[DeathEatsCurry]

I'm no expert on the SR setting but my feeling was always that good and evil weren't useful concepts in the 6th world. Are the Corps evil? For a certain index of evil, sure. But if you're working for them and their seedier actions keep you and your family safe, who cares? I think most rpg settings are better and more vivid when morality is entirely fluid and perspectival; it should depend upon choices, choices the player's make, choices the GM makes.

Plus, if the players are convinced of their righteousness, a good GM can always flip things to confront them with the consequences of those choices. I love that style and tone of play- I understand it isn't for everyone but I have always though SR was conducive to that style of play and narrative. That's one of the reasons I think its so cool!

Evil is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what evil is.
Granny Weatherwax

[Shadowjack]

I apologize as I do not have time to read the entire thread but I will say this: Your friend is triumphantly wrong and en route to completely destroying any fun you will have in Shadowrun. He is so far off the planet with his assessment of the game that his opinion is completely irrelevant. He also sounds like an extremely bad GM and shouldn't be the one running the game, there is no way in hell things are going to go well, it's going to be a trainwreck. I would advise you to get him to read this thread and if he doesn't change his stance you might as well not even play.

Regarding the lethality of the system, it is very lethal... kind of. You can burn Edge to stay alive when you should have died. There are a plethora of ways to survive in the shadows and you absolutely do NOT need to have the perfect team, which by the way, does not exist. You can play very fun campaigns with any team makeup provided that your GM is capable of creating suitable challenges. Your GM sounds like he has been tortured by bad DM's in D&D and moved on to what he thought was a more lethal game and is running it as such because his perception has been scarred horribly by previous experiences. First of all, the game should be FUN. It sounds like your friend is running a prison simulator and you guys are the inmates who are about to be executed. I would go so far as to say that your GM, at this point in time, is utterly incapable of GMing Shadowrun. One of you guys should GM and let him play or just kick him out of the group altogether. Saying things like "If you don't have ABC you're all DEAD 100%" is completely idiotic.

Sorry to be harsh but I don't want to see your Shadowrun experience completely ruined and it's going to happen if you don't proceed with extreme caution, take it from someone who has endured similar experiences and avoid it if you can.

[Jayde Moon]

Seriously, don't hold back.  Tell us how you really feel

[schenn]

It can be pretty brutal.

There are ways to offset the brutality, such as magic and technology, but in many cases a single bullet from a sniper when 'you don't expect it' and a poor soak roll can kill your character (then you burn an edge to stay alive to fight again).  Most GM's don't do that though unless you're being an unreasonable player :-)

The brutality goes both ways however, the players have access to the same or better gear and stats than the vast majority of mooks and bosses, and they also have edge to stay alive should they end up 'dying' while the mooks and bosses will simply be buried (in most cases)  The maximum health bar for anyone is going to be about 13-15 boxes (8 + (10 to 14 body) / 2 )+ ware or magic or qualities that specifically add a couple more boxes. The average base damage for most serious weapons is between 10 and 15 + net hits on the attack test.  The resister rolls that body + armor (average 12, average high of 20) . Meaning those tanks roll about 23 - 35 dice - armor penetration (average 2-3), averaging 7 - 15 hits on the soak.  The average heavy tanks are still going to take a little bit of damage (which has ways to be mitigated still but that's getting into a finer level of detail). 

Also, keep in mind, that is on the more extreme end of things. There are many runs where it is entirely possible to accomplish the goal just by being smart and skilled and not getting into a firefight in the first place.

This is intended. Bullets are deadly. Bullets are fast. There's no giant pool of hit points to whittle down because somehow 20 arrows to the face wont stop the wizard, but 21 somehow will. It forces you as a player to think "how will I survive life and accomplish my goals as a shadowrunner", not "how can I eventually beat up the god of the plane of air".

This is also up to the GM. They want you to feel a serious threat, but most don't simply want to kill you outright unless you're somehow being a really, really bad player (harassing other players or starting problems in general to ruin the game for the others). You're friend is over-reacting and from the sound of it, hasn't actually played Shadowrun and is instead going off all of the fluff about how terrible and deadly and short life is 2074. It is for most folks, but you have edge and the power of narration so it's cool.  Something I don't tell my players, I do listen for when the player says "out of edge". That's when somehow, the situation which could one-shot the player loses on a tie or suddenly turns its attention to someone else, or that weird and crazy and probably not going to work idea of theirs suddenly has a lower threshold than it should. The threat and suspense of "holy crap this could kill me" is 'fun', but it's more fun (imo) when the player manages to scrape by and succeed somehow than being obliterated by the power of stats or just walking through the scenario.

In the end, the point of the game is for everyone to have fun.

[Kincaid]

All of which is to say: Don't be afraid to declare Full Defense when you're attacked and against high-caliber weapons, it's better to Edge your Defense Test instead of your soak roll.

[Mirikon]

Indeed. Even better? Avoid getting shot at in the first place. Sneaking around, talking your way through checkpoints, knockout gas grenades... whatever it takes. There's no such thing as a 'fair fight' in Shadowrun. If you're not cheating, you're not trying.

[Glyph]

Yeah, it's not like a D&D dungeon where the goal is to kill everything and loot every room.  Shadowrun is a game of lateral thinking, where maybe instead of going through a high-security facility, the decker just hacks the delivery truck to bring the prototype right to you.

Shadowrun can be lethal, but honestly, it sounds like you just have a crappy GM, who is expecting an unrealistic level of preparedness and role coverage from a group of people playing a game for fun.  A good GM will challenge the group so they can enjoy a vicarious sense of real danger, but not the frustration of repeatedly failing.  And the GM should either tailor the run to the characters (in-game justified because the people hiring a group won't hire one missing a vital role), or make the missing roles into NPCs hired along with the team.

[Shadowjack]

Yeah, it's not like a D&D dungeon where the goal is to kill everything and loot every room.  Shadowrun is a game of lateral thinking, where maybe instead of going through a high-security facility, the decker just hacks the delivery truck to bring the prototype right to you.

Shadowrun can be lethal, but honestly, it sounds like you just have a crappy GM, who is expecting an unrealistic level of preparedness and role coverage from a group of people playing a game for fun.  A good GM will challenge the group so they can enjoy a vicarious sense of real danger, but not the frustration of repeatedly failing.  And the GM should either tailor the run to the characters (in-game justified because the people hiring a group won't hire one missing a vital role), or make the missing roles into NPCs hired along with the team.

That's exactly how I feel, especially about team compositions. A team is 6 Street Samurai would be extremely proficient at certain types of runes and Mr. Johnson would gladly hire them for such tasks. If the run requires hacking or magic support, oh well, they just don't go on that particular run, there are however many more jobs available.

[MijRai]

Or they are hired as the muscle/support for such a run, thus being on an escort/defense mission (when there's no shoddy companion AI, those can actually be fun, look up the All Guardsmen Party). 

[Sipowitz]

Yeah, it's not like a D&D dungeon where the goal is to kill everything and loot every room.  Shadowrun is a game of lateral thinking, where maybe instead of going through a high-security facility, the decker just hacks the delivery truck to bring the prototype right to you.

Shadowrun can be lethal, but honestly, it sounds like you just have a crappy GM, who is expecting an unrealistic level of preparedness and role coverage from a group of people playing a game for fun.  A good GM will challenge the group so they can enjoy a vicarious sense of real danger, but not the frustration of repeatedly failing.  And the GM should either tailor the run to the characters (in-game justified because the people hiring a group won't hire one missing a vital role), or make the missing roles into NPCs hired along with the team.

Heh, ha...
I never knew that the goal of a D&D dungeon was to kill everything and loot every room, but honestly, it sounds like you just have had crappy DMs, who expected an unrealistic level of ........etc.

Yes Shadowrun can be this brutal.  That is why it should be mandatory for every new campaign and/or group to sit down and hash out expectations of game and play.

[kyoto kid]

It's not that brutual....  With a good gm a good party can improvise past needing one of the roles.  Or they can approach the solution from a different aspect.

The brutual part is if you get into combat taking a full auto in the open can drop you near unconsciousness or death.  Considering most characters have 9-10 hp for physical damage and 9-10 hp for stun damage and having to resist 10 damage at once is not uncommon.

...well you can improvise in most cases save for magical threats.  If there is no Mage, or Physad with a weapon foci on the team, and you run into say, a couple force 8 fire elementals that just materialised, unless you have someone able to dish out a tonne of damage in one action with something like say, an assault cannon or AR loaded with EXEX or APDS on lead hose, the situation will go sideways for your team in a big hurry.

[schenn]

In those cases, as the GM, we're not supposed to drop those in unless we honestly think you have a way to deal with the problem (like hacking the fire sprinklers)

[kyoto kid]

...not always the case in Missions play as everything is pre written.

[Tarislar]

which is that he says that Shadowrun is a brutal system where it seems that anyone can die at any time for any reason. 

Is this true? 

To an extent.  Yes.  Combat in SR has a very "real world" feel to it, in that nearly anyone can be killed by a bullet or 2.

TL;DR: Is Shadowrun a game where any mistake, on the players' or characters' part more often than not spells death for everyone.  Especially if the party lacks a certain archetype.

Doing adventures can be hard if you lack a certain archetype, but really, that is all about the GM tailoring the adventure to fit the party.


If your party lacks magic then the GM really shouldn't be tossing a bunch of magic challenges at your group.

[Herr Brackhaus]

...not always the case in Missions play as everything is pre written.

Missions include notes to GMs regarding balancing encounters. The FAQ expands upon this, so no, even when playing Missions the GM has final say. There may be restrictions placed on GMs running missions as part of the living campaign such as not changing major NPC and Run rewards, but no one is forcing the GM to put a team up against something they have no chance of handling. SRMs are even written to account for the fact that any given table is random and you could end up playing a game with four faces, so yeah, the GM has some latitude even there.

An often misused reference is the sniper in SRM05-01; if a GM uses that encounter with a group of rookies, that's on the GM.