I tend to pay as much on time involved as much of anything. I have no set system as people in the shadows often don't communicate and establish a set system, some organizations pay very well, some organizations pay very poorly, all have their uses.

Someone asked for numbers so I would throw them out.

For my now very experienced teams inaugural run I paid them 20k, or roughly 3k a person for live capture of a hostile subject. There was an additional modifier for the recovery of a significant amount of contraband intact. This was for a one night job with decent intel (they new what neighborhood the target was in, they just had to track him to his final location) on the way they plused up their money by at least partially betraying their employer but their face concocted a story that they still got paid the recovery fee.


I have had Damien Knight pay them 120k (15k a piece) and upgrade their ware to beta as "shut up and go away" money after they stumbled on to a Ares facility in the Rockies infested by bug spirits. Before anyone freaks out, there were very good reasons at the time for not killing them and dumping their bodies in a snow bank.

Their current mission involves escorting a person who they now know is Aden through the middle east in her human form. They were paid 300k for the job divided amongst 8 people for what was expected to take about a month. Room, board, and many gear expenses were paid by the client. The team actually thought this was a little low, which honestly in some ways it is, but opted to do it as a working vacation and as a favor to a contact who's done them a solid in the recent past.

All my PC's are currently in varying degrees of capable of retiring, but most of them have decided that they run the shadows for more then just money. Some are adrenaline junkies, some have personal long term goals better served in the shadows, some because their only choice of retirement involves taking over a syndicate or buying a controlling interest in a AA or better mega.

So here are my rules of thumb on payment
A) Unless a fixer has reason to do so otherwise always pay the group not the individual runners. A good runner team knows how and why to split their money and your J. or Fixer doesn't care how that happens.
B) A J or fixer will always rate their willing expenditure on something and then quote a number significantly below that, pocketing the difference.
C) Unless there is special circumstances involved a J or Fixer wants the mission to succeed and will pay what's necessary to make that happen.
D) In the shadows you can have things fast, cheap, or good quality, but you have to pick two.

Typically for the level of professionals my runners are I figure unless their being asked to do the job by a known friendly contact (which lowers the risks signifigantly in most cases) it takes a bare minimum of 10k per person to get them interested. But as others have said I run a fairly black trench coat game. The runners maintain extra safe houses and weapon stores and as much as possible try and have on hand gear for most situations ahead of time. They have started to run their team as a business rather then just a group of people who meet to commit crimes.

I think that a good measurement that is coming up in this thread is a Runs per Month / Income per run = Income per Month.

My games tend to have 2-3 shadowruns per month, as they are rarely the black trenchcoat types that take weeks of pre-planning. My game isn't HEAT.

The runners pull in 3-5 or 6 grand a run and have to cover their lifestyle and personal expenses (ammo, gear and medical), and generally end up with around 5 to 10 thousand a month net income. This scale is affected by a Street Cred multiplier. A high Team rated group can expect to make four or five times this. My view on big time rewards - big ticket items like 500,000 nuyen betaware etc. - is that they come more through plot, and less through spending cash.

Haha, I think that's (runs/month)*(income/run), but yeah. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Monthly income matters, versus raw income, because players are getting charged lifestyle.

umm, i'm not trolling, i'm saying that a myriad of factors influence the details of a game, and that depending on what the GM wants to do with his game, the payment should reflect that. if you want to run your players down into the gutter, pay them less and see what they do to make ends meet. if you want to see what happens to low-lifes who land a windfall and see what they do with it, pay them more. if their employer can only afford a certain amount of money, then he bloody well can't pay them more than that; or he can offer more and then screw them over later. there are all sorts of reasons for someone to do something or not - if getting money for new toys is the only thing that motivates either a player OR a character, i do that that is pretty short sighted and unimaginative.

i've spent the majority of my working-life working for no money, but i always come away with more than i would have if i had just been getting a paycheck. "work" is not synonymous with "employment" for everybody, and EVERYBODY has to work for something, even if that work doesn't fit within the economic system that is standard for society. i was disputing yerameyahu's implications that money is a necessity for furthering goals, and that advancement of power level is what RPG's are fundamentally about.

Even street-level games (which are recognized as a *variant*) mean you need money. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) No one said that you shouldn't fiddle with payments, and *I* certainly didn't say (or imply) that money is a *necessity* for furthering goals. It's just fundamental to the function of the game, that's all. If the TM's getting karma and the hacker's getting no money, that's not fair. Anyway. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

For Comparisons... I have a character that I have been playing almost exclusively for a little over 2 years... He has 302 Karma and no Notoriety... His Street Cred is 30, and his Public Awareness is 10...

I can command a pretty impressive figure for a run... and have in the past... But, even recently, I have been payed in the low 10-15,000's nuyen for a job... on the other hand, my biggest payout was the 1 year long campaign leadup to the zero-zone raid that was done on Spec. In the end, we netted a comfortable 7 figure amount, split 6 ways... it was just enough for me to upgrade my Cybernetics to Delta Grade (after trying to locate a facility for over a year)... In the end, I am still just as proficient as I was before the Run... no skills really went up, and my Cyber/Bio Suite received no real augmentations to its capabilities other than grade upgrades... not too bad for a years run in game...

Anyways...

Its something of a classic issue (oh, and btw, its just dawned on me that I've been farting around with SR for its 20 years....), of the payout needing to be either directly or indirectly superior to other alternatives available to the runner.

Its both an IC and OOC issue, in-character, obviously a runner would have to earn enough to keep doing what they're doing, but also why they don't just focus on other stuff, like...identity theft and organ-legging, which would likely earn them more money. Out of Character, as a GM you want to be able to string the player group along so they want to keep doing this (the game) and keep their characters in the lifestyle they're 'accustomed' to, without going all monty haul and dropping the treasure of tiamat in their laps for 1 run.

In a tech type game, money will still only get you so far. There's only so much stuff you can buy and carry. SR has rules that limit how much junk you can stick in your body, so even with millions of credits, eventually you'll run out of space for cyber/bio/whatever gear. Even other material gear is limited. I mean sure you can let your runner team run around with gauss cannons and power armor and 53 types of firearms, but eventually they'll get bored, and that also ends up with a different type of game than 'street level'.

Not really, with enought money you cant really run out of essence as there's not enought usefull stuff to but in you.

Well, seems like my games tend to be on the higher-end of the pay-spectrum. For the record, we're 5 people taking turns DMing, and our characters are situated in LA.

Thus far, our jobs have been:
1. Bodyguarding a well-known VIP during her daily life, after she's received an assassination threat. Payment was 1000$ per person (was a 2 person job) for 5 days, and a bonus of 2500$ for defeating the assassin. So, in total 7500$ for 5 days of medium risk, high-profile work.
2. Assaulting a corporate outpost in the middle of nowhere. Yes, 'assaulting', as in 'leave no survivors'. Payment was 10000$ per person (this time, 4 people), and the job was fairly high-risk, with the facility being guarded by a small army of Prof rating 4 security, all with biomonitors slaved to the central alarm hub. They later received reinforcements in the form of a SWAT team.
3. Retrieving an artifact from a heavily guarded mansion in a AAA zone (Hollywood). Payment was 30000$ per person. Might seem a little bit high to some people, but the runners had to fight magic heavy opposition in milspec armor with only the gear they could smuggle into Hollywood.
4. Stealing a briefcase combined with bodyguard duty. The briefcase was on private property, guarded by a highly initiated mage, a Cybertroll in milspec armor with high-velocity weapon, and a melee adept ninja type. This time, bringing their gear was a tad bit easier, since it was only a B zone. 25000$ per person.
5. Breaking and entering an Aztechnology airship carrying a platoon of soldiers. 30000$ per person.

As you can see, our games tend to be high-risk, high-reward, in contrast to some of the street level games mentioned earlier. The synopsis on the individual missions was shortened; all missions required copious amounts of legwork, accessing contacts etc.

I like the street cred/notoriety factor, though if using the 'codes' system from Companion, for someone with the assassins code, that gains both street cred and notoriety slower, there may be a disconnect. So I propose using that cred/notor aspect, and then perhaps an additional factoring based on 'skillset' perhaps?

I'm not quite sure how to weigh it properly tho, and the downside is much added bookkeeping, but the premise would be certain types of professions have higher weight in calculations than others.

On the other hand, if you just take raw cred as a factor (not modified by adjustments, just based on karma) that could work too, more experienced characters earn more than similarly professioned 'newbies'.

It's all a matter of taste. First Edition Shadowrun and most of the early fiction seemed to suggest most Shadowrunners were barely getting by. Like it was said, it's good business for an employer to pay as little as possible to its temporary employees like Shadowrunners. And the Shadowrunners have to have some motivation to come back and do more jobs. Remember, a lot of Shadowrunners have limited options in regular society.

However, if your taste is to have the Shadowrunners be much more glamorous characters and live in nice apartments and live it up high society style, then that's your prerogative.

It's kind of the old argument of Monty Haul campaigns versus more restrained loot campaigns. There's no wrong or right way to do it. If your players are consistently doing top dollar runs that require new and expensive gear and equipment all the time, then perhaps, big payouts are needed. Otherwise, maybe if that samurai wants to upgrade his reflexes or slap in some awesome new cultured bioware, he should start saving his pennies. Some GMs ask/require players to put some thought into where and how they got all of their fantastic gear. Obviously any player who starts with more than 50K in gear has some serious cash invested already. Any player up above 150K probably didn't get it running the shadows prior to their "start" as a character.

At the same time, it depends on your feelings about player advancement. Some people are used to easily defined progression tracks like "Leveled" games. Others find that the game is not about seeing how much more stuff from the sourcebooks you can add to your character sheet. If a team is well established and constant, often times players are encouraged to share the cost of things the team needs which means the riggers aren't having to buy every new vehicle they might want.

A GM can also assume runners acquire "filler" jobs in between played runs. There are plenty of gigs a runner can get that don't require the GM to facilitate them. Work this out with your players and it can help them make up much of the cost of their lifestyles especially at the Low level. Then their adventure payouts become largely discretionary.

The way I've always imagined Shadowrun is similar to the way Smurf described it. If your campaign involves real Shadowrunners, then they are going to be cream of the crop individuals with a broad skill base to complement their specializations (which means everyone who ever sets foot on any target compound is has the basic stealth, non-lethal combat proficiencies, and athletics skill set needed, everyone can drive at a competent level, and has the social skills and contacts to contribute before stepping off the LOD). These characters are going to be subtle and professional. Those characters are going to need, and deserve, high payments. This represents the top 1 or 2% of the freelance criminals in any given greater metropolitan area. But their level of realistic opposition (passive and active) is going to be higher too. We're not even talking about those epic runs either. Those kinds of "zero zone" jobs are going to go to the elites, and might even be brought in from out of town.

The level below that are going to be the wanna-bes. This is where the vast majority of player characters I've ever seen are going to fall in. These are either characters not designed with a focused concept and a true grasp of the kind of incredible difficulty even the basic 2050+ security presents on any kind of secured facility, [b]or[/i] they were designed for a lower powered campaign. With 250 points, it's hard to build even a low powered shadowrunner. With less than that, there's just no way. And we're not even talking about some kind of min/maxed monstrosity. There are just so many skills that would be imperative for a top notch runner and that eats up a lot of points.

So, as a GM you have to decide what the reasonable amount of business (and competition) is for your locale. There can't be hundreds of runs going off every month, even in a major city. Business would be unsustainable, lol. And the more competition (read: other runners) in an area drives wages down since Johnson can always find someone cheaper.

But YMMV, and it is obvious some people are driving the Priuses of campaigns. So the best rule of thumb has been said before. If your players can afford everything they want and buy a new expensive toy (different than new mission essential gear) after every run, you're probably paying them too much. And remember, Johnson can always provide equipment they need. They do not, and should not, have to buy everything themselves, especially if it is an expendable asset. Johnson's resources and networks are probably much better than the players'. Their cost for that cool new toy is probably a little lower. Especially if they have a subsidiary that makes them, heh.

I will forever disagree with this notion that the Johnson would dirty his hands and create a paper trail by providing gear to shadowrunners.

That's what fixers are for.

I would agree that the upper echelon of shadowrunning would be people with super-high specialties combined with breadth in secondary skills. At typical 400 BP char-gen, most characters will not start out like this. They will either have a super-high specialty and just enough secondary skills to get by, or they will have breadth of skill but not have anything they are really great at.

I am not sure I would call everyone below that level a wannabe, though. Sure, you need to be that level to get past zero zone security, but there are a million softer targets out there - offices, warehouses, etc. And there are lots of other types of jobs, too - courier jobs, bodyguarding, you name it. A team of 400 BP runners should have some decent options open to them (although 400 BP runners can vary greatly in their capabilities).

Well spend a little less time than forever trying to figure out how equipment would be any different than shadowrunners when it comes to paper trails.

If he can hire people, and pay them using some kind of discretionary funds, and not create, or not be worried about, a paper trail, it stands to reason that he can procure inanimate objects in a similar fashion.

Inpu:


I am so stealing this.

"And you're pretty sure your saw your daughter's smile in the steak sauce the other day..."




Hmmm....a Toxic, vengeful semi-burnout shamen....hmmmmmyeah....


-Tir

/me casts Stabilize.

I have Method's implicit permission for this necro post. I think it was either this or start a new thread. I have two things:

1) My Thoughts: (Warning: extended ramble follows.)

I think I tend to give out KIND OF A LOT for runs while TAKING A LOT AWAY for expenses. As a result, even though my runs lately tend to pay in the high tens of thousands or more, the players are still kind of poor and living from hand to mouth, having to pay through the nose for fines, bribes, travel expenses, medical expenses, and hired help. I wanted to look at the nine fourth edition adventures I've written. Eight of them (the last eight) form one ongoing campaign, designed to be interspersed with other adventures. A separate eight of them (the first eight) my players have run through.

Note that I have a three person team I GM for, so in this case '60,000 to the team' is more than '10,000 Each'. Your mileage may vary.

Run #1 -- "Simple" B&E. This was something I wrote in the official SR4 adventure formatting just as an exercise. Taking a cue from Missions, the payment was listed as 6,000 + (2,000 * Street Cred) to the team. A provision for more experienced teams to
For future runs I abandoned official formatting. "What's up, Chummer?" and "Behind the Scenes" were kept, but all other sections & pre written readaloud text were lost.

Run #2 -- "Trivial" Courier Run and handoff (with a twist, natch). Apparently I was sticking with the (Street Cred based payment) thing. Payment to runners is 1,000 (+1,000 * Street Cred) each. Once complications arise, though, industrious and smart runners can collect a finders fee from a different character of (5,000 + 1,000 * Street Cred) each and ultra-competent and ambitious runners can steal, well (part of this giant list of stuff was borrowed by or inspired from someone else's adventure)...



So I guess lesson learned here is that the majority of the payment does not always come from Mr. Johnson. I won't discuss incidental swag for the rest of the runs, to save time/space. But I think this run had the highest maximum potential swag.

Run #3 - Dangerous and Complicated Data Steal. Which is actually a dungeon crawl to the sealed off levels of the ACHE.

One possible faction they can take the run from pays 30k to the team. The other possible faction they can take the run from pays 25k to the team. I believe the run is slightly easier the support given by the faction that pays less. (There are other story-important differences between the two hiring factions but they're not important in this discussion.) Anyway the idea here was that the difficulty of the runs, the street cred of the PCs, and the pay scale were all gradually increasing over time. Note that things did not go smoothly with the second one, as the PCs all got killed or accumulated tons of Notoriety through incompetence, failure, and just plain bad luck, but that's neither here nor there.

Run #4 - High Priority Extraction. Highest paying faction pays 50,000 Nuyen + (10,000 Nuyen * Average Street Cred) to the team. Lower paying faction pays a little less...or literally nothing if the runners worked for them last run and fucked it up. They get a choice from two factions again. Still trying to increase the difficulty and the payoff with each passing run as the stakes get higher and higher in the story. Don't know why I decided to bring back the street cred matters. Note that the person they're extracting offers to pay them 100k instead if they will take him to a third party. But the extra cred comes with a hit to their reps and some very scary enemies.

Run # 5 - Smuggling (Seattle to Hong Kong and back again). This is a side-job so I scaled back both the difficulty and the payment. Payment is either 10,000 + (2,000 * Street Cred) each or half that, depending on how the runners dealt with these Yaks back in Run #2. As a catch, payment is in MCT Corp Scrip, meaning that it is all going back to the Yaks anyway since no one else take sthat.

Run # 6 -- Structure Hit. Against MCT. Difficult AND risky. Payment is:



Run # 7 -- Mostly legwork, plus some 'Hooding' all in the interest of finding a retired 2050s era ex-runner who has gone off the grid but suddenly become a VIP. Payment is 10,000 Each. Simple enough.

Run # 8 -- High risk wetwork on a high profile target that is very well guarded. Practically a suicide mission. Payment is 250,000. Based on importance, challenge, and risk.

Run # 9 -- A little bit of everything. While not as flat-out blisteringly hard as the last run, this run is the climax of the campaign and is essenitally the kissof. Stakes are incredibly high. Also it doesn't really matter what we give players at this point because those characters (if they survive) are going to retire anyway. But I did want to maintain versimmilitude rather than paying them "a hundred million billion nuyen". So the payment is:



Now the more I look at it, the more I see these payments are REALLY all over the place. So can I find an average, even within just the things I have written? Some math and handwaving later, I've got a vague idea that the average payment per runner per run was around 30k. Although I do wonder if we eliminated the 250k and 6k outliers if we'd have something more like 10k per runner per run. How do people feel about that number as a rough baseline of an answer to the "what does a Shadowrun pay" question, before applying situational factors and GM spin?

2) The Question: Has anyone ever reached any kind of an informed, reasonable consensus on this much-much-much-much-much iterated topic? Just because people have highly disparate opinions doesn't mean that a consensus can't be reached...right?

That's why I use a Cash to Karma system to allow karma hungry characters to use downtime and spend money to "do work" that is good to essentaily trade in some of the nuyen for karma. Currently my crew is making 15-25k each a run and the rate of exchange is 5k for 1 karma. I make my characters spend 2 days for each 5k they want to turn in doing those good deeds like teaching street kids magic or warding a local homeless shelter or banishing spirits that are menacing the local coffee shop that they frequent. So they can have extra karma instead of extra cash.

I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. I think the consensus (f there is any) is going to be "it depends".

Assuming (and judging by this and other threads like it, this assumption is not universal) that the GM treats cash like a second karma track and controls it as a method of character advancement, you'll need to consider at least the following variables:

1. What Lifestyle does the GM and/or players want to be the norm for the group?
2. What is the team make up? - heavy tech teams are going to need higher payments than heavy Awakened teams
3. What's the "professionalism" level of the team? Are they "in and out with no complications" or are they "when robbing a bank, I take the pens on chains so I can fence them later" types.
4. Does the team pool resources?
5. How high do you want the "Mohawk level"? - higher tends to cost a lot more.

And there are tons more, I'm sure, these are just the ones I try to keep in mind when calculating payouts.

I rather think if anybody can make equipment/cyberware "fall off a truck" its someone on the inside. Granted, expensive equipment is more dangerous to make disappear, but these Johnson's are being asked to hire people to commit crimes, grand larceny, etc. They probably have ways to "write off" that delta ware visit.

Edit - The other nice part about offering equipment, rather than ¥, is that it can be a way to give some personality to specific Johnsons. "Mr Watanabe always seems to offer nice Chiba-ware, for those that are interested", that kind of thing. This gives the GM some nice ways to diversify the traditional job offer part of the game. Hell, the johnson might be working through a fixer in any case.

Well it could be that Mr Wassabe Johnson is using a Chiba Dark Clinic, that he pays with laundered cash, or with favors via shell corporations.

Certified Credsticks.



Well maybe that is the consensus, but what is the average? If a hundred dumpshockers are asked what they think the average payment for Shadowrun X is and then the results are averaged and the mean calculated, does that produce a meaningful number? Why or why not? Is it the closest we can get?



What is the alternative? Is it taking nothing into account but verisimilitude?



I would love to see a lengthy discussion of the "Mohawk level" issue in and of itself.



Agreed.

That's kind of what I'm hoping for, though I'd shoot for a larger number.

Well, I've played with a GM who seriously said that SR was all about DECLINE! You started out with a runner owning a million (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) in Cyber or gear (in SR3) and then had to do runs for a a few K. He always said that we would never again be able to afford whatever we got at chargen, so we'd better enjoy it....

My game has low pay, but it's getting bigger. I started with a street level, and they have progressed nicely and are really getting a rep. in the shadows so the juicier jobs are coming in.

For numbers, if I recall right they got offered maybe 1,500 to collect some lost gear from a sinkhole (2nd session maybe?) Currently (2 years later) they are working on bringing in a loose cannon team that took a job they shouldn't. I think the going rate in that one is 50K a head if they are alive, 5K if they are dead, paid on an individual basis. I don't know if that's still low for others, but for my guys, it's Scrooge McDuck dough, yo.

We have been Running a multi User Shadowrun Campaign for over 2 years now, (about 25 - 30 active players) and even did a multi group run Special for Bug City. (Probably one of the best games I played, 20 players and 3 GMs) and our payment varies from experience to experience. Since we almost always have mixed groups (ranging vom 0 to 40 Karma in most games) the pay usually is about 10.000 - 20.000 for a Run that involves open conflict.

If we have our prime Runner Team assembled (6 Characters, all in the Range of 150+ Karma, exellently build and very very experienced players) the minimum payment is about 50.000 Nuyen and it can go up to 150.000 (That was the last one and the best payed one so far)

Noobs: 10-20k
Experienced: up to 50k
Professionals: up to 100k
Top of the Notch: 150k