But what if his comments weren't relevant to the derail either?

First, let me just say that there's a difference between killing your family because you don't want them to be raped to death by the enemy du jour vs bursting into someones house and using it as an ambush point because you think that your death will be more glorious because you give the evil oppressors a black eye on CNN and Al-Jazeera. In one you've exhausted all other avenues (hopefully) and your only options are surrender and subject your family to "a fate worth than death" or prevent that from happening. I may not exactly agree with that philosophy but when it comes down to it I can't disagree. In the other scenario you're just a big media whore who is so self concerned with your own ascension to nirvana that you could give fuck all about the people you've just indirectly sentenced to death. I like to think that, if there is an after life, they have a special place for you already picked out.

You're basically saying that people can and often do mind fuck themselves into believing whatever justification they can come up with to kill whoever they want using whatever tactics they now find "acceptable".

I'm not at all disagreeing with you on that particular point. I'm just saying that it's not a morally defensible position in my, supposedly, rational view of the world.

But this is straying into personal beliefs bordering on religious convictions for me and I don't think we're going to come to much of a consensus here. I believe that the purpose of morally justifiable violence is inherently to protect life. People who use phrases like "acceptable casaulties" in relation to the people they are trying to protect and indeed consciously choose to use their wards as cheap body armor violate that basic tenet. If you end up killing more of your own people than the enemy does... you are wrong.

But yeah if you really think it's all morally sound and just for people to contort their minds to conveniently support their shitty tactics... There really isn't a point in discussing this further.

It's not like anything we've talked about on in the last two pages has anything to do with why the grenade rules for 4th edition are broken.

I just got down posting a totally pointless rant about morally reprehensible tactics in warfare, that's about what, 3 points tangent to the original discussion?

It is very relevant because if you're runnign against a major megacorp facility large enough to have its own day-care facility, school, or orphanage and you can't make it to an egress point when the drek hits the fan, do you or do you not make a bee line for the place where all of the young children are? Do you expect corporate security to just start lobbing grenades or missiles at you in spite of your young human shields?

And even more relevantly, does corporate security lob a grenade at you and risk you increasing the scatter to make it land closer to the children or do they lob the grenade at a child under the assumption that the kid's dodge will increase its scatter enough to land at your feet?

Or do they just pop the big-boom ™ cranial bomb that's been implanted into the head of whatever kiddie you're standing closest to, and then blame your death on those wicked, nasty, Shadowrunners (while cutting down significantly on the benefits they need to pay to Little Johnny's family, which will result in an increase in profits even after factoring in the lost work from Little Johnny's mother and father both missing their four days of paid bereavement time)?

How's that for some hostage negotiation?

Hostage situations very seldom work out nicely, so I'd recommend the runners don't take recourse in that scenario.

Whether the security risk the lives of the children to catch the runners depends on the circumstances. I suspect that it would piss off the mother-corp a hell of a lot more than simply using lethal weapons rather than stun weapons, which in itself is going to lead to an escalation in violence.

As far as taking a metagame analysis of the grenade scatter rules, and aiming at the human shields, that's just silly.

Freeze foam the room.

I can imagine an important corp facility would have numerous freeze foam dispensers built into the walls. Harder to avoid than gas, and if a team is running an extraction, limited chance of accidently capping your own employee.

It isn't metagame analysis, it is an analysis of how grenades really work in the game system. People who put together grenade training manuals will study the way grenades work and they will learn how dodging effects scatter. In turn, people who are trained to use grenades will understand how dodging effects scatter and manipulating this dodge effect to create an ideal kill zone would be part of advanced grenade training courses.

Freeze foam has several advantages:
1. Non-lethal
2. If you fill a room with it you can take your time digging through it to get all the kiddies
3. It lets people breathe so guess what! You can still gas the shit out of those evil runners at a later time.

Sweeping the le- I mean shooting hostages might be all well and good but it's amazing how much that negatively impacts future profits by decreasing short term production from their parents and the possible long term utility of their children, whom you just splattered on the wall.

Also, magic's hard to come by and who knows if you just capped the greatest blood mage of the next generation. Now if they're highschoolers who are clearly non-magical, bang away, those are a dime a dozen.

It's entirely reasonable for grenade users to have training in how best to catch their victims in the blast. That's what heavy weapons (grenade launchers) is for. But there is no way the actions a target takes to avoid a grenade is actually going to affect the trajectory or blast radius of the grenade. The use of a scatter mechanic, and the modifier the target can add to it, is an abstraction for game purposes.

Personally I'd be inclined to consider that each net hit by the defender represents the distance away from the impact he has managed to dive.

Hell, that's the way I've always done it. At this point I didn't even realize that was a house rule, I've been doing it so long.

I'd say that's the intent of the rules, that your success on the "dodge" is just how far you manage to throw yourself flat. Being on the ground helps a lot in avoiding the shrapnel from a grenade. Mythbusters did a neat test to see if someone jumping on a grenade to save a team would actually work. The dummies they had set up at varying distances all took some shrapnel hits, but aside from the ones right beside the 'nade, it was pretty much all at knee height or better. Incidentally, a human body (or a ballistics gel dummy) can actually absorb quite a bit of a grenade blast. It wasn't perfect, but the second set of test dummies had a lot less holes in them.

Of course, shrapnel is kind inconsequential if your organs got mushed by the intense shockwave off the grenade.

true, but iirc, the shockwave do not have the same ability to kill at a distance.

but if your sitting on the thing, it will not make much of a diff either way...

I just realized there needs to be rules for overpenetration in case we ever decide to shoot through the hostage.

You know what the world needs? Acidic freeze foam.

*FOOMP*

"Aiiieeee!"

How just about freeze foam with icy hot? It would be funnier.

Personally I'm a fan of freeze foam laced with Leas.

Whoa man, where am I?
*Six minutes elapse*
Whoa man, where am I?
*Six minutes elapse*
Whoa man- etc.

ah, the many uses of freeze foam

It's honestly in my top 5 pieces of Shadowrun tech . The same list that includes enhanced articulation and narcoject.

Likewise, though, the player's taking into account the scatter rules is an abstraction for game purposes. Just as the grenade doesn't really change direction because of the defender's actions, neither does the attacker really change his or her shot based on that change.

Sorta like how dodge still gets rolled after an attack.

Doc: please just consider how thoroughly you've framed the situation. Even the requirement that I be asserting that something is "moral" is already a pretty significant leap, given that we haven't agreed on a definition of "moral" (and if I were to grant that such a thing exists, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that it permits aggression regardless of circumstance, but enough about my mostly-unrealized tendencies towards nonresistance), but even laying that aside you've already assigned ulterior motives to the act you're displaying distaste for.

~J

Like I said Kagetenshi, we've approached what is a personally held belief that I feel is rational but that, by virtue of being a personal belief, is not something that I expect everyone to embrace. I will say this though. My disgust for self deluded "marytrs" is the same disgust I feel for "soldiers" who rape and murder in a warzone because they're "stressed out". It's a digust that's only tempered by the empathy I feel for anyone who suffers from destructive mental illness. The intentions and in a way the motivations for their actions matter little to me, it's the end result that matters.

I don't really feel up to getting into further moral debate because this isn't really the forum for that.

Dumpshock is exactly the forum for that. Where else can you talk about killing cats, throwing babies and the specifics of bunraku parlors without being instantly banned?

I'm pretty sure the organized madness of Something Awful will allow for all that and more

Never visited 4chan's /b/, I take it?

Let us not speak of 4chan, it is a dark and awful place...

Well, let me clarify: Where can you discuss it without drowning in 20 pages of spam.