[X] My Assistant

[Shinobi Killfist]

As for looting well as long as it doesn't interfere in the contract its cool IMO. Actually not looting is a bad sign IMO. Pro's look out for oportunities to make cash as long as it wont interfere with there contract.

Now taken to a ridiculous level there can be problems you shouldn't be dragging a sack of loot behind you unless its filled with something absurdley valuable. There comes a point in a carreer where a guns value of 150 nuyen isn't worth the effort to lug it around.

[Geekkake]

I don't have anything against looting per se, don't get me wrong. I encourage my players to loot, because running in my continuum results in a lot of nuyen sinks. However, I object, from a professional criminal standpoint, to rummaging through blood-soaked corpses in the middle of a newly-created abattoir while one of the team is puking and and another one is hastily muttering an Act of Contrition. For a fucking commlink. Then the sirens start, and your putting gore-spattered handguns in a sack.

No, sir, I don't like it.

[Xenith]

Generally, I tend to give out an average of about 3 runs a gametime month, with varying degrees of risk. Much of it is even random as I just wing the whole thing. I tend to write down a general scream sheet, stat blocks for NPCs, and a layout. I level onto the PCs a problem without thought as to how possible or impossible it might be and throw it at them. Its surprisingly entertaining.

Pay is simply on par with how bad they want it, risks involved (that they know of), difficulty and so on. So far it keeps surprisingly close to Serbitars guide (I've never read that section til now.)

Looting is allowed, but the hard part is the fence. First they have to know one in the first place. Then they might have trouble fencing certain items... misc objects(Jewlery, etc) and cheap weapons/armor net you almost nothing (about 20%). Real useful gear gets you about 30% to 50%, but its also useful for the team (never can have enough gadgets.) And easily ID'd gear is insanely hard to fence. You have to sell it for almost free (10%).

Plus its not a good idea to loot if the job needs to be done quietly. Theft opens up larger risks.

[Crusher Bob]

Here's what I said last time about SR4 run payments:

[Samaels Ghost]

But why be a runner if you're scraping by? If you go through so much trouble to change you identity, disapear from where ever you came from and then , what, live on the streets? If your job involved people shooting at you EVERY time you went to work would you keep doing it if it only paid enough to get you a low rent crap-apartment and a little dough on the side? It has to be lucrative or else no one would want to do it! Only crazies that need to shoot people on a regular basis would want to.

[Nim]

[Samaels Ghost]

Still, if you're a runner then you've ditched your past life. New Fake SIN and maybe a little cosmetics and you're good to go. New life, no worries. Something crops up and you do it again.

[imperialus]

[Samaels Ghost]

Wow, imperialus, that was EXACTLY the type of description I was looking for! Thanks :D

[eidolon]

Haven't read the post (I know, terrible person) but I find that the easiest way to pay runners in a manner that keeps the game going but without them being able to "retire" (and therefore only end up running because you're playing a game) is to figure up what their lifestyle costs are, and look at the number of "runs" you intend to send them on throughout a given month in game. Once you have that, it's a good baseline for figuring out what to pay them. You want them to be able to make rent (unless they screw up ;)) and have some money left over.

The "money left over" depends on the style of game you're running. Want them to have to save for stuff? Pay them lifestyle plus a little. Want them to be able to upgrade every run? Pay them lifestyle plus a lot.

Yeah, I know, not very scientific. But it has worked for me.

[Samaels Ghost]

eidolon, that's actually not that bad depending on what those upgrades are.... :cyber:

[imperialus]

[imperialus]

One other thing you could do to relieve them of some of their cash would be to suggest that they look at some "matinance costs" involved with being a live runner rather than a dead or arrested one. This may include ditching their SIN's after every run and getting new ones, replaceing their comlinks every couple of months, moving just as frequently and all maner of other little things that come up when you commit crimes for a living.

[ornot]

I keep my players from looting unnecesarily by not giving them time to hang about. They also don't tend to walk around with bags marked "swag" so they don't really have the carrying capacity to collect all the equipment their enemy are carrying

At the moment they've not been running long enough to make many enemies, but as they piss off more and more people it'll become increasingly expensive and paranoia inducing just to keep living.

[Serbitar]

I would say the average career time of a runner is 5 years.

Assume that a runner does a run every month. Assume also, that the odds to survive a run are 99%. He then has a 55% Chance to survive 5 years. Assume also that he is getting 20,000 Nuyen per run and is living medium lifestyle (5,000 NYen), He then earns 900,000 Nuyen in this time. Assume that he is only savin 50%, investing the other money in cyberware and other runner related stuff, he is getting 450,000 Nuyen, Enough to retire in the caribbean.
As the chance to survice is 55%, every second runner would make it.

Now some other calcultions:

(Further assumptions: Money earned to med retire: 1,000,000, medium lifestyle already subtracted, additional spendings (50%) not subtracted, earns you permanent medium lifestyle
Money earned to low retire: 400,000, low lifestyle already subtracted, additional spendings (50%) not subtracted, earns you permanent low lifestyle)

Average survivability: 99%
Runner half-life:69 month
Income per run: 20,000
Med retirement career length: 67 month
Chance to med retire: 51% (one in 2)
Low retirement career length: 22 month
Chance to Low retire: 80% (one in 1)

Average survivability: 95%
Runner half-life: 14 month
Income per run: 20,000
Med retirement career length: 67 month
Chance to med retire: 3% (one in 31)
Low retirement career length: 22 month
Chance to Low retire: 32% (one in 3)

Average survivability: 90%
Runner half-life: 7 month
Income per run: 30,000
Med retirement career length: 40 month
Chance to med retire: 1% (one in 68)
Low retirement career length: 14 month
Chance to Low retire: 23% (one in 4)

Average survivability: 95%
Runner half-life: 14 month
Income per run: 10,000
Med retirement career length: 200 month
Chance to med retire: 0.003% (one in 28,000)
Low retirement career length: 50 month
Chance to Low retire: 8% (one in 13)

Note that these statistics are not for punks and other low level folks. The statistic starts when somebody starts to do professional shadowruns. The surviability and payed money for low level stuff shold be much lower, as there are much more people who are desperate enough to do it. So the folks who are shadowrunners (s created from the standard rules) already went through a selection process.

BTW: I do not agree with imperialis explanation. Actors only pay with a bad job, runners pay with their life. The chance to retire (low) should be at least one in ten.

[imperialus]

I agree with your assessment Serbitar, I think the big difference is I was counting street punks and gutter trash into the equation. They are the reason why so many teams don't make it past their first couple of runs.

I think it really comes down to how you view the world and the runner subculture. If you envision a relatively small number of elite shadowteams being hired for the most lucrative of jobs then Serbitar's assessment probably makes more sense.

On the other hand I'm of the opinion that the only way a shadow industry on the scale that is implied by much of the fluff could evolve with people like fixers, professional Johnsons, street docs, shadowclinics and Shadowland ect. is if there was a constant influx of small and medium time teams that get used as "expendable assets". The corps arn't going to care if the teams they hire die as there will always be dozens more waiting for a chance to replace them. The number of truly elite runners should be pretty small but they are powers in their own right. Their survivability would be really good because they have the resources to keep themselves alive, most runners don't have that kind of pull and that's what gets them killed.

As for what draws most people into the runner lifestyle I choose to emphasize the hopelessness of life if you are SINless. Life is cheep in the barrens and there are a lot of people willing to do just about anything if it offers them the slightest chance to escape the streets. This is a society where you can and will kife someone over a pair of shoes or a soybar. I expect that a lot of young kids growing up in the barrens probably hear a lot of romanticized stories about runners hitting it big that they choose to ignore the other 500 runners that died so that Fastjack could make it to where he was. "It won't happen to me" is a powerful motivator especially when combined with starving, desperate twentysomethings. I expect that the corps secretly encourage this since it redirects anger among the more ambitious SINless and lets them feel like they are actually accomplishing something. Without the ability to go on runs a lot of that anger could turn into open rioting or rebellion.

[Dudukain]

That's the thing, cybers are can only have 5.999999999999999999999999 essence of cyberware. EVER. Or they die. whereas mages/adepts can have initiation level 43 billion and still not be done advancing.

[Moon-Hawk]

[spudrocks]

Question: Regarding essence being a limitted factor for high end sammies. Why wouldn't a GM house rule essence can be increase at say one third or one half the rate of a normal stat. Say the sammies have trained their bodies to accept more and more ware overtime. This would keep the players happier knowing there is end point for their character. However it would not make the sammies all powerful.

P.S. This is my first post though I am a longtime reader of the forums.

[X-Kalibur]

Generally because it is not canon at all. There are rules for being "alive" below 0 essence, but it involves crazy magic and surgery that are kept highly secret and the result is a cyber zombie that has so many problems staying "alive" you almost wonder why someone would bother.

[Nim]

The previous response was correct, also, but here's another take on it:

Adept abilities (for instance) have a constant cost. In order to get more and more abilities, the adept has to raise their Magic, and eventually will have to initiate in order to do so. The costs of the abilities don't change, but the total the character is allowed to have goes up.

With cyberware, it works in the opposite way: your maximum essence expenditure is a constant, but the essence cost of the ware goes down as you become wealthy enough to afford higher-grade gear. In the short and medium term, the effect is the same: your capabilities increase.

The problem comes in the extreme long term, because the Awakened character can increase their Magic without bound, but the cybered character with 5.99 essence of delta-grade ware is All Done. Given the costs involved, this isn't likely to be a problem at any power level where the rest of the rules still work...if your game goes to the point where this is a limiting factor, other parts of the rules will have already broken significantly :)

However, if you want to fix it anyway, the consistent approach wouldn't be to let street-sams increase their essence. It would be to introduce gamma-grade 'ware.

[Shadowmeet]

[Nim]

True. Rather than reducing the essence cost for the same effect, you could increase the effect you get for the same essence.

Actually, it occurs to me now that we're talking about this that part of the lack of a ceiling on mage advancement is the SR4 spell system, in which you no longer have to learn a spell at a specific Force. It means that when a magician increases his Magic, all of his spells instantly upgrade. It makes the magician that much less interested in nuyen, and takes away one of his reasons to be out making contacts and looking for opportunities.

For the sam to continue upgrading, he needs to find sources of better and better 'ware. The mage with a Magic rating of 15 and 9 grades of initiation still buys spell formulas from the same corner store where he learned his first Stunbolt.

Possible house rule: go back to learning spells with a specific maximum Force. Don't bother charging more Karma to upgrade them, but do require the learning roll and something (some one) to learn FROM.

[Shadowmeet]

That can be balanced with Insular mages not wanting to share new spells. Maybe make it so spells are not available on the common market.

If you are a wage mage, you might get taught a new spell as part of your yearly bonus, or some such.

In the shadows, you have to track down a teacher, which takes contacts, and nuyen to grease palms.

[Nim]