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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: Matb <mbreton@**.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Re: The Saint / Guns and characters
Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 01:40:27 -0700
Lady Jestyr wrote:

> This weekend I went to see The Saint (twice. Okay, so I liked the movie. Val Kilmer.
*drool*) I noticed one interesting thing: The Saint, despite being somewhat of an action
hero, never carried a gun (and only *used* one once, no spoilers for those who haven't
seen the movie yet).

I was entertained by the Saint... I'm a dissatisfied customer when it
comes to the movies (hated Lost World, f'rinstance.) Won't go OT in a
long discussion of the same, though.

> I was wondering if anyone had done that with an SR character - make a
> non-mage character who just doesn't use guns (and I don't mean the
> physad kickboxer martial arts god, either). Someone who actually gets
> things done by their wits... anyone ever done this?

I assume the elven samurai with the curare-tipped shuriken doesn't cut
it either?

The basic idea behind Shadowrun makes it nearly impossible to have a
non-violent campaign: you're performing the corp's dirty work. Since
your life is on the line, you have to plan around the possibility of
violence, and that usually involves being violent yourself. Even in
a low-threat situation (courier work, for instance) you have to presume
someone may just want that satchel handcuffed to your wrist badly
enough to kill you for it.

That being said, I can assert that I do have non-gun characters:
there's Meth, who bought a gun after some nasty threats, but he's never
fired it off the range; for the most part, he's lived in comfort, and
(outside of that one incident) doesn't see violence as a part of life.
This is mostly because the violence in his life is disguised by various
means (either by the Matrix or his art - in the former, it's hard to
feel guilt over destroying a black IC construct; in the latter, pirating
other people's art doesn't _really_ threaten its existence.)

And there's Push, who comes from a different angle; he's seen too much
of
what guns can do, having come off of tough streets. Guns escalate
violence; a punch may knock you off balance, but - black belts excepted
-
it's not likely to do much more than that; any gunshot, though, is
potentially lethal - and potentially lethal to the wrong person.
(One of the problems with SR damage codes - a ten-year old cannot kill
his best friend by accidentally firing his dad's .22. Statistically
rare, but it does happen.) It's easy to hide behind a gun, because it
offers so much more strength than an unarmed person could possibly
have. Push is coming under heavy pressure from his patron to be a bit
more physical (so much that he may soon have a smartgun implanted), so
it'll be interesting to see how he copes with the change.

Both are deckers, which explains why they've escaped so far. I do have
a group of broom-wielding samurai I'm looking to sic on some players one
day, just to show exactly how nasty staves can be in the hands of
masters. And then there are the semi-pacifists, who'll traipse about
with their Narcoject/SuperSquirt/Taser/Netgun/whatever, just to show
that they're not *really* going to hurt anybody. That being said, I
wouldn't say that because someone has a gun, they're *not* solving
things by their wits -- even the tough-buff samurai should be able to
see that there's a time for talkin', and a time for counting off paces.

Further Reading

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