Payment the Guitar Hero Way, An easy way to rid characters of their money Options

[raben-aas]

There are a lot of questions running around concerning the topic of "payment" for shadowruns – there are even some answers (just search for "payment" here in dumpshock).

But in my opinion, all of the ideas of how to balance payment are missing the point: The question always revolves around the MINIMUM payment a shadowrun should be "worth" to keep the shadowrunners being shadowrunners instead of making them car thieves or drone hijackers. The reason for this approach is that in the SR novels, Shadowrunners tend to be "poor" and in constant need of money. Load them up with 100,000 Nuyen, and the runners will scoff at the next Johnson who offers them just a meager 15K for their time.

While playing Guitar Hero, the answer to the problem suddenly jumped right into my face: In the game, you would earn lets say 5K $ for a Gig, but after smashing up your hotel room, partying out with your band and a solid amount of drug abuse the gig would leave you with 150 $ to spend on Outfit, new guitars or whatever.

You see the same principle in most of the novels: the shadowrunners make a decent amount of cash, but end up spending a large amount for bad habits, very cool but stat-wise totally unnecessary cars, "partying out in the zone", a solid amount of drug abuse or whatever.

Naturally, a player would never allow his poor character to spend money on unnecessary things. The poor sod will remain in his coffin motel forever, he will not eat fresh food or relax in a spa, but will hoard his ca$h unnter his pillow, to spend it on the next uber-ultra-bazooka that offers him a solid worth (stat-wise).

Well, no more I say!

Lets face it: If you want to play a Shadowrunner, fer chrissake let your character ACT like one. And since you can't enforce good roleplaying, do it "the Guitar Hero Way" by not giving the runners the full payment in the first place. Instead, make up a house rule (or a random "waste of money" generator).

In the end, this could look something like this:

– Total payment for shadowrun: 150,000 Nuyen.
– Divided by 5 Runners: 30,000 Nuyen each.

30,000 Nuyen minus 20% for a week of "after run partying out" + 1d6 x 10% for other unnecessaries (new cool jacket, new paint job for car, replace komlink with same-stat newer, more fashionable model, new haircut, drugs, hookers, whatever)

If you like, you could offer your players a small advantage in exchange, like "add 1 contact/raise loyality of one existent contact by +1 for each 1K spent onn partying with him".

I am sure that there is a lot of potential in this venue, as it approaches the problem of how to pay the runners a "realistic" amount of money in light of a balanced play or a "the runners always need money" style of play. Thecharacters may not receive any more money than they did before, but they will feel less cheated (I for one would prefer to earn 30K and burning 20K of it on useless junk and toys over earning a meager 10K total in the first place).