What to do about that accountant player, I can't mug him EVERY week! Options

[nezumi]

I agree, Ultra. In the 20's the mafia developed significant power because there was a large niche to be filled, a weaker federal government, poor internal controls to protect against bribery and extortion, and more lenient laws. Most of these are back in place in SR, so there's no reason the mafia shouldn't return to a power similar to what we saw in the 20's.

And I think mmu doesn't give the mafia the credit they're due. Thousands of government employees are forest rangers, but that doesn't mean your only worry from a US army brigade is they might tell you to stamp out your campfire at night. Yes, there are mafia members who run gambling rings out of the back of pet stores. There are also mafia members who run millions of dollars across international lines, who chop limbs off dealers and debtors, and who have access to military grade arms. More legal protections, weaker government and better communications have made things easier, not more difficult, for organized crime.

[mmu1]

[nezumi]

[TinkerGnome]

[IAmMarauder]

[Kremlin KOA]

Ultra reread your corp shadowfiles, in that Nestle today islisted as havimg been 20% bigger and more powerful than SK is in sr

[Guest_MK Ultra_*]

I know that, but Nestlé is neither extrateritorial, nore does it have an army of military equiped security personal!
And I´d doubt that any corp today is pulling such big shadowstuff in a decade, as many (if not most) SR corps are pulling on a regular basis every year (if not month, for the AAA).

EDIT: Oh, and Nestlé doesn´t have cybermancies and magical vampire clone-camelions, for that metter.

[emo samurai]

With proper planning, the 5-man team could blow up the 60-man team easily. And steal all its stuff.

[Guest_MK Ultra_*]

And what about 5 against 500 (thats only counting made man, ad to that hirelings and gangs).

[nezumi]

Yes, a group of runners could kick organized crime out of "a part of a city" for some time. I doubt it'd be long because then the runners are on the defensive, so the yaks can set up ambushes against THEM, or just start burniating everyone who they suspect is connected with the runnes until someone squeals, THEN ambush the runners. It really isn't a long-term winning proposition. The best way to do it would be if the runners hook up with another big dog who can defend that area, for instance the mafia. I would also agree that it is POSSIBLE for a runner team to kick the Yaks permanently out of the city, just exceedingly unlikely.

Yes, a group of 5 could beat a team of 60, assuming the team of 60 was poorly organized and poorly defending. The yaks are neither. If you'd prefer a better analogy, capture the flag with a team of 5 and a team of 60 on a huge playing field, where the smaller team has a better hidden flag. It's still not a great proposition.

[hyzmarca]

Five can defeat five-hundred with proper planing and sufficient momentum. The important consideration is that the five must remain offensive at all times. They must destroy quickly and fade away the second they begin to lose momentum because they will be destroyed by the opposition's superior numbers if the enemy is give any chance at coordiantion.

Te problem is that, while a small offensive force can take a city, this force cannot hold a city. They lack the manpower to defend and so any defense will have to rely on remaining invisible and causing so much damage to the enemy that they'll stay away. This cannot be guarented.

A guerilla offensives work best when the attackers can take the defenders powerbase and when the attackers are supported by a conventional force that can come in to defend and clean up.

This means that to drive the Yaks out the runners would then have to cut off the heads in such as way as to leave the Yak's businesses and muscle intact and willing to accept their leadership or they would have to ally with another organized crime syndicate that can come in and take over while the Yaks are down.

[nick012000]

Or the runners go and start their own organized crime ring after kicking out all of the others. Probably recruiting some of the smaller sprawl gangs for muscle, and using their fixers to get the resources they need in exchange for 'protection'.

[emo samurai]

Which ring would be the best bet for playing nice with the runners and not getting pissed when they jack cars?

[fistandantilus4....]

[Vaevictis]

Easy ways to prevent looting (from my own brain and summary of some earlier posts):

* Don't equip your "goons" with equipment worth the trouble of looting. If the problem is in the volume of items making it worth looting, pick heavy items that individually don't weigh the goons down, but if the runners try to pick up 10 of them, it weighs 100 kg.
* Make the equipment harder to loot. Put most of the capability in internal cyberware that requires serious cutting to remove, or in cyberware that isn't reusable (bone lacing was a good example).
* If they're doing enough volume, you're going to attract the attention of people you don't want to attract the attention of -- law enforcement, local organized crime, etc.
* Occasionally toss in loot that's "too hot to handle." Sometimes fencers will outright refuse to buy if it's going to be too hard to move (ie, law enforcement is watching for the objects, they'll piss off organized crime, etc). If the situation gets extreme, maybe a fencer makes a mistake and buys something that's too hot to handle and ends up dead. That's one less contact the runners can use to move the items, and the runners may pick up a bad rep and thus make it harder to move in the future. (Comment: killing the contact should probably be avoided on the GM's part AND avoidable by the runners {drop hints}. It should probably only be used in extreme cases).
* If they're looting magical or prized items, ritual sorcery to find it WILL eventually come into play.
* If they piss off the wrong people, you might give them a determined enemy that finds their homes every so often. When they move, make them pay lifestyle to move to a new place. If you're feeling really obnoxious, you can really make it hurt by having the enemy find you multiple times in a month.
* If they start getting too much money from looting, you can always scale up the opposition to require nastier and more esoteric gear to drain their bank accounts. Vehicles can be very expensive to kill, for example.
* If they're too flush with cash, you can push non-paying character development threads on them that cost. My GM was nice enough to have someone damn near torture a family member to death. As a shaman whose totem demands protection of family, the retribution my character was compelled to deal out was extremely expensive. The resulting response ended up costing my character like 55k nuyen. Well-developed characters will always have hooks that can be exploited, if the GM needs.
* Destroy their vehicles, if they own them. EXPENSIVE.
* Reinforcements. Nothing stops looting faster than reinforcements with overwhelming force. You should work early to make them constantly afraid of this. Because of this factor, my character tends to only loot choice items that are either very portable and very expensive (foci come to mind), or things that are almost impossible to get on the street (AV ammunition, higher grades of armor, etc).
* As always, any regular behavior which reduces the enjoyability of the game can be penalized on the karma side. (Mostly, this should only come into play if the dude is a jerk and ends up spending lots of real time per session looting the bodies)

[emo samurai]

How big would the mafia's cut be? And what do you mean too hot to handle? A gun's a gun's a gun.

[fistandantilus4....]

well, a lot of guns were supposed to be destroyed after ending up in police custody after being used for a crime. Being caught with such a gun could be very bad news. And not everything you're going to try to fence is going to be a gun. Signature items ("Hey, this looks like Ace's Predator. How'd you get it?") can be bad too.

As for the mob, I'd say 20%. Enough for them to get a good cut, make sure the car jackers know who's in charge, and enough to slow down their gains so that they don't become competition. YMMV.

[Vaevictis]

[nezumi]

There will be a limitation ultimately in the price. Too low and, obviously, they're losing money (and the resulting increase in crime draws more attention). Too high and people just won't report their gains or won't even bother using that particular avenue. I would expect their cut will be between 20-50%, however if they charge more, they'll offer more 'perks', better protection, more available chop shops, etc. After all, it's in the mafia's best interest that their 'paying customers' do well. Of course, the big thing going for them is what happens if you don't pay.

hyzmarca - History would seem to disagree. Barring one man with a bomb and a five hundred unsuspecting people all in one place, it is very difficult for a person to take out 500 people, even if he is armed and they aren't. Keep in mind, we have had organized crime going on in the world for centuries, yet history seems to provide no instance of a group of 1-5 people successfully pushing organized crime completely out of an area for any amount of time barring, perhaps, tremendous destruction caused through acts of war. If you can find the dozens of examples (remember, we're talking CENTURIES, not decades) of a few people without the support of a greater organization successfully driving organized crime out of anywhere, I would be quite fascinated to see it. Perhaps if Chuck Norris decided to take on such a feat...

[IAmMarauder]

[Moon-Hawk]

I apologize if this point has been made. If so, I missed it.
Many people are saying that if you make things somewhat inconvenient for a syndicate, they'll just leave an area because "it's not worth it." A valid point. Bear in mind, however, that these organizations exist on a powerbase of reputation. They will be inclined to fight you, hunt you down, and make an example out of you in a territory dispute over an abandoned parking lot, simply because they can't afford to have someone make them look bad. This will make them fight for things that aren't otherwise worth fighting for. If you seriously expect to get the mafia, the yaks, or anyone else to back down and leave you be, you have to give them a way to look good doing it.

[Calvin Hobbes]

1) Bear in mind that the Punisher has benefits of narrational imperative. He wins because the writers will not kill him. Characters in Shadowrun don't have that luxury sometimes.

2) Remember that syndicates, the mob, etc. come down to the decision of one person. It's not a fragging hivemind (unless... invae mafia? Cool idea...) so really, the decision to leave an area, kill the people causing trouble, etc, is going to be down to one person. So the question is, how much gross does he lose leaving versus how much net does he gain staying? Sometimes, these are factors of emotion and sentiment more than they are money.

[Kagetenshi]

[ascendance]

Simple. Make the party wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and thus, acquiring more money through looting meaningless.

Think of it as the transition from Season 4 to Season 5 in Angel. The characters went from the barely-scraping by Angel Investigations to heads of a major multinational corporation (of evil). In Shadowrun, characters could become full-time employees of a corporation, or a government, or whatever. Between Loose Alliances and Dragons of the Sixth World, I'm sure you can find an appropriate patron for the party, which keeps them in strippers and blow.

Finding better cyberware and magic becomes more a matter of doing the appropriate favors, and finding the right people. By the time you want to roll your campaign over, the street sammies are going to be out of essence anyway (and hence paying vast amounts of nuyen for incremental gains thru Delta-ware), and the real limiter on character development will be Karma.

[nezumi]

You are joking though, right? Right?