The single shadowrunner.

And who do you think the capo is going to believe: his own loser lieutenant (who had to cook the books to "prove" the debt is still owed and whose books show such tampering), or some cutting edge shadowrunner who was smart enough to make the capo a small "repayment" incidentally similar to the amount that said lieutanant is claiming he did not embezzle?

Yeah. About what I thought.

If you take the In Debt quality, in my games? An organisation who may or may not be more able to collect from you than you from them has chosen to do business with an extremely competent, highly expert professional who routinely come out ahead of similar organisations as themselves. CAVEAT EMPTOR indeed.

... one man, no matter how nice his toys, against an entire criminal organisation?

The shadowrunner loses. Every time.

It depends on how good the shadowrunner is.

A really good shadowrunner should win most of the time.

FTFY (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Unless your shadowrunner's name is Kane, or Fastjack? No, no he shouldn't.

A PC Shadowrunner is supposed to be heroic in nature (I don't mean goody goody two shoes.. I mean he is the one with the wallet that says BAMF). So yes, in the end the Shadowrunner will come out ahead of a Capo's crooked crony.. figuratively and quite possibly literally.

If you think the PCs are heroic and should eventually prevail against all odds ... then quite simply, you don't understand the genre.

In cyberpunk, the heroes rarely really win in the long run, and even when they do, the victories tend to be pyrrhic, have limited impact, or are similarly made questionable.

Obligatory Disclaimer: the following links lead to TvTropes, which has been known to devour people's brains. Consider yourself warned. ^_^

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CyberPunk

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CyberpunkTropes

A tiny portion of arctypes. However, the system itself presents mathemetics to the opposite (multiple attacker/defend against multiple attack rule). Rather, shadowrun lends itself to guerrilla tactics every time. One thing all guerrilla wars have in common is that the little guys do not wipe out the big guys, ever. It's a game of survival, denial, and psychology, about making it not worth fighting against. Shadowrun teams don't bring down the larger groups unless the GM orchestrates it for effect.

Shadowrunners, instead, depose the leader (to be replaced by another), destabilize control, deny resources, create acts of God, and otherwise work to make something less profitable or more profitable to effect some sort of change.

Shadowrunners don't play chicken with a rhino. They ride it.

Sorry, but thats getting really silly. The Rules say, you have to pay karma, if you want to reduce your dept. End of line.

So, please do not go around what the quality says, if you just ignore RAW anyway. That's just silly.

Um, do you mean debt? Because actually, they do not say. Not one way, nor the other. It is another case of implied handling, and comes down to which way the GM sways. Most of this discussing is disagreeing with a personal take on the implication, and it's relative fairness.

Here is the bottom line:
If it costs NO karma to buy off:
players borrow y=(5000 x d), and must pay P=(1.5y + .1P_1 x time)
because you get an extra 5000, lets call it 6 bp per rating, and assume exponential payoff rate due to higher interest (as credit card people do) and simplify this ESTIMATION.
You get 6 BP for 9,000¥ in game, 12 for 21,000¥, 18BP for 40,500¥, up to 36BP (thats 30 for quality, and 6 for the 30k) for 189,000¥
This is a ROUGH estimate.

Now, if you take the other extreme: it costs karma AND payoff, then it's 189,000¥ AND 60 karma to pay off the largest one. I personally would then never take it. This becomes like my previous post: only taken when one just HAS to have more than 300,000¥ and is willing to sell his soul.

One possible middle ground: pay off the 10% per month until you buy it off with karma (since it ALSO does not say you have to pay it off, the math and reasoning is squarely up to the GM)
6 BP for 1,500¥ + 10 karma in game, 12 for 6,000¥ + 20 karma, 18BP for 13,500¥ + 30 karma, up to 36BP (thats 30 for quality, and 6 for the 30k) for 54,000¥ + 60 karma
This assumes 2 months of paying debt per 10 karma you spend on this, and no middling buy downs. All or nothing.

Personally, the last one would be my approach.

By RAW, you have to pay karme for EVERY negative quality you want to remove. If you only have to pay back the money, this would be the ideal neg. quality for technomancers, mages and adepts - it gives you plenty of bp/karma, you do not have to wast bp/karma at chargen for money, and you just have to pay money afterwards.

The rules say you have to pay karma if you want to buy off your Negative Quality of which In Debt is one of. But the RAW of In Debt also includes a repayment method.

If people want to house rule/interpret in their own way, then I will house rule in the above manner. You find this house rule silly? To me, house rules are nearly always silly.

@toturi

For every negative quality there is a way of overcoming it. And since Karma is non existant in any solution (because it is an OOC resource)....
Enemy: Kill him.
Dependant: Set up trust found. (AKA buy permanent lifestyle)
Blindness: Get Cybereyes or cloned eyes.

Sure, but you also have to pay karma to remove the neg. quality - if you don't:

Enemy: now his son/brother/organization/etc. is now your enemy
Dependent: having a permanent lifestyle does not help at all, because:

A permanent lifestyle does not give you more free time etc.
Blindness: The doc gets a critical glitch while operating, destroing the new set of eyes.

@NiL_FisK_Urd
My point was, that if you start arguing that you can undo negative qualities without paying karma, you can arguee that way for all (or nearly all).

Ok, sry - than i misunderstood you - and you are completely right ^^

I'll just leave this here

Why is this relevant, you (and the mods) might ask?

Well, it just seems like a recent shining example of two sides disagreeing for 190+ pages, when they should have just agreed to disagree at page 2.

I think that makes it relevant here...

Opportunity cost.

Enemy: As strange as this sounds, killing him denies the character advantages in the forms of additional karma awarded that he otherwise would not gain when encountering the enemy.
Dependent: Nuyen. That's all that needs to be said. At 50,000 for squatter (and who would buy that?), 200,000 for low, 500,000 for medium, 1,000,000 for high, and 10,000,000 for luxury buying that permanent lifestyle means you're not spending a significant amount of your earnings on goodies to make you better. It also doesn't get rid of the nuisance factor of your dependent.
Blindness: IIRC, you can't just grab standard grade cybereyes and cure blindness. I was under the impression that you need beta or delta grade and going there you then have to spend more nuyen and time to find someone who can do it to overcome it.

The problem with In Debt is that its opportunity cost has always been too low if existent and hence why it's been a no brainer to take it. You take that quality at 30BP and that gives you 180,000 to work with. What's the opportunity cost of it? That mostly depends on what your first big purchase would have been had you not taken the debt. Let's say you wanted enhanced articulation (40,000) but you only have 10,000 nuyen that you can spend so you take a 30,000 debt to acquire it. So what's the cost of doing it?

Practically nothing.

If you had waited to buy Enhanced Articulation, you would have had to pay 40,000 later but you would be down 28 BP in character generation from not taking the quality. Instead you would need to have some other sum of NQs to meet 30BP or have severely reduced what was on your character to compensate.

Buying it now means you gain 28BP that you didn't need to get through worse NQs. You still end up having to pay that 40,000 plus an extra 5,000 and some change based on how much interest accrues.

BLINDNESS is Neurological and can't be cured by ANY kind of Ware. Not Cyber, not Bio, not Nano, not Gen.

Only the "advanced" version of reduced senses can't be overcome by cybereyes or genetech ^^

That's right. It's why you grab 10BP worth of NQ from Reduced Sight rather than 15BP.

Question: Why does in debt imply that you get money from it? I thought it implied that that you owe money, not that by taking the quality you actually get that money at char gen. It's not like going to a bank and taking out a loan, its a negative quality which to me means you get jack squat out of it, besides owing the money at chargen.

'Weak' (10BP) Blindness is a very special case. In nearly all cases, NQs do *not* have simple, no-karma methods of removing them. Often, the rules specifically say this (e.g., Enemy). I'm not sure Weak Blindness should even work like that, but it *does* at least require spending resources on replacement (time, money, Essence, etc.).

Jeremiah, do you mean 'why did they write the rule that way?' or 'why do you guys think this?'? Because the RAW is very clear about getting the money ('beyond the 30BP nuyen chargen limit', even). I agree that the rule *shouldn't* be like that, given how much BP you also get.

Whether it's taken raw or not, Just from a philosophical stand-point... it's not a disadvantage at all.

A: you get BP
B: you get money

The disdadvantage is you get debt, but debt isn't really bad. You're basically taking out a Loan and getting BP for doing so. Where as usually when you are "in debt" you are implied as being unable to pay it or having trouble with it. IF you technically had the money you could turn right back around and pay it off, keep the extra BP, deal with the problems (some grade A douchebag creditor), and move on all the BP richer.

Because it gives you money. The developers wrote it that way explicitly and so it is.

If I were to rewrite it I'd make the amount owed back 10 times the amount of money gained for chargen purposes (explanation: you took out a loan, only some of which has gone towards gear, you still have that gear, but also massive looming debt) and reduced the interest rate (1%, keeping the payments in line with what they are currently).

That way, instead of taking out 20k and paying back 30k, you're getting a 20k bonus starting cash and owing 200k. Which is actually pretty significant and makes the BP value look less attractive (i.e. fair).

Probably I'd also stipulate that the quality needs to also be paid off with karma or not (not making that decision here and now, but if I had to say which way I was leaning, I'd say no karma).