Game Morality, the casual shuffling of mortal coils Options

[Nerbert]

My first in depth experience with roleplaying was joining a D&D campaign about halfway through, right about the time the character were coming into easily available resurrection spells. Soon after that I convinced them to try shadowrun and few things became immediately apparent.

Firstly, in Shadowrun when you die, you're dead forever. This is an interesting dynamic, not only for the players, who now have an actual reason to run away instead of illogically fighting to the death with every creature they encounter, but also because the players invariably end up killing a large number of NPCs, which is clearly a morally questionable act with its own set of philosophical quandaries.

Secondly, without the alignment system of D&D in place, there's nothing to stop characters from "misbehaving". This is simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing. Its predominantly good in that it allows players to diverge from a prescribed archetype without penalty, its basically just more fun to be able to have your evil days. The downside to this is that its much harder to predict how characters are going to react to a given situation. In a morally ambiguous situation its truly difficult to predict where your story is going to go.

I was just wondering, how do people in your games handle this kind of thing?