Giving the massive kill-machine a job Options

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I tend to think of security forces as being very powerful but with short attention spans. The runner team isn't supposed to be the only game in town, fluff wise, even if in reality it's really a bunch of guys sitting around a table for their own amusement.

Anyway, as far as the overkill thing goes, I don't think stuff like Wired 1 on a veteran security officer is all that necessarily alarming. A guard with Wired 1 isn't necessarily all that much scarier than a troll ganger hopped up on a Nitro+Cram speedball unless they also have the dicepool sizes to back up their gear. You can still have that kind of tech and be a cut below say, the Red Samurai listed in the books depending on how you stat out everything else. I don't really think it's worth dwelling on too much.

[Demon_Bob]

Police responce should depend on the area you live in. Perhaps, roll a number of dice depending on area, if you get a hit someone makes a phone call.
If enough hits are generated then there's some kind of responce. The call from a AAA zone would probably be to a private security company asking them to send a patrol.
The call from a Z-area might be to Cousin Vinney asking if they can move.
Might say for Z-type area 1 die per incident looking for 7 total hits, and 7 dice per incident looking for 1 hit for AAA.
Whether, anyone shows up in time, and what they do are compleatly different.

"I'm sorry Mr. Astaire but we are going to have to site you for gunfire within city limits. Please pay the ticket within 10 working days.
The locations you can pay are written on the ticket. Have a good day."

Your player kinda reminded me of someone from a D&D fighter gaming background who wanted to kill and loot everything.
Not sure if you were trying to give that impression, giving a general Arrrggghh shout out, or looking for advise.

[Manunancy]

This arguement pops up every once in awhile and I feel most peoples vision of this is unrealistic in the shadowrun setting. Say your team kills a beat cop who knows too much or a sec. guard at McHughs or hell Renraku*. How (besides gm fiat) does the respective company know it was them? Cybereyes with cameras? Drones recording the whole thing? Ok so if you haven't disguised your appearence they got a face. Then what? They just "magically" know everything there is to know about a SINless criminal and extract their vengence?

Cmreas are dirt cheap and information storage space even cheaper. Which means nay place with a security can be asumed to have some cams. If no precations were take to get rid of them or hide one's face, assuming the ownr gets a mugshotisn't that far fetched. When it comes to the 'ho did they find who I ma bit', more often than not, the way many police investigations get moving : through an infromer selling what he knows, or som fellow criminal ratting out everyone he can in a plea brgain. Having a face might not mean a complete ID pops out from the databases, but it let the offended party ask questions. It also get filed for future references and if the chracter gets an habit of getting on picture the heat will increase.

Of couse you won't have tens of though guy teams popping the pciture around the Barrens asking 'seen that mug ? tell me about it', but said pciture will probably be ciculated to various contacts amongst the lowlives to figure out who he might be. If the characttrer makes himself both well know and not so well liked in his corner of the Barrens, odds are someone will rat him. Then thign will go sour on him. Even without picture, some gonk flaunting a pile of fresh nuyens around the clubs striaght after a corp got hit is lkely to get noticed, epecially if he's got a repute for bieng involved in that sort of things. Street cred, notoriety and public awareness are important there.

[Glyph]

What I find unrealistic is the notion that killing a few guards will galvanize a big reaction from a megacorp, while running off with their multi-million prototype won't. I do think that there are unwritten rules regarding intercorporate espionage and sabotage, and teams who commit wanton destruction - blowing up labs, shooting office workers by the dozen, etc. - will get a stronger than usual response.

But even the stealthiest team needs muscle. All of the planning in the word can't protect you from Murphy's law, the cruel whim of the fickle dice, a fatal gap in your pre-run intel, or or a Johnson who is out to screw your group over.

Outside of runs against corporate facilities, shadowrunners regularly deal with unsavory, dangerous people who cannot be trusted, not to mention the teeming dangers of thrill gangs, ghouls, and the many other predators infesting the sprawl.


If the problem is that the GM sees Shadowrun as nothing but mission impossible-type runs, where the group has to sneak in and out while leaving no trace, then the GM needs to explain to the sammie that his character simply won't work in his version of shadowrun.

If the problem is that the character seems to escalate the combat end of things past the scale of the other characters, it's not really that tough to fix. Just add some extra mooks. The sammie can kill a bunch of them, the others can kill one or two of them, and the lethality of the game won't increase to where the other characters are endangered. Also, just like the hacker and the face get spotlight time, the sammie can occasionally run into something that only he can handle - another sammie, a troll bodyguard, etc.

If the problem is that the sammie is a one-trick pony to the extent that he is useless outside of combat, then the GM needs to sit down with the player and help him fix his character sheet. The player can't know what the GM considers "essential" skills, or how much emphasis will be placed on legwork vs. infiltration vs. combat.

If the player has been told this, and hasn't changed, then it might be either a situation where only experience can properly teach him, or a situation where the player really doesn't want to be in that particular type of game. If it is the latter, it would probably be best if the player didn't play with that particular group. If his sammie is sitting around doing nothing all of the time, he might begin to start fights because he is bored.

[Whipstitch]

Cameras and storage is cheap but the time and effort needed to comb through and properly interpret that data is not. There's a reason why employee theft often goes unpunished and undetected for so long irl-- determining who stole something via cameras requires you to either have a good idea of when something happened or the will to go back and sift through hours (if not days or weeks!) of largely irrelevant footage. Determining what is and isn't relevant information is harder than people give it credit for. Granted, the combat situations we're talking about here aren't subtle, so at least finding the initial evidence would be pretty easy. But crosschecking it with already existing information? In a setting where so many people are SINless and live "off the grid" while other citizens are constantly surveilled? Not so easy; you could end up with hundreds if not thousands of potential suspects yet not have a singe one of them be the perp. It's a signal to noise problem. The massive amount of processing power available in SR4 helps, I'm sure, but I rather doubt it's enough to compensate for the fact that people need to properly catalog this kind of stuff in the first place.

[Glyph]

Exactly. Runner's Companion emphasizes that there is a huge glut of information, and that this information is extremely balkanized - often among corporations with absolutely no interest in sharing with each other. I would probably play this up a lot. It's the only way to make shadowrunning remotely feasible in a society with such ubiquitous surveilance.