yukami, while that is certainly a viewpoint, RPGs are fundamentally about advancement, and SR is built for it.

there is just so much wrong with this statement that i might almost say i feel sorry for anybody who actually believes it.

i often describe myself as a spoiled gamer - the most prolific gaming of my life was done while i was in college, and i would say that at least 50% of the games i played then were one-shots, intentionally or otherwise. we used roleplaying as an avenue to exercise our creativity, to explore new ideas, to evoke emotion, to learn about human interaction by imagining ourselves in other people's shoes, and even to explore serious real world issues in a more forgiving setting. if i want the tedium of advancement and moneymaking, i'll just go get a job, thank-you-very-much

also, the rules for karma and character advancement take up approximately two pages out of what i would guess are about 1300 or so pages of rules. i would posit that the game is built for far more things than advancement.

(sorry for the derail, but i think that having enough money to support a luxuriant lifestyle is boring, compared to what somebody does when they don't have enough money to support a luxuriant lifestyle)

There is no way to refute my statement. RPGs are not free-form roleplay, and they're not wargames. They're Role-Playing Games. I didn't say they're *wholly* about advancement. I didn't say they're not about creativity, exploration, interaction, etc. etc. Neither did I say that advancement meant moneymaking, or tedium. Nothing about it precludes fun, creativity, and so on.

I said 'fundamentally'. At base. At base, 99.9% of Role-Playing Games are built with rules about advancement. This is not a controversial point. The vast majority of RPGs are not meant to be one-shots, as board games are.

If you want to take a "holier than thou" position about how your gaming is "purer" than the rest of us and troll these forums I suppose that's your business, I'm just not going to respond further.

Back to the original topic, would anyone else like to volunteer example pay from their game? If possible, please note job type clearly.

I thought RPGs were about the bitches...

No, RPGs are meant to destroy the heavy armor on the field.

Light armor, at best. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

For our current run, our GM was generous enough to pay us 30,000 apiece. (We were shocked enough to do everything we could to make sure the credsticks weren't forgeries.)

The job in question was to steal a specific object from an Ares research facility and make it look like a simple smash-and-grab, probably another corp's work, to cover up the theft of a specific object the Johnson wanted. The object in question is a bolt of apparently magical silk. The group has several reasons to believe the Johnson is a well-disguised spider spirit, or something along those lines.

(Due to scheduling problems, cancellation, and general bad luck, we haven't managed to actually do the run yet, so I can't say if there are any nasty surprises waiting. Legwork revealed none.)

Have you ever worked in the real world where plenty of people, especially the ones with lower logic, end up being your boss?

At no point ever (outside of maybe the Olympics?) has pure ability ever defined 'talent'. Having 'better stats' in no way makes someone 'better' at their job. It is by no means a problem - being talented is great... But being good at what you do, having experience, self confidence, and (most importantly) knowing people makes all the difference.

My games tend to be street level action with payouts at 3,000 to 5,000 per run for each runner involved. Johnsons do not pay a percentage of their budget, they pay as little as they can feasibly get away with. Starting runners are not really Shadowrunners yet, they are not gooey babes all covered in afterbirth, neither. They are former professionals and skilled individuals that are making the move into the bigger game. Until they gain some Street Cred, their paychecks are going to be small.

Who cares if they have a 6 agility and 6 firearms if their Street Cred is 0. The 5 agility, 5 firearms older, grizzled veteran with 6 Street Cred commands easily ten or twenty times the wage because he has been around the block.

There really should be a Quality that can be taken at character generation that insinuates a PC being already established in the Shadows, something that adds street cred. A mechanical way to define a PC that is 'professional' vs ye street punk on the up and up.

Well, more *skill* absolutely means more talent. You're arguing that talent doesn't *matter*, not that Stat+Skill isn't talent. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It's not a bad argument, though.

I tend to go in the ¥3000-10000 range per player depending on the difficulty. I might lowball them for something that's related to the characters' backstories or if it's something that seems really simple but adds into a major plotline (like Missing Blood...the players only get a grand each for it, but they're then embroiled in the whole Universal Brotherhood fiasco)

If thats the case then the first think i do in your game is find this guy and kill him, maybe after that you can admit i got talent.

Then you got talent and several enemies.

But atleast i can get jobs that actually pay sometink.

We play weekly. My starting players are offered between 2k-5k each per session, with bonuses for secondary objectives that double payout, and occasionally getting potentially stiffed on payment by Johnsons unless they do their legwork. As the players get more established, I'm planning to allow payouts increase, but the jobs will also take longer. In the end, I want my players earning between 5k and 10k a week, with bonuses for exceptional performance. I also tend to provide non-cash rewards to players as a way to move the plot along, give them things they wouldn't normally purchase, and twist gameplay in interesting ways. These non-cash rewards are in addition to cash rewards, not in lieu of them.

I like keeping payouts on the smaller end of things, so players appreciate their good gear when they get it, and when a lucrative job rolls around, they are suitably suspicious. I also like to encourage creative income sources, although they can't be in the form of establishing a business. One of my runners recently returned to a run site because he saw an opportunity to steal the weapons of the local AzMart rent-a-cops. It only took an hour, but there was fire and Neo-Anarchists and a Shotgun, and many lulz. In the end, the player only earned 1k, after fencing the goods, but that isn't a completely insignificant amount of cash, and a good time was had.

With the group I am GMing for I give payouts between 1000 and 5,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) per head, when you average it over all the runs they have been on. Some runs pay nothing at all (in terms of nuyen), and for some they have been paid 10,000 per head. Last month (in game) they made about 20,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif)

As a player it depends. I enjoy playing games where the runners get paid pittance, wondering if you are going to make the rent and the loan payments. However I don't think that should be a constant thing. You should be able to get better gear as the game goes on. This is especially true for certain types of characters, for example Riggers. When your average drone is worth more then 15,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) and your primary vehicle is worth 100,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) getting paid 1,000 per run is not going to work for you in the long run, if there is a real chance that your drones/vehicles will get damaged or destroyed.

Plus unless the Johnson is paying for expenses, there are a lot of hidden "costs" to a run. Disguises, specific fake SINs, bribes, ammunition, medical rehab after, more bribes, chemicals, transportation costs, new SINs, fancy gadgets to perform a run, and bribes.

I think the ideal payment situation is if you can afford enough to cover expenses, and some upgrades; but after that are still scraping by month by month. For example if after paying expenses, rent, buying new drones/ware/focus you have 500-1000 nuyen left over each month. That means no nest egg and means you still have to be running.

"A man rises to the level of his incompetence." In no way does that prove the boss has more talent, though he does have experience. Trust me, I am not saying a new face will be paid as much as a known professional, but the fact is that a person with higher stats is more likely to succeed and is more talented. Whether or not this is recognized is another matter entirely. Some people are just better at things than others, and one's station in life depends on a larger number of factors. Experience, knowing people, so forth is important, but does not say someone is more talented than someone else. By the system, those people, if runners, will often have better stats as well as reflected by Prime Runners. One also has to account for different fields: maybe the boss is above a character because he has better social stats? A Runner can't be everything, after all. Master of their own field at the expense of other ones.

But that is neither here nor there. Thank you for your assistance.



My players usually do resource raids for parts on behalf of their Rigger while trying to get ahead. After all, they want the Drone backup.

It seems more people give a range rather than have something specifically in mind for job types.

In general, I find the Shadowrun economy to be unsustainable. Since it will never make sense anyway, and the point is to have fun, I prefer to use cash as a mechanism to manage player power levels. SR doesn't have a leveling up mechanism, but that type of progressive reward structure can create motivation in players that refuse to be story-driven. As cash rewards increase, they get access to better gear, which can feel like leveling up. I create a range of values that I think are appropriate for their 'level', and then choose a value within that range based on the difficulty of the job. The median value of these ranges increase with time, giving the feeling of progress.

I think by going with the conversion rates used by the system, every run should pay around 2,5k (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) per point of karma earned in the run, unless you want your awakened characters to begome even more OP then they are as the game progress. So that would be about 25k (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) per run.

Why not bring Street Cred and Notoriety into the equation? Take the original table and multiply it by the average of Street Cred and Notoriety, round normally, minimum of X1 multiplier.

Wetwork is worth five grand a head for a head. Neophytes get that amount, and as their street cred goes up they start getting paid more - the jobs get harder, the legwork gets more extensive and the payouts increase. Notoriety can tell the Johnson a story of how the team gets the job done and change the types of jobs they get, and when someone lays low to let the heat die off (burn cred to get the notoriety down) then Johnsons forget as well, and the payouts get dropped.

That sounds like a reasonable system, actually. It scales up quite nicely and gives another benefit for hoarding Street Cred.

Possibly Cred/Notoriety should correspond to a multiplier, instead of simply multiplying by Cred; that could get too high, too fast. YMMV, playtest it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I prefer the average of the both of them. I thought about subtracting Notoriety from Cred to reward slick teams as well. Averaging also ensures you aren't going to start getting larger payouts for basic jobs until you're about 3-4 Cred in, which means a few months of play. Yes, they could blow up a skyscraper to bring it in early, but I don't think they'd get suave jobs after that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

I like the multiplier idea as well, to be honest. My trouble right now is figuring out how to set up the multipliers themselves - how long does your average 'running team last? Street cred of 10? 20?

Maybe increase the multiplier by 1 for every 3 points of (Street Cred + Notoriety)/2.

Examples from my game. As a GM, I appreciate the problem - the what the heck does the team get offered? question has caused me some head scratching when writing my own runs (which is most of the time). With the radical change in costs in 4e (particularly vehicles and decks/commlinks), older sourcebooks are of questionable applicability, and my intuition from running years of 2e/3e games went out the window.

In my experience, and judging from the "If you do X in your game, it is different from how I do it and therefore you are playing it wrong. Plus, you are mentally deficient, of dubious heritage, and probably molest children," comments that this thread has spawned, a lot of the money question depends on the style of game you play. In general, I aim for a given character to clear between around 10k per run in profit on average, but there is a lot variability.

My advice is this: if the players have enough money to buy anything they want, you probably need to scale things back. If they don't have enough money to afford a safe house or ammo, you might want to raise the payments. If the players get really excited when they save enough money to buy that piece of cyberware or vehicle, you are in the right area. A little player grumbling: good. A lot of player grumbling: bad.

Notes on my game style and assumptions:

• Starting characters are beyond-the-norm types, with some experience. Maybe not in the shadows per se, but they've been around the block.
• Runners are in a high-risk profession. They have to be paid commensurate to that risk. If the pay scale is too low, they'd join a gang or become security guards (if it's an option), or just boost cars all day.
• There aren't that many real runners active in a given area. Less than 100 in Seattle. A whole lot of pretenders and wanna-be's - not many professionals. Demand is relatively high, supply is relatively low. Therefore, price is high.
• Most runs are not simple one in-game day affairs. They typically take place over several days, or even weeks. Typically can execute 2 runs per month.
• For various reasons (on-going plot threads, screwing by Johnsons, etc.) the team doesn't get paid for a run about 1/3 of the time.
• Runs typically have fairly high costs - vehicles, SINs, weapons, etc. are often burned or destroyed. The team often brings in support via contacts that have to be paid as well. As I see it, part of what makes a good team is their ability to keep expenses down...and knowing when they should pay for things.
• I use a "cash-for-karma" rule for my awakened types: 10k nuyen for one karma, for use for Awakened-related activities, except for raising their magic stat. (I'm considering dropping it to 5k.)
• My group averages about 1 session per month. Sometimes 2 a month, sometimes every other-month. I try and keep the in-game date advancing at the same rate as in real-life, but if we don't play for a month or two, I "pause" things.
• We have between 4 and 6 players for each session - PCs without players are assumed to be unable to participate for whatever reason. I try and match the threat to the number/capabilities of the team. If both hackers can't be there, they won't be needed. And if the mage isn't there, I'm not going to throw a bunch of spirits at them.

A little more detail:
The team is getting offered between 50-70k per run, or about 10-15k per team member. Offer is low if the Johnson thinks the team will view the run as low risk, or won't take much time. Things go to the high end if the Johnson is under pressure, he knows the run will take some time, or if the team will think the threat is high and will need extra compensation. As the team's street cred goes up, the Johnson's may offer a bit more, but I figure most of that advantage comes out as a bonus in the negotiation test. A lot of variability too: One run (full team of 6) was 100k for two weeks of work. Other runs are for free.

The team has a pretty good face, so he often negotiates the fee up 10-25%. Which I'm fine with - that's one of the key things faces are supposed to do.

My players are also pretty good at identifying ways to make additional money during the runs - selling software (the hacker codes some specialized utilities from time to time), looted kit, intel, random blackmail, etc.

Really big (50k+ per runner) paydays are rare, but they are possible, but typically require extended prep work with multi-session runs.

At the end of the day, I try and work things so that each player is looking at potentially clearing around 20k a month. After burned/damaged/destroyed gear, medical care, etc. they are probably making around 10-15k on average. Which is enough to buy goodies, and save up for big stuff. If they do really well on a run or two, they might end up with 20-30k. If things go badly, they may not have enough to pay lifestyles. I'm fine with either.

Again, a lot of this is game style, and I'm still working my way through how 4th edition campaigns work over time.