Yet Another moral question

[Chimera]

This event took place in a game just over a year ago, but it recently came up in conversation. Since there are so many "was this right?" threads floating around here, I thought I'd add another.

I'm playing Shadowrun with several others. My character, "Joe" (his pseudonym) is a Physical Adept (a sort of Monk/Psi-warrior with emphasis on physical talents, if you've never played Shadowrun). He's the quiet guy who fights like a tiger. Not entirely a good guy (no alignments).

While the rest of the group might pull a gun on a guard and hope that he'll simply obey and keep silent, Joe once kicked a corporate lackey upside the head as a warning to shut up and do what he was told.

Anyways, we were sent on a mission. Travel from our home base in St. Paul down to Chicago, to hijack a truck of goods from our employer's rivals. Not to take anywhere, just to make sure the goods vanished off the face of the Earth. We get down to Chicago and find the truck. We ambush the driver, who suffers an injury in the scuffle and is knocked to the ground.

So now he's wounded, on the ground, with my character standing over him ("Joe" wasn't the one who wounded him, btw). He orders his truck's defensive systems to kill us ("Sick 'em!"). Joe turns and strikes.

Now, had I rolled average, I would have done a moderate wound, driving the man into serious wound territory. However, with 9 attack dice and needing a 5 or better to hit (on d6, or 1/3 chance), I rolled _8_ hits and killed him. The GM turns to me and says "you were striking to subdue, right?"

Nope. (Sorry, but I hadn't declared that I was and I won't retroactively metagame that one away.)

So the GM describes how Joe basically rammed his foot through the man's chest and killed him.

Question: Did I _as a player_ do anything wrong? Was my character EVIL to do this?

I'll give some time for responses before I tell you how the GM and several other players reacted.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Question: Did I _as a player_ do anything wrong? Was my character EVIL to do this?

Well ... taking pot shots at all systems ...

SHADOWRUN: Chummer, you slotted some bad chips. Keep it frosty and don't get anymore wetware until we check out your aura.

D&D: Zounds! Twas an evil act! It says so on page 104!

WHITE WOLF: Your casual slaying of the truck driver only reinforced my belief in my own worthlessness.

GURPS: Dibs on his wallet!

HERO: Wait ... what rules version is this?

SORCEROR: If this was D&D this encounter would have sucked.

SYNIBARR: You did 238d12 points of damage to his upper forehead region giving you a 102.3% chance of a critcal wound. You failed? His spirit returns as a cybernetic dragon ninja, level 4. Roll initiative.

 

[Pyrex]

Wait a minute.

Your characters were paid to steal someone elses stuff and you're worried whether or not killing the guy who was a) paid to guard it and was b) defending himself, is evil?

Your (and your character's) response to the situation was both justified and reasonable given the givens.

Your PC (along with most shadowrunners) would be considered "evil" by the D&D alignment system.

However, Shadowrun isn't D&D. The scenario described above sounds pretty much like "business as usual" for SR. You didn't mean to kill him, but if it had come down to him or you I'm pretty sure your PC would have made sure it was him.

 

[Saeviomagy]

1. Worrying about morality in SR is really stupid. You're a paid criminal for christ's sake.

2. Did you remember the 'opponent prone' modifier? I think it's -2... so you killed him better than you think.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Question: Did I _as a player_ do anything wrong? Was my character EVIL to do this?

This is Shadowrun you're talking about. You can't be good and be a 'runner at the same time. The best you can aim for is "decent." Trying to find a Good 'runner is like trying to find a good mobster. Sure, some of them might be decent and honorable to an extent, but by their very nature, Good is a tad out of reach.

I'd say your action was fine. My own 'runner, "the Professor" might have seen it as unnecessary ruthlessness, but death and killing are a part of the job.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Mostly what Pyrex said. The default alignment of Shadowrunners is Chaotic Evil. (I realized this around the same time as the Shadowrun campaing I was playing in fell apart--to this day I'm not sure if my thinking "well, why do I care what the bad guy will do with the Macguffin, if I were the squeamish type who asked "how high" every time a dog-shaman said "jump," I wouldn't be in the business of killing people for money; I say we take him up on his offer" was responsible for the campaign collapsing).

So, yes, your character was an evil murderer. No, you as a player didn't necessarily do something wrong. Evil murderers are normal in Shadowrun. You have to do something like murder children or rape altar boys to really stand out.

 

[AIM-54]

Most people have already hit it on the head. SR is very different from D&D (and for that I love it! ), so trying to use the same morality code is sort of counter-productive. While it's possible to play honorable characters, it's not built for high heroism. I disagree with those that simply declare all SR characters evil (although I won't argue that many campaigns tend to lean that way, at least by any 20th Century objective sense); Runners are not inherently evil. While they do occupy a state counter to the laws of the country (or whoever has jurisdiction), a key aspect of the setting is that those that make and enforce the law are, themselves, generally corrupt/evil and runners can be Robin Hoodesque out there sticking it to the man and trying to make some good out of a bad situation.

But it tends to be played otherwise. I'm just saying it's a possibility and, indeed, reading some of the stuff how the designers perhaps envisioned it.

I wouldn't feel bad. A friend of mine playing a phys-ad sniper once killed a sec guard with a gel round. One gel round. Scaled it from stun damage right up to deadly physical.

In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have used ALL of his combat pool...

 

[Dextra]

Evil acts in future RPGS

Wow, guys, this has provoked a lot of thought and discussion here. We've been playing Cyberpunk for years (I played a single game of ShadowRun, but read the fiction like a junkie), and I tend to fall into certain habits.

Mostly, I get pissed at excessive collatoral damage, and the lack of consequences thereof. We've had a few players who constantly use automatic weapons in crowd scenes, killing a handful of bystanders in every firefight. It's appalling. As is the fact that some of these guys have high Empathy ratings, and yet feel no need to restrain themselves from killing innocents.

I think the best game we played was when we played a TraumaTeam rip-off group showing up at the scene of devastation wreaked by our players, one of whom insisted upon firing water-triggered explosive needle rounds into a crowd.

Then again, two of my characters have little compunction about backstabbing other characters for fun and profit.

So now I have a good idea. My Fixer is going to be all generous and buy the guys using automatics some "expensive" ammunition, which'll secretly be gelrounds with some heavy neurotoxins in 'em- drop the gonks fast, but with less fatalities involved.

So I guess we tend to play Chaotic Evil or Chaotic Neutral characters.

 

[Chimera]

Interesting responses. Evil, eh? Well yeah, runners would fit most people's definition of evil. Ruthless? Definitely.

What happened was the GM (and his wife) got upset with me that I killed him "in cold blood" and got on my case about it. The GM then inflicted the man's ghost on my character, trying to drive Joe insane, keeping him from sleeping, driving him into exhaustion. For the rest of that session and the next two (which is the point at which the game fell apart), they kept making mention of it, "jokingly" calling _me_ a "murderer" and "killer" way beyond the point of any "joke".

Did I mean to kill him? No. But I meant to stop him from directing the truck's weapons against us, from setting off any kind of distress beacon.

Let's put it this way. An Orc turns and runs for the alarm gong that will bring the entire complex down on you. Is shooting him in the back to stop him from doing this an act of evil?

 

[AIM-54]

I think the best game we played was when we played a TraumaTeam rip-off group showing up at the scene of devastation wreaked by our players,

What a great idea!

I agree with you on the collateral damage issue. One shouldn't allow one's players to spray lead all over the place without their being some consequences. What those are, however, is where all the fun is

I will say that the most fun I ever had playing was a sabotage run, where, with decker overwatch, my character planted explosives in two different cyber/bio shops and destroyed them without ever being detected. I think the sec guards mighta been KIAs, but that's sort of their lot in these games.

I just loved the image of those buildings exploding for no apparent reason.