Okay here's another. This time it's one that I GM'd...

The party have an object that an ancient vampire wants. He can't get to it because they've rented a room and the vampire's got that thing going on where he can't enter someone's home without permission. It's only a psychological thing, but still, it acts like a geas on his behaviour.

At first he tries sweet-talking them; he needn't kill them because he'd just be happy taking the object and leaving. But they can't hand the object over either because it's critical to their mission. So they're in the room, and the vampire's outside, talking through the door at them.

The players, to their credit, work out pretty quickly why the vampire doesn't just come in and munch them, but instead of making clever plans, they decide to take the opportunity to start taking the piss out of the guy.

This whole thing was great fun for everyone to roleplay; I was playing this increasingly annoyed vampire who can't do a bloody thing to these smug buggers, and they're loving it. The insults are flying back and forth and it's just a great laugh.

The vampire's getting really cheesed off now. There's no chance of an amicable solution. "I'm going to come in there and tear out your throats!" he screams through the door.

"Come and try it!" says one of the players.



...



The door is reduced to splinters, and the team fight a very tough battle against a very pissed off vampire. There are a couple of deaths, a lot of major injuries, but of course, of course, the player in question is largely unharmed.

To be fair, it's not entirely certain that what the player said counts as an "invitation", but we all discussed it after the game and we all (the player included) came to the conclusion that he'd better keep his mouth shut during future negotiations.

Aaaaaah-hahahahahaaahaaaaah. Stupid players, eh?

Why not just tell the Vamp "Sorry, we need it. You can have it when we're done."

I heard this one secondhand.

A player in one of my GM's old games pulled out his penis and told a woman to "Suck this". She complies. She turned out to be a vampire.

nick012000:

If you'll excuse the pun, that really BITES.

(Or "sucks", if you prefer. )

--Foreigner

That's horrible. I love it - especially the pun.

Jrayjoker, ShadowDragon8685:

You're welcome.

In the words of Detective Sergeant (later Captain) Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson's character in the LETHAL WEAPON film series):

"It's the only thing I was ever good at."

(Although he was talking about killing people, and that is something I hope never to have any experience with outside of RPGs and computer games.)

--Foreigner

Our last... Well, I hesitate to call it a run, since we're not being paid anything - our last adventure, say - has been one endless streak of mild player stupidity and good role-playing that has amazingly enough not resulted in any deaths yet.

We've just come back from a very tough run, and I think we might have gotten a bit complacent as a result. Since we were now back home, what was the worst that could happen? Well, what happened was Bug City - and we've probably been a little too good at not acting on OOC knowledge, and being worried and paranoid enough...

As a result, we so far:

1. Were offered a 10K retainer by the bug shamen (we think) for letting them call on us if they thought they had a job we could do. We sort of took the money and ran, but now, we sometimes have a watcher spirit floating after us going "My master says you should come. Will you come? I tell my master you said you not come?"

2. Drove into an Eagle Security roadblock in our van, and - because of all the police presence we saw earlier, before being stopped - decided we would try to bluff our way through it. With an unregistered mage, a shifter, several Strato drones (one armed) and a number of illegal automatic weapons in the van. Long story short, my character used up all his Karma to get the rigger's heart to beat again after an overdose of Narcojet, and we now own two slightly bruised and very duct-taped Eagle Sec cops.

3. We went to a safe place to get the rigger some medical attention - unfortunately, it turned out to be surrounded by about a dozen wasps, and some of the occupants were fighting a losing battle against them - so my character got out and charged in without a plan. Not sure how much of a plan we could have come up with, since it was down to me, a mage without any combat spells I saw so far (don't ask me how that happened, we found him during the last run and he only speaks Spanish... kids, never make a character with the Amnesia flaw at max rating), and a beat-up fox shifter, but I think we should have tried. We all lived, but at one point I ended up staging two 4D wounds (and several more 2-3D ones) down to L or nothing with almost no combat pool left...

Number 2 ranks high on the "LS&2SB" count.

"I hate traffic wardens." *wallop*

(its worth mentioning, that this was a halloween / shadowhoror one off )

Imagine, if you will, the following Situat ion
The Team of runners, after a Sew wrong Turns have finally figured out That The uber nasty Bad guy they've been chasing is trolled up in a dig-used Sewer - A sewer that was Drs-used due To the amount of methane that was building up in it.
a bit of sewer that their orc under ground Contacts have told them is haunted. HAUNTED with Real live ghosts, And every thing. The Party Gun bunnies Realise that d gas filled Pipe + guns =Boom:, and have Brought Cross bows. The Mage is even Packing a SCUBA Tank. The Troll Physad however decides To Table his normal load out_ no one considers this odd. or stupid.

After several tense "slasher film / house of horrors" type events, the now firmly spli up party gets their first glimpse of the "killer". it's actually just the killers pet dvil rat, "nibbles" (who's gotten out of the cage).

me: well, your gas detection equipment's needle isburried firmly in the danger zone, you can smell the fettid stench of gas, even through you gas masks, and up ahead you can just about make out something moving through the shadows.

gun bunny #1: i point the underbarrel torch at it. i wanna see what i'm shooting at

gb#2 :better safe than sorry, i kneel down beside the corner, and get ready to aim..

mage: i check astral ( i pass mage a note, telling him what he sees

physad: i toss a grenade at it (grabs bucket 'o' dice, rolls most of them

me: say what?
gb#1: huh?
gb#2: *grenaaaaaaaade* i dive arround the corner, hoping to be out of the blast radius.....i hope
mage: noooooooooo dont...

me: wel, as i've said before, i normally let you change declared actions *before* you roll.... so. lets see, thats no scatter. poor nibbles has a pretty respectablecombat pool, so he may not be about to meet his maker... what kind of grenade was it?

physad:, an incendiary one... why?

me: who wants to roll for secondary effects?


needles to say, the incendiary grenade set off the dangerouly gas filled sewer, and then we worked out if anything else wouldgo up.

unfortunatly, the one thing no one thought to check was the physads load. they knew he used grenades. what they didnt know was that he was carrying nearly 20 incendiary ones. and a dozenexplosive, a couple of superflash, and a couple of duel charge ir smoke/thermite ones.

does anyone have a good way ofcalculating the power/damage code of 300+ cubic meters of methane/air mix, 30+ incendiary grenades, and a scuba tank?

the next week we started with all new characters. the ingame news however did carry an article covering the *huge* hole that appeared inthe palyup barrens.

scenario: Character has detailed back gournd, part of it concerning why he left Ares. His wife was a mage, and someone in the corp wantd a powerful power foci she had in her possession. She wouldn't sell it, so he had her killed, and took it. THe character couldn't prove it, so he went to the shadows, and waited for a better time to get his revenge.

Fast forward about 2 years game time. Character is now a vampire, and an experienced runner. He wakes up one night to an e-mail in his drop box. It details his 'nemesis' ' schedule for the next few days, including a flight to Denver,and a two day stay in a hotel there.

The character heads down to Denver, scopes the place out, sees a building next door ( across the street, about 50 '), an office building about 40 stories compared to the hotels 30 (big hotel). His target is on th 25th floor, conveniently favinf the office building. Before leaving Seattle, he got a grapple gun and a stealth grapple line.

Now here's where it goes bad. He goes to the back off the office buidling, to the loading dock's personel door, which he knows to have an alarm on it... and breaks it down. He then runs up the stairs (Very fast vampire, very high body, light gear). One sec gaurd manages to get in his way at floor 20, he plows through him, goes to floor 26, and begins busting down doors indiscrimintely (so they don't know where he's trying to go). he then gets to the office he inteds to go to, breaks out the window, and shotts the grapple through the window of the room above his targets.

Bear in mind there is another runner in all this that he hired, another player, but he asked him to wait in the car. He's sitting there watching all thes e cops start showing up. THree cars so far. Plus the in house security, which is nothing special, but they're gettting there.

Back up stairs, the vamp-runner reloads his grapple gun, and is about to head out, when two security officsers get to where he's at, and point shotguns at him, shout the usual "freeze". He grabs a computer from the desk, and heads out the window. THey shoot, no damage. He uses his adept power of gliding to run across the line. He sees one of his targets bodygaurds at the window, looking at the cop cars out side, then at the guy in the long coat and ski mask running across a rope 30' from him.

The runner-vamp chucks the copmuter at the window, breaking most of it out, and successfully leaps from the line into the room. First bodygaurd shoots him a few times, and is quickly cut down by the vamps weapon foci katana.

The rest of the body gaurds come into the room. One shoots off his SMG full auto, does m dmg. Then the troll bodygaurd that the vamp saw before (but never assensed) wades in, shock gloves swingin'. He's an adept w/ titanium bone lacing, pain reisistance, and mystic armor. First hit does S dmg, but regenerated, knocks the vamp backa few steps towards the window. 3rd body gaurd shoots his pistol, does L dmg as well (yay APDS!). Vamp swings at the troll, does M dmg. Troll swings again, inflicts S dmg (which does not regenerate, hit him in the head, rolled for it). But the character had taken enough damage to kill him (10 total), and rolls horribly on knockdown, goes out the window, 25 stories up. He 'woke up' 3 seconds before hitting the ground... and goes for his grapple gun. Then he hits, takes some 17 boxes of damage. I don't remember the total numbers, but he ended up with some 23 boxes total.

The character did survive, but why he didn't jsut go mist form when he 'woke up', or didn't do the run completely differently (as I said, this was an experienced runner and character) I'll never know. As it was, he spent 2 months recovering from the damage that he couldn't regen from, was starving (2 essence left), broke (cert cred stick was on him) , has no idea where his weapon focus is, and now has the flashback and phobia flaws of heights (this isn't the first time he's fallen out of a building!).

what a retard, or at least retarded plan.

we had our own retard this past weekend. big ugly troll, with all kinds of "me wanna kill" mentality and the gear for it. so he's slogging around the barrens with an assault cannon, which you can do in the barrens. so no prob.

plus he's got 100 freaking rounds of explosive ammo wrapped around his body.

gm setup the opposition with a flamethrower. (beforehand)

narrow corridor, big ugly troll in front. one blast from a flamethrower, gm "misses high"

get the hint? no. troll stands there.

second blast, full on. one big ugly troll on fire. still in the narrow corridor, everyone else moves to get out. so now the troll is on fire.

2d6 roll for cooking off ammo: 12

gm was nice, player was a friend. only made him resist 18D once. troll spends karma and does so. i still don't think the player has a clue that he should no longer have a troll character.

And suddenly I see the Riddler, "If you kill him, he won't learn nothin."

Mission: Get back some information stolen from Corp A by some lesser corp exec.

The runners had at this point failed horridly at obtaining the info from the execs offices and later fail to intimidate the exec into handing over the information (Here our lucky "hero" loses his first char on the run, captured by the neighborhood watch).

The "hero" created a new character, a Giant wrestler (cant recall if it was another phys ad) who lacked any kind of common sense.

The Hero captured one of the exec's daughters, tied her up infront of a payphone, called the Exec and told him to hand over the info, then splattered the little girl with his combat axe and walked away.

The Exec went to the Star and in the runners attempt to make best of the situation at the suppose second meet with the exec (watched by the Star) one of them gets captured, questioned, framed for the murder of the girl and later mind probed when all else failed. The Giant, who recently heard his co-runner had been captured by the Star, decided to "stack out" the local Star precint, sitting in broad daylight outside a cafe across from the Star. He is of course noticed, since the star now has a description of him and the call swat (later renamed Smat during the course of this story). The Giant takes down several beat cops before fighting his way to the top of a nearby building where he is encountered by Swat assault trooper coming up from below. It ends in a Hand to hand fight where the Giant manages to throw two of the three trooper over the edge (here by SMAT team) before he himself decides there is no other escape and jumps over the edge, aiming for the roof of the Swat Mobmaster below, thinking "then twin guns in the turret cant hit him". The Star has in the mean time barred off the street and gotten several men out from the precint into the street. The mobmaster is parked smack in the middle of it all, surrounded by dusins of cops. The Giant survives the 5 floor drop, only to stand up and roar defiantly, where after he is prompthly mowed down (I didnt even roll the dice).

...

That run (the group's first) went wrong on so many levels even before the top incident, maybe because I thought they MIGHT have a tad of common sense, could coorporate or at least communicate ... but neither happened. Think I threw my notes over my shoulder three or four times during those sessions

Group consisted of
Dwarf Rigger with Distinctive Style
Elven Combat Decker/Infiltrator/Sniper
Japanese Sword Swinging Phys Ad later Giant Phys Ad
Elven wannabe Face
Human street kid, ganger

My first time playing shadowrun I had a troll ganger, fairly concervatively made nothing too special about him except for one small detail. He had been a survivor of the Night of Rage and as such had a fairly accute phobia surrounding fire. Now he never told the other players this, what with it being a rather unpleasant memory but I did drop plenty of hints. I made sure to discribe the horrible burn scars all over his back and arms and he always flinched whenever one of the other characters lit a cigarette. Anyhow we ended up in a firefight in the hallway of a 4th story apartment building. I was keeping up a pretty steady rate of fire down the hallway mostly just to keep heads down and give us time to figure out an escape route. The group mage decides that he wants in on the action too though and leans out of the door long enough to fling a fireball down the hall before promply passing out from the drain.

My character kicks into flashback mode and though he has the forthought to grab the mage before making his escape from the flames. Unfortunatly the only way out is through a window at the end of the hallway. 50/50 chance to determine who would land on top and unfortunatly it wasn't the 110 lb elf mage useing the 500lb troll as a cushion.

imperialus:

What's the Damage Code for that?

That is, a 500-pound Troll ganger landing atop an Elf mage (presumably no more than 200 pounds) on a concrete (?) sidewalk after a four-story fall?

Are we talking massive internal injuries and/or lots of broken bones, or was the Troll scraping Elf paste off of his clothing afterwards?

Either way, YUCK!

--Foreigner

The latter, i'm sure.

Grinder:

Indeed. I'll bet the Elf--or more likely, the person PLAYING the Elf-- was all broken up over it.



--Foreigner

Man, you guys are all so lucky. I wish that I got to be a player in a game with some blatantly suicidal PC. It would be so much fun.

He killed the character not the player.

elf + 4 story fall = death.

easy enough for me to understand.

i'm thinking that either way, without freefall, he's going to die.

i'm also thinking that you have had a character die and felt it was the GM's fault. just what i'm thinking from your tone, but i could be way off target.

4 story falls don't come out well, and any GM that lets them is doing his players a serious favor. if someone goes out the window of a 4 story building in my world they get 2 chances. straight body roll, then hand of god. success in the first represents a miracle and use of the second is considered a miracle as well.

I think the troll would have landed first just by the nature of his size and bulk and how you carry people. If he held onto the elf the whole way down did he push the elf out in front of him or something?

This sounds like a GM who just wanted to kill a character because he could.

And there you have it: could a full-grown man in relatively good shape jump out of a four-story window while carrying an eight-year-old child and land in such a way as to not kill the child? Clearly, the answer is 'yes' if he jumped and the ensuing fall was relatively controlled. If he panicked and ran out, well... anything can happen.

Alright, this run is called Panther's Shame, cuz it sucked for my poor char.

The characters: Panther, Mage verged to Initiate (Me), Zeke (Troll Adept), and Johnny (Face-Type guy played by someone I can't remember)

The mission: Kidnap a princess from Tir Tangiere and take her to the Plane of Night. (for some reason my GM thought Panther had already initiated.)

The effect - Well, Johnny had enough contacts (Lofwyr as a rating 3? Well the guy DID play since he was like 14 and he was 22-ish.) that he had a fake SIN as a CAS celebrety and he looked the part. So he pretended to be an under-the-table diplomat trying to feel out the Tir for trade agreements. He managed to persuade them.

The long story short, we get a private meeting in her top-floor suite in the Hilton. He can't bring his Thors (Dunno what they were aside from ultra-powerful pistols. He had ambidex, by the way) in while loaded (But can with them empty) where my character posed as a bodyguard and Zeke rode with an NPC rigger who we rented for his helicopter.

Meeting starts. Helicoper throws the ladder down and Zeke hops in, pops one of the Princess' two bodyguards with a nice burst from an Ingram.

Johnny shock-gloves the girl. She goes down bigtime and is out cold.

I manabolt the other guard. He falls out of a window.

We notice two UCAS military helicopters. Johnny burns Karma to buy successes and takes one out with each single-shot. AV rounds are cute.

My character is last onto the helicopter. Before we know it, a UCAS soldier with an RPG fires and nails the chopper. 3 failed saving throws (Though I could have used Hooper-Nelson, I was a n00b and my GM didn't remind me...)

Six story falls hurt, but with Armor 6 on they aren't so bad. At least, considering I also had regular armor on so my roll wasn't that bad. I take deadly stun and serious physical and am out. Wake up in a prison getting tortured.

The good news? Panther managed to get revenge on that very same hotel room....

Actually, the troll should fall last. Heavier objects don't fall faster, but larger objects fall slower due to air resistance. Also, the troll should have suffered a higher damage code, since being heavier, he hit with more force. His size should have made it harder on him, not easier.

Granted, the troll is bigger, and thus has more air resistance. But is the troll denser than the elf? If the troll is denser, it might still fall faster than the elf because of inertia -- with wind resistance needs to work harder to slow the fall.

Inertia is a vector. This means that the troll running horizontally will have momentum in that direction, and that energy will not increase his rate of fall (if he was jumping up, it might delay his fall slightly).

The troll was also holding onto the elf for at least some of the fall which changes the tumble properties from "less air resistance falls a teeny bit faster" to "drek, I hate complex object rotations and surface approximations of changing shapes."

Now, unless someone wants to actually calculate the air resistance and relevant vectors for every moment of the troll and elf freefall (with conditionals based on if/when the troll releases his grip), I think this nit has been picked beyond any potentially productive extent.

Was the elf out cold right after being used as a battering ram? I'm suprised they didn't cast levitate or shapechange into something that can fly(or a small white cube, cause they fell no pain).

Personally, I don't know much about physics, but I'm smart enough when I'm falling to shout "Wonderrunner powers activate. Form of hawk!"

I suspect levitate won't do much for 600 lbs (unless it's viciously high level), and most mages I've seen don't have much that would help (invisibility? Nah... Fireball? Maybe...)

All else being equal, the troll will fall a little bit faster than the elf. Thanks to square-cube law, the troll has a higher ratio of mass to surface area than the elf, and force of gravity is proportional to mass, while air resistance is proportional to surface area. The relative builds of elves and trolls probably add to that effect slightly, too.

But it's a very small effect, and, in a relatively short fall, is going to be overwhelmed by other factors, like the initial positions of the characters and how they tumbled as they fell.

Also, while the elf has very little chance of surviving a four-story fall, the troll's chances are even lower, basically zero. Mass cancels out of the equation when determining how fast you fall (ignoring air resistance)... it doesn't cancel out when determining how hard you fall. The elf is likely to break every bone in his body when he hits... but the troll will splash.

It still sounds like to me the GM made up his mind to kill the elf and did it. Lame GM.

The elf was already dead before they hit the ground.

why ? was the troll hugging him for a security blanket?

Dammit, people. If I were GMing the elf and the troll falling out of the window, I'd just spend 10 minutes looking up the falling damage codes from the Companion and then tell both players to resist the damage without armor or combat pool, and then leave it at that.

yeah, but I'd give maybe a 1-12 chance (foro easy numbers) that one land on the other, just to make it interesting. But not just declare it out of hand.

Falling damage is fun to look up. I had to look it up for 25 stories the other day (see earlier thread). Characters body was in the low 20's, w/ armor, and a quickened armor spell, so there was actually a chance.