So we completed a run last session, everyone was pretty happy with it as we blew the lab and took out all opposition without sustaining any nontrivial damage.

I'm a little dubious as to the success, as there were explosive rounds detonated on the roof, HE grenades fired all over the street (2 roto drones with launchers) and our mage flung a sports car up 80 meters from where it flew into a building.

Also, our rigger stole a semi trailer from the lab...

Am I just being paranoid, or will that draw heat? Is there any sort of reference scale for that sort of stuff?

That depends, do you consider the sun to generate heat? Because I think that is a fair comparison for the amount of heat your group just drew.

How much heat depends largely on what kind of game you're in. There are two major schools of thought about how Shadowrun should be played: the "Cloak and Dagger" crowd believes a perfect run is one where nobody realizes a crime has happened, and the "Pink Mohawk" crowd believes that a perfect run is one where you got to blow stuff up and still made enough money to buy bigger weapons.

In a CnD type game, the GM would use your last adventure to trap you in a nightmare. The media is going crazy for you, with a few underground sites cheering and the big boys trying to use you as a scapegoat for everything wrong with the world, the new face of violent crime. Knight Errant is going to be putting a ton of resources into bagging you as fast as possible, every CSI trick in the book with ritual magic and matrix work to boot. The longer you stay loose, the wilder the press will make it and the more pissed off the Chief is going to be. Expect to be hit with a SWAT team soon. In addition, whoever you hit on the last run, including the owner of the lab, the owner of the car, the owner of the building that got hit with the car, and anyone else caught by collateral damage is going to be gunning for you. The owner of the lab and the building are probably corporations with private armies, not to mention weapons development programs they would like to show off for good PR. "Our Black Jaguar strike team [AVAILABLE FOR HIRE] took down the terrorists last night, using our new Ultra-Gauss Assault Rifle [PREORDER NOW] and our premium Gladiator Powered Commando Suits [BEST OF SHOW THREE YEARS RUNNING]."

If the GM likes "Pink Mohawk", on the other hand...you done good.

I probably missed some potentially important mitigating factors.


1 - The "Lab" was an illegal BTL manufacturary
2 - The facility itself was an underground room that we demolished with 8kg of commercial explosives, so not a massive city block size explosion
3 - The lab was owned by go gangers from a reasonably large gang (although the defenders were kitted out at a level that suggests to me some larger involvement)

The go gangers were happy enough to let off LMG's in the car chase, so I figure some amount of heat had happened anyway, I'm mostly concerned with the carpet bombing of HE gren's and the Car being thrown into a random building (albeit probably in the slums)

Again, it really depends on your GM.

Personally, if that had happened in one of my games, I would take the following actions:

A) A pedestrian/employee of a local warehouse/resident of one of the buildings would have recorded the entire thing on his cybereyes. He would then sell the footage to whichever media outlet would pay the most.

B) The gangers would turn out to be backed by the Ancients, Yaks, an AAA, or maybe some organleggers.

C) The car would have turned out to belong to Damien Knight. He just happened to be slumming.





~R~

Uh, yeah, mitigating factors like it being illegal and loaded with gangers instead of SINners REALLY matter in Shadowrun.

In Shadowrun, this stuff is like real estate. Location, location, location. Bellevue and downtown Seattle calls for cloak and dagger runs because people who live in these areas like to think of themselves as normal and safe in a world with some semblance of sanity. The Barrens, on the other hand, has places like the Rat's Nest, or the Plastic jungles as well as a delightful group of escaped convicts called Zoners. Which, frankly suggests a world more like Escape from New York or Robocop than the one seen even in pulpy films like Ronin or Heat. So if "lab" means the sixth world equivalent of a meth lab in the Barrens and the people most put out by the property damage are the residents of the nearest ghoul den, then you are probably OK if you keep your mouths shut and weren't sloppy with your data trail. But if "lab" means it was a consumer electronics development division and MCT executives are publicly mourning the horrible tragedy, then well, you might be in a world of shit. It's a bit non-sensical, but well, it's an RPG setting and it's intended to be one stop shopping both for stealthy sorts as well as for groups that would prefer to get off at the first stop in Crazy Town so they can get into scraps with the cybered version of the Baseball Furies.

TLDR: Your first description sounded really bad but with details not so much.

Agree/win.

Tangentially related:

Pretty much what Whip just said. If you were doing this in the Barrens? The Star will shrug and move on. Any other abandoned / half demolished / ex-Urban Brawl arena is pretty much the same way.

When the real estate costs start going up? That's when you've got a problem, and that's when cloak and dagger is called for.

I agree as well. As the GM, try to set the tone of the neighborhood's security/response/consequences early. If you wait until the players start developing plans, you will be forced to nix some of their ideas when (as a GM) you should be finding ways to say 'yes'.

If the 'Star cracked down hard on every yahoo doing dumb shit with automatic weapons, there wouldn't be a Barrens.

As an example of location, location, location:

In a recent mission my team was brought in mid-mission to guard the subjects of a botched extraction. They knew they were going to have to fend off at least one recovery attempt by the wronged corp while waiting for the next exit window from the plex. They chose to set up in a squat in one of the worst parts of the Redmond Barrens. My game is usually pretty cloak-n-dagger professionals but in this case they chose the venue to go Pink Mohawk. There was a glorious shoot-out with helicopters going down and a featured performance by Mr. Willie Pete.

Moral of the story, you can have your Pink Mohawk and your CnD in the same game with the same characters.