KIlling in the name of, How different is from murder Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Outline Switch to: Standard Switch to: Linear+

[Chrysalis]

Greets,

It is a bit of a moral dilemma for me and I am trying to figure it out. What makes a runner a professional killer? Is it that they take money for it, or is there a kind of steely professionalism that creates mental barriers so that you are not killing Smith, but the henchman that got in your way.

If the runners are hired to kill someone in a club. In one version of the scenario one of the character's seduces him so that he drinks from a poisoned cup, dying of what might be a stroke or heart attack (until the autopsy of course). In a second version he is lead to the back alley of the bar where the PCs wait and confront him and kill him and his bodyguard in an action movie style hale of bullets. In a third version the PCs corner him in the back alley and beat him to death with tire irons and fists.

It seems to me that the difference between killing and murder is that killing seems to involve James Bond like adversaries and methods and is murder involves plebian weapons with plebian motives.

Am I off base here? Is there a limit to what you consider to be acceptable violence? Is it really about seeing the sensible guns, but not seeing the senseless act?

[john_doe]

Although, in the D&D line of thinking...D&D rewards you for killing things. The tougher the monster you defeat, the more XP you get, so the murderous mentality is dumbed down or desensitized in the name of character advancement.

Where in SR, you can successfully complete a run and not kill anyone (except wetwork jobs of course) and still gain just as much Karma (or more if the GM deems so) as if you had killed everyone along the way.

But then again, in D&D you are the heroes that come to save the day.
In SR, you are a nobody trying to make it to tomorrow.

In my groups games, it's just mutually accepted by everyone that due to the nature of the biz of running in the shadows...killing someone is all in a day's work. Would you be a shadowrunner otherwise?


Didn't SR3's Shadowrun Companion have a flaw that prevented you from killing people, or at least made it so you didn't have to or something like that?