Quote from: Itachi;1013766Huh.. I thought it was clear in the OP I was referring to the macro-structure, not the operational one/the missions.

Once you're inside the missions, sure, it's as open as the GM let it be, but outside of it

Outside of the missions, it's even more open because it's everything in the world that isn't in the mission.  How can you possibly not know this? Seriously?

Quote from: CRKrueger;1013782No one ever said GMing was easy.

It takes some work, but it's not really all that difficult though.

If you're talking about the campaign as a whole, then the question is really, "how do I design a sandbox campaign setting". Something which many words have been written about, and many tools designed to help with.

There seems to be an assumption in the OP that a Shadowrun sandbox is inherently and substantially  different in design and requirements from a D&D sandbox, but this isn't the case.

I am unclear on the problem here.

Some players like to be spoonfed missions, but want flexibility in how to complete the mission.

Other players want to be spoonfed everything.

A few players are proactive and will seek out (or create) their own missions.

We dropped Shadowrun fairly quickly, partly because our GM relied heavily hevily on the modules and the railroading structure of Mr Johnson gives you a mission, the mission has one path to success, you get screwed in the end.

I ran a fair bit of Cyberpunk , original and 2020 for our group. Similar world, similar dventure structure of going on issions ofr patrons. Less railroading. I set up the world, wrote up a number of possible mission outlines, along with some other plot threads and things that were happening in the world. The players were free to pursue what ever missions they wanted, and to tackle them in the ways that seemed best.

Sometimes they did stupid things. Like the infamaous "head-in-a-box". They came upon the tail end of a gunfight with the osers dying and the winners jumping into an AV and flying off. Left behind was an object about the size of a hat box, with biohazard warnings and status display indicators. They opened it and found a human head, wired to electrodes and floating in a clear, viscous fluid. This was my intended hook for a mystery involving a corp who conducting very illegal experiments into extracting rna from brains and using it to make a "skill serum" inject the serum and gain the skill. Only downside was you needed skilled, living brains.  Well my players jumped the tracks right there.  They saw a corporate logo on the head-box and called the Corp saying "Uh, we found your head."  Corporate security wishing to contain the incedent gave them an address (in a skeazy warehouse district) to bring it to for a "reward".  You can guess what happened next. Players blithely went there, taking no precautions of their own and walked straight into an ambush.  I had expected them to either ignore the box entirely, or having discovered the head on life-support take a more cautious approach to finding out what was going on. After all they had seen one fire fight with fatalities over it already.

No "Mr Johnson says 'go here, do this'" required.

I guess if the question is how to avaoid railroading outside the mission itself I don't see the problem. Create a sandbox, or dangle threads, or whatever you would do in any other game.  A dungeon crawl is really a focused mission after all.

I don't get what the problem is here.

I've never played Shadowrun, so colour me ignorant, but I also don't see the problem here.

I run loads of mission based games, and they are never (as far as I'm aware) railroads. The PCs boss or patron will ask them to perform a task, but they are free to solve it however they wish. All the patron cares about is that the job gets done.

This is also true for the detective games I run, which when they are working for a law enforcement agency might not be that true to how such bodies work in the real world. But is usually true of how detectives operate in other entertainment media (books and films), and so my players don't feel at odds with the freedom they have in the set-up.