NOT Ragtag misfits

Sort of?

I played a somewhat run of the mill "hired by the church of x to defeat hordes of undead" campaign where everyone was more or less experts in that particular line of work and were chosen for that purpose - you had a ranger that specialized in corpse hunting, a tomb raider rogue, a cleric who was more of the scholarly monk type whose breadth of knowledge (and literacy) was immensely helpful, and me, the two hundred year old vampire paladin who fucking hated vampires.

Early game we had on lock down and only started getting thrown curve balls when skeletal fey started showing up.

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I wasn't a player but my mate ran a Dark Heresy campaign where the party went full operator-as-fuck in the Storm Trooper/Guardsmen vein. They meticulously planned every single engagement, if time wasn't an issue they'd spend days staking out trouble spots or acquiring the tech/data for an accurate floor plan and more. Funnily enough only one of them was actually an army bloke. They rolled through every encounter so easily the GM admitted he had to just start throwing shit in so that it didn't look like the cultists were complete scrubs.

>>52781425
Every Shadow Run game I have been in has started out as the rag tag group of misfits, but when you get to higher karma play, planning becomes basically everything.
A big thing in shadow run when you start raiding mega corps and things like that is you not only have to have a plan going in, but when going out as well. You have to cover your tracks and do things with a ruthless efficiency. Because guess what and track left uncovered is one the GM can use to FUCK YOU.
One spell that wasn't astral scrubbed, one piece of data left unchecked by a hacker, hell not picking up ammunition casings can allow a Mega corp to trace the raid right back to you.

>>52781681
>not picking up ammunition casings
There are no cases in Shadowrun, unless you use one of a tiny number of revolvers, a very particular SMG or 70+ year old relics. Everything else from the shooting bracelets to the assault cannons is a caseless wonder, fresh out of a contemporary to first edition Heckler & Koch small arms laboratory.

>>52781425
When I DM I give my players a group the belong to. They are a team of operatives for a company, or part of a troop of mercenaries, or are in a band touring the land. Stuff like that. I find that moves the start of the game along a lot faster and helps maintain group cohesion much better than just being a pack of randoms who happened to bump into each other. Never had any complaints.

>>52781425
I had a party that was inbetween. They were a ragtag bunch of misfits but they successfully founded a country after kicking the necromancers out.

>>52781425

Fuck rag tag groups. That's weak DM work.

I make the players come up with what binds them.

>We're all three from the same village, and we just ended our 1 year service in the army, now we're out looking to start a life
>We're all three guards
>We're all three rogues that got ran out of the city, that's why we're traveling

And they work well together as a team. Partially because they didn't "wake up from a lolmagic sleep together".

>>52782004
>Only able to run a game if he forces order on his players
Yes, well, I suppose even faggots can learn to DM after all.

>>52782196
>>52782004
>>52781961
>>52781943
In this case, I'm less concerned about what brings them together and more "how good they seem to be at doing shit once together."

Every group I've ever played in or run a game for seemed to be a rolling clusterfuck. Often enough, they'd still accomplish whatever they set out to do but usually by making a bigger mess of it than the one they set out to resolve.

>>52782291
>a rolling clusterfuck
That happens when they are RPing randos. If you want them to act in an orderly fashion you have to give them an orderly framework. Group hierarchy and structure are as important in RP as they are in life if you want to avoid chaos.

>>52781425
Had a group that started out as a small thieves guild plus one dimensional displaced individual who all turned into hyper competent demon hunters for hire (while still being thieves) in a world that never had demons before until now.

>>52781425
Eclipse Phase as corp "trouble shooters". Everyone was a top knotch cop/millitary guy of one sort or another.

>>52781425
The two PCs in my current are both very competent, although the player for the ranger is... a bit too impulsive.

The DM actually gave me a 'Wise Decisions' counter for my actions in the last game. While we were recovering from and harvesting meat from the corpse of a giant viper we'd just been attacked by, a dire bear ambled out of the forest, attracted by the smell of the kill. The ranger was half-dead and I was out of spells, so instead of fighting the bear for our loot, we just edged away and around it and into our wagon, and then GTFO while the bear was chowing down on the corpse.

If I can make another 18 'wise decisions' it'll up my WIS score by 1.

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>>52781425

I think it is common because as a DM you want to try and harness the enthusiasms players have and so stories usually need to be open to lots of different kinds of characters.

If that sort of thing bores you though you should perhaps try and think of a game where the players are meant to be competent people. This isn't as easy as it sounds though, one tip I would say is make them part of an organization and help them understand what kind of resources/support they have backing them up. This makes its own problems of course but if the players are higher ups in this organization anything they delegate to NPCs can still lead to game if you put the work in.

I once ran a horror/mystery game where the PCs were all DEA agents. The first half was like a police procedural but as the investigation went on and the players learned the 'truth' behind their case the whole thing got more and more unhinged. That totally fit though, and when the PCs were no longer able to explain events rationally and reconcile their case with their conceptions of reality they started bending and in some cases actively breaking the law themselves. It wasn't a perfect game but certainly got across the True Detective vibe that I was looking for.

>>52781497
That sounds pretty fun. I've been wanting to run a fantasy zombie apocalypse kind of thing where an economy had cropped up around adventurers getting paid for things like retreiving family heirlooms from shambling corpses or even clearing fortresses of the undead so your employers could take the castle's treasury.
Sort of like how Dungeon Meshi has an economy that revolves around dungeon diving.

>>52781425
My last game was IKRPG, which encourages this sort of thing.

Our party was (mostly) a bunch of Llaelese deserters who abandoned their posts during the Khadoran invasion and went mercenary. We were almost all playing professional soldiers, so whether things became a clusterfuck or not depended on whether it was in line with our skills, or if we had to get creative.

>>52781425
>Has anyone ever played a game in which your group was competent? How about good?

Yes and yes

>Has there ever been a tabletop group where the PCs were all really, really good at their jobs?

Yes.

>I don't mean "has high stats" or "rolled well" but in which the characters all seemed like competent,

Yup!

>resourceful individuals

YES!

>who actually got shit done

WE DID!

>without it turning into a clusterfuck?

WE WERE - I-I mean...that is to say...ahh, come on, OP! We're not miracle-workers.

SpyCraft 1.0, my whole group rolled up characters who were, individually, exceptionally good agents and who could even get along with one another. My character in particular was a sniper assassin, though she was skilled with all firearms and could one-hit headshot anything (to the point where I had a gentleman's agreement with the DM to not do this with boss characters); we also had a highly skilled hacker, an excellent team organizer and planner, and a quartermaster who could pull all the strings to get us whatever we wanted, wherever we wanted. We were the Agency's best team.

...and everything we touched somehow consistently turned to shit. Particularly in Venice.

We do not speak of Venice.

Just about every Shadowrun and Edge of the Empire/Age Of Rebellion game I've been involved in have been very professional, operational operators games.

>>52788928
Anon, your going to have to speak of Venice now.