Not in-game, it's not.

You don't fucking know what you're gonna need it for, you just always need it.

Why am I just thinking of The Gamers?

This is true. Also, I have sprung some pretty wicked numbers on players over the years, so maybe they're onto something... Maybe I should tell them over and over how important it is to bring guns and see if they start refusing to ever use them...

---> "It's not what they need it for, they just always need it." Close but no cigar.

What's this 'they' shit? This isn't a movie.

admiral ackbar is a terrible example. anyone can tell it's a trap *after* it's sprung... i mean, seriously, it took the guy until they were surrounded to figure out it was a trap.

if you want the guy who detected the trap *before* it was sprung, you actually want to look at lando...

Then they're just resort to using non-guns. Blades, flame throwers, or sharks with friggin lasers attached to their heads.

--



You mean Nein Numb.

Played the World's Largest Dungeon?
That campaign made us fucking paranoid. ONE SINGLE trap on the ceiling early on in the dungeon added "and search the ceiling too" to our repertoire of "standard exploring procedure."* It never came up again (except once, but it was Obvious Trap Is Obvious with a ceiling mounted magical trigger and no need to disarm it because it was a dead end, empty room).

*Which was already having the rogue out 30 feet in front traveling at a speed of about 5 feet a round (that's 1 foot a second) using a 10 foot pole to poke anything, and specifically searching every map-square and every wall. Didn't need anything like Detect Magic to find magical traps, the rogue was already good enough to spot them.

yeah...i think i finally got that grappling hook after arguing with the merchant that talked
like Jerry Seinfeld...
i think...

I think he was racist against Giant Obsidian doods.

Sorry, those are on the CC's endangered species list. But we have some real badass warform sea bass...

Sounds like awesome, to me. I will immediately implement Plan" Reverse Psychology My Players Into Refusing To Use Guns™ immediately.

Have not. The only published module I've ever rule was Keep on the Borderlands, and that only with heavy modification. However, I have watched Raider of the Lost Ark more times than is good for anyone wandering through a building I designed.

no, i don't. he was operating the scanners, but lando interpreted the data to understand that the shield was active, and that the empire knew they were coming.

also, i agree that it would be interesting to see an entire runner party that refuses to use guns for combat (distinctive style, ahoy!)

anyways, i think i'd be inclined to add some malware to the list of stuff to have, but that's just me. precisely what the malware does should depend on the runner in question, i would say.

Maybe then, they would see the wisdom of my Wall-Running dual-flamethrower Adept build.

Because sometimes, absolutely every motherfucker in the room has to die.

(not intended for indoor use)

Raiders of the Lost Arc is tame by comparison to the WLD. There's a section--this wont really spoil anything, because if your GM is nice, he'll let you avoid it--where there's a 7 day time limit on the region. If you don't kill the tarrasque before then, it escapes, eats its way through the dungeon to where the devils are housed, releasing them. They kill the tarrasque in 7 rounds, take over the region in 7 minutes, and the entire dungeon in 7 days (by summoning more devils).

It's really the only "you just lose" scenario in the entire thing.

Although there are two cockatrices in a part of the dungeon spec'd for a level 4 party, which is pretty nasty (if someone gets turned to stone: roll a new character, there are no stone to flesh items in the region and its unlikely the cleric will have been capable of learning it yet).

*cough* Back to topic anyone?

What was the topic again? Oh yeah... stay out of my beer.

Seriously, though. Flamethrowers. NOT generally considered required running gear. Smoke grenades, on the other, very useful if you know how/when to use them.

Yeah, smoke- and gas grenades are the shizzles. Especially if you deploy a mix (during for example a tactical retreat).

Been there, done that. When the security forces are mostly blind and hallucinating, they're much less effective.

Gunpowder, for distracting guards with chemsniffers. Which is all of them.


Alpha Omega is hilarious. It's like Exalted, if Exalted was easy to play and you couldn't punch people hard enough to turn them into a duck.

(A-scen-sion! A-scen-sion! Annunkai Omega source wielder here. Level 3 on the ascension scale currently. God, I really, really wish Annunkai could use Arcane wielding.)

Annunkai are actually underpowered compaired to nephilim, as you can buy what the Annunkai get for free with like 30 BP, but doing the reverse takes like 60.

My group's not that deep in, though I think our heal monkey is up to Ascension 3 (with a HP regen rate at 1 per round and 70+ Endurence). The rest of us who are on that track are only at 2. Though our bio-engineered (glowing torch) strength monkey is only a few points shy of throwing whole cars.

Yeah. We're not very far along at all (Challenge Rating...5?).

I know someone referenced a mask earlier, and how it might be possible to see through one...But I've also always considered gloves a fairly essential set of gear. While its true that even a stray few strands of hair can get you busted today, fingerprints are far easier to pull.

Flash-bangs are also pretty nice to have on hand, since they...Umm...Flash and bang. That.

If high places are involved, or helicopters, I'd consider a parachute if one doesn't have Levitate. I recall one time that my mage character fell out of a helicopter as it was hit by an RPG. Didn't end too bad, as he was fortunate enough to survive. What was unfortunate was when he landed in the midst of the Tir Tangiere officers he was trying to kidnap a princess from.

Very unfortunate.

Other stuff? Well, in the old SR3 days we used to say cell phones were important, but commlinks alleviate that problem. Someone once did forget flashlights - it was a fun time to call the rigger for a maglite. I've mentioned in other threads the idea of having small, back-up safehouses that also stash stuff like emergency kits with a gun+ammo, first aid kit, a fake ID and other stuff. If you've got these around and you can't go home for a while because you need to lose some heat, well, it helps to have some of your own!

If you have to meet a Johnson that's not particularly trustworthy, a dead man's trigger works. You press-and-hold, and if you stop pressing-and-holding without disarming the device, everything goes boom. Or, conversely, you pull a Keamy from LOST and have a biofeedback monitor that, if it flatlines, triggers a big kaboom.

Another good thing to have programmed into a commlink or just on hand is a map of the frikkin' city. If you can get a map of the sewers, all the better, but you'd better know where you're goin' if you're operating out of your home range. Otherwise, it can end up bad.

A final consideration, before I start rattling off everything I can think of, is for at least one character to have a toolkit handy. It doesn't need to be some big ratchet-and-clank (Bad pun!) setup, but just something with a screwdriver and various heads, a pair of pliers, a wire stripper...The basics. That way if you need to take something apart or, in sticky situations, put something together, you'll be alright.

I'm sure there's plenty more.

The problem with those few strands of hair also is that everybody is carrying around several foreign DNA samples at any given moment. You leave a DNA trace on every door you open, but that also means it gets transferred to the next guy who uses that door.

We had a minor scandal in Germany recently, the police were hunting for a female "Phantom of Heilbronn" who had left her DNA at dozens of crime scenes, most notably the murder of a police officer (in Heilbronn, hence the name), but also petty burglaries and other crimes which showed absolutely no connection to each other. After two years they finally "caught" the phantom...she was working in the factory that made the cotton swabs.

Those cotton swabs were never cleared for forensics use by the factory, too.

So basically over-done cost-cutting by some bean-counter caused murder cases to go south.

It can be very useful to hackers or mages whose physical bodies can be in a "neutral" territory.

Back on topic, I think a chameleon suit is very useful: it's a bit expensive, but it makes you very hard for most people to see you.
And of course, clothes, a commlink with some basic software and mirrorshades.

Charlie Bronson's always got rope.

Flex Cuffs, I need to get some for G.

I think Gecko-Grip is going to be awesome. Sort of like when we found out about immovable rods in D&D, we bought 2 each.

And shepherds we shall be, for Thee, my Lord, for Thee.
Power hath descended forth from Thy hand, that our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command.
So we shall flow a river forth to Thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be.

In Nomine Patris, Et Filii, Et Spiritus Sancti.

This is at the same time sad and funny.

EDIT: I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet, but a dummy commlink is almost mandatory.

Indeedy. Cracked.Com ran an article about police myths, and that DNA thing was one of them. In 2070, I'm sure the technology will be more advanced - or, it might just be abandoned as unable-to-improve. However, I'd still say you don't want your DNA, even if its foreign, tagged with that last run on Saeder-Krupp. Its more a problem if you're ex-military or something, and your genetics are already on file for some reason, but then again, like ya said, it can be awfully hard to screen out what is what, so making a bust based on scant evidence is pretty tough. Unless you don't have a SIN, I suppose...

Shame to hear about that chick, though. I hope nothing unreasonable happened to her in the process.

She was only identified after police had figured out that something was wrong, to verify where that FUBAR had originated. So nothing bad happened to her, and she could participate in the nationwide facepalming.


Anyway, if DNA analysis in the Sixth World has advanced at the same rate it did in the last 20 years, they'd find traces of two thirds of the metroplex at every crime scene. Good luck identifying the four traces of the runner team...

"Sir, that blood patch we found on the wall..."
"Yes?"
"There were 14 matches, 3 of them are internal security (one of whom is dead). Of the other 11, 7 of them match residents here in the complex. The other four...are unknowns. They're not on record."
"I see. So clearly we can't even get a strait identification off of a clearly obvious trace left by the criminals."
"No sir. Our technology is too good. And the SINless are too many."

Maybe some of you should go watch the movie Gattaca.

A commlink with analyze and some decent IC is a must in my games. My player's links get hacked now and then. Nothing like someone getting admin access and stripping all your credits away.

Yup. They only way they caught him was because his brother was one of the cops.

More like "there were 108 human traces, 21 of them belong to internal security or their extended family, another 40 of various residents in this complex and their friends/family, 17 could be matched to fastfood sellers in the area, that leaves just 30 traces belonging to 26 random people at the street and four runners."

I meant 14 that were just from the blood. You want to scrape everything off the wall, then sure. 108 human traces.

Heck, my old 2E SR character used to discreetly collect DNA samples from bums and stuff, carried it in plastic baggies to contaminate crime scenes.

One time he got the DNA of a senior VP at Ares. Boy did he have fun planting that in all sorts of weird places.


-karma

ha! You assumed that all four Runners left traces. Some innocent schlub's getting a .45 to the back of his head.

Form Fitting Body Armor.
Too much is never enough.

Would you be willing to stat that out? It sounds a bit cost-prohibitive.

Even today that technology is insane. You're carrying around so many traces of DNA right now it just isn't funny. Well, it is funny, since you could commit a crime and leave a hair implicating your little old next door neighbour, the 80 year old with the cat named Mittens. Not exactly who you'd pick as the mastermind behind the bombing of a crowded preschool. They don't bother with skin flakes, and sometimes not even with blood. Hair and large quantities are about all they can do. Commit a crime in a hotel room and they won't even bother with DNA evidence unless you were stabbed and there is a blood spray.

Some small evil part of me wants to steal some hair from the 80 year old cat lady, commit a crime, and leave it as false evidence now just to see if the cops show up and try arresting her.

Heh, the issues raised in the thread are part of the reason the cops usually only use DNA to confirm a suspect they arrived at by other means (the other part of course being they wouldn't read the DNA and see "80-year old cat lady", just "unknown subject" unless she was typed for some reason). DNA evidence can be good if it picks up somebody who had no reason to be in the area or if comes from something obviously suggesting guilt like bloodstains, but if "such-and-so was here" isn't sufficient damning evidence it won't assist much. TV is also somewhat exaggerated on what you can get good DNA from, it's not quite "spray luminol around the room like mad and scrape up everything that shows up". You might get some DNA, but it's pretty much clouded with background then.

Shadowrun-wise, I'd say DNA is dangerous but doesn't completely wreck a SINner runner's career normally. Even assuming greatly increased detection of DNA I'm not buying "tracking a runner by skin flakes" kind of detection outside environments specifically meant to allow that like some sort of secure area kept as a clean room, anything that could detect that well would amplify so much background DNA in a regular area it'd be useless to differentiate. Which means the usual source of DNA evidence would be blood stains or semen, neither of which a professional runner will routinely leave at a scene normally (and bright ones will bring bleach). Even if they get a match, the enlarged database may actually work against them. DNA evidence works on the principle of "only one in X people (approximately a billion with current standards if memory serves) has this pattern"; if you have billions in a SIN registry you're going to get a few random hits by default, though ideally they'd all be from somebody across the world so you could rule them out (though useful bonus for a runner travelling the globe to a job). Then of course there's the inevitable data entry errors possibly kicking in. Really DNA tracking has probably become a backup forensic technique to ritual magic; any perfect DNA sample probably can work with ritual tracking just as well with the bonus of usually knowing it's gotta be that one individual who left it (and whom you can immediately locate wherever he or she is). DNA would become more useful for non-fresh samples or those somehow cleansed of association magic-wise, as well as victim-associated samples (i.e. those bloodstains in your car come from X).

Ug never leaves without his Ingram Valiant.

Once had a jungle mission where weight was uber important. Ug brought ingram just in case. DM give extra restrictions so we only get a little gear. Ug bring clothes, ingram and 1 50rd magazine. DM and party think Ug stupid. At end of run party tries to leave and dragon comes after party, oh noes party says. Ug says take the stick I got stamp on dragon and need to bag my limit. 10 rounds full auto APDS ammo (it weights less too) one dragon fall out of sky.

Moral of the story? always bring an ingram ya never know when shit is gona hit the fan and an ingram will be needed to open a hole in the tunnel to escape the flying shit.

"A fugitive for 60 years was captured today, wanted by the FBI for ties to Puerto Rican independence-oriented militants back in the 1950s. Her latest crime that her brought attention to the authorities...gluing toilets to the ceiling at a plumbing store."

Good luck with that "always bring an Ingram Valiant" plan.

thanks, I need all the luck I can get since it annoys the crap out of the dm every time I find a way to bring it.