I can't see people doing corp runs right after chargen, especially not AAA corps. And no one actually has a medium lifestyle. And mages already get too powerful over time, by the time the Mage has initiated twice, (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) 22,000 a run doesn't seem that crazy when Beta wired reflexes will run you (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) 84,000 and get you 0.3 essence.

If they can't run against corps, they are not worth the title of shadowrunner. Not all corps are Ares or Aztechnology. That small pharmaceutical corp, or that MSP call center with customer data are corps that runners may go against.

And on the other note, you give a good rigger 30,000 nuyen a run, and see who becomes the most powerful person on the team.

I could not disagree more.

My business needs a website. I expect it will bring in $20,000 of additional profits per year. Does that mean I should pay $10,000 for a website, and take $10,000 as an 'acceptable profit margin'? No. I pay what the market will bear. If I can get a web site for $200 that meets my requirements, I will pay $200, even if the profit from it is $20,000. Same with runners. If I can get a dude to bust up the Renraku prototype for $500, within my range of risk tolerance, I'm going to hire a guy for $500 to do that job.

You are correct that the cap should be, approximately, in that area. A billboard might bring in $1,000 in sales, but that means it's not worth $2,000. But a cap isn't the same as a budget.

This does indeed reflect back on the party's 'level'. If your party is in the 1,000 karma range and you get a job offer to go hunt paranormal animals for a week for $10,000, well you need a new fixer. That's not an unreasonable pay for that job, but it's below what a really experienced party should be expecting to make for their time, regardless of the nature of the work.

It's also important to remember that the price paid reflects how many screw-ups the Johnson is willing to tolerate. Killing the target during an extraction mission where you're paid $5,000 is probably going to give you a rep hit and some sour looks, but you can walk that off. Doing that on a job that pays $60,000 might just end with you having a hit team on you when you get home. The higher the pay, the more the Johnson expects the PCs to be able to take care of themselves, improvise, provide their own resources, 'go the extra mile', adjust to changes in plans, etc. This goes up to the 'ridiculous' levels of pay, where the Johnson probably expects the PCs to die (by his hand, if necessary). Players think they're worth $300,000? Give them a $300,000 job. Tell them in advance to keep backup characters.


If characters walk away from a reasonable job offer, take the opportunity to smash them (EVEN if they walk away for moral grounds). Run through a few weeks in game of no jobs and no income, the continuing rise in cost of their crippling smack habit, Vanessa calling to tell you it's triplets, and where's her fragging child support, and some dude threw a brick through the window of your citymaster. Pitch them some trash runs ($1,000-$10,000 range). Make sure the Johnson mentions he heard they're 'desperate' and thought they might be interested. Then, for no reason, attack the bar with legions of drop bears, killing everyone. Fragging whiney shadowrunners.

True. A neophyte team would likely cut their teeth on A-level corporations that don't have any public ties to the megas. They can cut their teeth learning the biz off penny-ante datasteals and the occasional company sabotage.

Sample career arc: Team starts out taking a job from a Johnson to sabotage a couple Dominion Pizza trucks. Pays maybe a few thousand a head since they're small potatoes. Maybe a few shakedowns of LCN Pizza franchises to spook the employees. Steal the new dough recipe from Dominion, sabotage the rollout of LCN's new Chick-E-Nubs. Things continue to get escalated, turning into a low-level corporate war between the two - then the team goes up a level. Dominion's really a subsidiary, and the AA-level hires the team off for higher jobs, with the understanding that this crap stops now. Maybe on the other end, you find out LCN's a Mob front, and they'd rather use the team on some problems they've got at a well-defended Triad drug operation. Stakes get raised. Pay goes up. Ten thousand a head to shut down the drug operation, or extract a researcher from a university who's perfecting the formula for a new silk that can be weaved into body armor. Word continues to get out. The team does well, doesn't ask questions, and they pull off the tough jobs.

At the top of their game, they're being hired direct by a veep out of the megas to pull high-level defectors that could be paying 50,000-100,000 a head. Infilitrating Zero Zones in order to get that new cyberware prototype that's worth millions on the black market. At that level, only the perfect run can have everyone walk away unscathed, but Lady Luck still has a card to play and the stakes are high enough the runners can buy their own pizza franchise to launder their profits - and be the business owner when a neophyte team gets a job from your competitor to steal your new pizza dough recipe...

If your players are seriously trying to hit your NPC's for ridiculous amounts of money, have the NPC walk away and just improvise the rest of the night. The players just told a job to go away, and now they just have to deal with the consequences. Play out those consequences. First of all, who did their antics cause to walk away? And who set them up with that meeting? They've just made fools of themselves and anyone who recommended them to the Johnson. You think a fixer is going to set 'em up with another Johnson when they've just proved that they aren't someone you can do serious business with? IMO they are lucky if they didn't just loose their fixer, or at least cause him to drop significantly in loyalty towards them.
2nd of all, let them deal with the fact that rumour travels fast in the shadows, and let them deal with the consequences that they now become known as ridiculous amateurs who people shouldn't waste their time on.
3rd, let them deal with the fact that the bills keep coming, even if the income doesn't. The landlord don't give a hoot if the characters didn't get earn any money last month because they got greedy and scared off the Johnson, pissed off their fixer in the process, and made fools of themselves in the shadowcommunity.
4th, hit them with the next work opportunity and see if they've learned anything from last time. If they still try and run up the price by a factor of 10+, have the Johnson walk out on them again and repeat the consequences from last time, but crank it up to the next logical level. If the players keep trying to pull the same stunt you ultimately tell them that there isn't any jobs to be had, and that they will have to try and make their own missions, if they want to make any money. Or they can make new characters, because their current runners are socially sunk and won't be able to find anyone who'll waste their time on them.

If the players want to play hardball and try to hit you up for stupid amounts of money, then hit them back with the consequences of such behavious. It changes the game and means that the players don't get to go on any runs, but the characters will still have a personal life, and you can probably improvise the content of some normal days in their lives. Maybe they get mugged by a bunch of Go-Gangers. Maybe they witness the rape of a streethooker. Maybe the mob suddenly wants a piece of their earnings, if they want to work in their area, or maybe they just got hit with a "fine" by someone powerful, because they annoyed him, and now they suddenly have a 25K debt on their hands, and 8 days to get the cash, if they want to keep all of their organs etc. Plenty of stuff you can throw at the players, without sending them on actual runs (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) So even if the characters do cause a Johnson to walk away, you don't have to call it a night and tell people to go home. You can still get to play, it just won't be the run you planned, and which the players expected.


As for how much money characters should make on a run, I believe that really has to come down to the game in question, and the nature of the run. Finding someone's prized dog might only pay the entire group 1000 + expenses, whereas a run against a high security fascility with many armed guards and magical support etc. might pay 50K or more per character.

Depending on the reason for the walk away, that might be a positive thing in the PCs favor.

If the job was a piece of hell and the Johnson was being overly stingy, that rep will get around as well.

Door swings both ways, and Mr. Johnson is typically only anonymous to Society, not the Shadows. If he's a professional, that is. If he's some idiot Suit whose only idea on how to hire 'Runners comes from the 'Trid, well... You get what you pay for.

Next step: You'll have to get new players as your old ones appear to have no time whenever you call them.

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Concerning karma level and targets: I'm closing in on 500 karma points but I don't even want AAA level runs. Im entirely content with mid-level, mid-risk runs for 10 to 25k Nuyen and the occasional bigger one. Semi-legal ones are even better.

Bad examples are bad. Hiring a shadowrunner team is not like doing another service. You're not building a billboard, or setting up a website. You are hiring an elite team of professional criminals that specifically work as deniable assets. If you need someone to break into a stuffer shack, or deliver a package across the city, you hire some ganger for a couple hundred or maybe even a thousand or two. Shadowrunners do the jobs that require more finesse and tighter lips. They handle delicate situations, and, assuming they are good, will not give up their Johnson.

These are reliable professionals who do sensitive work for a living, and oftentimes have unusual specialties that may be required for a unique job. All this costs money, a lot of it. And in most cases, if runner team a doesn't accept, there is not always a runner team b that has the skills necessary to do the job.

A runner would never accept a job for 1 or 2k, because it would devalue their skills. If they get a reputation for being cheap, they won't get johnsons who are willing to play them good money, because they work cheap, in fact they might not be accepted into the shadowrun community at all.

A final note, the whole johnson budget argument is silly. You're the GM, you decide how much money Johnson has. Period.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with the 'elite' part but that is certainly what you'd hope for. Not all shadowrunners, especially those right out of 400 BP chargen, can be called elite. In fact not all group scan rightfully be called a 'team'. So I'm gonna just agree with "Professional criminals that work as deniable assets." With the emphasis on "deniable". Of course, YMMV, but just 'cause you want to run the shadows doesn't make you an elite.


A Parliament of Thieves, Denver Mission 01 seems to disagree with your bolded section.


Again, you're automatically assuming that a self-styled shadowrunner is necessarily a pro who is already at the top of his/her game. I on the other hand will claim at this point that the shadows are full of more newbies and wannabes than ice cold pros, though the life expectancy of the formers are not high, there are plenty of other dregs of society to fill their place. Certainly if you're hiring a deniable asset with unique skills you're unlikely to find a quick or less expensive alternative. But for those 'runs which take less finesse, there's always another team out there.


This part I actually agree with. Most runs even for starting runners ought to clock at least 3-5k per head, and probably should have additional opportunities to earn money from the job be it from selling acquired information, or fencing captured loot. As runner experience and street cred climb, or if risks vs returns climb, the team can expect to be offered more, and to be able to ask for more straight up.


YMMV. If you're trying to make a semi-believable shadow-economy where you don't want to throw common sense out of the window, earnings will be limited. But if you just want to cater straight to your audience, feel free to award whatever.

The negotiation is as much between GM and players as it is between PCs and Johnson. If the players feel you're not offering them enough, they might feel bogged down - this way they'll never get the shiney toy they want. On the other hand, if you offer more than they expect, then they'll be wary and paranoid because this mission must surely be harder than it looks...

A straight-up negotiation where the parties are only negotiating price is pretty dull. Either the GM is willing to give it or not, and the same goes for the players - but both sides basically need an agreement, or the game won't go on as planned. So it's a rather thin negotiation.

But you can spice things up: the mission can have variables that can be negotiated! He's willing to pay more if you're faster, or he can pay more if you take part of the payment in useful goods, or he'll pay less if he has to hire an external specialist to do something because the team doesn't feel up to part of the mission - like hacking, in some groups.

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How much money is enough? It depends on several things, most importantly the social level of the characters and the kind of missions.

In a Barrens/gutter criminals campaign, 1K a head for taking out some other gang is reasonable and a couple of jobs like that will have you comfy for the whole month.

On the other hand, you could have a high-roller, work hard play hard kind of campaign where characters live the high life, going to expensive casinos just to burn money and sleep with 10K a night escorts. They'll have to be good to warrant the kind of payment needed to support such a lifestyle, but it's an entirely viable campaign style too.


The tricky part I suppose is the split in income between equipment and "funstyle" expenses. There's something kinda dull about characters who spend all income on more gear and sit in the basement cleaning guns. On the other hand, as a player you sometimes just feel like you want your character to improve between games, and money practically a kind of XP - why "waste it" on RP stuff?
I haven't really figured out yet how to deal with this.

I totally agree. Someone has to be doing those runs for the gangs and for the Yaks, someone has to be out hooding, someone has to be out hunting paracritters in the woods or ghouls in the sewers. Most runners are SINless, poor, and uneducated; it takes time and experience for them to become "professional" shadowrunners and very few will survive that long. Realistically nine stupid or unlucky newbies have to die in the shadows for each ice cold runner that emerges. Corp runs are the top end of the shadowrunner scene. When I imagine a starting party, I usually imagine them as a group just about to emerge from the "rabble" and into the "professional" scene where corp runs become an option.

As for the economic argument, the payment figures for SR have always seemed absurd to me. Sure, there might be a few nutcases out there whole whack somebody for less than the cost of a family sedan but corporate spies make serious cash and it never made sense to me that a Johnson is going to quibble over a few thousand nuyen when the team is stealing something valued in the millions to billions. It doesn't make sense that the Johnson can't pay more, it's got to be a matter of having so many shadowrunners that there's always someone else willing to make the run. That should hold true for the more "low-skilled" work but for the more advanced stuff there's no way for that to hold.

FYI, a 400 BP starting character is at professional shadowrunner skill level, and that is the default assumption. Shadowrunner aren't just people who commit crimes for money, they are a special class of mercenary.

I think you're right by the book (AFB) but with a street cred of 3 they're can't have been running for long (or must have screwed up very badly) and the sample characters in the book certainly don't seem like professional runners. More importantly, I think this varies depending on the experience and optimization of your party. Sure, a SR vet with a reasonably optimized character could probably start making runs against corps out of chargen but if the players aren't experienced or the characters aren't very optimized then it's probably better to have them start by making runs against gangs, criminal organizations, or small corps below the A ranking. A clothing store like the Gap certainly wouldn't qualify for A ranking but you can certainly imagine there's money to be made running against it. And hey, it's probably a subsidiary of somebody so you can expand it later one.

Edit for PS:
Also, I think the books definition of professional and the definition of professional we've been using here are different.

A lot of RPG grognards cut their teeth on the sort of wargaming-based disposable-character fantasy Vietnam meatgrinder that supports the opposite style of play.

If that's what people like, more power to them; I know I've had plenty of good times rolling 3d6 for stats in order and checking for traps with 10' poles. But the golden rule of all group activities is make sure everyone is on the same page, and a lot of GMs and players just don't give a shit about other peoples' fun.

The "RP stuff" might actually earn you a contact here and there. Spending copious ammounts of money should help for some.
Sure. They might not be too loyal for the most part, but a contact's a contact. And really, taking that corp's secretary out of a soycaf on a lunchbreak is nice, but it won't keep her satisfied. And you never know when you might need her again. And you need to actually get to know her somewhere too. Surely you're not just calling her corp, noting a female receptionist and asking if she's free tonight? The same goes for collecting whatever kind of very useful to utterly silly paraphernalia. You never know who you run in to at that Urban Brawl game, especially when you're walking around with a (signed and dented) Sprawl the Brawl Troll helmet on your head. (however that troll helmet may be shaped (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif) ) Having that specially casemodded (to look like his) Panther strapped to the same bike that he drives? All the better. In that little gear list, you're meeting a black market arms dealer, a skilled metallurgist for the modjob, and some vehicle salesman for the bike, probably modded as well. And hopefully another fan or two.
If Sprawl keels over the next match, all the better!
If you hired the sniper that offed him, to make that helmet worth just that bit more, power to you! ;p

And yeah. The GM decides how much a Johnson is willing to offer, but that should be based on his background in all but the more pink mohawk games, and probably even there it's a good thing. The local Stuffer Shack manager just can't pay you 10k a head to get you to "deter" a local gang.

It might. But that shouldn't be the reason you do it.


Yeah, I guess typical characters may be a bit overqualified for that - or the Stuffer Shack managers are just out of luck. Although it could be a fun hooding/charity job, dealing with opponents way below your level.

It shouldn't? I don't think anyone's at liberty to determine why people do things (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
That said, I was just providing a possible mechanical benefit. Those who do so anyway don't need those, since they're doing it because they enjoy RPing for RP's sake. Those who don't, or not so much, might need some incentive. Though really, any behaviour you as a GM find preferable, because it's the kind of game you want to play, because it enhances group atmosphere or whatever, can do with encouragement. You just need to find the proper buttons to push, some times.

Yeah. my group is composed of such "do-gooders". I rarely toss out a run involving assault/murder/assassination as its goal. If I do, it's for a (hopefully) damn good reason. I've basically let it become a reputation they have, and people acknowledge it, at least. So jobs like that never even get offered, because it would be a waste of the Client's time and effort when they could be getting some one who will do it.

As far as price is concerned, I tend to low-ball. The Client is generally only a cog in the great corporate machine, after all, and they are budgeted only so much. Keeps the notion of good ole' greed involved.

If I remember, the third edition Shadowrun Companion had a list with approximate costs for various runs. I used that as the baseline, and allowed characters to haggle from there. I'd really like them to remake the list for fourth edition, just so people have a decent idea of what the average 'going rate' is, and to give the game master something to work with.

Always overpay, people can be poor in real life, and you can always take toys away, in fact if you arn't attritioning gear your doing something wrong IMHO.

For most corporate level meetings I offer the runners a retainer of 2-3k just to show up and keep the meeting confidential. It shows them that the J isn't wasting their time and obligates them to keep the matter private if they decide not to accept the job.

From there I calculate a figure based on roughly ten percent of the item or persons value for theft and 5 percent for protection (as it usually involves less risks or elgal hassles). Obviously you've got to eyeball it some for things who's inherant value is out of synch with their actual value, this is why 'hooding or "favor for a friend" runs pay little or at all.

I've said it before in other runs and I'll say it again here: Figuring out what to pay the runners gets a lot easier if you work out motivations with the players other then coin.

If the OP wants a table to use as a baseline, than a good place to look that is at least semi cannon would be the SR missions, where you have a table rating based on average karma per player. New chars are Green (TR 1) than streetwise (TR 2) and so on.

Difficulty in the mission is than scaled in various places based on the table rating and number of players, and so is what the Johnson is willing to offer.

I think (3000+2000xTR+500xnet negotiation successes ) per runner might be typical, but that's just off of memory.

While the newer stuff is bundled up in fancy PDFs that you have to pay for, the older ones are free downloads. You might want to read through those both for inspiration and to get a feel for what some people consider standard pay and difficulty.

Personally I pay more, probably have more risk in my missions, and have corps and even cops crack down surprisingly hard on theft compared to most runs. Their reasoning being that if some runners stole your prototype, after the dust settles and your competitor releases their product there isn't really any info the runners have worth getting, and whacking them doesn't really gain the corp anything either as the runners just as likely to work for the offended corp next time.

If you don't bag the theives however, they'll probably be back again. I encourage GMs to have one of their early missions be one where the players hunt down a different runner team that either has turned to a crime spree (the expensive stolen cars are in the news, and LS/KE wants those reports stopped, NOW) or maybe the other team killed a secretary on a run that just happened to be the mistriss of a major executive, and he wants vengence, screw the bottom line.

Also to get them to actually take those months between runs I do karma for cash, where higher lifestyles for the month generate more karma. I find this keeps the players greedy and gets them to take downtime which is great for RPing.

I've always seen this list as totally ridiculous. That's the sort of payment leading to runners turning into car thiefs.

Really? Because from what I saw, you could tally together the different things the Johnson wants as part of the run, and come up with a reasonable figure. Then what I'd usually do is use the reputation of the runners as a modifier to increase how much they'd get. Then there's the negotiation roll by the runners themselves to raise that even further. And the outcome, I considered, was 'per runner', not 'for the whole group to divide'.

UCAS$5000 and a 1000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) gift certificate to Stuffer Shack.

Keep in mind, Nuyen has increased in buying power from SR3 to SR4, so the old values per-run are quite a bit more lucrative.