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Posted by: CrystalBlue Feb 7 2008, 05:51 PM

First off...there's one thing that I must be missing from the book. Things like assault cannons and sniper rifles have and sometimes need massive recoil compensation...for what? They are usually single shot weapons. They don't generate any recoil per the rules...because after you shoot you have to wait for the loading of another round before firing it off again.

Second, how do I discourage my PC's from becoming thugs? I mean, sure...there are runners out there that are little more then thugs...but that doesn't do well unless the whole group is a band of roving thugs. Runners are supposed to be professionals.

And third...organ legging is bad. Very bad. It's business, but it's still bad. With that said, one of my runners is expressing a SERIOUS interest in either finding or creating a chop shop. That could ruin so many things on so many levels...how do you think I should handle this?

And finally...loot. Loot after runs becomes some-what ridiculous. The runners might take on a bunch of corp sec armed to the teeth or borgs decked out, or maybe a few drones. If the runners succeed, not only do they have the reward for a mission well done, they have a bunch of guns, toys, and vehicles that they ganked off of the dead. Sure, selling it on the black market might only get them around 10-30% of the original value. But they could just use the toys themselves and up their armament. Is there a way I can limit this?

Oh...one more thing...I forget, but where are the rules for 'ware breaking down? There used to be a bunch of rules on this in Cannon Companion, but I haven't seen them in the main book, Arsenal, or Augmentation. You know, like stress from a moderate or higher wound and how it can break ware or, worse, your attributes.

Mrow. :3

Posted by: Ravor Feb 7 2008, 06:00 PM

* It's just part of the fluff.

* I disagree, but thena gain I'm firmly of the "Pink Mohawk Forever!" style of Cyberpunk. Ice-Cold-Pros are just boring to me.

* Let him and run it with a straight face, it is generally a bad idea for a Runner to tie himself down to something, especially when he is treading on Big Crime's turf. Besides, why is organlegging any worse than any number of other things that Runners do on a daily basis?

* If corp-sec isn't run like a bunch of morons the Runners should very, very seldom have time to properly "loot". Re-evalulate how you are running your NPCs and enforcing time stresses at your table.

* I don't remember seeing anything like that in Fourth Edition, but equipment breaking down is a perfectly legit Glitch result.

Posted by: DireRadiant Feb 7 2008, 06:02 PM

The first item I won't go into. No doubt a huge gun thread will spawn regardless.

The second and third involve the GM and players having different ideas of the game. No point of view of the game is wrong. Neither side is wrong. They just have different views. Talk to the players about the GM expectations, and listen to the players about theirs. It's entirely possible to have a fun game involving organ legging thugs.

Loot... if it's so valuable to the players after they take down the tricked out cyborg sec guard, it's certainly valuable to the corp the sec guard worked for. If you lost a couple million nuyen out of your pocket would you cheerfully write it off and keep walking, or would you stop and look for it? The corp always has more people to send to retrieve their investment. They might not show up right away, but they will eventually. If the players stop to loot, have the corpsec backup arrive. If they take away lots of goodies, have those goodies easy to track down, and hard to hide their origins.

Jimmy the Fence, "Ah, these must be the latest cyber hydraulic jacks that Renraku must be looking for since one of their facilities got hit last week. How much did you want for these again?"... without mentioning the reward money

Posted by: DocTaotsu Feb 7 2008, 06:08 PM

I think you're fighting a losing battle omae. If your players want to go there, you do them a disservice by not letting them explore those themes (unless you just don't want to in which case you might need new players). The best advice I can give you is the advice I've heard time and time again:
Make them pay.
er.
Give players appropriate consequences for their actions. If they want to run around like retards and shoot their guns in the air, 4 different kinds of security teams should show up and wipe the floor with them. If they can fight off said teams than, well, their total badass's and have earned the right to run around and shoot off their guns like idiots. That doesn't mean bigger, meaner, armored teams won't show up later though.

Runners are /not/ professionals in my book (So this whole paragraph might not interest you). They may have professional beliefs and so forth but there they aren't licensed by some organization that stamps their SIN and says "You are now professional runners, go forth and prosper." The only thing that compels professionalism out of runners is their employers. Some employers might be looking for a bunch of dumb thugs because they are just that, dumb thugs. Unprofessional runners probably don't get the good jobs, the good intel, etc because no one wants to work for them or put money on a losing proposition. Still, there might be a niche market for them somewhere, even if it has a high turn over rate.

Organ legging is bad. My initial objections aside, organ legging is big business. Big business run by big scary organizations like Tantamont (sp?) that employee ghouls and worse to manage their "interests". If this player wants to break into the organ legging business freelance... he's probably going to have to deal with local organized crime and well... these are the people who keep claw hammer manufacturers in business.

Loot control. Well the funny thing about people who lose expensive things is that they will certainly want it back at some point. Hope your runners remembered to burn all the RFID tags out on those drones they stole. Even the ones that don't turn on until 48 hours away from it's standard service cradle. Hope they store all their stuff in a Faraday cage. Plus, how the hell are they carrying all this stuff away? Why is no one chasing them? Where are they hiding it? Why is no one raiding their hiding spot after local gangers notice "These mean runner looking guys" keep showing up with cartloads of crap?

My understanding is that there are no hard and fast rules for stuff breaking down or SOTA lifestyle mods. i've been using critical glitches as a way of degrade equipment over time. I also assume that runners with higher than a low lifestyle pump some of their lifestyle costs into maintaining their equipment.

Hope this helps.

Posted by: Whipstitch Feb 7 2008, 06:15 PM

My characters tend to treat organlegging basically like using every part of the buffalo; they won't kill people just to harvest their organs, but hey, if they're already dead, why not? That said, as people here have already pointed out, the Tamanous aren't exactly the sort of group I'd put too much faith in, so a lot of the time selling corpses and ripping out 'ware and trying to sell it is more trouble than it's worth.

Anyway, I figure if you're a runner, you will likely end up killing people, and if you're not more or less OK with that you will likely have a short career because I doubt that most of your rivals have the same qualms. I take a "Get in fast, get out even faster" approach to runs, so it's not like the body count is particularly high in the games I've played in, but I find the idea that "If you go easy on the enemy, they'll go easy on you" theory to be somewhat laughable. I'm not convinced that a security team will go any easier on you because what you're shooting at them is "only" a SMG, but I know that pulling out a White Knight may convince them to get their heads down, at least temporarily.

Posted by: JonathanC Feb 7 2008, 06:17 PM

I thought I saw rules for Cyberware damage and such in Augmentation. The gun thing is just a side effect of SR4 abstracting the rules a bit more than SR3 did. Arsenal adds in more detailed recoil rules, I think. I don't know, since it's not out yet in paper, and I don't want to buy the PDF. The rest of your problems sound like an issue of your theme conflicting with what your players are drifting towards. While it's nice to think that you can subtly push them towards your theme, or ruthlessly punish them for straying from it, a more positive (and effective) solution is to just talk to them. If you don't like organlegging, mention why. There are certainly good reasons, beginning with squeamishness and ending with the sheer impracticality of running what is essentially a medical/forensic operation while "moonlighting" as a terrorist for hire. Where are they going to keep the bodies? Do any of them have the medical expertise to remove cyberware without damaging it? You can just reach into some dude's chest and yank out his skillwires. Do they have the tools? I'm pretty sure that even a top-rating Medkit isn't going to have the appropriate gear for cybersurgery; it's for patching people up, not taking them apart.

Who are they selling to? Directly to Tamanous? Are they buying a Tamanous contact? If not, how are they finding them? These guys don't advertise in the yellow pages, and given how creeped out a lot of people would be by organleggers (in the books, even the Runners on Jackpoint and Shadowland seemed squicked out by them), you're not likely to find a hook-up through "respectable" street contacts (yeah yeah, words that should never go together).

It's funny and natural to bring the old D&D "loot everything, sell back in town, upgrade to epic gear" formula into Shadowrun, but the shoe doesn't necessarily fit, and if the GM isn't interested in running that kind of game, then it definitely doesn't fit. It's as important for you to have fun running the game as it is for them to have fun playing it. The two are connected, IMO. It's no fun running a game for bored or miserable players, and GMs who aren't have fun tend to run awful games.

Posted by: nezumi Feb 7 2008, 06:22 PM

If they don't need recoil compensation, don't put recoil compensation. I don't see what the problem is.



They can play how they want. However, if you don't want them to be thugs, make sure they have higher skill, better equipment and get jobs that generally require professionalism. If they don't work professionally, they don't get those jobs and they get paid less. If that's what they enjoy though, well run with it.



Why is it bad? I must have missed that memo. My runners actually runs his own clinic and does all his own organ-legging.

If it's seriously a problem though, pay them more for doing jobs and pay them less for doing stuff you don't want them to do. They'll learn what's worth the risk. But don't expect them to throw nuyen down the gutter because YOU have moral qualms about how they operate as professional criminals.



Generally you can expect to get 5-15% of the full market value for an item, plus it takes time. So there's not a lot of benefit to selling them. Using them? Well if you don't want them to use high-tech gear, don't send high-tech gear their way. Seems pretty straightforward. Very technical stuff you can expect to have trackers on them (for property management). So stealing a cyber-zombie is a very poor idea. Same with security armor, unless they have someone with the armorer skill and the time to strip them of electronics. If they want to steal busted up drones and armor full of holes though, they're welcome to it. They might as well buy them new for all the money they'll be putting into repairing them.

My party has in their group gear 'stack of ammunition' because they've collected so much. I just don't bother counting. They have dozens of different, fairly standard firearms as well. If they use it, go for it. I did have one guy try and strip out cyberware while on a run, and got caught by Lone Star for his trouble. They've learned.



Man & Machine, but I'd avoid them if I were you.


Edit: When's the last time one of your party members got killed or nearly killed because he was pulled over for a search and had hugely incriminating gear in his possession, because he brought something home that the parent corp tracked back to him (and his safe house) or because he took so long stripping corpses security got the jump on him? If that happens once or twice, they usually clean up a little bit.

Posted by: DocTaotsu Feb 7 2008, 06:26 PM

*points to last sentence*
Truth. A typical game lasts what? 6 hours? If everyone at that table isn't having fun there really isn't a point to being there. But it's a delicate balance between pleasing your players and keeping the GM from killing himself.

Unless you meat puppet your GM like we did for my D&D game. 12k to get some decent RP? Jesus! it's a freaking steal!