I think self interest is a continuum. On one end, you have people who always put others before themselves. On the other, you have people who always put themselves before other people. A completely selfish person would be evil, because he would do things like take candy from babies if he could get away with it. Fear of reprisal might prevent him from doing many traditionally "evil" things, but if nobody would know you can be he would do horrible things. Of course, most all people fall somewhere in the middle. Most of the time, though, when people say selfish what they mean is self-centered.

While painting lines on things like good and evil can be hard at the best of times, I have to disagree with the notion that selfishness isn't a component of good and evil. After a point, selfishness becomes evil by virtue of the effects on others. Does the idle monarch and his court who feast behind glittering walls while their serfs starve qualify as evil, or merely selfish? What if they take all the food for a "critical reserve" for themselves? Are they selfish, or evil? I'd argue both.

On the flip side, somebody who sells all their possessions and donates the money to charity qualifies as selfless, and at least to Western thought, good.

As for "proper" CN, I suppose there are a variety of personalities represented by it. For instance, one could be a committed anarchist. This character believes in absolute freedom (chaos) over any law, to the point of not caring about right or wrong. It's an extreme example, but plausible in a standard DnD world where alignments get divine incarnations backing them up. Heck I met some people at college who pretty much believed that and were proud of it.

Also, there are people who simply do what they want. They drift through life never committing themselves to anything. They don't take pleasure in harming others (evil), but neither do they go out of their way to help. When asked about important moral issues, the best they can manage is "meh."

A druid who shuns the never-ending war of good and evil to tend to nature and resents the strictures law could well be CN, but more likely TN.

CN does happen to make a handy alignment for people that are actually insane, in the straight jacket sense. They may be homicidal, but I'd find it hard to pin "evil" without the ability to understand consequences.

I'm not sure that's really an accurate definition of a Sociopath.... Sociopaths usually have something other than general "Selfishness" going for them....

As for the intentions... I believe a person is judged by his actions, but his intentions do come into account... Is someone who killed another person by accident evil? I'd say no, since he didn't mean to do so, circumstances just led to something bad happening...

Hell, man, I've known games to be chock full of torture and brutality. The whole theme of cyberpunk is loss of humanity. At the risk of being too blunt for the sake of being perfectly clear, I don't think I'd like playing with *you* if you're going to be creating drama between friends at the gaming table or the IRC chatroom. Drama is asinine and distracts from a well-organized game with statistics and objectives.

Well, you know, I'm starting to roll my eyes at all the replies that seem to be agreeing with the OP that SR characters torturing someone for information in a distopian future of grinding poverty and elites with electronic brains is somehow totally uncalled for or wrong.

If you were hypothetically playing a RPG set in the Industrial Revolution in London and the player characters were a bunch of thugs from the street hired by a rich industrialist to torture someone for information, you'd be surprised if the downtrodden and brutalized player characters didn't go ahead and commit the torture. Why should it be any different for the sterotypical de-humanized cyberpunk genre which presents a similar divide between elites and have-nots?

Certainly, let there be consequences if the player characters, acting as hired thugs, manage to shock and horrify the public, or otherwise rock the boat too much. But if it gets to a prissy "screw you guys, I'm going home, because you're not playing exactly how I want you to play even though the way I want you to play is at odds with genre", then I'd say the group is better off without that person.

I dunno, you could argue that Robin Hood, under the logic of the feudal system and ideas of nobility, could consider any property acquired under the purview of the Sheriff of Nottingham to be evilly acquired.

The point is, people have moral lines, some are tighter and some are looser but they still have morals and while shdowrunners may have the looset moral lines ever they live by their reputation and if word comes out that runner X always plans his corp's invasions by picking a middle-level wageslave, torturing her and her family so he can get all the information he wants and later kills each of them and live them to the pigs (or ghouls, the next step on biological body disposal), well, some Johnsons might find this way over the top and stop hiring them. Also, this gives Notoriety and some runners do like to live WAAAAAY deep in the shadows, not the Today's news top stories.

Why? Your mind can countenance a dystopian future of grinding poverty etc etc but can't grok to the idea that people , even poor ones, are complicated beingsdriven by multiple levels of internal guidance and drives beyond the internal "what it takes to survive".



Depends, is my character a practicing (and more importantly believing) catholic? Again your trying to paint complicated situations in a black and white morality, or in this case black and gray, in order to get the situation that you want.



At odds with the genre was pretty steadily debunked several pages ago. If you want cyberpunk (which is by the way not shadowrun) to be a place that not allows, not condones but flat out requires brutality that is your interpretation and not even a factual one.

Thank you. That's what I've been trying to tell my friend every time he wants to kill someone just "because I wanted to". Shadowrun does have enough cyberpunk elements but it evolved beyond that.

Agreed.

You know what? You get paid to steal, murder, kidnap, and commit other crimes, with your primary compensation being money. Sure, you CAN play people do who it altrustically, but let's not mince words: if you are playing Shadowrun in the way the book expects you to, you are playing a violent criminal who expects to get paid for his violently criminal activities. These are people who toss grenades at groups of security guards, and use automatic weapons in public. These are people who control your brain with magic and violate your memories to get at what they want. They're the people who use black hammer on your innocent little girl who'd worked for MCT's matrix security division for a month, having just graduated school. They're people who might accidentally kill your wife cuz you and she were on the street when they were having that firefight with Knight Errant while fleeing the scene of the crime.

And you're gonna look at me like I'm a bad player who crossed the line if my PC slices off a guy's ear in an attempt to get information? Or breaks his knees?

Yeah, that's a messed up thing to do. But you know what? So are a lot of things most runners do.

Have your PC get pissed at the other PCs. But keep it IC.

I get paid to do a job, if i wanted to be required to take only the jkobs offered to me and to carry them out in exactly the way my masters want them carried out with no free will of my own I would be a corper, but as I am a shadowrunner and a "professional" i select my jobs and I select my team mates. I select my tools and my methodology my moral code and my after hours recreation. So yes if you slice a guys ear off to get information, especially when we have a mage that can manipulate and read minds there. i am going to strongly urge you not to do it, and then you believing there are no consequences are perhaps going to do it anyway. At which point I decide whether my moral code weighs heavier thent he trouble it would be to kill you, usually yes. because I am a paid killer who puts the highest priority on my own freedom of choice. If my initiative goes faster and more of the team backs my point of view then you at the end of the day my view is right. if you kill me then your point of view is right. Neither point of view is the setting norm. The setting doesn't have a built in moral perogative. What it does have is a series of expectations based on 20 years of canon material which doesn't support your view points save for one novel about a shifter fem fatala masturbation target.

I have no idea what game you're playing, if you actually think that. First, you haven't even addressed my 'viewpoint'. Second, I'm going to give you a list of things runners have done either from fluff fiction in sourcebooks or from published adventures.
Runners - as a group - have for 20 years of canon, done the following:
They have kidnapped people.
They have killed people.
They have had firefights in public areas.
They have brain-burned people.
They have committed terrorist acts, such as demolishing buildings or nearly melting down a nuclear power plant.
They have aided and abetted drug lords, fanatics, revolutionaries, and corporations.
They have killed children. Admittedly, children who were brainwashed by something worse than they, but they have killed children.
They have assassinated people in cold blood in exchange for money.

Whatever "moral code" you choose for YOUR PCs is fine. But all of your talk about that in your final paragraph does not matter one jot about my base point, because it doesn't even address it. To whit, my point is this: There is nothing "wrong" with players choosing to have their PCs use violent means to accomplish a goal, because the use of violence to accomplish a goal is inherent to what is expected of PCs by the game itself.

My two addenda are as follows.
1) You say, "If you slice off a guy's ear when we have a mage on hand whoc an read minds, I'm going to tell you not to do it." Personally, on an OOC level, I'm of the opinion that forced brain rape is probably more morally objectionable than physical violation, because if I physically harm you, you decide when to give in. If I Mind Probe you, I have violated the core of your self, and that seems to me to be a more exreme invasion.
2) You say you run an ice cold pro type of game, where doing things like torturing a guy for information makes people unhireable. My response is that the logical outgrowth of that is this: to be truly ice cold pro, I torture a guy for information where nobody but the team can see, and then I kill him and burn the body, every time. No witnesses talking, no chance that anyone's going to go crying to my johnson about how I'm too extreme.

Seems like we have several separate themes here:

• Is there a 'correct' moral code for the setting of SR?
  I think the only consistent rule in playing SR is that it should be fun for all players, including the GM. If the group prefers to role-play a bunch of psychopaths, than go for it. If you'd rather be a bunch of white knight do-gooders, that's fine too. There's plenty of evidence both in SR background and in real life to show that people exist on both extremes and everywhere in between, so there's no 'wrong' way to play.
• What does torture do to your reputation if caught?
  Just like in real life, different people respond differently. If you're a viscious gangster among a group of viscious gangsters, being know as a crazy evil fuck might be a good thing and enhance your street cred. In tamer circles it would probably encourage people to keep you at a distance and trust you less. If your actions indicate that you're unstable and truly insane you're less likely to be picked for tasks that require subtlety and finesse, but a character like that isn't going to want those jobs anyway. Regardless, the actions that people observe in you will increasingly define what kind of jobs you get in the future, but actions nobody knows about shouldn't have any impact.
• Is torture an effective way to get information?
  The jury seems to be divided on this. Torture is one of the fastest ways to get someone to talk, but mainly will just get them to say whatever they think will make the pain stop, whether it's true or not.
• Is torture more or less heinous than mind-reading?
  Again this might vary from individual to individual. But I would personally be more bothered by the guy who cut off my ear than the one who read my mind and stole my secret cookie recipe.

Quick question, aside from it hurting like a bitch, why?
in the World of SR it can be reattached,regrown or replaced with something even better than the original . .
TODAY where that is impossible, such cuttings are much more hardcore i would say . .

Errr this is kind of ridiculous, I'll resent the hell out of both but personally the one that leaves me with actual scars and that I have to fix later, provided I survive at all, and causes me physical pain during the doing. Is likely going to be the one that bugs me more. Just sayin'

Depends. As per the Fluff, the target actually can take lasting damage with such brain rapery too.
Not as per the rules, that much may be true, but we are right now talking fluff anyway correct? O.o
And if it's in the line of duty, who says YOU will have to fix it? It will be fixed FOR you. Without scars.
Probably. and if you want to, while you're under, we can correct that little sag in your skin. Or so . .

Exactly.

SR is a game. Play the game the way you want to play it.

In the real world, people have different definitions of professional. There are RL high-class prostitutes who make six figures (or more!) a year, keep a confidential database, report their income to the IRS, and have a retirement plan. They consider themselves professionals. Other people think they dirty whores. Sometimes their clients (Johnsons) think they are dirty whores, and hire them for that reason, and vice versa. There is no reason for SR to be any different. Every Runner likely has their own code of acceptable behavior that is a natural outgrowth of their experiences. Like most of us in RL, their code is primarily made up of rules they made for themselves. Plenty of them were probably made AFTER they learned the hard way.

I also think arguing whether a person prefers physical torture over mental violation is academic, at best. Both involve violating someone to get information. The real issue is whether the PC's and the group are comfortable with it.

Regardless of morality, in a world where trode nets and simrigs are readily available, what need is there for physical torture?
The brute force method is to use the simrig to torture your target but if you have more time you can easily fool them into believing they are in a situation where revealing such information is reasonable. This method also allows them to be released after the fact, no harm done, with more reliabilty as those under torture will tell you what they think you want to hear rather than the truth.

From a player perspective torture is at best unnecessary and at worst gratuitous.

Even if, for some reason a player decides that it is necessary to torture someone, VR allows such without physical harm and can be repeated indefinitely.

Wellll... that's true, to a point, but also untrue from a strictly mechanical viewpoint. Full ASIST black box rigs require a lot of skill to use, not to mention being very expensive and hard to procure. They are, at best, rarely employed. As to putting someone in a situation where they can be fooled, that would require a UV host, and those aren't easy to come by.

Alter Memory or Control Thoughts would be more useful, and in the shadow community, probably much easier to get ahold of.

But your hands? Your hands are for free, and they're always there.

In my personal experience and observation, people who live at a certain level of poverty or desperation on the streets tend to be aggressively opportunistic and self-centered. With some people whom I've had long-term daily interaction with almost everything they say is a glib lie calculated to win sympathy, which is funny when they themselves forget that lie later and contradict it maybe a month or so later.

I wonder if I'm going to get the "that's not politically correct" flak cannon for saying that. What can I say? I'm actually kind of left-wing on a lot of political/social issues, and my aforementioned interaction was in conjunction with medical treatment of certain individuals, but definitely I'd say that most homeless people are aggressively opportunistic and self-centered. That is not to say diabolical or anything like that, but rather more in a way that causes facepalm.




Yeah, I'm just too damn simpleminded. Clearly I don't get anything.



See, now you're putting words into my mouth. My original point was to say it is ridiculous for a Shadowrun player to get pissed off OOC because the other players' characters are acting like vicious opportunistic thugs. Now you're attributing to me a much more extreme statement that all player characters must act in a brutal way.

But who am I to argue with you? You obviously hold the Tome of Cyberpunk Fact.

I almost posted giving some examples of how I dealt with a similar situation in a past group, but you seem to have resolved that issue and the thread has moved beyond the original post.

I think Shadowrun was initially marketed as Future 'Hooders working in the shadows to right societies wrongs, but not very well and not very long. I think they wanted to stay away from it being termed a game where you play a criminal and shoot people in the face for money, or used magic and commanded spirits, or lost part of your soul by wanting cyberware - in short any unaccepptable social behavior a parent would object to, meanwhile trying to avoid the RPGing backlash aimed mainly at D&D. The published adventures didn't back up the stance, and many of the people who play just heard or skimmed that you get to play criminals and went with it. By 4th edition, the game is marketed as playing criminals.

When getting a group together, it is probably best to find out what type game people want to play and what type PCs they are going to play. Unfortunately, the response is usually Race and Archetype, not criminal, 'hooder, antihero, professional.

Shadowrun can be many types of game. I wish people would quit saying it IS a certain type.