Just got done running my first Shadowrun session, and my players acted too good. The mission was simple- Break into a biker compound out in the sprawl and shut down their 'Jazz' operation. Johnson just wanted the place destroyed, and no more bikies in the area. (I wanted a cut and dry mission to start things off, with a simple twist- innocent bystanders.)

The job was going good, until the players realized that there were innocents in the compound- some of the biker's families in nearby houses, and a few Jazz addicts roped into manufacturing the stuff in the lab itself. The group had botched a few aspects of recon earlier, and were planning to simply toss grenades/summon fire spirits/get the heck out. Players abandoned their plans and set about evacuating the place/stunning the bikers, even explaining their actions to the biker leader.

Here's the part that blew my mind. When it's all over and all they have to do is toss a few grenades in to finish the job, they blow up the Jazz as well. All four of them, in an instant, agreed to blow up the drugs. I was like "wut?"

Anyone else have players act just too darn nice before?

EDIT: Woot, looks like I've stirred something up with this one. Came home to find four pages of comments, a personal best. My replies on page 4.

That kind of stuff is worth good street cred. They did their run well, and Johnsons will be willing to hire them out more.

On the one hand, they're not going to get good reputations for being ruthless and stone cold killers.

On the other, those are a dime a dozen, this shows they have thinking skills, morals (Of a sort. This is still an industry based on face shooting for fiscal returns.), and are less likely to attempt to garner secondary income from Shadowruns (Which Mr. Johnsons do enjoy, as it does give a less risk percentage to the operation being blown or discovered because some greedy Decker/Hacker took some Datafiles that were just lying around.).

They might get called "Goody Two-Shoes" by some folks in the Shadows, but the people that are heavily anti-drug (And, let's face it, there's a lot of them even in the Shadows!) will respect the group all the more for it. Street Cred indeed. It's a "Good thing" they did.

Definitely. Our team is known as "Fight Club" and we (unintended) do collateral damage wherever we go. So nobody is hiring us anymore to do "sneak in and steal something without sombody noticing it"-runs. If you turn in a specific direction, the only thing that should be happening is that Mr. J is not giving you "unsuitable" contracts anymore. No team can do everything. If your team is fine with this reputation...go for it.

I wouldn't count on that after "even explaining their actions to the biker leader".

Also, most groups I've ran with or GMed for were strictly on the G side of the alignment chart: one used a truckful of drugs to frame a stained politico and gain some favours from the face's contacts, police destroying the drug, instead of selling them; another jumped a bunch of insect spirits to save whatever poor soul they had caught, and now have an orphan ork girl in their hideout :\

What's so terribly suprising about this? That they gave up on a somewhat noticable profit (really, Jazz is a ceap-ass drug, and they get to sell it at some 30% list price by the rules) for self-respect? It's not a bad thing. Explaining who they run for to the biker leader is, of course, but telling hiom moral stories is not, especially if they destroy the gang's lab and maybe rough them up a bit to scare them, it has a nice Batman/Rorschach/vigilante vibe. Gives the group a recognisable feature to stand out from the bunches of gangers who off people left, right and center, and may help their street cred. If they overdo it, and botch jobs for morality, just give them notoriety and dial back the qualityof their jobs.

But yes, I have done this too, as a player. If it fits the characters, what's to complain?


Here's hoping she's housebroken.

Any group of shadowrunners is going to gravitate towards a specific "level" of nastiness. Some are stone-cold and wouldn't blink at massacring an orphanage, others are "moral" and only take jobs that they can defend ("Taxes are unAmerican! Smuggling is an act of patriotism!"), others are somewhere in the middle ("Killing people in the Business is okay, but no harm to bystanders who didn't know what they were getting into"). None of these is wrong.

After a while, you'll get a reputation for your particular style, and that lets Johnsons know if they should hire you. A Johnson who wants you to do something you'd be ethically comfortable with, can expect you to do the run with fewer complications. This can make doing business much easier.

On the other hand, now and then there could be an adventure where Johnson is trying to set up the "softies", thinking to exploit their naivety. If the players find out, then you could spin an awesome payback-for-Johnson adventure off of it. Time to teach Mr. Johnson that just because you're not a total bastard doesn't mean you're harmless!

I'm missing the problem.

The vast majority of my characters are NOT psychopaths. Although I don't tend to take the pacifist trait (because, quite frankly, at least one person on the team is usually playing someone with zero regard for (meta)human life), my characters tend to prefer NOT killing people, not destroying property, and not making society worse. Alas, that tends to be what they're paid to do.

A team with ethics could easily attract loyalty. Think Burn Notice if you're young, or if you're an old fart, like me, think Stingray. Heck, even A-Team featured ethical criminals who only blew up the bad guys.

100% agree. Unfortunately this is something the GM has to handle, because "pissing a Johnson off" is always rewarded with a point of notoriority, no matter if he earned it or not. I already had to pay off 3 points of not. because of this...and have still 3 ones left.^^

Well, the pacifist quality is not that bad. Non-leathal ammunition is better than normal. So here goes BP for free. Mostly.

Non-lethal ammo is more expensive^^

Well, your stereotypical runners are self-serving calculating bastards, not homicidal psychopaths. So runners helping kittens down the trees kinda seem strange.

IMO the typical runner is a self-serving calculating bastard because either his start in life was very bad or he had to turn into the shadows because of a happening something later. They do what they have to do, but this doesn´t mean that they lost the respect for life completely. If you don´t get paid to hurt somebody, why should you? Hellboy is a tough bastard but his love to kittens is nothing i would mention "strange".

Lets put it like that: The rules make it possible to be very friendly because it is mostly the most effective road.

why the hell burn the drugs? they all have a fixer or smuggler connection. Just get them out of town and sell them. That's the only thing I was confused about. I would even make a your life for your drugs trade...

The mission was "shut down their 'Jazz' operation". Burning the drugs definitely sends a message that this is not a good place for anyone to run a Jazz operation.

Personally, I don't see why simply having a fixer or smuggler connection would be enough to be able to unload the drugs. I'm sure there are fixers and smugglers who don't touch the stuff. From a fixer standpoint, he has a corporate rep to keep up and moving drugs isn't going to make that rep particularly better. From a smuggler rep, the question is, what do they smuggle? Weapons? People? Food? It could well be that whatever connections the team has are more life relief workers than hardened criminals. (Henry Rollins and Ice-T's characters in Johnny Mnemonic come to mind.)

I'm sorry. The only thing your saying is, that either loyalty rating or the share isn't high enough. If he still refuses to handle it, I ask him to find me somebody who will.

The discussion was whether the team was too nice, I wonder how they were not greedy?

That's not what I'm saying. That's just the only thing you're hearing.

For your playstyle, what you are saying is fine. However your playstyle, my playstyle, and the playstyle of the players in the original post are different playstyles. I'm trying to help the OP come to grips with his players style of play.

Not if it's about setting themselves up with a certain reputation. At least, if they do things cleanly and preferrably nonlethal, they also get called for the kind of run where they can't just blast their way into a place, grab something and blast their way back out. The kind of run with a favourable nuyen gain/enemymotivation rate.

Plus, if you don't shoot people left, right and center, that much less people will stalk you in a dark alley and kill you for revenge. Not killing people for the lulz pays, IMO. As does not dealing in large quantites of drugs, which only pisses off an important part of the underworld whose business you are just interfering with.

It always depends on. If you try to keep a low profile and might be going in a AA or even AAA district you won't carry drugs on you. Because every god damn chemsniffer finds them.

And selling them does not turn in a great profit. (Due to the rules. Only 30% and a discount because it is stolen and illeagal)

Plus, selling them is likely to piss off local drug lords. For ... change, at best.

In the OP's scenario, burning the drugs certainly was the professional choice. Now, if there had been, say, 100 doses of Deepweed lying about? To burn that would be ... well, a bit on the self mutilation side.

I've once had a NPC the PC killed ask in his last breath for the closest PC to give a credstick to someone.
There were 20K nuyens on the credstick. Digging a little deeper - in hope it'd help them understand what was happening in the adventure - they discovered it was for the guy's girlfriend and they dropped the credstick in her mailbox.

Honestly, I blame you for making it too easy. They were able to be 'good' because they could afford the risk, right? Stunning all the gangers and only destroying the drugs is a lot harder than the initial plan of just wrecking the building.

@Yerameyahu
Yeah, becase this generates so much more heat.

I dunno what you're saying, sorry.

My point is that throwing grenades and sending a fire spirit is easy and safe. Evacuation and nonlethal takedown of the whole building? Not easy, not safe. If the run were harder, they couldn't *afford* to do it the nice way.

This is a pretty simple concept. As an analogy, only the expert shot can afford to go for a wounding but not maiming shot, whereas less skilled shooters have to just aim center of mass and see what happens.

--
Anyway, Wolfgar, this is just a fun challenge for you and the group. You can tempt them with money, and put them in more desperate situations where they have to choose between survival/success and goodness. Their inevitable moral degradation will be a great theme!

@Yerameyahu

Yes, if you just look at the deed itself.

But as soons as you look at the aftermatch it looks quite different.
Not many people will look twice for a bunch of burned drugs. (Maybe the guys the drugs belong to)
But the explosion of a drug lab with several civilian casualties.

What would you do with 50 kg of novacoke and specific contacts who are potentially interested in buying in bulk?

Enhanced skills give you more options, thats for sure. If you are a low level runner you cannot afford accepting risks because you want to be nice. If you want to survive (which is difficult enough) it´s them or you. So we all should start powergaming to make the world a safer place.^^

I *am* just looking at the deed itself. That's what we're talking about. Anyone suspicious enough to care about the drugs wouldn't believe they were really burned anyway, and presumably Plan A called for the whole place (drugs included) to be burned in the first place. I'm also assuming they didn't choose Plan B in order to burn the drugs, but instead to save the collateral.

I assume the explosion of a drug lab with 'civilian' casualties is dog-bites-man for gangland, so we're not talking about them deciding on the option that involved less aftermath. They're deniable assets. So. They made a bleeding-heart plan, and followed it with a non-greedy chaser. The former enabled the latter, and the former would be impossible if the run were harder.

That's assuming you have a contact in the drug trade. If you only have a generic fixer (who arguably is not deep in the drug trade), possibly burn it, because we'b be talking about some 10% of listed price, which is peanuts for the effort needed, and not worth attracting the attention of mobsters who don't like anyone messing with their drug trade.

If you happen to have a contact with the local drug ring, who deals in this anyway and is interested in buying, sell it if I get a price that makes it worth transporting 50 kg of drugs across the sprawl. Otherwise, it's probably just not worth risk and effort you'd have to invest.

I agreed with you on that. Maybe i didn´t make it completely clear.^^

Sorry, Machiavelli. I was still responding to Irion, not you.

Anyway, runners need Jazz for themselves! Who cares about selling drugs? Hehehe.

Now it´t getting clear. Isn´t Jazz this "gives an additional IP"-thing? In this case: right.^^

And of course people's ethics don't have to be consistent. You can be a guy who kills people for money, and yet feel bad for accidentally saying a racial slur to someone sitting next to you on the train.

People don't like to think of themselves as Bad Guys, so they compartmentalize, and rationalize: "shooting this guy is acceptable, because he's really a nasty piece of work, and I need to make a living too", while also being a decent guy the rest of the time.

There are examples for that. People who keep their privat and professional life sperated. (To the extream)

But staying on one level is more than impossible.

You always try to justifiy your acts. And to justify the last you commit the next. And it is getting worse and worse.

No such thing as "too good." If they want to be loner heroes in a dystopian future, let them. The world will react according to their actions.

This part is my only concern:



Did they rat out the Johnson? That can get them in some deep drek. If they just said "somebody doesn't like your kind in this neighborhood" then there's no problem. If they said "Clarence Townsman doesn't want you here" then they're in trouble.

Maybe that's what you do.

Some people seek redemption. To atone for their last act, their past mistakes, they commit acts of self-sacrifice and try to make the world a better place. They take the bad thing that happened to them as a kid and instead of using it as justification as evil, they use it as inspiration for good. They try to see that the world isn't as bad for the next kid as it was for them. They regret their mistakes and while they can't change the past, they can make different decisions in the future.

Characters don't have to be bastards.

@suoq
So somebody how does not kill, does not justify it. O lord, I would have never thought of that.

Yes, there is always a way out. It is just hardly possible to remain at one level.

The best example is often vigilanty justice.
You start by killing a druglord or some childkiller. It is good, because you saved Children/made the world a better place blablabla.
But it mostly does not keep that way. There will be an other druglord, an other murderer.
So you kill him too. Becaues if you don't the first kill won't be justifiable.
And so on and on.



For that you would need to admit, that you are bad first. Thats not that easy.Most people can't.

I do love all this binary thinking. You can choose never to kill anyone, Shadowrun gives you a variety of non lethal but ridiculously effective take downs. Further it also provides a variety of non-lethal but permanent ways to deal with people. Want someone never to pick up the drug trade again the right ware, brainwashing, or spells can make that a reality, it's all about the level of effort your willing to put in.

Truth be told as others said I think the runners made the tactically correct decision, they'd rather not complicate their mission and sit on a bunch of drugs for potentially minimal profit, that makes sense to me. As for giving the gang leader a good talking to, depending what was discussed that seems fine too, some people only understand violence and dictates of strength.

Personally I can understand people having aversions to killing, even in shadowrun, I can also believe that a person can kill without being a bad person, especially by the dictates of the setting. They don't need to justify their actions to anyone but themmselves, their teammates, and their J in that order. Those are the three requirements for work, everything else is just details and quality of life.

No. You don't have to admit you are "bad". You just have to decide to be something different than what you were.

Here's a quote from a man who's been in every penitentiary in the state of California and was the welterweight boxing champion of San Quentin: "When I devoted my life to helping other people, that's when things started getting better for me". - Danny Trejo

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Champion/70038785

So you say to yourself: Killing people is good, but now I am doing something else good?

To change your live you first have to want to abbandon your old life.

Anyone else having trouble understanding the point Irions trying to make here? Could you clarify?

I think he's saying that changing your life is hard and that you can't do it unless you want to. As to what it has to do with imaginary people burning a bunch of imaginary drugs? No clue.

I think he's trying to say that by wanting to change your life, you have to recognise the evilness of your old ways before, or else you would not want to change your life, after all.

And I have to say I diagree. There are a lot more motivations to change your life from being a mass-slaughtering gunbunny to a sworn user of tasers, gammascop and sticknshock than "good" and "evil" (which are very subjective concepts to begin with). Like, having to flee from your one criminal life in one city for shooting the wrong person in the face and not wanting to repeat that mistake. Doesn't mean you think shooting the don's baby boy was evil (necessarily, at least), could also just be a notion of "gee, people get so damn upset when I nshoot their kids in the face and so much less when I just taser them!"

Said (rather extreme) sociopath doesn't consider shooting the Don's son in the face evil, but he considers it a mistake he doesn'T want to repeat for the heat it brought down on him.

Or having read all the studies and realized just how powerful nonlethal weaponry can be compared to the lethal stuff. If you're knocking them out with your bullets you have a lot more time to kill them slowly with your scalpels.

Simple statements:
There are not much options out there.

If you have accepted a certain level of crualty you will very likly drift down.

The only possibility to change direction is to admit, that what you did was wrong.
Thats not very easy, because nobody sees himself as evil.

It is like every unstable balance it will fall, sooner or later if you do nothing to stabalize it.



Kill, possibly. Murder? Very unlikely.

@hermit

Well, you just found a more effective way. You will still fall back to your old ways if it seems the better part.

Not to mention interrogate them, loot their accounts dry, thoroughly test the limits to which they'll get mortgages, then douse them with Laés, and arrange it like they were out on a severely drunken night. Really, why kill people and leave all the money on their accounts?!


Moralising much?


The difference between intended killing (we're not talking about car accidents here, are we?) and murder being?


Of course, I never said this was the kind of moral shift you obviously think is necessary. If you're a killer who has to remain in hiding, though, resuming to kill left, right and center is a phenomenally bad idea.

And unless you have some cmpulsion killing people, why should you kill more than necessary anyway. Killing people is a messy business and usually attracts fare more trouble than is worth, from the corpsec swearing oaths to the kami to bring chief Kobayashi's killer to justice to an angry kid devoting themselves to grow up a killer and get you just desserts, to what happens to copkillers. It doesn't need superior morals to not kill loads of people. It just needs an awareness that the best path in crime usually is the path of least resistance.

And what do you base this on your conjecture seems wodnerfully free standing.

There are habitual criminals that never cross the murder barier instead doing a variety of petty crimes their whole life. There are soldiers who come back from war and never kill again (and those who keep killing to be fair). There are those who rape but don't murder, even when it is chillingly in their best interests to do so.

As hermit said, you don't even have to admit that what you did was wrong, you just have to conclude that there are reasons not to do it anymore.

@hermit

Killing might be self defance etc. etc. etc. Murder is defined a bit stricter.


@LurkerOutThere
If you have 1000000 people capable of murder. Only a very small percentage of those will murder someone.

If somebody killed his wife he ran out of wifes to kill a time. The question is, if he would do it the same way again?


Well, and most of them need pschological care to deal with what they did and saw.

All my characters have their limits. Most are in the "Yeah, I'll kill someone, it's the job" category.

A few are a little bit more twisted. Surprisingly, the one whose religion involves killing your enemies has a Masters Degree in Business Ethics.

One would destroy every chemical drug he could get his hands on, but doesn't balk at Chips. After all, someone can force drugs into your veins and get you hooked, you have to willingly get a datajack for BTLs (I don't think Trodes give enough of a OOMPH for BTL to work right. It's a gateway method to BTL, however.).

Another is just angry as hell and would destroy things more out of spite than any real moralistic intentions. And it's really, *REALLY* easy to slot him off.

Yet another smuggled drugs for a living until an electrical fire set a half-ton bundle of prime Hawai'ian Deepweed on fire and hotboxed the GMC Banshee.

It's all about the individual and their own moralistic code.

Don't forget Twist, the infamous Pacifistic Shadowrunner who only carried a Narcojet Pistol. Yes yes, not everyone likes him, but he's cannon and a good character in a lot of ways.