1) Audie Murphy - single-handed fought off tanks and infantry using the machine guy of an M-10 tank destroyer, that was disabled and on fire, while calling down air support on his own position.

2)Jack Churchill - Single-handedly captured 42 German soldiers using nothing but a Scottish claymore, staged a grenade down to stun damage while playing bagpipes, and escaped from two POW camps, among other things.

3)Yogender Singh Yadav climbed up a sheer wall of ice while under heavy fire, was shot several times by large-caliber machine guns, killed four people with a grenade, was shot some more, and charged into a pillbox and killed four more people with his ice-axe and his bare hands, then used his belt as a sling for his broken arm so he could go out and kill more people.

4)Alvin York - Single-handedly captured 132 German soldiers and 32 machine guns using nothing but a M1903 and a M1911.

5)Simo Hayha - Killed 700 Russians in 100 days, 500 with a hunting rifle using plain iron sights, and 200 with a submachine gun. In -40 degree Fahrenheit weather. Caught an explosive bullet with his face and survived.

6)Wojtek - Was a bear, literally, an Iranian brown bear. He liked to smoke, he liked to drink, he liked to wrestle, and he enlisted in the Polish Army (it was World War II, they didn't care what species an enlistee was just as long as he could fight). Not having opposable thumbs, he couldn't very well use a rifle. But he could carry huge boxes of artillery shells to the front lines day and night, and he did just that, while under heavy fire.

7) Jack Lucas - Jumped on two grenades to save his buddies, then jumped out of an airplane with two parachutes that didn't open. Died of cancer at the age of 80.



Now, looking at these seven real people, who were all incredibly badass, some of the less plausible things that you can do in Shadowrun become much more reasonable. A super sniper adept who can take out hundreds of people with a minimum of difficulty is unrealistic? It is if Simo Hayha is unrealistic. A guy with a sword taking down three and a half dozen people armed with guns? Jack Churchill did just that. Is it silly to let sapient paracritters enlist in the military? Poland accepts non-sapient critters. And that Jack Lucas fellow most certainly HoGed twice, possibly three times.

Sometimes insanely awesome stuff happens. A great deal of insanely awesome stuff happened between the years 1939 and 1945, but there is no cut-off date for badassery.

Mechanisms like Hand of God, burning Edge, Karma Pool, and so on, which make it possible to do seemingly impossible things, are not particularly unrealistic, given the nature of some of the absurdly awesome things that people have done in times of stress and necessity. There is something to be said about embracing the huge dice pool situations, where a character might not be able to easily defeat 160 guys with machine guns, but can at least put enough fear in them that they surrender rather than continue fighting.

So you visited the badassoftheweek?

And yeah... sometimes with pure luck, skill and willpower unbelievable things happen. But think of the hundreds who tried it and died. You know... the british dudes who were killed by friendly fire from the US attack helicopter. Stupid things happen more than awesome ones. (But yeah, we are the heroes we can do cool stuff (with some edge and rerolling *g*)

P.S. the entry for Simo Hayha was one of my favorite.. the Berserker at Stamfort Bridge was awesome too. (Held a bridge alone for about an hour, killed more than 40 man, wounded more)

Simo Hayha is a legend. It does however help that he was fighting the Russian Army, you know, the army that basically depended on either the weather killing the enemy or being able to throw so many bodies at them that the attackers get bored and go home.

im not sure hayha would get away with it today, as one would probably deploy copters or drones with FLIR if a sniper got troublesome.

That got a chuckle out of me... my personal favorite was.. Voytek!!! that bear was aweeessommee!!

a bear withh a bomb on its back, why am i thinking c&c red alert?