OK.

I'm sure that this is done. they eliminate the employees SIN, zero-ing him and then when his service in the black ops is complete, they give him a brand new SIN.

The corps pursue them until they make it back to another extraterritorial 'safe' ground. After that, they've 'crossed the border' and everyone just stares at each other, and walks away - because direct confrontation between corps is still forbidden by the corporate court.

Too much escalation. The corporate court is pretty strict about what level of sport they allow beyond a corps own territory.

I picture the corps taking deliberate effort to keep that kind of stuff off of the street. And yes, governments will have some of that stuff, but the corps generally produce it and make a great profit from them. If the government abuses their toys (by using them against the corps) then the government may have to pay a premium on their next batch of goodies.

Then by your own mockery of logic, following the instructions to make your own personalized runner is just as non-canon as following the instructions to make a prime runner NPC.

Thank you for conceeding the argument to me. I accept your surrender graciously. Now, fall on your sword.

Now there really is no margin in that. Why waste resources when you've already implanted the cranial bomb. Allowing that knowledge of their own activities to exist is a little on the fuzzy bunny side for a game that's supposed to be a dystopian future.

And you called accepting that the premise of Shadowrunner existing was juvinile? You think that someone who made the effort to take their forces which have no juristiction outside of their extraterritorial borders and move them into the city chasing runners would just stop and another corps border and say, gee shucks, you got away this time, but you darn Duke boys will slip up some time!

No that’s ridiculous. Furthermore if you’re highly trained and equipped special ops team had to run back home tail between it’s legs and by doing so implicate you then you’ve got some poorly trained expert spec ops teams.

And to clarify this is the Corporate Court that you imagine in your setting? Why would they act like this? A spec ops team sabotages corp A’s facility then runs and hides in corp B’s, the Court is just going to be okay with corp B saying, I didn’t see any spec ops teams run and hide in our basement. I don’t care what video you have, I’m denying it.

History indicates that the deliberate effort to keep things off the street tend to fail. How can you wave your hand and say that a corp is good enough to keep that off the street? The US government couldn’t prevent stores of Iraqi munitions from getting on the streets now they are IEDs very much on the streets. Criminals are more resourceful than you give credit, they will lose your genie and this will get out there. Governments will upgrade their soldiers who will end their service eventually. There is ample opportunity for the small time operators to get things.

Once they exist you’d be a fool of a corporation to waste that available resource and say, no I won’t hire you, my honor forbids it! Your competitors will do it to you.

Now if you’ve come over to the concept that small time runners can exist you’re basically back to the game as it is and all you have left to argue is that corps may be more vindictive than some of us think. That’s pretty much reversing your opinion.

On a side note: Style

Please consider these two things.

If you include who you’re quoting it is much clearer if someone wants to refer to the whole post instead of the part you felt important.

Second, five posts in a row is on the excessive side. It’s much simpler as a reader to have longer posts that include all your content rather than a slew of posts jammed around referencing answers in a haphazard manner. Including the user names in your quotes makes it simple for anyone to follow what you’re responding to without jamming up the board with unnecessary headers and footers and frams for each of three to five responses in a single thread.

Precisely! I never claimed that a player created PC was canon. A player-created PC should not be canon, except for certain PCs, namely the ones made by Brian and Michelle. Those are the canon player generated SR4 PCs that I was refering to in my previous post. A PC created with canon rules can only be canonly generated PCs, not canon PCs. There is one other canon SR4 PC that I know of, but that one was never fully fleshed out.

Thank you for conceeding the argument to me. I accept your surrender graciously. Now, fall on your sword.

In much the same way that corporate loyalties are created today; possibly even using brand names, but possibly not. Corporations today are often hidden behind a mist of obscurity that hides matters of ownership and responsibility. Corporate structures are complicated with complex mergers, buyouts, acquisitions, friendly and hostile takeovers, subsidiaries, etc. Did you know, for example, that Wells Fargo owns First Security Corp? That Fox owns myspace.com? That Pepsi owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut?

None of this is even assuming how complicated it can get when a corp is trying to hide its identity, which can be done quite easily. And as far as creating loyalty to a false identity, no one is better at doing that than capitalist corporations.

Well, yes. How many times have I said that now?
But corporations like owning things. They like establishing stuff within corporate parameters and creating policies so that the people who run those policies are interchangable. Network A, once established, is easy to keep running forever. If some people in it die off (which will happen after 50 years or so), you can train people to replace them and put them back into the corporate owned communications network. A freelance network can go away anytime, is subject to change by outside forces with which you really know nothing about, and will inevitably be useless after a couple of years. It happens with all natural relationships. And the cost only has to be paid once, really, if its worth being paid at all.

My point isn't that the corporate communications network is better than the freelance network, although I think it has definite advantages. My point was that there is plenty of room for both in the setting and I see both types of people having prominent influence in the world. But I refute the idea that ONLY freelancers can be "deniable assets". Hell, corps deny assets all the time. They're damn good at it today, and I imagine they'll get better at it as their power and influence grow in the next 60 years or so.

That's not canon and you have no right to bring it up.

(Sorry, couldn't resist. ) Okay, seriously: You're right, but my point was that you need a network to begin with and that's difficult to setup. Hell it's almost easier just to buy your own network than hire a talented executive face who can hopefully make one for you. But then, corps are getting better at this, too...

You're right, assuming the network is a good one to begin with, the problems go away the more times you use it. But those problems don't exist at all in the private corporate network. Also, it should be obvious that there are huge advantages in establishing a network to private shadowrunners, than waiting around for a new freelance network to create itself so that you can find it. Each time you find such a network, you're taking huge risks, too. Those risks also go away the more times you use the network.

Good point.

I agree. This was listed as SPEED in my reasons why freelancer teams have more advantages than setting up a private in-house team.

I think if all the corps have a gentleman's agreement then it's not really Shadowrun. This is one of those "first Principles" for me. It's the conflicts between the corps that really define things and contribute to all the general wackiness abound. Take away trolls and elves and spells and putting your mind in vehicles and funny head-bombs, and you've still got Shadowrun, in my opinion, as long as you have nasty powerful oppressive corporations playing King of the Playground.

I accept the principle of pursuit based on genre. The idea of corporations butting automated guns and electrified floors tied to motion sensors in their hallways is ridiculous to me, but I accept it based on genre. Likewise, you would think corporations would just complain to police and government like they do now, but Shadowrun has always had these weird corporate teams sent after runners and players have always liked combat scenes with those teams. I accept this on genre. Because genre is a "first Principle" for me, I've never really had to defend it before.

But if I have to, I will:
"Saving face" is kind of a dumb concept. It only works when your playing on even turf. When things aren't even; when you have the ability of retaliation (and prevention) at your disposal, it is in your interests to use them. I imagine some corps might benefit from laying low and playing sneaky hoping to recuperate their losses, but the situation will never change for them except to get worse. Corporations in Shadowrun are trying to remain independent and autonomous. The more they can demonstrate that they can utilize power, the more people and organizations will accept their use of that power without challenge. A corp should have every interest, not only in maintaining order (read "Policy") in its territory, but also applying that order ("Policy") well beyond its (current) borders.

Also, remember that a properly run corporation is not looking at the world as it exists in 2070 but sees the world through their views of the world of 2170 or beyond. Corporations are long-lived entities, and the people who make the executive decisions are working toward long-term goals.

Why not just solve your arguments with bigger guns? Hmmm... You'd think after someone's played Shadowrun for awhile, he'd stop asking this and expecting a different answer. This isn't an attack (people are so sentitive with that lately), but I don't think you expected a serious answer to "won't shooting at people stop them from chasing you?"

Let's flip the coin. You play or GM a shadowrun group. If they needed to chase somebody down, do you really think there's any way possible (other than GM fiat) that the person is going to get away? Seriously, work it out with a couple of shadowrun players.

In my game, persuits aren't the big deal anyway. It's the long-term investigations that happen later that's the problem by folks whose only job it is to prevent the sort of mayhem shadowrunners cause. Needless to say, the investigators have impossibly hard jobs and are very underpaid.

Why are you addressing me on this?! Seriously, go back and read my posts. Twice now, I've written a list outlining the advantages of freelancers over private corporate divisions and one of the major reasons, written in big capital letters, was that funny acronym SOTA, along with arguments why such runners would possess gear that has to be better than corps and why corps purposefully would supply this gear to shadowrunners instead of their own corps while persuing their not-so-enlightened self-interests. I'm kind of offended that I'm being addressed on this point.

I, for one, admit you win this point.
I will hear no further arguments that convince me. You win. PCs aren't canon. Neither are interpretation of rules. Nor are anything built on rules.

So what?

Campaigns, adventures, and interpretations of setting are not canon.

Comments about the validity of rules, fluff, adventures, campaigns, style, and interpretations are also not canon.

Discussions of canon material or definitions of canon are also not canon.



If this is the definition of canon, are any of us really here to discuss canon? I mean, we're here to discuss playing the game and apparently, according to your definition, you can't play the game and have that game be canon. So isn't it better to discuss our games or interpretations of canon material as it relates to playing games?

I mean, if canon is all that matters, and out discussion is not canon, what's the point?

There's a level beyond canon that's important, and that stuff gets explored once you open the book and start using the material. That doesn't make our discussions about those explorations and interpretations irrelevant and pointless, nor does it automatically put our discussion in that imaginary wastepaper basket annoyed posters like to label "house rules". We're discussing the GAME Shadowrun, and the canon material is only part of that game. Hell, actually, I think that's said somewhere in the CANON book now that I think about it...

Edit: Seems to work just fine. Thanks again!

Nah, don't worry about it. I had just come back from the dentist when I posted that so I was a little cranky...

I never really clarified my position. But you did, below.
I am against the idea that freelancers have no place in the setting, as is, and believe there's a plethora of reasons why a thriving freelance market can exist, if we take the existence of any market at all as a given.

However, I do not believe that "deniable asset" is the best reason, or even a good reason, of hiring a freelance shadowrunner team. There are lots of valid organizational methods for constructing shadowrunner teams and maintaining anonymity, and there are many different ways of perusing deniable. The ability that shadowrunners are "required" for their use as a deniable asset seems ridiculous to me, however, there are so many valid reasons why freelance shadowrunners will still be used. In addition to making more sense according to my views on economics and politics, these opinions also help to expand my home game since I don't have to curtail a "deniable asset" requirement on every mission, adding variety to the mission possibilities. This is the only way in which I have agreed with HappyDaze, other than to occasionally clarify posts when I felt people weren't responding fairly or ignoring earlier posts.

I have also been focusing the direction away from astral surveillance (sorry Cheops!) because I have MY OWN issues with the canon material that would put me in a similiar camp with Happy's but for much different reasons. (Basically, I don't like the limitations of the magic system. It seems goofy to me that magicians are very, very restricted on what they can and can not do and the way everything works the same way for each and every magician, and yet the Matrix is this vast mysterious wonderland and the powers of hackers are limited only by imagination. I mean, cool theme, but really stupid way to treat magic.)

You also have summed up my critically main point in the paragraph below:

There are lots of reasons for having both, or either one, and the amount of variety of ways to peruse this particular issue is as extensive as the amount of people in the world with the power and authority to peruse these aims. Whether or not it is prudent to have both, or just one, or not at all, depends on many factors including a hiring agent's individual needs, his expected needs in the future, his deployment strategies, his communications network, his income and how often it increases it, the amount of risks of various types he's willing to take, and most importantly, how educated he is on all these particular topics. Many of the choices come down to value statements, like "What's more important - communication security or speed of deployment?" For different hiring agents, this answer will be different based on his needs and personalities. In summation, it's a big world out there.

I keep intending to write a little list of all the points that have been addressed by each side so that we can see which ones have been refuted and which ones have been ignored, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Which was really all I was trying to prove all along. Since the "freelancer argument" was the only case put forward to why "Shadowrun is stupid", there's now a valid justification for shadowrunner freelance players running around.

That being said, a game of a team of elite corporate agents sounds really cool.

And you know, there were some guidelines written up in SR3 for ditching the freelancer model altogether and running games where players work for corporate security, DocWagon, or are impovershed street gangers. I'm sure this still will be printed in the Runner's Companion for SR4. I wouldn't be surprised if they add options for playing as members of Lone Star or government military forces.

So, you don't allow Masking Wards (p.125, Street Magic) in your games?

Oh no, we are still argueing canon. We are argueing canon because Shadowrun is a shared universe. While the IP is owned by Wizkids, who have chosen to use FANPRO as the caretaker of the property in the English speaking world, the universe does not belong to Wizkids in totality. It is shared between all players.

toturi's statements were only partly correct. While it is not canon that any PCs exist (which the exception of those mentioned) it is also not canon that they do not exist.
Canon does not provide the game, it merely provide the framework in which the game exists. All things that exist within this framework are valid. All things that exist outside of it are invalid in relation to canon.

The framework is important because the individual games and, to a lesser extent, the entire universe are a cooperative effort. If the players and the GM cannot agree with each other, then there is no game, there is only a mess. The canon framework provides a world that all can be sure of and all can agree upon. If there is a disagreement one can simply point to the the book, either in the rules or the in flavor text, and all will know who is right and who is wrong and the game can continue without further argument about the subject.

However, when an individual or group strongly embraces that which cannot exist within canon it becomes difficult for that individual or group to play with others who are not of a like mind on the issue. Expectations become broken and the world is no longer right. It is as if it suddenly started raining up or giant sentient bottles of vodka drank people. It is like living in Wackyland or Soviet Russia. Some can adept, but it is unnerving and it makes intergroup play, including tournaments and exhibition games, difficult.

Thus, we sit here and argue about stuff like this. The gaming police certainly won't arrest you for playing outside of canon (though the gaming lynch mob might necklace you) but one must understand that it produces adaptability problems if you chose to play with canon players while still clinging to the non-canon frame of reference.