From:	David Thompson <david.s.thompson@****.EDU>
Subject:	Re: FWD> Character Death was RE
Date:	Wed, 18 Dec 1996 19:29:44 -0500

Steve Collins wrote:

>Gee I've never had one of my characters die off either. Of course I have
only played Shadowrun about 6 times. As a GM ( I am always the GM :< ) I can
only remember 1 character dying on a run. A Fire Elemental Adept who decided
to stand up to 5 guys with SMG's she casts fireball, 3 of them die the
remaining 2 open fire resulting in 2 serious wounds (She's dead JIm) of
course this action of hers did allow the rest of the party to escape so it
wasn't in vain. I had 1 character die of terminal stupidity on the players
part. After a run when he had some spare cash he decided to get some more
Cyber installed. A week or so later I did one of my periodic character
reviews and found that this character had 32 (that's right 32 not 3.2)
points worth of cyber in his body ( this was 3 years ago long before
Cybertechnology too ) to go along with 16 points worth of Biowear. He had
apparently just been adding whatever he wanted right along only this time he
bothered to tell me and actually pay for it. I used it for the basis of the
next run. Gee anybody seen The Sarge ( his name ) around lately I heard he
was goin in to get some more cyber but that was months ago. The Doc had
chopped him and got rich by selling the parts and was living it up in the
Riviera. After that I wouldn't allow this player to write anything on his
character sheets. And finally there was the time I told the entire party to
just give me their character sheets because they were all dead. There were
being paid by Renraku to Aquire some code that this company in the Ute
Nation was working then destroy all the copies. They hosed the run totally
when the Cat Shaman was captured doing some scouting while invisible. The
rest of the party decided to try and rescue him and conduct thi run like a
military strike. They figured they could deal with site security and just
had to be out of there before the FRT's showed up ( There were after all 15
runners involved I had that many players ). Well they just kept hosing
things up and had to fight the first 2 squads who were Heloborne before they
were able to scatter just a few seconds ahead of the National Guard. The
reason they all died, the managed to have their decker get the code, but
they still had to destroy all copies and were worried that there might be a
hard copy somewhere so they sent an Earth Elemental carrying 50 kilo's of
C-12 back into the building while they were escaping and blew it up. There
were still over 250 people inside at the time. Even this was not enough to
ensure their deaths except one of the player characters bodies had been left
behind in the final retreat. Who was this character, why a former Renraku
Company man. Now their employer is linked to the run however small that link
was. Well to avoid nasty probing questions Renraku "cooperated fully with
Ute Authorities in bringing these international terrorists to justice and
provided video's of all the dead mand known associates while they were
conducting a "revenge run on Renraku ", it was actually a doctored version
of them walking down the corrodors of the Renraku office that they went to
meet their Johnson in. I just decided they were all dead and gave each one
of them a quick description of how it happened for him ( usually Ritual
sendings )
>
Sorry to say it, but this is exactly the kind of thing I don't like. Sure,
I agree that the players completely hosed the run, but whenever the GM
decides to wipe out the whole party because he doesn't like how things went,
I think that is a waste. Instead, face them with the consequences of their
actions. Give them a chance to survive and learn. What I would have done
was to actually decide what kind of forces would come after them and make
them deal with that as the next set of adventures or two. Then, if any of
the party survived that (which would at this point require intelligent
thought and cooperation) give them an out -- something they can give to
Renraku or the Ute people to get them free. I've had characters killed by
GM's because of things like this, actually less drastic though. I had a GM
send huge magical and mundane forces after the party, chasing us and
disorienting us with the troops, and then killing us all by a combination of
suprise, huge elementals, and some invisible (as in really not present, even
to astral perception) mage casting mind control on the guy with the minigun.
It was a waste, and the whole reason he did it was because he decided we had
taken too much time and wanted the adventure over with. (Oh, and the only
reason he had suprise was because he decided to ignore me and one other list
member yelling at him that we wanted to post watches and patrols -- remember
this Club?).

Anyway, I think it is pointless to just declare the characters dead.

--Sanction