Yeah...the Devil has all the really good musicians, too...

Funny, I must have missed that part in Neuromancer.

Sure you can. If you tweak canon a bit and focus on only the bad parts (despite canon SR saying that most people like the corps, at least to some extent, and most LS cops are actually no worse than today's cops), you can play a Robin Hood campaign. the setting is pretty versatile. I'm just saying that this isn't really a natural for the setting, and that most people don't play it like this.

Not to mention the best parties. And better drinks.

Sorry, when I was mentioning "Cyberpunk and Shadowrun stuff," I meant sourcebooks, character archetypes, and canon adventures from the RPGs, specifically. Since we were talking about running and playing in games, not reading novels.


And, yes. I understand that it's not natural for the current setting, that most people don't want to play like that, and that it requires tweaking. That's why the sentence starts with "if you were to go out of your way," and why the post itself ends with "if you wanted to," and my own feelings on it (ie, I don't want to).

Nah, what's wrong with racial segregation laws in apartheid South Africa? Or, for that matter, those racial purity laws in Nazi Germany?

Paper is patient. You can issue the most ludicrous laws. Laws aren't always moral. then again, is morality firm? I think not. Morality is what you are taught, it's not a genetic trait. Without being taught morals, there aren't any.

Yes. And most of them get passed while good people watch. Why? Because the rights of the many get stripped away one line at a time, day by day, year by year. Until you have a Shadowrunnish future where average people have very few 'rights'.

That’s because you were busy reading a book that has nothing to do with Shadowrun. In 1st ed the Robin Hood aspect of the game was played up. The editions have since homogenized the game so that it's all shades of grey.

Personally I like playing Robin Hood characters who commit crimes for the greater good.

He said CYBERPUNK, not Shadowrun. See for yourself:

That's wat I was referring to, okay?

While I’ll attempt to address these points of yours, let me list my points about why it’s a good idea to incapacitate instead of kill: it leaves less evidence, it’s less suspicious, it reduces the effectiveness of guard response, it reduces how hard the corporation will look for you, and it works better against mages.

“It leaves less evidence.” Someone who has been stabbed or shot will leave bloodstains on the floor beneath them and frequently on the area around them, which will often include the attacker if they are close. An unconscious guard can be hidden. A dead guard will leave obvious signs in the area that runners are present and attempts at cleanup will likely result in more blood being transferred to the runner’s clothing and could leave footprints as well.

“It’s less suspicious.” An unconscious guard may merely be suffering a health problem or have had an accident. The initial impulse will be to check on their condition. A dead guard lying in a pool of blood leads to the immediate triggering of alarms.

“It reduces the effectiveness of guard response.” If you kill one guard, the other guards are more motivated to find you and kill you. If you incapacitate one guard, but do not kill him, at least one other guard will be busy tending to his injuries and/or getting him to safety.

“It reduces how hard the corporation will look for you.” Ultimately, the corporation wants to keep its expenses down. The more damage you inflict on them they more likely they are to find it profitable to hunt you down so you can’t do it to them again.

Public image is also important to the corporation. The less damage you inflict, the better the chances they have of keeping the run out of the press and thus avoiding their stock taking a dip. It’s a lot easier to cover up a dozen guards being knocked out than to cover up the deaths of a dozen guards.

Employee morale is also important. The corporation has to act like it cares about its employees so they’re more effective and productive. If the runners did minimal damage, the corporation can just fire a scapegoat. If there are dead bodies everywhere, the corporation will have to spend some time and effort tracking down and eliminating the killers.

Finally, corporations (including Lone Star) don’t have the budget to spend infinite amounts on every single crime that occurs. The bigger, more public, and more violent crimes will get more time and manpower spent on solving them.

“It works better against mages.” A wounded mage can heal themselves. A mage with several boxes of stun can choose to use a stimpatch, but he’s nowhere near as eager to try it as your average security guard.

Now to your points.

People can recover from ruined lives. I’ve not met one yet who can recover from a destroyed life.

Ultimately, it’s not a black/white issue, but shades of gray. Shadowrunners, like real world criminals, will judge themselves based on these shades of gray. There are reasons child molesters have to be separated from the general prison populace. There are reasons that organized crime figures have no problem killing their rivals, but consider their rival’s children off limits.

During the run, the other guards who will be highly motivated to kill you before you kill any more of them. After the run, any surviving guards who were friends of Ms. SecGuard. And the corporation itself, if you caused enough damage.

And while your example with the family is true, the more people you kill, the more likely it is that some of them will have friends and family members with the skills or influence to make life tougher for the runners. What if Bob Miscellaneous was a reporter, for instance?

It’s not cost effective for the corporation to fire all the security guards. It is cost effective to boot out/demote/whatever one or two scapegoats. The top choice would be anyone who obviously screwed up and they’re not usually particularly competent enemies.

The second choice is to pick someone who already had problems with the administration and make them the scapegoat. Which leads to the next point about a fired security guard seeking revenge.

While that former guard could seek revenge against the specific runner (or runners in general), she could equally well blame the person who fired her, her boss, her coworkers, or even the corporation as a whole. In fact, it’s more likely if they were picked as the scapegoat specifically because of previous conflicts with the administration.

It’s also a lot easier to find her former employer than it is to find the runners, and Ms. SecGuard also knows a lot more about her former employer’s abilities, location, and resources.

Only if they’re fanatics who fight to the death. An unconscious security guard knows the runners could have killed him, but didn’t and she probably still has some Stun modifiers. Neither of these will make her eager to go looking for you.

Another consideration is that guard who is unconscious is only one stimpatch away from being in a condition where you can question them. The same is not true of dead guards.

At the least, it’s a decision that once made cannot be unmade. If it was a mistake, you cannot undo it.

Unless you’re using the rules for Lone Star response times.

Actually, witnesses are not your primary problem. They’ll generally manage to get your gender and metahumanity right, but not much more, even if you have made no attempt to hide or disguise your identity. Some will be able to pick you out of a police lineup, but if you’re already in custody for that lineup, witness identification is the least of your worries.

And eliminating a witness does not guarantee you have really eliminated a witness. Real people have survived being shot in the head twice, then run over by criminals who attempted to eliminate them. Unless you are willing spend the time, effort, and ammo to make certain that everyone you downed is dead, you may have left a witness behind.

Cameras are a far bigger problem than witnesses. Killing witnesses usually only means the cameras have recorded you committing additional crimes. And you can’t guarantee that you’ve eliminated all cameras on site.

Ever heard of Nerf guns?

Or have an elemental or four or five to sustain them. (Something that's been mostly overlooked in the lastest "Hermetics cost too much" thread )

Edit: I am suddenly so tempted to open "Nerf Guns" as a Pistols specialisation, and see what happens at the extremes of when "if you keep playing with those things, you'll lose an eye!"

I'm just gonna hop out on a limb here, and state that I'm pretty sure the original poster meant "when speaking of weapons that are combat viable and of any sort of vague usefullness to Shadowrunners, there's no such thing as non-lethal, only less-lethal."

I also think you knew that, but thanks for your attempt to add to the conversation.

Which can also be pretty expensive in and of itself. It also would require the Elemental(s) to be present in Astral space the entire time, which isn't necessarily a Good Thing™.

I do believe Physical Mask is specifically a single person only spell.

You could develop an area effect Invisibility spell, but an area effect Physical Mask that covers multiple people would result in 4 or 5 identical people trying to infiltrate the facility.

Magic is supposed to have limitations, otherwise it would be too overpowering.

Implicitly, it can't be "area" effect: since not everything the magician sees would -- or should -- go invisible.

Not necessarily. Suppose the magician's conception takes the form of a group or type rather than "clone"? For example, give each person janitor's coveralls and long hair and shift their features in a common direction (ie. broaden noses, to suggest NAN ancestry). It's something done in common for everyone, like a template: but doing this same thing for each person doesn't leave them looking absolutely identical.

I know that's a typo, but damn does it ever conjure up some hilarious imagery. That Face girl must be doing her work mighty well.

To weigh in on this, I'm in the 'all depends on your situation' camp. Sometimes it's better to incapacitate than kill. Sometime's you just have to shed some enemy blood. There are obviously downsides to both, including the variable amount of enemies you come out of it with and the escalating immensity of your crimes.

Generally I would consider that no matter how nonlethal the runners are, their opposition is going to have no such scruples. Unless they want the runners alive for some reason, the secguards are going to be shooting to kill, especially if the runners appear to be holding heavy weaponry of their own (an assault rifle that fires only gel rounds still looks like an assault rifle). If they're trying to kill you, why aren't you trying to kill them? (insert appreciably pacifist reasoning here).

Well, if I was chief of security, I’d want to know how the runners got in and what they were trying to accomplish. If they haven’t been massacring my secgaurds I’d like to capture them alive for questioning.

There can even be advantages to releasing them afterwards.

Agreed. And runners with grenade launchers, machine guns, or rockets will receive a warning shot through the forehead.

Actually, my posted reasons had nothing to do with pacifism.

And I’d use different tactics with a street gang. Whether you killed one, or just knocked them out the gang’s rep has taken a hit so they’re going to be coming after you. Not that there aren’t times to use non-lethal force there as well.

Under most circumstances it really doesn't matter. If there isn't enough info to figure out how they got in, they're either ultra-pro (which means you probably won't be able to catch them either) or you'd better start cleaning out your desk. With regard to why they're there, it only matters if there isn't supposed to be any reason to think that whatever's inside is valuable or important.

~J

Phantasm and Trid Phantasm most definitely do not require voluntary subjects and/or targets. I believe you must be thinking of Entertainment/Trid Entertainment.

The more important question is who sent them. Runners are usually hired by someone. Taking out the runners does nothing to eliminate their Johnson, who may very well try again with a more competant team.

Damn you, James Densmore!

Really? Wow.... and here I thought a joke could be made here. Silly me.

Depends on whether or not you consider the executives at Enron theives. *cheesy grin*

It can provide some intelligence which could give them some idea of who hired the runners. They could get the same informatin from a detailed investigation but that would take more time.

They could discover who the Johnson is from a simple mindprobe and then kill the runners. Use the matrix and some footwork to track and mindprobe the johnson and find out who his contact is. If the enemy was stupid enough to use an in-house Johnson then then investigation can end there. If not, they can still use a matrix serch to trace the Johnson's employer.

Against another megacorp this information probably can't be acted upon in the corporate court, there are too many layers of deniability. However, an annoying fringe enviromentaist group could be destroyed easily enough.

There are also indirect actions that can be taken. Say Corp A has a top secret lab that has b een compromised by runners. They don't know who sent them but it was either Corp B, Corp C, or Envriomentalist Group D.

If it was Corp B or C then the runners were after the ultra-secret super-doo-dad and they'll have to move the lab to a new location. If it was Envriomentalist group D then they were trying to free some monkeys and can be safely bombarded into oblivion.

The later is more cost effective. If corps B and C havn't atacked the lab then moving it is just a waste of resources.


Information is power. It is best to have the most information as quickly as possible

The purpose of runners and johnson's is plausable deniability. A lot of people know about the illicit dealings of the megacorps. For the most part the megacorps all know who is doing what to whom. The difference is that runners and johnsons provide enough insulation that such infractions can't be proven in the Corporate Court.

Even if there was an indictment the megacorp in question could just scapegoat some pencil pushers and say it was a few rouge employees secretly violating company policy.


Its impossible to completly erase a trail of contact. If a corp hired some runners the runners can be limked back to them if one follows the trail long enough. The best that can be done is make the trail as long as possible and cut off loose ends.
The corp could have the Johnson or a higher link in the chain killed, but those people still have friends and they still make credstick transactions. The evidence become more tennous as one goes further up the chain but it doesn't disappear.

On the contrary, it always matters why the runners are there. Are they here to steal a prototype, copy data about it, or sabotage it? Is that sabotage supposed to be subtle? Which prototype are they trying to steal? All of this can tell you who hired them (or at least narrow the suspect list) and what you need to do to reduce the chances of the next runner team succeeding.

If the runners are here for an personnel extraction, it’s very important to know who they were supposed to extract and whether that extraction was voluntary or not.

Knowledge is power. Live runners can provide a wealth of info that will help you as chief of security do your job better.

There are also (sometimes) reasons to let runners go after questioning.

First, you could simply tell them they are trading their life for information. If you keep that deal, future runners are more likely to surrender and spill their information. Sure, you could just have a mage with mind probe rip it out of the runner’s skulls, but do you trust the mage not to lie to you? Do you trust the mage not to mindprobe you?

(I personally think mages with Mind Probe have a lot higher accidental death rate than average.)

Also, released runners can be used as deniable assets later. Note that it’s much cheaper to tell them they have a cortex bomb installed than to actually install one.

Released runners can be tracked. Stupid runners can be tricked into thinking they managed their own clever escape and got what they originally came for. Won’t their Johnson be pleased with all the fake data you let them steal? Greedy runners could be co-opted to do the same thing.

This is why Corporate Politics is a very important skill for a chief of security. If you’ve established the proper connections and have been persistently requesting more and better personnel, training, equipment, etc. then you can ride it out, pointing to the bean-counters in Accounting. If only they hadn’t denied your repeated requests for something that cost thousands, the company wouldn’t have lost millions.

Just remember, it’s never your fault. If a guard blundered, it’s because Human Resources didn’t hire someone who matched up to the standards you had asked for. If a security device failed to detect the runners, clearly it’s defective, and that can’t be your fault because you wanted a better model.

If all that fails, blame your predecessor. Politicians do it all the time.

And don’t forget that discrete surveillance of other people in the company can provided a wealth of job-saving leverage when you need it.

Do not go gentle into that good night, since a security chief knows enough that they’re usually retired with a large caliber round to the back of the skull.

To me, this approaches the question from the wrong angle. The important enemies garnered from killing are not the family or close friends of the deceased.

Here in Australia, a mere theft of thousands of dollars from an armoured van is unlikely to garner any press coverage beyond a couple of column inches on about page 8 of a newspaper.

Kill one of the guards of the security van during the heist, however, and you get front page coverage in every major paper for three days. The fact that it was an "execution style" killing, probably because the guard could have identified the killer, made it even worse. This happened several weeks ago, and I think it's very relevant.

Sure, corps are very money-focussed in SR. Perhaps the Australian experience is atypical. I still think that the PR implications of killing during a run are significant. A team that kills guards is far more likely to create a manhunt than one that simply steals things and does property damage. Of course, this shouldn't prevent the use of deadly force when it's stopping you from being the victim of deadly force. But it is by no means unimportant.