[tequila]

Even better, have the kid seem to buy the "it's nothing personal, it's just business" line for a while, then sell them out on a run and turn that phrase back on the team.

[Reaver]

My hope was they would recruit the kid as a back rigger for more complicated runs I was planning.... And maybe tone down the full auto firing.


Sadly, Tanamous pays well for 'young, slightly used' organs. And a ghoul contact bought what Tanamous didn't....

BUT, they have tobed down the full auto fire.

[Wakshaani]

"Bullets bring bullets"

"You can't outrun the radio"

and

"Knight Errant loves an excuse to bring out the heavy ordinance"

These three phrases should put the fear of KE into them. If you don't want to end the campaign, have them catch a live news feed the next time they're at a bar, where some team of Shadowrunners went on a shooting spree and now KE has locked down 9 city blocks to trap them in a tic-tac-toe grid and is now moving in with a couple hundred officers with milspec gear, covered by scores of drones, several choppers, and some HR mobile attack vans. Watch runners get flushed out, bullets go 'ping!', and get brutally, brutally butchered. Have a few people mention how they'd hate to end like that, and if the PCs speak up, point out that whatever they have is what the poor schmucks who just got cut apart had and it wasn't enough.

You have to make a point that just being the biggest, baddest, bullet-est bunch of Shadowrunners ain't enough. You're outnumbered, out-armorered, and out-gunned, not to mention out-magiced. Direct conflict on that scale should be a huge, HUGE no-no in almost every case. (Mind you, every now and then, a big shoot out in the Barrens with a well-armed gang? Nice change of pace! But, in general? "Bullets bring bullets".

Live by it or die by it.

[Mirikon]

Exactly, Wak. Too many people get caught up in the trap of thinking that encounters have to be 'balanced'. This is simply not true. If players do something that moves them to the top of someone's 'to do' list, then things are going to get very UNbalanced, very quickly, and they need to understand that. Sabaton's 40-1 is a kick-ass song, but remember that the people that song is about lost, and most of them died.

[Adamo1618]

\m/

[Rooks]

This is why my team generally uses tasers rubber bullets and pepper punch and nacro jet knock the security out but dont get pinned for murder that way when the security guards wake up they get fired lose their jobs and end up having to run the shadows too, also security cameras are EVERYWHERE even today

[Ghost Rigger]

Flooding the labor market with amateurs who take our jobs and drive down our pay? That's even worse than killing corpsec! At least when you kill corpsec, you only make life harder for yourself and not for the entire shadow community!

[firebug]

I'm so glad this forum has people like you guys.  A recent trip to the Shadowrun subreddit resulted in people arguing with me claiming any combat where their enemies weren't all dead was a failure.

[Ghost Rigger]

Well, it is.....sometimes. Sometimes you want them all alive but unconscious too. In fact, sometimes you want them conscious but unable to fight. The key is that you always want to end combat with all threats neutralized.

That said, "dead" is my personally favorite form of neutralized.

[firebug]

Oh sure, sometimes you want them dead.  But a lot of players have this fallacy going on that "not dead = totally fine" and that being knocked unconscious with Stun is just a slap on the wrist.  (The person was initially arguing that having armor be able to convert damage to Stun was a horrible rule that made everything worse from a player standpoint and a GM standpoint).

Being knocked unconscious is often way worse--  For one, only stimpaks can recover Stun damage, so a magician's Heal spell becomes much less of a threat.  They seemed to think they'd somehow be having to fight enemies multiple times, like they'd wake up in a few seconds.  Considering most runs are done in less than an hour once the combat starts, a player can bank on enemies not having the time to recover from being unconscious.

[Reaver]

Honestly, I find this depends a lot on the GM and how consistent his world is.

My GM, and my games that I GM, are persistent, consistent worlds, where every decision the players make have an impact. Now that impact might be small - Like burning down a known bar, but its there.
In games like this, leaving a trail of bodies behind in your runs, actually starts to limit your work. After all, if its known that you have killed 40 Ares employees during your career, how likely is it that Ares is going to offer you an Actual job (that is not a setup?). And if you think the Corps don't know what you've done... well what do you think those Reputation scores mean?

Corps expect shadowruns, that's just the nature of business in the 2070s, and they have a certain amount of "loss" built into their budgets. But that doesn't mean they won't come after you if you, well... piss them off... which a few dozen dead employees will do. But if you keep the body count low, then Corps are more willing to let it pass.. or only offer token reprisals.


And speaking of reprisals... A lot of people don't seem to realize the true "reach" of a megacorp. They are plugged into every facet of life on every level, they have connections that reach from top of the towers to the deepest of sewers... A Corp can throw everything from a bunch of gangers paid by the Corp to hunt you down, all the way to Pictures of the team flashing on every AR screen hooked to their network in the city next to a bright red WANTED sign with a lot of zeros and a phone number...  Yes legally, the Corps reach ends at the property line, but their clout can reach everywhere.

But Some GMs just run a bunch of adventures that are loosely strung together with nothing in between and no real sense of continuity. In games like this then killing everything and everyone is the best option as that's less change of someone waking up early and sounding an alarm.... and there is no consequence in doing so.

[firebug]

I feel like though it's not unreasonable to say that Shadowrun is not meant to be a game where the PCs are free from consequence.  It's very clear to me that the setting and mechanics reflect this--  Games like Pathfinder and D&D are built on a vaguely connected string of combat encounters.  Those encounters are the flesh-and-bone of the game, which is why everything is balanced around those.  The fights are very finely tuned to be roughly even fights.  There's no real "non-combat classes"; every enemy is given a Challenge Rating, etc.  It's kind of designed around combat encounters being their own sort of "bubble", disconnected from other stuff.  This was incredibly clear in D&D 4th Edition, where almost everything outside of combat was removed from the main rules.  Shadowrun isn't like that; the game's focus isn't individual combat encounters.  Switching the focus towards individual missions kind of stretches the scope.  Normal corpsec aren't supposed to be a serious threat to the party.  Some characters can only barely fight, but are invaluable outside of combat...

I'm just rambling at this point.  I suppose my real point would be that Shadowrun is less "videogame-y" in many aspects of the setting and gameplay, and freedom from consequence is a purely video game trope that has begun to seep into tabletops despite not really fitting in.  In particular, many things in Shadowrun are "balanced by consequence".  Things like Forbidden-legality armor, explosives, and many aspects of magic in general.

I love video games, but I love tabletops more, and every once in a while I resent the medium for giving people dumb assumptions about how a tabletop game goes.  Every time I have a player ask me if their wizard is physically capable of hitting something with a sword, or see someone's mind get blown at the idea of being able to shoot someone through a cheap plaster wall, I can't help but facepalm.

[Ghost Rigger]

snip

I've found that Reavers remarks apply moreso when you're running against the corps and big syndicates. On the other hand, I've been running against smaller players and found the opposite way of thinking to hold true. When you're going up against someone without a lot of manpower, killing a lot of their guys means they have significantly less boots on the ground to hunt you down. When you blow up their stuff, they've got less money to buy bullets with your name on them. And if they don't have cameras and access to a forensics lab? All you have to do is leave no witnesses alive and they won't even know who they're looking for. Not to mention that some players are small enough that you can actually intimidate them.

[firebug]

I've found that Reavers remarks apply moreso when you're running against the corps and big syndicates. On the other hand, I've been running against smaller players and found the opposite way of thinking to hold true. When you're going up against someone without a lot of manpower, killing a lot of their guys means they have significantly less boots on the ground to hunt you down. When you blow up their stuff, they've got less money to buy bullets with your name on them. And if they don't have cameras and access to a forensics lab? All you have to do is leave no witnesses alive and they won't even know who they're looking for. Not to mention that some players are small enough that you can actually intimidate them.

That is very true; when you're not going against someone with the "infinite compared to the common man" level of resources a megacorp (or even more large syndicates) have, it's not worth it.  But against private groups, particularly gangs and policlubs, "causing serious damage" can definite be beneficial.  The sort of "default" of Shadowrun, or more like, the generic run that is used for most discussions or thought experiments tends to be an extraction or data steal against a corporate-owned facility.  That's usually the kind of game people expect when they're talking about what usually works.  But Shadowrun is definitely a very flexible setting, and someone say...  Fighting gangers working for Tamanous in Chicago's Containment Zone doesn't need to avoid lethal damage.  They might even just think it's the morally right thing to do to end those people's lives.

[incrdbil]

 If you've let the power level creep up a bit, you have to decide if you want to perhaps relaunch the campaign, or create a situation that removes what you feel has ruined the campaign (excess gear/nuyen/whatever). If they simply have gotten too much karma..well, you are the GM, you have unlimited resources, use them.

Seriously, they cant beat a really fired up great dragon, for example, unless you've completely lost control of the campaign, or you aren't using the critter abilities, or playing the opposition as  talented as they shoudl be.

Corporate and military special forces teams are better than the players can ever be in a standard game. Better gear, better stats, better training, better teamwork.

Set up missions where social skills are the only way forward,. The mission takes place in an area where they cant bring any gear through. an extraction where the compliance of the extracted person is needed, or the mission will fail. A subject you have to have them get data from, but has a cortex bomb and locked data stores. or one where a force solution will get opposition so severe it becomes impossible, and let the players choose. If they go in with force against what has obviously been presented as insurmountable odds, that is on them. That is not a "TPK" trap, thats players making a poor choice and suffering the consequences.