Gangs and Your Runners, Or, how DO you survive in that Squatter? Options

[BrianL03]

Emo's thread about "Why Do You Shadowrun?" got me thinking as to why I Shadowrun, and why I run the games I do.

I have always been interested in the street-level campaign that eventually turns heroic. What I mean by this is although the characters may start incredibly detatched from the everyday actions of the megas, politicos, IEs, and dragons, they will eventually rise to a point of prominence where they will be directly interacting with these entities. Still inferior, but in a position where they have the chance to make or break canon history.

I'm running a game set in pre-Bug City Chicago, and while all the money's really to be made in the Elevated/Core/Southside, several players have their main lifestyles in the less-than-glamorous Northside, and thus need to either spend a lot of time to drive out of their way to avoid, or drive right through, the Noose.

Now, I want there to be consequences to their actions of living and driving through the grittier areas of Chicago, and sometimes even horrible ones. Hence come the gangs... go-gangs, groups demanding tribute, random muggers, etc. However, I don't want this to be like D&D with a Random Urban Encounter Percentile Die™, where the runner mops the gangers up, and walks home to nurse his Light Wound for the night (exaggeration, and I'm going to play these guys dangerously and occaisonally with intelligent tactics). Yet at the same time, this game is online, and I don't want to slow the game down too much with these kinds of events.

How do you run these kinds of events? Random violence already happens to people not targeted by corps, and I want to get them to realize why living in a Low Lifestyle isn't the best of choices for a person's life span. To put it simply, I want to bring the street back to their street-level lives.