Without getting into a debate about what constitutes an evil act this post is about finding out what sort of criminal, morally questionable, to downright repugnant acts have your characters committed in game. I won't list what each SR character I've had as done just the acts and what frequency they've occurred.

Murder (Killing not in self-defense) - Big Yes. Every character I've played has done it for various reasons.

Murder for Hire - Yes.

Assault - Yes. Numerous times.

Robbery - You bet.

Selling Stolen Goods - Check.

Receiving Stolen Goods - Yes sir.

Organlegging - Yes. I've had two characters with a Tamanous contact and one with another organlegger.

Torture - I'd say about ten times. Everything from using pressure points to get a little info from a street snitch to a four day, in game time, torture session to get everything out of one guy.

Organized Crime - Everything from being part of an organization to doing contract work for one. Jobs: Everything for protection work, gun running, and murder-for-hire.

Selling Illegal Substances: Everything from beetles to bud.

Pimping: Had two characters who were involved in that. One did it directly the other benefited from it indirectly.

The only things I haven't done with any of my characters are sex crimes besides pimping. No rape, child molestation, nothing really dark like that. In fact a character of mine beat the crap out of another player's character who tried it in game. We actually had a big fight about it out of game. We had taken this very pretty elven girl as a hostage and another PC wanted to have his way with her. He argued that my character shouldn't have cared because I was a hitman with a Tamanous contact. "Why the hell should you care? You're just going to kill her anyway and sell her for spare parts," is what he said. I didn’t see it that way.

I ended up having to kill his character later on over it. He just wouldn't let it go and hired another hitman to take me out. Surprisingly enough after the first incident we didn't take it personally and just ran with it in game. Of course he had to make a new character.

I don’t why but I’ve always had trouble committing crimes against women in game to the point where most of my characters have a built-in thing against it. It’s always sort of bugged me because I see it as a creative hindrance the whole Leon “No Women, No Kids� thing, but I just can’t get over it. Every one of my characters has it to some degree. Hell I find ways to let female hostages go, or simply wound female opposition. It really takes a lot for me to kill a female NPC in game.

Killing- Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes.

Assault- Yeah

Robbery- Yes, wheter hired of just freelancing

Selling stolen goods- Kinda goes hand in hand with the whole robbery thing so yeah

Recieveing stolen goods- Does "It fell off the back of a T-bird" count?

Organlegging- For fun and profit

Torture- Not so much my characters but I've been their and benefitted from it.

Organized crime- and piracy ARRR!

Selling Illegal substances- even tried brewing up a few

Pimping- Ain't easy... never tried don't remember anyway.

Use of Mind probe- not necessarily evil but I can see how it can be considered such

Control Manipulations- all the time

Using people as bait- yup

EDIT- The only real hangup I have is harming animals. I'm not talking the hellhound trying to eat me. I mean the corp execs puppy or kitten. Children is really dependant on the situation. 12 year old ganger pulls a gun on me is going to be "tried as an adult" as it were. A lost little corp kid I usually go out of my way to help.

Well, there was this time I told a guy I was letting him go, and that he should walk away and not turn around, and then put a bullet through the back of his head. I thought it was the merciful option, though—he never had time to know he was going to die.

~J

dropping gamma-anthrax into the water supply of an Ares research compound: check. killing children (who happened to have been transformed into the ravenous undead by shedim): check.

Killing zombies is kinda bad, but doesn't killing children make up for it?

~J

Oh, mfb... Zombie children?
I think I have to change my undies now. That's wonderful.

You know, this one time, my PC let somebody go who he should have killed, and they came back and almost ruined his life later. The problem got fixed about 50 rounds of point-blank EX-EX later.

On the other hand, I let someone go once who had already tried to ruin my PC's life. And she ended up saving my ass a couple of times later. But her corp had sold her out, so there is that.

Me mmmm about all I can say about my Cher is they have eatten 3 ppl and set part of a bulding on fire with 5 WP gernades and.......mmmm you know don't sound as bad as some here that have already posted oh well.

i'm not sure what's worse--the fact that he ate people, or the fact that he was still hungry after the second one.

Well I've had characters kill ghoul women and children, but they're not people so it doesn't count.

Also anyone ever kill a Johnson or a Fixer? Never killed a fixer. Had them killed, two of them, not by us though. Killed six Johnsons. Four of them were from published Adventures. Queen Euphoria, Double Exposure, The One with Jetblack, and Anne P the Bug VP! Her we chopped up into little bits and dumped in the Potomac.

I hurt someones feelings once.

My character has been mostly law-abiding, but my players have this unnatural love for grand theft auto. Other than that: theft, vandalism, quite a few murders (several involving police, vehicles, or both), breaking and entering, a semi-kidnapping, some torture (of a J, no less!), cruelty to animals, smuggling, corruption of minors, reckless endangerment, and speeding. Lots of speeding.

Edited to Add: mfb: On the one hand, she ate those people over a long period of time, she didn't just sit down and gorge. On the other hand, she's not a ghoul.

Whatever do you mean? You got paid.

It's true, I guess money does make up for lack of torture.

~J

...Killing: huh? oh yeah, with my gun, that's what the bullets are for.
...Assault: kind of goes with the territory
...Assassination: Night Angel and Jill liked to think of it as being "politically pro-active"
...Committing Terrorist Acts: yeah, that is if you only take it from the from viewpoint of the opposition. But Leela's so damn cute...
...Sabotage: kind of goes hand in hand with the above.
...Making and transporting of controlled substances (namely Milspec Explosives): yeah, little Leela is guilty as charged. But she is so damn cute...
...Theft: well it was from that nasty evil corp so it was okay, right?.
...Selling of stolen goods: can't get a real job so gotta make a living somehow & it beats walking the streets selling tricks.
...Felony use of Government Property: Night Angel likes to refer to it as "creative requisitioning"
...Bribing of a Government official: "better public policy through "
...Vehicle Jacking: kinda like FlexCar without all the membership drek. Goes well with...
...Piracy: be it on the high seas or in the air, a big "Yaahrrrr!" here too.
...Organised Crime: not so much directly but had dealings with various syndicates
...Torture: mostly through the use of certain compounds and the occasional bared shoulder to help grease the interrogation skids as opposed to more direct methods.

Things my characters generally stayed away from

...Organlegging: just have issues about this one & the parties you end up dealing with. Eventually it usually comes back to bite you.
...Sexual assault: I'm on the same bus with Lazarus on this.

From a somewhat IC perspective:

"I've never touched a child. I've never killed someone out of anger. Anger makes you sloppy. I've killed people who've made me angry oh, dozens of times. But never while I was mad, you see.

I've never raped anyone either. That's just too vunerable a position to be caught in... but I have made plenty of women change their minds."

There's plenty I'm guilty of portraying in games, and only one thing I'm really not.

Eh, it's okay. My character's brother who is a Contact is a priest.

Hmm. One of my characters:

- Pushed a still conscious man face-first into a smear of burning thermite and held him there until he stopped screaming. (the guy really had it coming, though - he'd held our rigger hostage and buried a bunch of people alive)

- Shot a Johnson twice (well, the second time was with a gel round) then squeezed him for money. (the same one Kagetenshi and Taran talked about)

- Bought surplus Russian nerve agent on a whim.

- Painfully executed several badly wounded scumbags with a sharpened piece of rebar in a fit of righteous rage.

- Kidnapped two Knight Errant officers.

- This one is just a theory of mine, but I suspect we took a job involving killing an old Johnson of ours in revenge for a murder (or murders) that our team itself committed while working for that Johnson.

- Burned the aforementioned Johnson alive. (only way he'd die, the bastard, but still)

- Fired/tossed grenades into enclosed spaces containing 5-10 people more times than I can readily recall.

It's really weird to list it all like that, though, since he's actually - except in extreme circumstances - a really nice guy. Unselfish, kind, polite, etc. I guess the problem is that extreme circumstances tend to come up more often than you'd think, when you run the shadows...

You're asking a bunch of Shadowrun players what bad stuff their characters has done? Well, duh. We're talking about professional criminals, who break at least a half dozen laws with even the most routine and generic (IE, a datasnatch, let's say) of jobs they take on.

Of course the lists of "sins" are going to be impressive.

Well a player of mine once injected himself with a new strain of VITAS before taking a stroll through Sea-Tac Airport. Granted he knew he was going to die whether he took the job or not, but he figured that his kid sister was worth killing untold masses that he would never actually know. (Of course the bastards didn't uphold their end of the bargin.)

Most of what's been said before (murder, assault, trade in illicit subtances, ect).

Does framing someone count? We actually did the murder and pillaging, and set up everything to look like the fall guy did it (including doping up the fallguy with novacoke after Laesing him so he couldn't remember what he did while under the influence). Even the fallguy thought he did it.

I think one of my characters got a speeding ticket...

mmm well with my gunbunny...um..lots of aiding and abeting? Torture, Murder,theft,lots more theft, the stuff my guy has done him self?

transporting of controlled substances : weapons count ya?

Killing: only realy few times the first time was a cop i took out with stick and shock then shot him with his own side arm..then stole the side arm..and uniform..and gym bag..didn't kill that many people all in all their was that time I helped with offing some mafia types and that time me and my partner a mage assulted a base out side the country. oh and one time but I did not do it, a spirit stole my hand grenade then pulled the pin, Then my partner the mage killed the spirit and it fell to the floor and I jumped out a window. the explosion killed the target and my mage buddy, does that count as killing?

Selling of stolen goods: ...hehehe

Piracy: software realy,

pretty much the group my bunny was with in the start never had to kill many people if ever. and I used a squirt most of the time

I nearly had my players kill a hundred children... not zombie/shedim/bug children, just regular sick children.

Finally they decided to let Lone Star deal with the problem, and Lone Star let an orphanage deal with it and the orphanage let Tamanous deal with it... And Tamanous dealt with it alright.

A naughty part of my sub-conscious ran off into the Matrix and began a massive program of social engineering, kidnapping, and brainwashing. Where does that put me on the scale?

Federal Offense: mailed a letter to the person written in the upper left corner without attaching postage.

My last PC poked a piasma with a pointy stick, so that might be called torture. Had 3 Great Form spirits in a row use Storm Strike Power on some people who interrupted my sleep. Oh, and destroyed a footbridge in the process.

I usually kill people clean if at all in games, but I must admit to being a repeat organlegger. The character most famous for it amongst my group is the source of my forum handle, actually. The character was a monowhip toting (former) street doc. Fun part was explaining away the handle with "I like knitting" (which he did) to NPCs/PCs who didn't really know the char's rep yet.

As far as torture and sex crimes go, I've never done the latter, and rarely did the former, except with the aforementioned street doc, who practically specialized in it. I rarely had to make more than a few incisions on people before they talked though (thankfully). Strapping someone to a gurney and explaining how long modern medicine could keep them alive while I prepped my gear to harvest their organs is usually enough to make them crack pretty quick.

The nice part about the whole mess though was the simple fact that it was hard to feel too torn up when my street doc was finally killed. He wasn't exactly a nice person.

When you think about it, all runners do bad things for a living. I'm not speaking about killing, or stealing or anything like it, that some runners can avoid, but I'm speaking about well... shadowrunning.

Shadowrunning is illegal. Why? Mostly because it's not really a good thing. Sure, you might do some good work, sometimes being a runner can lead you to doing good work the cops can't do because of pressure from corps or something...

But most of the time, what you do has bad consequences. You stole a prototype from a small company? A few month later, the company will go bankrupt and the honest manager will kill himself. You didn't harm the guard? Good, he's alive. But he'll be fired and will have a hard time getting a new job. You brought the suitcase to Mr Johnson without destroying anything nor hurting anyone? Don't worry, there's enough toxins in the suitcase to compensate.

The good thing is that you're not alone. You can still comfort yourself by thinking that the contacts you dragged into this also have their part in this mess.

Come on, this world is a steaming pile of shit and you spend your life inside it, how can you pretend you're clean?

Conversly:

You had some guilt and didn't steal the prototype? A good manager gets offed by some thugs when one of his staff decides the prototype is his gateway to fortune.

Guards will suffer in any situation that involves what they were guarding not being there anymore. Depending on the suits involved, an EXEX to the lower abdomen may be relatively merciful. Knowing that requires much more research than simply enough to do the job right and most guards would rather have to change industries than die or be CZed.

As for the suitcase, what kind of neo-anarchist are you if you didn't find a way to see what was in the case first and do some digging into your employer? A suitcase full of DDT+ to be replicated and sent to Africa to kill off awakened malaria carrying mosquitos is a completely different genocidal goal than a suitcase full of Elficidal Anthrax.

The easy moral answer is not to play, but where's the fun in that? More intel means more ability to bend the outcomes of your jobs to your moral preference, so start bribing otaku (they're usually cheaper than deckers).

...KK4.2 did blow up a car ferry in mid Puget sound, by planting a briefcase bomb in a car (told by the Johnson it was "Incriminating evidence" to throw the Metroplex election) Well in away it was...just not the type of evidence she thought it to be.

BTW that Johnson is now a pushin' up daisies...

...and KK has taken a long sabbatical at her dojo in Kyoto.

I'm on board with Blade and HV here. SR to me is a crap world where everything is corrupt and dystopian. Shadowrunners for the most part are bad people doing bad things. That doesn't mean that you can never do anything "good". You just have to pick your spots, they are usually personal, or if you want to do good things full time join a charity that isn't funded by corrupt elements or a front for something else. Or you can be a hood runner, get labeled a terrorist by the main stream media, and die violently and broke.

In other words: Good Luck Chuck!

Most of my characters have done some pretty bad things but they did do the "right" thing on occasion which was not in their best interest most of the time.

Here are some of those times:

- Saved a couple of corp kids from getting killed by some gangers near Underworld 93. Had to take them to a hospital because their Doc Wagon coverage didn't extend to the Barrens. Didn't hold them for ransom or anything <Much to the chagrin of other characters.> Just left them when my char. knew they were safe.

- Fixer, who we liked, got killed over some stuff that didn't have anything to do with our group. His "girlfriend", a call girl, knew one of our group, not in the biblical sense, and wanted protection. We killed the people responsible, painfully, protected her, and gave her 500K and a kick ass SIN to start a new life some where else. Of course a bunch of the money came from his accounts, the hides of the people who killed him, and some from our own pocket. I think we all kicked in 20K each.

- Another player sponsored an Ork Kid and his Mother. Put them up in a condo, got her a job, and sent him to a good meta-friendly school. Didn't have a thing for the mom, wasn't related to them. Mom asked him for some change one day and he decided to take it a step further. He called it salve for his guilt. Never told any of our characters in game about it.

*Disclaimer* I am not condoning what I am about to say I'm just covering a different angle on rape and torture. I apologize ahead of time. *Disclaimer*

You know Angelone I've never actually looked at it that way. It does raise the question as to why though? Sure I personally have a huge hang up with that stuff hell it's uncomfortable for me to watch it in movies or TV so I never go down that road.

I've had the opposition do it a few times but it's always as a way to piss off the PCs or to illustrate just what scumbags they’re dealing with. That's always the line. I just find it interesting that murder was not the line. In fact sometimes it was far removed from the line altogether. It all depends on who was killed, how they were killed, and why. But rape was never okay under any circumstances.

I don't know I’ve just always found it a fascinating take on my character's morality.

I even find it interesting that it's the same way in prisons among criminals. You could be the most stone cold killer alive and you will get respect and fear but if you're a convicted rapist or child molester then you're s**t scum waiting to die. I wonder if that speaks to something in us as human beings which serves as natural baseline morality or is it a strong cultural influence that we just can’t escape? Or is it something else altogether?

You may want to review the incidence of rape in prison before you claim that rapists get no fearful respect.

~J

I'm not saying people don't get raped in prison. Not saying that prisoners who do it to other prisoners are viewed with disrespect. What I am saying is that people convicted of sex crimes are on the bottom tier of the criminal hierarchy in prison. Rapists usually end up getting raped for that reason. I know there are other factors that play into it; however that's how criminals rationalize it.

Hm, as a female character (and a female player) I'd probably shoot a team member before I let them rape someone.

I have, however, participated in torture. Favorite method is to strip a man, hold a knife to his crown jewels, and, well, you get the point. Most start talking when the blood begins flowing.

I've also gotten information from a woman NPC (and forced her to steal something we couldn't get to) by threatening to torture her son, in front of her. Only had to threaten, thankfully, 'cause none of us would have been able to hurt the kid.

We've killed, in the heat of the battle and otherwise. The otherwise was done with distaste, but it was a job, and we'd offered the guy a way out. Don't even consider it a sin to kill someone if they're shooting at me (even if I was trespassing, robbing or destroying something of theirs first). When we shoot first, we use narcojets. We've also spared someone because they were protecting a child, and killed someone simply because they were dealing in the child-sex trade (wanted to torture them first but we were in a hurry).

Biggest sin in our group though, is turning on your team-members. GM's tried to get us to double cross each other, but it fails everytime.

I think the disgust with child molesters and serial killers is due to fear of what we don't understand or relate to. Greed, anger, and especially gang affiliation are all motivators that a lot of criminals (and even normal citizens) can relate to or at least wrap their minds around. On the other hand, jonesing for an 8 year old is just not a common occurrence, even amongst criminals. And context is probably a huge part of it as well. Prison rape continues in part because it's no longer an unexpected part of the prison subculture. And people in prison can claim that they're not gay when there's women available, but someone who rapes children on the outside have no alibi. Flimsy argument perhaps, but last I checked, prison inmates aren't known for their circumspect manner.

Somewhere in the vicinity of 20% is pretty common (Briere and Runtz, 1989—more here). Of course, that may contribute to the violence more than anything—recognizing a part of oneself that one abhors in another can be pretty unpleasant.

(It should also be noted that Howells, '81 among others found that some number of perpetrators of sexual abuse against children demonstrated no significant arousal response towards children in general—not that it will necessarily convince a fellow inmate, but there you have it)

~J

I'd like to point out when I mentioned rape I wasn't talking about females only, males can get raped too, in prison or out. The definition of rape or atleast the military definition is " An unwanted sexual assault which includes penetration." It goes into more detail that's the hard and fast version.

I have to say another thing I won't do because it's so abhorrent to me, in RL and in game, is getting close to someone or infiltrating an organization with the intent of betrayal. It literally turns my stomach thinking people can do something like that.