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[Dog]

I just got out of a police training seminar-- (I'm not a cop, but I work with them in a few different ways.) -- where I had to watch a couple of training videos in which police officers were killed or seriously injured by gun-or-knife-happy criminals. When they didn't see the threat in time or didn't get their gun out quickly enough.

I gotta tell you guys, it was moving, scary stuff. I feel compelled to address this in my games. The screaming pleading for one's life. The desperation as a person struggles to fend off a huge, coked-up attacker. The sounds of a cop's skull being cracked. I'm not a stranger to violence, I've been in fistfights and made arrests myself, but there's no way I can describe to you guys how brutal this stuff was...

I know that it's just a game we play, and that we don't want to take it too seriously, but man, I gotta say: What I saw today is really going to affect how I regard the actions of my game's characters. Anyway, I leave it open for discussion....

[Prospero]

And what if that huge, coked-up attacker was a troll? :eek:

I've always found that my newbie players were really interested in the hack-n-slash (shoot-and-burn?) [and this is a game, after all. There's nothing wrong with a little suspension of reality coupled with mindless violence, as long as it doens't get out of hand] aspects of the game but as they played more and got more into it, they tended to mellow out and kill as few people as possible. Imagery like that would always help things along, I suppose.

And Ancient History is certainly correct. But think about one of the posts in the intro to the SRComp (in the shadowcell section) - the physad who confesses to having killed someone for the price of a nuke-it burger because he was so hungry he just didn't care. So that gritty horribleness DEFINATELY exists in shadowrun and could make an interesting (if disturbing) encounter for runners who are getting a little high-and-mighty.