I'd also love to hear about how this was handled at conventions, was there a difference from when you played at home? Was there differences at events run directly by FASA, FanPro, and CGL (or between those for that matter) compared to private citizens running it (even though they may have received prize support from the publisher)? My understanding is that Hand of God/Escape Certain Dead was/is removed as an option for graded tournaments? If so what was the motivation for that?

War stories will be tolerated, and likely even read ...if you also answer the above questions.

Well, keeping the caveat that I started playing in the SR4 era in mind, I allow it RAW, for the most part. If, however, a PC "dies" and survival even being possible is debatable, I allow each player and myself 30 seconds to say why or why not, then we vote on the feasibility. The decision is still in the GMs hands (namely my hands), but I will allow myself to be overruled by a unanimous player decision.

On the other hand, I've GMed a few gritty arcs where Hand of God required burning all your Edge just to get a 50/50 survival roll, so, yeah. I don't necessarily recommend this approach though, it's a good way to lose players. The one I posted above is better IMO.

It honestly hasn't come up very often. At my home table Hand of God has always been a once per character event. Period. Our group decided up front that you only get one second chance. Allowing it multiple times lessens the fear factor too much for my taste. It carries the full costs according to the rules, and leaves you alive but horribly wounded (one box below dead). I reserved the right as GM to disallow it's use in any case of extreme player stupidity, something I so far have not had to do.

As someone who organized and ran the Tournament at Origins and Gen Con for a number of years, I can honestly say that A) It was allowed and B) I don't think it ever came up, that I know about. I never had it come up at one of my tables.

Then again, we rarely killed characters during the tournament either, unless they did something colossally stupid (At which point, they weren't likely to win the tourney either, and in the old days, weren't progressing to later rounds since they were elimination based).

I personally never killed off any characters. Came close a couple times through bad dice rolls on my part of the part of the players, but it was only a close call.

We had one tournament where there was a Scripted PC Death at the end of Round Two, and the player would take over an NPC that they had been escorting around for two nights for ROund Three. I know a couple GMs didn't make it clear enough what was happening and the players kinda freaked out, thinking they had screwed up (And one team that played it really, really safe and really smart got a "Silly" ending when the GM gave up trying to find a logical way to off the PC and had him hit by a bus out of nowhere. Not ideal, but funny as hell ).

I know that at a Gen Con tournament before I was involved at all, during the Dunkelzahn Election, the players were apparently bodyguards for Dunklezahn, and somehow they decided that he was the bad guy and pulled guns on him. THat ended up as a TPK (and a weed out for the next round).

At Gen Con one year following YotC, the PCs were FBI agents trying to track down the Maltese Falcon (WHich had been stolen from the Smithsonian at the Origins Tourney). They followed the trail to Denver, and eventually find out Ghostwalker was behind the theft for some reason (It had started resonating an odd magic after YotC and he wanted to check it out). One of the PCs thought he'd try and arrest Ghostwalker right at the end of the tournament. Ghostwalker ate him.

Other than that, yeah, not much in the way of PC deaths. Usually we didn't design the tournaments to be meatgrinders or anything like that. THe PCs were scored, but a lot of it was based on Roleplaying, their ability to figure out and follow the adventure, problem solving, and general rules knowledge. So we didn't often write in situations that were likely to outright kill players.

Bull

We had only one Character really use it, in all this time we were playing.
And afterwards, he had to take a hit to his lifestyle cost and had to adhere to regular rituals(feeding the koi in a pond in one of the yamatetsu owned compounds on exactly the same time and day once a week, taking REALLY GOOD CARE of a bonsai tree and buying a pint of the most expensive ice cream and letting it melt outside in the sun on his roof, strictly adhering to feng shui in his lifestyle/house/flat) as an offering to the gods, else he would simply drop dead again.
A Character of mine basically had HoG forced onto him, because i had forgotten about a troll size modified docwaggon super platinum contract, when i wanted to get rid of the character <.<

It has rarely come up with my group. When it does, it's because someone who was doing everything right just got some really ruddy rolls. The character usually appears dead and is moved on to the disposal phase (or whatever is appropriate for the situation). When he wakes up, he gets a free flaw for his trouble, and still needs some pretty serious medical care. I also only use HoG when requested by the player, and since my players are pretty new, I don't think they know to ask.

We've always ignored the line that described the rule as optional (in fact, I didn't even realize that it was optional until I scanned the SR3 core books listing all the optional rules in force for our new campaign late last year). Other than that, straight up.

In principle edge cases could exist in which HoG would be denied, but they're generally not worth considering.

~J

In my experiences it hasn't come up that often.
Often when a character caused their own demise (through a lapse of judgment, grave oversight, etc), they would simply craft a new character.
When a person has been really attached to a character, or just wasn't done yet they have used this rule, but it is more the exception than the rule.
I attribute this largely to the dynamics of Shadowrun and the attitudes that come to our table. We know it isn't a boardgame or a wargame and it isn't like "that game that causes cancer" so players are rarely out "to win".

Really? I find the single biggest motivator for not HoGing is the fact that you proceed to lose your entire karma pool, crippling your character; especially early on, before a lot of effort and emotional attachment go into the character, it just gives better mechanical results to let the character die and start over.

~J

I think I've seen it actually used once against the worst dice roll and situation ever.