To clarify my stance:

I have had the group increase the yeild from a run by over 500% for particularly lucky "looting" - the opposition included team of runners they got the drop on, the team had a van at the time and they just drove off with the Sami's corpse and a fairly intact drone. Wired 2, dermal sheathing and a small cross section of impant weapons, pitty the turned his skull into goo and dropped the selling price a fair bit or the team would have been living Highlifestyle for s few months.

The issue I had was not this kind of one off,
It's that they regularly lift anything not nailed down and assume there will be few repercussions.
It was the blithly stealing cars day after day (each time taking up a bit of RP time) assuming that since I stopped asking for rolls (his dice pool was gross) that it was going to be a cake walk forever. So I toss curve balls to remind him although I'd have to design a car for him to not be able to break into (and at this point its computer system, ICE and physical security is FAR more expencive them most cars) he is in the Sixth World and he does not have all the bases covered no matter how much he thinks he does so he had better be careful.

Does your team include a skilled cyber-surgean, as otherwise i would say that you can't just cut wired reflexes out of someone, that's delicate prosess needing a right set of skills or you risk damaging the goods.

Agreed, on stuff like cyberlimbs it seems like it would be a simple matter to lop it off, but to actually have the time to remove most other ware while on the run without damaging the ware beyond use.... well that seems like a bit of a stretch.

The hard part of stealing cars is not the breaking in (although that can be made hard if someone really wanted to protect their car), it's the getting rid of it afterwards bit. Why would people be putting their lives on the line shadowrunning for 10k (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) every few weeks if stealing cars was easier and just as profitable? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) Every component in the car is RFID'ed (probably with security tags), you've got GridGuide traces to deal with, and so on. A stolen car should only acquire significant value after it's been "processed" by a quality chop shop to eliminate the red flags.

Plus, of course, you never know what's in the trunk of a stolen car if you don't look (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

i had a character who would do that in our last game. the combat medic was an expert with medicine first aid and ware and would take obvious peices like cyber-hands, cyber-eyes and the like if we had time.

A gay Yakuza boss wearing nothing but socks and underwear?

Shrug, occasionally you can just use Caveat. No need to specially design a car for this, no need to specially design anything. Next time he steal a car, have him roll his dice. Whatever his result, barring massive success (unless you are even willing to ignore that), he sets off the internal alarms. The rest of the session is then a rolling firefight. The mission you gave them was time sensitive, and because of all the dithering about the car, they failed to complete it. Whatever group was associated with the vehicle is pissed that they tried to steal it, and will be looking for them, etc... You can use the entire session just to show the many things that can go wrong with something so simple.

As an alternative, wave your hand and shrug dismissively. "Yada, yada, yada... you steal another car. Unless you are trying to keep it, or sell it, I just assume that you succeed. No point in wasting everyone else' time on something so trivial." The same could apply to theft. "Ok you steal everything not nailed down, and the street sam pried a few things up. I am not going to roll up random loot, so you get X (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) " Just treat it as a trivial thing. You decide how much money you want in your campaign. If they steal more than that, they have trouble selling immediately. Fixer: "Oh dude, I can so get you a bunch of cash for that...It will take a bit of time, but I am sure I can get you a buttload of cash. If you are in a hurry, I can buy it on speculation, but I can only offer 30% of that amount"

Normally, unless part of the group is bored while this sort of thing is going on, let your people roleplay whatever they want. If they want to spend an entire session looting penile implants, hey more power to them. Just make sure that you screw with them enough to make it fun for yourself as well. When they start to have some of the characters monopolize the time of the others, then you just say, this is taking too long, I am going to the other characters, and I will come back to you...

I remember a couple of years back when I was playing in this group. We where looting the bodies and it went so far that we started having arguments about how got to loot what...

The GM we had got tired of the situation and... their armour and weapons just disappeared after they went down. After that we cooled down a bit... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Just my personal opinion here... so take it for what it's worth.

When I watch a movie and the hero takes out a bad guy but doesn't pick up the guy's gun even though he is low on bullets I find myself calling him an idiot. "Why leave the fully automatic weapon on the ground when you only have 3 bullets left in your beretta???"

So when I play or run a shadowrun game I have no problem with searching the bodies. In fact I would encourage it... I mean, what if some guard has the passkey for a maglock on him? What if a certain person's comlink signature is needed for doors to open, etc. In a regular game ripping out cyberware for some cred and selling the left over tissue to ghouls might be a bit over the top... but in other games it might be acceptable.

In the current game I am running I have a bunch of characters built with 300 BP and limitations on how much money/magic they were able to start with... they are all part of a street gang and I wouldn't be surprised if they chopped off a cyberarm for some extra cash (if the opportunity were to present itself.)

It's because these movies go by the 'rule of cool' where your ammo clip is always full except when a dramatic moment is called for (like having the BBEG on your sight 3 minutes after the movie begun)



Well, checking for intel, ammo, etc should be default. Come on, every time a soldier slots some one and they are not under heavy fire, they will always check for supply and intel... The same thing could be ingrained in shadowrunner who begun life as soldiers or mercs.

Yeah but it's really agravating when the dramatic moments comes 3 minutes after the hero walked a way from dozen at least half loaded submachine guns.

Easiest way to curb the car theft thing without taking even more time is to have all the buyers dry up meaning he can't offloaded his car. Alternatively pick soemthing he didn't do exactly right witha theft and have the authotheft detective come down on him, hard. Arrest him, have him sweat enough, have the detective release him due to lack of evidence but witht he clear notation he'll be watching for him in the future. The detective is of course on one of the major autheft rings int he cities payroll and they don't take jkinda to "independant contractors" if he doesn't get the hint step up the harassment.

hence I mentioned that you take the body with you. When you have the body, you have all the time you need to get cyberware out of it.

As for the skill to remove cyberware, the GM probably should have required someone to have the cybertech skill, but the guy that did it was our hacker with 5 logic and like +4-6 dice to logic linked skills.

Oh that is priceless. Unless they specify that they are searching for a biomonitor, assume that it is still active. The group is quietly driving away from a spree of mass murder with a van filled with their spoils, and at least one is telling the authorities that it is in the back. If they do check, have one of the bodies carry an internal commlink in hidden mode. Security RFID tags in all of the company installed cyberware, or etc...

Both Medicine and Cybertechnology are not skills that you can default on. So your hacker shouldn't be able to properly extract the cyberware. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/twirl.gif)

I wasn't aware that blackmarket traders went on twitter after each sale and posted "Sweet, I totally just bought X, Y, and Z from some runners who hit an ares compound last night. They left their contact info, it was 123 easy st." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Also, I'm kinda curious why looting bodies is so acceptable in D&D and not SR? I mean in D&D you are generally playing a hero(ish) character, while in SR you are playing a criminal. Seems to me the criminal would be much more in character for looting a corpse than a hero... :shrug:

I have to agree with all the people talking about putting RFID chips in stuff that they are trying to take. While the corp they are in at the moment likely wouldn't know the numbers to track off hand, they likely could figure it out by the next day. Also keep in mind that RFID zappers zap electronics like commlinks as well, so good luck clearing the commlink of tags.

Biggest ways to prevent this are enforce encomberance and time limits. There is -never- unlimited time to loot corpses.

P.S. All NPCs die with their finger locked down on the trigger, thus burning all their ammo (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Chiming in with my two nuyen
..Several people have said that being a shadowrunner means being a person who is paid to kill people.
Uhm.. No.
A lot of shadowrunners, to my knowledge don't do wetwork, sure a firefight might come up, but theres a reason theres a specific term for a job that involves contract killing.

That being said:

My adept is a wetworker, she -only- kills people when she has been paid to do so, and shes good enough to pick her contracts. The rest of the time its dmso and narcojet for everyone. And boots to the head. Or just plain sneaking around so it never becomes an issue. When she -does- kill someone she loots the body, and I don't just mean rifling its pockets.. she takes the entire body to a ghoul who used to be a successful surgeon, and sells the cyber, the viable organs, and then the rest for meat. She actually plans around doing this.

However when she is -not- doing wetwork.. well the only time the team has looted the opposition was when they -really- pissed them off, knowing it was considered a dick thing to do, and doing it more or less to prove a point. (They'd been set up for a double cross, and these guys meant to tpk the team.. so the team tricked them into giving themselves away early, and in public, while we kicked their arses in ways that made it look like we were complete victems, and left them passed out for the Star to pick up after a quick pocket rifle from our invisoed team member)

I think it's a difference in goals. In D&D, you're sort of in a DIY business. You may get the occasional reward from the townsfolk for slaying the dragon, but the real reward is in the dragon's lair. That's where the Sword of Ultimate Power is, where there's a nifty new spell waiting for your wizard to learn, and so on. The only time you generally resort to making your own gear is when the GM won't plant exactly what you want in the hoards, In any event, in D&D the major resource is picked up on the bodies. So it only makes sense to make sure to strip-search /every/ body.

In Shadowrun, on the other hand, the self-made criminal is a rare PC figure. In general, every adventure begins with meeting your client. If you're lucky, it ends the same way. You're being hired to do a job with a minimum of fuss and evidence left behind. If you're doing it properly, no one ever knew you were there, and dead bodies are a complication no one involved really wants. Most importantly, stopping to loot everything slows you down. When the stated goals include minimum disruption, stopping to loot the bodies is an unnecessary complication to getting the job done. Grabbing an obvious ammo magazine or two is probably fine, especially if you're getting low and it matches your weapon. By the same token, if you're in the CEO's office to kidnap him and he has a solid platinum paperweight on the desk, taking a free action to pocket that isn't too bad (although you'll probably have to melt it down and sell it for materials value). But if you're taking everything that isn't nailed down (and anything that can be pried up isn't nailed down), you're almost certainly putting the main job at risk for a smaller nuyen return than the job itself is worth.

Or, short version: In Shadowrun you're being paid, in D&D you're on your own time.

We have a standing house rule:

It's assumed that whenever the team has an opportunity while on a mission, they're doing light looting. They aren't taking anything of personal value to the guards or whomever (no wedding rings, etc), just things from the target but that aren't mission objectives. This accumulation of stuff just so happens to pay for whatever ammo and other consumables they happen to expend over the run, and it's also assumed that between runs they'll have a chance to restock supplies.

We're also running a limited-lethality game this time, and I didn't have to enforce it at all. We just had a discussion starting off to the effect of "The guys you're running against have massive, worldwide resources. Would you be happier if they could deny anything was wrong and run a quiet investigation, or if they started their investigation after news of three dozen dead security guards was all over the trid for a week?" Mission kill targets get cacked, but other than that, my team is all about the professional courtesy. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/twirl.gif)

So they're like lawyers and sharks?(IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

That is one type of job... and that would probably be a rare type, where a johnson just needs a copy of something a rival corp is working on. I have been playing shadow run off and on for years with multiple GMs and only had maybe 1 or 2 runs where the point was to not have any evidence a run was done at the target.

As for bodies, if you notice there are far far more items in the game centered around killing than not killing. For the most part the more bodies the better when you are targeting a corp. If there are a lot of deaths from security that weakens the overall corp, afterall who wants to take up a security job where the position is open because the last crew was killed?
Corps probably wouldnt normally hire runners to just go waste security and leave, as that would encourge their rivals to do the same to them, but when there is another target at hand I dont think a johnson really cares if you kill every security guard in the place if you meet the mission objective.

I still would ask the Shadowrunner what is he planning on doing with the body now that he has undressed it. Is there a particular fetish about undressing every one of them and stealing their clothes and other personal possessions?

Wetwork is just one aspect of doing a job to kill someone. If you are sent on an extraction run you will probably have to kill people to get the target out, that just comes with the job. Waiting for security to drop from getting hit with narcoject is just a liability, it leaves you and your team open to return fire.
If you are sent on an extraction, a theft, a demolition, a sabotage or a distraction run the johnson probably expects you to kill a few people and the runners should expect it as well... you are being paid to do something that will involve the death or others.

If you're looking for a decent way to scare your player off of the 'loot all the cars' mentality, well, drop him a surprise next time. Is he awakened? If not, good. The setup goes something like this.
Mage: 'Well, I've parked my nice sedan in a bad part of town, but I neeed to be here to pick up some important things. It shouldn't be too long, but just in case... Here, fire spirit, watch this car. Warn anyone who approaches it, and fry them if they touch it.' And that's the car your thief just tried to steal.

Another way to curb this is to heavily enforce the availability and cost adjustment tables. Also contact-fencing(sr4a 287). Twenty percent each for stolen and used, and under investigation. "Hi, on-star? My car got stolen, can you look into it?" That kind of thing. If you enforce the idea that shadowrunning pays rather well compared to the alternatives, especially when you figure in time and effort, most players will get the drift, if you're trying to curb 'steal everything that isn't nailed down' behavior.

No, thats what the stick&shcok rounds and stun balls are for, no need to kill anyone when you can stun them much easier.
It's very unprofessional to kill the whole security detail when you extract someone, unless thats what your specifically being payed to do.