We've all swapped stories about characters doing dumb stuff to get them killed, or causing millions of dollars of property damage but how about some stories where your characters managed to walk (or drag themselves) away from a fight that they probably should have lost.

My own happened about a year ago. I was playing a mage/face who specialized in manipulation spells. The way the campaign was structured, using Blakkie's Clout rules made it so that money was always very tight. We were fairly experienced runners but it was still almost impossible for us to make significant purchases cash on the barrel. Typically if you wanted a new toy you either had to steal it or get a Johnson to give it to you in exchange for service in trade.

At any rate we were running in Hong Kong and needed a boat. I don't remember the exact plan that required it but I do recall it involving blatant acts of piracy. Anyhow the rest of the team was busy trying to gather up other stuff we needed so I went to get a boat. I went to the shadier docks and looked around for a boat that looked seaworthy belonging to a captain that it looked like I could take. Upon finding a boat Blakkie described the boat and the captain as looking like "an Asian version of Relic and his boat". (for those who don't know Relic was a character from the show The Beachcombers). Being born in 81, I'd forgotten what an unpleasant man Relic was, so I tricked him into taking me out for a cruise at which point my plan was to mob mind him once we were clear of the harbor and tell him to take a long walk towards shore while I put my pirate hat on and went back to shore in my boat.

Unfortunately for me Relic was some ex special forces nutjob who was very protective of his boat. My mobmind failed, and he realized I'd tried to use bad ju-ju on him so he did the only reasonable thing when you are within arms reach of a hostile mage, he started hitting my poor unarmed body 3 mage, over and over again. I ended up defaulting to clubs and fending him off with an oar while I called a fire spirit that I had bound previously which eventually managed to kill him. When I pulled into the natural harbor where I was supposed to meet the rest of the team over an hour late and 9 different shades of black and blue, basically sitting 2 boxes short of a full physical damage track, one box short of a full stun damage track. I couldn't even heal myself because my dice pools were so low.

hrm . . there's the one fight that became the reason for a phobia, a nice set of scars and two ellbow mounted spurs in my first troll samurai . . basically, the GM had me cornered with another troll holding an centurion laser axe to my chars throat . . obviously thinking i won't be so dumb and try to actually get out of that situation by fighting . . well . . i did . . so, after doing some surprise tests . . yep, the GM had to roll for surprise, not just the NPC . . my char went from 0 to 1 box before deadly physical damage in a matter of 3 seconds flat only managing to stay below D by burning one point of karma . . one hit killing the other troll with his own pole-arm after scaring him by basically saying:"you came close to me . . dumb move" . . and then using his throat to push the axe out of the way so he could turn around and slice him in two . . so, after fainting afterwards saying:"can't believe i actually did that . . and survive ugh" my character woke up in an docwaggon clinic for the second time(don't ask) having acquired a severe phobia of laser axes, a nice case of paranoia concerning people being behind him, one hell of a big scar over the whole throat, one side to the other . . and on the next possibility i got me 2 spurs with dikote mounted so they come out of the ellbows in case i EVER got into that situation again . . not very likely, because i practically took the money and ran to the AGS/Troll Kingdom of Schwarzwald for a long time visit to a remote part of the family to try and recover from that . .

Lessee... the worst thing I ever put players up against is a pony nuke.

I had a male elf who was basically a slightly altered version of the Covert Ops Specialist from SR3, and his name was Raven.

One night, Raven was having a drink in a crowded nightclub. Given that he was relaxed, a little drunk, and it was my first time playing shadowrun, he was only wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and only had his Shock Gloves rolled up in his back pocket. He took a trip to the gents to take a slash, which is where the saga began. He was standing at the trough, whistling, when he hears some-one creep behind him. He whirls and is attacked by a human with a knife or some similar weapon. He manages to biff the guy in the face and run out of the gents, where he stops, waits next to the door and coathangers the hitman with a shock as he races out through the door.

Unfortunately and accomplice of the hitman, an ork in a brown coat on one of the balconies, watches this unfold and pulls a Browning from his coat and opens fire. Among the casualties, screaming and push for the exit, Raven takes a round in the the torso, but manages to make it to the exit, as the bouncers are occupied with the Ork. This is where it becomes tough, as Raven, a puny elf with no armor, has taken a moderate wound.

Once in the street, Raven enlists a taxi driver to take him the hell out of dodge. Unfortunately again, the taxi is soon rammed by a eurocar westwind, and a chase begins. The chase is ended when a mage inside the eurocar fries the taxi with a lightning ball spell, the taxi driver manages to bring his ride to a halt in a suburban area and expels Raven, while demanding a tip. Raven throws a certified credstick at the driver and runs into the street. He leaps a fence and bolts down the side alley of a nearby house. The hitmage shortly follows him into the lane, and Raven attempts to leap the fence that adjoins the house to another property, but fails due to his bulletwound and falls on his back, luckily the damage does not stage. As he does, a fireball burns past his face and he takes this as an incentive to try again. He vaults the fence and continues to the back of the property, hoping to reach the other side of the block. He jumps another fence and finds himself in the front yard of an apartment building, and manages to lie behind a small wall before the Eurocar screaming around the corner spots him.

The mage alights from the vehicle, looking the worse for drain, as does the rigger from the westwind, a dwarf carrying a shotgun. As Raven pours with sweat, the Mage approaches the wall, inevitably about to discover his target. On the spur of the moment, Raven leaps up and pounds the mage in the face with his gloved fist, sending the already stunned mage to the pavement like a tonne of bricks. Raven then leaps of the wall, taking advantage of the surprise to charge his way inside the Westwind, through the shotgun wielding dwarf.

He manages to shove the martially unskilled rigger out of his way and leap into the open passenger door of the westwind, where he promptly ducks a volley of buckshot, slams the door and guns the ignition. Amazingly, given that Raven has no car skill whatsoever, he manages to pass an acceleration test and leave the owner of the sportscar behind.

Unfortunately for Raven, his night's worries are far from over. After a few minutes of unskilled, nerve-wracking driving, Raven begins to notice a faint beeping from underneath his seat. Which happens to be a timed charge of C12, a some-what drastic measure against car-theft. Raven swiftly pulls over and examines the source of the beeping, not wanting to simply abandon the expensive car and deny him from fencing it, making the nights stresses almost worthwhile. He manages to remove the charge, and not having any demolition skills, tosses it through a shop window, where it explodes after a few seconds and throws raven, now with a Serious wound over the bonnet.

Raven finally manages to call his fixer to relieve him of the hot vehicle and arrange for him a ride home, in exchange for a cut of the fencing profit. Unfortunately, the meet involves heading out to Auburn, which will take a few hours of driving, but unfortunately, Raven has little choice.

Upon nearing the meet, Raven's car is halted by a tree trunk lying across a dark stretch of road. Before he can surmise how to circumvent the obstacle, a bald ganger appears at the window with a large weapon pointed in Raven's face. Unbeknownst to the ganger, Raven has his hand on the grip of a Ruger Super Warhawk revolver that's nestled next to gear stick.

Once again, Raven is in a rather compromising position, with a serious wound, no armor, no Warhawk specialisation, no money to bribe the ganger (all spent on booze and the taxi tip), and an unfamiliarity with ganger etiquette that makes negotiation futile.

Luckily, Raven's fixer comes to his rescue with a few runners. And the gangers are reduced to shred by the rock'n'roll of an assault rifle, except for the bald ganger, of course, who pissbolts off down the road. And Raven, while usually a pretty mild-mannered guy, has had just about of enough of this night's drek, that he steps out of the car and unloads the revolver into the gangers back.

Dude, what the frag, did you fuck the GM's wife or something!?


Seriously, that's pretty damn harsh to pull on a complete newbie!

Thus far I think our most impressive survival was breaking out of and then back into Chicago within the first few hours of the barricade going up. We made the mistake of trying to get out quietly the first time, so I took twenty boxes of Stun from narcoject while still jacked into the team's van. Note that this meant that they couldn't yank the plug, as the dump shock would probably have killed me. I fortunately managed to roll well enough to wake up, jack out, and collapse again, otherwise we would've been pretty much sitting there waiting for someone to hit us with a rocket.

We'll probably have a better story in the next few months.

Edit: regarding harshness, much of it was, but the GM threw him a big lifesaver in the form of having the explosive beep.

~J

I would never put a anyone through King of the Mountain. 130 12-20 year old female multiple-initiatory grade magician judeo-christian zeolots? Guarded by at least thirty cybered ex-special forces ops under a near impenetrable fortress in the middle of a huge below-zero snow-storm in the transpolar aleut.

Let the eskimo's sort it out for themselves, I say.

I did very much like Heartbreaker.

...yeah, it was pretty simplistic in that sense. I mainly used it as a "warm up" to a much larger campaign. I basically wanted to see how the team functioned together before throwing them into what would amount to be a literal "war zone".

The funny thing was, for the flight to the job they found themselves in another cargo jet filled with drop pallets. It was somewhat amusing to see them sweat & squirm a bit before they even made it to the destination (which ended with a normal[?] landing on an unused stretch of old highway).

One time we were out in Africa, out in the middle of plains. Off in the distance, we see something coming our way. The rigger sends his scout drones to check it out. Turns out it's a kilometer-wide Awakened giant ant (ants the size of lizards, not 20 feet tall) going berserk and eating everything in their path. They are moving pretty fast. We are all on foot, with an unconscious VIP and several down team mates. We load up as much as we can on the rigger's helicopter drones, but that leaves the 2 sammies and me on foot.

Now, my character was an African guide, an Adept with a few levels in boosted Athletics and all, so I can run pretty good. However, the other 2 sammies are more like steel boulders than nimble runners. So they start running for their lives, basically they need to buy time in order for the rigger's drone to unload some people somewhere safe and come back and pick them up.

The ants are gaining on them. It is a mathematical fact they will catch up in a few turns. So they run, run and run. They go through a small forest, which one of the two lights on fire with his flamethrower, but that hardly does anything to stop the swarm. As the ants gain, and gain and get closer, the sammies start tossing grenades behind them to little effect. Then they empty up the remaining fuel from the flamethrower. Then they start buring karma just to boost their Athletics test just to stay a few inches away from the pack of ants. Then they start batting at themselves as ants start jumping on their legs and taking bites out.

Finally, just as the two are basically resisting a large amount of damage every turn as ants bite them, and they keep running like crazy and swiping ants off, the drone comes back and hooks them up. The two finish batting off the last ants clinging to them and fly aove the horde.

They both ended up boxes away from death. The only reason they lived was some intense dice rolling by them as they ran, and the rigger as he made his flight back and forth.

The ants subsequently overran the merc outpost we were trying to get to and nearly ate our sniper alive, but that wasn't as intense as that running.

Wierd that there's no delete post on DS.

Lets see, finding ourselves under a Saturn 5 missle about to launch...(a fire elemental popping up near the nose cone ocnvinced them to abort)
in an undersea base when our moron, I mean Street sammi opened up with AP rounds full auto- while most of the teams was screwaming 'why did you bring those?', two of us ran for it.
dug in on a hillside shooting at Japanese troops fighting in a nappa valley vineyard. we had a great position, dug in at the military crest, with clear fields of fire, until a gun ship came over the ridge behind us. bleah!

It's also worth noting that a "Gas Vent III" and a "suppressor" are kind of polar opposites. Drilling giant holes in the top of the barrel (to "vent" some "gas" perhaps) in order to help control recoil means that a long tube on the end of a barrel (used to "suppress" the sound of a weapon firing by absorbing those gasses that you just vented out the top of the barrel) will not do very much work.

It's also against the RAW, btw, not just against the common sense rules of firearms realism. Only one accessory per mount (under, over, barrel), and both of them are barrel accessories.

I didn't know that Mr. Wasserman had made any such statement.

~J

Can we stop harping on a tangenital point?

The point was that the idiot took reasonable and unreasonable measures to make his gun a silent killing device, and then fired Ex-Ex out of it.

I figured it was just obvious that explosive ammo made a noise - presumably at the point of impact. Thats probably a fairly resonable GM decision, I'd make the same one and call it a houe rule if pushed. I wouldn't give anyone a bonus to pin point the shooter though, 'shots being fired' would presumably be obvious.

Really? I swear I have had this same conversation for all 4 editions.

I don't believe so. I modded out all my guns so much in SR3 I may be misremembering, but I think the Smartgun -- while still quite a solid purchase -- in SR3 just came with a smartlink, a suppressor, and a folding/retractable stock. No gas vents.

Fields of Fire describes EX-Ex as having a denotation, albeit a tiny one and talks about the bullet's "load", so yeah, the Ex series of bullets do use mirco-explosives.

However, I don't believe there has ever been a bonus to hear them in RAW, although I agree that it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there is one, smart Runners simply don't bring EX-Ex when they are trying to be ghosts, and RAW be damned. (Same reaction I have towards 'Turn to Goo' flipping off Sixth World Magical Theory without every Mage and Researcher scrambling to be the first to get a new Magical Law named after themselves and usher in a new era of magical spell design.)

Now with that said, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the pop from a EX-Ex load would be any louder then say, a very small firecracker, but I found the story to be ironic and fun even if at my table I'd give the player a "do-over" the first time and allow him to assume that his character knew enough to load some quieter ammo.

And it's not like the sound of a bullet striking flesh -- or anything else, for that matter -- is all that silent an affair in the first place. If you start handing out bonuses to hear EX rounds based on the fact they make a sound when they hit something...well...every other gunshot in the game, silencer or not, should do the same.

(SR4)
Overplanning for our group turned a simple data grab into a three ring circus. We had to do a simple data grab from a compound in the middle of a strip mining area. Well we didn't want to operate under complete radio silence in order not to be picked up by scanners so we decided to go the other direction. Fill the airwaves with so much data that our team will be the least thing of notice.

My character at the time was a professional courier (basically from "The Transporter") but also played in Street Racing. Had the skill to outdo pretty much anyone, but hadn't built up the cash for a big time racing machine. So I start pulling my contacts, and my team sponsors and organizes a demolition derby race through this strip mining compound. About 25-30 participants, all driving vehicles armed to the teeth, include roto drones flying all over the compound to film the event as well as hackers jacking the compounds visuals to get all the footage from every possible angle. I've got my racing car in this, with some minor artillary and my groups got my taxi with more artillary sitting at the other end of the compound(yah, forgot to mention arabian cab driver for part time job).

Race starts and for the first lap its just dealing with each other, but by the second lap we've got the attention of all the earth spirits that have been working in the quarries and their adding more to the mayhem. Team goes in does have to deal with security on the inside and raises an alarm that gets attention even with everything else going on. I can't remember exactly what happened inside, but while racing I also patched into my cab so I could act as lookout for them outside the building while at the same time participating in the race. Authorities show up and start cordoning off the building, completely ignoring the car sitting there.

This company was fairly small potatoes, and no way equipped to deal with the professionals are character were. A short while after this cordon is set up, a man comes running over the hill towards them. It's their mage who's been watching astrally everything going on inside, and tells the guards to just clear out theres nothing worth staying here for, the team will just tear them apart. The mage then declares he's getting the hell out of there, and takes off back up the hill. I couldn't help it I've been jacked into the car picking all this up on the sensors, and I have plenty of unused weapons on the car. I unload into the mage as he's heading up the hill (GM gives me a karma penalty for the unnecessary kill). Results in 2 grenades being tossed at the car, which basically drops half its damage capacity. Peel out to the otherside of the building where the team blows a hole and loads up.

Unfortunately GM wouldn't allow me to win the race as well. So it was the first race I'd participated in that I didn't at least place. He figured I'd be too distracted driving two vehicles to maneuver for position as well as I usually do. (FYI the car that only had half its hits left I was still rolling 15 dice on driving) We still made more cash out of the race than we did for doing the run, since we were collecting registration fees, the bookie we lined up had to give us a percentage of his profit, and we had our own bets placed on participants.

It was by far the most insane run I had been a part of.

Um, as you point out, those are grenades. When bullets start being that size, they start calling the thing that fires them a cannon. Lemme see if I can find a size comparison somewhere.

Edit: ok, there's a few layers here. First, a size comparison between a 20mm round and some .50 BMG rounds. Note how large it is in comparison, and in particular how wide the actual bullet is; grenades are shaped differently to increase explosive volume, but we'll start with this.

Then, after letting that sink in, take a look at a size comparison between the .50 BMG and some other rifle calibers, including the common assault rifle calibers. See how dramatically larger it is, including in that all-important (for internal volume) width, and then consider stacking the difference you saw between the .50 BMG and the 20mm round on top of that.

You do probably gain some volume going down to pistol-round size, as bullets tend to get decently wider, but not much; what you can usefully put into a cannon round does not in any significant way indicate the ability to do a similar thing with a standard rifle or handgun round.

Also, the forums apparently do not parse LaTeX. How sad, if expected (and this paper is going to eat my brain. Or my brian. One or the other.)

~J

I know they are bigger! I even said that ;P

My point was it's probably pretty reasonable for someone to sit down with SR4, see that the bullets are 'explosive', mentally benchmark against an OICW and say 'well the bullets probably aren't silent then.'

I mean a grenade is really really loud, even if they were capgun loud (which doesn't entail very much black powder at all, and makes a nice crack, this is using sci-fi explosives) that would undo the good work of you sound suppression - i'm assuming in the really quite case as listed we are talking something like those silenced WWII sten guns that are bizarrely quite.

Edit: Thats pretty much the line of logic I'd employ if the question came up in a game and I had to make an off the cuff decision.

Doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.

Yeah, thats probably a pretty reasonable look at it too. I suppose I think of that sort of thing (like safety slugs and stuff) as hollow point rounds, though I know hollow point rounds are deforming rounds.

Heck, I'm not the only one, global security on frangiable rounds.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/sys...s/frangible.htm

Well we did have one run that ended in a small war in a South American company. Mostly due to an outbreak of a highly virulent strain of Ghoul. Which was kind of sort of our own fault, but we did get the antidote. Too bad you had to take it forever, and our Adept decided it would be cool to go off it, and start passing it as an STD.

No, I'm pretty sure the issue is that rules were written for them once upon a time which had them explode, and then later on someone realized that was silly and changed the description, but didn't think to change anything else about them. The mechanics, as noted earlier, fit the idea of a high explosive round perfectly (minus that whole practicality thing), while the description covers something totally different mechanically but much more sensible.

It's sorta like how in the Decking rules for dealing with security tally for multiple deckers, in some places everything assumes that tally is a property of the host, while in others it's assumed to be a property of the decker/connection. Either one is at least internally consistent, but somewhere along the line it got forgotten which one was actually being stuck to.

~J

Nothing wrong with having Explosive rounds make a firecracker sound when they hit. Assuming they have some kind of really nifty futuretech explosive, that's gotta have more report than BLACKPOWDER in a firecracker.

They were quiet when they were fired... not where they hit . It's not as if there aren't a fair number of good ammo loads which would be quieter options such as APDS.

Anyhow, loving the stories...