Splitting the Party is is a Good thing ? Or Doom

The best part of these videos are the Comments .. this one by from facebook

John Scheibeler

Also, Kevin, there's a fallacy in your thinking about Shadowrun groups. See, smart groups that are missing a role will realize that they are missing that role in the group -- and will not take jobs requiring that role. If the party doesn't have a decker, then they'll inform their fixer that hey, the team doesn't have a decker, so they can't do jobs that require decking. "But (insert role here) is ubiquitous! They HAVE to have it!" Well, yes... and no. See, as the GM, it's your job to keep your players happy, and one of those ways is NOT TO FORCE SOMEONE TO PLAY SOMETHING THEY DON'T WANT TO. I cannot stress this enough. If no one wants to play the decker, or the magician, or the face, then either you get an NPC to cover that -- or the team does without. And another of your jobs as GM is to make sure the team is useful. So if they don't have a member of the team that fills an ubiquitous role, then there have to be jobs that don't require that ubiquitous role -- or you have no game. So you have a party consisting of three mundanes and a rigger -- and let's say your mundanes are a mercenary, a combat medic and an infiltration specialist. You have firepower and no social skills, magical support, decking or legwork. Your job as GM is to make sure this team has adventures to go on. So you set up jobs that don't require these elements. No legwork? The Johnson, or the team fixer, has exceptional information sources, and can supply the team with information. No magical support? The team is only rarely going to deal with magical threats, then -- and even those are going to be avoidable, or can be taken down through some effort. The team is going to end up being muscle or assault more often than not. Because if you throw in something that they can't handle, well, that's you, the GM, being a bully, because no one wanted to play that one role you wanted to see. It's all well and good to try to get a player to play something outside their comfort zone, for the good of the party, but if the player adamantly refuses to play that support type, then so be it. Plan around that. There are runs in the world of Shadowrun that don't require magicians, or deckers, or... well. Admittedly they may not be well-paying jobs, and they may frequently be suicide runs, but that's what you get, in the world, for not having a team that can handle a wide variety of jobs. Me? I got the opposite team -- I got the party who all wanted to be support types, and no one wanted to be the muscle. Now THERE'S a fun setup, to plan jobs for. Your runs have to be solvable through stealth, social engineering and magic, and suddenly your players become the ghosts who walk through walls, because if they get into combat, they know they're all dead. We had a ninja adept, a magician, a face shaman, a spydrone rigger (not only no firearms skills, INCOMPETENT with all firearms and gunnery) and a technomancer. I realized I had a perfect Shadow Journalism team, and set up a meeting with KSAF -- and off we went.