Negotiations: The Meet, How to set that all important price Options

[TinkerGnome]

This is an opinion piece. It's not wrong. It's not right. It's simply a set of suggestions and food for thought along with a way that you can do things if you so choose.

That said, this is a brief guide to how I go about pricing runs and handling the negotiations. The basic steps in the process are:

1. Define the Johnson and his goals
2. Characterise the shadowrunner team
3. Establish the "per run baseline" of the team
4. Determine how the PCs will get the job and any fees involved
5. Decide on the Johnson's total budget
6. Conduct negotiations for a better price (optional)

Define the Johnson

The first step in the process is to define who the Johnson is, who he works for, and any special aspects to his dealings. Some good general questions to ask yourself are:

1. What corporation/group is the Johnson working for?
2. What corporation/group does the Johnson want the PCs to think he is working for (answer may be that he doesn't want them to think anything)?
3. Is the Johnson acting in an official capacity?
4. Does the Johnson intend to doublecross the runners?

Characterize the Shadowrunner Team

There are a number of questions to be asked about the team of shadowrunners your players will be using.

1. Are the runners an established team?
2. Do the runners have a particular reputation?
3. Is it known that the runners are looking for a particular piece of hardware (a glitched availability check, for instance)?
4. Does the team lack any capability that's obviously going to be necessary for the run (most commonly a mage or hacker)?

Establish the Baseline Price

How you actually determine the price for the run is up to you as a GM, but there should probably be a price that the runners consider to be worth their trouble. A fair rule of thumb is to take the average cost of the lifestyles of the team and add 10-25% to that. Alternately, you can just pick a lifestyle (middle works) or other criminal occupation (like car thief) and use that.

Determine How the Team Will Get the Job

The most important part of this step is deciding who pays the finders fees. Depending on the contacts involve, this could be the runners or it could be covered by the Johnson. If the players pay these fees, then you should probably increase the base price you intend to pay for the run to compensate.

The Johnson's Budget

Now comes the fun part. You know what the run is and you know what the lowball price is. Now figure out how much you're going to pay at the very most to the PCs. Be consistent within your campaign, but keep in mind how often your games occur in game time when you establish pricing. If your campaign world is based on the assumption of one run per month, a simple extraction might be worth 10k per runner. If you assume two runs a month, the same job might be worth 7.5k. The important thing is that prices remain relatively consistent for equivalent jobs within your campaign.

If the PCs are obviously going to have to hire on help to get the job done (a needed but missing mage or hacker, for instance), you probably want to include that as an allowance in the pricing.

Conduct Negotiations

The Johnson's initial offer will be a lowball, but not so low as to be insulting. A good rule of thumb is for the Johnson to offer something between the baseline and 2/3 of his maximum price, no more than about 1/3 up front. It's expected that the PCs will try to negotiate a better price and they should win at least some concessions.

Negotiations can be RPed out or rolled. The following is a system which could be used to boost the price the PCs get for their efforts. If the PCs are willing to accept payment in equipment or corp script, they should get a bonus to the roll. At the GM's discretion, equipment values may actually exceed the Johnson's maximum budget if they account for 50% or more of the total payout. Very rare items shouldn't break the maximum budget.

The test itself is an opposed Negotiations (Bargaining) + Charisma test. The following modifiers may apply:

The Johnson's Roll:

[Cang]

:cyber: i like this very much, i really needed something like this for my game.

[Aku]

is there any consideration for who the johnson WANTS the team to think he's working for? for instance, lets say the J REALLY works for Aztech, , on a run againist horizon, but wants the team to think he's with Ares, would he still get the die penelty for paying them with Ares gear?

[mdynna]

Great post, I think this system produces very balanced and believable results. I espeically like the Lifestyle + 10-25%. I think, generally, the PC's should be making just above lifestyle and should have to "save up" for any major equipment upgrades.

[neko128]

[TinkerGnome]

I should clarify it. The die penalty for "Johnson trying to mislead the runners" should only apply if he is trying to do so through the payment. For instance, the Aztechnology J paying off the runners in Ares marked gear or corp script. The other aspects of the Johnson trying to mislead the players is purely related to the roleplay and run itself.

The idea behind the small penalty for the misleading is that the Johnson doesn't hold gear or script in as high a value when it's just going to be used for misleading. He probably aquired the gear at an earlier time and is just going to offload it on some stupid runners either way.

For further reading, I recommend the SR3 Mr Johnson's Little Black Book. It has some interesting thoughts in it on meets, Johnsons, and payment. I haven't finished reading it, myself, but it's interesting.

[Xenith]

Bravo. Very nice. Supremely useful for anyone, I'd say, who wants to GM. 8)

[Clyde]

An excellent treatment, dude. I will take your modifiers into account in my own games.

[Dashifen]

Wonderful. Thanks :)

[emo samurai]

Shouldn't the guy with the highest notoriety be allowed to used his street cred to offset the penalty associated with him?

[mdynna]

No way, I love it the way it is: average Street Cred, highest Notoriety. A good reputation is hard to earn, but a bad one is quick and easy.

It also will cut down on the "I got 50 extra BP from 10 Incompetent Flaws" munchers.

[emo samurai]

Hmm... what if they were incompetent in a field that wouldn't strike most Johnson's as that big? Like, if my mage was incompetent at ritual spellcasting and banishing because he doesn't like to banish spirits and he finds rituals to be limiting? What would the Johnson care? I can understand him being leery of a runner who can't drive or something, but what about something really obscure to him?

[BlackHat]

If its obscure enough that it doesn't matter, it shouldn't be worth build-points (GMs descression). If he thinks those fields are important enough to warrent build point, his Johnsons will probably find htem important as well.

[emo samurai]

How about a 3 street cred to 1 notoriety ratio? If a runner's good enough, a flaw like that will only add to his mystique. Kind of like the Dixie Flatline.

[TinkerGnome]

The GM should exercise some discretion in how Notoriety is aquired. My view on Incompotence is that each skill you take it for should be something that you would have need to use. Also, at some point in your past, you should have suffered for not being able to use that skill or at least have been embarassed because of it. Maybe the mage was on a team with another mage one time and the run would have been a cakewalk if the team could have used ritual sorcery. Because he was incompotent he caused the run to fail.

Anyway, that's a digression. A character with Notoriety is a liability to the team and that's what the Johnson will see. Even if the character has 50 karma, he's still a raging alcoholic who has to hit the bottle in the middle of runs. He gets to add his cred (which is already reduced by Notoriety) to the average, but that doesn't represent the full liability he may prove to be.

[emo samurai]

I see. What if my runner's flaw somehow contributed to perceptions of his awesomeness? Like, if he couldn't drive, he'd summon an air elemental to fly him around at around 7 times the speed everyone in the city's driving at? He'd be famous for that. Or like Dixie Flatline, whose failing heart helped him deck?

[Johnnycache]

[fistandantilus4....]

[Brahm]

[emo samurai]

But the reputation is what we're talking about, not his actual performance. I should say if someone is sort of in an ambiguous space between fame and infamy because of his flaw, and he role-plays that space, then he should get street cred.

[TinkerGnome]

Well, I look at notoriety as something that either comes from a bad incident while shadowrunning (Scorched, SINer) or something that causes a prejudiced reaction for a majority of people (the Poser flaws, Uneducated). Take a look at the list of things under Gaining Notoriety (p 258). Just about every one of those items is something that would make a Johnson wonder about someone's ability to pull off a job or would make him just not want to deal with the runner.

[Shrike30]

It really comes down to balancing them. Sure, the guy's got a couple of black marks, but if he's got a good rep, those marks are just part of his character. You take them into consideration and hire him anyway if he's still going to get you what you need.

If, on the other hand, he's Chris the Berserker Troll Demolitionist whose first three runs include such nifty stunts as getting on the evening news using hand grenades in a crowded hotel stairwell during a fire evacuation, you're looking at black marks without a lot of rep to counteract them. That's when you say "I *do* need someone to distract security so my *other* team of runners can get in... and I know the perfect expendable asset..."

[TinkerGnome]

This is more a case of, "You guys are still running with Chris? When are you going to ditch that chip head and get serious about this biz."

Just like with every test where it applies, the GM can chose not to penalize for notoriety (or just some of it) if it doesn't detract from the job. It really gives a reason to burn cred to get rid of the notoriety points, too.

Take a reasonable case of a notoriety 2 character on a four man team where everyone has enough karma for cred 5. The average cred of the team would be (5+5+5+3=18/4~=4, rounding up). The total modifier from cred and notoriety would be +2 dice. That's still a bonus, but it actually makes notoriety hurt whereas in the current rules it doesn't hurt much or often.

[Shrike30]

The Johnson actually fired Chris. When the team got the call from the Johnson to go out in the field again, Chris didn't get a call, and when he turned up at the meet anyway the Johnson told him to take a walk, and told the rest of the runners they'd better be professionals from here on out. The implication was that Chris wasn't supposed to be involved in the rest of the campaign. The execution was that they went to huge efforts to conceal from Mr J that Chris was still working with them, on the job he'd hired them to do without Chris. Hilarity ensued.

[emo samurai]

What if his habit is something much less crazy than news-making explosions, such as the habit of flying around while invisible? I think that's MUCH more awesome than driving ever was; if anything, that should make his reputation higher.