[RPG] How to improve a drone’s Reaction (defense vs. bullets)

When I think of noir, I think about the following elements: crime, betrayal, temptation (often sexual), urban settings, pessimism, cynicism, and no-win situations. There's also a host of cinematic techniques that don't translate precisely into non-visual mediums, so I'll leave those aside for now.

Shadowrun has crime and urban settings covered, so that's easy. For pessimism, cynicism, and temptation, I'd look at my NPCs. Almost every one of them should reflect those traits in some way. They don't all have to be pessimistic; in fact, some of them should be defiantly optimistic, but that should be something other NPCs comment on. That'll bring home the point that it's a pessimistic world. And everyone should be capable of being tempted by something. Everyone has to have a price.

Betrayal and no-win situations are trickier, because you don't want to kill the fun of the game and if the PCs are betrayed all the time, they're going to wind up expecting the worst of everyone. This quickly turns into a game of turtle. I'd recommend having a fair number of missions that are the result of betrayal. In other words, the PCs should often be hired by someone who's been betrayed and who needs revenge. They're living in an atmosphere of betrayal rather than being betrayed.

Although it should happen to them once in a while. Don't avoid it all the time, by any means.

Finally, coming back to the visual stuff: play it up in your descriptions. It's raining. It's raining cold, bitter rain. The raindrops are exploding like a child's dreams on the cold, hard pavement. Well, maybe not that last.

You could easily argue there's no way those runners are getting out of there under their own power. However, that doesn't mean that they all have to die and the end of the campaign. Here's how I would deal with the situation as you describe:

Don't let them escape - have Ares turn them into an asset.

Have the guards fight them with non-lethal ammunition and tactics, such as Stick-n-Shock rounds. Incapacitate the PCs - they're unconscious, and at Ares' mercy. However, the party has just demonstrated a willingness to resort to extreme violence even in the face of very difficult odds, which makes them exactly the right sort of group to throw at a certain kind of corporate problem that you don't mind being dealt with in a very loud and unpleasant way. Remember that, in general, the corps tolerate the existence of shadowrunners because they need them to do deniable dirty work.

Now... maybe the Johnson isn't really dead. Medical technology is very advanced in the SR setting, after all, and he could be resuscitated if a DocWagon team gets there fast enough. Or maybe he is dead, and there's a different high-ranking Ares suit you have to bring in for this. Either way, the suit recognises the potential in having this team as an asset for a certain kind of job - so they install some leverage (such as the cranial bomb augmentation) in the unconscious runners. When the party finally come to, they're all strapped in to a transport, toting some shiny new gear and being given the details on the secret Aztech facility in the jungle they are compelled to do their very best to destroy, on pain of cranial bombing.

This way, you get to impose a consequence for how badly they screwed up the run - which is only fair, as by the sound of things they really made a mess of it by making a series of unwise decisions and demands - but you don't have to kill them, and the party gets to keep playing the actual game and doing cool Shadowrunner things - they're just under the thumb of a megacorp. There's a lot of places you can take it from there depending on what the players enjoy; that might be a series of runs at the behest of their new Ares "employers", or maybe an exercise in the party figuring out how to free themselves ASAP. Maybe they use the situation to get in deep with Ares, all the while planning to eventually free themselves and turn the tables on them. Either way - you get to give them a serious consequence without killing the game, and open up new opportunities for the story.