Shadow Census, A Population Breakdown, recently updated Options

[Mercer]

I made up a table years ago that was my attempt to deal with the "buyer's market" side of Shadowrun. I imagine this has been covered in a sourcebook somewhere, but its not one I own. I figured on roughly 1 runner for every 10,000 people in the population as a general guide, with "hot" cities (Seattle, Denver, Hong Kong, or Bogota by way of example) having as many as twice that. This was mainly to get the figure of 500 for Seattle, which would make my percentages easier in the next stage. If 500 is too high for your taste, you can make the number whatever you want. I basically used a Runner Population of 250 with a wannabe population of the same. Runners don’t consider the Inferior guys real runners, but people have to start somewhere. The percentages would break down similarly for most major cities, regardless of the pop. (There's probably even more wannabes than that, but all the excess does is keep the number relatively static as they get wiped out.)

With a Total Runner Population of 500, it breaks down like this:

Samurai, 40% (200)
Riggers, 20% (100)
Hackers, 20% (100)
Adepts, 15% (75)
Magic Users, 5% (25)

From there, it went by a general Rating:

Inferior, 50%
Average, 30%
Competent, 15%
Superior, 4%
Ultimate, 1%

So as a guideline, starting at 500:

Street Samurai (200 Total). Inferior: 100, Average: 60, Competent: 30, Superior: 8, Ultimate: 2.
Magic Users (25 Total). Inferior: 12, Average: 8, Competent: 3, Superior: 1, Ultimate: 1 (or less).
Adepts (75 Total): Inferior: 38, Average: 22, competent: 11, Superior: 3, Ultimate: 1 (or less).
Riggers (100 Total). Inferior: 50, Average: 30, Competent: 15, Superior: 4, Ultimate: 1.
Hackers (100 Total). Inferior: 50, Average: 30, Competent: 15, Superior: 4, Ultimate: 1.

As far as ranking goes, Dice Pools in their areas of expertise are a better indicator than BP of overall character power (as I can make thoroughly incompetent runners with any amount of BP) but I'll include both to give a general idea:

Inferior: Stats, skills and spells around 2, Dice Pools of around 4-5. Sams will have maybe a point of Cyberware, Magicians will have only a point or two of magic. They might have a 4 in something, but will most likely be defaulting rather than have the applicable skill. Gear will rarely have above and Avail of 6. (Characters, non-player or otherwise, generated at this level would usually be 200BP.)
Average: Stats, skills, spells of around 3, Dice Pools maxed around 8. Sams might have Wired One, but won't have more than 3 points of Essence filled, Magic stats will cap out around 3. Gear will rarely be higher than Avail 8, though they may have one signature piece that's better. (Characters generated at this level would usually be 300 BP.)
Competent: Stats and etc of around 4, Dice Pools around 10-12. Most gear under Avail 12. (Npcs of this level will either be generated with 400 BP, or be archetypes.)
Superior: Average stats and etc of 5, higher in their field of expertise, Dice Pools in the 15+ range. (These guys are good. 500 BP as a rough guide, with high karma pcs in here as well.)
Ultimate: Prime runners. The only real restrictions on character generation are story restrictions (I'm probably not going to make a guy who is great at everything, simply because Mary Sue's annoy me). These guys are the Michael Jordans of the shadows, the Wayne Gretzkys of runners.

Now, thats how I arrived at how many of who are in the talent pool in Seattle. How you hire them is handled like buying any other piece of (perhaps disposable) gear, as per the table below:

Rating-------Avail--------Cost
Inferior----------3------------1000¥
Average---------6------------5000¥
Competent-----8------------10,000¥
Superior--------12-----------50,000¥
Ultimate--------20+---------100,000¥

And there is a mark-up to represent Sams (who there are more of) are easier to get than Mages, as per:

Samurai: -1 Avail, x1.0 cost
Rigger: x1.0 cost
Hacker: x1.25 cost
Adepts: +3 Avail, x1.5 cost
Magic Users: +5 Avail, x1.75 cost

It looks a little less complicated to me on my scrap of notebook paper since its easier to do a table on paper than in a forum post (at least for me). These aren’t hard numbers, and the pay can scale with job difficulty, but it makes for a handy guideline.

Now, these numbers are to represent the number of freelance runners in Seattle at any given time, and used as a rough guideline mainly for people who are trying to put together teams on relatively short notice (be they pc's or npc's). These numbers don't cover the corporate black ops teams (who are like runners, but aren't freelancing), or the criminal population. Gangers, other than the select few talented enough to freelance, aren't on the list. These were just numbers I tried to keep in mind as a GM to answer such questions as, "Who can we get here in an hour?", and to provide a rough guideline for SR pay scales (based mostly off lifestyle). If an npc with no prior runner contacts went through a fixer to get someone to hit the pcs, who could he get, how long would he take, and how much would he have to spend. That sort of thing.

This is still based pretty heavily on my SR3 table, with SR4 updates. Seeing’s how Hackers are so much more a part of the system in this edition (at least in the games I play in, as opposed to the SR3 games I played and ran in) I might bump the numbers around—switch out Sams for Hackers. Also, its just a guideline as to general role in an group. Hackers rig and Riggers hack and Samurai can do either, but it’s based around what they’re best known for.

Another thing I always wanted to include was more census figures in my tables. If you look at the economy of illicit specialists, I'm sure it’s always fluctuating as people get killed, step off the bus, or come off the DL. A fixer, or just a dedicated data broker, would probably be keeping track of these numbers, to the extent it was possible. If nothing else, people would have a general sense of how healthy the population was. (Is competition for jobs fierce, are cultural subsets taking over certain rackets, that sort of thing.) But I don't how useful a mechanic would be in this instance, since it seems like something the GM could just handle by fiat.

But, then you could have little fluff details like if things start heating up in the Philippines, you could have a disproportionate number of Filipino runners as the refugees start surreptitiously making their way in. Mainly, it would be a cool way to say: