to plan and throw a large gala ball type affair,
inviting many VIP's. After planning this for a couple of months in both
real and game time, we actually had the ball a couple of weeks ago. It
ended up costing this character and the one he managed to con into
co-hosting and going halvies with him about 40K nuyen each, however, the
whole party got to go and mingle and hobnob with the bigwigs for the
night. My character, who hadn't yet met the team at that point went as
someone's bodyguard/date(hey he has Ballroom Dancing 4), and spent much
of the time handing out business cards for his Muay Thai dojo to anyone
who would take one. Most of the characters had little idea how to act in
such company, but it was fun watching their attempts. Particularly the
Sam in the group, who found out about the social penalties for obvious
cyberware.

The point I'm trying to make here is that all this atmosphere was made
by the players and GM of our group.

I'm not naive enough to say that atmosphere in various sourcebooks is
crap blah blah blah, but I certainly feel that the best atmosphere has
to come from the players. If all the PC's want to do is fight(a problem
I have with one of the characters in the group I GM), then it can be
difficult to get them to do anything else. All I want FASA to provide in
terms of atmosphere is the sort of background level stuff they put in
the sourcebooks, because if I'm not feeling creative enough to conjure
up my own images and atmosphere, I'm probably better off not playing.