What stories rub you the wrong way? Options

[Voran]

I was just flipping through my Seattle sourcebook, and was reading the short-story that leads into the first chapters "Kaboom Ka-bye". Now, don't get me wrong, its an excellently crafted story, and I enjoyed it in that sense, but after finishing it my first thought was this.

I would track Marie down and disable her, then feed her to ghouls, alive.

The casual nature by which she decides, "Hey the best way to deal with this courier is to slap a bomb on him", while entirely efficient, is entirely on the terrorist side of things. She rationalizes "Oh the blood is on the hands of the corp that used this unwitting wageslave to transport a datafile he didn't even know he had", then proceeds to blow him up, presumably the 7+ escorts in hidden array around him, and who knows how many innocent civilians.

She's not a runner. She's a fucking terrorist.


Anyway, we've had some excellent stories across the various new source material, just wondering if anyone else had any stories that for some reason or another inspired such a reaction. Whether homicidal, like mine, or whatever (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[eidolon]

I think maybe your definition of "runner" is a bit narrow. You personally might not like her methods, but "runner" != white knight in shining armor. Some of them are bad, bad people that can get a job done.

There aren't any bits of the fiction that I can remember not liking in a "that irritated me" way, but I'm probably just blocking them out and remembering the awesome that is all of Cybertechnology.

[CanRay]

I think maybe your definition of "runner" is a bit narrow. You personally might not like her methods, but "runner" != white knight in shining armor. Some of them are bad, bad people that can get a job done.

Some?

Yeah, the "Stick t to the Corps" types died with the Neo-@s for the most part.

[eidolon]

Yeah, I know. I don't know if it was the fluff changed the player base, or if the player base changed regardless of the fluff and then the fluff changed or what.

[suoq]

I blame/credit William Gibson for using Mark Brandon Chopper Read as his inspiration for Keith Blackwell. Once that happened, all bets were off.

[tete]

Well she certainly isnt getting Good Karma *snicker*
Runners to some extent ARE terrorists, that said she wont live long in the shadows with that kind of behavior... One of those innocent civilians could always be a good friend of Lofwyr... best not to blow up his friends.

[LurkerOutThere]

I think morality has somewhat softened on Shadowrun but occasionally the pendulum swings back. For my part I and my characters don't like explosives for just this exact reason and a bomb on a crowded street is not an acceptable tool for one guy.


A sniper rifle is the professional answer.

[eidolon]

Meh. "Professional." Humph.

[CanRay]

Yeah, but then people know who the target was with a sniper rifle.

Bombs create more "Noise", and it takes more time to figure out who was the target, and, thusly, the suspect pool.

Drive-By, that's a bit better. And, if you're squeemish about bodycount, program a Smartgunned SMG to only miss except for one target IDed by Biometrics. A bit of noise with the bystanders, and you still only nail your target.

[Catadmin]

The main character of the story was a single 'runner with no team backup. Yes, there were alternatives to how she could have done the hit, but she didn't appear to be a sniper or a ninja or a poisoner. Her specialty seemed to be explosives / demolitions.

So when reading this tale, I make the assumption that Mr. Johnson knows the runner's skillset and either knew exactly how the hit was going to go down or specifically requested it to go down that way.

I'm willing to give the author the benefit of this doubt because in a story this short, there's no way she could explain everything going on behind the scenes. She just had to assume the readers would know enough about SR to figure it out.

[Brazilian_Shinob...]

I think morality has somewhat softened on Shadowrun but occasionally the pendulum swings back. For my part I and my characters don't like explosives for just this exact reason and a bomb on a crowded street is not an acceptable tool for one guy.


A sniper rifle is the professional answer.

Rule number 7: There is no problem that can't be solved with the right amount of explosives.

[tete]

Rule number 7: There is no problem that can't be solved with the right amount of explosives.

Depends on your definition of "solved", I suppose that is one way to "solve" bleeding out from a knife wound, but I would have preferred the Doc Wagon approach.

[CanRay]

Rule number 7: There is no problem that can't be solved with the right amount of explosives.

I prefer Rule 11: "Everything is air-droppable at least once."

Especially useful when you have some nice, tall buildings. Or a T-Bird. Or a Helicopter.

[Smokeskin]

I was just flipping through my Seattle sourcebook, and was reading the short-story that leads into the first chapters "Kaboom Ka-bye". Now, don't get me wrong, its an excellently crafted story, and I enjoyed it in that sense, but after finishing it my first thought was this.

I would track Marie down and disable her, then feed her to ghouls, alive.

The casual nature by which she decides, "Hey the best way to deal with this courier is to slap a bomb on him", while entirely efficient, is entirely on the terrorist side of things. She rationalizes "Oh the blood is on the hands of the corp that used this unwitting wageslave to transport a datafile he didn't even know he had", then proceeds to blow him up, presumably the 7+ escorts in hidden array around him, and who knows how many innocent civilians.

She's not a runner. She's a fucking terrorist.


Anyway, we've had some excellent stories across the various new source material, just wondering if anyone else had any stories that for some reason or another inspired such a reaction. Whether homicidal, like mine, or whatever (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Compared to a bunch of "no-wetwork" runners who run after run sneak into corp facilities and every other time they have to shoot their way out with automatics with APDS ammo? She's doing about the same.

[CanRay]

The fact is that, in 2070, a lot of Security Companies are lumping Shadowrunners into the "Terrorist" category, even if they don't deserve it.

Why? Well, they figured out it's a "Hot Topic Button" that makes the Norms "OMGWTF SCARED!!!" and takes away from the glamour that Shadowrunners had in the '50s and '60s, where they were seen as "The last bastallion of Freedom, sticking it to the Corps" thanks to a lot of Trid and Sims that were "Based" on Shadowruns.

Terrorism became a horrific thing in the public eye (At least in the Western World) again after Dues and Winternight did their things during Crash 2.0. Before that, they were seen mostly as either Eco-Terrorists (Which kind of make sense, in a insane sort of way) and Policlubs (And who can't help but hate a bigot?). But, with Crash 2.0 and it's affiliates erasing SINs, causing "Apes", setting MAGICALLY ENHANCED NUKES off... Yeah...

Funny, considering what Shadowrunners did to help prevent ACTUAL nutbar terrorists from blowing up the world!

RIP, Captain Chaos and ShadowLand.

[Whipstitch]

She's not a runner. She's a fucking terrorist.

A lot of runners effectively are terrorists. My last team had 2. Doesn't mean they're not runners.

[MortVent]

to paraphrase another story:

some runners are out for vengence, survial, to stick it to the man.. and others are just paid to shoot someone in the face



runners are professionals, but not all professionals are going to use the same tools and methods. Some are scapels others are a truck load of C-12

Each is used by the corps for different reasons, collateral damage is going to happen.

sometimes it's the runners that cause it, other times it's corp security firing without hesitation into the crowd to take down the runners (and killing innocent wage slaves held as meat shields to do it)

Life is cheap in SR, morality is based for most on how much ya willing to pay

[CanRay]

The problem with "Professional" runs, which my group just dealt with right now, is the amount of work that goes into it. Particularily on the Hacker, who needs to Forge the documents, do the research, hack the facilities, blah blah blah, while the Street Sami and the Magician sit around playing Poker. (There is an advantage to all that Cyberwear, it makes the Aura harder to read!).

On the bright side, when it comes time to steal Lincoln Sprawlcars and put on fake Diplomatic Plates, and the occasional flatbed truck, well, that's fun for everyone!

[Voran]

oooh activity (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I'm not opposed to wet-work runs, sometimes you're going to have to leave a few bleeders and make a few widows/orphans/whatever. Guess I'm just old. Time was the game was about 'sticking it to the man!', now apparently a good day's work is to take a page from the IRA, or Al-Qaeda. Not really a criticism, as the game and the vibe go with the times I suppose. Still, from a PC perspective, my history in gaming lent towards less collateral damage, cause our GM was nasty enough with consequences we KNEW about, why give him extra ammo, "Oh that bomb stunt? Yeah, you killed the daughter of one of your contacts."

[Jaid]

ah. well, i guess if your GM is going to arbitrarily punish your characters for doing your job in a way he doesn't like, then i could see why that angle might be particularly bothersome.

[CanRay]

Guess I'm just old. Time was the game was about 'sticking it to the man!'

Ah, the good ol' days, I never knew them. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Thing is, you're working for "The Man" while sticking it to "The Other Man", so, really, who was getting anything out of the deal?

That said, as a GM, yeah, going out of your way to up the body count is not a good idea at all. But, then again, it's socially accepted that there is some "Collateral Damage". After all, you see security guards get aced all the time by Shadowrunners on the 'Trid.

Still doesn't stop Lone Star from beating the ever-loving $Diety out of Shadowrunners who are Cop Killers or geeked Little Suzy in a Drive-By/Bombing or some such. And then handing them over to Bubba the Love Troll (BTW, loved his Cameo in Shadowrun: Vice!), after finding "Evidence" of enough crimes to put them away for an Elf's Lifetime.

If they're SINless, of course. If they have SINs, well, there are a "Few" protections left for them... Better hope you got enough laundered cash in your legitimate accounts to pay a good Lawyer to make sure you get those, however.

As the SINner in my group is finding out. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/devil.gif)

[Whipstitch]

See, I consider the form of "sticking it to the Man" that shadowrunners typically engage in as being somewhat akin to terrorism in many instances. It's not just sabotage anymore when you're willing to shoot your way through a half dozen people on your way to wreck the machinery or otherwise prove that you don't want the corps pushing people around anymore. It's a matter of perspective, in the end. One man's mujahideen is another man's cowardly fanatic. Even purely mercenary criminals who liked wearing the bad boy image on their sleeve tended to think of themselves as more of daring than as bad guys. Dillinger was fond of letting people know who we as, after all, and he rather successfully cultivated an image of being fairly polite to hostages. People don't like thinking themselves as the bad guy, so forgive me if I always took the fuzzy neo-anarchist shadowrunning scene with a big ol' honking bag of salt.

[Voran]

ah. well, i guess if your GM is going to arbitrarily punish your characters for doing your job in a way he doesn't like, then i could see why that angle might be particularly bothersome.

Why is it arbitrary tho? Consequences for choices made, you choose to be random, you get random consequences too.

[tete]

Why is it arbitrary tho? Consequences for choices made, you choose to be random, you get random consequences too.

/agree

everyone has relatives and friends, rack up a body count and eventually you killed someone important enough that you made yourself a target. Thats part of the fun of Shadowrun.

You can do the moral thing,
You can do the get rich thing
or
You can just try to survive chummer

[Eimi]

There have always been runners that didn't give a crap about leaving a huge bodycount behind on jobs, just like there have always been runners that have been careful not to kill anyone they didn't have to. Nothing's really changed, other than the PR rap runners as a whole tend to get, though they're still pretty darn popular in some places, as LA's 'star runners' will attest to.

Running hasn't gotten any bloodier or more conscientious on the whole, it's still down to how individual runners and runner groups operate. Leaving behind piles of bodies still gets you more heat than not leaving any would, and not leaving any while still succeeding on a run is still more complicated and hard to do than the alternative. The corps still need the runners, so they tend to invest about the same amount of effort in delivering retribution after a run as they ever did. Johnsons may still want to either avoid collateral damage and the extra attention it brings with it, or they may want a lot of explosions and noise to send a message, just as they sometimes did in the past. Runners that try to avoid wanton killing still come into some conflict with runners that just don't care or even enjoy it.

There is no new breed of more dangerous and immoral runners, just like there's no new breed of more conscientious and moral corp or government targets. Nothing changes. Except for the SOTA, chummer.