What kind of stupid stuff have your players tried to pull off, only ending in their untimely and well deserved demise?

A team of a Troll Mage, a Troll Muscleman, an Ork Combatant, and a Human Infiltrator are charged with kidnapping and holding some rich dwarven lady. They find out where she lives, which turns out to be a AA zone. High fences, personal bodyguards, lots of Star and other security firms about.

Well the Infiltrator does some Recon on the house (real non-conspicuous sitting on the back of the bike with some binoculars). The Ork drives the Mage to the house too so he can do Astral Recon. The mages gets a good idea of the layout, the occupants, and finds that the lady keeps a Hell Hound as a pet. The other Troll... is home drinking.

Well they watch untill night falls. That's when the Infiltrator, without notifying the rest of his team, decides to break into the place. The Ork and Mage watch him go in, they're still on recon, mouths open at his stupidity and gall.

He prys off the keypad, breaks the code, and starts sneaking in. He nearly gets caught twice outside by making noise. He manages to climb up to the balcony and sneak in through a bathroom window... only to come face to face with the big bad doggy. Well it chews him up something fierce, the guards come running. He jumps out of the window and limps towards his bike. The Ork and Mage just quietly leave.

He makes it too his bike, makes a Bike check to see if he can get it started... and promptly floods the engine. A foot chase and he's gunned down but still alive.

Technically he's not dead; but, he probably wishes he was after what happens next.

Before the run he decided it would be a good idea to take a picture of the Johnson with his Cyber-Eye. Well the cops downloaded his memory and found it (He was the targets ex-husband). Both the PC and the Johnson were charged with attempted murder. They make it so easy.

Just recently, runner throws an Incendiary grenade then decides to pick it up and throw it someplace else. He was 2m from it when it exploded. We used Hand of God to keep him alive (buh-bye 7 Karma pool).

Well we got one smart cookie there...

I ran that run in the parking garage in Brainscan once. The team (two gunbunnies, a troll bouncer, a drone rigger, and a hobgoblin with a bag of grenades) is trying to get into the parking garage beseiged by the Red Hot Nukes.

They decide not to parlay with the Nukes and just try to sneak in. They're caught (with so many people, it was basically a given). So they're stopped by a couple of dwarves with assault rifles, and a couple manning an MMG. The dwarves yell something to the effect of "Who goes there?"

The players look at each other, clearly not knowing what to say/do. A couple of them shrug. Finally, one of the gunbunnies says "Aw, fuck it, let's open fire."

The dwarves (already having their guns trained on the runners) go first. The resulting fight saw the troll die (slowly) by one of the hobgoblin's incindiary grenades, the hobgoblin die when his bag 'o bombs went off. The rest would have died had not the drone rigger just about sacrificed his Doberman w/ LMG to save them.

Man, I should've killed my group off this last session. What a frustrating sesh. Everyone gets the bright idea to start drinking before gaming. I don't, of course. I have to keep my wits about me to run everything. But, it soon becomes apparent that things are slipping out of control. Gah, I don't even want to go into details, but the group of three characters went up against a contingent of special forces operatives... somehow thinking they were going to win. I gave them one out, which they took, when they were pinned in a building and allowed them entrance into the London sewers... which had its own problems.

If these all weren't my best players and their favorite characters, I would've been a death dealer this last weekend.

Dude!?!?!?! That's seriously uncool.
I'd have nuked em' all if they wanted to play like that.
Damn!

hay garland, that hobgoblin didnt happen to have spider-man comics as a knowledge skill?

a hobgoblin with a bag of grenades sounds way to familiar

When people start drinking before gaming I pull out the folder of expendable, high-powered characters and have a running gun fight and testosterone fest. It saves on regrets later.

I once had a player (physad hand-to-hand specialist) shoulder roll over a pool table in a bar (in use) and randomly hit three balls. Suffice it to say the light stun before combat was enough to take her out. I didn't pull any punches because I didn't feel like it.

I seriously have to wonder what possessed you to make him flood the engine with a bike failed bike check.

I think its the defaulting SNAFU thing again.

There was a post a while back about a player that "flooded" the engine of his Westwind when defaulting on his Car check due to TN modifiers. IIRC, that case involved "high stress," and some other shit.

In this case its probably a combo of "high stress" and wound mods.

Just a guess.

This seems to be another case of Rainbow-Six-Hyperrealism syndrome.

Yeah, it happens.

I think I've been through that scenario Garland, or that scene used in another run.

We managed to get into the parking garage from the roof of the building next to it. The only way to get in from the roof was to jump down one level to the exterior ramp that went from one level to the next. However the Nukes spotted us and started spaying autofire our general way. The stupid death was sort of indirect stupidity from taking the cursed karma flaw, the player in question failed his athletics roll to jump down to the ramp. He chose to use karma to re-roll his failures and got lots of successes, but rolled a one on his cursed karma check.
He wound up overshooting and jumped clear past the ramp and fell, the Nukes took a pot shot at him in mid air with a rocket launcher and missed but still caught him in the blast radius doing M damage, before he hit the ground taking Deadly

Luckily for the rest of us the char had a gold Docwagon account and a HTR Team showed up a few minutes later to pick up their client. Of course the Nukes backed off and let the armed and wired for war parameds get their dead body. This was when my char the team's sorcerer cast Trid Phantasm and Thunderclap creating the image of a Nuke ganger throwing grenades at the Docwagon SWAT guys, sparking a huge firefight between Docwagon and the Nukes distracting long enough for the team and the other gangers trapped inside to sneak out and escape.

Even a stupid death can be turned into a useful advantage.

See, that's entirely fair.

And stupid. But, given his performance thus far, not surprising.

That happens too.

You didn't seriously make him do a Bike check to start the engine right? I read your reply I'm just making sure...

in the "should have died" column, i was GM'ing a decker who had two Enemy (megacorp) flaws. that, right there, should have been enough to just delete him at any moment. however, he would have whined, and i didn't feel like dealing with that again.

so, i tell him flat out that the host he's looking at hacking is Red-Hard. he goes for it anyway, and pops up Trace-10 IC in the act of logging in. i tell him an icon appears, attacks him once for no damage, then disappears. most people would, i think, get the idea.

he doesn't. tries three times to validate admin-level access, popping up more IC every time, while the Trace cycles down and locks onto his jackpoint. it finally dawns on him that he's in seriously deep doo-doo, so he tries a Graceful Logoff. Trace adds its rating to the TN to do that, so he fails twice and pops up even more IC. by this point, his icon is at S+3, and he's at M stun. panicking, he physically jacks out just as the Black IC is closing in. by spending most of his karma pool on rerolls and burning one point, he manages to take only S damage from the dumpshock, leaving him one box from TKO.

i still don't think he quite understood how close he came to losing that character. i mean, if you've got two megacorps listed as Enemies, and you get picked up by the 'Star? you're dead. the only question is which corp will kill you first, nevermind the utter stupidity of having a megacorp listed as an enemy in the first place (Motivation 1, Knowledge 1, Power 32084728093420).

Speedy: Each new post of yours I read increases my gladness that I am not involved in your games.

What crap.

Ignition systems nowadays have automatic starts. Imagine the technology available in a plain-jane standard bike in 60 years.

Add to that the fact that many people have to pick up, mount, and start or restart their bikes in stressful conditions in real life just in races alone, let alone the bikes actually used in combat maneuvers. And sometimes they're injured to boot!

Hell, I've even done it after wiping out and breaking two ribs and a leg, and started it successully first time and rode to the hospital. Albeit I was not under gunfire at that time, but then I was not necessarily as professional as the character in question would be.

A driving test I fully understand, but a starting test is bullshit!

A 'anything but all ones' check might be in order... but anything more that that is just the GM screwing with you.

It could just be an insufficient knowledge of math, i.e. how hard is TN X with Y dice?

Unless we're talking about being wounded to the point where you see the ghosts of 47 dead ronin charging at you every time you blink, I can't justify a test for starting the damn thing.

Group of PC runners are on a stakeout pending an extraction of Mr. Target. They're in a hotel room.

In their astral recon, they discover a group of suspicious, heavily armed, heavily cybered, and magically active individuals a few rooms down. Quickly, they determine it is more runners.

A brief discussion between professionals reveals that, in fact, the NPC runners are surveilling (is that a word?) the Target. They have no objection to the PC runners' actions against the Target, whatever that might be. The PC mage confirms truthfulness on the part of the NPC runners.

The PC runners nod thoughtfully, and attack.

The PC runners had certain deficiencies in close quarter combat against standard runners. They didn't have a lot of armor or reaction enhancements compared to a typical samurai. The PC who pulled the gun went down, followed by the mage, followed by the third PC shot in the back at the end of the hall, where he had started to run to.

As best as can be determined, the whole unnecessary combat resulted from a desire by the players to prove how Badass they were compared to these "competitors." The GM was speechless. I was glad I was stranded 900 miles away from that game and didn't lose a PC.

Maybe he had to make the check for starting the bike and accelerating it (IE, starting to drive)?

starting a bike may be a non-test when all you do is walk over to it, sit down, put the key in and turn it. but when the same thing is happening while the person is being shot at after being badly mauled by a awakend pet i think its ok. the question is, is it a stressful situation or not?

I think the whole "vehicle check" discussion makes sense, and not, at the same time. Lemme esplain....
Yes a check could (like as in, if you feel you have to) have be warranted, but it should have been called something else, like a "willpower check to see if you remember where your keys are under fire", or "Intelligence check to see if you remember where the start button is" . Okay, I know these seem kinda dumb, but I think there may be some check (probably not my examples which are intentionally cheesy) that you could insert here.
However, something more well thought out in terms of what checks are built into the game already, would be better, like.....
"Driving check while attempting to serve out of the way of all those hundreds of bullets that are flying in your general direction right now".

I would not require a roll for starting the bike.

The skill of the rider should mealy reduce the chance of failure (more dice) however remember a well tuned vehicle today will start first time every time. Modern computer controlled engines are almost imposable to flood. By the 2060s it should be harder

If you look at the maintenance costs for vehicles the only way you can justify them is by keeping the vehicles in perfect condition. The only time I would consider a check to start a vehicle would be if it had not been properly maintained for quite some time.

Edward

Going back to the actual topic, there was a "you live so I don't have to hear you whine" moment in one of my games, months ago. There have probably been others deserving death, but this one stood out the most.

The rigger had Hunted 2, and was being followed all over Seattle by this other running group after him in a black van (they had a tracer on his bike, but he never figured it out, even after getting a hint every half hour or so). Every time they've shown up, they've attempted to kill him. Eventually, he thinks he's lost them because he managed to make sure there wasn't a bug in his cyberarm (he thought it was put there when he had his decker/techie contact work on it, despite the techie later disappearing and his apartment full of bulletholes with the door sliced in two), and so he goes out to check out a building that has to do with his most recent run.

He parks his bike (the one witht he tracer on it) in an alley across the street, and goes to check things out. He sees a black van drive past while he's in there, and assumes it's just me (GMing) tring to mess with him, something I'm known to do to my players, thus ignores it. After he's done, he heads back to the alley where his bike is. When he gets to it, a black van drives up and parks at the end of the alley, blocking the exit. A shotgun, assault rifle, and SMG are extended through various small openings in the side fo the van.

He forgets what color their van was (not that he ever asked), and assumes this is something else. He asks, "Can I help you guys with something?" because, like I said, he thought he lost them. They open fire.

I let him use his bike for cover, and then let him manage to escape on the thing despite it barely being in condition to run.



I'll not go into the time he began a covert operation by opening the target building's back door with a volley of minigrenades.

Restarting a bike is the easy bit, the engine is already hot. Try to start a bike from cold that has been raced tuned in the morning and even with electric starters it can be a few goes and it might not fire properly for 5 minutes on a cold morning. Obviously if you follow the standard SR policy of if it is a bit iffy now 60 years or technology will make it perfect you will ignore that bit.

Having to take a test to see whether the bike stalls when it is first put into gear and the clutch released seems very valid. I view it as the final part of "starting the bike", just before "going somewhere". How many of you (drivers/riders) can honestly say you have never stalled a car when startled at a junction or have never seen a person "kangeroo" a car.

Basic driving manuvers: i.e. not Evel Kinevel, do not require a test. Nor would accelerating away from a pedestrian. You guys are skewing the meaning of the rules to win your little battles in GM vs. Players. Thats not what it's about.