"No grenades, Jayne."
"But captain!"

Seriously, there should be an IQ test before a player is allowed to load down his character with grenades.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iaa2oE3SPTI

funny thing is that i was looking for basically the same one, but done by a norwegian comedy group. Now i find myself wondering who did it first.

In my defence it was one of our first games and WE ALL THOUGHT (Garou included) that throwing was part of Athletics skill group. To our surprise, it wasn't. And there I was throwing a grenade with my STR 2 DEFAULTING with one die.

After reading a bunch of these I was telling our GM why I like his games so much, because the only other person we have who's run SR doesn't...quite...get it. His game is like Pink Mohawk where the PCs are hopped up on K-10 permanently (there are no consequences, for anything, ever).

So one of the comparisons I made was between Ruke having blown up a secret research facility on a bad excuse gaining entrence, and meandering out casually with Case File #6. #6 is unintentional stupidity on part of the player. The same scenario where 'Mage' gets to walk away whistling while things explode is sheer stupidity on part of the GM.

One run that I was part of dealt with extracting someone from a small holding facility on the Lonestar main downtown Seattle complex. This facility was not the primary one, it was more of a waystation in that it held really dangerous people while LS figured out what to do with them. We barely got inside before it hit the fan. My character got taken down by a guy behind a security window before he got a chance to shoot back. The other player, Jim, decided to throw a grenade through the small port in the security window. Somehow he managed to make the massive TN. This was SR3, by the way. Well the grenade went off. The GM asked him what kind it was. It was one of those dual-explosive extra powerful ones, I forget what they were called. It was basically a frag and an HE duct taped together. On steroids. The room behind the security glass? The armory. Yep, thousands of rounds of exex and dozens of grenades went up. Now that's bad right? Well it gets better. The motor pool for the main LS downtown complex was under the facility. The explosion breached the motor pool and reached the emergency fuel reserves. Which then blew up. Long story short, that grenade started a chain reaction leaving about 1/4 of Downtown Seattle a glass crater. Yeah. When I took over GM'ing, right after this incidentally, I retconned the whole thing.

Possible Ghost Cartels spoilers

Got linked to this thread by a couple of friends, joined the forum to share a recent special moment from our campaign.

We are a low-combat, stealth-based team of four, running in LA. The team has a reputation for being fast, never getting seen by the security of a place we're breaking into, and using almost entirely nonlethal means. In short, doing everything wrong from a lot of teams' perspectives, but still kicking hoop. I play the Face, who is an ex-ganger that has the Action Trids knowledge skill, specifically to help him come up with tactics during shadowruns.

So there was this secret milspec Aztechnology base out in the desert, specifically built to research some intensely magical stuff that we needed to steal. We're also cleaning up some blackmail as long as we're in there. So, despite poor intell, we sneak in and everything goes like clockwork -- We manage to bypass the sentry towers, all the alarms, the wards, all the defensive turrets, the full sec team at the security checkpoint, and the biometric handscanner / keypad doors leading into the secret lab spaces. In the lab space there are three doors. So, we open the door on the right.

We see what looks like a medical set-up, and a giant acid-drooling bear, which growls at us. The Face closes the door. The Bear opens the door, and growls loudly. The Face closes the door again, and gives the hacker a concerned look. The Bear opens the door again, growls louder, and starts forward. The Hacker closes and locks the door with the power of the matrix. We start hearing loud thumps, as the bear assaults the security door. We glance among ourselves for a second, and decide to start checking out the other doors. Then comes the tell-tale hiss of acid starting to melt through a door lock...

The Face says, "Everyone get into the hall and out of the way, I have an idea."

So everyone hurries out into the hallway they came from, and the face stands in a doorway, puts one hand in his jacket, and waits. The bear bursts out into the secret lab area, sees the Face beckon to it, and charges him -- then gets Flashpak'd. The Face steps out of the way, as the temporarily blinded bear keeps charging, then leaps onto its back, and rides the ridiculously angry bear back the way the group came, through a few doors, through the plate glass window of the sec checkpoint (turns out the bear can spit acid, too), and into the middle of the aforementioned security team. So the Face and the Bear are in the middle of a fight versus the security people, the Mage and the Assassin grab the magical artifacts we came for and then go running for the combat zone, and the Hacker+AI find someplace to jack in and start messing with the local matrix.

So a pretty chaotic fight ensues, involving two blood mages and a large security team with rifles and shotguns, versus an Assassin-adept, a Nahualli mage, a Face who rolls 6 dice to shoot people on a good day, a hastily-summoned Force 8 Air Spirit (Coatl), and a giant pissed-off acid-spitting bear (which goes down fast, since it takes the rest of the team and the spirit a round or two to get there). The Aztech security force surrendered as soon as the blood mages went down. Since our team's entire shtick is that we minimize casualties however and whenever we can, our mage started going around stabilizing and healing the guards that he could...and then asked the GM, "Is the bear still alive?" ... Well, turns out it's pretty smart, and also pretty grateful for both the healing, and the chance to maul some guards that had been hoops to it.

So it followed us home, and now there's kinda a bear in our safehouse. ... Whoops.
I guess that run was a little less subtle than we were originally going for...

Almost almost as good as Bear Town.

But not quite.

Shame on you... Don't you know the point to being a Shadowrunner is to cause as much havoc and mayhem as possible, get your names on "most-wanted" lists across the globe, and earn a reputation as the most overt team of bomb-wielding, pink-be-mowhawked, wanton engines of destruction?

Maybe that's just my team's goal...


How does one "kinda" have a bear in their safe-house?


Anyways, so a few months back (in game time) my team and I, consisting of a Russian Orc Sniper/Sammy (Misha), American Elf Bear Totem Shaman/Doctor (Sam), Norwegian Dwarf Hacker/Rigger (Olaf), American Elf Technomancer (Cable-Flame), and Norwegian Dwarf Face/Useless (Tim) are in Italy waiting for a long distance luxury zeppelin ride to India, where we plan to make our way to the Philippines. While in Florence, we stop at a quaint little restaurant that just happens, we find out, to be owned and operated by the local branch of La Cosa Nostra... Not wanting to piss them off by rejecting the restaurant, we sit down, and order, and are very patient with the lack-luster service, and the less-than-savory company, a table full of angry, meta-hating, humanocentric mob members sitting at a booth in the corner, constantly throwing not-so-nice remarks our way.

Typically my character, Misha "Headshot Joe" Koprenevski, would take much more offense, and may have attempted to attack them, if he had not known they were LCN members. Misha had recently weened himself off his Vodka addiction, and had picked up some extra Willpower and Charisma points during character improvement, and he wasn't about to go and act like he hadn't. Misha is a good boy, and restrains himself.

The food arrives, and it's disappointingly wrong. They have sent Misha a very burnt leg of lamb, and sent a very large, very rare beef steak to each of our Elven companions, who are devout vegetarians. Neither Olaf nor Tim complain about their food, but I suspect it's because Dwarves will eat just about anything, especially if they're Norwegian.

Misha doesn't react negatively, although he does send the lamb back, and orders some pasta instead, apologizing for not having his mind made up when he came in, and agreeing to pay for both meals. This sits well with the mobsters, who must have realized that Orcs can be civilized people too, and they stop picking on Misha.

Sam, however, who is played by a friend of mine who is a chef, becomes distraught with the waitress (both he and Cable-Flame had ordered a fresh garden salad), and demands better service, or he won't pay. Cable-Flame agrees. Big mistake. Now the mobsters are getting up from their booth, and they come over to talk to Sam and C-F.

It is a painful argument, and the Dwarves, already done with their meal, leave to go and dig a new burrow, or something. Even Cable-Flame seems to realize that shit is about to hit the fan the way things are going, and she decides to leave with the Dwarves. When the waitress returns with Misha's meal, during the argument, he asks for a to-go box, and leaves a cred-stick on the table.

Misha informs Sam that he's paying for the meal, and if Sam would just come with him now, and leave his argument behind, Misha will pay for another meal for Sam at someplace nearby, where the salads aren't made of meat. Sam refuses. Misha beckons harder, emphasizing the urgency of the need to leave now, especially as the waitress begins to bus the table, and picks up the cred-stick. Sam refuses. He is irate, and stuck up, and still demands the situation be rectified.

The mobsters are reluctant to start any fighting on their own turf, especially since the meal has been paid for, but are unwilling to give in to an Elf.

The waitress takes the cred-stick to the register.

Misha calls Sam from outside...

Misha: "Sam?"

Sam: "Yes, Misha?"

Waitress scans the cred-stick, it beeps an error, she looks confused.

Misha: "Please, comrade, just leave restaurant, you don't want to start something with La Cosa Nostra."

Sam: "I don't care who they are, I want good service when I come to a restaurant, damnit!"

Waitress scans the cred-stick again, it beeps an error again, she looks more confused.

Misha: "Look, things are about to get really bad for you if you don't leave restaurant RIGHT NOW!"

Sam: "Misha, it's the principle of the thing! I can't let them get away with this travesty of the culinary profession!"

Waitress scans the cred-stick once more, and the spark of realization crosses her face...

Misha: "Comrade, I am give to them an empty cred-stick..."

Sam: "Look, I don't care what you say, they need to...wait, what?"

Waitress: "Hey, they gave us a bum cred-stick!"

Battle ensues, Sam takes a baton shotgun round to the back as he tries to escape, one of our NPC contacts who was nearby saves him, but gets killed in the process, and now we are wanted by La Cosa Nostra to this very day...

*giggle-snort*




In the way that we admit to no one he is there, and we spoil him horribly and feed him all sorts of drek he shouldn't be eating, and have named him.

Me and my team are running discrete security for a big shot politico. We're running gearless, but we don't expect much trouble.

My character is known as One-Shot Bill: a cantankerous, uncouth, bastard of a crazed mountain man hunter-turned-sniper who typically sports a sawed off .50 anti-material rifle and a pair of hatchets. He's fidgeting uncomfortably in a slightly small, turn of the 20th century suit with his prized tree-moss beard dejectly groomed into forced obedience by one of my teammates. We're eatting lunch with the other minor lackeys of the politico in an out of the way side room, while the big cheese wines and dines some of his fellow sleazeballs in the main area. I'm doing my best to not talk, because that typically never ends well, so Bill's stuck glaring at his food, which is actually very nice but which he loathes out of principal.

Sitting with us is a former lover of the politico who he kept on as a low level secretary, jilted and fuming over her treatment. "That scumbag, who the fuck does he think he is? Before he got into the politics game he was a nobody. Hell, I could tell you stories that would ruin the careers of everyone in a hundred foot radius, if only it wouldn't get me knocked off. God damnit! So I'm good enough to sleep with but not to be seen with? Is that it? Why the fuck am I sitting at the goddamn kiddie table?"

Bill turns to her in a rare moment of gruff compassion and blurts out, "Yeah, you seem pretty okay to me. At least there's a reason for me to sittin' here." It is at that very moment that I, as a player, accidently let crack the loudest, raunchiest fart of my life, incapacitating the entire room with uncontrollable laughter for a good ten minutes.

~Umidori

Well, it's been very well behaved so far. Good training, fairly inobtrusive ish. Just kinda wanders around, gets a tub icecream whenever the rest of us do, chills out with the face and the mage, and intimidates the frag out of the remaining prisoner + houseguest.

This is your friendly Mega-Mall Network. Your tampon has just reached 75% capacity you do not seem to be carrying a spare one. Proceed two aisles down to your right for this week's special offers in female hygiene, with NERPS for perfect protection in all situations.

Tampons would certainly carry an RFID tag. Any chance to demonstrate the degrading, humiliating aspects of dystopia shouldn't be passed up.

Well, SR4 DO say that RFID tags is basically into EVERYTHING (maybe except for food)...

But do I REALLY want my underwear, socks or shoes tell me the Dampness level, humidity or sweat factor - or for that matter how many hours it was since said items were changed.

Even worse - do I want them to network? Do they report back to their company so that they get a VERY personal profile of me?

Talk about targeted commercials...

i seem to recall rumors of energy bars with embedded rfid tags. Tho it could be from some thread trying to demonstrate the "insanity" of the SR4 matrix rules...

>_<

Let's see...

Spike an Energy Bar with one of your own "improved" security rfid tags with an improved Signal Rating of 5.

Get the target to eat it.

hack targets cyberware by using the RFID tag as a signal relay.

It's included in the fluff in Unwired as a warning about a runner who forgot to erase the tag he ate before infiltrating a high-security complex, but it's not something I for one would ever take seriously.

Any facility that has human traffic is going to pick up all the RFIDs from employees' personal products so if they really are that ubiquitous then the security rigger will have dozens of readings pinging information at him about underwear, hair gel, lunch choices, tooth caps, etc. and he'll get that constantly on every shift making an extra RFID or six seriously hard to spot. The facility could have an eraser system for all employees, but they might have tags they want or need to keep and erasing this many tags individually for each and every employee each and every time they enter the building is going to cost a lot of time and money.

So, ultimately, there are RFID tags in a lot of things (maybe even most things) but if you say it comes in things like chocolate bars (as per the Unwired fluff) then the whole system becomes too unwieldly to be used against you anyway.

If one decided to follow every piece of fluff seriously then each and every individual in SR4 would be their own personal spam zone from all the RFID tags.

You just need to filter data correctly. This can be done at the source of the data (the PAN centralizes all the RFID's data) or at the end-point with the computer mashing all the data together in a package called "Mr. [Name of the guy"]". This way, the spider will be able to spot the extra RFID: "Moving chocolate bar" might raise a few alarms in a high-security complex.

Mostly, I just assume that the paranoid runners tag erase everything. As in the example: why would there be an RFID for a gooey bar in the vault where no one else is supposed to be?

another thing could be that said facility only allow corp approved products beyond the checkpoint. Show up with a non-corp product and bam, red flag time.

I know how we love going off topic around here but there are these threads that might prove fun reading and perhaps any further discussion could go to one of them? Sorry, don't mean this to come off as rude in anyway, I just really enjoy reading both things, the crazy LMAO stories and the sordid tales of RFID SR4A and hope this helps:

visualizing rfid fields...
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...530&hl=rfid

Tag eraser, Where is it?
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...l=rfid&st=0

Jamming RFIDs in SR4A, Too bad the Headjammer doesn't cover the whole body.
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...095&hl=rfid

RFID tags, what's the shelf life
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...078&hl=rfid

I probably missed a bunch but I hope that helps some.

a mechanical model of a SR team plan?

http://www.chilloutzone.de/files/player.sw...HCeeWCejXnHAS/c

I don't understand that video.

There should be a part in there where something goes tragically wrong. Like, the arrow should have accidentally grazed a housecat who was supposed to be outside, who then flips out and runs around, knocking the burning candle flying at just the right arc to have it land in a wastebin and start a fire, which then has the cameraman scrambling for the pitcher of water, but he slips on a wet spot where it accidentally spilled and upends a table, at which point commandos storm into the building with assault rifles blazing.

~Umidori

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

And apparently you don't understand sarcasm and comedic irony.



~Umidori

i pick up on it, when there is a smiley or similar around. When its not, one either have to assume everything online is sarcasm until proven otherwise, or take everything at face value...

Well it was very obvious, if you read the second paragraph at all.

You post a video of something very intricate that takes forever to set up and is needlessly complex (comparing it to Shadowrun planning sessions), I comment on how it failed to catastrophically fail due to unforseen factors and turn into a bloodbath.



~Alja~

My reply in image format:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2yx55eh.png

We had a good one at our session last night. The mission was a B&E into a hidden underground lab run by Wuxing - the lab was underneath an office building run by a puppet company, and the only access the party could find was through an elevator that also serviced the rest of the building. (You needed the right access ID and passkey to get to the lab, of course.)

One of the players, looking at the floor plans, asked "The only access is this one elevator... doesn't that violate fire code or something?"

I looked back at him and said, with a straight face, "Yes, Wuxing's secret underground lab is in violation of fire codes."