Now before I get everyone who's got a bone to pick about checklists crawling all over me let me preface this section with a statement: having an SOP is not necessary and may in some cases be dangerous. Now that I've said that, why am I talking about this stuff at all? Because it might just save your life. I can't tell you how many times I've had this scenario happen: A group of runners is broken up by an encounter into smaller units, sometimes individuals. They all take off in different directions to evade pursuit. I ask "where are you going to meet up?" Blank stares around the table. Eventually they all turn to look at the one person who has bought a lifestyle other than street. This person immediately, and wisely, says "NO!" This is followed by a five minute discussion in which they discover that not everyone has a phone or comm unit. Finally, the ones in contact agree to meet at the hangouts of the ones without communications. This all could have been avoided with some prearranged plans. Nothing elaborate, all it would have taken was one person saying beforehand: "If anything happens, meet at the tube station on the corner of West 128th and Grayson in two hours." Common sense, you say? You'd be surprised. Of course, you can always get more elaborate. Having SOPs means that you know the rest of your team has at least an idea of what they're supposed to do in the event something goes wrong. Which it inevitably will. Now before you all jump on the bandwagon and create twenty seven step SOP checklists, let me pose one important caveat. When a team uses SOPs it must be aware that a time will come that it must break that SOP. Usually that's after two or three runs when it works really well. The gamemaster, in his devious way, will create a scenario in which using the SOP will run the team right into more trouble. Not that I'd ever suggest that gamemasters were out to get their players.