Another thread gave me this idea to share real and made up, hand of god moments as to exactly how burning a point of edge saves a character from certain death. Just because I think it could be funny. So they don't have to be things you actually saw during gameplay.


An enemy mage is about to melt an allied runner with a powerful manabolt, the injured mundane runner has little chance to resist the blast which would certainly kill him if he doesn't resist the entire spell. Just as the mage is about to finish the incantation and blow the runner away. The target is hit by a car sending him flying out of view. He's battered, bruised and unconscious but he'll survive as he is now out of sight. The driver of the car is another member of the team who was on his way to help but for reasons unknown the breaks locked up and he lost control of the vehicle.

Your cornered, injured and your enemy is only a few meters away with big heavy automatic weapon trained on you. Death is almost certain. He takes a step forward to brace himself to fire in full auto when he slips and unloads 10 rounds of explosive ammo into the ceiling collapsing it on top of both of you.

My favorite Hand of God moment is the real-life example of the parachute that didn't open and the skydiver survived because she landed in a sludge vat at a sewage treatment facility.

That is a real nice hand of god moment

I just HOGged on my character a couple weeks ago. There was some sort of sapient dracoform that was being held captive in a helicopter. I leaped onto the helicopter which then proceeded to take off. I had 7 Strength in my Cyberarms and a 7 Edge, and I had to use it all to just hang on (luckily, I made the 5 Threshold for the test). I then proceeded to hack the helicopter through my skinlink Echo (he's a Technomancer) and opened the cargo door, then caused the tail rotor to stop, putting the chopper into an uncontrolled spin. The baddies on the inside (which included a pair of mages that were keeping the dracoform under magical control) were flung out to fall to their deaths. I failed the roll to hang onto the helicopter by one hit (the GM said that I would need 4 hits to stay on the helicopter, and I rolled 3 hits with edge). As I was plummeting to my death, I decided to burn a point of Edge to HOG. The GM decided that the dracoform regained its senses when the mages died from hitting the ground, and it flew down to snatch me up before I died.

It's been a few runs since then, and I've bought my Edge back up to 7. I'm ready to do MORE stupid things like this. *grin*

I had to Hand of God an NPC, actually. He was a recurring enemy for one of the runners. The NPC's wife was cheating on him with his brothers, and the NPC suffered a psychotic break. He hired the runner to kill them both, and when he regained his senses he didn't remember doing it - he just knew that the runner killed his wife and brother and posed them in a sexually explicit manner to taunt him. The NPC then devoted his entire life and his resources to killing the PC.

The PC called him up from a bar, and taunted the NPC while drunk. The NPC headed over in a rage, and the PC ran. The PC was an optimized gunslinger, rolling 20+ dice and had gotten his hands on APDS ammo. So he shoots the NPC through the door, doing enough damage to outright kill him. Instead, the NPC staggered outside with a bullet next to his heart, fell into his car and ordered it to get to a street doc.

That NPC ended up getting hit by a truck on the last run of the adventure.

A lot of people have some good Hand of God stories. But the truth is, you can Burn edge for a critical success. Its not -quite- the same thing, but in the right circumstance, it can make just as much of a difference.

In a recent game, our doctor's Judas quality kicked in. We had the perfect run, stealing a potent magical artifact from a high-security company. It was powerful enough they'd brought in a seperate company to secure it. We ended up hitting the security company to steal the security and personell details, impersonated their people at the target facility. Social engineering at its finest. We bullshitted our way past, showing up with a manager for a final inspection, our guest passes, waltzed -right- past the security station, down the elevator, past the -other- checkpoint. Proceeded to 'check' the security. And by check, we mean turn it off and steal all their data on the item, and waltz out with it in a manacase that looks like a cigarette case. One of our people faked a heart attack(and the condition was on his personell record too) and our doctor was driving the ambulance.

Perfect run. No suspicion. Even within the timeframe. Got away scot free. The session ended with the doctor slapping an antidote patch on herself, and gassing both our getaway vehicles. The session ended right there.

I knew there was no way my puny human hacker was going to make his resistance test, so I Hand of Godded it away, by critically succeeding on the resistance test, and opening windows. Having one team member still awake made -such- a huge difference in the way events played out. Edge is a very powerful tool, if you know how to call your shots.

Jason bourne is another classic HOG moment. Bullet to the brain, falls overboard, is picked up by a local fisherman with the amnesiac quality.

Not to rain on your parade but you can spend edge after seeing the results of a roll, why couldn't you have spent your edge normally (and with 7 dice) you'd be getting your extra hit.

This makes me want to make a high Edge character who is suicidal, maybe structure a Neg Quality like Addicition, you have to make a WIL check or you do something dangerous or possibly fatal, and then HoG to live through it.

It would basically be the movie Short Time.

Back in SR3, one of my character got killed by a bug spirit:
"you're in the room and suddenly a bug spirit appears right behind each one of you, roll initiative... The bug spirit have 40 (well it probably wasn't that high, but it was higher than any of our character could hope to get), they stab you (rolls, I get poisoned and probably have to resist a S or F wound) , this has lowered your initiative so they can attack again before you can act..."

I got killed several times before hitting the ground. At first I refused using HoG, since I could get killed about 4 times in just one combat turn: not only did they have a lot of IP, but I was pretty sure they could fill my physical+overflow monitors several times with just one blow.
The GM insisted I use it, saying he had been a little too heavyhanded with the opposition. So my character survived and layed there waiting for the rescue team... but he actually got eaten a bit by a ghoul first, and glitched his tests so he ended up as a feral ghoul.

Anyway, I guess I had to use HoG nearly everytime I played my 10 karma characters along with a team of 750 karma munchkinized characters and/or with a GM used to them.

Because at our table and by RAW, you can't spend Edge more than once on any given roll (SR4A, p 75):
"No more than 1 point of Edge can be spent on any specific test or action at one time. If you spent a point of Edge for extra dice and rolled a critical glitch anyway, for example, you cannot use Edge to negate that critical glitch since you have already applied Edge to that test."

I had already added Edge to my roll, so that the entire roll had exploding sixes. Probability-wise, this was the best option to take at that time (if I added Edge after seeing the roll, I don't get exploding sixes on the base attribute dice. If I rerolled failures, I wouldn't get exploding sixes, and I wasn't rolling very many dice for that roll to begin with).

This was a "game stopping" moment in which we busted out the rulebooks and made sure that I couldn't reroll failures in this case or have some other method to save myself. So yeah, it was quite cool to do, but failed just barely in a spectacular way. You really have to live for gaming moments like that.

Hand Of God ideas:

- someone who you think got shot dead suddenly sits up, opens their jacket and pulls out an object that deflected the ammunition.

- a particular ammunition is actually a dud, didn't go off as expected and does way less damage (or perhaps none at all) than originally thought.

- sudden weather change or HVAC/Fire System goes haywire and changes something enough to change the outcome.

- target slips and falls or bends over to pick something up and whatever was coming their way totally misses. Heck, they may even be completely oblivious to their brush with death.

Really? Because I remember seeing the doc on the boat remove three from his back, none from the head, and the local fishermen weren't amnesiacs...

They weren't but he had the quality.

I had one with my old mage. Me, our technomancer, and the chump we were protecting get blasted out of a window by an explosion we were able to survive basically by running at the window the moment we realized the room was about to burn. So I quickly realized I could catfall the technomancer and our client because they were even squishier then me but then what was I going to do. So I burned a point of edge (I had 5 compared to the TMs 3) and as I fell I hit enough stuff on the way down that I was slowed down and survived.

SR3

My team had headed into the Octagon in Seattle to take on the Universal Brotherhood. We had been tracking their movements and hitting hives all over the place. They had got us back by kidnapping our fixer... we knew we were going to be outnumbered and to a certain extent outgunned. We had to be quick.

We were not subtle, our entry point was created by crashing a rig into the side of the building and entering through the hole it created.

Before we knew it, guns had begun blazing and a corridor fight was underway with my Chinese Swordsman at the front. Fortunately he has enough skill to take on multiple opponents in melee and was doing so quite effectively for a few rounds. Unfortunately, the bugs numbers were holding us up and allowing reinforcements to keep on coming.

Before long, I found my character surrounded by 6 rather powerful bugs and as the light wounds began to stack, my effectiveness began to fail.

It came down to three bugs hitting me, I had deflected two of their attacks but the third managed to get through. By this point, I had spent all of my karma pool and burnt quite a substantial amount of it too just to stay alive. This attack however was just about to take off my characters head.

It was time for a hand of god moment.

This was resolved quite easily, and quite to my annoyance; the GM reminded one of our players that he had the lightning ball spell and for some god unknown reason, the idiot was just using his Assault rifle with APDS ammo on the critters.

Blam, the corridor was cleared with the combined firepower of now multiple ball lightning spells, minigun fire and some SMG fire. I was reduced to a limping freak as the ball lightning didnt hurt me because of spell shielding that our mage had on me when electrfying the area. I was still on 2 blocks away from a deadly wound. I still could take one the bugs one at a time... just...

We managed to find our fixer but had to retreat with haste as we could hear yet more clicking of another wave of bugs......

Our escape plan was a good one... leave the way we came then activate the 3 pre-rigged, drone controlled lorries full of explosives, petrol and so on, to ram the Octagon....

The bugs were not too happy with us for this, and we are still paying the price.

I had a character like that in SR3. He was haunted by ghosts of people he'd killed, which drove him to try to kill himself. There was one HOG moment (of many) where our team was on the roof of a building and the BBEG was escaping in a helicopter so he cast a huge fireball spell to blow the helicopter out of the sky. Unfortunately it came back down on the roof of the building, which was not so cool for the rest of the team. My character didn't care, and was unconscious from drain anyway. But IIRC the cybertank street sam grabbed me up and jumped from the roof in the nick of time. We both had to burn karma to save ourselves. Good times.