Considering he had access to the logs so he'd know if someone came inside the building, I'd say he was fairly safe as it was.

Given all their firepower. Why didn't they put 2 Smart Firing Platforms with LMG's aiming at the door to the command center. A pilot 4 program with the targeting autosoft. You have R6 cameras mounted on the LMGs so you can keep an ar window open displaying what they see.

Operational Security is important. If you have a weak link, shore it up.
These guys have a sub for crying out loud, they could afford a pair of like 4k firing platforms.

That's what every Spider thinks before a Shadowrun team steps in.

It's just my opinion, of course. If, for instance, this particular GM would have killed the TM even with immediate aid, then I'd count it as Fiat since it could not be changed. The act of taking out a weak link is not, in my opinion, fiat itself.

Well, let's look at the initial description again. The TM went offline, the hacker went to assist and got sedated by an 'unknown assailant'. Depending on whether or not the hacker got to resist the attack, both events may be fiat or not.

Yes, I agree. It depends on how this GM did it. I wished to point out to those who thought the situation itself was fiat that it need not be.

The GM at one point said it was fiat, so it is likely it could not be changed.

Sure, sure. I do agree it need not be fiat, and it was a combination of factors that put everyone in this pretty little predicament.

mutilation + mass murder I suspect, was way worse than the GM pulling an alarm

If the team had played it straight, gone non-lethal or even been ghosts in the night, then the alarm wouldn't have been so bad. Quick run and gun and out they go. Instead, they decided to slaughter wholesale, stand and fight against incoming police, and then managed to get caught. Honestly, they screwed up, and badly. The shadows are deadly. They need to learn that.

I say let them rot and go with FNG's or a whole new team that hears about their old team on ShadowSea

Well actually you can't tell if a GM pulls through with a storyline unless the team really gives it a try.
If I think back there were several occasions where I thought as a GM:" This is happening like in the book. There is no way the players could evade it."
Well, I was mistaken more then once.
To the positive (there is no way for a shortcut) and also to a negative (there is no way to screw this up) my expectations were not matched.

In this case, no I don't think it makes sense. If you are on an unsecured battlefield yes, guarding the corner stone to your mission makes sense. If a building has 5 guards, its after hours and no one else is there and you have dealt with the 2 guards and you know where the other 3 are and are moving in to deal with them. Putting a guard on the TM is just a waste of resources. What are you guarding him against? The Johnson, wants you to succeed so he wont double cross you until after you steal and hand over the vase. There aren't any more guards, no one else is there, why are you wasting resources guarding someone when no one is around? You are a group of 4 or 5 guys, you can't really have many people standing around guarding people n a safe zone. Back in 1-2e you might have someone around guarding the decker just to pull the plug in case he starts having a seizure, but that is probably a mook NPC guarding him and not a player.

The only way someone is in there and jumping the TM is if the GM wrote into his notes, someone jumps the spider and sets off the Alarm when they reach the Vase. A guard being there wont change that, a guard just means the GM asks him to make a perception check, nods and then asks him to make a willpower check. Then he tells him he is unconscious.

The only logic to guarding him is you rolled 2 hits n your RPG knowledge skill.

Any other Shadowrun team that might be interested in over a hundred authentic articles of history stored in a museum, any regular security checks that may come by, anything that might jeopardize your Run and turn it from success to flaming Hell Hole.

It has nothing to do with out of character knowledge. It has everything to do with being a professional Shadowrunner. If I am in a secure location (depending on the character) I am going to make sure the greatest weakness is most secure of all, especially on uncertain ground where anything can happen. I hope you are not arguing that it is fine to leave a weakness unguarded. That really is asking for trouble. Part of the Shadowrun creed is to watch your back. That means, don't take chances. If you can do that without risking resources (how much does it cost you to put a Hacker in the same room to keep a good eye on the group while the TM Spider keeps an eye on incursions?) then all the better.

Otherwise, my hope is that this logic isn't used in other scenarios too. Because if it is and someone hired a team to get your team at *any* point, you'd be proper screwed.

My post-fu is weak.

The day you're not paranoid enough is the day you die.





-karma

Quoted for truthery.

A big YMMV, and couple of IMHO's. But this all depends on the drek factor or difficulty level players are at.

1. No matter what your intel is, it is always a guess. Therefore you can assume there or only 5 guards and trust that intel, but what if there is a 6th? Or even a night janitor that is a former Desert wars veteren? Never assume any facility you break into is secure.

2. The NPC techno could betry you for reasons unknown too. Having a guard there insures (to a degree) that there would not be a double cross.

3. Others looking for the object, yeah how many players are there looking for this thing. One person considers it valuable enough to hire runners, would another group do the same?

4. The assumption the players can make is the Mr. J want's them to succeed. He may not care, and may have alterior motives.

FInally ? to the OP, what leg work did the group do prior to the run (if any)?

Sorry, if this was already mentioned I am not able to go through the whole thread. I suggest you send them to jail, have the players make new characters, play for several sessions, and then use the jailed characters against them. You can explain it how ever you wish: they were "recruited" by a corp or a government agency. Introduce the fact that they feel betrayed. ("Why didn't you come a nd rescue us, we were freinds!" type stuff.) Some good role playing moments could be had there, I think.

And you don't need them in the upcoming firefight where you deal with the known threat? So you go there undermanned leaving some people to protect the TM on the off chance another shadowrun team is hitting the same museum at the same time or whatever other totally improbable thing people have come up with in this thread. Why do I suspect that if the team had split up and left forces to guard the TM and this thread was about how they got there butts handed to them by the 3 remaining guards who were not suckers in training but there trainers people would be saying how bad there tactics were for leaving forces back to guard the TM in an obviously safe situation.

That's what the Spider security is for, eh? If you have five guards in an *obviously* known situation, then you *obviously* don't need that extra gun, do you?

See, it works both ways.

You are free to go with what you want. I've given my reasons plenty of times and I see a few others agree with my assessment. Apply those decisions in a game and test it for yourself. It is the only way to be certain of something.

Umm, assuming that the runners had worked before, and they had an outsider (NPC) with them on a run. I sure as hell wouldn't trust somebody on my first run with them. Always be prepared to Double cross first!

"The 'Run's not over until the Johnson has screwed you."

Ok, I think I'll need to clarify a few things:
-Building security: Surveillance wasn't top notch. In fact, it was an old building (think about a 19th century manor), and each room was guarded by 2 cameras on opposing ends. The cameras were old-school, hardwired ones. The individual showcases are a different story; those had high-level wards and a laser grid around them. The players knew all this from their legwork, and they were able to get the drop on the museum's security spider. Other than the 3 guards & spider in the security room, there were 20 regular guards patrolling the estate.

-Technomancer vs Assailant: I've had one of the players pre-roll a couple of dice, but he didn't know what they were for. Those were the TMs checks to detect the intruder. Due to the outdated nature of the security grid, it's not that tough to sneak past it; the clumsy PC mage managed it too.

-Hacker vs Assailant: the team's PC hacker actually detected the person ambushing him, and the image of said person was multicast to the entire team. The ambusher and the hacker fought it out, but naturally, the hacker was no match vs a dedicated fighter. And I seriously consider banning Narcoject capsule rounds... those things are pretty much instagib.

Reading the last post, I'm seeing a disconnect.

I don't think this is about technical aspects, it's about style. You're running a game where the players are merrily mutilating bodies and getting away with it. They killed or wounded 15 SWAT members and SWAT took them alive.

Now personally, I have serious doubts about such people being taken alive in today's society, but I don't think anyone here has any doubts about taking them alive in Shadowrun. There has been an across the board consensus that if anyone else here was running the game there would be new characters being rolled up.

However, the question is, where do you go from here? Clearly you aren't going to kill the characters because you and your player's aren't running that sort of table. (If you were, they would have been doing the job and getting out, not redecorating the place with bodies.) And that's fine, it's your table.

If you're not going to have an element of risk to the players, let them or help them escape. It's that simple. If you are, just kill them and get it over with.

IMHO-that does not qualify as GM fiat.

1. Knowing that security is so flawed, they should have done more to protect the Technomancer. A retransmitter might have helped here too (so the tecno could control and remain with the group.

2. Yeah narcojet is nasty, just remember that the damage takes place at the end of the combat round due to the speed of the toxin. Irrelevent in a suprise round though.

3. Hacker had a chance...oops. What if he had a summoned spirit with him?

They do not have access to that, since the PC mage is a free spirit, and they cannot conjure.

The way I see it, it is GM Fiat if the GM thinks it was Fiat. Maybe they should have been better prepared but if the GM thinks it is Fiat, then it is, especially if it was something that needed to happen for plot reasons.

Which means they deserve punishment for being stupid (mutilating corpses, turning the place into a warzone) but not for the things beyond their control (the alarm being sounded, getting caught to an extent). The problem is, they were caught. For my money, they deserve a chance to save their characters.

I'd vote on someone in authority offering them a nearly suicidal mission. If they refuse they get executed. If they succeed some other slag will be executed in their place, they'll get a DNA change, cosmetic surgery, a new identity (and a secret their employer hangs over their head). Of course, since they're officially dead, they lose all their contacts, street cred, notoriety, essentially becoming unknowns until they reestablish their rep. And if they reveal their new identities to any of their old contacts, they run the risk of someone selling them out and going on UCAS' most wanted.

My iron-clad (secret) rule is that if I take PC's alive, I give them a chance for escape/rescue. Killing characters off-screen just seems like an incredibly douche-y thing to do.

That being said, if these guys were playing with me, they would have been rolling up some new toons. If they want to play brutal and gritty, you need to do likewise. Really, if I were you, I would consider taking the campaign in a syndicate war type of direction. Or something like that where cops are less likely to come poking around and getting pissed over a pile of bodies. Or if you start over, maybe a nice Barrens gang banger campaign.

(On a side note, that's probably the best argument I've ever heard for never taking a Free Spirit mage - a real mage would have had a watcher spirit on the new guy, and could have summoned up a bound spirit to hold off the assailant while the meat bodies were in route to take care of it.)

Well, at least the mage can survive, it'll just have to reform itself into a different humanoid. It can also take the metaplanr shortcut to any locale it has been to.

Depends on with whome he has his friendship pact.

@Mooncrow
I would never kill any player in off time. Why, if you can make them walk to the gallons pole.
And the rest may try a rescue or just watch the execution on trid.