Yes. My hypothetical character, with a hypothetical grenade, during a session we hypothetically played yesterday.

IMO, tossing it was the right choice - the guy who was captured not only survived it, but managed to stay conscious, which is an interesting revelation about the character (This is what happens when you have a creative GM and decide to make a character with maxed-out Amnesia...), roughly half the opposition is down as a result (including a man in charge that was probably a physad or something), we should be able to easily turn the tables on the other half, and since we are in Bug City post-quarantine, the explosions don't really blow the mission. (in fact, the plan was for the rigger to hit from the outside, with the characters inside attacking at the same time - a covert extraction in force. )

What I was curious about mostly was not just whether other people thought it was the right thing - or only thing - to do given the circumstances, but how they'd view this sort of thing in terms of team dynamics / professional runner code, etc.

Well, that's definitely the worst case scenario in Bug City, but not necessarily a given.

The setup was this: The guy we were trying to bust out is a surgeon. (one of my character's Level 2 contacts) After the quarantine happened, some enterprising goons basically took him prisoner at his medical practice, and started selling his services to anyone who could pay them in food or ammo. We'd have wanted the guy freed regardless, but even more so in this situation, since we had a number of people in need of medical attention, and expected to have more, the way things were going.

My character has a transducer, so when he came in pretending to be a patient (carrying a backpack with food as payment, with the concussion grenade hidden among cans of Aztecola), the doc caught on instantly and plugged into my datajack for "diagnostics", allowing us to have a detailed conversation under the noses of the guards... Which did reveal, among other things, that while one guy is visibly in charge, all the real decisions seem to come down from his "associate" who stays out of sight at all times, and is supposed to be a magician. Which of course makes you wonder what other, ulterior motives they might have had for taking over a medical practice.

Indeed.

Anyway, to the question. I'll sometimes go with the colateral damage option even when it's really only about equal tactical value to other options. So, umm, i'm a bit puzzled where "Tough Calls" ties into this? Did you leave out something, like the captured guy owed you a LOT of money that you wouldn't be able to collect if he died?

You GM was playing it by the book, the Amnesia PC didn't know this would happen?

Well the full on five point amnesia flaw says that the PC doesn't know their past, skills or abilities and that the GM should write up the character so that goes for their attributes and edges and flaws as well. Kind of drastic putting him up against a concussion grenade in crowded territory as a way to figure out what kind of body rating and cyber/bioware he might have, but needs must when the devil drives I suppose.

I think it kicks ass, and not just from a GM POV. Sounds like a really fun moment all around. A big salute to the GM if that is what was happened.

Well at least you'd be able to rest assured that you teammates won't risk humping the mission and get a TPK just because they were sobbing over catching a single member in a little Stun.

P.S. As a player i personally do use more caution in SR than other games where the margin between a tickle and death is smaller, and death is nigh unreversable (save for the extremely expensive Hand of God).

Possibly, possibly not. If you know that there's zero chance of running a rescue mission to get them back then giving them a quick and painless death as opposed to a long drawn out and excruciatingly painful interrogation before being executed or similar ending could be viewed as the last favour of a good firend.

Going with that logic, we ought to execute our whole team just to be completely safe...

You see, everyone has been really good about not metagaming our reaction to the various strange events going on, and got mixed up in all sorts of weird stuff, and... Well, the long and the short of it is, UB has been trying to hire us for the last three in-game days to try to smuggle a cargo out of Chicago for them, and we're running out of ways to say "maybe". (though they offered us such an absurdly large amount of money for it, no one on the team is willing to touch it with a stick - I don't think the UB hippies quite get how runner minds work...)

If the players had a decent shot at getting out of the Zone then it could have gone either way depending on how mercenary the characters are. If they could get out then the pros of it are the one PC's gets to keep their contact and the others get a surgeon that owes them big time, and since runners seem to have this annoying tendency of keep getting shot/stabbed/otherwise injured this is always a good thing. If they can't get out of the Zone then this guy becomes a golden commodity - he can patch them up and they can team up and trade his skills for stuff whilst watching his back. Combination made in heaven.

Hell no. Having a surgeon owe you favors is always a good thing. Unless, of course, he sprouts into a Bug and...well...eats you. But until he starts nibbling, he's still a good contact to have.

And PP - quite honestly, this is Shadowrun. Granted, most PCs aren't as bad as, say, "Reservoir Dogs", but two things remain the same.

1. Life is precious
2. Charity begins at home

And as many people pointed out, being captured by people who may have little or no compunctions to taking revenge for the loss of a valued asset...yeah, just kill me.

I'd rather not be sold off to organ leggers a piece at a time. Or disappear into a slave pit or...well...fill in the blank here. And this is assuming they aren't Bugs or something equally unsavory.

And, let's face it - it's not a tactical advantage...they could have strolled away with minimum fuss and not bothered at all.

-Siege

He was unwounded. Under the initial assumption that the walls were Structural Material, estimated damage code was 58M Stun, staged by rolling half Power against TN 4, with damage stageable into physical.

~J

Well, keep in mind that 'cold' and 'warm' are generally a matter of sentiment vs. logic and not morality. Even though popping his head like a pimp may be in his best interests, and even the 'right' thing to do, it still requires a degree of emotional disconnect to be able to perform the act.

Personally, I like cold, as long as the character has some cause or connection that will cause him to go warm. Most of the better Shadowrun novel characters are pretty cold-blooded, but that one thing/person that melts them is the subject of an entire novel.

From what I can remember, most of the 'warm' Shadowrun characters were the focus of criminally shitty novels. I don't begrudge people the right to play Robin Hood and Lancelot in the dystopian future if that's what works for them, but I do think they're largely missing the point.

Or, to put it another way: an Evil character in a D&D party can be an interesting change of pace, but an entire party of Evil characters misses the point of heroic fantasy. A lone shadowrunner with unshakable morals can be a good change of pace for an SR team, but a full group of them is similarly off-genre.

There is smart risk and dumb risk and times when you are neck deep in turds. When any or all of the players have a tough time differentiating between #1 and #2 or recognizing when it is #3 and not #3 yes you can have RL issues. *shrug*

This isn't about out and out purposely killing a PC. He didn't know for sure if the captive would live, but it was also uncertain that the captive would die. After identifying the situation best you can, evaluating options, and weighing the risks he made the call. Risk of PC death that is something that is intentionally part of the game.

I have never found myself in a situation where i felt compelled to intentionally bring about the certain death of another player's PC to save the whole party/mission. I also don't recall ever killing or permanently maiming a PC....that i didn't intend to bring about certain death to.**

I do understand and appreciate that sometimes you have to make allowances for POV of other individual players, and judge where they are willing to go. Hey, talk to the player right at that moment, within whatever table-talk limits apply. (EDIT:I've found having and conveying some sort of compasion helps too. Things like "Hey, don't rip up that character sheet. I want to frame and hang that sucker in my trophy room." are likely not condusive to a friendly gaming environment. ) But you can't deal with your PC dieing by bad luck or an honest, non-recuring mistake made by another player? IMO you shouldn't have that PC at the table. If you can't deal with any of your PCs dieing under those circumstances you should likely deeply consider if you are at the wrong table.

I have done that before and once walked away from a table/group permanently after incidentS involving players unable to clearly identify #3 (i actually suspect it was something more malicious and/or pathological than that). Life is too short to put up with that.

** But that's a whole different kettle of fish, and set of stories.

Oh man, does our group ever miss The Point at times. As in 180º away from The Point. Fortunately they still have fun.

P.S. I appreciate the irony of that coming from someone with the handle Lucifer...even though Lucifer was a Biblical translation quirk that was then mistaken for Satan...but of course that's another story too, and maybe you already know it.

I'm named after the star, not any supernatural manifestation of evil. Any attempt to imply otherwise will be subject to full legal reprecussions of libel or slander as appropriate the situation!

There's really nothing wrong with missing the point, as long as you're having fun, but when posting on a message board dedicated to a game you generally have to assume that most people there play to the genre (or close enough).

Therefore, Lucifer is Jesus, obviously.

I'll disagree there. I think they understand how SR runner's minds should work. Very large sums of money and a plan to get out of there? How can you say NO!!!!! Deal with other issues after you leave. Shadowrunner's sure aren't humanitarian, who cares what 'evils/lucifers' they unleash on the world?

Because the healthy shadowrunner immediately says 'boy, this sure is suspicious. Most people LIKE money.' In general, if the Johnson offers you an obscene amount of cash, he doesn't plan on paying you.

They didn't actually give us a plan for getting out of there - we'd need to work that out ourselves. (and the cargo is pretty big)

And while we're a merry bunch of sociopaths (well, most of us, anyway), there are certain things we won't do - both because some of the characters actually have moral qualms, and because it's really not that smart to get involved with people who might want to hire you to spread a plague, firebomb a grade school, or smuggle large crates filled with unspecified cargo for people who live in a building with a large and slowly growing background count...

How big, queen-size?

Besides the fact that the individual in question was not a mage, no, it would not have been. Too much risk of failure, and if you succeed all you've done is raise TNs.

~J