Sauce-Man

            In the Annals of the “No Shit, There I Was” Pantheon, there is a story that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It features a character with pluck. A character with Determination. A character that just would NOT FUCKING DIE!!

            This is the story of Sauce-Man.

            Shortly after I graduated High School, Striker started running Cyberpunk. A game of a Nihilistic future of Bad cops, Cyborgs and Corporate Ninjas. My character was known as “Dragonfly”, but this is not his story, though he is in it.

            Sauce-Man was Slick’s character. Slick has a certain style of role-playing. We like to call it “Gonzo”. Sauce-Man’s name was Arnie (There is no subtlety to Gonzo). Arnie was a Solo (Soldier of Fortune). Slick maxed him out on the Cyber-ware. Arnie was more Metal than man. He had something called an Omega-Frame that brought his Body (a trait in the game) practically off the chart. Arnie was a tank.

            Striker was running the game that night and our mission involved the group of us (about 4 or 5 of us were playing) breaking into a warehouse that the bad guys were using as a hideout.

            I had Dragonfly climb to the roof and open a sky light to rappel down. Arnie was waiting outside by a loading dock, and I guess he got impatient. He was strong as all fuck and could take a lot of damage, so Slick decided to take the direct approach…

            So Arnie steps up to the loading dock door (you know the kind, a big metal garage door), and just yanks it up, shattering the lock. Dragonfly was coming down from the roof and saw the three guards armed with machine guns, but it was too late to warn Arnie. The guards were startled, but not too startled to fire. And fire they did, all three of them emptying their guns into Arnie.

            I’ll let Striker fill in the details:

When [Slick] open the garage door with his cyberarms, three armed guards with fully loaded AKs opened up at him at a distance of 6 feet -

Since his body (?) stat was SO HIGH and the armor bonus for having cyberarms, legs and a vest, I rolled for headshots only and got 2 - both were resisted, so we went back to the damage chart. After the first 10 or so rounds were defeated by his jacket armor, we started into his body. Since it was so damn high, and the damage for the gun was average, he kept taking shots and filling in boxes...So many boxes, that [Slick] started to invent boxes so he could cross em off…

            How damage works in Cyberpunk is that for every point of damage that gets thru your armor, you mark off a box on the chart. For every four boxes you roll for system shock against your Body Trait. Every consecutive group of 4 boxes has a bigger negative until you get to negative 9 (The Trait is only supposed to go to 10). You roll ten side die for this.

            Sounds complicated, but what happened is that Slick went off the chart. He just kept making his saves. He just wouldn’t die. They just sat there at the game table, rolling and rolling. It was mind-boggling. Slick just sat there rolling 10 after 10. Striker looked like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to laugh or cry. The other players began to wander out of the room, getting snacks or taking a quick bathroom break, but I couldn’t look away.

            It was like a battle of wills between Slick and the universe. Finally, they stopped. Striker announced that they had run out of bullets.

            Once the dice rolling was done, Striker described the scene for me, since my character had witnessed it.

            Arnie had yanked the loading door open and then the shooting had started. He hung onto the door the entire time, never falling as they pumped round after round into him. Since he had a hydraulic grip, he just… hung there.

            Somehow, since Slick had made all his rolls, Striker said that Arnie was still alive. Slick shook his head.

            “No way. This guy is Sauce.”

            Slick could have kept the character, but it was such a glorious way to go that he volunteered to just die.

            As a bit of an epilogue to the story, I should add that after witnessing the horror of it all, I tossed a grenade at the guards and blew them away. Then I started some therapy…

            That Character Sheet hung on the wall next to the Gaming Table for years.

JHO