I have a problem player in my missions group who drop gas grenades ( what they are actually called is slipping my mind) with a airborne toxin that does 10 stun damage, he is a street sam, so he is fairly prepared for this, the problem is that he has dropped these grenades in both a bar full of gangers, and a club. I have awarded plenty of notoriety to the entire team for allowing him to do this , but by my count he has killed over 50 innocents.

Not sure what to do, or if i am handling this right, even by using all the pushing the envelope options in the mod the party is well put together so they take out all the opposition that i send at them, can i up the ante more and start sending squads of cops, gangers, even other Shadowrunners at him even if it is out side the scope of the mission for all the excess damage and killing he has done?

Thanks

When you say "kill" 50 innocents; does he drop the gas grenade, and then kill them? Because just stun damage should just knock them unconscious. Also, if someone went to a club and set off a grenade, you can bet there would be a public outcry to capture the murderer. Throw the kitchen sink at him.

-DrZaius

He drops the gas grenade as i understand it , it constantly does 10 stun damage to all those within its range , 10 stun on an average dude would bleed over to physical, then they would take 10 more stun, and die.. when it drops normally 3 to 6 at a time..

I just wanted to make sure that with missions ( this is my first foray into missions, and new to SR for that matter, i have done other living campaigns before) i could leave the scope of the mission to do something like this, in a home game everything and their sister would be after this runner group, until they would need to bust out their back up charcters

I haven't run or played in a missions game, so I would defer to others who have to answer your question. However, I would rule as a GM that a "knockout gas" grenade wouldn't bleed into physical damage, just knock someone out.

-DrZaius

AFAIK, gas grenades don't inflect continuous attacks at their power. *Maybe* (MAYBE) 2 or 3 doses, depending in the ventilation.

It would only deal it's damage once. Stun damage is Stun damage, though, so it's possible someone with a low Will might take a point of physical from the STun Overflow... But it still won't kill them.

Aren't there rules for overdoses? I must have misread something.

Not really. P 257, SR4A.

It's basically one of those "GM call" type of situations, and applies to drugs and toxins, not to stun gas.

Bull

Okay, thanks! I think stun gas is obviously a toxin, but yeah.

This is not correct, effectively the gas grenade does 1 burst of 10 stun damage.

Incidentally, I've always wondered: when you buy a gas grenade, how many doses do you pay for? I mean, one capsule round has one full dose to pay for, right? If the gas grenade can do full dose to multiple people, it must have multiple doses in it, and you must have paid for them. Right?

Actually, the wording under "Concentration" on p255 when talking about toxins is a pretty strong argument in favor of continual doses of gas doing more damage, and the "Exceeding the Condition Monitor" discussion on p163 is pretty clear on stun overflow to physical.

I've always been careful when using Neurostun (my toxin of choice) to get my targets clear once they've been rendered unconscious.

Robert (aka Spanner)

Yes, but only (as I said) '2 or *maybe* 3 doses' if you're in the gas for several minutes. Which is a long time.

Stun-to-Physical overflow should be on a toxin-by-toxin basis, and that means it's really just the GM's call. Too much of some knockouts certainly will kill you, while others would just leave you out longer.

The_Dunner ruled that burstfire with toxin-laden Capsule Rounds staged the damage up so a short burst would deliver a toxin at +2 Power.
I know thats not a hard ruling on stacking grenades but its not a stretch to have multiple gas grenades stage the damage up rather than allowing extra resistance rolls.

Up to the GM at this point... two precedents to draw on.

God, I hate Gas/Chemical Grenades. Sucha pain in the ass. Combined with the less than useful or coherent drug rules in SR4, they're an even larger pain in my ass.

First off, unless the room is airtight or gas is being constantly pumped into it, it'll dissipate enough that you don't have to take a second dose.

Otherwise, it's GM call. A stun gas grenade in a bar isn't going to kill everyone in it. Strapping someone to a breathing mask and pumping it into them, then yeah, that will eventually do it.

Bull

I remember a few years back when soviet special forces used a sleep agent to help pacify a theater full of hostages and terrorists. Alot of people didnt wake up.Read all about it.

Depending on ventilation any gas would linger, sinking to the floor where all the bodies are, replacing the oxygen

True. But then, the Russians managed to detonate a Nuclear Power Plant, something that is difficult to do even with poor safety conditions. And up in Cleveland, we managed to set a freaking river on fire. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's normal.

THere are no clear rules to cover this, and is specifically written in as a GM's call. For a public Missions game (Convention, or Open Play at a Demo Team Firebase), I would say don;t mess around with optional stuff, and just rule it goes off once, and that's it. For a home game, it's GMs call.

Bull

I will rule it only goes off once, but he still drops at least three in quick succession to make sure he gets everyone, personally I could care less if he kills or stuns an entire room of nobodies, it the indiscriminate use of force that I am not sure how to punish with in the realms of missions

Thanks for your help guys

I think you've already solved your own problem, there. You've dumped wads of Notoriety on them, yes? What's their Public Awareness looking like? Nice and high? Enough for them to be hunted by law enforcement a la Waco? Or tracked down as terrorists?

If so, my suggestion (if you're looking for advice) is to have the Powers That Be track the team until they're in an uninhabited area, then send some drones or a t-bird or two to carpet-bomb the place.

If you don't want to be that evil (and I don't blame you; I wouldn't be that evil without a lot of in-character warnings), I'd say the next time the team is somewhere they can be trapped, surround them with troops. Then have somebody in command outside call in, "We don't want all of you, we just want [runner with the highest Notoriety]. We prefer not to take out the rest of you to get him/her, but we're not afraid to do so if that's what it comes to."

If you want to be evil with plausible deniability, pass a note (or otherwise speak privately) to one of the players, in character. Tell them that they've been contacted by someone who wants [runner with the highest Notoriety] in custody, and they're willing to pay a lot for it to happen. Then let your PCs deal with the problem.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: By my reading, the strict RAW strongly implies that grenades are resolved individually, as an environmental effect rather than a direct attack. Sucks if you're not prepared for it, of course. Is this for a strictly Missions-based game?

Due to their high Public Awareness reduce their pay for missions because they just aren't discrete enough. After all, their rep is that they get caught doing obnoxious things so the Johnson is either going to hire them for cheap or get some REAL runners who can be covert... which of course costs more. I mean, why pay THOSE rates to an indiscreet team when for the same nuyen you could get pro's?

You CANNOT do this in missions btw. It's not your call to make.

Sorry if i get beaten up on killing a theoretical PC for mind controlling their J i think there's a line to be drawn here. And to be honest, pay rates in missions are already the saddest joke in all the land.

Yeah, I thought about that after I posted it. File it under 'In home games you can do whatever you want' I 'reckon.

Aaron had some very good suggestions. Personally, I like to feed players like that a taste of their own medicine. Have the Johnson at the next meet use the same gas on the whole runner team. Add in as much narco-ject or stunballs as needed. When they wake up, bad-samurai-gas-player is gone, and the Johnson proceeds with negotiations for the next Mission as if nothing happened. Tell the now taken care of player to roll up a new character, one who's not a d-wad.

Mesh

Aarons solution is also outside of missions, just saying.

Honestly the OP's basic problem is steming from a misunderstanding of the grenade rules, which are already somewhat slip shod in the case of gas grenades. But ultimately the character in question is not likely to be killing whole rooms full of people..

Further I want to get a personal gripe off my chest. Please do not put your own personal morality on the J's in missions or frankly Shadowrun period. It's bad story telling and inconsistent with the world view.. These are people who regularly hire professional criminals to do deniable operations some of which likely involve potentially killing a whole bunch of people. I do not think they would have nearly the problem you ascribe to them. I would personally find it much more reasonable to go slightly out of line and have the J say "I need minimal noise on this, zero out collateral damage." But honestly outside of their mission parameters and a basic expectation of secrecy and ability to deny the teams actions I really doubt your average J gives a frag how the job actually gets done. Individual J's like individual people may vary, but given the nature of the world I can't see most caring.

The trick to making morality work in SR is to make the players want to buy into it, not randomly killt hem when they step out of line.

Only for convention and other public games. If it's a private table that uses Missions adventures, it's fair game (no pun intended).


I believe that frankly Shadowrun period states that killing innocents has negative consequences. On or around p. 265, I think. I'm not saying you're wrong or right, just that the hymnal seems to imply a certain moral slant in and of itself, rather than having one GM's personal morality projected onto it.

True but that's not saying anything, a home game is a home game is a home game.



No actually what shadowrun states is killing an innocent person may cause a notoriety gain. Then we get into fun things like what constitutes an innocent person in the world of Shadowrun. While it is possible that there might be an innocent person in the theoretical bar full of gangers to say that because they died is a reason for the Johnson to pre-emptively whack a Runner is a logical leap i'm not willing to make.

*shrug* There are cops and worse who exist specifically to punish this. Problem solved.

I think it'd be cool if future missions had an add-a-goon option that raised the number of goons for:

a) Public Awareness ("Hey Joe, its Killer Cabana the famous murderer! Grab reinforcements!")
b) Indebted ("You give us the vig or we take a piece of you home for da boss!")

And yes, add goons not increase TR. Let payouts stay the same and difficulty increase.

As a Missions GM I am perfectly free to add whatever I want to the game to deal with Notoriety and Public Awareness as I see fit.

SR Missions aren't a pick a path or choose your own adventure book.

Frankly I think it's a waste of space to write in and encode all these "Missions" rules (I have horrifying visions of 30+ pages of boilerplate missions text in every adventure) when it is the GM's job to go Yes, No, and "WTF? Orbital Space Cows" fall on your character.

On the other hand, you might be able to write enough rules and deal with enough situations that you won't need a GM at all.

And by doing your own thing enough you may not need a Module at all. Now can we set the sarcasm aside?

Pet peeve: Telling other posters "No" makes them all defensive and flamey. Keep it cool, omae.


What interests me in this scenario is *why* there was an innocent in the line of fire. Did the GM have the bad guys start a fight someplace public, counting on the PCs to "play nice" and fight with a disadvantage? That would be the GM's fault, not the players. Did the players go looking for hostages or bystanders to up the mayhem? That's sick, and will play well on the news. Expect to get as much mayhem as you can handle as the media circus ramps up.

Could it have been an honest mistake? I can't see that happening. Either the GM deliberately left little ethical boobytraps for the players to step on, or the players went out of their way to start a major police action.

Most Shadowrunners should never deal with "innocents" when they're on the clock. You meet the Johnson, you collect your gear, and you hit the enemy. If an innocent gets shot, somebody screwed up. My money is on the GM being a dick, though.

So am I reading a module to the players are am I unleashing my imagination and the players to have fun and excitement in an environment unfettered by some other GM who isn't even at the table and most likely will never interact with the same player?

In my mind its a judgment call with having fun being the goal. Some GM's might appreciate the structure. Some might not.

I can think of a few folks on the CGL demo team I've met over the years that preferred sticking to text and stats over improv-ing stats and that has allowed things like Notoriety, Public Awareness, and Indebted to be abused. I'm suggesting training wheels to show a clear way to hinder that and not at all saying you or anyone else should be forced to use them. As is though they are being abused. My team has a member with Public Awareness 7 who jokes openly and repeatedly about his character wanting to get sponsored by NASCAR and Indebted goes from negative to extra-super positive quality when the GM's don't persecute those not paying back the vig.

So...
Do I think its a good addition? Yes.
Do I think you personally need it? Don't know you so I couldn't say.
Do I think your preference to improv penalties is common? No. Damn sure not in the CGL-sponsored games I've played.

Well, if you poke someone with a needle that does 10 Stun, the stun monitor is now full.
Now you poke him again, after he has taken the stun damage, and the damage transfers to physical.
the physical monitor is now full. the unlucky bastard is dead or dieing. cause: overdose on tranquilizer.
basically what you would expect, if you hit someone with enough tranquilizer to drop a horse with.
now with grenades, this becomes slightly more complicated.
for simplicity let's say that one grenade deals 10d stun one time.
and if you drop another grenade, well, guess what? you just gassed a whole room of people to death.

RAW you're right. I think what people have a problem with is this dynamic doesn't match reality (yes, I know RAW vs RL ad nauseum). When a drug goes from "standard dosage" to reaching its toxicity level is usually not at a double dose. Two sleeping pills can knock out an adult. Four sleeping pills won't kill you.

Mesh

In the core rulebook (Seriously, I want to ban the term RAW, I hate it it with a passion ), the suggestion for overdosing is to increase the power by a point or two per dose, IIRC (I'm being too lazy to look the exact wording up). I'd say you can run with this if necessary. But unless the player was intending to kill the room with stun gas, I wouldn't worry about it.

As for the discussion about "Choose Your Own Adventure" vs "GM choice", well... I think we need to find a happy medium for GMs working in an "open" environment, like Con games. We have to trust our GMs to do a good job, and we want them to have fun. Simply reading a prepared script for 4 hours may not be fun for them. So they have some leeway. By the same token, we want players experiencing the core adventures that we publish, and we don't want to go too far off board, so that when they play the next adventure under a different GM, they haven't thrown the game completely out of whack.

But, at the end of the day, the biggest thing is that we should be having fun. That's more important than anything else.

Bull

The core book reads,
"Concentration
If a toxin is applied at concentrated levels (more than a
single dose), the gamemaster may increase the Power of the
toxin as he feels appropriate, as well as increasing the damage it
causes or its other effects by an appropriate amount.
Likewise, if a character remains in contact with a toxin over
an extended period, such as being caught in a gas-filled room
for several minutes, she may receive an additional dose and suffer
stronger effects (or have to resist the toxin again)."

For Neuro-Stun, it reads,
"This colorless and odorless knockout gas is used
for emergency-containment conditions. Neuro-Stun comes
in different concentrations. Some become inert after only 10
minutes of contact with the air; others become inert after only
1 minute. Wind and other environmental conditions may disperse
the gas more quickly."

I'd just go with gas grenades, having the version of the gas that goes inert after one minute, by default. This way, You'd be correct to just increase the power slightly.

PS:
The core rule book use to be called BBB (Big Black Book), may I suggest, BGB (Big Green/Grey Book, SR4 is green, and the 20th Anniversary, is grey)

But 50 innocent bystanders also stunned?

If I were the GM of this SRM with a player that did that, first I'd warn them of severe consequences for such an action. If they continue anyway, I would have no problem with putting their character on the "public menace wanted by authorities" all over the Matrix. And I'd give them +1 Notoriety for each innocent they stunned, which in the case described equals +50 notoriety.

Congratulations, you just made your character unplayable through your own actions because no one will hire a runner with +50 Notoriety.

Stunning? Eh.

Stunning to death? Okay. I could see the Notoriety boost for that. Sleep gassing a room of people is a rather humane way to control the crowd.

The GM , me, was following the mission that was laid out for the players, they needed to get to the top floor of a triad owned club to find an assassin responsible for killing a little girl. The club was packed to because of the time that they were running the mission, to keep a fire fight to the minimum ,and to make a combat heavy group use some of their other skills. At least that is what I saw when I read the mission. I used bouncers,low end triad thugs, to make it difficult to walk right up into the secure offices of the club, in response the grenades were dropped. Dick GM maybe, but I tend to want to challenge players and throw things at them that are a challenge to handle, not to mention I was following the official mission.

Anyway I have taken some of the suggestions to the table and we got it all cleared up if he tries that again.

I agree that gassing a whole club full of people would probably get you some public awareness but if noone died no noteriety unless the johnson says so. I would want to know where they hid those grenades to get them past the bouncers.

No notoriety for gassing people?

Saddest part of that story was the detail that many of the unconscious hostages were laid out in the parking lot on their backs and in the rain. Some did die from the massive amount of gas that was pumped through the ventilation system, but many more actually drowned.

Edit: the gas was pumped into the theater (probably though the HVAC system) for 30 minutes prior to the assault, and while all the hostages were KO'd, the majority lived, although most have long-term health issues related to their long-term exposure to the gas.

Most modern nightclubs have vigorous ventilation and fire-control systems. I could see a problem in an underground club in the barrens having zero ventilation, but a licensed club would have some heavy safe-guards. Knock-out gas certainly could kill some people, with the elderly and children most at risk. I imagine some otherwise healthy club-goers might be on drugs that would have a bad interaction w/ KO gas, but generating 50 dead bodies with KO gas seems awfully heavy.

Now that it has happened, you will have to deal with it somehow, so maybe this was the night everyone in the club was trying some designer downers that compromised their respiratory system and that combined with nasty KO killed them. That would take some of the heat off the perp, without really absolving him.

What if you bought some KO gas grenades that turned out to be filled with Nerve gas? That could kill 50 people and make for a mighty interesting run and resolution.

I don't think it was a 'sleep agent'. I think it was a (powerful, surgical-grade) contact/inhalation anesthetic that they refused to identify fast enough to save over 100 people.

I just watched Oldboy last night. Odaisu said, "Later I learned the valium gas they used on me was the same used by the Russians in the theatre that killed all those people." He had an alcohol problem though so I'm not sure how true that is.

Mesh

Not very. Everyone's middlingly certain it was a weaponized version of fentanyl.

Does the player in question actually know that his stun gas grenades are prooving deadly? He may not be intending to murder rooms full of people, after all.

If you're talking about Narcojet, it specifically says in its fluff text that it has no negative effects beyond knocking people unconscious! I would just rule that it doesn't do physical overflow and/or (to make it more balanced overall) only does its 10 Stun (Toxin Power) once, or once per MINUTE (so it also doesn't inflict EVERYONE IS UNCONSCIOUS MWAHAHAHAHA which is more of a game balance issue) rather than every turn.

Anyway, this samurai is at least using Narcojet. People ought to stop making him out to be Hannibal Lecter!

Narcoject is Injection, not Inhalation. Generic stun-gas is Neuro-Stun; it fails to say 'no side effects'. :/

Oops! My bad on that one.