The Gaming Den

What the title says.

This task seems almost impossible. Not as impossible as, say, trying to end the blood war between orcs and elves, but pretty much.

For any of you who play games like Shadowrun or Paranoia, what would you do if the players expressed an interest not only in their characters being heroes but also expecting reasonable and permanent improvement throughout society as a whole as a result of their adventures?

Stage a coup, set up a 'temporary' military dictatorship, and contract your infrastructure to a Company. You'll be hailed as a hero, and things will just fall into place. Freedom, here we come!

Paranoia? The same thing you would do for any session: Kill them. Repeatedly.

I don't think it's all that hard. It just involves the PCs not killing anybody (rather easy using stunning attacks only) and attacking and exposing evil corporations. They probably also want to take a contact with some kind of media influence to put their stories in the news and spread word about what they're doing.

Then they look sort of like batman or spiderman.

The original rules assumed that this was your plan exactly. The basic structure of any run was something like:

1. Take job.
   
2. Upon investigation, discover the actions of evil doers.
   
3. Stop evil doers.
   
4. Spread the word.
   
5. Either get paid or not.

That's the setup for the Universal Brotherhood, that's the setup for Total Eclipse, that's the setup for Harlequin's Back, that's just how 1st and 2bd edition Shadowrun rolled. The villains varied (Insect Spirits! Vampires! Horror Constructs! Whatever!) but the song stayed the same.

3rd edition offered up the idea of just being a criminal if you wanted - someone who went around doing piracy and not getting caught. 4th edition is the first edition in which Insect Mages and Toxics are vaguely playable as PCs.

But you can still make the world a better place. Hell, you're interested in making the world a better place even if you're an Insect Mage (though you, get this, kill people sometimes!) You can either set it up where people have to make tough choices between Good and Evil, or you can just let people self finance for Good.

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Right now, I have two long running campaigns. One of them features completely evil and insane characters who draw the line only at things that would destroy entire cities. And even then, only some cities. One of the characters has a Bunraku that he keeps around for sex (she's a Latvian woman programmed to behave as a sexy Alice in Wonderland), another character has a plant in his room that he feeds people to sometimes. Nonetheless, when a group of vampires was trying to spread a biological warfare agent in the port of Hong Kong, they took time off to stop it on the grounds of "that's where I keep my stuff!"

But the other team are good guys. They run a medical clinic in a Sydney slum and go after corporations and monsters that prey on the weak. They took down a gang of marauding thugs who had a whole shipment of cor[porate military weaponry, they took down a man who was stealing antivirals from clinics for use in lycanthropy experiments, they took down a corporate black ops group that was killing university students in order to protect the whereabouts of their secret arms caches. And so on.

In 4th edition you can be good, bad, or ugly. Or some combination. Or be something more complicated where there are things you'll do and things you won't do and such.

-Username17