So my GM and I got chatting last night (one result of that was the girls night out post on my diary thread, but I digress) and I mention that I think it's kind of silly that some characters in our group don't carry any less lethal options, and in one case outright refuse to carry non-APDS. He points out that one of his legacy characters (Now cameo NPC) back from his old second edition game habitually avoids less lethal options unless it's specifically pointed out to her.

I go "Yeah, why is that?"

*Flashback effect*
"Well, the reason is that back in the day our 2nd edition GM was a killer GM. In his games it was expected that you would leave no witnesses, and if you purchased gel rounds you'd be ostracized and probably hunted down."
"What?!? Why?" I ask, perplexed.
"His logic was that if you knock people out with gel then you could drag them off and torture them for information, so it was a lot less illegal to carry normal bullets and kill people than to carry gel and knock them out."

"But hang on. What if you just knocked them out and left them like, oh I don't know, a normal person who doesn't get their jollies torturing minimum wage security guards?" I ask.
"Well in that case the guy you left alive would send a shadowrun team after you." my GM elaborated.
"Uh huh. So the security guard would be able to afford that kind of hit on you, personally, along with tracking you down in the first place which if you're reasonably competent isn't going to be easy."
*Shrug*
"He'd pull something out of his ass like the guy was related to someone important. Ironically, killing them never had any negative repercussions."
"Huh?"
"Out of sight, out of mind. Yeah, it was complete bullshit. He also wouldn't let us look at his books and back then it was really hard to get your own books. I didn't even know what most of the gear options in the splat books were until he used them on us, and even then all I knew was 'OUCH!'."
*Blank look*
"Back in the day my sammie carried an SMG and was considered to be the hardest hitter in the group. To this day I don't know how good it was or how hard it would have been to get better gear. and as for getting any ammo other than regular rounds? Good luck with that."
"So he would have hated our old loot-happy group, then?" I ask.
"Well every bullet for whatever new toy you picked up would have a tracker on it so you'd have to ditch all the ammo you got with it. And good luck finding more."
"Damn! What an asshole!"
"Pretty much, yeah."

Hah, funny story. Our current GM did a quite good development, but he also startet with sh***t like that. Every time he bought a new book, he tested the weapons and critters on us and if there were some benefits (like upcoming APDS) he "granted" us these things in a way of "here i give you APDS....3 rounds per person". I am happy, that we have overcome things like that.

It would have been an immediate BYE for me.

No sense of reality kills of suspension of disbelief and, heck, he looks like an total idiot (bad move for a game that is about planning tactics and investigations).

Me too. But back in those days, we didn´t know better. He also kept us away from game-information, but as we wondered how the enemy shot down our banshee and he pointed to a smoke launcher from arsenal and yelled "with this baby", we knew that he hadn´t a clue himself. ^^

My first GM was a killer GM but he didn't mean to be. Published 2nd edition modules just tended to result in TPKs from the way they were written.

Well, that made me into the mirror shades guy I am today....

Similar experiences, but that was because my GM was a min-maxer of the highest caliber, so he would send challenges he thought he could handle at our level. Like I think it was 2 or 3 ettin at 6th level (a single ettin is a CR6, two makes it an 8 IIRC) who proceeded to one-shot kill my animal companion. He interrupted our sleep for three days straight so we couldn't recover spells, all the while doing attribute damage to us (Con mostly), massively degrading our combat effectiveness.

That's why I create things the way I do now. He made me better, faster, stronger, but because of the massive trauma I had to experience at his hands.

Hah, do we have the same GM? ^^

Our GM put us into Ghost Cartels and turned run after run and enemy attack after enemy attack on us, so that we neither had the time to raise skills, attributes, learn new spells, initiate or purchase equipment (even ammo), install cyber-/bioware, nor did we get the chance to rest long enough to cure our wounds properly. This worked out semi-optimally, until he put us into this discotheque, where we had to leave our guns behind and everybody just wore light armour because of the club-wardrobe we had to use. After we stepped in, he turned the cops in military-grade-armour with assault rifles on us. Nearly wiped out our whole group and even now, months later, he doesn’t accept that it was his mistake. He only says “I did it like it was written in the adventure”.

But testing new toys on players is so much fun within reason of corpse.

Yeah, i know. We switched GMering in the past between all players and i know how it is to be on the „other side”. But our characters are all well build and we need a long time to get some inspiration to create a new char. that fits our wishes. Losing such a char. just because the GM is playing around, would cause the terrible torturing of the GM, instantly banning him out of reach from the pizza-delivery and the mixed alcoholic drinks. So behave GM. ^^

Meh, most of my players actually don't mind getting meatgrinded, though the problem is if their current characters get killed they'll just make something more powerful in it's stead. Now that's motivation to keep your PCs alive and well if I ever saw one.

I am tempted to one day just drop a bomb on their heads to see if they can survive, but then they already blew up Seattle once already...

What was done to you was monstrous.
Alas, they created a monster.

I think you can almost take something philosophical if not poetic out of all this.

Funny story.

But the most important part of a gm's job is know the group and make sure they have fun.

Depending on the GM that's highly theoretical...

As for Killer GMs, have only ever had one thankfully that did this. He also happened to create Mary-Stu NPCs it himself who were uber amazing. I remember losing 3 characters in 3 sessions once. Sadly while he didn't know all the rules for each of the systems, let alone close to what I did (use to and still do read rule books front to back repeatedly for fun) he was the best Story Teller in the group. We just had to out up with his dickery every so often.

Most memorable was a Drow 3.5 campaign (and to too the cake he was a uber Drizzt fan...) where I lost my monk to a group of 15 orcs and 30 bugbears that ambushed him, and he went into great detail describing how hopped I was. Afterwards he said he could have done it himself, and pointed out different items in the area he could have macguivered a win from. I shrugged and made a fighter only to have a TPK right afterwards by a dragon who didn't feel respected because we didn't grovel and eg for our lives properly. So third try I min maxed a sorcerer to ridiculous levels an used a loophole allowing me to cast a inverted reflecting spell and quickened AoF spell. Since the spell lasted until it couldn't expand and was in a contained reflecting area it essentially continued on until his pet npc, and all the heads of the drow clan were extra crispy.

Needless to say after that te GM quit his dickery for the most part but every so often he would do something along those lines again and all it took was me taking out a character sheet for him to not be a killer GM for no reason.

I think it's a part of every GM life.
Thinking at first that this is a game of 'me vs them'. I know I was like this. I think it took me about two years to finally understand that RPG is a cooperative game of 'me with them' telling a story.
Of course, every once in a while I'd meet an obnoxious player who had to have a 'rocks fall everyone die' and most of the time it occured as a TPK instead of only singleing out the obnoxious player.

I'm actually convinced this is where a lot of cheese weasel munchkins come from. Players who had early gaming experiences with GMs who thought that was the most fun way to play, and never shook the habits or learned better.

My best friend had a tendency of saying, "I don't think that's a good idea..." to anything that didn't fit his narrow definition of how the game scene should pan out. Needless to say, it got really boring (for me at least) to hold back on everything to wait for the Holy Decree from On High that playing my character as-intended wouldn't make him an immediate grease spot. Case in point, we were playing a futuristic spec-ops game with GURPS and the squad leader called for a distraction during a battle that made the Battle of Kursk look like neighborhood kids playing with army toys in the sandbox.

So my character, following orders from his immediate superior, cranks off a LAW-equivalent at a relatively nearby Hover APC that is suppressing a nearby infantry unit. I roll the bones, get a good roll. Looking up, I get the dreaded, "Are you sure you want to do that?"
Me: "Umm...sure. This is one of fifty missiles flying around right now, right? Besides, if the infantry unit can flank, it'll open up this area for our infiltration while they try to move more men to fill this spot." Sounded pretty good to me...
Him: "Well, your missile pretty much explodes against the APC without effect and you have *rolls again and again for about 45 seconds* 16 smart missiles targeting you. Roll your dodges."
Me: WTF?!? "Umm...it's an A...P...C...not a main battle tank, fer crying out loud! It's a gawdam battle wagon, not a flying reinforced bunker!"
Him: "Oh yeah, well all the APCs are hovertanks."
Me: "How the fuck do you get 50 tons of cermet and weaponry to hover?" *Grabbing dice and rolling my own spree* I dodge 13 of them...*red mist*

Later on while some other players smoke outside and I can chat with them out of earshot...
Me: "WTF, dude? I was created the distraction my character's superior officer told him to!"
Brude: "Oh our characters ignore the LT all the time. She's a fucking idiot."
Me: "Yeah, thanks for the info dump..."

Can I first say I don't understand all the different stories that float around about how "the GM beat me" or "I beat the GM"?

I truly don't get it. We have a fairly tight knit group, have had one for years now. Characters come, characters go, some live to retirement, some die in a blaze of glory, some roll crappy dice and die in a horribly undignified way.

At no point, whenever I have GMd or when others have done so, have we thought, "Aha! I'll show that GM! I'll make this super twinky character, and make his life miserable, mwah ha ha!." First off, that type of game is just shitty all around. The game is supposed to be the GM telling a story, and putting challenges in front of the players that they are supposed to succeed at - unless 1) they get unlucky (and even then, a good GM will try and save them from that if it makes the story worse) or, despite a warning or two, 2) they do something really stupid or 3) It is a story that involves them meeting failure up front in order to make way for a storyline about them coping with that failure in order to triumph later.

Almost every story in this thread are of GMs who behave like petty bullies who got no respect out of game, and so decided to take it out on the players in game. Which leads me to the second reason why the super twinky character to piss off the GM shouldn't work - if I were a GM who was so petty, who engaged in a "me vs. them" attitude, what difference does it make what kind of character you build? I have an infinite army of NPCs whose only limit on the amount of men, money, and weapons they have access to is my own imagination.

It is why the whole idea of getting your jollies as a GM by "beating" the PCs is such utter crap. Its a rigged game in every sense of the word. I don't care who you are, what game system you play, what kind of character you make, how much experience/karma/equipment you have, if the GM wants you dead, you will be - if not in this battle, than the next.

I can fortunately say I have never played with a "killer GM" - although I have had many characters die over the years. I suppose I should just be grateful.

That was one example. I have so very many more.

Being locked in an underground chamber with an ECL 17 when we were level 7 just because "adding all those templates doesn't change the type, therefore it doesn't change the ECL" (or some such ruling... Master Artificer or some such. I could find it again if I wanted to. He was right, too.); Encountering an Epic Level Frenzied Berserker at level 18 (in a Dimension Lock because I figured out how to weaponize a Cubic Gate); the creatures from MM5 that had Antimagic Grapple; fighting hordes of clockwork horrors at level 5 (one of which was a CR5 alone that was encountered with multiple CR4s)...

I can literally go on and on.

EDIT: Oh, and the GM does SR also. Let's see... A Cyborg-Zombie Adept that still had a Weapon Focus bound ("It doesn't say you lose any foci you had...", which it doesn't) at 400 BP characters, and a crazy game of cat-and-mouse that resulted in nothing for multiple sessions except we were duped into kidnapping a child from a library (whom we later released in front of a Lone Star precinct [funny story actually]), kidnapped a man and his family and had them brutally murdered by factory machines, and generally pissed off all the players. Game ended before we could track the guy trying to blackmail us.

Also, nearly every enemy you fight has an HE cranial bomb.

Yeah.

It could have happend to me in the past.


Nowadays, I suffered 1 unfair TPK where the GM clearly showed his goal was to kill everyone.

Afterwards, he discussed about a new campaign.
Believe me, the "Well, we'll see when we're ready to play again" was kind of a douche for him.

And off to chummer I go. As to the OP, killer GM is a misnomer, our group likes meat grinders but that guy was a dick.

Which edition?

In 4th ed: "No magician may bind more foci than her Magic attribute...  The total Force of all
bonded foci is capped at the character’s Magic x 5. " - SR4A, p. 199. The process of making a Cyberzombie, by requirement, drops a person into "Negative" essence, causing Astral Hazing (BGC of 4 or more at any given time). This would drop the rating of any focus by 4, as there is no Cyberzombie tradition. A +1 bonus is better than nothing, but there's other, superior ways to get that elsewhere and cheaper. Like... say... better cyberware.

Edit: Considering the Cyberzombie drops to negative essence during the process, and Initiation would only preserve your last point of Magic at 0 essence, RAW, you'd lose all bound foci during the process (dropping to -1 essence would kill your last point of magic, meaning no foci, before you complete the ritual and get the permanent 1 magic).
Edit2: As Astral Hazing has never been errata'd to not affect the character themselves, this would make their effective magic rating at any given time a 0 or -3, meaning no foci anyways.

Show me where in the rules it says you lose foci if your Magic drops. Hint: it does't.

When you get to Magic 6 you can bind 6 foci with a combined Force of 30. If your Magic is lowered then you can't bind any more foci until you raise you Magic above a 6, but the foci you have bound are already bound. It's like saying that you can buy items with the money you have. If after that you go into debt you don't magically lose anything you've bought, you just can't buy any more until you get more money.

EDIT: Now, if it said "No magician may have more foci bound than her Magic attribute..." that would change things. That is not what the text says, however.

Also you mentioned a cyberzombie tradition on the Internet so not only does it exist there is now porn of it .

I am now putting out a contract on both my own imagination and whoever made that porn. Be sure to make certain both are dead.

Don't forget to hire a technomancer to make sure it's all completely deleted, provided they can still do that sort of thing.

I'd figure we'd be better off with a rating 1 agent.

Can one reach the resonance realms great archive? Why I suggested a technomancer, assuming that such a place still exists.

"The total Force of all bonded foci is capped at the character’s Magic x 5."- SR4A, p. 199. Once you hit -1 essence for the first time, you've lost all your foci. If you haven't initiated, you lose them when you hit 0. It's only after the process that you have 1 magic (until your soul escapes to true death). As proof of this, Augmentation p.156:
"During implantation, the cybermantic techniques ensure the subject’s spirit does not depart when the zero Essence threshold is breached. At this point, the cybermantic ritual forces the spirit to inhabit the empty shell of its body.
Following the implantation, the subject is kept in stasis for a week plus an additional day for every point (or part thereof) that her Essence has fallen below zero. At the end of that time, the subject (hopefully) awakens as a cyberzombie."

Rules as written, your magic rate drops with each point of essence, and the permanent 1 magic and subsequent immunity to magic loss isn't until after the process is complete. Ergo, you lose all your bound foci because, for a period of time, you do not have a magic rating above 0. Because you have a magic rating of 1 AFTERWARDS, you can bind a weapon focus afterwards... though your whole body counts as a magic weapon if so employed (not including bullets that have left your body). Additionally, your foci and any other magic around you is going to be at a minimum -4 to its rating because of your haze. A +1 bonus from a +5 focus is rather... disappointing.

It got destroyed by Aztechnology when they tried to kill Sirrurg.

Holy Resurrection! sorry, but I have to relate my history of playing (excluding GMing) anything beyond SR3.

I found a FLGS on the opposite side of town (we have 1 downtown) and went there as to run some demo SR4 games for CGL. I had next to no luck getting players interested and finally asked one of the owners if they knew of anyone that played SR. It turned out there was a group who played weekly. (Side note: this was a VERY player friendly store with about 3/4 the space devoted to gaming tables. they even had a small Kitchen serving hot and cold snacks.)

So I come back on their game night, get introduced by the other owner and ask if I may join in. Sure, no problem. I only et to watch and try to get a feel for the type of game they are playing. It was sort of hard to follow, but I get told to go ahead and make a character (we discuss what I'd like to play and it is welcome.) I spend at least a couple of days making the character. I come back the next week, the GM is a different GM from the previous week and get told I need to change some things, so I spend 20 or 30 minutes changing it - the game is starting late, but no big deal - right?

We start to play and half the players from the week before are not there, though I saw a couple of them before redoing my character. 2 more players who are in the nice private gaming room, say something to the GM out of my hearing at the far end of the table and leave. One of the more genial players from the previous week sits down on my end of the table and... I'm not even sure if the GM sat down...the GM asks where our characters are? I'm waiting to be introduced to the group/team, so when the only other remaining player says he's in a diner, I say I'm in the diner toward the back in a booth facing the front door. The GM says some character shows up outside, the other player says he goes out to meet him and the GM says a rocket destroys the diner and everyone is dead.

A moment of shock later, I say, "No initiative roll?" I guess I failed my surprise test. Ok, I know I failed my surprise test, but I guess my PC did too. So I add, "No damage roll?" I think he may have conceded and my PC may have barely survived. I don't really remember. But the game died that moment. I never played with them again. I think I GMed for one of the guys one time a week after that. The next week, I got 2 and a half players who decided to kill some time and jack me around until their group showed up.

I stopped going to this 'F'LGS for a couple months and when I returned it was out of business.

So I think I got to be a player in a game newer than SR3 for less than a minute.

They obviously didn't want you at their table? I guess I would have slapped that guy in the face because, if he doesn't feel like I join the table, he says it from the start and doesn't make me lose my time creating a character.

I don't think it was me. From what I observed there was a guy they didn't like (he was the one guy that played one time in a game i ran the following week.) 4 of the guys were friends and I think they 1) did not really get the setting and 2) had grown tired of it the way they played. The guy who started in the diner with me should have named all his characters Kenny or Timmy (maybe he did and I didn't notice) because he seemed to like having them die, as I saw in every game he played.

But, maybe it was me.

You mean I'm not supposed to be keeping a stack of character sheets of the characters I killed?!?!?!

J/K..

Death of characters in my games are for 1) Bad luck 2) Bad player/character decision which usually leads to 3) Story advancement.

Don't get me wrong; I have made bad calls in the games myself (like I had an encounter that I thought would be on par for the party and it ended up way overpowered. I'd take it to the end (all characters "dead") but I wouldn't actually kill the characters. I'd use an excuse like the bad guys wanted prisoners to heal them and give them a chance to escape. Of course they didn't know this and assumed I was pulling a TPK.)
Gotta love suspense!!