[Critias]

Quite frankly, I'd rather see the brat (Netcat) whacked.   The current iteration of shadowrun is a bit too fluffy nice... clockwork is one of the few remaining vestiges of the good old days.   /dev/grrl fills the hole neatly... worldly if still a bit naive... netcat has no excuse... she's just stupid/lucky and shoulda been left in a tamanous operation for parts long ago.

Any good story needs it's villains and right now the roster is a bit lacking with way too many bleeding hearts and politically correct tropes.

Interesting,...so you see 4th Edition full of bleeding hearts and the majority of runners too P.C. for your taste?   Maybe you're aching for the good old days of Teachdaire and Winternight.  After all, they were villians.  Of course, to work with them made your character a labeled bad guy.  Unless ya got off on shooting into a crowd of civilians and justifying it later as preventing possible witnesses from emerging.  Well?
I think there is a fantastically wide excluded middle here.

[CanRay]

What about KAM?  She's posted a few times on JackPoint, and she isn't even a Shadowrunner.

[Angelone]

Kane's not above torture, I could see him waterboarding someone with jet fuel and lighting it when he's done.

[Mirikon]

The people on Jackpoint aren't white hats, with the possible exception of /dev/grrl, Netcat, and the late Fatima. But other than Clockwork, none of them are raging bigots. This isn't like Shadowland, where everyone can come in and say their piece. It is invitation only (mostly), and the general consensus is that twisted hatemonkeys of spite tend to be bad for the health of the network.

But really, I don't see how you can say the Jackpointers are white hats. Skipping past easy examples like Kane and Puck, there's Sticks (no qualms about delivering escaped bunraku girls back to the Yaks), Black Mamba (ill-tempered merc), Ma'fan (thief who does it for the thrill), Aufheben (radical neo-Anarchist), Ecotope (radical eco-terrorist), Orbital DK (runs a black data haven), Hannibelle (works with Tamanous), and I could go on. They aren't white hats. Not by a long shot.

[TheWanderingJewels]

Quite frankly, I'd rather see the brat (Netcat) whacked.   The current iteration of shadowrun is a bit too fluffy nice... clockwork is one of the few remaining vestiges of the good old days.   /dev/grrl fills the hole neatly... worldly if still a bit naive... netcat has no excuse... she's just stupid/lucky and shoulda been left in a tamanous operation for parts long ago.

Any good story needs it's villains and right now the roster is a bit lacking with way too many bleeding hearts and politically correct tropes.

Interesting,...so you see 4th Edition full of bleeding hearts and the majority of runners too P.C. for your taste?   Maybe you're aching for the good old days of Teachdaire and Winternight.  After all, they were villians.  Of course, to work with them made your character a labeled bad guy.  Unless ya got off on shooting into a crowd of civilians and justifying it later as preventing possible witnesses from emerging.  Well?

You have an interesting definition of White Knights and Bleeding Hearts.

A major problem with delving into Complete Monster territory (sells kids for sex, guns down large groups of by-standers and other what not) is that it makes you very interesting to a large group of people who rather object to that sort of behavior. That typically includes  Security types of all flavors and other sort s of armed types who object to that sort of thing. There are times to Go quiet, and their are times to go loud. And there are Wrong Kindsa Loud.

And there are types of Loud that you really don't want to have.

Politically Correct? Well, I gotta give you that with regards to the whole Ghul thing. Sorry, as soon as they made for all intents and purposes a bloody cannibal that is tolerated and a thinly disgused commentary on the SIDA viri a player character option, that was when P.C. reared it's ugly head.

Sonny, my old time street sam NPC, makes a habit of hunting down Ghuls and removing them from the planet. Typically with fire. He doesn't do it out of hate, but to him the represent a walking infection that takes away a persons meta-humanity and replaces it with something Alien and Predatory. Gotta Go. Same with Vamps and all of their variations. It's like hunting any other supernatural critter that is capable of thinking. It simple requires a bit more work.

He also systematically tortures a person if he needs to to get information for ops, then geeks them

And yet, he  saves kids from all sorts of sundry types.

So you tell me: Bleeding heart or not?


 

[ArkangelWinter]

Ah, Hannibelle contributes to the network, followd FastJack's rules, and has shown a willingness to help/cooperate with others on JackPoint. Since she's a good person to have in the biz, it doesnt matter if she lives off nyan cats and the souls of infants.

So long as it's not personal, of course.

[Bruce]

The primary problem with monsters is that they're unsympathetic (for the most part).  It's very difficult to make a reader be interested in the fate of a monster (other than wondering when/if they will 'get theirs'.)

In order to make a reader feel for a monster, you have to make them understandable.  Hannibelle is someone infected with a disease that made her a ghoul.  She ddn't volunteer for this, and is trying to cope with having to eat metahuman flesh by trying to do good in other ways.  This makes her understandable; her choices are limited by things beyond her control.  The reader can put themselves in Hannibelle's place, and wonder what they might do if faced with the same problems.

Which is part of the problem with Clockwork.  I admit I don't have all the sourcebooks, but what I do have doesn't go into Clockwork's background enough to make his hatred of technomancers understandable.  Which, for many readers, would make Clockwork a basic monster.  Monsters can be capable and enterprising; but in the end, they're one-dimensional.

[ArkangelWinter]

Clockwork is kind of the voice of everyone's fears. Take someone who's been discriminated against everywhere because of race, always struggled, and made hinself successful. Whether he's had help or not, he ends up a hatemonkey because he only remembers the bad. Then take everyone's TM fears. Clockwork doesnt have the experiences or inhibutions or whatever to get over it or be objective. In his mind, everyone's as crappy a person as he is, because thats just how he thinks. So of course TMs are just as malicious, plus they have unknown potential to be more harmful. He's expressing thoughts everyone has, but most people also have the common sensr to know that its probably misplaced, where in his worldview everyone's a selfish bastard.

I can understand why he is like he is.

[CanRay]

Ah, Hannibelle contributes to the network, followd FastJack's rules, and has shown a willingness to help/cooperate with others on JackPoint. Since she's a good person to have in the biz, it doesnt matter if she lives off nyan cats and the souls of infants.

So long as it's not personal, of course.

Clockwork contributes too.  IIRC, most of the drone books were written by him.

[Black]

The amount of chatter Clockwork gets on this forum is impressive.  So whether you hate him, or hate the hate for him, he makes an impact.  His creator and all who have contributed to shaping his personality/image should be proud to have created a character that really gets people talking.

The key is keeping him interesting or wrapping up his storyline.

Lets have a Survial of the Fittest style book, except this time the Mr Johnson is a member of either Jackpoint, or an enemy of Jackpoint.  (Actually, I like the enemy angle.  Someone who is manipulating Clockwork and the Jackpointers to cause enough damage to destroy this anit-consensus organisation...  Each mission frags with a different Jackpointer, not a direct attack, but a run which messes with each Jackpointer and manipulates them into potential destruction... eg kidnapping Kane's girl and giving her back to the Azzies, running against the Denver Data Haven and framing FastJack (or a megacorp and framing FastJack,  Extracting Devgrrl's parents from their megacorp... and of course, somehow framing Clockwork for kidnapping Netcat's kid... Stuff like that)

[CanRay]

We've already had people try to screw with JackPoint.

It...  Did not end well for them.

[Black]

Was that the Horizon thing at the start of... um... Conspiracy Theories?

I still feel unclear on what happened,.. 

[CanRay]

Was that the Horizon thing at the start of... um... Conspiracy Theories?

I still feel unclear on what happened,.. 

Perfect!  That's the sign of a well-performed Shadowrun!

No one knows what happened, how it happened, why it happened, or who did it.    They just know it really, really hurts and they should not do the same thing again.  Whatever it was that caused the owies.

[Mirikon]

Was that the Horizon thing at the start of... um... Conspiracy Theories?

I still feel unclear on what happened,.. 

What happened? Fastjack waltzed into Horizon's high security servers, while a team in the meat made their way into Horizon HQ. Fastjack laid waste to all the technomancers and spiders in the node, before tearing the Dawkins Group's servers apart at the seams, while the team in the meat used nanoweapons to destroy hard copy and physical servers.

In other words, it was the same idea as when the Ayatollah declared a Jihad against the Awakened, and Aden showed up, said "See what you will be warring against!" and then leveled Tehran.

[CanRay]

I thought Aden was saying, "GIT OFF MAH LAWN!"?