[The_Gun_Nut]

Speaking as one who has played the game since release (1989, for those not in the know) I remember that the whole bit about "honor" and "bringing some light to the darkness" were done only when a paycheck wasn't on the line.  The street samurai in our group had no compunction about murdering masses of people, even squatters or other down-and-outs, as it sometimes fit into his "personal code."  That's always the kicker about those codes, they are different with each person, and honor is what you believe it to be.

The cabbie killing I mentioned earlier was in that first 1989 campaign.  As my character was a former wage mage, his moral code wasn't terribly up to snuff (nominally better than the other corp goons though it was), but he did have his moments.  When some guys were robbing a plain jane bank that catered to the less than affluential, he moved to bust it up.  But, as always, his needs trumped everyone elses needs.  Pretty much like everyone else in the world (needs are funny things, everyone's are different, too).

[Critias]

Speaking as one who has played the game since release (1989, for those not in the know) I remember that the whole bit about "honor" and "bringing some light to the darkness" were done only when a paycheck wasn't on the line. 

Not always, though that may have been how your group saw it.  Only being honorable when it's convenient to you isn't, well, being honorable.  It's easy to be good when being good is easy.  It's doing the right thing in the face of adversity -- be it financial inconvenience, taking the more dangerous of two jobs, trying not to kill folks who don't have it coming -- that really makes a moral code tick.

[Billy_Club]

Speaking as one who has played the game since release (1989, for those not in the know) I remember that the whole bit about "honor" and "bringing some light to the darkness" were done only when a paycheck wasn't on the line.  The street samurai in our group had no compunction about murdering masses of people, even squatters or other down-and-outs, as it sometimes fit into his "personal code."  That's always the kicker about those codes, they are different with each person, and honor is what you believe it to be.

Couldn't agree more.  I don't know where all the "being good in a bad world" stuff got to be such a huge issue.  Been playing since the mid '90's and it was always mainly about surviving the next run with your team intact (or at least your own hide).  Not going crazy and gunning people down willy nilly was just good business because it drew too much attention.  Capping a bad man at the end of the run to close off loose ends was well within the moral code of a shadowrunner.  Even the newer published missions nowadays are set up to encourage or trick people into doing wetwork, getting involved in the drug trade, body snatching, organ legging, and the whole gamut of totally bad things that only sociopaths do for a living in real life.  Becoming a hero comes later in a campaign when you become awesome enough to pull yourself out of the muck and maybe bring a few of the innocents along with you to the good life, but that road is paved with a whole lot of bad.

[Rockopolis]

Forget Risk, what about Global Thermonucular War?  Pacifisim is the only option.  And I seem to remember killing more people with the lousy driving controls in Grand Theft Auto than I did deliberately.

[FastJack]

Speaking as one who has played the game since release (1989, for those not in the know) I remember that the whole bit about "honor" and "bringing some light to the darkness" were done only when a paycheck wasn't on the line. 

Not always, though that may have been how your group saw it.  Only being honorable when it's convenient to you isn't, well, being honorable.  It's easy to be good when being good is easy.  It's doing the right thing in the face of adversity -- be it financial inconvenience, taking the more dangerous of two jobs, trying not to kill folks who don't have it coming -- that really makes a moral code tick.

I lean more towards the Firefly side of morality versus the Leverage. When you're hungry, it's tough to turn down the job that will feed you.

[Lansdren]

My morality is flexible depending on the character concept

The mage I'm playing at the moment thinks of himself as a good guy but he is willing to go further then some if it gets the job done.

One time he was walking down the street and walks into some guys robbing a stuffer shack, he stopped them only after being told they had some hot food with them (the SS he went to up the road was closed due to a robbing that morning and he couldnt get anything to eat). He stunned them till they were drooling and chucked their commlinks and weapons down into the sewers before taking their food and walking off.

But then another time he threaten to torture a physical adept with some FAB3 until he got information from him. The guy cracked after a very in depth explination of the FAB3 eating away his magic until he was a husk of a man.


So swings and roundabout's really.

[Rascal]

Oooh, good threats will get you a long way. "So, mr Pianist, do you want to talk or do you want me to crack those slim, strong fingers for ya?"

My team was morally split in half for a while. The street-shaman and adept very much pacifists, preferring stun bullets (locally dubbed "rubber gloves" one late night after quite a lot of alcohol) and stunbased magic. The orc gunlugger on the other hand always had violence as his first plan, our first game with this group ended up with the adept and shaman mostly staying out of the blood-splatter as the orc brutally went about killing a good dozen of low-level security (curbstomping two mages in the process). Other members stayed somewhere in the middle, but never really seemed to have any problems with killing enemies.

The current team line-up is more last-retort killers, except for the cybered face with Neo-anarchist tendencies. "Kill the cops, it´s not like they´re people!"

[savaze]

Educate them the way I do, with a prime runner street samurai that hunts down dishonorable acting characters and makes examples of them.  Have contacts stop doing business with them or start charging them more for stuff.  Doing amoral things also attracts the attention of Knight Errant.

When I started playing RPG's in Junior High the answer was to hit 'em with the self explanatory 'Stupid Stick,' but I can't do that anymore with potential legal ramifications and all.  I use to dismember/maim characters to teach the more thick headed, but that really only works in games that can't easily fix those problems.  Then when I got the 'news' player I started man hunts, most wanted, bounty hunters, black listing, etc.  It just became such a pill.  I wish my dogs had known the command 'sic gamer' at the time.  I had one player who could push his buttons to keep him in control, but he moved and then it became tedious. 

Speaking as one who has played the game since release (1989, for those not in the know) I remember that the whole bit about "honor" and "bringing some light to the darkness" were done only when a paycheck wasn't on the line. 

Not always, though that may have been how your group saw it.  Only being honorable when it's convenient to you isn't, well, being honorable.  It's easy to be good when being good is easy.  It's doing the right thing in the face of adversity -- be it financial inconvenience, taking the more dangerous of two jobs, trying not to kill folks who don't have it coming -- that really makes a moral code tick.

I lean more towards the Firefly side of morality versus the Leverage. When you're hungry, it's tough to turn down the job that will feed you.

I wish I had shows like Firefly that I could point to, back when I last played, yeah it's been awhile for me.  My last group would have all, probably, mimicked Jayne... 

It seems hard to find a solid gaming group.  I've tried to establish three in the last two years and they never panned out.  Have MMO's and games like GTA finally knocked out all the potential candidates?!  How's that for a moral conundrum...

[theKernel]

Most of the time I think of my characters as people and acording to their skills and history I determine what they'd do

[SpiderWord]

Short version: backstab is the common hobby in my group.

[thalandar]

Speaking as one who has played the game since release (1989, for those not in the know) I remember that the whole bit about "honor" and "bringing some light to the darkness" were done only when a paycheck wasn't on the line. 

Not always, though that may have been how your group saw it.  Only being honorable when it's convenient to you isn't, well, being honorable.  It's easy to be good when being good is easy.  It's doing the right thing in the face of adversity -- be it financial inconvenience, taking the more dangerous of two jobs, trying not to kill folks who don't have it coming -- that really makes a moral code tick.

I lean more towards the Firefly side of morality versus the Leverage. When you're hungry, it's tough to turn down the job that will feed you.

Firefly is a great example.  As long as the are only hurting the Alliance (or the Corps), Mal has no problem being bad.  But when stealing medial supplies hurts a frontier world, they do the right thing.
Hell, the even get on the bad side of a Crime Boss because of their morals.

[Rockopolis]

And how many people are depending on the Alliance remaining stable?  Ah, I've argued both sides, I don't know where I stand.

[Kontact]

Well, I'm a GM more than a player, but I've done some harsh things as a player.
A favorite thing for one combat hacker was to do the Anton Chigur thing where I told a guy that if he didn't cooperate I would kill him then find his five closest DNA matches on the global SIN registry and kill them too.  I proceeded to do so, just to prove a point to a dead man.


As far as how low I can go as a GM, how about this as a counter to the "Uber assassin who kills runners I don't like" concept being bandied about as pure genious:

"If only you'd killed that security guard, then at least his family would have received death benefits. 
Instead, he got fired.  After all, somebody has to take the blame when a valuable prototype gets stolen, and it sure as hell isn't the management.

Because of your heroic restraint, his whole family was left homeless in the barrens, where they got scooped up by the 405 Hellhounds.  His wife got passed around in a five-hour-long session of gang rape, proved too unruly and was killed in a manner involving much stabbing and thrusting.  Meanwhile, his kids were set in a pit to fight other kids, hardened barrens kids, for the right to get jumped into the Hounds.  Their dead bodies were later sold as ghoul food.  The man himself was shot in the back way before all this though.  The Hounds stuck some meathooks in his body and drug his corpse behind their bikes, all the way over to the local bodyshop, to see if there was anything in him that they could salvage.  Too bad for them, there wasn't.  It turned out that the corp took back all their ware when they fired him and threw him out on the street with nothing but corpscript that he couldn't spend outside of the company stores where he was no longer welcome.

Next time, murder every guard.  Their families will thank you."

Enforced morality is never a good look..

[thalandar]

Well, I'm a GM more than a player, but I've done some harsh things as a player.
A favorite thing for one combat hacker was to do the Anton Chigur thing where I told a guy that if he didn't cooperate I would kill him then find his five closest DNA matches on the global SIN registry and kill them too.  I proceeded to do so, just to prove a point to a dead man.


As far as how low I can go as a GM, how about this as a counter to the "Uber assassin who kills runners I don't like" concept being bandied about as pure genious:

"If only you'd killed that security guard, then at least his family would have received death benefits. 
Instead, he got fired.  After all, somebody has to take the blame when a valuable prototype gets stolen, and it sure as hell isn't the management.

Because of your heroic restraint, his whole family was left homeless in the barrens, where they got scooped up by the 405 Hellhounds.  His wife got passed around in a five-hour-long session of gang rape, proved too unruly and was killed in a manner involving much stabbing and thrusting.  Meanwhile, his kids were set in a pit to fight other kids, hardened barrens kids, for the right to get jumped into the Hounds.  Their dead bodies were later sold as ghoul food.  The man himself was shot in the back way before all this though.  The Hounds stuck some meathooks in his body and drug his corpse behind their bikes, all the way over to the local bodyshop, to see if there was anything in him that they could salvage.  Too bad for them, there wasn't.  It turned out that the corp took back all their ware when they fired him and threw him out on the street with nothing but corpscript that he couldn't spend outside of the company stores where he was no longer welcome.

Next time, murder every guard.  Their families will thank you."

Enforced morality is never a good look..

Damn, don't know what to say but you have a good point.

[Charybdis]

.......
Next time, murder every guard.  Their families will thank you."

Enforced morality is never a good look..

Damn, don't know what to say but you have a good point.

OKie, maybe killing all the Atzlan guards is warranted  , but even Ares can't get away with this type of behaviour...

@Kontact, I love your counterpoint but it's only a sociopath who will murder an innocent bystander, with the rationalisation that 'Hey, there's a slight chance this is the better option for him'.... Your example is way over the extreme scale for Joe Average security guard.