Karma Ethics, Hunting the Dragon Options

[Crakkerjakk]

I understand that the missions are the missions, they're not changing, and thats that.

However, I find it odd that karma is awarded

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to the runners at the end of Hunting the Dragon for trying to convince Lady Jade not to torture the guy to death. I mean, it's a horrible thing, but to paraphase an old saying, the players in Shadowrun play horrible People Who Shoot People In The Face For Money. To be completely serious, I think that while Lady Jade's behavior is unprofessional and would totally understand it if the runners didn't want to get involved with her in the future, due to her getting emotionally involved in her work, attempting to tell her what to do would also be horribly unprofessional on the Runner's part. I can see professional runners having a problem with being responsible for a childs death and being willing to track down the man who did it. I can also see them having no problem whatsoever with letting a man who shot his own daughter be tortured to death, and I don't see how they could have formed enough emotional connection to Lady Jade to care about the well being of her soul or anything.

Am I the only one that feels this way? I'm not talking about the typical runner created by a new player that is a cold callous sociopath, with no family, and lots of military training. I'm talking about people who steal things for money, not to mention occasionally shooting someone for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without some heavy duty emotional armor, I don't see how the runners could do what they do for any length of time.

[ Spoiler ]

Honestly, unless my runners went out of their way to play characters with firmly held, clearly defined morals on torture, I would consider it out of character for them to attempt to stop Lady Jade and would dock them karma in that 1-3 discretionary award for doing so.

Also, I feel like the whole "you'll only become what he(the Dragon) is" argument rather trite. Like the end of the cop movie, where the guy's partner convinces his partner not to shoot the bad guy, because that would be wrong and sinking to his level. Perhaps it's because I'm a former Marine, and was actually trained to do mean things to others at one point, but I just find it hard to rationalize that kind of approach, especially for hardened criminals.

the_dunner -- Edited to add spoiler tags.

[the_dunner]

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, and I wouldn't attempt to dissuade you from it.

However, the point of this scene is to help save Lady Jade from herself. Her character is torn up, and allowing her to torture the guy is likely to cause her permanent damage. From the perspective of the PCs, the goal here is to preserve a friend/contact. It's not so much about the PCs' values. It's more about Lady Jade's values.

The other side of the coin is that I'm of the opinion that not everyone should get every Karma award possible in every scenario. Players make decisions about their characters' actions. There is nothing wrong with a player deciding that his action would go against a theme. I know I've run quite a number of scenarios where players happily accepted the consequences they earned for killing a NPC. Simply because, in their opinions, they were much better off with that character dead.