I understand if a player wants to be a good guy, and I don't necessarily punish him, but in the sixth world, it's never easy. Sure, so you've got a drop and a bunch of security goons and have an opportunity to pick them off with some less-than-lethal tech, whether it's a chemical grenade, hand-to-hand knock-outs or a stunball. But when a character I gm'd, Vaziel, heard the sewer-dwelling ghoul growl behind him, or the troll physad charge him at the end of a dock, he pulled his Browning Mp and sunk Karma Pool into nailing both of them through the brain. I understand that ghoul's are in a very difficult situation, and personally I wouldn't make a ghoul hunter character "ten points!", but when you're shit scared, the white cap tactics should dissapear.
Also with the exception of my first character, I've never done one of those "won't won't won't" moral qualm characters. Most of the characters I create are conflicted, yes, as most of them have trained their whole lives to assassinate, torture, blow-up and ruin people's lives through various crimes or morally bankrupt professions.
Kestrel was a young Sioux who enrolled in the armed forces as a scout/sniper because of nationalistic pressures and because it suited his love of his home wilderness. They trained him in information warfare and riflery, so his job was to jam/decrypt/triangulate the enemy's communications and then watch through his scope as their heads explode with the pull of his trigger. One day during a long stint of scouting near his home town, he managed to pick up a team of Tir Ghosts, practically right on top of him. Wide-spectrum jamming stopped him from calling in back-up or air support, so he managed, with his Electronic Warfare skills, his high calibre rifle and moving stealthily through the familiar terrain he managed to kill them all one of them he had to kill with his bare hands. This performance instantly qualified him for the Wildcats, but he felt claustrophobic throughout the arduous training and removed from his home environment. He turned his back on the military soon after, choosing to live in a valley near his birthplace, but it was soon that corporate interests threatened the ecosystem of his home, and eco-terrorists approached him, knowing of his skills, to murder the supervisors of the project and sabotage the machinery with a bomb. So he ended up a Shadowrunner. He doesn't enjoy killing, but his skillset and training suit him to assassination and merc work.
Abraham Baruch, an Israeli troll, left high-school due to prejudice and claustrophobia, and the IDF was happy to have him, due to his physical strength and endurance. He just wanted to be a quartermaster, not being a particularly violent person, but the army was the only job other than physical labourer that would take him. When an islamist terrorist detonated a bomb on a bus Bram was on, he watched several of his fellow countryment turned to chunky salsa, and he lost an arm. He spent decades of his life as a special forces operative for the IDF and Mossad, participating in assassinations and unconventional warfare operations across the middle-east, as a weapons specialist/tech. He tortured countless people throughout the operations, justifying it with his memories and nationalistic fury. About When his baby daughter was born, and the agonized faces of his torture victims began to outweigh the memories of the bomb victims, and his wife was killed in a retaliatory strike by a foreign intelligence service, he took his daughter and left Israel.
When Bram begins play, he's living in Seattle with his 20 year old daughter, who resents the fact that he's turned to Shadowrunning to support them. She's moved out. So he sits in his crappy house amongst his stockpile of fire-arms, oiling his old military issue cyber-arm, casually gunsmithing and having to go do another reprehensible and violent job when he hasn't got enough money to pay for his rent, cigarettes and various addictions.
Another (very lame) character I put together when I was younger was a Ninja. (I had been watching a whole lot of Lone Wolf and Cub, Rourouni Kenshin and Kurosawa films). Shinji Mitsurugi was a young adept born into a ninja clan (well they actually recognized his powers as a young child and murdered his parents, scattering his orphaned siblings about the globe). When he left, he was nineteen. Literally his whole life had been training to kill people. His magical powers did little but facilitate assassination. When his only friend in his clan, Misato, fears that after a failed mission, she will be killed, Shinji sneaks into the restricted areas of the dojo and finds the file on his parents, goes berserk and makes his escape, killing his master, and several other lesser ninja.
The interesting thing about roleplaying Shinji was that while he hated Ninja and killing, they defined him. He had nothing else (he was even a virgin) He had the compulsive: Killing flaw. As a role-player, I would try not to kill, but Shinji instinctively moves to eliminate opposition. And despite a white cap attitude of "i hate killing killing is wrong", what choice did he have but become a Shadowrunner and do wetwork? In a fit of Lame-itude in the "are there any quotes from your character" in his 20 questions I wrote.
[ Spoiler ]
“I hold this blade and loathe it, for the blade is death yet I cannot cast it away because I am empty without it, and I cannot replace it with the artists brush nor a farmer’s tool, because I can’t use them. So I hold this blade in my hand, and I hold death close to me because I cannot exist without, but what existence is this?�
Also, in my games, I'm not going to openly punish you for doing morally reprehensible things. But if you shoot that guy in the torso, he's unlikely to give a movie style "ugh!" and drop dead, he's got an equal chance of falling to his knees, spewing blood, convulsing, and screaming to god and about his wife and kids. I was GM'ing my young neighbour, who came across two gangers mugging a woman in an alleyway. They told him to back off and turn away, and he shot one ganger in the head with his Manhunter and fried the other one (holding the woman with a knife) with a manabolt, but not before the ganger saw his friend's head explode, chips of bone and chunks of bloody grey matter thrown across the alley and the wet thud of his open skull hitting the pavement. Understandably the ganger, before his brain was fried with a force 5S Manabolt slit the woman's throat from ear to ear and ran for his life.
My neighbour comments to me afterwards, that I was being a bit harsh, especially with my description of the bullet fucking up the ganger's skull, and the woman being cut open. I replied that it was he who made the moral decision. The gangers were most likely going to take the woman's purse, and maybe sexually assault her. And my neighbour's call ended up being to murder the two guys, and risk her life in a hostage situation. Luckily he had a heal spell, and knives do shit all damage anyway.
“I hold this blade and loathe it, for the blade is death yet I cannot cast it away because I am empty without it, and I cannot replace it with the artists brush nor a farmer’s tool, because I can’t use them. So I hold this blade in my hand, and I hold death close to me because I cannot exist without, but what existence is this?�