Active and Passive Challenges

Once the party was in-mission, I had relatively little hard-and-fast laid out. I had notes on where particularly plot-important things were, and notes on what was in the weapons locker, but the entire basis for the mission was for them to get into the computer core and pillage it for all the could. I took a lot of queues for the challenges they would encounter from the table talk -- every time they thought of something the opposition (in this case, TerraSec) might do, I mentally evaluated the concept with my advanced knowledge of the situation in mind, and decided if that was something I wanted to throw at them. There are generally two ways players overcome difficulties they plan for: passively, and actively.

When players passively overcome an issue, they planned ahead in such a way that it never comes up. In this example, they needed to get past the front desk guard. Their solution was to fake a communications disruption, and show up as scheduled to fix it. By doing this, there would be no suspicion of ill-intent on the part of the guard -- TerraSec called for a technician, a technician showed up. Everything is proceeding as TerraSec expects, so there's no call for closer examination. In this way, the players just breeze through the checkpoint. This is easy to integrate into the session for the GM: even if I hadn't already considered this encounter (I had, for the record), I could run it simply by describing more or less the best-case scenario the players had envisioned. That's exactly the way it went down in this game; they entered, the guard was expecting them, and let them in, handing them off to an officer to escort them.

When players actively overcome an issue, they use equipment or a skill check to get past their problems. This was the case later, when Simon and David made it to the computer room, they started poking around, but they had a guard watching over them. Simon tried to access Alexei's criminal record while they were in the system, and he decided to try to act as if he needed to see that to fix the issue. We decided it was an Acting check, and he made an Opposed Skill Check against Officer Westinghouse, their faithful escort. Simon failed, but not badly, so he was able to pass the access off as a mistake on his part and continue.

At this point, the party's primary plan had failed -- they were being watched as they worked. Simon switched over to more authentic-looking comms maintenance, while the party initiated part B -- Shin. Morgan tends to play his cards close to his chest, so all I knew when he started was that he was going to create a distraction. He accomplished this by entering the station and proclaiming the Word of Blake loud and long to the front desk officer, making a nuisance of himself enough to get himself thrown in the drunk tank. Morgan did a marvelous job acting out the part, so I rewarded him with the other officers coming to grab Officer Westinghouse to come watch the proverbial monkey jump around his cage for a few minutes. That gave Simon and David the time they needed and made Morgan feel like he accomplished the mission.

Simon, having grabbed all the information he needed, sent the all-clear signal to his jamming setup, "fixing" the problem. Then he rebooted the servers before heading out, and to make the fix seem more authentic for the now-returned escort and oversight officer. I felt that this mission had gone a bit too well at this point, so I winged a new obstacle -- when the system was turned back on, it failed to start. Simon was worried at this point, and Officer Westinghouse started making sounds about Quality-of-Service and contractual obligations on the part of Simon's employer (who, of course, didn't actually employ Simon, but the officer didn't know that and Simon had to maintain the illusion lest the actual communications support firm found out.) A few moments later, Simon and David made a Technican/Electronics check to establish what went wrong, and discovered that four different substations of the security system around the building had to be reset simultaneously.

I admit, this was extremely arbitrary and doesn't stand up well to close examination, but my goal was to get Alex and Clark, who had been sitting in the truck the whole mission, inside and doing something. They donned coveralls and came in, and the party fairly trivially solved the four-people-push-four-buttons problem. It did allow Alex private access to the conceal body armor, of which he concealed and wore a set out of the building. It also got David into the Chief's office, where I had a few letters from other members of TerraSec with information about David Alsace and his family's death during Case White, to help set him up as the ultimate baddy of TerraSec to the party. All this done, the party exfiltrated without incident. Shin was released in the morning, no charged having been filed against him.

The takeaway lesson from this session is that with only a loose and easy mission, you can fill in the gaps with the challenges the players anticipate, which both gives you a chance to pad the mission with tense moments, as well as make the players feel their planning efforts were not wasted. Passive solutions offer a moment when the players are waiting to see if they read the challenge correctly, while Active solutions can burn party resources, and tell you immediately whether the party successfully disarmed the situation they were trying to avoid. By only using the most direct path to success as plan, you can fill out the session by reflecting the players expectations back to them, ensuring that they get a sense of accomplishment from the adventure.

Of course, there's something to be said for the "Surprise!" factor, but that discussion will have to wait for another session.