Do stupid plans by NPCs count?
Yes, yes they do.
So, some background: I was playing Shades, a jill-of-many-trades with a heavy emphasis on hacking. Yes, it was SR4. The group at the time consisted of me, two Free Spirits of Fire, and a katana guy.
We were scrambling to track down a big bad nasty motherfucker who had tricked us thoroughly into delivering to him a little girl. We rescued her from a real black research facillity, but he wasn't her real uncle, he'd killed him and stolen his identity, and was evidently trying to sacrifice her to bring something nasty into the world. Through herculean hacking efforts by yours truely, we tracked his car to a chop shop in Puyallup which had sold it wholesale to someone in Shanghai, with an expected profit of 2,500
. With it, went the only leads we could pursue immediately, so I came up with an idea to occupy us while we were otherwise waiting: I
encrypted the chop shop's entire computer system with strong encryption, and data-bombed it. It would have taken an average hacker most of a day to fix the damage I did, more if he was really unlucky, and he probably would've charged like 5K for it.
I sent the owner of the chop shop, which was a small operation which was paying protection money to both the mafia and the yaks, so we knew they weren't actually under any protection, a message telling him he could pay us 2,500
(not coincidentally, the precise sum of money they expected to make in gross profit from the car's sale,) on a certified credstick by a courier to a dead-drop near the crime mall, or he could choose not to do so and spend more nuyen than that hiring a hacker to fix it, which would also likely cost him an entire day in which he could not conduct business.
So, two options
1: Pay
2: Don't pay.
If you said
3: Respond with WWI gas warfare, you would be the owner of the chop shop! And also an idiot.
He sent a gas bomb full of chlorene and phosgene gasses (AKA White Star,) to the dead drop instead of a databomb. Two of the members of the group were literally immune to it, and katana boy ran out with his gas mask on to check, before we could send one of them. He took some hurt, that the spirits patched up in like, six seconds.
Well, that's personal. That's not only stupid, it's an attack. We decided to be merciful and burn his shop and all the potentially saleable cars on his lot to a crisp
before he or his employees arrived in the morning. Somehow, I bet that cost waaay more than 2,500
.