[X] My Assistant

[Daier Mune]

with my current Face character, there is little he wouldn't do for the right price. sexual assualt is on his taboo list, but torture, defiling corpses and organlegging are not. he's not a guy who really thinks about consequences, and relies on his social graces to get out of trouble. he's even taken to messing with his fellow runners (taking personal cuts of the profit, lying to contacts). i really don't expect him to live for too much longer.

[Kremlin KOA]

As a GM, I never make the NPC opposition too weak. The cops all use Jazz and have an assault rifle and ballistic shield in the trunk.

I have yet to have a hot female elf NPC that didn't have better cyberware than the PCs.

If PCs are bloodthirsty, Aztechnology tries to "recruit" them, leading to retirement if they don't change their ways.

So, there are no limits or rules, but certain behaviors lead to consequences.

-E-

hmm, sleep spells + concealment power + astral cleansing = team kept in Jazz, assault rifles and ballistic shields for life

[Kremlin KOA]

It varies for me, depending on the character. I have played total white hats, and scum who I would never have worked with IRL

My curent fun character is a hacker/sammy who has absolutely no qualms killing somebody. He has a thing about protecting children though. His first kill in the campaign was when he found out that a Triad underboss was threatening a Made Man's son (it was search and rescue for that Mafia's Don.) so he hacked the controls of the Triad's vehicle and left a backdoor, keeping it quiet until the last second, he waited for the guy to be driving over a bridge and then suddenly locked the doors and made the steerring swerve, while accelerating at full speed off the bridge into the putrid sound.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

So really, there's only three things I won't do as a GM: one is punishing my players for doing horrible, terrible things successfully in a reasonable manner. I hate to put it so bluntly, but were a character to rape or torture someone in one of my games they'd likely be better off killing the victim afterwards to avoid leaving a witness.

On the other hand, given the guaranteed 100min memory loss caused by Leäl, killing is only cost-efficient for people nobody really cares about.

[Cardul]

As a player: It really depends on the character. I mean, I played a troll rigger who had a dedicated Samurai Seat in his Eurovan..a seat loaded with explosives and ball-bearings, and consisently kept any modifications made recently on the Eurovan from his team. (in fact..when I play a Rigger, there WILL be a dedicated "hot seat" for a Samurai...why do they ALWAYS pull a gun and try to tell the Rigger how to drive?) But, then again, I also played an Ork Sam who had no problem blowing up a wall where the guards were hiding behind..but killed 10 'weeners to save a kitten. I also played an Orkess Shaman(celtic, used the Wise Warrior to represent The Morrigan) who tended to not kill "grunts", but would kill anyone who she thought "worthy" of facing her not holding back.

As a GM: Well, I go by what the quisiest of the players can take. If they can't take being asked to pay for their new AR with a 10 year old girl? They won't get that demanded of them. However, as a GM, both me and my current GM both agree on one thing: your life expectancy is directly proportional to how smart you are. And, I admit, I tend to LIKE players who come up with daring schemes to do a run, so much so that, when we had a team of Runners once BASE jump off one building to get to their target building...well..that was just so crazy, that I gave it a Karma award, and had them surpise the guards wwh were not expecting something like that...that time. Of course..it never worked that good again (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[arathian]

hmm, sleep spells + concealment power + astral cleansing = team kept in Jazz, assault rifles and ballistic shields for life

LOL. If they can get away with them before the SWAT team arrives. In my game, the Lone Star response to an Awakened threat includes their own Awakened officers. But, if the players do well against them they might score some foci as well.

[Fuchs]

In our first SR1/SR2 campaign in 1992, we had the weirdest team limits: No wetwork job was ever taken, but there were no qualms at all about collateral damage ("go get some more C-12" was the answer to many a problem), or bloodthirsty revenge. The team called themselves "Firestorm", but the rest just called them "psychos".

(Never to their face, of course, which led to an amusing session the player characters (and the players) spent chasing after this elusive new team on the scene called "psychos", "who are copying us!" Paranoid, the runners assumed the "psychos" were after them, since they supposedly hung out at the same places, but were never seen by the runners...)

[Prime Mover]

I leave no subject off limits the world is a dark and horrible place and I make sure my SR world is just a little bit darker. I do however hold the players responsible for there actions and thankfully theres a few in the group who act as moral compass for the rest of the team. We've had some very dark scenes of retribution and I try to keep wetwork to a minimum or aim them at targets that "derserved it" or there lead to beleive they did. In that respect I'm lucky, if my players didnt have a group morality I would probaby inject some via an npc.

[FriendoftheDork]

I don't think it's the GMs job to decide what a PC can or cannot do morally. You can of course set an "aligment" prior to the campaign, but if you don't you shouldn't suddenly tell a player that his PC can't chop someone up, or even rape because it is "wrong." Too much hippocracy for me, considering what you would allow killing, causing excessive collateral damage etc.

Some players and DM's can't handle certain topics, and if so it's best to deal with that before playing if possible, or have group agree to what can/can't be done.

And really, if someone does play a pedo and want to describe his rape in detail I'd just speed forward. "Ok, you kidnapped the kid, raped and abused him. So what do you want to do now?"

No player has the right to keep the spotlight on his PC for too long doing things that is not connected to the mission at hand or involves the team directly.

[BFaolan]

I generally play with an unspoken contract, because most of my players know each other reasonably well, but some are new.

I dislike, in general, black hat characters. That said, my current campaign has one amoral bastard who occasionally does good deeds when its easy, a troll that is now technically as well as practically insane (critically glitched an addiction roll, and burnout would have literally killed her, so I gave her a mental disorder from Augmentation), and a troll who cheers the fact that his brother is an outright terrorist. (Of course, said terrorist is a metahuman rights terrorist, and currently the teams major employer, so I guess its a wash).
I was planning for a bit more of a white hat campaign (and the other characters are mostly gray, generally due to not defining themselves), but the players wanted grey. So they got it!

I will generally allow most things - if its included in the expectation of the campaign. Which leads to the fact that I try and keep the expectations clear all around. When everyone's on the same page, a lot fewer problems happen.

[Kyoto Kid]

...well so far for Violet's purpose, our team has broken the #1 tenet as we were sent on one wetware job and another shapes up to end that way. Not the kind of thing she's into. Second, while she's trying to keep a low profile (paranoid delusions about a certain Corp.) the last couple missions wound up more like terrorist ops which garnered a lot of press coverage with one causing civilian collateral damage.

Looks like it's time for her to say �'וטן ט×?ָ�' (good bye) and slip back into the shadows for a while.

[Whipstitch]

On the other hand, given the guaranteed 100min memory loss caused by Leal, killing is only cost-efficient for people nobody really cares about.

Yeah, Leal would work too. Depends on the scenario. It was really a hypothetical example, honestly; nobody in my group is really interested in roleplaying such scenarios anyway, which is nice, 'cuz I could certainly think of better things to do with my time than roleplay such scenarios. My group's not really big on making sure the security guards or other witnesses are dead either anyway; it's been made clear that there's so many surveilance methods in SR that they quite sensibly figure that if you're seen by security guards you've likely been seen by an image linked set of cybereyes, contacts anyway, hand scanner or security camera; best thing to do is just wear disguises and move fast.

[Hank]

This one time, I had my players kill a puppy so it wouldn't give away their position.

But that was an evil campaign.

[Feshy]

Some of my favorite Shadowrun moments where with teams that did not agree on "how far was too far."

One of the best was a team of three people -- myself (playing a former bodyguard turned street sam), an elf adept, and a shaman. The street sam was would go to great lengths to avoid killing people, and would outright refuse any wetwork. He eventually earned the respect of the adept, who joined him in his "no killing if at all avoidable" ways.

What the two of us didn't know is that the shaman was the most deceitful, scheeming, mercenary, dangerous psychopath in the sprawl. Two of the three of us didn't realize it, but our team was constantly being hired for wetwork. After the adept and I had neutralized the opposition, and were busy with our objective, the shaman would be slitting people's throats, or far worse (and usually far more intricate.)

This sometimes backfired, and dramatically so. The "last straw" was when we were hired to retrieve the ears of a group of gangers. The adept and I, at great expense and personal risk, managed to trap them in a building and flood it with nerostun gas. (Being a Street Sam can be awful, as every risky situation that we aren't prepared for is the sam's responsibility. "Uh... I guess I have two dice I can roll for that 'deploy dangerous chemical without training test'... with a huge modifier.") So, we knock them out, take the ears, and head upstairs to steal some goodie that I'm now convinced was only a diversion that the Johnson and the shaman contrived. The shaman keeps 'lookout' down stairs. The adept and I return, and check the gangers to make sure the shaman hasn't killed them in their sleep. They are alive -- but we fail to notice the invisible can of gasoline, and (because of our gas masks) the smell of gasoline fumes all throughout the building.

We get in the van, and start to drive off, when the shaman steals my shotgun, and opens the back door of the van and fires at the gas can. Conversation goes like this:

Shaman: I wip out the sam's shotgun from its hiding place under the van's floor, and fire it at the can of gasoline you can all now see *rolls dice*.
GM: (GM had previously ruled that firearms cause movie-like sparks in the future) The gas can ignites, setting off the built-up fumes in the building. It explodes in a tremendous fireball --
Me: No it doesn't.
*everyone stares at me*
Me: That shotgun is loaded with Gel rounds.
Shaman: No... it can't be. Even you aren't that much of a pacifist wus.
Me: Points to character sheet
*everyone bursts into laughter*
GM (still laughing): Okay, the round hits the gas can, and with a dull "thwump" knocks it over.
The shaman, once he recovers his composure, is forced to manaball them to get paid, and is promptly thrown from the van by the adept.

That was the last run we thought we did with that shaman -- though the player went so far as to have the character undergo a sex change to re-infiltrate our team and hire us up for more wetwork. You have to admire that kind of determination to evil -- or to whatever the Johnson had on him.

[Nightwalker450]

Shaman: No... it can't be. Even you aren't that much of a pacifist wus.

That is awesome.

[Spike]

when I play a Rigger, there WILL be a dedicated "hot seat" for a Samurai...why do they ALWAYS pull a gun and try to tell the Rigger how to drive

Irony: The first every Shadowrun Game I played (way back in 1st ed...) it was the RIGGER who pulled the gun on my Sammy during the actual RUN... of course, he was the worst munchkin cheese, taking rigger implants as cheap wired reflexes... before they wisely made that specifically illegal. I was proved 'in the right' by the GM amusingly (was going to kill a guard we had just beaten before he hit the panic button, rigger drew down to stop me (gun shots are loud, sayeth he, I have a silencer, noob, sayeth I...) and the guard hit the panic button during the Rigger's moment of glory.

Man, I hated that group...


More recently I was the one everyone (if they were smart) hated. My 'bio-adept gunslinger' kept anywhere from 25% to 50% of the rest of the teams pay on every job, sent fellow runners into 'die gloriously so that I might keep your share' numerous times, and on the very last run (escort a sealed cargo van to Portland) I actually drove the real van an alternate route while visibly sending the team down I-5 as decoys. The Minigun that lit them up was... amusing (my character was already in portland at a coffee shop listening to their screams over the network... if I'd been really sharp I might have recorded it for sale...).

I sold salvaged equipment, organs, cyberware. I was a hitman... and my team was mostly disposable meatsheilds and ablative armor... in short, I was a bastard. Sadly the GM was fighting with his wife and the game died before anyone caught on... you'd think not actually BEING on the run with them might have clued them in....

[Whipstitch]

I dislike things like that since they tend to bypass dice mechanics and rely on metagame presumptions. Unless your PC's a Face or something it just generally rubs me the wrong way when the OOC "We're all buddies!" thing leads PCs have an easier time screwing fellow players over due to the general assumption that the PCs are on the same side. I'm fine with running a game that way if people want to, but as a GM I'd prefer some warning prior to the games and would basically require that the characters don't necessarily know eachother all that well in their backgrounds and would likely let people know that anything goes prior to the start of the campaign.

[fool]

with my current Face character, there is little he wouldn't do for the right price. sexual assualt is on his taboo list, but torture, defiling corpses and organlegging are not. he's not a guy who really thinks about consequences, and relies on his social graces to get out of trouble. he's even taken to messing with his fellow runners (taking personal cuts of the profit, lying to contacts). i really don't expect him to live for too much longer.

especially if any of other players ever read this post

[Spike]

I dislike things like that since they tend to bypass dice mechanics and rely on metagame presumptions. Unless your PC's a Face or something it just generally rubs me the wrong way when the OOC "We're all buddies!" thing leads PCs have an easier time screwing fellow players over due to the general assumption that the PCs are on the same side. I'm fine with running a game that way if people want to, but as a GM I'd prefer some warning prior to the games and would basically require that the characters don't necessarily know eachother all that well in their backgrounds and would likely let people know that anything goes prior to the start of the campaign.

Weirdly, the Metagame was what should have made this sort of thing impossible. I wasn't 'passing notes' or conferencing with the GM on the side, everything I did I did in full view of the other players.

In CHARACTER my character was right in the game. I was playing him, near the end, like a johnson, calling up the team and offering them a stripped down version of the deal my character had been offered. Money and contacts flowed through my character, giving me the leverage necessary to run these scams.

I wasn't a 'face', but I had the charisma and connections to be believable in this secondary role.

[Kyoto Kid]

in fact..when I play a Rigger, there WILL be a dedicated "hot seat" for a Samurai...why do they ALWAYS pull a gun and try to tell the Rigger how to drive?

...A Sammy kept doing that to my Rigger Josie one campaign. She finally got so annoyed that she stopped the vehicle in front of a bar, jacked out, grabbed her M22-A2, got out of the vehicle & then told the Sammy, "OK Homme, you say you can do better? Then y'all do it, Ahm gonna get myself a drink." After tossing him the keycard, closed the door, slung the rifle over her shoulder, & walked into the bar. About a half hour later, one of the other team members came in and told her everything was fine. Indeed, the Sammy finally had ceased his backseat driving as they impressed on him it wasn't a good idea to piss her off like that, especially if she was flying a plane instead. [and yes, in such an instance she would have jacked out, set the controls on autopilot, grabbed her chute & jumped leaving them to fend for themselves.]

Of course this was in 3rd ed when Riggers commanded a bit more respect as few if any characters knew how to fly a plane and everyone inside a vehicle was limited to the driver's initiative (which without a VCR was 1d6 no matter what other boosting one had). .

[knasser]

Kyoto Kid - Please tell me that your avatar isn't what I think it is. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

[Kyoto Kid]

Kyoto Kid - Please tell me that your avatar isn't what I think it is. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

...why yes, yes it is one of those cute cuddly little guys who'll rip your throat out.

...wanted something to convey the nature of my namesake ('cept she doesn't drink blood...at least I don't think she's a follower of that Adept way.

[Grinder]

Kyoto Kid - Please tell me that your avatar isn't what I think it is. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

What's the problem with it? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/ninja.gif)

[Kyoto Kid]

...seen Fisty's Avatar yet?

[Grinder]

Of course and I love it (and him (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) ) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/love.gif)

But he is one of the DBC....