Future Shadowrun campaign

Over the summer I will be GMing a Shadowrun game. The story takes place in and around Las Vegas, and is focused on investigating and eventually toppling a very powerful drug dealer. There will be only three players (there was a fourth, but he decided to accept a work placement scheme in London instead. Talk about poor priorities!), so I'm throwing in a couple of NPCs as well.

The story will start with all of the characters awakening and finding themselves in a small room, which looks very much like a high-security prison cell (mostly because it is a high-security prison cell). They all have envelopes in front of them with various instructions on how to escape which will only work when combined. With any luck they will escape the prison, and will then have to find their way to Las Vegas, the nearest city, whereupon Mr Johnson (for those of you who aren't Shadowrunners, "Mr. Johnson" always refers to a person who hires shadowrunners, in order to disguise whatever their true identity is) will contact them, and offer them a job. Although they don't know it, he was in fact the one who put them into the jail cell.

The job he offers them is to take down a local drug dealer and shut down his operation. It isn't a difficult job, but if the players dig a little deeper into the situation, they will find a tangled web of evidence suggesting that Mr. Johnson himself is the one who supplied the dealer. Either way, Mr. Johnson will continue to give them jobs of various kinds, one of which will bring them into contact with a group who claim that Mr. Johnson is poised to betray them. Whether or not they beleive these people, they will soon find themselves attacked by thugs.

Various things happen and, with a dash of luck, the campaign will end with the overthrow of Mr. Johnson's operation. He may or may not be the 'final boss'. Of course, players have a nasty habit of throwing your plot off course, so I have a few sidequests prepared for if such a thing should happen, which will give me time to prepare.

More on this as it comes in.

Creating Characters

I don't know about you, my dear readers, but in my humble opinion the best part of playing any sort of tabletop roleplay is the creation of characters. So many stats to be decided, so many skills to purchase and abilities to consider. You start with the vaguest of concepts. For a recent Shadowrun character, for example, I started with solely with the idea of a an former motorbike-gang member. I imagined him/her doing really really cool things, like jumping on his bike off the roof of a high building, smashing through the window of an adjacent high building and laying into whatever was guarding the place with a shotgun in each hand. Of course, the characters you create never quite match up to those initial fantasies do they?

I'm sure every one of us can remember at least one time when they spent two hours looking through the Dungeons and Dragons PHB in an attempt to twink a character to do really cool things. Like you managed to create a Fighter who at level 20 could have an almighty seven attacks (plus Great Cleave, because naturally this fighter can kill ANYTHING in a single hit) a round. You envision him standing in a swarm of monsters smaking them down one after another. Of course, then the campaign starts and you get owned by a small badger in the first adventure. *Sigh* I love DnD.

I am not ashamed to say that I create about three characters a week. Understand that I will never use them at all, it's just nice to imagine how they will be used.

I think I'll treat you guys to a view of the Shadowrun character I was talking about earlier (yeah, I did create them in the end). However, that can wait until I find his character sheet!

Anyone else have any thoughts on the creation of characters? Am I the only one who takes extreme pleasure in making and never using them?