@Doc Chase
This is not the freaking point.

Let me elaborate a bit, using an example.
A evil and powerful man let you choose:
You may chose a man, who will fire a gun at you from 5 feet. If he misses you both die. He has to hit the torso or the head for the it to be considered a hit.

You may choose between an elite sharp shooter or some punk. Both promise, that they will try not to kill you.

Considering the Shadowrun rules, you would go with the punk. Would this be a wise choice?


Well, unless the target is alergic to something in it, right?

Yes, he did not take the right "tool". He took the tool at hand. But he tried to compensate by having a huge dice pool. The point is, that the player would get punished for trying to do the best thing at the time.

Rule wise it would be best to get about 4-5 dices to hit and spray her with a full auto wide burst. (She has no dices to dodge and you may keep your dicepool small)
(The Ares alpha does not have this mode, but I guess it is obvious where I am going)
This on the other hand would (in reality) be plain stupid.

The point is, that the choice of tool did NOT kill her. It was the fact, that his char was using the tool with superhuman skill.
If he would just have thought: Fuck it, I will hit her and it probably won't kill her it would have worked.
He would have rolled around 12 dices, getting 4 hits or something and she might have got one hit on the reaction test and one on the body. So it would have been a total of 6(?)+2 = 8 boxes. You want to punish the player for trying to walk the other mile and that is bullshit.

GM:"He is dead. His Head is lolling about as if there were not a single bone or tendon in his Neck. Yes, he is dead. WHY? YOU HIT HIM! A STR16 Troll with Titanium Bonelacing hitting a Body 1 Elf on the head is STILL A STR 16 TROLL WITH TITANIUM BONELACING HITTING A BODY 1 ELF ON THE HEAD!"

@Irion: I get the point perfectly. You simply cannot grasp that actions have consequences and that is a shame. Rewarding this kind of behavior often leads to poor decisionmaking in the future and I would be remiss as a GM to let it continue.

Now. You may throw half-baked hypotheticals at me all you like, but it does not match the situation given. Allow me:

Pop Quiz, hotshot: You are a highly skilled, heavily cybered man with a heavy pistol chambered with a Narcoject/DMSO mix in a capsule round. Said capsule rounds hurt before they deliver their payload. This loadout can flatten a Troll. You ostensibly know this loadout can flatten a Troll. After all, it is why you loaded your weapon with it, yes? (Different pop quiz)

Your target is a waiflike shell of a girl who's already sporting bruises and booking down an alleyway while screaming rape. You have assets moving to intercept via vehicle at the end of the alleyway, but you have approximately six seconds before she gets to the end.

What's telling is that this waiflike shell of a girl is not a Troll. Nor is she Summer Glau.

What do you do?
What do you do?

Why in the ever-loving crap didn't he give chase? He could run her down like it was Pamplona, get a Grapple check which he'd likely win, and hustle her into the back of the car without having to even take a shot. If you have to pull a gun on little Cindy Lou, you have fucked up. The greatest marksman in the world cannot change the laws of physics and that is what you're claiming must be done. She spends or burns an Edge, and then the sammie can explain to Cindy Lou why he had to break two of her ribs and nearly stop her heart with a horse tranquilizer.

OK, so the blue wire would have been the correct one...but my stated intent was to defuse the bomb, not blow all of us to kingdom come...


If mistakes can be lethal (with a non-neglectable chance) and the player takes his chances, I see no reason to let him off the hook that easily.

Actually yes the choise of tool had a lot to do with, a narcojet loaded capsule round is pretty likely to kill someone who allready has taken stun damage and has no soak pool to speak of(Seriously that stuff isn't ment for shooting injured children, it's ment for taking out dangerous Trolls) .
And on top of the idiotic tool selection the player did the most stupid think imaginable and spend multiple rounds aiming and then even used edge, seriously thats a long chain of moronic shoices and he should face the consecunses of his actions.

Well, in the case of "snipping the blue wire", that's a false choice. If the GM says "what wire do you cut", he's not caring if the PC made his demolitions roll - he's caring what choice the PLAYER'S made, and I don't think that's quite fair.

Shadowrun suffers from two problems when it comes to subdual combat: lack of guidelines as to what 'special effects' called shots can grant (Can I subdue someone with only 1 net hit, if that's my called shot?) and a lack of mechanic for "holding back" other than being *less accurate*, which is a horrible mechanic.

I can't find rules for it in the Combat or Skill Test chapters, but for magic (sr4A, p. 183) "The spellcaster can always choose to use less than the total number of hits rolled in a Spellcasting Test."

My table has extended this to all tests, where the player can look at the dice and decide to not use all of the hits. HOWEVER, this is decided before they know the result of the opposed test. So, in this case if the shooter saw he had a ton of hits, he could choose to only use say three of them. There can be some metagaming as the player tries to figure out how many dice the GM is going to roll, etc, but honestly, if they are self-handicapping I don't mind.

Imho the biggest problem is still: If one doesn't want to kill and has a lot of successes it doesn't kill. Next time he does not want to kill he has only 1 net hit. Is that a head shot which fills up to 1 overflow, or what? Glitch kills instantly and critical glitch…well…there will be something…

Roleplay or roll-play, the messaage is the same: Mistakes can be deadly, or at least have some nasty consequences for the players.

Are your players shooting at targets, and get into a brawl with you as well? If it is a mistake the player made you should ask yourself if the character would make the same mistake and only then hit the character with the consequence hammer, there should not be consequences for the player, unless his play style clashes with the rest of the group.

BTW not all bomb makers color code their wires at all.

And many use their own personal color coding, that is not standard. Part of being a good demolitions guy is having access to the database of explosives and how they were wired. Great ones have this database partially loaded in their brain.

Exactly and that is part of a high logic and demolitions rating, not guesswork of the player

Ahem.

No.


You're GUESSING that the intention of the game designers was. Your guess is as good as mine. Frankly, this particular case might never have been even considered by many of the game designers. This is simply one of those situations where the GM has to arbitrate and figure-out what's best.

I still find it counter intuitive that a super-amazing once in a life time shot by a professional marksman means = oops you fucked up she's dead. He should be able to clip her in the leg, or the shoulder. Given how weak she was, as long as she did not crit glitch her soak roll, she should not die, but instead need immediate medical attention. Snipers choose to shoot people in the leg, etc and disable instead of kill all the time. Especially in a cinemagraphic setting like shadowrun.

This is why you're better off burning an Edge point on the NPC's end. You're changing far too many rules to 'not kill'. You're still shooting someone, which is an action I cannot stress enough. You are undertaking a potentially lethal action.

A foolhardy action like this is directly invoking the Hand of God. If you try to fuck with the rules in order to reflect the shooter's skill, you're going to end up with a whole bunch of broken rules.

Don't overthink it. Make the NPC burn an Edge -or-, make your player burn it if he doesn't want to live with the consequences of his actions.

@sabs: Clipping her in the leg or the shoulder still means she's resisting 5 from the round and 10S from the Narcoject. The player stacked the rules against her and then expeceted the GM to wave the hand and say 'she's totally still alive'. He would have been better off shooting her with a standard round.

well the player can't burn it. He already used edge on the roll.

Then we're setting a bad precedent where every mission-important NPC is going to burn an Edge to stay alive when the players hose down the area in order to 'subdue'. There must come a time where you have to say "You fucked up, they are dead."

If you want to try a trick shot, don't do it with a two-stage damage code unless you are damned sure it won't kill.

I'd tend to agree, the question is : Did the player invoke the 'called shot' rule before rolling to hit a less-lethal place? Or did they simply say: "Imma gonna roll everything I can to do as much stun damage as possible" ? The two choices are quite different actions and should have different consequences. Shooting a less-vulnerable spot (this isn't really covered in the rules, but lets just run with it) might due too little stun-damage, increasing the risk the girl gets away.

As an aside: the GM probably should have invoked the 'common sense' rule. I.e. "Your shadowrunning experience tells you that shooting an already wounded girl, even with stun rounds, might severely injure or even kill her. Are you sure you want to use Edge on this one?"

Called shot or not, you still have the Narcoject to consider. That doesn't care where the hit is, just as long as there's a hit.

honestly she was dead even if he'd only gotten 1 net hit.

She was taking 16S, and she was already hurt. 15s against body 1? Even if she soaked all 2 hits she could.
That's 13 boxes. She had 16 boxes + 1 overflow. She's got 17 boxes, and she's taking 6S + 10S.
If she's unhurt she's completely unconcious, if she's taken even 1 point of damage, she's /dead/ unless she makes both of her body shots. So unless the girl had less than 3 boxes of stun already, she was /guaranteed/ dead even without the extra net hits.

I have no problems with her being dead because he shot her with 16S.
What I have problem with is that he would have done less damage by doing a snap shot, than by carefully aiming for the least lethal spot, and not having his super successful roll cause more damage than he intended. (Even though his intended damage was really enough to kill her)

Hmm, so it seems usual people are easy to kill in shadowrun . . who would have though O.o

But he didn't do this, that would be a called shot, he just spent 3 round aiming to increase his dice pool and added edge to make that pool even higher and have the rule of 6.

If you do the same actions against an injured fleeing child as you would do against a crazed troll trying to kill you, you should realize that the child is very very likely gonna die and reconsider the best course of action. Then if you deside to go along with that action, you should be ready to face the consequences and not except your gm to carebear all the bad consequences away.

@Mäx

It was told, they FORGOT the narcoject. So yes, if they would have thought about it, she would be dead, no net hits needed.
But it did not facture in and the only reason for her to die would have been the net hits. So the reason the shot killed her was, that the player tried not kill her with the shot and was very good at it.

The point is, the player is not punished for doing a stupid thing, he is punished for trying not to be too stupid or for not beeing a rule lawyer.


Right. Because every player has to fucking know any fucking rule in the fucking book.
You did not refere to page 3435 paragraphe 34 line 12, so you are dead.
Come on, seriously?
Sorry, in every game I played I have been a newbe once. And back then, I would not be able to explain what my character would do in the rules.
I would just discribe the actions my character would undertake and my intention. If you want to bash somebody for that, well you are a dick.
Some players do not enjoy reading and lawyering the rules. They do enjoy writing 20 pages of background for the attuned animal of their character.
To demand from those players to know all the rules would be like expecting from an other player to give in one page of background for any part of ware/spell etc. he wants to have

@capt.pantsless

I do not have to guess, I am able to read.

@nielsk

If you do not want to kill/injure somebody I would rule like every 2 net hits above the first three are used to reduce the damage of the weapon by one.
So If you get 9 net hits you may reduce the damage dealt by 3.
For more easy understandig:
Nethits/damage modifier
1 / +1
2 / +2
3 / 0
4 / 0
5 / -1
6 / -1
...
To keep the possiblity of a fatal shot in play I would use the rules for critical injuries.

The Called Shot rules don't give much for that. Unless I've missed something, for all intents and purposes SR doesn't shoot to wound.

By RAW, Suzy's dead unless she goes for the critical success or flat out burns for a HoG thanks to the two-stage ammo. If you try to say they're going to do less damage by getting more successes, then you're just going to run into problems. You can go with a reverse scale that you're buying off damage at the net hit rate, but there has to be a minimum. You can't shoot someone wearing a T-shirt and say your aim is so great that the bullet doesn't penetrate. Bullets don't work that way.

No, but your aim can be good enough that you shoot them in the leg, through and through and not hitting an artery (although probably not on a child)..
You're shooting a child, you're probably gonna kill them.

I'd be okay with a simple, I get to choose how many of my hits I use. (before the GM rolls his defense dice)