Not in-game, it's not.

You don't fucking know what you're gonna need it for, you just always need it.

Why am I just thinking of The Gamers?

This is true. Also, I have sprung some pretty wicked numbers on players over the years, so maybe they're onto something... Maybe I should tell them over and over how important it is to bring guns and see if they start refusing to ever use them...

---> "It's not what they need it for, they just always need it." Close but no cigar.

What's this 'they' shit? This isn't a movie.

admiral ackbar is a terrible example. anyone can tell it's a trap *after* it's sprung... i mean, seriously, it took the guy until they were surrounded to figure out it was a trap.

if you want the guy who detected the trap *before* it was sprung, you actually want to look at lando...

Then they're just resort to using non-guns. Blades, flame throwers, or sharks with friggin lasers attached to their heads.

--



You mean Nein Numb.

Played the World's Largest Dungeon?
That campaign made us fucking paranoid. ONE SINGLE trap on the ceiling early on in the dungeon added "and search the ceiling too" to our repertoire of "standard exploring procedure."* It never came up again (except once, but it was Obvious Trap Is Obvious with a ceiling mounted magical trigger and no need to disarm it because it was a dead end, empty room).

*Which was already having the rogue out 30 feet in front traveling at a speed of about 5 feet a round (that's 1 foot a second) using a 10 foot pole to poke anything, and specifically searching every map-square and every wall. Didn't need anything like Detect Magic to find magical traps, the rogue was already good enough to spot them.

yeah...i think i finally got that grappling hook after arguing with the merchant that talked
like Jerry Seinfeld...
i think...

I think he was racist against Giant Obsidian doods.

Sorry, those are on the CC's endangered species list. But we have some real badass warform sea bass...

Sounds like awesome, to me. I will immediately implement Plan" Reverse Psychology My Players Into Refusing To Use Guns™ immediately.

Have not. The only published module I've ever rule was Keep on the Borderlands, and that only with heavy modification. However, I have watched Raider of the Lost Ark more times than is good for anyone wandering through a building I designed.

no, i don't. he was operating the scanners, but lando interpreted the data to understand that the shield was active, and that the empire knew they were coming.

also, i agree that it would be interesting to see an entire runner party that refuses to use guns for combat (distinctive style, ahoy!)

anyways, i think i'd be inclined to add some malware to the list of stuff to have, but that's just me. precisely what the malware does should depend on the runner in question, i would say.

Maybe then, they would see the wisdom of my Wall-Running dual-flamethrower Adept build.

Because sometimes, absolutely every motherfucker in the room has to die.

(not intended for indoor use)

Raiders of the Lost Arc is tame by comparison to the WLD. There's a section--this wont really spoil anything, because if your GM is nice, he'll let you avoid it--where there's a 7 day time limit on the region. If you don't kill the tarrasque before then, it escapes, eats its way through the dungeon to where the devils are housed, releasing them. They kill the tarrasque in 7 rounds, take over the region in 7 minutes, and the entire dungeon in 7 days (by summoning more devils).

It's really the only "you just lose" scenario in the entire thing.

Although there are two cockatrices in a part of the dungeon spec'd for a level 4 party, which is pretty nasty (if someone gets turned to stone: roll a new character, there are no stone to flesh items in the region and its unlikely the cleric will have been capable of learning it yet).

*cough* Back to topic anyone?

What was the topic again? Oh yeah... stay out of my beer.

Seriously, though. Flamethrowers. NOT generally considered required running gear. Smoke grenades, on the other, very useful if you know how/when to use them.

Yeah, smoke- and gas grenades are the shizzles. Especially if you deploy a mix (during for example a tactical retreat).

Been there, done that. When the security forces are mostly blind and hallucinating, they're much less effective.

Gunpowder, for distracting guards with chemsniffers. Which is all of them.


Alpha Omega is hilarious. It's like Exalted, if Exalted was easy to play and you couldn't punch people hard enough to turn them into a duck.

(A-scen-sion! A-scen-sion! Annunkai Omega source wielder here. Level 3 on the ascension scale currently. God, I really, really wish Annunkai could use Arcane wielding.)

Annunkai are actually underpowered compaired to nephilim, as you can buy what the Annunkai get for free with like 30 BP, but doing the reverse takes like 60.

My group's not that deep in, though I think our heal monkey is up to Ascension 3 (with a HP regen rate at 1 per round and 70+ Endurence). The rest of us who are on that track are only at 2. Though our bio-engineered (glowing torch) strength monkey is only a few points shy of throwing whole cars.

Yeah. We're not very far along at all (Challenge Rating...5?).

I know someone referenced a mask earlier, and how it might be possible to see through one...But I've also always considered gloves a fairly essential set of gear. While its true that even a stray few strands of hair can get you busted today, fingerprints are far easier to pull.

Flash-bangs are also pretty nice to have on hand, since they...Umm...Flash and bang. That.

If high places are involved, or helicopters, I'd consider a parachute if one doesn't have Levitate. I recall one time that my mage character fell out of a helicopter as it was hit by an RPG. Didn't end too bad, as he was fortunate enough to survive. What was unfortunate was when he landed in the midst of the Tir Tangiere officers he was trying to kidnap a princess from.

Very unfortunate.

Other stuff? Well, in the old SR3 days we used to say cell phones were important, but commlinks alleviate that problem. Someone once did forget flashlights - it was a fun time to call the rigger for a maglite. I've mentioned in other threads the idea of having small, back-up safehouses that also stash stuff like emergency kits with a gun+ammo, first aid kit, a fake ID and other stuff. If you've got these around and you can't go home for a while because you need to lose some heat, well, it helps to have some of your own!

If you have to meet a Johnson that's not particularly trustworthy, a dead man's trigger works. You press-and-hold, and if you stop pressing-and-holding without disarming the device, everything goes boom. Or, conversely, you pull a Keamy from LOST and have a biofeedback monitor that, if it flatlines, triggers a big kaboom.

Another good thing to have programmed into a commlink or just on hand is a map of the frikkin' city. If you can get a map of the sewers, all the better, but you'd better know where you're goin' if you're operating out of your home range. Otherwise, it can end up bad.

A final consideration, before I start rattling off everything I can think of, is for at least one character to have a toolkit handy. It doesn't need to be some big ratchet-and-clank (Bad pun!) setup, but just something with a screwdriver and various heads, a pair of pliers, a wire stripper...The basics. That way if you need to take something apart or, in sticky situations, put something together, you'll be alright.

I'm sure there's plenty more.

The problem with those few strands of hair also is that everybody is carrying around several foreign DNA samples at any given moment. You leave a DNA trace on every door you open, but that also means it gets transferred to the next guy who uses that door.

We had a minor scandal in Germany recently, the police were hunting for a female "Phantom of Heilbronn" who had left her DNA at dozens of crime scenes, most notably the murder of a police officer (in Heilbronn, hence the name), but also petty burglaries and other crimes which showed absolutely no connection to each other. After two years they finally "caught" the phantom...she was working in the factory that made the cotton swabs.

Those cotton swabs were never cleared for forensics use by the factory, too.

So basically over-done cost-cutting by some bean-counter caused murder cases to go south.

It can be very useful to hackers or mages whose physical bodies can be in a "neutral" territory.

Back on topic, I think a chameleon suit is very useful: it's a bit expensive, but it makes you very hard for most people to see you.
And of course, clothes, a commlink with some basic software and mirrorshades.