[jamesfirecat]

Insert spoilers for ALL of Season 3.

Bear in mind that in Food Poisoning, you ARE the dicks who poisoned all the people who are dying, since you gave them the toxic grain at the end of Jacknifed.

I call it morally ambiguous because you're never actually doing anything that's good for a good reason.

In In and Out, you're helping the woman keep her restaurant so that you can use her to manipulate her brother into perjuring himself to cover for the crime you commited in Burning Bridges.

In Spin Control, you're working for a bug, who's paying you to shut down a program that might actually help humanity fight the Invae.  It's not easy to discover, but it's hardly impossible.

In Knight at the Opera, you're offered a huge mystery reward to reveal personal information about one of Damien Knight's doubles, which will inevitably lead to something truly awful happening to an innocent family just because daddy kind of looks like Damien Knight.

In Burning Bridges, it's not terrorism, since there's no political statement involved.  It's simple, basic human greed.  Someone asks you to commit an atrocity, and you decide that you're going to do it, or you decide to go to the NYPD and bring the guy down.  The ambiguity comes in figuring out how you're going to do it and how much trouble you're going to take to minimize the damage.  Blowing up the Brooklyn caisson is a lot easier than the river one, but will do a lot more damage and kill a lot more people.  The hardest option is blowing up the river caisson in the middle of the night which greatly reduces collateral damage.  The place where you decide that the risk balances out the volume of mass murdering you're comfortable with is where you draw your moral line.  There's also the issue of how far you're willing to go to cover for your crime.

Elevator is pretty black and white, with the notable exception of what EVERYONE other than Ares wants from you, and why.

The less you say about elevator the better since I have not played it yet, may be playing it this weekend or the weekend after that but whatever let me address the points you bring up.

First of all, "we' are not the dicks in food poisoning, the company that thought they could pass a bio weapon off as a grain is.  The grain was designed to pass even the very best tests that Pulaski could run on it, so there is obviously nothing the runners could do to keep people from getting killed by it, they can only clean up their own mess but they are not the dicks who are ultimately responsible for the grain, Aztechnology clearly is.

Secondly, it's not about covering the crime we committed in burning bridges, its about covering himself.  We got away from Burning Bridges scott free and there's no way that the police are going to be able to tie it to us even if Mr. Johnson testifies against us, since we blew up all the evidence along with the bridge.  Also, we are comparatively smaller fish than he is, as the mastermind is a bigger catch than the peons who did the job.  It is about getting him to commit perjury so that he will not go to jail for the crime he committed so that he could try and support his husband who was dying of Syphil-AIDS or some other disease that can't be cured by 2070 magic or technology.  It's not about what is best for us, it's about what is best for him.

Thirdly : In Spin Control we did figure this out, or at least we suspected it enough that when we turned the data over we eliminated all the info we had gathered about how Ares and the CIA were planning some strikes against certain hives at this very moment on the off chance that he was a bug spirit and thus would not get any info which he could use to help his insect brothers.  This run ran way too long (did you have that problem also?) and so we did not have time/energy to come up with a clever plan that required him to walk through a ward to get the info he wanted, thus 100% proving he is a bug spirit to us, which probably would have lead to him getting stick and shocked/stunbolted and then dropped off on the doorstep of the Ares/CIA base to become the next bug spirit on the chopping block for disection and experimentation because Karma is a bitch like that, but yeah this run went on too long for us to try anything trixy like that we covered our asses and got paid because sometimes real life trumps being a smarty pants in shadowrun.

Fourthly, in Knight at the Opera there is no such thing as a "huge mystery reward" since if the reward is a mystery you can not be certain it will be huge, QED.  Also this mission features an even more blatant case of "Syphil-AIDS" considering all of Ares' facilities should have been at the disposal of curing the daughter's illness and I am skeptical that there still exists diseases that can not be cured by a proper mix of bioware and getting bodyparts replaced by chrome.  Also honestly I though I did end up releasing info on the guy, I did it with every belief that he was in fact the real Mr. Knight at the time, so whoops on my part but I did not feel morally conflicted at the time about releasing info on Mr. Knight having a secret wife/family.

Fifthly, there is no "Run" if you decide to go to NYPD.  You go to them, you tell them, they stick some guys to watch the place where the explosives are going to be stolen from, catch whoever Not your Johnson hires to try and steal the explosives and you're done inside thirty minutes.  There's no "Run" if you don't want to destroy the bridge at least not unless your GM is willing to create something out of whole cloth.  Also as for how you blow the bridge, we actually did blow the river caisson at night (with some help from a motorcycle that doubles as a submersable)  and found it easier than blowing the bridge itself would have been for one simple reason... there are no spirits patrolling the  caisson.  So yes the when and how you want to blow the bridge  does let you determine how evil you will be but like I said you're effectively going to be horrible people whatever your choice if you want to do that particular run, you only determine if you're going down in history for killing more New Yorkers than... well I can not finish that analogy in good taste.

I would argue that if "doing the right thing for the right reason" is what is necessary to avoid moral ambiguity than any run will have moral ambiguity since the reason you do any run is always the "wrong " one... because Mr./Mrs. Johnson is offering to pay you for it, and thus it is not a very high bar to clear.



Also these are just my personal beliefs and I hope I'm not coming across as insulting.  Shadowrunners come in many shapes, sizes, and moral compasses, a shadowrunning team made up of The Joker, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze and Bane is just as viable a concept as one of Nate Ford, Sophie Devereaux, Alec Hardison, Elliot Spencer, and Parker... though I think that first team might also want to bring along The Clock King since it currently lacks a hacker/technomancer.

[DWC]

I call it morally ambiguous because you're caught up in the middle of doing a lot of awful things that directly lead to immense human suffering and misery, rather than just ruining a few careers.  Based on your definition, it doesn't qualify as morally ambiguous, which suggests that I should have described it another way.  How about I call it "bleak" instead?

[jamesfirecat]

I call it morally ambiguous because you're caught up in the middle of doing a lot of awful things that directly lead to immense human suffering and misery, rather than just ruining a few careers.  Based on your definition, it doesn't qualify as morally ambiguous, which suggests that I should have described it another way.  How about I call it "bleak" instead?

Bleak and or dysptopian are fine, it's just that morally ambiguous to me implies a general sense that the runners are in a situation where they have a hard time telling wrong from right and are unsure if they are doing the right thing or the wrong thing at the moment.  Burning Bridges is a very bleak mission for sure because the runners can tell wrong from right, but are deciding to do the wrong thing anyway so that they can get paid, and when all is said and done....



The only one who gets what they want is Aztechnology who are as always the biggest dicks in a city filled with them




So yeah, it sounds like our disagreement was more to do with word campaign.

Well that and I never had too much trouble (only one combat my team has taken part in has made it past the first turn and that was because the bad guys were so spread out) with fighting.

Though we also have been relatively smart in the fights we have picked, we manage to preform...



Everybody is your friend: This entire mission's combat was resolved  with one well placed stunball.

Ready Set Gogh: Not a signle shot was fired.

Knight at the Opera: Not a signle shot was fired.  Would have been no offensive magic either but the mage I was extracting  Daimen Knight with failed a sneak check.  We split up and he stunball, dust develed and blizarded his way clear.

Firestorm: All combat was resolved with two well placed stunballs.

Now for Something Completely Different: Test of self and mini-gun used as door opener to let people get out of the party.

Food Poisoning: Combat ended with a stunbolt and a single long burst.

Though on the other end of the spectrum, we did recreate the Lobby Shootout/Helicopter Rescue scene from the Matrix in Block War, and we earned a point of notoriety for taking out 30 mook guards with some well placed suppressive fire from a helicopter mounted mingiun


Also for complicated reason Jackknifed's climax invovled us fighting two Shadowrun teams at the same time, though I managed to take out 4/5ths' of one team in one combat pass....



But combat is a finicky thing in shadowrun so your results will vary even more than your character's morals.

[lonewolf1210]

Thanks for all the reviews!

btw: has the storyline that was unfinished in Ghost Cartels been adressed in any newer book since then?

No, and it likely won't. It's complicated.

For now, you might see a small nod to it here or there, but in general, it's one area where you should write your own stuff.

Now you´ve peaked my interest. What is complicated about that?