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View Full Version : Leeroy Jenkins Syndrome



blackout
2007-03-19, 10:36 PM
Ok, my group and I are playing a d20 version of Shadowrun. It's good. Anyways, there's so many of us that we actually divided into two seperate squads. Each squad has six people. Alpha squad consists of me, and five others. Beta squad consists of everyone else. Each squad gets a heavy weapons specialist, a sniper, a medic, a hacker, a jack-of-all-trades guy, and a sneaky-guy. I'm the heavy weapons specialist for Alpha squad.

Anyways, our GM is giving us a simple 'run. We're being paid a little cash to break into a small-time corporate warehouse and steal something for a rival corporation. We're going over the plan, and half-way through the planning session, Beta squad's sneaky-guy RUNS OUT THERE, YELLING HIS NAME, AND GETS EVERYONE KILLED!

Goddammit, Jacob...

Black Swan
2007-03-19, 10:45 PM
Should've just abandoned him. The original Shadowrun system is very, very, very unforgiving in combat and not planning ahead really well can get you killed very fast. Characters who do that die by the bushel.

blackout
2007-03-19, 10:56 PM
We WERE planning ahead. We DID attempt to abandon him. But the guards spotted where he ran into the complex from and then sorta retraced his steps. They saw us running away, and proceeded to maul us before we could take cover and return fire.

Stormcrow
2007-03-19, 10:59 PM
Characters who DON'T do that die by the bushel as well. One stray grenade can kill your whole party in Shadowrun :P.

I think D20 would subtract alot of Shadowrun's Flavor.
Tell the player if he does it again you'll feed him to the Astral and he can't write another character till he escapes. :P

TheOOB
2007-03-19, 11:00 PM
Eh? d20 Shadowrun? I don't see the reason to take a cyberpunk system and apply a high fantasy ruleset to it. Shadowrun is all about being gritty and dangerous, while d20 is all about killing hapless minions with godly magic.

Anyways, when you have a character who is playing a bit to "kick in the door", especially when the campaign is supposed to be serious and gritty, theres really only three things you can do.

1) Talk to the person and ask them to tone down their heroics a little, you don't want your group dieing because someone can't understand tactics.

2) Tell the person to create a squishy character who can't withstand frontline combat, that way they won't run out like that

3) Kick the person out of your group, if their making the game not fun for everyone else theres not much point in playing with them.

Obviously #3 is a last ditch effort and shoudn't be exercised unless the person simply cannot be reasoned with. D&D is about fun yes, but the enjoyment of the group comes before the enjoyment of the individual.

Anyways, welcome to the shadows, watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never, ever, cut a deal with a dragon.

blackout
2007-03-19, 11:04 PM
Yeah, it took alot of work. The only reason we didn't use the original shadowrun system was cus we were too lazy to try and learn all the rules. We just took a system we were used to, and altered it a bit to fit the game.

alchemy.freak
2007-03-19, 11:25 PM
Interesting, My advice is do nothing for now, just warn him

But if it happens again consider some serious in game consequences.

Renegade Paladin
2007-03-20, 07:07 AM
...

You don't consider a TPK to be a serious in-game consequence? Because that already happened.

Saph
2007-03-20, 07:53 AM
1) Talk to the person and ask them to tone down their heroics a little, you don't want your group dieing because someone can't understand tactics.

2) Tell the person to create a squishy character who can't withstand frontline combat, that way they won't run out like that.

No, no. I've played with these kind of people before and they've got the long-term memory of a goldfish. Trying to explain things to them never works, they'll just forget it. :)

What you should do is assume that he's going to do something stupid and get himself killed, and plan for it. Say, he creates a distraction at the main entrance while you sneak in. (Don't be surprised if, after all this, he manages to survive instead. The guy in our group like this had a ridiculous lifespan given the kind of things he pulled.)

Just don't ever make any plan that includes the words "Now, this depends on everyone following orders and not doing anything stupid . . ."

- Saph

Kender
2007-03-20, 07:58 AM
First off - you probably spent as much time tweaking d20 as you would have if you'd learned SR's system. :) SR4 is much easier to learn than previous incarnations, although it definitely takes some work to learn.

Secondly - have you considered smacking the guy? :) (I assume this was a PC character, not NPC) but it seems to me that either your GM subscribes to the hard-ass club of GM'ing, or he thought it was hilarious. Have a chat with your GM and the player, and let them both know that the "Leeroy-ing" of your group was *not* fun for you as a player.

Swordguy
2007-03-20, 08:16 AM
First off - you probably spent as much time tweaking d20 as you would have if you'd learned SR's system. :) SR4 is much easier to learn than previous incarnations, although it definitely takes some work to learn.

Secondly - have you considered smacking the guy? :) (I assume this was a PC character, not NPC) but it seems to me that either your GM subscribes to the hard-ass club of GM'ing, or he thought it was hilarious. Have a chat with your GM and the player, and let them both know that the "Leeroy-ing" of your group was *not* fun for you as a player.

No, SR really does work like that. It's incredibly lethal if you're players AND PC's aren't smart about the way they do stuff. I'd have probably blown them all up too, based on the scenario described.

BTW, to the OP, Saph has it pretty much spot-on. If he does this, plan ahead for it. Use him as a distraction or something, and get the rest of the job done as quickly and professionally as possible.

Everyone always forgets that the best shadowrun is the one in which your guns are never used.

Kender
2007-03-20, 08:39 AM
No, SR really does work like that. It's incredibly lethal if you're players AND PC's aren't smart about the way they do stuff. I'd have probably blown them all up too, based on the scenario described.

BTW, to the OP, Saph has it pretty much spot-on. If he does this, plan ahead for it. Use him as a distraction or something, and get the rest of the job done as quickly and professionally as possible.

Everyone always forgets that the best shadowrun is the one in which your guns are never used.

Believe me, I know that. I've been running SR for far too long. :) I just think that it was a spot of poor GM'ing - to wipe an entire group because one player was being a moron. Would the "sneaky guy" do that kinda thing?

Now, if he was suicidal or had some sort of psychosis, I can see that. But if they player just did it to be 'funny', I would have fragged him, and given the players at least a chance to get out without a TPK.

Swordguy
2007-03-20, 08:53 AM
Ah, OK. I see what you meant now.

Yeah, it is kinda hard-school. But sometimes the circumstances demand nothing less. I've had some stories put into Karen's CLUE files on dumpshock.com regarding TPKs from dumb PCs. Like the ones sneaking through fume-filled (which I mentioned several times, and were bad enough that the party was all wearing rebreathers) oil refinery pipes. They decided to cut their way out of the pipe, and so lit up a blowtorch.

In a gas-fume filled pipe.

How could I reasonably NOT have killed them?

I can see it being the same thing here.

Saph
2007-03-20, 09:04 AM
I've had some stories put into Karen's CLUE files on dumpshock.com regarding TPKs from dumb PCs. Like the ones sneaking through fume-filled (which I mentioned several times, and were bad enough that the party was all wearing rebreathers) oil refinery pipes. They decided to cut their way out of the pipe, and so lit up a blowtorch.

In a gas-fume filled pipe.

How could I reasonably NOT have killed them?

Wait - that story was from you? Hehehe.

- Saph

Kender
2007-03-20, 09:39 AM
Ah, OK. I see what you meant now.

Yeah, it is kinda hard-school. But sometimes the circumstances demand nothing less. I've had some stories put into Karen's CLUE files on dumpshock.com regarding TPKs from dumb PCs. Like the ones sneaking through fume-filled (which I mentioned several times, and were bad enough that the party was all wearing rebreathers) oil refinery pipes. They decided to cut their way out of the pipe, and so lit up a blowtorch.

In a gas-fume filled pipe.

How could I reasonably NOT have killed them?

I can see it being the same thing here.

And they all thought this was a good idea?

By all means! Call the Colonel! We have extra-crispy ready for him! :smallbiggrin:

Swordguy
2007-03-20, 09:56 AM
Wait - that story was from you? Hehehe.

- Saph

Several of those stories were from me. I met Karen at GenCon 98 and she mentioned a SR horror stories list she was making on Dumpshock. I told her I'd send a few stories of my own out to her, and over the next couple of years, she judged my players funny/stupid enough to merit the occasional entry into the CLUE files. I actually sent in about ten-ish stories, but she pared them down and paraphrased several to emphasize the stupid.

Specifically:

The team sneaking through the Mt. Ranier tunnels to save the girl. The scout is rapelling off a slope and hears chanting in the distance. Not having a radio, he yells at the top of his lungs back to the team that "I hear chanting". The chanting stopped. The team let go of the rope.

...And its followup with the crazy SOB slaughtering the sheep with his chainaxe and getting caked in gore. Then killing a guy, putting on his torn and bloody clothes, and trying to infiltrate the cult because he's got the schmuck's name badge on (forgetting the fact that there's blood on him and the clothes and the clothes have been ripped to shreds by the chainaxe). Mike to this day doesn't think that it was a fair death, because "it was a good disguise".

The aforementioned bit with the gas pipline.

And finally: the Troll burninator mage who rolled 28 ones upon seeing a Banshee and panicking. It broke down into: Sorcery 8, 8 Spell pool dice, 3 Power foci dice, 2 dice in fetishes, and 3 dice from his Karma pool. I felt bad for him, but sometimes the gods of dice luck just smite you, y'know?

Tobrian
2007-03-20, 10:01 AM
Does this player grasp the idiocy of what he's done? Does he care if his character dies? If not, then killing off his PCs and hoping he will learn is useless... next time, have the opponents capture his character and torture him a bit and throw him in prison. Or use the original SR rule for serious wounds and cyberware damage/failure. Maim him characters, so that he will have to shell out money and essence for cyberware. If he plays a spellcaster or physAd, well... sucks to barely survive a killing wound and then have to roll on essence loss.

Of course that assumes that the GROUP, both OOC the players and in-character his team mates, still want anything to do with him.

If the player annoys too much, ask him to leave.

It could be worse... I once played in a group where one player was prone to suddenly issuing death threats against other player characters during a run, without provokation. He kept waving his gun under my mage's nose, making barely veiled threats like 'Better sleep with one eye open, or I'll sneak into your room and shoot you in the head, mage', I never understood why because my combatmage had just joined the team, the run hadnt even really started... :smallconfused: PErhaps he didnt like spellcasters, but there never was any indication for that.
Shortly afterwards, this character (he was the team rigger) started the car and tried to back over another character in the driveway while everyone except the rigger was standing around discussing a plan. He pretended he hadn't seen the guy standing behind the car, but we were pretty sure he did it on purpose. I can't recall what we did, I think we hatched a plan to leave the guy to the enemy during the run and leave without him, and the gamemaster had the rigger captured and thrown in prison. Not very honorable of us, but hey... I think the player took the hint and left after that.


And they all thought this was a good idea?

Well, even in the Real World newspapers or TV channels occasionally run "Stupidest Criminals" stories. Not to mention the Darwin Awards... :smallwink:


First off - you probably spent as much time tweaking d20 as you would have if you'd learned SR's system. :) SR4 is much easier to learn than previous incarnations, although it definitely takes some work to learn.

*twitch twitch* d20... Shadowrun?

Personally, I prefer 3rd edition, because while SR 4th edition introduced some ideas I like, I hate that the whole system was redesigned to feel like World of Darkness/Storyteller system, complete with stupid stuff like Rule of 1 that later editions of Storyteller rightly threw out the window. They didn't get rid of the unholy dicepools of Shadowrun, they just made the situation worse! DC 5 on a d6. When we played WoD during the 1990s we usually used GURPS conversion. Having Storyteller's sh*tty dice system now sneak into Shadowrun via the backdoor is... arg.

If someone has a working conversion of Shadowrun to GURPS, I'd be eternally grateful. I'm member of a Yahoogroup of that topic, but I haven't checked it lately, because the last few years I've not had much opportunity to play SR.

Of course GURPS combat is even more lethal than SR... I actually always considered SR only medium-lethal, because of all the dodge rolls you can make, and rolling down damage to minimize it, and rerolling using karma, and the availability of healing magic. Of course, cyberpunk originally wasn't supposed to be gritty-deadly ruleswise, but gritty-dirty atmosphere-wise, the genre originally was about Style Over Substance... see the Cyberpunk 2020 game. But powercreep in Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk and FASA's Shadowrun meant that characters came to resemble more and more Special Ops soldiers with military gear instead of streetpunks with attitude. Groups now routinely expect players to have their characters act with military-style precision and have only the best high-tech gear and most powerful spells available or you suck. It's one way to play it, certainly, but it makes SR resemble more the Ghost in the Shell anime (post-cyberpunk) TV series than 1980s cyberpunk genre. It's not a bad thing, but it means you are forced to make high-profile professionals which is technically impossible with normal SR starting points.

Lapak
2007-03-20, 10:45 AM
...And its followup with the crazy SOB slaughtering the sheep with his chainaxe and getting caked in gore. Then killing a guy, putting on his torn and bloody clothes, and trying to infiltrate the cult because he's got the schmuck's name badge on (forgetting the fact that there's blood on him and the clothes and the clothes have been ripped to shreds by the chainaxe). Mike to this day doesn't think that it was a fair death, because "it was a good disguise".You left out my favorite part: him yelling "Someone's murdered Mike!" while wearing bloody robes and Mike's ID tag.

Swordguy
2007-03-20, 10:54 AM
You left out my favorite part: him yelling "Someone's murdered Mike!" while wearing bloody robes and Mike's ID tag.

"Abdul's" ID tag (or some such), but yes...

Honestly. It's been the better part of a decade now and it still hurts to think about. I have more amusing SR TPK stories than any five other games combined - and that includes Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia.

I theorize that there's a dimensional nexus contained within the Shadowrun ruleset (perhaps encoded in that damnable skill web) that leeches the IQ away from players when they're within a certain close vicinity of the book. It's the only way to explain the horrors I've seen.

Woot Spitum
2007-03-20, 11:07 AM
If I had been gamemastering this shmuck, the door would have turned out to lead into a broom closet. I would have given his teammates the option of locking him in. If the whole party is being stupid, then you have little choice but to make them pay. If one guy is being stupid, you can just make him look stupider, then get on with the game. That's the difference between D&D and World of Warcraft. The DM can stop one stupid person from ruining everyone's fun.

blackout
2007-03-20, 05:03 PM
Ok, we've spoken to the guy. He admits, it was kinda stupid. We're all laughing our collective butts off about it now. All our characters are back to 'pre-run' status. It never happened. We're going over 'inventory check' right now. Grenades: Check. Pistols, rifles, sniper rifles, check, check, check. All our other gear? Check. Ready to roll. :) Wish us luck.

Kender
2007-03-20, 07:06 PM
Ok, we've spoken to the guy. He admits, it was kinda stupid. We're all laughing our collective butts off about it now. All our characters are back to 'pre-run' status. It never happened. We're going over 'inventory check' right now. Grenades: Check. Pistols, rifles, sniper rifles, check, check, check. All our other gear? Check. Ready to roll. :) Wish us luck.

"Note to self - if Leeroy shouts again - shoot him in the throat." :)

UglyPanda
2007-03-20, 09:02 PM
There is always the extreme method of getting him to shut up. If I remember shadowrun correctly, it's possible to give someone so many robotic enhancements that they have to roll to see if they can move/breathe.

Swordguy
2007-03-21, 09:34 AM
There is always the extreme method of getting him to shut up. If I remember shadowrun correctly, it's possible to give someone so many robotic enhancements that they have to roll to see if they can move/breathe.

It's not a roll. Barring some extreme magic (cyber-zombie-ing), they just DIE.

Me, I'd forcibly addict him to some drugs, and then intentionally withhold them, foring him into withdrawl symptoms.

Then I'd do the same to his character...

Matthew
2007-03-27, 07:31 PM
I dunno, wouldn't D20 Modern / Future work okay with Shadow Run?