Or if you do, actually. I've done plenty of evolutions where the gun went "bang" once but it was offline of the target and the slide was kept from cycling fully. In a Fucked Up Tangle ™, it's a lot harder than people think to get the room you need to stop what you're doing and slingshot the slide to give that shot another go. Before you go into a talking about the superiority of revolvers in this instance, you can jam them up just as easily by grabbing the cylinder or the hammer if it has one. Strangely enough, fighting over a gun actually sucks worse in real life than it looks like it sucks in the movies.

When your guards start rolling their firearms against the Unarmed or Melee Armed adept specialty in close combat, it tends to go...poorly.

> PICK NOSE

Depends on the Lockpick.

But yes, a Decker or Mage should have a some kind of backup weapon to use when not performing their main functions (casting/hacking) if necessary.

Hopefully they should not have to do more than provide some cover or suppressive fire, but still it pays to diversify a little.

YOU CHOOSE THE NOSE ON THE LEFT, A FINE HAWKISH AQUILINE VARIETY WITH A MINIMUM OF HAIR. THE SCHNOZ MERCHANT NODS APPRECIATIVELY. "EXCELLENT CHOICE!", HE SAYS WITH A HINT OF PROFESSIONAL SATISFACTION, AND BEGINS RINGING UP YOUR BILL.

> PAY BILL

BILL IS NOT CURRENTLY HERE.

> SETTLE ACCOUNT

THERE ARE NO COUNTS PRESENT TO SETTLE.

> "ACCOUNT", NOT "A COUNT", YOU CHEEKY BASTARD

HOW RUDE.

> I'M NOT THE ONE BEING PURPOSEFULLY OBTUSE

TRUE. BUT YOU ARE THE ONE ABOUT TO BE EATTEN BY A GRUE.

> WHAT GREW?

NO, A GRUE.

> SO THE LETTER A BECAME LARGER?

I.. WHAT? NO, STOP THAT. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

> NOT SO FUNNY NOW, IS IT?

SILENCE! I AM THE MYSTERIOUS NARRATIONAL FORCE! MY WILL IS LAW! MY WORD IS REALITY! YOU ARE TRAPPED IN A TEXTUAL WORLD OF MY CREATION!

> TAKE RED PILL

NO! STOP!

> LAUGH MANIACALLY

YOU FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-//end of line
2014-5-1 8:05:52 [INFO] x8L4D3x [/181.245.115.163:50384] lost connection

~Umi

[INVENTORY: BIRD | QUILL PEN | LOCKPICK]
> GIVE UMIDORI THE BIRD

UMIDORI IS ALREADY A BIRD

~海鳥 / うみどり

The new guy refers to his HE grenades as "Casual Grenades", then proceeds to use them for demolitions despite the fact your team has been strategically destroying the building's supports and the insertion team has just called for the demolitions expert.

EDIT: Hell, calling any grenade a 'Casual Grenade' displays a lack of respect for explosives that should put you on edge.

You're a priest who takes "Thou shalt not kill" seriously for both spiritual and practical reasons. The rest of the team consists of three sociopaths.

(Doing this right now. Going to see how well the adventure goes and if they want to keep him around.)

I so want to make an Amish Sniper who uses a crossbow to disable people with blunt arrows. Just a thought.

That was pretty much #28 that I posted. A friend of mine played a pacifist and made it through bug city. Player decided to take that character along into the next game he was in which was more traditional "shoot people in the face for money." Also included Jim, who interrogated a guy with a hammer, a tent stake, and a blow torch. He got as far as "hammering the stake into the floor" (not even hurting the guy, other than the fact that we'd knocked him out during a firefight, and proceeded to be rough with him since) before he was blubbering out the answers we wanted. Oh and then someone else set of his cranial bomb (the lowest level one that just kills you). Either that or he committed suicide, I'm not sure which any more. So we had to dispose of the body.

The pacifist was the one to leave, rather than the group not wanting him.

Got a Priest in my game as well. It's made for some interesting roleplaying already but we're going for a "Person of Interest" feel so wholesale slaughter won't likely be an issue.

Played a Jesuit Priest in a Werewolf Game... He was an interesting character. Played him for a couple hundred XP or so.

I know this would technically work via the rules, but really, shooting people with blunt quarrels wouldn't really be non-lethal. They're too rigid and have too much mass - they'd just make messier wounds that are less lethal because they don't pierce to hit vital organs, but instead disrupt more soft tissue and break more bones. "Gel Round" bolts could work, I suppose, and there's always the SnS equivalent.

That said, sometimes I wonder if the one thing SR combat actually gets right is how very hard it is to hit someone with a weapon without taking a big risk of killing them. I also wonder if that was intended, or just dumb luck.

~Umi

Yeah, blunt tips will still fuck you up. I've seen them and been told the kind of damage they do by someone who uses them.

Nerf-bolt?

I know there are pistol cossbows, but for the version I imagine (which CAN be used for sniping) "blunt" will work as well as gel rounds for sniper rifles. Quite fitting for this thread really.

NPC remote decker is a new Shadowrun GM's best friend.
Keeps the game fast and gives you a way to drop info to the players.

The team routinely reverts to plan 'X', which stands for eXplosives. Worse, they always try and out-do their last mission's explosion.

doesn't "revert[ing] to plan 'X'" imply that:

1) your team actually plans anything at all, plan X or otherwise
2) they were ever going to do something other than blow everything up

?

Plan X is rarely plan A. More often than not we initially plan to do something quiet and effective, then we find ourselves dealing with the aftermath of someone doing something stupid and we go to our go-to method of dealing with any problem: make it go away with BOOM!

As a side note: 3x25kg AMFO bombs set up to drop several buildings on a target work REALLY WELL for assassinations.

I invoke the power of the double post!

Worse would be when Plan A is your typical work, which quickly devolves to Plan B.

B for Boom!

Rule 1: FuelDrop has many plans.
Rule 2: FuelDrop's Colleagues just ruined plans A-J, and should be finished demolishing through to Q by the end of the combat.

"I dislike letter labeling my plans. It implies I only have 26 of them." - Old Man Jones







-k

1: "Plan A" implies that we only made 26 plans.

2: The number of plans doesn't matter, since you always end up shooting everything in sight and blowing up the building.

I always use alpha-numeric labels for my plans, as it makes very effective shorthand when the team needs to switch plans on the fly without giving anything away to hostiles who're listening in.

173467321476c32789777643t732v7­3117888732476789764376. Lock.

~Data

"Plan 3.14?"
"No, Plan 42."
"Why 42? We always end up with plan 69 anyway!"

Scary part is that I heard a similar discussion not that long ago. And not in a Shadowrun game.

Does does rerouting a gas main.
</did that>

Oddly enough, this seems to be how a lot of Call of Cthulhu games go (usually with fire rather than explosions), and that's with experienced and clever players.

"I suggest we nuke the site from orbit...it's the only way to be sure."

The main thing with the Elder Gods is that quite often, good ol' state of the art bang-bang will fall short where the cleansing power of fire will do the job just dandy.

Referencing Ellen Ripley & Clarence Boddicker in the same post. I love it.

And on the same lines: If your team hacker's backup plan when things go sideways is to hack an Ares weapon satellite to drop a Thor on the target, and it isn't the first time said hacker has done this.

Isn't having a hacker who can hack gear of that magnitude a good sign?

Sure would be, but having to run from being at ground zero of a Thor shot on a regular basis would be like using a Ruger Super Warhawk as a universal lockpick.

I see what you mean. The Warhawk pales in comparison to the lockpicking power of most shotguns, so they're using the wrong tool for the job.

At least you ultimately got to the right destination to what I was thinking.

I have always preferred the analogy of, "Using a shotgun as a fly swatter".

Hang on, I've hear of Buckshot and Birdshot, but never 'Flyshot' before...

Idea.

Hmmm... what would the rules for that be? I assume that trying to dodge it would be along the lines of 'good luck' but damage and AP would be a joke. Maybe light pistol damage at +9 AP?

Wouldn't that just be a shotgun shell filled with sand? I'm not even sure +9 AP is big enough. Oh, and I'd give it +5 vs. unarmored targets, to boot.

I'd say that if you're going that way you might as well just load up with salt. Extra pain for the win!

We always bought a lot of dynamite. It was cheap.

Well, in the Shadowrun universe that would be a real thing, but then you'll probably want to be using APDS slugs instead of any kind of buckshot or sand.

http://bugasalt.com/

You know, before I put War! down in disgust and declares that it was forever banned at my tables, I did some numbers on the nukes in the book. I realized that a nuke not only couldn't destroy a large enough ship, it couldn't even sink it with a direct hit. The engineers would be able to repair it faster than you could sink it.

now take a bundle of grenades and have it go off in a structurally well constructed enclosed space . .

Yeah, I heard the bundle of grenades move was beyond silly in SR5. I think if I ever run a game, I'll just declare that they don't stack, they count separately.

They had them stack in WAR! too, if i remember correctly.

I think I've seen it before.

It probably has been mentioned already in some variation, but when the teams idea of "silently capturing a person alive" involves sneaking up on him while sleeping and pumping him full of several full auto bursts of gel rounds the B&E specialist might want to look for better companions (or operate on the other side of the building they are infiltrating).

And yes, that really happened. To their defense, it was their first SR game ever and, coming from D&D, they did never even glance at all the poisons available, only at the different bullet types and found no other way to knock him out...

You should have seen my group. We needed to perform an assassination on a guy we actually liked. So we decided to kidnap a hobo, Disguise him up, and kill him instead.

Upon finding our (un)lucky hobo we went to beat him unconscious.

We went round the table:
APDS
Fireball
Titanium Bonelacing
etc.

Not a single Stun attack in the group.

We ended up beating the guy with his own hobobag.