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Posted by: jaellot Apr 24 2016, 10:58 PM

I'm indicating edition just in case somebody has something very particular to throw out.

I'm gearing up for a new campaign and I got a friend who essentially wants to own the building he lives out of. And he wants to rent out the other rooms, as a means to try and cover cost. He's also pretty much come out and said he's hoping to make money off it as well. I'm thinking he hopes to lure in the other players, but I'm not sure how they would go for that. Not very likely. I don't know if there are ambitions of expanding his fledgling rental property business, I do know he wants to have a middle man of sorts to do most of the work. In exchange for an apartment or some such. The idea is for this to be more along the lines of Low lifestyle.

Nuyen aside, I'm honestly cool with there being an even-steven sort of thing. His amount of overall rent and overheard for gear upkeep is met by the rent of all the tenants. This makes it all simple for bookkeeping, if all of the apartments are occupied. And if all of those occupants are paying on time. I think it would be simple enough to come up with a roll table to determine things like how many apartments are being rented currently, who's late on rent, and who moves out or some such. I think want I'm wanting are weird roommate/neighbor stories to populate this building. I'm not trying to make him regret trying to be a slumlord, but I do need to make it clear that this isn't simply a magical cash cow that's going to fart out money on a timely basis. Oh no. No no.

Thanks in advance!

Posted by: Zednark Apr 24 2016, 11:48 PM

I'd recommend making him pay for the building himself, then having him earn ~1% of the building's value per month. 1% is a good renting average, but you could represent it as 2D6+3x0.1% if you're renting more than one property, to represent the variable value depending on stuff. Roll a d20 every month, with rolls equal to or lower to the amount of properties you own resulting in something breaking that you have to repair for 2D6x250�¥.

Of course, how much he earns depends on how much he pays for the building. I'd put 50,000¥ as a lower limit for property value, representing a single coffin apartment. I wouldn't place a higher limit, however.

Now, this might not seem like much. But keep in mind it's possible to start with a LOT of money in character creation, and what you can buy in character creation is restricted. So investing 100,000¥ at chargen gives you ~1,000¥ a month, which can then be used to buy equipment you can't start with. Not to mention it covers expenses.

Posted by: Cochise Apr 25 2016, 08:57 AM

So the SR3 landlord idea strikes again: buy 1 to 10 permanent low lifestyles and then rent them out at the normal 1000 per month ... thus providing a regular income of up to 10.000 Nuyen per month.

Well whenever a player tried to utilize this idea my first question was why he/she wouldn't just permanently buy a high lifestyle for 1.000.000 and be done with playing a Shadowrunner before the game ever started?!

In most cases the idea was dropped right there. In some cases however the player would insist on going through with his plan. At that point I usually reminded him/her of the fact that neither the monthly nor the permanent payments for lifestyles actually represented just rent / property ownership but also running costs like electricity, food, part of the mobility costs and more ...

Subsequently I told him/her that buying a permanent low lifestyle for 100.000 Nuyen would not net him/her 1.000 Nuyen per month but only 400 to 500 at best. I also reminded him/her that Shadowrun isn't an economics simulation but a game about professional criminals and if he/she were to insist on me as GM going through the trouble of simulating that aspect I'd do so with full force:

• tenants regularly not paying their rent on time
• tenants wrecking his property and simply moving elsewhere
• legal ownership on a real or faked SIN regularly bringing the IRS to his door ... in case of a faked SIN with the added trouble of potentially burning the ID plus losing the property
• periodic maintainance costs to accomodate for most recent ideas that governments have about safety regulations and other housing related regulations.
• spending character time on managing his real estates or hiring third parties for doing so, thus either severly cutting into his "free time" for running or further diminishing his income with the added risk of being ripped off by that third party.
• Insurance fees ... both legal ones as well as potentially illegal ones
• ...

TL;DR: I actively discouraged any such idea because I as GM wanted to play Shadowrun and not Landlord Simulator.

Posted by: Blade Apr 25 2016, 09:27 AM

That's the heart of the problem. You can also create a SINner character who'll be the best surgeon ever and have him get hired by a megacorp and paid a whole lot of money. But then you're not playing Shadowrun.

I wouldn't prevent my players from starting a business, if they're really into it, but I'd make it clear to them that this will change the focus of the game.

Another solution would be to create an "investment" rule: players can invest their nuyens into something (it can be stocks, real estate, businesses, etc.), allowing them to roll a dice each month when paying lifestyle and according to some investment table either win or lose some money. That would be a way to let players do stuff like this without taking the focus away from the runs.
And once in a while you can have a small adventure involving it or have it involved during an adventure, with the possibility to get some modifiers for the roll.

Posted by: Tias Apr 25 2016, 01:19 PM

Comedy option: Have his tenants be other runners who constantly start meth lab fires, attract rival gang members or literal gypsy curses on his property 24/7. It may not be a net nuyen loss, but there's just so much shit you'd like to deal with in one month

Posted by: Wounded Ronin Apr 25 2016, 02:44 PM

At first I thought you wanted to have a Shadowrun Monopoly board game where the properties represented major canon properties of the SR world. And there would be a way you could send runners to blow the properties up and wipe houses and hotels off of a given property.

As far as being a landlord goes, why not just simplify it and use the Day Job flaw? Day Job: Slum Lord.

If the player wants to invest some nuyen into properties in order to get that flaw and some income, that's fine, but then the problems associated with being a slum lord are represented by the bad points of the Day Job flaw.

It could actually be a great plot hook since the player could get pulled into ganger turf wars, impacts of drugs and BTLs on poor communities, etc. It also gives the player a big tangible asset that opponents can threaten. If you have the time and mental energy for it, it might be fun.

Posted by: Tecumseh Apr 25 2016, 11:07 PM

I actually love it when my players take the initiative to come up with stuff like this. It really gets into the gritty details of what daily life is like in the Sixth World, which less traditional in terms of gameplay but is super-rich in storytelling opportunities. Be careful that it doesn't take too much time or attention away from the other players, but with the right group it can be a blast. I've tried to do something similar (on a neighborhood scale) for ganger campaigns where the players were trying to manage the gang's turf.

Wounded Ronin's suggestion of the Day Job flaw is a good one. If the player demurs, saying they wanted a on-site manager to take care of the day-to-day stuff, then you could try taking the Trust Fund flaw from SR4/5 and dropping it into 3rd Edition. The concept is similar - regular income, someone else manages it - but it also comes with constraints, like needing to have a SIN if this is a legal investment, or needing to defend the investment from the outside interests if it is less-than-legal.

Posted by: KCKitsune Apr 26 2016, 06:13 AM

This is the reason I took the "Lost Loved One" flaw for my SR4 Combat Medic mage. Being a mage alone can get you big bucks, once my character has enough Medicine to be a full time surgeon, then he would doubly rake in the bucks. The flaw would make it so that my character, even if he had a billion nuyen and every piece of cyber/bio he had was delta, then he'd STILL continue doing 'Runs to find his sister. I mean what's more important than family?

Posted by: tisoz Jul 16 2016, 08:00 AM

Me too. Sounds fun! Like all the custom Monopoly Boards out there.

You might check the Sprawl Survival Guide. It has rules for room mates and associated lifestyle costs.

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- Photos: http://www.spaceneedle.de/ankuendigung-shadowrun-monopoly/

Posted by: JanessaVR Apr 28 2017, 06:37 PM

Our group has branched into things like this in the past, as we're not much for "traditional" Shadowrun these days. Our last campaign was as paranormal security experts / dangerous critter exterminators. We actually saw a good deal of action, but we were all SINners and thus didn't have to live in the Barrens being hunted by the cops and used as disposable tools by Johnsons. Sure, nearly all of us had High lifestyles, but the entirely legal business we ran was how we paid for them.

Posted by: Emperor Tippy Apr 29 2017, 08:14 PM

Sure you are. The player is the drek hot surgeon working in a Fuchi delta clinic but then Novanet happened and Ares ended up in possession of said clinic and he doesn't like the new boss so much. So he starts arranging his own extraction to what he wants, perhaps he smuggles messages out inside the deltaware that he is now implanting into elite Firewatch operatives. He needs nuyen to pay for his extraction and set him up afterwords though so that means figuring out ways to sell secrets (or provide services) under Ares's nose - perhaps a few runs end up with him running the delta clinic and so he can jigger the records to sneak in the odd non Ares approved individual for augmentation, and perhaps he needs to go on a run to sneak into the server room and edit some records so that the excess supplies that he has used up don't raise any red flags.

You could easily run a whole SR game with one of the characters being some super suregon working in a megacorp delta clinic.


Or you just use it as a ready hook for runs. You own an apartment building, well it turns out that it is in Yak territory and they are trying to squeeze you for protection money - of course just paying the squeeze would really harm your shadow rep so you need to encourage the Yak's to forget about the issue. Perhaps you have your apartment buildings sign a contract for matrix services with MTC and then a month later some NeoNET manager who needs to make quota for the month starts pulling strings to hold up your permits and approvals unless you give that contract to NeoNET instead. Perhaps you find out that one of your tenants is really some guy on the run from SK and you can't afford the kind of heat that would come if he is caught and/or linked to your apartments so you need to remove him from play and wipe some information from a few corp and government databases.

PC's want to start playing the market. That's fine. Thing is that if you want to play the real market (as opposed to acting on the shadow exchanges) then you need an ID good enough to stand up to Corporate Court scrutiny, this isn't just some rating 6 fake SIN bought from your local fixer but a "real" SIN. So you are looking at a few runs worth of work to get everything set up before you can even start. And if the nuyen you are trying to invest with is coming from illegal activities then you need to set up a laundering operation, or you could just use some syndicates services but then you give them leverage over you and open yourself up to potential future issues. Well you have everything set up and decide that you are going to invest in relation to your runs (or run to effect the market) - that's nice but corp agents are watching for patterns and if they see your investments are dovetailing nicely with runs then they will start looking at you hard and suddenly you need to run a few jobs for Renraku unless you want them to let Ares know who was sabotaging their weapons designs.

Pretty much anything can be made into a run or even an entire campaign of runs without much issue. And well if the PC's decide to try and play with the big boys while acting like low rent gang-banging thugs then kill them - do it enough and they will probably learn that what you can get away with in the Barrens working for a few thousand nuyen will get you smashed flat in moments if you do it while trying to be a "player" in the Sixth World (even if only a very minor one).

Posted by: Glyph May 1 2017, 03:23 AM

Nearly anything can be made into a run, but the real challenge is doing it without having the one player's story arc hog too much game time. It's fine if the rest of the group is involved in the subplot, or if the whole game is a variant campaign, or if everyone gets so much game time for downtime activities. But otherwise, you need to be careful that the other players don't get bored waiting to do the run while the landlord deals with deadbeat tenants and gangers demanding protection money. Obviously, this is less of a factor in play-by-post games where several subplots can unfold at once, and is not a factor for a solo game.

Posted by: ShadowDragon8685 May 1 2017, 04:09 AM

I like it when the players are invested in some kind of group thing, and more than just random missions for money.

I mean, random missions for money are great, it's the game's bread-and-butter, but you need more than bread and butter. You need some protein (more than is in butter,) you need some variety.

Think of it this way; the property is an investment, it's also the group home. (I'd make that mandatory: "Okay, but the place has to have a space big enough to be a group headquarters for your whole team.") I'd advise them to site it out in the Barrens somewhere lawless, somewhere the tax man doesn't come by, but the mob might want protection money, etc. They'd have opportunities to fix it up, gentrify it, etc, but in the process may have to deal with unhappy locals. Just what kind of scum do you want inhabiting your rental units? Low risk/low reward, random barrens rats who are working some gray market jobs, have a bit of dosh and need four walls and a roof over their heads? Want to step it up a notch and rent to, say, Ancients with some rank and some cash? Rent to other 'Runners exclusively? Go whole-fat, try to carve off a slice of the barrens, establish order and start renting to legitimate wageslaves?

Who you rent to matters. Runners would be profitable, and if you vet your potential tenants well (to make sure you're renting to professionals and not maniacs, or at least maniacs who won't burn your property down,) you stand to make a lot of money. "I know what you do. I don't have a problem with it. I provide security, anonymity, comfort, and as long as you're not doing anything ridiculous like manufacturing explosives or drugs on my property, I'll let you make whatever modifications to the unit you need to make. As long as you respect my property and pay my price - and I'll be reasonable if there's a lean month, but I won't let you walk over me like a chump - you'll have a safe, secure haven."

Renting to Runners has its ups and downsides. Security against normal problems will basically be a nonissue - after a few messy examples get made, the local gangs and even the go-gangs/mobs will know "that's where the crazy-dangerous people live, we don't go there anymore." But it also brings the possibility of corporate black squads descending on your property.

Etc, etc. Renting to go-gangs or mobs could be profitable, and comes with built-in security, at the risk of Runners trying to hit targets living in your units, renting to gangs of any sort risks them starting to think of your property as their turf and needing to be pointedly reminded that you're the landlord and they're the tenants, etc.

It could be a fun side campaign to the running-for-cash thing. But you should make sure the whole group is okay with it, because it's going to become A Major Thing for All of Them.


Personally, I always wanted to run a game set inside either a literal castle in the barrens, or set on a Firefly-sized boat (like a fishing trawler; think the ship from Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong,) which the players sailed around as they pleased.