Take the Challenge – Say Yes

Picture the scene. You’re a street samurai on a run against a Knight Errant compound, wired to the gills: dermal plating, reflexes that make bullets look lazy, a grapple gun on your wrist, and a cyber-stomach that can digest a Stuffer Shack soy-dog without complaint. The rent-a-cops in the yard? You’re squashing them like bugs.

Then the team takes fire from every direction, including a heavy weapons team on top of the guard tower (okay, that hurts). So you sprint inside the tower’s base, slap a breaching charge on the main support, and set it to blow at the end of your next turn. Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Except right then, a wave of security floods the ground floor and boxes you in. What do you do?

Sure, you could shoot your way out. Or you could ask your GM if you can fire your grapple gun straight up the stairwell, ride the line to the roof as the charge goes off, plow through the weapons team, and leap off the crumbling tower onto your rigger’s passing rotodrone. You’d be dangling fifty meters over the compound, the tower collapsing beneath you, looking like the Angel of Mother-Effing Destruction.

I don’t care who you are, that’s cool. The rules might not cover it exactly. So what? Here’s how a GM ruins it:

• “No.”
• “Hang on, let me check the rulebook.”
• “Okay, roll Athletics with a threshold of 5, then Perception, then resist the blast, then another Athletics test for the jump.”

Really?

Here’s how you handle it as the GM: “Abso-frakking-lutely. Roll Body to see how banged up you get on the way through.” That’s it. Now the whole table is talking about that run for years.

You’ve probably read articles telling GMs to just say yes. Maybe you agree, maybe not. All I can say is that the game is more fun for most tables when the GM looks for a way to say yes. I’m not saying cater to the players at the expense of balance or story. I’m saying story trumps mechanics in any roleplaying game.

Wargaming is a different beast. When you’re playing BattleTech, mechanics are the whole point, so play them like there’s no tomorrow. But a roleplaying game is the GM telling a story with the players weaving their runners’ stories into it. When a player asks for something the rules (or the GM) aren’t ready for, find a way to make it happen. And remember that failure doesn’t have to mean a dead end. A missed roll or a glitch can just mean the plan gets messier: the runner still reaches the roof, but now they’re bleeding, out of ammo, and someone saw their face.

Players, This Part Is for You

When the GM throws something at your runner that feels unfair, don’t always fight it. Chances are they’re doing it for the story.

Go ahead and give your runner a kid, a sister in the Barrens, or a fixer they’d take a bullet for. Yes, that person will get snatched by a corp extraction team someday. It’s a cliché, but it beats another runner with no friends, no family, and no reason to care. Take the hook. Or maybe the GM wants your runner under a Control Actions spell for a scene, no roll, because it makes the story hit harder. Trust them on it. (GMs, a quick heads-up to the player beforehand goes a long way.)

Saying yes makes the game run smoother, cuts out the rules arguments, and makes everyone, GM and players alike, want to come back next session. Take the challenge.