We are adventurers and we are adventuring. We are fallowing the path of the Dead Suns adventure, but I have this concern...We keep failing to kill people.
Our hale and hearty band includes a crafty and creative Android Mechanic, who makes machines and technology dance to his will. We are protected by a mighty, monastic Vesk Solarian who lost her honor and most of her name in some sort of noodle incident involving Skittermander. Bending the laws of physics is...well we have some player drift but that slot keeps getting filled with a caster. And me, the charismatic and charming Envoy...with whiskers and a long tail.
But we keep failing to kill people. It all started with
Incident at absalom station spoiler:
the Android Operative...no actually it started earlier. My memories are foggy (we play slow) but I recall there was a gang-leader we needed to "deal with". After lucky-crit removing her heavy hitter we knocked her out and then stabilized them both. We gave them a stern lecture and stole their stuff, there may gave been more but I can't recall.
Then we got to the derelict ship. Instead of just killing everything we actually rescued the two idiot goblins and, to make matters worse, when the ship left us on the drift rock they were aboard. This annoyed our employer enough he decided to punish us...by making them a part of our crew.
After that we beat down but did not kill the Android Operative who surrendered. We patched her up and left her with some (but not all) of her gear so she'd be less able to shoot us in the back, moreover we had reason to accept that she wouldn't be jumping us when we were her ship had been trashed.
She declined to come with us into the mysterious facility, did not face any of the hazards, but when the final boss fled through the walls to escape us it ran straight into her. A few die rolls later she showed up and asked for more healing, shocked we were still alive.
After that are some events I don't recall, but I think we actually did what we were supposed to...until we talked to Guido.
Temple of the Twelve spoiler:
I don't remember names, but I call the local criminal/coyote/fixer guy "guido". I dressed the part of an even scarier mafioso and walked in with an android who was acting "I care not for meatbags" and a glowing-but-with-blackness (graviton armor) Vesk and intimidated everyone between me and the answers I wanted. Not a shot fired, spent 100 credits on "playing and looking the part".
After that we went on Safari. We faced the stampede and something like half the successes we needed to escape were me making intimidate checks against giant thunderfoot beasts. Jokes about "mouse that roared" and "elephants afraid of mice" abounded.
Other things happened, a%%%%&+ scorpion monkeys etc, but things didn't get weird again until the cultist. We saved her life, because at the time I was still in the mindset that every scrap of intel is important for your shadowrun to succeedheroes to win the day. I then decided (because I'm playing a gentleman adventurer who picks up the Rat Man's Burden and believes that Ysoki's prevalence across the universe proves we are manifest destiny to guide and help other races) to recruit her.
Then we got to the undead elf solarion. Now every person I have seen on the internet says they had to kill him dead. I listened to his tale and thought, "wait, can't I rules-lawyer this? He's in a magical bind he doesn't like." So after pointing out that we were clearly members of the cult *point to cultist we rescued* and he was under orders to take cult member orders under advisement, he should follow our suggestion to go check out a dead monster all the way down the mountain path, FAR away from us and any potential power-struggles that are perfectly normal business as usual for the Cult of the Devourer.
He said, "that's a damn good point" and walked away.
After that (and a boss fight or two) we had another crew member (cultist girl) and the Professor had a whole new avenue of research called "chatting with this dead guy."
Of course, that led us into prime-time. We had an NPC crew, we had a ship, we had a lead...so off we went
Splintered Worlds:
into the Diaspora.
Our Solarian used diplomacy (and a suprising amount of charm) to talk the pirate who was supposed to be our space battle into just giving us coordinates and leaving us alone.
On the asteroid, we captured the mind-slave Sarcesian sniper because we thought he was a cultist who knew the entry code. I spent several hours grief counseling him later.
Leaving the asteroid, we stole the Devourer-themed Golemforged Plate and decided to wear it, forgetting that it's Devourer themed for several sessions and accidentally making some intimidate checks with it.
On Eox, we failed to kill the undead who were roughing up one of their fellow soldiers, instead robbing them and sending them home in their skivvies to explain to the base commander why they were out of uniform and missing their kit.
We tried a "higher ground" strategy against the giant monster by climbing the building, and falling through it...
We brought a mind-mage enchanter to an undead fight and she spent most of the fight ENRAGING the hopping vampire/ranged specialist with 'you don't get to make ranged attacks' fog cloud.
And since 75% of the party doesn't need to breathe, (those ioun stones are dollar-menu cheap) we had trouble even recognizing that the assassins sent after us were trying to assassinate us.
All-in-all, I think our watchword for that book was "Macgoo".
And now, we're in Ruined Clouds. No need for spoilers, but after successfully hitting the first 3 locations on the track we've killed a total of 1 person, and he was technically killed by his friend under the influence of a suggestion spell, and he still honestly believes it was his own idea and that his friend had betrayed him. (also, it was a lucky crit).
Okay, maybe 2 people. There's a critter that might be sapient, I'm not sure because I can't exactly look at the stat blocks of an AP book I am currently in. But we even didn't kill (saved, actually) the inside-out dudes.
So yeah, I think we're doing it wrong. I may lose my GUMBO card. Still having fun though.
Seems reasonable - even the "fights till he is killed" NPCs can technically be dropped down by non-lethal damage, or grappled/pinned and tied up.
The recruiting though - if I was the GM, I'd have them cause more trouble than they are worth, so the party gets rid of them as soon as possible. Balance wise, carrying NPCs around is troublesome.
Some of the books feel like they're a bit on rails, but if the GM has a flexible turn of mind you can play a bit differently. In our case, we avoided doing several of the (sub)bossfights by making something else do it for us;
book 1:
The monster at the end scared the beejezus out of us but we managed to lure it to the robot and have them fight it out.
book 3:
We located the lair of the skreesire, didn't want to go anywhere near it, so we got back into our ship and threw the entire acid lake into space with our graviton cannon, killing the beast in the process.
When we got to the ellicoth we fought it a couple of rounds but realized it stole almost as much life as we could inflict on a very good hit, while we had trouble hitting it. So we fled, and plotted ways to dispose of it. Getting flyover permission from Eox air traffic command took too long so we calculated the cost of deploying a massive amount of L1 grenades vs. the cost of jetpack-flyover-spell gem of magic missile and decided that 30 spell gems ought to be sufficient.
Some people may say we're playing it wrong because we're not doing encounters by beating our head hard enough against the wall to break it, but these alternative tactics give us the feeling of being in the future where people are smart and use technology, and they scratch some of our Shadowrun itch. So we're having fun.
