Not really sure I want to start a rant thread, but I would like to know that I am not the only person out there with players in his group that make you wonder, "What are they thinking?" and "They can't be serious."

The group had spilt up momentarily during a kidnapping run where all they had to do was wait for the Johnson to call them and give info about where to make the drop.
The characters in question had made an effort to eleviate the kidnapee's fears to make her easier to handle.
The Characters had snuck out of England their home and wound up in Spain.
While one of the players was warding the room the other untied the girl and sat down to watch TV.
The hungry spoiled rich girl shortly thereafter called room service.
After they were unable to understand her she called daddy's secretary to help her translate.
Room service arrived and panic ensued. The two characters in question decide to run, and start making mistakes until the GM finally gives up and ends the session with, "Your caught. The Spanish Police agree not to press charges if you send out the child and give up peacefully." They do so.
Upon arriving back in London, England they are promptly arrested and charged with kidnapping.
One of the players in question starts off by making statements like:
"I spent 5,000 to have a lawyer on retainer he will get me off."
"They haven't sufficient evidence." despite the trail that they left.
and the capper "I'll just escape and leave England for 15 years because that is how long the statute of limitations probably is."

This kinda sounds like they're coming in from a D&D game. Where if you stir up trouble in a town you just get out and don't come back. Townsfolk (or even people of a larger city) are usually too busy with running and/or protecting the place to go out and chase down the adventurers that just caused a ruckus, they just run them out of town. Usually there are no repercussions unless they try to come back to the town.

Remind them that this is Shadowrun, there's extradition, pissed off arms of the law with long reach, lawyers who won't stop at anything for the money and noteriety of prosecuting infamous insidious shadowrunners, not to mention pissed off vengeful corporations who have no qualms about erasing your little SINless hoop.

Number 3 actually has the good idea. However, it isn't that easy to impliment. HE'd have to lay low in a place that simply doesn't extradite to England. There are some nice places in Africa where they can hide, Asamando for example.

Likewise, they can hang out with some pirates in Southeast Asia. I hear that Sri Lanka is pretty nice. They might even still have a cease fire with the rebels.

If any of the characters were Mages or Shamans and were active in the UK, there is a pretty good chance they would have samples on record with the government. These of course could be used for ritual locate and if need be spell targeting (and I'm sure that the Lord Protector's office recruits the best of the best for any field in which they need expertise).

You lost me at "called room service". Now I'm a reasonable fellow, but under no means would I allow a kidnapee to contact an outside source or allow her to walk around unshackled. Egads
! It's almost like these runners have it coming!

At that point i was already going "oh, oh" from the line above. Untie before settling in for some channel surfing? WTF? Does this mean she can see their faces too?

But yes, Demon_Bob, i get that feeling sometimes. So do the rest of the players in our group. We all have a bad day every now and then when we ride the short bus. It does tend to make for interesting running jokes because this stuff just doesn't get forgotten. One of our group has even taken to putting a star sticker somewhere in the margins of the character sheet for, in her judgement, "special" actions. She also gives out penguins stickers for exceptionally good ideas. "Good idea" typically meaning something that saved another character's life and/or averted someone else getting a star. A little phrase about the event is then written in after the sticker.

I have one D&D character that has, oh, at least 7 or 8 stickers. IIRC only 2 of them are penguins. However you have to keep in mind that sometimes even true brilliance can get a star due to their subjective nature. For example one of the stars has the word "taxman" after it. This was for successfully planning and executing a snookering, over multiple months RL time, of the GM so that my PC now has a royal writ giving him the tax franchise to collect from the rest of the party the [standard for the kingdom] 20% taxing of adventure spoils.

Why are shadowrunners operating in a country where they can't speak the languange?

If it's just a shoot-n-scoot, that's one thing.

Carrying out an effective kidnapping and having to interact with locals and not be able to speak the language?

Yikes.

-Siege

That's it. We need a support group.

Demon Bob, you are not alone. I'll save you the headache of reiterating all the stupid player stories that I've already posted. Suffice to say this: the guy who reads up on, and thinks about, the game the most usually ends up the GM. You have to presume the players are less informed and less focussed than yourself.
Sad but usually true.

Actually I was considering going back and deleting it.

I had a player who wanted to his character have a Day Job in landscaping. He never did explain why a tiger shapeshifter would want a job at all, let alone one working in landscaping. Nor why anyone would hire a homeless person (Street Lifestyle), with no skill, and no legal ID (he didn't even have a fake SIN) to be their regular landscaper.

In this case it was the players delusion that the PC made sense. Which is one of several reasons I didn't let it in the game.

considering how easy it is to get linguasofts, and how common a chipjack or knowsoft link is, there is no excuse for not having someone know the language. If you didt get the linguasoft when you were getting the transportation there, you made a big mistake.

The day job "flaw" was way too useful - and working as a landscaper does open interesting possibilities to a shadowrunner.

The other questions, however, do kinda need some pressing answers.

Beware the pizza delivering shadowrunner!

-Siege

I always thought the day job flaw ought to pertain to something that could cause trouble for you as a runner...like you were a wageslave for Renraku during the day, so if you went on a run against your boss, you better be VERY careful......

Aye. Even today there's a day laborers that I see hanging out at gas stations and such, many of them are likely to be illegal aliens who will do anything for short time work. And I'm sure you've heard of new stories of migrant farm hands, many of whom are in the country illegally. Contractors will hire them since they don't have to pay minimum wage nor worry about any other employee benefits/insurance for them.
These smaller firms get to cut more for themselves at the bottom line. I can see many of these corporations who hire subcontractors, the subcontractors might have a few Sinless working on stuff (especially in the grunt labor area in the non-restricted area), or for places where they don't care as much about employee safety.

I perfectly understand that people have hired poor illegal immigrants for things like landscaping. This isn't the same thing.

First, the tiger wasn't just poor, it had spent absolutely no money on lifestyle. How many people hire someone who lives in a cardboard box and bathes only when it rains to do their landscaping?

Second, the tiger had absolutely no skill at landscaping. At least the illegal alien would know what a lawnmower was, even if they'd never used it. Can you imagine what kind of landscaping that untrained tiger shifter would do? They'd be lucky to last a full day at the job.

Also, without any SIN, you'd have to pay the shifter in certified cred. Why would any employer go through that hassle? It's easier to find a poor person with some sort of SIN and just lie about the number of hours the employee worked, to hide the fact you haven't paid them the legal minimum wage. (Assuming there is any legal minimum wage in Shadowrun.)

The big problem, is that after I flat out told the player several times that he needed to write up reasons why the shifter would want any job, but especially this kind of job, and why someone else would want to hire him for it. He never even tried.

Good gawd, a squatter?

And as a regular landscaper, not just a nameless hired grunt? Sheesh.

Although, the shifter might have had some luck as a day laborer - up until he stopped for lunch.

-Siege

Hmmm... if I was the contractor, I'd keep hiring the guy. I'd just not let him have his lunch break till after the shift is over and he can eat the other laborer, thereby not having to pay for that guy. lol. Just kidding.

Actually, that's a very shadowrunner way of looking at it.

-Siege

Would you allow a PC to take "Day Job" as a flaw without defining any of the particulars?

-Siege

So the spoiled girl gets on the phone to roomservice....someone get me a LARGE bottle of Asprin.

Of course if she's too dim to dial 911 asap maybe the characters deserved her.

That's the worst case of ADD in a gamer I've ever seen.

The worst I've had was a ninja without the stealth skill, because they'd spent all the points on unarmed, armed (this was SR2) guns, demolitions and getting high stats. Naturally, I assumed it was a mistake and pointed it out to the player. They harrangued me for half an hour about how stealth was not an essential skill for a ninja (and I mean a proper born-in-Japan secret-ninja-clan ninja, not someone who likes throwing stars and sounding cool), despite me pointing out that a ninja is a practitioner of ninjitsu, which literally means "the way of stealth".

I don't have much to offer in relation to stupid player deaths, apart from one incident. Back in the day before maturity caught up with most of my players and me, they played characters who would generally get to the point of being so ruthlessly hunted by the cops, organised crime, families of their victims, the gummint, the Tax Department and the League of Women Voters that they had to retire the character after about three games.

After one particularly bad incident with them being dumped in the Barrens naked and ending up trying to rule street bums like kings and viciously assaulting then mangling the corpse of about fifty Ancients, it became obvious that it was time for another 'wrath of God' type attack to teach them what's what.

The players know this is coming, of course. I think this was about 1am when they came up with "I know, let's find a backwoods town and defend it." Each of them got out Fields of Fire (again, SR2) and went through listing everything they would buy and take with them. It was a list of almost everything there is to buy in Fields of Fire, with a truck being needed just to carry the ammo and the explosives. They spoke to contacts, bought up big, stole some trucks and picked the town by saying "we drive until there's a good down then we kick everyone out."

They set up, with sniper positions, ammo dumps, armour, food, water and so on. Each of them has a rocket of fifteen with them, and they've taken strategic positions. They plan backup positions, fields of fire, medical aid if any of them are hit, escape routes, vehicles, reloading if they're wounded, the works. The players are nearly wetting themselves with how cool this plan is, and how cinematic and cool the combat is going to be.

I, being a total b*stard, had no interest in them getting a cinematic cool gunfight out of basically screwing up my carefully prepared game by being immature idiots.

I describe how they see an armada of black sedans and choppers approaching the town, seeing cars in almost all directions. I describe how the corporate types out there (Ares being the most p*ssed off of the corporations gunning for the players) set up a permiter very wide, almost a kilometer back in all directions. The players feed belts into their SMGs and take some shots with their Barrets which miss.

Amongst all the choppers and so on they see a large cargo-type plane flying overhead. Thinking they're smart, they shoot at it with SAMs and whatever is available, because they think it's dropping paratroopers. I think to myself why waste the lives of some perfectly good paratroopers and it drops a massive FAE bomb.

The bomb blows most of the very small town (basically houses around a single street) into tiny pieces with the players taking a whole lot of the blast. Some of them die, some live after their ammo stockpile goes up as well, but are in no state to do anything at all about the Guardian drones that come into the crater/rubble and spend a couple of minutes pumping them full of bullets. Total planning time for the players was about three or four hours. Total playing time was about ninety seconds.

This thread made my day.

I think that this one is applicable to the GM, although my memories of it all are a little hazy. IIRC, the team had to go to some slightly out of the way place in Southern France. One of the characters spoke French. The ones with datajacks got chips. We go to France, get some vehicles, and spend a couple days driving south.

We get to the town where we're supposed to meet this shady guy, and since it's late, the runners go into a local resturant to get something to eat. We sit down, we look at the menus. The waitress comes up and starts talking in a language we don't understand.

Turns out, we were in a region with a high Basque population. Everyone in town spoke only Basque, and we hadn't noticed, not even when we were somehow 'reading' the menus. No one spoke English. No one even spoke French. The waitress got pissed when someone tried pantomiming with a credstick, thinking he was treating her like a prosititute. EVERYTHING we did just pissed off the locals more and more ('cause apprently we always did just the right thing to come off as purposefully insulting, instead of completly confused). Someone runs off to get our guy, and he shows up with a couple of tough buddies. Instead of going, 'hey, these guys are foreigners here to see me,' he gets pissed off too. We ended up bolting from town in a running gun fight, in which the locals wait on the sidelines, for the perfect oppurtunity to throw themselves in front of bullets.

At the end, when we demanded from the GM what was going on, he said he wanted to give us an NPC with a good strong reason to hate our runners.

...

How did you manage to drive south through France a couple of days? Where did you start? What kind of vehicle did you use? Bikes? o_O

I...always thought most Basques still spoke French, too. I dunno, could be wrong, I guess.

The shifter landscaper could make sense with some minor modifications. 1 or 2 points in the landscaping knowledge skill, the owner of a small landscaping company as a level 1 contact, and perhaps a more industrious totem.