Hyzmarca's thread which got locked really got me thinking about body counts and player characters. I think playing Jagged Alliance 2 version 1.13 made me obsessive about player character body counts. The 1.13 mod made it possible for characters to get body counts well into the hundreds because of a combination of enormous amounts of targets (i.e. you can decide to give the Queen 3,000 troops, or whatever, AND set them to aggressively counterattack conquered sectors) and the fact you can now equip your characters with a huge variety of sniper rifles which are actually capable of shooting all the way across the map, as they should be. However, my ruminations on bodycounts lead me to think about player character bodycounts in the context of tabletop RPGs. Specifically, must we differentiate between actual rolled one-by-one bodycounts and handwaved bodycounts (i.e. your character detonates a nuclear device in downtown Seattle and millions perish, but the GM didn't roll dice for millions of average citizens with 3s across the board. He simply handwaved those millions.).

In a video game like Jagged Alliance if you want your alter ego to have something insane like 700 kills you actually have to go and execute all those kills with your sniper rifle. You have to go through the logistics to gather up enough ammo for that many kills and it needs to be the right ammo for your gun; 1.13 in particular is especially complicated with sniper rifles and designated marksman rifles firing 5.56 NATO, 7.62 NATO, .300 winmag, .338 (?) lapua magnum, 12.7 soviet, .50 BMG, that Soviet round used by Moisin Nagant rifles which dimensions I've forgotten, and even that subsonic 9x39 (?) cartridge. If you're using an exotic rifle like the 12.7mm Gepard (M2, was it called?) actually getting over 700 rounds of the requisite ammo to your character is a fair chore. And then on top of this of course you then have to move your character around the map and position him so that he can use his bigass rifle to blow away hundreds of enemy soldiers while at the same time not getting outflanked, blown up by mortars, or screwed when reinforcements from adjacent sectors appear on the edges of the map. Especially if you do this "Iron Man" style with no saves or restores except in the case of bugs messing up the game I feel like it's possible to really take pride in having managed to give one character something like 700 kills. There is absolutely no handwaving by the computer...every kill is played out to the very last detail.

On the other hand, in a SR game, I can see a GM, or even a player, wanting to handwave some of this stuff instead of rolling for 700 guys. I can imagine a GM saying, "OK, Hmm, your mortar lands dead on in the middle of the squad. They, uh, all die." instead of rolling for everyone and having to manage several guys with different wound mods in addition to the rest of the enemy forces present. Certainly, as with the atomic device example, there could be some cases where for all intents and purposes the GM *must* handwave, if the event gets too big and setting-altering.

So there are a few questions we must address. The first question is whether or not we must differentiate between a "rolled kill" played full out, and a "handwaved kill"? I cannot help but feel that adding handwaved kills to your PC bodycount is not legitimate. If you didn't have to struggle through the rules and logistics and myriad dice rolls to earn those kills it just seems tough to take pride in that as a player accomplishment using that character. Think about how much more is behind you, as a player, using that character to play the game very well and knowing the rules cold, actually getting the better of a certain number of GM controlled opponents. (Or especially if the GM assigns one player not to control a player character but rather to just control the opposition forces which would generally make things even more challening.) Basically, if the effort invested makes the figure have emotional value, we clearly must count rolled kills and handwaved kills seperately.

Another question that comes to mind is how we establish what a respectable, impressive, or paltry number of kills is. In real life in this day and age infantry kill counts for individuals definitely seem to be a lot lower than the Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 700 figure I mentioned before. I read some real historical after action reports from SEAL teams in the Vietnam War which were included in certain scenarios from the Electronic Arts game SEAL Team and I saw that in many cases combat between SEALs and Vietcong or NVA would produce at most several confirmed kills. In the Vietnam era and later war memoirs I've read usually the person writing the memoir also only describes maybe 1 or 2 personal kills of the enemy. However, a typical Shadowrun character probably kills at least 1 or 2 enemies per gaming session. So, we need to realize that an impressive body count for a real person is not impressive for a Shadowrun character. In Shadowrun we have inflated standards. But how inflated? What are the benchmarks at which we can start taking pride in our characters' body counts? At what point, even if we assume a tactically sucky GM, does a rolled bodycount start to become indisputably impressive? 100? 200? 700? 3,000?

My instinct is to set the benchmarks at perhaps 500 and 1,000, but that's just because they're nice big numbers that at the same time don't seem too out there. What do you think? What numerical expectations would you hold over a player's head if he expected to be able to boast about playing well?

Incidentally, bodycount issues could affect home brewed sanity rules. If each kill subtracts a certain amount of sanity in your system then having enormous body counts might end up being guaranteed insanity, which probably isn't realistic. If it were me, I'd cap a maximum lifetime sanity loss figure due to killing of others, since I figure that once you've done a certain number and not gone completely insane you can probably take any number more, having gone totally numb.

Curse SL for being down.

For my street sam, Connor, I actually kept track of just this sort of thing (for no real reason). What's more, I did differentiate between my rolled-for, and my hand-waved, kills. In cases where I couldn't be sure (like when he tossed a grenade down a hatch into a freighter, after hearing people coming his way), I just quietly asked the GM after the game was over, so I could keep track.

At last count, it was...pretty high. Strongly into the triple digits, just for confirmed, mano-y-mano, rolled for, face to face, kills.

One difference I can see between Shadowrunner kills and RL kills is the difference in what it takes to take the fight out of someone. Example: The Canadian Army (or whatever) decides to invade Michigan. Who cares why. One of their men takes a shot at a National Guardsman, and hits him in the leg. If the Guardsman is given the chance, most likely he'll stay day, having had a bullet tear up his thigh.

Now in SR, a leg wound like that would be, what, 6 boxes of damage? It's hefty, but low enough that a player may decide to keep on going. Understandable in some situations. Now think of the last time you invaded a corp facility in SR, and shot at a group of security guards. You hit a few with some suppressive fire, and some of them took wounds. Now stop and think about it, because it's going to differ from GM to GM. Many GMs , in my experience, will simply tally up wound modifiers and keep going. This is why I liked professional ratings in the last edition. Takes a Serious wound? Ok, that guy's out of the fight. GOing ot go crawl into a broom clsoet or something.

Not a lot of GMs (that I have seen at least) take things like that in to accoutn, nor do players. Which tends to lead to having a person taht was only wounded getting finished off.

We played with wounded guys pulling out-only the hard core or seriously stupid(gangers) fight to the death.

I use the prof. rating a LOT. As much as I use the handwaving 'yeah hes dead' bit. Joe sec guard isnt going to to be taking cover while hes holding his liver in place.
The minor advantage to this is once in a while they run into a seriously indocternated person who WILL fight to the death, they know what they are up against. They tend to have a karma pool above 1 as well.

I have been inspired to add bodycount tracking to my character tracker. The categories I have so far:

• Metahumans
  • Mages
• Critters
• Spirits
• Unknown
• Drones
• Vehicles

Any other categories that should be added?

~J

If a character can reasonably expect to get several hundred kills in their career, the karma system could be adjusted to resemble D&D experience points so 1 karma = 1 kill and perhaps halve the award for hand waved kills.
It could work well for certain archetypes.

As for body count tracking what about IC and other artificial entities.

Well, the question of "bodies" gets harder to determine there. If you smash the server, did you kill one of every IC on the server? What if you force a system crash? What if you just crash the IC? Even though it'll come back next time someone's tally gets high enough?

~J

Biggest kill count for my characters? Rookwood, the physmage who's actions were getting questioned in the "Bad thing" thread there for a bit. And even his aren't that high.

Face-to-face: Maybe 10 or so, but definitely less than 20.
Handwaved: About 200, thanks primarily to sabotaging a passenger train.

Though I have to guess on mine, because I really don't see the point of keeping track of kills in SR. I'd rather be able to tell stories about runs than give random stats.

"And that's why my character was responsible for the destruction of a half-dozen office buildings" sounds better than "*flip, flip* ...2,527."

I add in drones and vehicles because they're a big enough accomplishment and don't do that "coming back" thing that IC and Spirits can.

~J

how many kills do you get if you kill the same shedim's physical form multiple times? what if it reinhabits the same form multiple times?

No, Prime Runner Mages is a subset of Prime Runners, since there's a lot of difference between a mage and a Prime Mage, and a lot of difference between a Prime Runner and a Prime Runner who is a Mage.

I prefer expanded trees anyway. That's why mages was a subset of metahumans in the first place. Because they're extra-hard, and worthy of seperate notation.

I just prefer to super-expand.


Oh, and YOU go ahead and tell a Dragon he's a subset of Paracritters. I'll be on the other side of the world swearing up and down I didn't give you the idea to tell him that.

Yeah, Dragons and Great Dragons are Critters, though they're not a bad candidate for their own category. Also, you reintroduce the problem of defining "death" for IC. Plus, you've got some non-existent categories on there, like Hackers and Technomancers (are they some kind of critter?).

~J

For this purpose, I'm going to define death as "directly caused the death of a living creature, or otherwise combat-defeated with lethal intent."

IE: Stunbolting a person? Does not go to the bodycount. Stunbolting to death, accidentally? Bodycount.
Intentionally derailing a train? Bodycount.
Unintentionally derailing a train? Bodycount.
Ordering another to derail a train? Not bodycount.

Defeating a spirit so that it returns to whence it came? Bodycount.
Defeated an IC in Cybercombat? Bodycount.


[edit]Oh crap. The list got buggered, let me try to fix it. A lot of those are supposed to be one down.



[edit2]

• Metahumans
  • Mages
    • Threat Mages
  • Prime Runners
    • Prime Runner Mages
• Critters
  • Paracritters
• Spirits
  • Threat Spirits
• Unknown
  • Horrors
  • Things Which Ought Not Be Known
• Drones
  • Combat Drones
    • Airborne Combat Drones
• Vehicles
  • Combat Vehicles
    • Tanks
  • Aircraft
    • Combat Aircraft
• Cyberfrags
  • IC
    • Black IC
  • Hackers
    • Technomancers
      • Sprites
  • AIs
• Dragons
  • Great Dragons

If body count is not used for karma assigning purposes but is rather just used for bragging rights/character background I think it's okay to be very literalist about it. I believe that would actually lead to some laughter around the table as the group argues about if something was literally a kill or not. I can see people joking about some NPC they inhumanly worked over but didn't actually kill not ending up as a kill for the purpose of bodycount even though getting the NPC to that point was extremely difficult or perhaps the climax of a long campaign.

Eh. It's all completely pointless unless you keep strict track of the quality of the opposition killed / defeated, and the circumstances.

My two current characters could probably have inflated their "Kills" stats a couple of times over if, over the course of their careers, they'd been sloppy and trigger-happy. After all, anyone can kill gangers - 90% of the time, you might as well break out the hakapik...

I'm not sure I'd really call it pointless—it may not be an indicator of everything it appears to be, but "how many people have you killed" is still a statistic that gives some insight regardless of whether all of those people were paraplegic and in comas or if they were all -6 Essence Cyberzombies.

~J

In all my years of gaming, I have never been too preoccupied with kill counts. I think I may have tried keeping track once a long time ago, but I think it was in response to a GM asking how many people my PC had killed as part of his backstory.

Most memorable bodycount related quote: I was playing a recycled PC where the PCs had been namd after astrological signs of the zodiac. Another player who did keep a kill count would often say IC and OoC for his PC, "I've killed more people than Cancer."