That's the exception not the rule. (Yes there is absolutely something to be said that many Shadowruns are the Exception ot the rule.)

But yeah there's easily many reasons. Off the top of my head, with no preparation or time to think: build rapport, build rapport to eventually double cross, build rapport to expect the same sort of treatment when they're in that same situation, because the guys working security are actually honest and good people. That's off the top of my head in less than three minutes. I am sure there's more out there.

At any rate I'll write this off to difference in style, and there's certainly no way with a straight face I could say what you do at your table is wrong. In the end the only rule is Fun.

That was an example of both extremes. At best, shadowrunners are doing quasi-legal things (otherwise, their employers would be hiring through legal channels). At worst, they're completely morally bankrupt. Robin Hood vs. Batman Return's Joker.

In some ways, shadowrunners are the mafia. Not in that they're tightly linked and organized; they're a rather disparate bunch. But the core of "ice cold professionals" has captured the popular imagination. They've been romanticized, vilified, mass-marketed, and made far more visible than their numbers or even their accomplishments warrant. People love them and love to hate them. People don't understand them. Their Matrixpedia article frequently dissolves into edit wars, hacks, and fact-free rumormongering. They're the vigilante heroes and the terrifying bogeymen of the 6th World. "Shadowrunner" gets a response even if you can never predict what the response will be.

This has two consequences. One, many much more petty criminals start calling themselves shadowrunners, swaggering around, maybe getting some very visible cyberware, using shadowrunner lingo, and dressing as shadowrunners. Would any real prime runners do those things? Of course not, but that doesn't matter. The role of shadowrunner has been memetically created in the popular consciousness. Shadowrunners exist en masse even if they're not "real" shadowrunners. How many people would list their jobs as "shadowrunner" on a census if that weren't stupid? Lots. How many are the pros that AAA Corps keep on file? Not nearly as many. Probably no more than a few hundred worldwide.

The original shadowrunners, and the people who may think of themselves as the true shadowrunners, probably don't think of themselves as shadowrunners. "Shadowrunner" has been diluted by the stupid punks who pick up a Predator and think they're the hottest drek ever. If the pros call themselves shadowrunners, it's only to invoke the mystique of the word. In their own circles, that carries no weight at all; if you can't attach reputations to names (or pseudonyms, more likely), you have no business dealing with these people. They're skilled professionals for hire who happen to do illegal work. At their best, they are the most eclectically elite and terrifyingly effective force under no chain of command. Think James Bond, as a group, not an individual.

What else are shadowrunners? They're the guys eking out a living on the edge of society as best they can with skills that don't lend themselves to upright pursuits. Or they're the ex-spy driven to revenge, the cop who's seen to much and turned vigilante, the odd small criminal band out to screw over everyone else and laugh all the way to an early grave. Batman would be a shadowrunner. Maybe the Joker would be too. And so is every street tough from the barrens.

"Shadowrunner" is a label. It's useful. it's imprecise. No one in the 6th World agrees on what it means any more than we do here. That's perfectly okay. But if your character is running the shadows because he wants to be a shadowrunner, well, the novelty and romance wear off the first time CorpSec sends you to a street doc to have a limb replaced.

I have to agree, with the exception of attaching "Ice Cold Pro" as the "true" Runners of course.

Because Ares depends on LS to provide policing in areas were they operate. And someday soon Ares will want LS to help them investigate a crime against them or their clients. Criminals who yesterday shot up a NeoNet office are likely to be shooting up an Ares subsidiary tomorrow, or robbing Ares employees on the way home. It's people helping people who help them. Everyone who is anyone in the security business knows everyone else who is anyone in the other companies.

Except the lieutenant has a review coming up and its based on efficiency reports based on the amounts of cases that have been closed and the man hours required to close them.

So he pressures all of his sergeants to only investigate crimes that can be open and shut. And since the sergeant had to cut his labor by 4.5% from last quarter can only put his men on a few cases so he forces his men to only investigate easily solvable crimes.

His men are forced to close open files by busting the first person they see without a SIN.

Meanwhile corporate HQ sends out a memo that each branch must reach a goal of increasing efficiency for the next quarter by 5%.

And don't forget that memo from information security about no unauthorized professional contacts between them and outside business entities without a prior memorandum of understanding or an approval from a Director level or higher. The director's calendar has an opening a week from now during his morning run. The VP's secretary just laughed at him and hung up.

Basically in the highly vaulted REAL WORLD agencies work together because their mandated to by law and while the friction between them certainly isn't as great as it's always portrayed on TV it does exist. Bump it up to the corporate extraterritorial level where there is no requirement they work together, and in some cases some requirements that they not and you have a problem.

Kill a boat load of people in my game, and guess what? Local, County, State, National, and International Law Enforcement people start looking for you.

way late to the thread, but this caught my attention. obviously you can run your game how you like, but a big part of cyberpunk/dystopian themes is that there are multiple classes of people. big people, little people.

shooting a few bums in an alley 'cause he saw you running shouldn't generate a response. killing a bunch of gang members who tried to fark with you shouldn't either. (unless you have a dudley-do-right as a nemesis, which isn't a bad idea). gunning down a Big Person, whether immoral or morally right, WILL generate all sorts of wonderful law enforcement shenanigans.




worst. movie. evar.

OK, so, reading this thread, I am wondering why people seem to think the "Pink Mohawk" style requires senseless killing? Or even why people seem to be lumping Shadowrunners in
with common street thugs or other RL Professional Criminals.

Maybe it is just my odd-ball approach and view, but I think of Shadowrunners a bit differently. To me, part of the goal of a character is to be "Cool." My favourite approach to dealing with security
is non-lethal, using either aerosol designer hallucinogens, or Ares Squirt. Remember: the security guard cannot hurt you if he on his back smiling at pretty butterflies that are not there, not even in AR.

And, what are Shadowrunners in the setting? They are common people, people who might have fallen through the cracks. Maybe they enjoy the freedom of not having a SIN, maybe, for some reason, they cannot get one. Either way, they do have highly specialized skills(Rigger, hacker/decker, magician), or tons of illegal equipment and implants(Streetsam), so, in theory, they could
get a job working with the Corps. But, why would they? Runners know about the Blood Magic in Aztechnology. They know about MCT's Zero-Zones, and none of them really want to work for a Dragon in the case of Saeder-Krupp. But, they can make money hurting these corps. They can take the money of a Corp, and hurt another corp. Remember: it is the Corps that are responsible for the crappiness of the world. If not for the Corps, it could be an age of wonders, but instead it is a grim, dirty world. And it is the Corps fault... Maybe you make your runs and steal prototypes for another corp, maybe you steal data, or scientists..maybe you selectively kill dangerous people. It does not matter...you have hurt one of the corps. It is only when you get older that you realize that all you did was maintain a balance of power in the Corps..which, is still a good thing. What would happen if any one company grew too powerful for another corp to oppose? That is what Shadowrunners are doing..They are the heroes of the common man. They are the champions of the SINless.

I take it you have not seen Highlander 2?

What are you talking about, there was no Highlander sequels.

Exactly, there was only one.

It's lucky that nobody in SR world does things without permission. Like hiring runners to shoot his boss... So things happen. And if your teams hacker can break into the LS records, what makes you think that KE, who employs entire teams of hackers, and can offer some serious bribes in addition, doesn't have real time access?

Which goes back to a cost benefit scenario, assuming that Lone Star isn't facing major heat to catch these guys in particular why would they offer bribes to a singular agent at say Renraku, a fact they likely can't put in their report. The problem is your looking from a FBI and ATF standpoint, two agencies that would have common goals when the actual fact could be likened more to Mossad vs Hezbolah two agencies that are in close proximity, often adversarial and unless the threat was sufficiently common to them to overcome their mutual distrust seems unlikely to breed and kind of co-operation. That's the world that good shadowrunners would try and live in, they'd try not to piss off enough people so far that they'd expend a lot of resources against them, or unite against them.

You misunderstand. You bribe a DBA and a security analyst, apply some expert hacking and volia!, real time access to the entire Lone Star database. Not just for this case but forever. "Let's see what LS has found out...."

Not forever, just until the accounts are updated. And smething else to keep in mind is whether or not your bribes gained access to the real database or just a dummy one, at best you'd still have to "trust but verify".

No one in this thread is allowed to talk about the worst movie evar, unless, or until they have seen Manos: The Hands of Fate.

After you have done so, provided you did not take your own life within the first 30 minutes of the movie, then we can discuss the subject. The discussion will be very one sided.

It might not have been a very good movie, but it's an excellent showcase of various levels of "professionalism" in runner teams. I for one think it's pretty damn boring when every character is a Hard Core Professional That Never Messes Up and Is Perfect In Every Way. *yawn*

i almost agree with the OP.

the types of criminals he describes are the types of criminals i tend to play. however, in my games, these guys are high-end. below them is an ocean of shit talent that's not going to survive another six months, being continually replaced by gangers on their way up an ex-professionals on their way out for whatever reason (addiction, enemies, bad luck, simple inability to cope with how bad the world really is). my rule of thumb is, if there's one guy who can do something well, there are ten or twenty guys who are willing to half-ass it.

basically, i think since 2040, the barrier to entry for a sustainable life of crime has plummeted. the black and grey markets are huge and hungry, always looking for bodies to use up and spit out; security is riddled with bad cops and corruption; the upper echelons are more concerned with the bottom line than keeping a lid on the world. it's easy to make a living doing crime, in SR, whether it's knocking over Stuffer Shacks, or being a standover man, or running Matrix games, or bloodsports, or working security for OC, or whatever. there are more jobs than there are people to do them, so long as you're willing to get your hands dirty.

as for the term "shadowrunner", i take it as life imitating art. some producer back in the 2030s did a schlock sim about the new breed of professional criminals, and called them 'shadowrunners'. everybody who wanted to sound like they knew what they were talking about started using the term, and eventually the criminals themselves began using it. this fed into more Hollywood crap, which spawned more street criminals using the moniker, and so on.

This would probably be my first post here in years, but I thought I had to throw in some input. I haven't played SR in years - the latest edition I own is the 3rd, though I've perused the 4th - but I'm generally in the same boat as Paul here. You'll forgive me if this comes out disjointed, but I'm typing it as the thoughts come to me. F*ck, I'll be surprised if I even answer Paul's goddamned question.

Like everyone else, shadowrunners have varying degrees of sanity, but it's the most sensible one that are the most successful. For example, I keep remembering Hatchetman's bio from Cybertechnology: barring the bias of the narrator, the guy had a relatively normal life up to his lucky break from Renraku. Even then, he was consistently one of the more sensible recurring characters in the sourcebooks.

On the other hand, another (radical) example would be Joker from A Killing Joke: One bad day is all it takes. He was relatively normal too, until that one bad day.

Sanity can go both ways. So can morality: I'm sure Paul will correct me on this, but as far as the 'sane' criminals go (and I'm excluding the pedos and psychos here), I'm not exactly 100% sure they would choose a life of crime over anything else if given the chance. Not every 'runner is evil, but every 'runner is an opportunist. Are they criminals because they're doing something morally wrong, or are they criminals because they're doing something illegal? (For example, does Batman not kill because it's morally wrong to take a life, or because the Gotham PD would finally drop the hammer on him?) Maybe they don't buy into the corporate lifestyle...or maybe they do, except crime pays better.

(Debatable point time: Crime is merely an act following the precepts of consumerism {or was it materialism?} taken to a logical extreme. Shadowrunners fill a niche in a market the megas badly need. Thus, they're not so much criminals as they are...salesmen for a particular kind of service.)

One of the reasons I tend to stick with the 'punk' in cyberpunk is that, as Deev said, it's about the mindset of being 'punk' - at least before those suits in the music/culture industry got their grubby little paws all over it and neutered the living shit out of it by focusing on the style over the culture - and refusing to accept what was then a disturbing trend towards corporate hegemony (in other words, corporate culture).

Speaking of corporate culture, some of us (re: bleeding heart liberals) see the trends in Shadowrun as a bit...behind the times: Damien Knight, for example, is nowhere near as ruthless some of CEOs today, but I see this more as a limitation on the part of the writers and their sense of decency than any fault of the game culture itself.

One of the major charges placed against corporations today is that they place profits over people. One of the major concepts of cyberpunk is that megacorporations have eclipsed governments as the premiere source of political power.

(An aside: Say what you will about privatization and socialism, but post-humanist forms of governments are theoretically created because they have a moral obligation to secure the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness to the people who maintain such an institution, while corporations are theoretically created to generate a profit. The shift in culture would be immense, changing a person from an active citizen to a passive consumer.

For this reason, by the way, I mentally edited out former military folks, as they would still have something of a remnant of patriotism in them, though nothing like the American patriotism of today. If anything, it may be more akin to one of the former Imperial powers, like Britain or France - an institution that used to be top dog, but no longer. However, since I know nobody from those countries, it's hard for me to say what those mindsets would be.

It's probably one of the reasons the Big D was considered one of the good guys. Philosophically, he was a humanist...or something along those lines.

The point I'm trying to drive through, though, is that by today's standards, the world of Shadowrun is relatively insane. Values are completely up-ended, anything that could even be considered a foundation for the humanism we've grown up with has been overthrown, and the only reason people have to live is to buy more stuff, be famous, and get their name on the Trid. Outside of the sphere of the corporate lifestyle, however, things are more familiar, but that is neither here nor there.)

So what happens if you take that belief, put it into hyperdrive, and make it part of the popular culture? What happens when laws are less about human beings and more about material possessions? What happens when those kinds of beliefs turn the world into a sort of dystopia? (Why am I thinking of Bioshock?) What happens when unfettered consumerism is considered sanity? Even if 'punk' still exists, what would such a world think of people who still think of people as, well...people and not merely consumers?

I was born in the late 70s, which makes me a child of the 80s to early 90s, and this new millenium already seems...unwell to me, simply because I'm of the opinion that technology changes culture, and technology is progressing at a neurotically fast rate. I can only imagine that my reaction to the world of Shadowrun would not be unlike the reaction of one of Warren Ellis's Revivals to The City. In fact, in my eyes, shadowrunners might be the only 'sane' people left in the world.

That being said, the big problem I have with the 'punk' counterculture in Shadowrun is that in earlier times, that sort of mentality fell under the Neo-A's, which would have felt very secretive and very underground back in the 1980s, but today would be branded as some sort of cultural label. Common causes get marketed and sold, just like every other commodity. The other problem is that it seems to depict a 'shadowrunners' versus 'The Man' picture, a grand narrative that seems a bit unbelievable to me.

Come to think of it, this is probably one of the reasons I actually like the magic angle, or to be more precise, the shamanic magic angle. In a game overshadowed by corporations, technology, hypermedia (and the hyper-attentiveness that comes with it), possessions, and reeking of material gain and social progression as a driving force in everyone's lives, it's actually somewhat comforting to see some characters who would be motivated by something more valuable than creds, more timeless than the newest fad, and demanding of one's absolute attention. In the world of Shadowrun, happiness and personal fulfillment is determined by how much you own and what position you hold in life; in its world of magic, personal fulfillment is determined by something older, something more comprehendible...at least to someone raised to believe in that sort of thing.

-

Well, here's something scary, if you think about it. I'm 34 years old. To me, e-mail is a tool, and Google is secondary to actually asking a live librarian for help with reference. To my 14-year old brother, e-mail was a way of life, one which has quickly been succeeded by text messaging, and the only time he's ever set foot in a library was to surf the web. This is the difference from one generation to another: I suspect the differences will be greater as technology progresses at an ever-increasing pace. It's also one of the reasons I completely distrust any ruling on the social effects of cyberlimbs, wired reflexes, or cyberware in general: if you go through various sourcebooks and accept the characters and settings as canon (anyone remember Shadowbeat and how most professional athletes cybered themselves up?), then you quickly come to the conclusion that cyberware and bioware is not just useful and dangerous, it's fashionable.

I'll throw one out. Say you get a cultural and musical phenomenon like hip-hop, which was on the fringes when the First Edition came out. Now accelerate that into 2060 (or whatever year SR is now set into). Got a scenario where a former shadowrunner turns into a rap star and blings the hell out of that wiz-looking cyberarm? See where I'm going with this? You think people aren't that stupid? Anyone remember grillz and spinners?

Think about this: A shadowrunner lives in a world where it is considered culturally acceptable to shear off parts of your humanity...unless you have an asset that suffers because of it. No, not essence. Magic. Transhumanism aside, humanity/spirit is completely tossed aside in favor of efficiency and fashion. So...who's crazy now?

So while a role-player might look over something like retinal modification (say, changing the shape of one's pupils or adding low-light vision) and see them as a useful tool, someone who lives in the world of SR would see them as natural and fashionable as a cell phone. It's not just a tool, but something that one cannot do without. Hence, a shadowrunner would, due to the nature of the relationship between the player and the game, always live on the fringes of what would be considered normal society.

-

See, didn't answer the fucking question at all.

Good post. I missed it, first time around. Thanks for reviving it.

That's just GM asshatry. The GM should have warned or let the player's know - clearly he has different levels of expectation compared to you guys.

If its something your character should KNOW then he should TELL you or otherwise, let you roll for it. Even then, killing the character is extraordinarily harsh.
If its somethign you as a player didn't know about then that's just blatantly rude and the GM is begging for the players to leave.

- J.

I've always believed that if you're having fun you're doing it right, no matter how you're doing it. In the end it's a matter of personal play style preference. There's no right or wrong in that. So what works at my table, may not work at your own.

Plan 9 from Outer Space, worse than Manos.

Totally have to agree with you on that. People play RPGs so that they can play characters who are different from themselves. Who have skills and know things that they don't. Should the hacker character be punished because the player doesn't know the difference between a field and a variable? No. Should a professional assassin character be punished because the player doesn't know the -exact- location of the... crud.. that.. oh yeah, jugular, or even what that is? No. Should the professional criminal be character be punished because the player forgeot to say "I make sure my connection is secure"? No.

GMs should presume that the characters have some level of knowledge related to what they do, even if the player is mostly clueless. If the mage is leaving traces of his spells all over the place, the GM should remind the player that that stuff can be tracked back to him, and likely let it slide the first time if the player didn't know. Even after that an occasional reminder might be good if the player has a poor memory.

BobRobers, I suggest you give that particular GM a good beating talking to and remind him that the players aren't all professional criminals (You know.. I hope) and so don't know everything about committing crime that their characters would, and should be granted some leeway in areas of character knowledge.

Been a while since I saw it..but I thought it was pretty funny, myself...