Making A Job On The Fly

As of the time of this writing my most recent Shadowrun session has just ended within the past thirty minutes. An interesting thing happened during the game too. See, when we came into the game everything was in an odd spot with the group having just done a couple of dangerous high profile jobs and were looking to lay low for a bit. However, down time isn't very good for filling a session and so quick enough we ended up with the group looking for more work. Sadly, I didn't have anything prepared, so I dug deep into the GM tool bag and improvised. Here is how things worked out.

You Gotta Have Dice Rolls
So, since we need to have dice rolls - if nothing else they let the GM buy time to think - I had each player roll a D6 against their contact of choice's connections and loyalty, and then had them roll an edge roll to see if past actions would come back to mess with them. Sadly, one of the players critical glitched the Edge roll and only one player got more than a single hit on the edge roll so things weren't looking good.

Delegate To The Players
With the results from the roll I had 3 players come up with ideas for jobs that they wanted. They were allowed to kibitz with the group for things but ultimately three people had the decision power for each job. Sadly, this didn't work as well as I wanted due to communication. I had hoped/intended for responses along the lines of "recover data from a corp R&D facility" and instead ended up with more vague concepts like "vigilante justice."

Now, this isn't a problem with my players. I was unclear in how i explained the instructions to them, and what I got still gave me a lot to work. Even better, the ideas and the time spent in coming up with them gave me even more time to think and contemplate. Also, to be fair to them, some of the ideas - while not specific to the exacting degree I hoped - were still solid ideas for jobs.

Making The Jobs
From here, with the die rolls and the ideas from the players I had everything I needed to come up with some ideas. I chose three of the core concepts from the player's suggestions and came up with the jobs. One of them is a charity case where someone wants help saving some imprisoned women for low money, one of them is a high paying high risk job covering the extraction of another team, and one is a mid-paying job for recovering some drugs to help people (well paying charity?)

The Crit Glitch?
But one of the players glitched the luck roll on the job. Because of this I make one of the jobs, randomly determined, is a trap.

The Results
The results turned interesting. The group decided that they could, should, and would try to do 2 of the jobs. Initially they were worried about time constraints, but when the Johnson for the third job wanted to meet in 2 days they decided to use those 2 days to do the charity job. This resulted in a no-leg work infiltration of a russian mob front, and very quickly turned into a firefight. Which is where the group is now.

Assuming the group survives the job healthy enough to do the second job, it should be fun to see what happens.