In part, it depends on which version of SR you are playing. In SR2 and SR3, your main tactic to stay alive is to raise the other sides target numbers to hit you. The best way to typically do this to to find cover. If you can't manage that, at least stay on the move. In addition environmental modifiers (lighting, smoke, etc) are great for raising the TN. In general, you should consider a load out of flash packs, flash, and smoke grenades to jack up the firefight TNs.

If you are asking about SR4, then your most important goal is to get the other guy to miss, since most runners are only going to be able to soak 3 to 5 points of damage. Your first line of defense is a high passive defense (reaction). Expect combat heavy chaaracters to have passive defenses in the range of 7-12. This means that goons (with die pools of around 8 (agility 3, skill 1, specialization, smartlink) have a hard time hitting you. The additional minor penalties from stuff like cover help you survive vs goons. Real gun bunnies (rolling 18+ dice), on the other hand, can hit you basically no matter what. Your objective here is the kill the gun bunny as fast as possible, because he has the skill to kill you in one pass, no matter what you do. Against these guys, you can't put your meat on the line, use drones or spirits to take themout.

@Critias: Whoa! I struck a nerve. Sorry for bringing it up...

@Doc: I think you're right and wrong about cops. A big part of it is going to be your setting, of course. For instance, if you spend your time in a totally lawless place like Redmond, there isn't much point to the cops trying to find you - nobody will talk to them, and they're in danger just by being there. They'd have to go in with a lot of brute force, and that's expensive. Too expensive just for a few dead cops, because cops die every day in dystopian Shadowrun.

It also depends on which cops you're talking about. For instance, Knight Errant might astrally track you or use ritual sorcery on your ass just to show you who's boss. But Lone Star's not quite the same. They definitely might go after you. But on the other hand, Internal Affairs might track you down and hire your cop-killing skills to eliminate a corrupt unit they haven't been able to gather enough evidence on. Or maybe they'll just leave it alone because they don't have the resources to investage no-name criminals hiding in the trackless barrens. It's probably cheaper to hire more officers than to take revenge on some armed to the teeth Shadowrunners.

The cops in SR4, especially Lone Star, are not "good guys." They're employees of yet another faceless, soulles corporation. They're largely corrupt. People don't call the Star because they trust the Star, they call the Star because they can't afford a contract with a more reliable security contractor. Cop killing is a big deal today because a) cops are generally good guys, and heroes, and the public supports them, and b) cop killing is rare enough that they can make sure to come down hard every single time it happens. Neither is true in SR4, so we shouldn't be importing ideas about modern police into Shadowrun.

And lastly, police in competence is almost a neccessity for a successful Shadowrun game. You have to assume an enormous city brimming with criminal activity far in excess of what the police can control. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense that there was a thriving black market in deniable assets. In fact, that market is another reason why cops aren't going to go the whole hog to catch shadowrunners - those runners work for corporations, and those corporations don't appreciate crackdowns on their illicit labor sources. And they have the influence to stop them. When thinking about an element of the theme, you have to ask: if this were true, would Shadowrunning still be a decent way to make a living? With a strong, competent, vengeful police force, I'd have to say that the game's other theme elements would be in jeopardy.

Mmm... you can certainly spin it, but you'd think that if IA wants to talk to you to kill some cops, because you already kill cops... that their major motivation is because they can accomplish their goals and pin it on "Dirty Murdering Runners". Sure it's some easy cred but do you really want that kind of work?

I play Johnny Law as the end of the world, the 5 stars of the GTA: Shadowrun world. If your in a firefight with the cops, something has gone horribly wrong and you need to be seriously thinking about damage control. I run LS to be a faction my players should fear as much as any of the other groups of people who want to kill them. What makes LS different is that smart runners can do things to fly under the radar, not killing cops or carrying out random street gunfights are some obvious examples. Cops are financially motivated in SR to maintain a facade of public order, their contract with the city depends on them providing that facade. Runners who kill cops go along way towards fucking that up and thusly should attract a serious amount of bad juju. One of the elements I'm playing with in my game is the fact that the Seattle LS contract is up for negotiation and that a major fuck up in the next couple of months will mean that KE can swoop in and take away the most lucrative contract on the west cost. LS needs to keep it's nose clean and win some public support. Free Market+Election Year: For the win!

If you're operating in the Barren's cops aren't really an issue, if you want to raid a corp enclave Downtown, where all the businesses have their LS bills paid up, that's another matter. If cops are dying everyday somewhere, that's probably going to quickly become a place where cops don't die everyday. That's because cops aren't going to be working there anymore, it's not profitable.

We could also get into an interesting discussion about why a person would work for LS if cop killing were the norm. If I recall LS is not like Renraku, there's no giant LS arcology where they cradle to grave families and have a constantly refreshing pool of stupid corp kids to employ. Without conscripts they're recruiting from the "general" population pool. If cops are dying left and right LS is going to have to offer some serious financial compensation to attract anyone to work for them. If runners are killing cops left and right this recruiting becomes even harder because anyone with the skills to become a cop is probably thinking "Well shit, why don't I just become a runner? Pays better and it looks like they get away from those lousy cops all the time." I tend to think of cops as being low rent Blackwater operators, all the guys who couldn't make some big money corporate team but not motivated enough to be Runners. Someone's sig said that runners should never be paid less than what they could be making stealing Americars, I also tend to think that they shouldn't be paid less than what they could be at legitimate job.

LS only cares about their contract and getting paid. Running gun battles make them look weak and put that contract in jeopardy. Corporate crime is just that, corporate crime, if it happens in an extraterritoriality zone they could probably care less (unless those corporations are willing to pay them to care, and if that's the case they have to be competent enough to attract that interest). That of course gets into a discussion of what happens when you get back out of a corporate enclave and you're on the street getting chased by Red Samurai. When you get past the gates do the corps automatically post a bounty collectible by anyone who helps them? Is that the only reason LS would be interested in chasing runners who have effectively committed crimes in another country? The market for deniable assets exists not because good is stu- er... because cops are incompetent but because they get paid enough to care. Johnson's probably don't look highly upon runners who have double digit cop killing scores just like they don't think kindly upon runners with other high profile exploits. I think that with the stipulations I've put in place you can still be a successful well paid runner, you just have to take the cops into consideration. This plays well with what I think are central Shadowrun themes "You are not the good guys" and "No, you're not paranoid, everyone really is trying to kill you"

One other thing, I think you're right, people call the Star because they have to. But I disagree that the public has no sympathy for them. The Star is not the one shooting rockets in their neighborhood and as such are farther in the "good guy" category than runners are. Killing a contract cop doesn't get the same sympathy a public servant would get but LS PR will certainly try to spin it that way. "Patrolman Mclovin died trying to protect a neighborhood from dangerous Shadowrunners. We mourn his selfless loss." Joe Nobody will certainly reflect that runners have never showed up to stop "dangerous shadowrunners" from killing him and that, even if they were late, LS is at least paid to try.

You had half the runners in the 'plex's attention at "Easy cred."

Letting runners get away looks bad too. Either way they're after you, and once you get away, even temporarily, much of the impetus to continue tracking you down is gone because the Star already looks bad; the milk has been spilled, omae and the guys they catch and string up don't have to be you, they just have to be SINless and get booked before the nightly news comes on. Messing with the cops is terrible in my games; probably worse than in yours, at least in the initial confrontation, which is why it makes little difference whether you spit on his boots or shot his buddy in the face-- runners and gangers are the enemy. All you're pointing out is that the Star likes to come out looking good in highly public confrontations. If you cap a first responder but make it to the Barrens clean in all other respects, then I fail to see how you're really all that much worse off than if you cap an officer with stick and shock and make it to the Barrens clean in all other respects.

You act like people have unions and safe employment options in the Sixth World. There's generally four kinds of people in Shadowrun: The filthy rich, the "lucky" wage slaves, the SINless masses living in abject poverty and those who only avoid the last category by putting their hoops on the line-- aka, runners and... Lone Star. It's the 2070s: for a lot of meatheaded SINners with a general lack of talent your options are being unemployed and getting shot out in the streets or getting shot on the job with healthcare benefits and eventually a chance at retirement, plus some of them really do probably believe what they are doing is necessary. A good job is the most relative of concepts in this game.

YKIOK and has merit but it's not how I see it. This is largely because my game is pretty middle of the road when it comes to Dark vs Chrome. It's dark but it's not "Cops die everyday, literally die everyday" dark.

I will say I've never been comfortable with the whole "Most people don't have a SIN". I can understand why a criminals wouldn't have a SIN and why certain areas would have high numbers of SINless but if it's required by law and you're some homeless dude it seems like it wouldn't hurt to go get some free protection from some nations laws (I'm thinking UCAS/CAS not a corps that will of course require you do something useful). SIN's are free right? Required by law? I can understand not having one if you were born without one, it's probably a huge pain in the ass to get the paperwork together to prove your UCAS. But... didn't they have a "SINs for everyone!" Campaign after the second crash?

Yep, and a lot of people didn't take it because having a SIN isn't like waving a magic wand that solves all of your problems anyway; the prisons of today are littered with men with birth certificates, social security cards and are registered for the draft. Having a SIN doesn't make you any more educated or employable, although it does remove a few barriers like that pesky paper work the corps don't give a shit about (never forget that they break the law whenever it suits them). Quite frankly, if you had the life skills and opportunities to be employable than there's likely a corp out there somewhere that would have issued you a SIN ages ago... perhaps even Lone Star. The difference between being an uneducated ork with a SIN and no prospects and being an uneducated SINless ork with no prospects is that the former has theoretical protection under the law (which isn't much help if you have to scrounge and barter through blackmarkets to make a living) while the latter has no real rights but at least the local authorities don't have his biometric data or knows where to start looking if they want to track him down, which is kinda handy in a setting filled with endemic corruption.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that cops and guards get killed on a daily basis in my gameworld. Probably more like a couple a week; sixth world medtech goes a long way towards making encounters near fatal rather than definitely fatal, and drones and spirits are in heavy use in my games for safety reasons. 50-100 cops/guards dying a year doesn't hit me as that terribly unreasonable when you consider just how crazy the setting is, and finding people who could really use the job isn't that terribly hard when you consider that Seattle has a ridiculous poverty rate (Something like 30%? I'd have to double check) even amongst those with SINs.

all of the street cops in your world would be rookies then, anyone worth their salt to the corp isn't going to be on the street. how long does it take to train them? how much does it cost?

I think everything you say in that post is essentially on the money It's definitely a bad idea to go toe to toe with the Star, just like it would be with any security service. When the cops show up, Runners should be focusing on escaping. I wasn't trying to say that cop killing is no big deal, it's just not a Big Deal™ like it is today. But rather than put oodles of yen into Getting Those Dirty Copkillers™ the Star will probably do whatever has the lowest cost for the biggest benefit. That might include stringing up some random SINless people, like Whipstich suggests, or they might just underreport their causalty numbers. If nobody knows the real officer death figures, it won't deter recruits, and it won't harm public confidence. I'm not saying that copkilling is a totally acceptable think in Shadowrun, just that we should avoid importing modern day notions about it into Shadowrun.

I Feel your pain!

First off, welcome to the fun world of Shadowrun.

Combat is one of those topics where you're going to get a lot of opinions and multiple answers may be right. Fighting is going to be unique in each instance if your GM sets up well. Tactics, gear, 'ware is all going to depend on the type of characters your group consists of. For an obvious example, it likely wouldn't behoove you to get in a fist fight against a Troll if you're a 2 Body, 2 Strength eco shaman. But if you're a cybered-out-the-hoop street sam and Blade is your middle name, then maybe it's not such a big deal.

I think a lot of the advice that people have posted thus far is pretty accurate. Good luck and don't forget to have fun!

My basic advise for surviving combat is duck, run, then run some more. Combat is not something to take on lightly, and if weapons bigger than light pistols come out it's just time to get out of the area fast.

If combat is a must (like most people have suggested):

Try for an ambush, if you suprise your opponent and they can't fire back for a round your chances at survival go way up

Use Cover, failing that make cover with smoke etc.

Don't take on superior numbers

Know when to run away (the goal is survival after all)

I love Cyberpunk, but here's my criticism:

1 out of 10 times, no matter how you stack the odds in your favor, you fail. Even if you roll that 1-4 on the fumble chart and it's "no fumble," the "no fumble" is an automatic failure - by virtue of checking for a fumble, you have already failed.

That's what I don't like about it. But on the plus side, it goes a long way to enforcing the 'shit happens' feeling of the game.

Pretty much, yeah. If you have talent you end up as a company man somewhere else, a drone rigger or on the SWAT team or in an investigations unit. Beat cops likely rely on Knowsofts and AR backup for how to proceed in various situations along with minimal training and there's likely also high rate of turnover at the lowest ranks. After all, I'd say it's fairly obvious that the the core rulebook doesn't think too highly of Joe Lonestar. Joe Lonestar is there to put a human face on things and make decisions drones aren't qualified in scenarios like domestic abuse and depends heavily on quick back up to handle a violent crisis like a gang war or a team of runners busting out of the Aztechnology Pyramid loaded for bear. I have a lot of respect for police officers, and I realize they go through more training than I'm implying here, but frankly, I rather doubt that Joe Lonestar takes as many college classes or learns as much about legal procedure as today's cops do before they slap a badge on him and hand him a gun; their true power is in their magical assets and technology-- a Lonestar mook isn't that tough but that won't save you when their riggers roll in the Yellow Jackets, Citymasters and SWAT. A highly trained police inspector likely is too valuable and highly trained to go in busting heads when the Ancients and the Spikes get into yet another pissing match, but that just means he gets to investigate the scene remotely through drones or gets to show up with the rest of the investigative team to poke around well after the lowly grunts and drones have taken all the risk. Lonestar is a corporation guys, and I rather doubt that it's immune to having a few higher ups making decisions based on the bottom line from atop their ivory towers.

you have to survive long enough to be recruited and not everyone with talent is gonna get noticed, you'll have politics and infighting. the "best" are never chosen.
6,000¥ for someone who's gonna die, and you are spending 600,000¥/year just for the equipment? you can do whatever you want in your game obviously but that's just bad business.
however we have a new answer to how to survive. just give all the lonestar cops rating 3 firearms skillwires!
(no that's not a slight, but the average human lonestar rookie with skillwires 3 and agi 2 (3 if he's athletic) isn't gonna hurt any runners, so the only fear they'll have is the lonestar swat team)

the way i run it, there are simply so many bodies available that it doesn't matter how many die. the sixth world is a meat grinder; anybody who shows up at Lone Star's door looking for a job meets the minimum qualifications simply by virtue of having survived to an age where they're able to apply. the only people who survive to that age without picking up a relatively strong set of survival skills are corp kids, who aren't going to be dirtying themselves with this kind of work anyway.

the costs of training are easy to reduce by enlarging the operation. if a police academy today graduates 100 cops per year, a Lone Star Academy would be graduating 5,000 cops per year. also, there's going to be a surplus of ex-merc/ex-military/ex-whatever guys floating around that you can draw on. and, of course, where a modern training regimen will put a lot of focus on things like public relations and graduated response, Lone Star training is basically thug school--they teach you how to shoot, how to punch, how to swing a baton, and how to tell the difference between actual street scum ("targets") and corp kids who are slumming it ("valued taxpayers").

to get off the street, in the Star, you have to bootstrap yourself. there are going to be plenty of guys who retire after twenty years having never gone further than patrol. everybody wants the 'cushy' detective desk; the guys that get it are the guys who train themselves in order to pass the expensive classes that are 'always available to any member of our fine service'.

Note I said cops and security guards, and not just to shadow runner teams. We lose a police officer a day on average today in america, and despite what Michael Moore likes to say, we're not exactly what I would call a dystopia yet. Guards and cops rarely get killed in my games; the last run went without any fatalities (unless you count runners; had 3 PCs burn edge thanks to a botched crash test). Vehicles and drones galore will have to be repaired and bound spirit services were expended, but the star isn't stupid, even if they aren't highly trained in my games. Why in the hell should a cop climb out of a perfectly good citymaster when the Steel Lynx can do it? Anyway, my stance is actually closer to what ixombie is saying, when it boils right down to it. In my world, the cops get really pissed when you kill their friends. It just doesn't matter that much because they were already trying to kill you.

son of double-post!

It is? Where's the parent?

I tend to think that finding some dirty SINless to pin a crime on is a pretty popular tactic. Those SINless probably take the form of ganger who aren't playing the game and need to get hammered. I still maintain there was a huge drive to register people for SINs as that's the only real way for traditional governments to assert thier authority. True many people would avoid SINs but it strikes me that the average citizen still would like to get a legitimate job somewhere. But that's my take on the matter.

Like I said, I play LS as well trained, well maintained, and motivated to get the job done. I'm a fan of the "Police Force Run By Spreadsheet and Vice". I'm also willing to admit that my major inspiration for LS is long hours of watching "The Shield" and saying "Jesus, as if that isn't nice and cyberpunky". If they want to hurt you they can but if you don't kill them than the case file is going to slide to the bottom of the list of things to do. It comes down to:

Case#1 Armed Robbery, Assaulting a Corporate Drone
Case#2 Armed Robbery, Double Homicide (Cop Killers)

To my mind Case #2 is going to get "solved" first and than they'll get around to dealing with Case #1. Again, this is long term, shooting ANYTHING at anyone is not going to win you friends. I'd also say that it's easier to spin a PR story about a robbery where the cops took a stim patch and ran away than it is to spin a robbery where bystanders have commlink photos of dead cops. 2070 appears to have a survillance society and something as big and obvious as a gunfight is going to draw the flies. Under reporting only gets you so far when LTG DEADCOPS has streaming video of the latest dead LS.

I import modern day notions because in it's dirty beating heart most of cyberpunk is still trapped in a dystopian 1980's analog where people wear ripped jeans and eat at "The Cafe Reagan" . The thread on "Worlds First Mega" seemed to indicate that we really aren't close to the overt corporate takeover envisioned. Following the SR timeline we should be coming up on the 10 year anniversary of Seretech Decision and bowing down before our corporate overlords. If I was more imaginative I'd start using more post cyberpunk memes but I've been told that transhumanism really isn't really a big theme of Shadowrun. There are post cyberpunk elements creeping in but it's hardly "The Diamond Age" in here

Which is fine, as a child of the 80's and a paranoid adult, I enjoy blowing up cubicle farms and running over politicians.

The best way is never to be attacked in the first place. There are elegant and sneaky ways to do this but it can mean nothing more than not being the party member who is furthest forward.

Yeah. Everyone calls the guy slinging 18 dice in automatics a munchkin, but the real powergamer is the face with field medic skills who stays in back and has his buddies do the fighting (and bleeding...).

No, the real munchkin is the face that makes the don drop his pants and bend over.

That's why you make the Don the face, and have him laugh at the PC when he attempts something stupid like that. (Followed up with a nice, clean "Shoot you in the face" goodbye)

Ah but the face is not a munchkin until he has that much more dice than the Don that he can make the Don do as he tells him to.

A lot of good stuff, but no one's mentioned the most important thing in a fire fight - meat shields.
Drones!
Spirits!
Mind controlled gangers!
Heck, even watchers can meat shield if your magician is from a Possession tradition.

It doesn't matter how skilled or lucky your opponent is if what they're blasting is your expendable underlings. If nothing else, they'll buy time for you to run away.

On the lethal/non-lethal debate:

Spellcasters should run with stun damage, simply because you suffer less Drain for the same result. Besides, you can Mind probe a prisoner, or even get more for him from a chopshop(the parts are fresher).
So if the street sammy is blowing people away, he's likely to be the *only* party member geeking people. Making selling him out as viable way of getting the Star or Corp Security off your back.

And yes, even in Shadowrun the police will be hunting down copkillers. If they're unable to cope with the amount of crime, they'll just ignore everything else - after all, the number of burglaries doesn't affect their life expectancy, the number of copkillers does. And if they can't even keep up with that?

"I'm sorry officer, clearly my gun/spell licence has, err, expired. If I was to reduce a copkiller to slag, could we forget about this matter?"

An obvious way for vaguely heroic shadowrunners to persuade Lone Star to turn a blind eye to shadowy activities.

To avoid that I've switched my CP2020 games to Fuzion's dice mechanic: instead of 1d10 you roll 3d6.
3x1 means critical failure - roll another 2d6 and subtract them (end result: Stat + Skill + 3 - 2d6).
3x6 means critical success - roll another 2d6 and add them (end result: Stat + Skill + 18 + 2d6).

Of course, I've also adapted Fuzions slightly different difficulty/target number chart...

hehe... I seem to recall that there is a KE or LS division devoted to performing runs and hunting down runners. They would make interesting but utterly terrifying employers.

Possession Tradition Watchers do not Materialize. Watchers are the same for every Tradition.

Really? Is that an errata, or have I missed something?

I never cared for Fuzion much - although my crew did tweak out the original crit charts. The whole "auto self-mutilation" thing just seemed a little absurd, even for us.

Mind you, this is the same crew who coined the phrase "I parry the desk...with my face!" (Back story: The "face visor" gave a 3 in 10 chance of taking the hit instead of the actual face. So for cinematic humor value, the hapless Corp PC kept fending off an enraged Yak hitter wielding, eventually, a desk. With nothing more than a face visor and a vengeful die.)

-Siege

I believe Fortune is referring to the fact that Watchers do not have the Materialization power and so cannot swap it for Possession (as Possession tradition spirits do). Hence Watchers are usually astral-only beings for both types of traditions.

The exception is if you chose to use the Corps Cadavres and Living Dolls Optional Rule (p.95, Street Magic) which specifically grants Possession tradition Watchers the Possession power they do not have by default.

Watchers are not one of the Basic Spirit types, but are a special type summonable by all Traditions. They are specifically described thus ...



No Errata is necessary.

Forgot that! I hate Voodoo!

Thanks everybody, I'd forgotten that cadavers were an optional rule.

[shrugs] Well, it's up to the GM whether or not you can use them as bullet shields. (And hackers/riggers should be using stolen cars as bullet shields).

Interesting that Corps Cadavres and Living Dolls get the Artisan skill. I suppose that makes them useful for painting your house; although a band that is truly made from zombies would probably make a name for themselves as a heavy metal band.

Interesting... just had this discussion the other day... we were about to head into something when I asked are we loading nonlethal or lethal.... and everyone looked at me like I was insane. "Lethal of course, I don't have anything nonlethal". (I arrived late also, and didn't realize we had moved into the barrens, so lethal IMO was perfectly acceptable). Soon thereafter I learned I was the ONLY character who seemingly carried any non-lethal weaponry and ammo under NORMAL circumstances. (taser, SnS, gel, and plain vanilla basic ammo... non-combat specialized mage)

Of course less than a quarter way through the first pass someone calls to try and take some of them alive for questioning... since I'm not a gunbunny and not really a combat mage either... my reaction to this is screw you. Next time bring non-lethal ammo if you want people alive! Proceed to cast 'increase reflexes' on the sniper I'm hiding with boosting him from 1 to 4 IP's and hide below the low wall on the roof while he proceeds to empty an entire SMG mag in a single combat round killing everything in sight.

Also, it seems everybody carries Ex-Ex or something else with a 'F' rating all the time... Just for arguments sake... you get pulled over for speeding... the cruisers scanner picks up that you're armed... so the computer checks to see if you have a license... officer finds that you have patently illegal ammo... what happens?! Not talking losec here, say a nice neighborhood where you're just trying to fit and and avoid attention and an armed response. As a generous GM: do I have the officer take a bribe and confiscate the goods off the table... do I feel less enthused and have the officer take him into the station to pay his fine... do I give his ID's and such extra scrutiny and let the dice play out... (really having your good quality fake SIN and all it's associated licenses blown and potentially gaining a criminal SIN would be a PITA). If I'm feeling really generous let the char try and fast talk his way out.

But overall, I'm of the camp... why leave corpses if you don't have to. Granted in SR it's oftentimes quite called for. But still to leave yourself w/o even the option to decide when less than lethal force is desirable. Frankly, that's what I'm seeing reading this thread. The posters saying kill em all let the spirits sort em out... haven't really made a case for why it's in your interest to leave corpses instead of unconcious bodies in your wake.

The only thing I can think of is 'dead men tell no tales'... and even that doesn't hold with spirits and astral quests if it's important enough now. That and the ubiquity of cameras and image recorders. Do you really trust that your decker has managed to find/wipe out all the image recordings. Frankly, if I were the GM I'd be asking my players to justify why are they using lethal force when they don't have to and slowly work up consequences over time.

Nobody ever said a damn thing about killing everyone all of the time. Ever.

blagh. Double post.

Well, I'll try and make something useful out of it.

I'd like to think I've been rather polite up until this point, but I'm getting kind of tired of the strawman argument that implies I advocate senseless slaughter as a sensible play style. Killing everyone doesn't make you friends. That's stupidly, patently obvious. What I argue against and what I'm sure Ravor was initially arguing against in his offhand remark is the goofy idea that using non-lethal ammo will consistently make people appreciably less likely to kill you in the midst of a combat, something that's actually been brought up repeatedly before on these forums if not in this conversation. Going in with guns drawn and expecting the guards and Lone Star to not just plug you with whatever they have on hand is rather naive since you have already branded yourself as the enemy and because people generally don't appreciate getting shot at with anything, even if it does turn out to be so called less-lethal ammunition. There's long term psychological benefits to not killing everyone, but there's also short term psychological benefits involved with being able to threaten death by Panther Cannon. The promise of mercy carries a lot more weight when you wield death in your other hand. Speak softly and carry a big stick, and all that. Add in my belief that the Sixth World doesn't grind to a halt to mourn Joe Guard and you'll have right there a short version of all my previous posts were ever meant to convey.

P.S.

I also suspect you guys must run your games a lot differently than I do, because dealing stun damage all the time simply isn't an option when I'm your GM, and I genuinely believe the game works better balance wise the way I do things. Ever notice how many neophyte GMs (and I am a neophyte) wander into Dumpshock to complain about how their mage just stunballs everything to death? That li'l niggle has a funny way of becoming a non-issue when a good 60%+ of your NPC aggressors are drones or in vehicles and are thus non-living and immune to stun and pack natural object resistance. Taking out a vehicle can often spell death for the occupants and taking out a small swarm of drones with an HE grenade is probably bad news for any live security standing in their midst-- security deaths in my games are often essentially collateral damage. I'm basically a huge believer in making PCs bring the right tool for the right job, in other words, and often times stick and shock is mostly a good option for back up weapons and heading to the meet.

Sure, Ravor was just pointing out that there's a point when you need to be willing and bale to blow the opposition away; but Falconer isn't the only one who has played with a group of psychotics. Shadowrunners need to be flexible. If you can't, frex, take prisoners, you've crippled yourself. And there'll be lots of people determined to make that crippling literal.

I've been playing a lot of SWAT 4 and that actually deals with lethal versus less-than-lethal attacks since as a police officer you're not authorized to use deadly force unless a suspect is pointing a weapon at someone. Deadly weapons (like MP5s) are more likely to "drop" a suspect quickly, but because of police procedures you're at risk as you have to pause and demand surrender before opening fire. On the other hand, if you're using a shotgun filled with beanbag rounds, you can open fire whenever you like, since it's not deadly. It makes it much easier to surprise the suspects and lets you act on your hair trigger reflexes. I feel it's easier to beat everyone into submission with the beanbags pre-emptively than it is to wait for them to aim at you before trying to beat them to the shot.

So I could see a really big benefit with non lethal rounds in situations where the user specifically wants to avoid killing at all costs while at the same time minimizing the risk associated with doing so. But unless attacking quickly and pre-emptively while at the same time not killing anyone is a priority, it's hard to imagine that the drawbacks of non lethal would overcome the advantages of lethal.

Wow, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or worried that people know my arguments just as well if not better than I do.

Well considering that I'm a Dumpshocker I guess I should conclude that you are all my Ally Spirits now, so where in the nine hells did I put my Dikote, I know I still have a stash from way back in 206x ....

yeah, the only times my players have used less than lethal has been on missions where they were told specifically to minimize casualties or take everyone alive.

Otherwise it just more sense to fill the room with spinning doom.

We mostly avoided killing because we figured that corp y doing blatantly illegal and "unauthorized" whatever was unlikely to be willing to call the cops when certain critical parts of said illegal experiment went missing. Questions they didn't want to answer would be asked. If a dozen guards were killed and the entire building blown up in the process it's pretty hard to avoid the cops being quite interested in the people who carried it out no matter whether the corp wants the cops involved or not.

I think the closest I've ever come to having to pull punches was once when two of us got hired to wipe out a freighter full of Triads, and were specifically forbidden from pulling head shots on anyone because one of them had a headware computer chock full of files that were the target of the whole thing.

So just throat shots instead.

Well, you only have to remember the posts; we had to do the whole mindwipe/rebuild, work out how your opinions would fit in with your fellow hosts, plan contingencies in case you randomly met someone from your real past, and so on - so it makes sense that we know you so well.
Don't worry, we did a fine job, you should have a happy life - until the activation codes kick in, anyway.

Well...yeah.

Considering how difficult it would be to confirm a kill on a torso shot, all things considered - separating the head from the neck is the next best option.

Although, I gotta admit, that's one hell of an argument for the torso-fitted brain pod...

-Siege