One of my characters runs a street clinic. I've set up a simple mechanic so that he makes a certain amount of money based on the value of the used cyber he brings in during a run (so about a quarter of the book price, assuming the ware is in perfect condition). However I've realized he brings in a lot of bodies in very good condition (generally just eviscerated or with a few very well placed shots). So I'm wondering, all told, about how much would a metahuman body be worth? What about a magical metahuman body? How fast do they sell? What else would I need to know before determining a 'fair' street price for him?
Take a look at Augmentation for prices of organs, and give him a percentage based on what you think is fair market value and what organs are still intact. After that, figure out how much he can charge for ghoul chow (probably not much).
I don't see why Awakened bodies would be worth any more than mundane bodies. They're not Awakened any more.
From what I recall from today's market, all the part s (including marrow, eyes, etc) can be sold off for over 100 grand. As lnog as all the part s are in good condition. This is what I recall from an article on a mortuary that was actually selling the parts on the black market. Don't know if that would go up or down though in SR era.
Take a look at SR3 p128—it has prices for limbs and organs, and if you apply the usual fencing modifier that should work out for you.
~J
| QUOTE (Large Mike) |
| I don't see why Awakened bodies would be worth any more than mundane bodies. They're not Awakened any more. |
34 minor organs = $255k
14 major organs = $210k
4 limbs = $100k
(going off the list on wiki plus 4 limbs, regularly forgetting to count doubles)
Total: $565k
(This is final retail price. Since the fellow in question is a street doc with a clinic, so he actually can make full price on it.)
So for every person he kills and brings back more or less intact, he can expect about half a million nuyen?
Sounds like free money to me.
Is he careful to only kill type O donors? What’s the cost of auto-immune response inhibiter drugs? What if someone wants to track down the dearly departed?
I wouldn’t give a PC a free ride.
What's the second hand organ group's name again? I'm thinking Tantamouse, but I know that's not the right spelling at least and I'm not sure which book to check.
But my point is that there's a nice monopoly on 'previously used' 'free range' organs and limbs, and monopolies don't like startups, no matter how small.
Tamenous
Tamanous.
~J
Oopsie.
Doesn't the price for a new organs include surgery? So much like cyber wear you are going to get a pretty heavily discounted price because you have to undercut a fresh vat grown clone by a significant margin.
Is anyone really going to want body parts? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to clone stuff?
The price for surgery used to be added into the cost, but in M&M they added surgery rules (which most don't use) and it set up different prices for surgery. So to answer your question by canon no, in practice yes.
| QUOTE (Cthulhudreams) |
| Doesn't the price for a new organs include surgery? |
The character in question is a surgeon, so surgery costs would be part of his income.
Immuno-suppressants are free. The rules for the clinic clearly state it includes a device that can make just about any medication he might need.
And yes, why would anyone buy body parts when they can get cloned parts? That's the crux of my problem. If he gets a datajack or a pair of cybereyes, he can just about guaranteed to be able to sell. Sure they're used now, but even so, that's a product that'll move. Body someone's leftover left arm? We assume surgery is about half the cost of a given piece of cyber, but is that the case with meat too? How does lack of demand impact these prices? It seems to me that if a runner is holed up in a hospital waiting for an arm, his buddies should have no problem going out, finding someone similar, killing the guy and bringing the body back, thereby saving the runner a good chunk of change, yet there isn't much of anything to separate the value of the limb from the value of the surgery.
How about this for a rephrase, if a runner needs a new organ or limb and his team go and bring in a body double to supply said organs or limbs, how much does the doctor charge?
| QUOTE (nezumi @ Aug 6 2007, 09:44 AM) |
| And yes, why would anyone buy body parts when they can get cloned parts? That's the crux of my problem. |
I would agree that the big question is whether or not something can move. Since SR doesn't really have an economic engine I guess this is handled poorly or not at all.
Basically, just because limbs retail for X it doesn't mean that limbs translate into X. If we bring a body back to the clinic, unless there's a huge line of people with missing organs waiting for a secondhand replacement, I doubt you're going to "use every part of the buffalo". You have to figure that of all the clients coming for new limbs only a certain portion are going to actually buy secondhand and it's unlikely that there will be enough such clients to use up each and every organ in the recovered body.
So, the amount of profit someone makes off a body is directly related to the number of secondhand limb patients. The rest of the body must eventually go to waste. We need rules to simulate this! And it must have different ratios of cloned to cyber to secondhand based on neighborhood economics.
MORE RULES! BRING ME MORE RULES!
Write them up, and if they're good they're a shoo-in for SR3R.
~J
| QUOTE (Kagetenshi) |
| Write them up, and if they're good they're a shoo-in for SR3R. ~J |
Doesn;t one of the Docwagon subscriptions include a completely cloned body of you as a toss in with a years subscription?
In that case, aren't second hand body parts going to be worth like half that plus implantation? I'm assuming there is some economy of scale in going the whole hog, but also cloned parts are going to be alot more attractive than someone elses second hand bits.
IIRC, it does. I can't find the reference, though, and it's likely to be one of the upper (and thus very expensive) levels.
~J
| QUOTE (Kagetenshi) |
| IIRC, it does. I can't find the reference, though, and it's likely to be one of the upper (and thus very expensive) levels. |
| QUOTE (Cthulhudreams) |
| Doesn;t one of the Docwagon subscriptions include a completely cloned body of you as a toss in with a years subscription? In that case, aren't second hand body parts going to be worth like half that plus implantation? I'm assuming there is some economy of scale in going the whole hog, but also cloned parts are going to be alot more attractive than someone elses second hand bits. |
As a rule of thumb: No mater what rules you do - the payment for dragging a body to a street doc should never be more than the payment for a run. Otherwise, shadowrunning does not make economical sense anymore (why risk your life for 5K if you can bag some nobody and sell the parts for 50K?).
Given that the payment for a body is based on preexisting prices, that means you're going to need to adjust the price for the run, not artificially constrain the price for the body.
~J
Or simply adjust the prices for "used" organs downward.
But that makes no sense—the price for used organs is based, as I just said, on preexisting prices.
~J
Why would it not make any sense? With cheap cloning available, used organs (and all the immunosuppressing stuff one needs with them) need a boost, and making them dirt cheap would explain why someone even bothers with them.
The cloning costs, as they stand, aren't cheap. IIRC, a full limb is 25,000 nuyen--that's 5/4 what a top-paid Lone Star Enforcement Officer makes in a year!
The standard fencing rules are adequate for the cost reduction, or nearly so.
~J
And what does that officer's insurance cover?
On-duty medical issues only. While on duty they've got a DocWagon contract of a level that I don't remember, but if they get injured off-the-job it's out of their own pocket.
~J
I have to amend my earlier statement...
I got my numbers initially from the table on page 128 (Body Part Types Table). What I didn't notice is it isn't labeled whether this is the cost for cloned parts (which would make sense, considering it has a 'base time to grow' or donated parts. The book offers no hint. However, M&M goes into more detail. We have three versions of transplant organs:
Generic donations - this is for 60% of the cost of what is listed on the table in SR3. Presumably my street doc would be doing this mostly, so that cuts significantly into his profit.
Type O parts - these parts undergo a medical profile to see if they match with the recipient. The book doesn't go into detail on how long this process takes or how common it is to find a Type O donor for a given recipient choosing from a given set of bodies, so we can only guess. It does say hospitals have an 'ample supply of generic parts in storage... In rare cases, a well-stocked hospital may have a Type O part on hand.' Presumably, this means that Type O organs are very unusual and therefore out of the reach of our street doc. If you're selling organs to the hospital, unless you already know it's a match, they'll sell as generic donations. This also shows me that a Type O donation costs as much as a cloned organ.
Cloned organs - we know this. Obviously, unless you run a cloning shop, you can't sell cloned organs. If you do have the cloned organs for a given recipient, they would sell as well or better than Type O parts. For everyone else they're generic parts.
This leads me to believe that generic parts have a pretty low cost in most areas. I imagine paying people for these is like paying people for scrap copper. They get the cost of gas plus a few hundred. Enough to scrape by, but not enough to really make a living.
Another simple explanation for cheap bodies, expensive parts, could be wastage. Wastage can have a serious effect on the profit margins for any perishable good. I used to work in a factory that among other things, made those layered cream wafer biscuits. To cut down on the wastage of the off cuts from the biscuits (they're made in larger sheets and then cut into the required shapes), they begun grinding them into powder and putting it back into the cream as filler.
A Street Doc might buy say 5 corpses one week from some runners, because he needs fresh parts and body parts have a farily short shelf life, but he ends up scrapping them for ghoul chow because he had no buyers that week. The next week he buys another 5 corpses and somone DOES want that second hand leg, but now he not only needs to turn a profit on that limb, but cover the expenses of all the limbs he wasted. And he's still only selling the leg this week, the rest of the body is more wastage. And that's not taking into account diseased and sickly bodyparts from poor living conditions (helps deter people from killing junkies and other nobodies) or the wounds inflicted in killing the person.
This way, if you think 30% for standard fenceing rules is still too much, you can pretty much justify dropping it to whatever you like.
Ah, stick and shock and a autodoc to keep them under. Then all the doc has to worry about is food. Not even tasty food.
| QUOTE (Serial_Peacemaker) |
| Ah, stick and shock and a autodoc to keep them under. Then all the doc has to worry about is food. Not even tasty food. |
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