I never try and deliberately kill my players. I like to make them think they are going to die and believe me, they know it! Now if they PC does something stupid (like pick-up a live grenade before it goes off), then I think he's got what's coming to him.

As it's been suggested, don't go too hard on new players, but don't let'em think it's all a cake walk.

This is pretty much what I do (the Edge as an Edge doesn't exist IMG).

I also almost always devote at least an hour or so of individual time for one-on-one chargen discussion. This is where I can explain things like the consequences of carrying that PAC down street in Bellevue, or the limitations of the Combat Pool in relation to the Combat Turn as a whole. I also try to run through a mock-combat, and indeed an example of all the different tests that apply to that character. This goes a long way towards familiarizing the player with not only the mechanics, but a general idea of the time and/or threat involved.

Sure it involves a little of your time, but in the long run it's worth it, and even serves to give you, as the GM, a brush-up on what just might be a mis-remembered mechanic or two. It might also inspire you to adopt a House Rule for a certain aspect, in which case this is the perfect time and opportunity for such.

I don't know how to feel about this sentence. I may disagree with it more strongly than anything I have ever heard about how to control the lives of fictional people in imaginary settings (which, to gamers, is saying something).

One, how do you plan a pc's death? Shadowrun tends to be motivated by conflict, most of it physically violent, so the possibility of death is always there. In a system where anyone can be killed outright in a single attack (as long as someone rolls good or bad enough), to say that no one will die without it being "pre-planned" seems odd to me.

Two, the idea that a game master will decide ahead of time when a character will die is (to me, and maybe only me) blatantly offensive. As a player, I can't think of anything that would piss me off more.

As a gm, I would never try to kill a pc, or run a situation where that was my goal. I would never manipulate rules to kill a pc (or keep one alive for that matter), and I wouldn't engineer a situation so that by the rules, a pc had no chance (or an anomolous one) of survival.

The npcs in the game may try to kill the pcs, they may do everything in their power to put the pc's inescapable situations, to stock the numbers in their favor, to seize every advantage. But they are still npcs in the game, limited by their own knowledge, capabilities, and by the same rules the players have to play by. Anything else, is cheating.

I have to aggree whole heartedly. To decide ahead of time who will die and who will live is to decide who gets to enjoy it, and to decide who you like and who you don't. In my opinion, and quite possibly only my opinion, the GM exists to let the players play. He is only there as a referee, he runs the rules and the background, but almost every situation that occurs should be started by the PCs only. They should decide whether to accept the job, it should be their planning, their skills that decide their fate on a run, not the GM's fudging of numbers, no matter who's numbers that might be.

The GM shouldn't plan a run saying, "I'm going to kill him, him, her and him, because I don't like the character." The GM should plan going, "this will be hard, but if they do this, this or this they can survive." It's his job to make it dificult, but survivable.

And that's my money's worth.

Thats where we come to a parting of the ways. I think the beauty of role-playing is that everybody gets together and contributes. If a gm was just a storyteller, we wouldn't need stats or dice, we'd just all sit around the campfire. To me, the part of gaming that is the most fun is when unexpected things happen. I plan scenarios, not outcomes.

A lot of this comes down to the way a group plays, and one thing my group doesn't like is the cheating and the helping. Most of the group gms part time anyway, and we play a couple of different systems but the one thing that remains constant is that whether the group achieves its goals, completes the mission, or lives or dies, they want to come by it honestly. As a player, if my character prevails, survives or dies because of GM contrivance, it invalidates it. At that point, I might as well be playing a video game.

brrr...now this sentence coming from any GM would make me simply get up and walk out of the gaming group.
pcs die all the time, heck I lost the first SR char I made to a sniper rifle in sr2 aafter spending 6 or so hours making him. I didnt mind.*shrug* my fault for saying there was a 100k bounty on my head in my background. I have also lost MANY chars to random damage rolls.. *shrug* or reallly stupid actions <trying to reach that stone ledge after falling 100 m>.. *shrug*
now having an npc plan my chars death is ok, go for it, fully up to the npc`s ability.
but having a gm decide now I think tomorrow it will be good for the storyline if your char dies, good dramatic moment??
Here is where roleplay is NOT like a book, the players actions should matter,
roleplay is not the same as storytelling. If a GM wants absolute control he should be writing books or telling stories or some such thing, not playing in a group with other people.
/end rant
DS

So how is that fun?

I think many of you are misunderstanding this quote. It doesn't mean that the GM should routinely plot the death of the player charcters - it means that the best character deaths are the dramatically appropriate ones that the GM (and possibly the player) have planned for in advance.

Absolutely there are times where it is necessary to fudge die rolls as a GM. They should be rare events but they do occasionally occur.

Just the other day I was running D&D for a newbie group. One particular character was being played by a kid of maybe 14, and it was probably the second time he had ever sat down to an RPG. During combat this newbie got critted by the big bad and knocked down to -9 hit points (for you non-D&D types, that means he was going to be dead the next round unless someone saved him). His buddies got over to him and brought him around again with a healing potion and he leaped back into combat.
The next round I rolled ANOTHER crit on him. Knowing he was going to be dead if I let the result stand, I fudged it into a complete miss, and he took out the baddie on the next round with a crit of his own.
Dramatic necessity. It would have been flat out unfair to kill the kid through no fault of his own right after he just had a very narrow escape from the exact same situation. He may have walked away from the table with a bad taste for gaming in his mouth and never come back.
Fotunately, unlike life, rpgs can be fair.

Yeah, but I find it strains the suspension of disbelief.

I've had players who thought characters should only die "if they do something stupid", or think that if they can't solve the mystery, the gm will fudge it so they make it to the end combat. All I can say is, I don't get it.

The part about the "do something stupid" that I have a problem with is that, who's to say whats stupid? As a gm, I pretty much get the final word on the subject, but I am aware that the authority to declare an action stupid doesn't have with it any special power to be correct.

Sometimes, no matter how brilliant a group of players you have, you will be staring over the screen wondering who these morons are and how they got into your house. The thing I had to realize is, as a gm, my judgement of what was the right or wrong thing to do was based around having perfect information. I had read the module or designed the adventure, so I knew the repercussions of the pcs actions. Pc's don't have that benefit. They make their decisions based around the information they have, which is the information that I give them. If they're tackling a scenario in an asinine manner, then there exists the possibility that instead of them being morons, I presented it poorly. (Sometimes they're just morons. It can go either way.)

Further, just because something is obvious to me doesn't mean its obvious to anyone else, or even especially right. What if the gm's idea on how to tackle a situation is moronic? Are any of us infalliable? (Its a rhetorical question.) I've played in games where the gm decided on the correct course of action and would punish the party for not doing it (and not consciously, just if you deviated from what he thought was 'right', it was skewed against you). All I can say is, for a group of players, its not the most fun way in the world to spend a Thursday night.

I prefer to design open ended scenarios. I try to know what capabilities and motivations the npcs have, and come up with a few ways they and the pcs are likely to meet. But I find its fairly useless to try and pick what path the pcs will take (except in the broadest sense), and all but impossible to say how it will turn out. Letting the situations play out in unexpected ways is where a lot of my enjoyment of the game comes from.

halalujah brother. It took me a while to get over it but I started designing adventures that only had an objective. I made sure I could think of at least two ways to get there and then didn't care how my players reached it. I am also a big fan of weird dice rolls changing events. I had a player nuke a car off the map that was supposed to get away. The target was 24, he rolled a 26 = car-beque. I thought out the repercusions for a minute and moved on with the story. When your game goes totally sideways you can have a lot of fun on the ride.

Wow, this sounds exactly like a D20 game I was in, including the day we played.