Yeah. I really meant for the blackmail thing to be an alternate interpretation, one that could easily explain why someone would open fire over something. That doesn't, however, mean that we aren't giving the Physad entirely too much credit if we use that as an explanation for his actions.

Anyway, I must take issue with something: the idea that the promise of merciful treatment by your enemies in any way offsets the risk of leaving witnesses and enemies alive. Rules of engagement and the Geneva convention and all that stuff is great... if you're a country at war. Surrenders and decent treatment of enemy combatants is viable in wars because both sides are known quantities and their reputations do indeed precede them. However, in Shadowrun, we're talking about criminals who have a vested interest in being somewhat anonymous, at least to their enemies, anyway. Joe Security guard isn't likely to recognize the shadowrunner before him as someone who has a rep in the underworld for being "merciful", they're likely just going to see some guy pointing a gun at them, and I doubt he's going to wait around to see those rounds flying at him are stick and shock before he defends himself in the most effective way available. Having a reputation as being stupidly bloodthirsty should indeed limit your future employment options, even in the shadows, but generally, I think your relationship with most people will sour a bit the second you start pointing a gun at them, regardless of your reputation. As for what happens when your runner is taken alive, well... I'd rather try and avoid such things by greasing witnesses and covering my tracks no matter what the cost than hope the Yaks will somehow feel kind just because I ruined their operation with stick and shock instead of Ex-Ex.

A rep for being merciful won't help you when the shooting starts.

It will help you when they come calling 'round your own shack.

Oh, and thanks, Cellshade, for letting us know how it worked out.

Honestly, If the TM was going to blackmail someone, he would have probably just e-mailed the a copy of the incriminating evidence to the person.

If he was planning to threaten a guy known to be good for killing with a gun why do it in his presence without hacking the guys stuff first. If I was going to threaten a Gun Bunny with a TM I would hack his equipment, threaten to post his photo and the video on the Police's most wanted, send a copy of it to the gang in question, and before even talking to him set up the whole thing to be sent off on a timer somewhere the Gun Bunny has no idea to look.

Now a professional killer would/should think of these things and realize that although the TM was going about it in completely the wrong way shooting him is not the answer.

Besides if the TM can get the video who else might have it? Wouldn't you need a good TM/Hacker to erase the incriminating evidence wherever it might be stored.

My understanding of the Hand of God rule is that it doesn't necessarily mean that everything is just hunky dorey afterwards. Rather, it could well mean that although you survive the fall from the top of the building, you are hospital bound for the next 6 months. etc.

Now certainly, it would be within the GM's discretion to say that miraculously, the bullet passes completely through your body but misses all vital organs and arteries. It just comes down to the GM's personal preference and take on the situation. If I was the GM and I thought that I had made a run too difficult for the players by overestimating their abilities or underestimating those of the NPC's, I would be more inclined to use the latter description. If the PC was just plain stupid though and charged the 100 armed orcs, he could expect a lengthy hospital stay and the player should plan to bring a different character to the next several sessions.

That will likely get your players to think a situation through a lot better.

It can also present survival opportunities.

"Okay, Mr. Nice Guy. You've fucked our corp, but you haven't killed any valuable employees. So here's the deal; we've just put a cranial bomb in your head. You work for us now, or the bomb goes off. It's that simple."

I think the point is not that the cops will keep a guy alive because they're feeling warm hearted and nice, but that they will not hunt him down and kill him out of revenge for Smitty and his widow/orphans.

Cops tend to be brutal to cop killers.

You are missing the point - which is the Human Element.
That's a variable that will be there as long as there are humans, and thus, you have to take it into account.

And even if you only consider a wageslave corp property, there's a financial difference between destruction of property and damaged property.

Ravor: You're right. I missed it by reading too fast, but Rotbart is right. There will always be a human element. If I was working for a corp, I would more likely deal with a professional and more likely just dispatch with a cold-blooded killer even if my dealings required cold-blooded killing. I would assume the professional can execute when needed. I would doubt the wageslave killer's ability to refrain from excess loss of life. Sometimes you need people who don't put a bullet in the back of the head of everyone they can.

Another thought is that some of he big sec companies are also trying to get lonestars police contracts, so if the sec company can apprehend a dangerous criminal before LS finds them then that make them look even better.

so you only get 7 pts, as a human, of edge, for your entire running career? its luck, not the hand of god itself intervening on your behalf, imo, which is essentially what you're turning it into if you cant reaccquire it.

and thats what it sounds like to me you're saying

So...cats have an edge of 8?

A common house rule is that HOG reduces your maximum by 1. Low edge folks still replace the burned edge more cheaply, but they'll run out of 2nd chances just as fast (assuming they buy it back up before they need it again). It still makes player death a long hard road for the GM, but hey, it's fun killing PCs over and over again.

Especially since it would take 320 Karma to actually use the "Lucky" attribute. That's assuming you didn't ever use HOG.

Sure, it's always a risk that the Joe Blow you just wacked was the favorite nephew of a blood mage, ect...

As for your example of "unoffically offical" revenge, personally I really like it and don't have a single problem with it, but I guess I'm not quite sure how it disagrees with my stance that a dead wageslave(s) isn't enough to convince a corp to spend the time and resources to hunt a runner down. In this case it took framing the runner for data theft and I'd imagine that the corpers involved would be in a world of hurt if the truth ever did come out.

I think people are misunderstanding me, I'm not calling for the "kill everyone and let God sort them out" approach to Shadowrunning, but I don't buy that a corp really gives a frag about some dead wageslave or that said wageslave's death will affect whether or not the corp leaves you alive if you manage to do something that does warrent hunting you down.

However as you've proven with your excellant example Rotbart van Dainig Shadowrunners aren't the only ones who can maniplulate the system to get what they want.

I don't know why, but this is something that's really bugging me -- repeating (and over-emphasizing) "wageslave" over and over and over again doesn't make it any more accurate or unbiased a descriptor. "Wageslave" isn't, like, a corporate title. It's not on anyone's business card, or paycheck stub, or resume. It's a derogatory term that Shadowrunners (and others who may or may not be jealous they can't hold down a real job) use, that's it.

It's not necessarily a genuine descriptor. It may be, or may not be, but just saying "slave slave slave, they're called slaves!" over and over again doesn't really accomplish anything, or back up a point. It's an insult, a slang term, a nickname at best. Saying "wageslave" repeatedly doesn't necessarily make it true, any more than someone repeatedly calling me white people crackers really means you're likely to see me on a little dish with finely sliced cheese any time soon.

The simple fact is corporate employees do do some important work, or the corporations wouldn't be paying them in the first place. This isn't to say they aren't wholly replaceable. This isn't to say the corporation cares about them as people instead of numbers and productivity ratings. This isn't to say that killing a few of them will send Ares grinding to a halt. But if they didn't do anything important to the company, well, the company wouldn't have them on the payroll.

Which means, yes, you can inconvenience even a megacorporation by killing the right person at the right time (whether you mean to be killing that person, or know it's the right time or not, is another matter entirely and not the megacorporation's problem).

You might think Joe Cubicle Schmuck #4 that you wasted during a routine datasteal was just some loser working the late shift, and you might be right... but Joe Cubicle Schmuck #4 needed to be working on something, and the 9mm you put through his skull didn't help him get that work finished on time, did it? Which means someone, somewhere, is going to be upset Joe Cubicle Schmuck #4 didn't get some project finished...and depending on that project, and that "someone, somewhere," you might have just pissed off someone with enough clout to do something about it.

It won't happen every time, nor should it. But that's what GMs are for, isn't it? Creatively fucking over the player characters, within the context of believability laid down by the game setting, and in such a manner that the game is an enjoyable experience despite aforementioned fucking over?

Rotbart van Dainig that's the chance that every runner takes every time they agree to pull a job and has nothing to do with whether they geek some random wageslave or not.

"Will this be the time that the corp will decide to throw good money after bad in order to make an example?", is a question which every runner should ask himself before accepting Ms Johnson's rather reasonable sounding offer.

<><><><><>

Well Critias the reason I use the term wageslave is because I think that the term is more then a mere derogatory statement although you're perfectly right, it doesn't appear on anyone's business card. However the corps don't have to play by the same rules with their employees that today's companies do because the check and balances provided by a strong government is virtually gone, it's the pre-union era on steriods and that is a fact that is too often forgotten in my opinion.

Ravor, the last three words of your last post sum it up perfectly.


Now stop trying to cram YOUR opinion down everyone else's throat! Corps may not care about the person you geeked, but guess what? The co-workers he worked with? His boss? The people under him?

Unless he was an absoloute fragger, they're going to care on a personal level, and unless he was about to be fired for ridiculously gross negligence anyway, they're going to care on a professional level. Depending on who he was and what he did, there are likely to be at least a few people gunning for the guys who put a 10mm APDS in the back of his head. And these people may or may not even have to justify themselves.

When you get high up enough on the company's food chain, you can pretty much spend 20K, 40K, to have the guys who killed your poker-buddy hunted down and shot. You don't even have to justify it; hell, you have an expense account! That's what it's for!

"Dystopian" does not mean "machine-like". Unless it's The Matrix...

Wageslave is an accurate descriptor. That's the entire point of voluntary extractions. The Business Recognition Accords are essentially international Fugitive Slave Laws that require escaped wageslaves to be extradited back to their employers. Yes, they are very much slaves.

But if I go to an auction and pay $850 for Kunta Kinte then I'm going to treat him well because he is an expensive piece of equipment. Yeah, I'm going to beat him until he tells me that his name is Toby, that's necessary. But, if some random guy killed my Kunta Kinte, then I'd certainly hunt him down. I wouldn't kill him, that's just stupid. I'd require that the killer either pay me $1000 (his original cost plus compensation for the time and effort required to break and train him) or provide me with a trained slave of similar ability, subject to my approval.

In SR terms, that would be putting cranial bombs into the runners and forcing them to work for you.

The other thing that needs to kept in mind that excessively pissing off the people with guns who you are trusting to keep you alive is a bad idea. Not only might they suffer a nasty weapon malfunction at the wrong time, having people in charge of your security motivated to sell you out is just not a good plan.

ShadowDragon8685 get testy much?

Seriously, if it's merely my unfounded opinion and the Sixth World is supposed to be some semi-bright and relatively-fluffy cyberpunk world then it should be easy to go through the fluff and show me where I've gotten it wrong, point by point.

Oh and thank God that the Matrix movies has almost as much in common with Shadowrun as "The Shield" has with "The Power Rangers".


kzt hmm, I stand corrected on the issue of the gang sizes, it's been awhile since I cracked open New Seattle and for some reason I remember them as being bigger then that. Oh well, I don't think it changes the larger issue.


hyzmarca not much that I can really add other then to second Demon_Bob. (I may not totally agree with you but I can't agrue with the post's pure STYLE.)

But there are no rules for what connections Joe Average has.

That's why I asked which NPC can be deemed to the closest to Joe Average. Is the Bartender closest or is it the Blogger? Or who else? Whatever you decide, it is a damn shade better than fluff.

Or, you treat every character as a person, none of them generic. Instead of throwing out Average Joe archetypes for fodder you stat them out individually, create their backstories and their contact list.

This is absurdly time consuming, but it can be done posthumously. You can even invent NPC backstory on the fly during a game if it comes to that.

I've just read though this thread...so back to the original discussion...I have to say, that was a good call on the GMs side to make the physad an NPC. I just did the same a couple session ago with one of my players. He ended up getting sloppy, not on runs per se, but starting hitting drugs and alcohol, causing problems with the rest of the characters.

We ended up losing a player (the mage), so this guy rolled up a new character and I NPCd his former. That lasted one session until the other party members decided the final straw was now, and shot him down.

The session before, there was a little OOC conflict between two players, but it was really due to IC events and roleplaying. I let it go, because I do believe allowing the players to have free reign is fine. And in that instance, it was between to PCs, so I really could just sit back and make sure the rules were enforced.

I talked to the two guys (both friends) about it afterwards, and got everyone back on the level. These two have a history of doing stuff like this a couple times a year (it a regular RPG group, multiple games and campaigns)...

I do think the physad was a out-of-line shooting the TM in the face...I mean, based on his background, it sounds like he would just coldly disagree with the TM and say it had to be done, that the TM was a giant pansy and needs to learn the way to handle things. I mean, I think its fine to have teammembers disagree, but once you start damaging other PCs, then it is going a bit too far, especially when the intent is to kill...

I don't know, although I strongly disagree with toturi's stance that the rules should trump the presented fluff and generally speaking don't like the sample NPCs in the book either, I do think his idea has some merit.

And we know that generally speaking your average wageslave has a ( Connection Rating 2 ).