EDITOR'S PAGE

        Recently my gaming group and I were the subject of a very
vicious assualt by someone who took advantage of our hospitality.  We
are always looking for new players, for more players, and welcome them
to come join us for some quality Shadowrunning with some solid gamers.
But recently we had someone who showed up at a game of ours not for
gaming, but on a witch hunt looking to vilify both me and the group that
I game with.
        The day after the game, this person blasted me and the entire
group on a local message board that I monitor; leveling accusations of
munchkinism, powergaming and a total lack of roleplaying.  Needless to
say, I am quite displeased.  My group is rather annoyed too, feeling
that the entire mess is unwarrented and untrue.
        Actually, I'm more than displeased.  I'm enraged.  I dislike
personal attacks, and that is what this took the form as.  The accuser
claims to merely be calling it as he sees it, but he is merely calling
it as his biased and uninformed eyes are able to see it.
        Shadowrun is a game that is not really designed for *pure*
roleplaying.  I say that because it is true.  Perhaps a definition of
pure roleplaying is in order.  Very few games meet the qualifications of
a *pure* roleplaying game.  Most people that I have encountered define
it as a total of roleplaying and a dearth of combat.
        A game and/or a game system that have no or an extremely low
amount of combat and combative action.  Everything in the game,
everything about the game, is roleplaying.  Scenes, interactions, lines,
dialogue and so forth.  Not guns or blades or punches.  Currently, the
only game genere that meets this qualification is the Horror RPG area;
games such as Chill (TM by whoever makes it).
        But cyberpunk is a game genere where combat and combat type
actions occur as a requirement of the game.  You can not fend off a
pissed gang in a cyberpunk RPG with words alone (unless you've backing
for your words, and that takes action in nearly all instances).  You can
not extract an item or unaware person from a high security target with
words alone.  You can not strip valuable data from a megacorporation's
database with words alone.
        In short, the game requires combat in some form or another.  Now
this too demands explaination; before I leave the wrong impression.
This does not mean mercenary style action with overwhelming firepower,
supression of targets with artillery or collasping entire buildings.
But it does mean that you will have to have the ability to engage the
opposition successfully, the ability to preform in a hostile
enviornment.  You have to be able to handle gangs, corporate security
that's on to you, rival shadowrunners that feel they've been crossed or
upset fixers that think you're why their operations are falling around
their ears.
        You roleplay what you can.  Your contacts, your meetings, your
interactions with the party, your interaction in non-combat mode with
the opposition.  But you are ready and able to handle combat whether you
or your opponents initiate it.
        This was the scene that we were presented in the game that the
accuser sat in on.  Retrieve from a safe some files in chip form.  The
safe was in the distribution headquarters for a talismongers' North
America operations; the top seven floors of a forty-seven floor office
building in Tacoma in the Seattle Metroplex.
        Some research revealed that this talismonger was an established
business man, based from London.  With his name, we checked the London
Govermental database on registered magicians and turned up that our
target business' owner was a hermetic mage.  A short "misunderstanding"
involving pickup of some "ordered" items didn't yield much information
but did grant the oppoturnity to plant a small micro-camera in their
entry hall.
        Preliminary research and target data collection completed, we
got down to figuring out how to do the extraction.  We figured that the
safe would probably be on the top floor, as most executives keep the
safes in their offices; and most executives reside on the top floors of
their business' place of operations.
        With forty-seven floors to cover, and elevators a very bad
choice to make on any raid; I and my character's decision was to use
something we'd done before.  HALO insertion via parachute from a chopper
or other aircraft from an altitude over the building's own sensors to
the roof, and entering from there.  This had enabled us to skate right
around a heavily secured target's defenses before with only minor
skirmishing with a bare fraction of their assets, and we liked this
option.
        But our accuser, claiming to play in character (which is fine),
refused this option.  He was afraid of heights, and didn't want to jump
out of a perfectly good aircraft.  He wanted to enter from the ground
floor of the building and clear through the length of the target to
reach the possible location(s) of the safe and our target item.  He
wouldn't even consent to riding in the helicoptor and providing magical
support (playing a Hermetic mage, a professor no less, at MIT&T; sheya
right) on insertion and extraction, and on getaway.
        So out of five people, we had to split up.  The proper thing
would have been to cut the character loose, but for the sake of the
game, we had to put up with the compulsions (as players, not as
characters) and work around it.  So three went in from the ground with a
five minute headstart, and my character and one of his close chummers
came in on the top floor from the air.
        I zoned out a bit while the mage and company conducted their
business, but they screwed things over royally.  Our reluctant mage did
nothing but cast invisibility on himself and hang around the lobby while
a very overexcited samurai fooled with the main security board in an
attempt to call an elevator.  By the time the samurai and tech (the mage
stayed in the lobby) finished a brief exchange of gunfire and grenades
with each other in a misunderstanding and started up the stairs, we were
hitting the roof.
        On the roof, we found a lack of building access.  Swinging out
over the side of the building, we found the first two floors' windows
armored tank style viewports; too small to enter from.  So we dropped to
the forty-fifth floor and cracked through from there.  No stairs to be
found anywhere, so we hit the elevator shaft and went up to the
forty-sixth floor for a look see.
        Stairs were found here, and a lack of guards, and we made the
top floor.  A pair of bodyguards, apparently, and their charge were
here.  A concussion grenade and about two seconds of gunfire put the
bodyguards out with no wounds on us.  The safe turned up and I scared a
confession of the combination outta the bodyguarded charge, then we
knocked him out.  The target chips were here, and we made it back to the
forty-fifth floor.
        We'd just got off the raido with the ground team telling them to
extract, that the target was secured, when we had to deal with an
elevator of security guards.  My fears of elevators were found founded
when we handled them very easily in that enclosed space.  The rigger had
the chopper stable as a rock outside the window we'd come in through,
and a bit of line enabled us to swing over.  Then it was just a jaunt
away, and presto.  A completed mission.
        The ground team had more problems getting clear, but they
managed and we cleared out to complete the contract and collect payment.
The next day, the message and the roasting.
        Now, I ask my readers, what is your response?  Is this
powergaming?  Is this an ignorance of roleplaying?  Is this munchkinism?
I call it good Shadowrunning, and good cyberpunk roleplaying.  Our
accuser calls it the (paraphrasing here) lamest session of roleplaying
he's ever had the displeasure of being at.  He also insists to me that
combat and combatlike action wasn't necessary to extract the target
item from the target.
        So I also ask you, how else could we have made an extraction
from the target?  We were given a week tops, and actually used two or
three days of that before we made our move.  I'm either not as
tactically intelligent as I fancy myself, blind, or just plain stupid;
because I don't see very many other options for getting the chip out
short of perhaps outright purchasing of them from the businessman.  And
that's not only no fun, it's unprofitable (we were only getting about
forty thousand nuyen apiece for the effort, if it was successful).
        That's my editor's page for this issue, a bit bleaker and
more angrily than has been my habit previously.  Respond as you see fit,
I await the feedback.

I am the Nightstalker, thank you for your time.