Mo' Money Mo' Problems, What's are realistic rewards? Options

[Cripplemronion]

Perhaps I just missed this in the rulebook, but I was wondering how all of you decided what rewards to give your players at the conclusion of a successful run. I'm mostly thinking in terms of material wealth, but I'm open to anything. How do you choose how much to pay?

[Lagomorph]

I try and pay 5k+ per person per run. Runners aren't just mooks, they're supposed to be skilled professionals (even if they don't act like it).

[Ophis]

It is up to you completely, but for a skilled team with a good rep in my games you get 5K-30K each per run depending on skill and rep levels, and the risk of the run. I try and think how much the Johnson stands to make on the run (or whoever he is working for) and pay about 10% ie a prototype that will allow a corp to make a million (or just save that much) is worth about 100K.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Konsaki]

You actually pay your runners? Damn... And here I was sending my runners out on suicide missions, expecting them to steal everything that wasnt bolted to the floor to pay for their squatter lifestyles. :D

[sunnyside]

As a side note I also vary the pay based on other things.

For example my Johnsons often have secondary goals that can get bonuses (extract the employee primarily, but certain files and a prototype would be nice), and often offer bonuses based on whether things stay stealthy or whether the runners do stuff that could bring trouble back home/get on the evening news. Maybe a bonus if the person they're extracting comes out unharmed as opposed to barely alive.

This makes sense from a realism point of view as if they don't try stuff like that into bonuses you either get runners not playing things your way or you have to try and dock their pay after the fact (not wise).

From a gameplay point of view I like that there are degrees of success.

For some examples of "cannon" payscales check out the free SR missions pdfs over on fanpro's website.

[Moon-Hawk]

[FrankTrollman]

In general, missions should offer sufficient monetary incentive that the players wouldn't be better off running around town triangle buttoning cars.

With resold equipment selling for approximately 30% of market value to fences (assuming that they have contacts and social skills - more like 10% or even 1% if they don't), that means that an evening's run should take in more than 6 grand. More experienced runners should expect more of course, but runs that net less than that had better be soy milk runs where there is less danger than jacking cars at 5 in the morning.

---

That being said, here are some real-life Shadowrun takes:

• Being a security contractor in Iraq nets you $20,000 a month if you get shot at.
  
• Capturing murderer Brian Nichols nets you $40,000.
  
• Rescuing a kidnapped girl nets you $250,000.
  
• Rescuing a kidnapped girl who is really cute, or politically important nets you $2,500,000.
  
• "Misplacing" a pallet of reconstruction money in Iraq nets you $100,000,000.

-Frank

[cetiah]

[lunchbox311]

[WearzManySkins]

[deek]

Yeah, 5,000 per runner is about what I end up paying. But those are for "general" jobs...and if a runner does 2-3 a month, they can maintain a low to middle lifestyle and have a little extra cash to spare.

Granted, I run a more karma-driven game, as I have upped the karma awards greatly. Most of the players don't have any super equipment or cyber...honestly, no one has purchased any cyber since chargen, but they also haven't really wanted to quite yet.

I throw in a "big" job from time to time, where they may make 10,000 to 30,000 per runner, but those are few and far between. And if there is equipment that they really are wanting to get, then they will look for it and I will build a mission for that...

[Konsaki]

Being found out that you were the one to kidnap the really cute girl in the first place - Priceless :grinbig:

[Moon-Hawk]

Let's put it this way. If the mission is to rescue some rich Johnson's daughter and, after rescuing her, they start calculating what they could get for fencing her betaware, talking to the organleggers, and the ghouls relative to what they're being paid for the run, they're probably not being paid enough. ;-)

[lunchbox311]

[Kyoto Kid]

[Sterling]

This is a rough one. It's changed in my campaign due to the fact costs seem to have dropped a little bit.

But the first rule of thumb is try to see what they're spending in terms of legwork. A problem may arise in that the Johnson's offer (say 3k a head, 500 up front) won't reflect the costs of doing business. If a rigger suicides a drone during the run, they might not break even (but new drone prices are so much better than before).

One way to adjust it is to offer other things to help beef up the payout. Paydata (important information that isn't related to the run but worth money), items, vehicles, drones, weapons.. they all can be fenced. If you realize you then went overboard and everyone's carrying a duffel bag full of pricey items to fence, then remember items to be fenced go for (base) 30% of their price. The modifiers and rules are found on page 303.

I usually try to offer midlevel runners 3 to 5k a head, minimum. The reason I have 3k as my minimum is that's the base fence value of a Honda Spirit. If your runners can make more money stealing cars than they would earn on a run, you need to adjust your minimums. Larger, more complex runs offer more. At the moment I'm running a metaplot that the ghoul population of Seattle is increasing, which meant ghouls were having to venture into more populated places and were attacking people in greater numbers and with alarming frequency. For a while the governement was offering bounties to help curb the attacks that were occurring all over.

Edit: I love the phrase 'triangle buttoning cars'.

I started this post when there were no replies, but my two year old son got fussy so I abandoned it, and when I returned, proofread, and hit post, I discovered many of my points were already made.

I am going to offer my team a moral choice in an upcoming session, sell an ancient artifact to a corporation, or destroy it. I was particularly proud of the Johnson's offer..

"I work for a large, very influential family. They have expressed particular interest in this item. The family's name? Nuyen, they're relatively well known. There are hundreds of thousands of them interested in acquiring this item."

[Lagomorph]

Oh, I actually have a really interesting idea that I'm planning to pay my runners with next time.

Imagine this scenario:

Johnson has two jobs that need to be completed, one that involves an extraction of some person or object, and a second one where you only need to out or deny another corp of some object, which may be useful to the runners.

So, for payment of hiring the runners to run the extraction job, you give them the data (collected from a previous and different shadowrunning group), on this new tech. If the runners use it, you've denied the enemy corp from using it, if the runners sell it, you've outed the tech before the enemy corp could get proper rights meaning you can release your own version and get the lions share of profits.

It gets the runners interested in the item, usable tech, experemental tech, or new weapon systems. And if they sell it, they would get a worthy compensation. And for the johnson, you nail two runs with one team, for not paying them anything.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Sterling]

[mfb]

something to consider: it actually doesn't matter what you pay the runners for a job. all that matters is how much the runners end up having. if a Johnson pays the runners 10k for a job, but during the run they end up acquiring a piece of gear worth 100k, then they have received 110k for that job. similarly, if they get paid 10k but 15k worth of their gear gets broken or expended during the run, then they received -5k for that job.

[Lagomorph]

[FrankTrollman]

If runs are going to seem realistic, they should have payments in-line with the benefits your employers expect to get out of them. On the other hand, you should only expect your players to take those jobs that seem like a good deal as far as labor and risk. This means that many covert ops won't get done because the payment that can be offered simply doesn't hit the cash level that someone would want to actually do those tasks.

And that's fine. Actually having low hanging fruit that "just doesn't seem worth it" sitting on the table for weeks at a time makes the whole thing feel a bit more believable.

---

From the Johnson's perspective:

Any amount of money that goes into the Black Ops department can be invested in Haitian knock-off factories to fabricate look-alike dolls of Tickle-Me-Tlaloc to be sold on the down-low to overworked moms looking for a cumpleaños present for their kid. These things are cheap to make since they are made with reanimated labor in the Carribean League, and selling them for 20% the price of a "real" Tickle-Me-Tlaloc ensures a good throughput. Every yen that your black ops department throws at that hole is going to rain 2 yen back on you by the end of the year and there's basically fuck all that Aztechnology or anyone else can do about it so long as you don't overshoot yourself and make enough TMT replicas to cut into the overall demand and give Aztechnology a case in front of the Corporate Court.

Further, any amount of money that goes into the Black Ops department can be invested in an armed resource extraction caravan to the Congo, where it will spend a few weeks grabbing stuff that isn't nailed down and then pull it out to Cape Town or the Lagos Necropolis. Even with the bribes you have to toss to DeBeers-UO or the Ghoul kingdom you're still walking away with millions of yen worth of raw materials if your team walks away at all. With barely a 20% chance of never seeing your investment again, you're probably looking at doubling your money in a month.

So if you're going to hire some no-name Shadowrunner team for something, you'd better be looking at a monstrous return, because hair-dyed spazzes in Seattle and Hong Kong are unreliable.

In part this can be mitigated with the Johnson strategy of payment upon completion. That is, if you don't pay Shadowrunner groups who fail in their missions, then the only thing you've lost is time and opportunity - which actually equates to quite a lot of money, but not as much as if you'd also given them credits out of your bank account.

But you're still looking at a turnover of perhaps 10 times your total investment or you're just going to keep looking - because there are much lower risk ways to spend black ops funds than to hand over money and information to goons from the Longbeach Sacrifice Zone hoping that they'll steal stuff you want and then give it to you.

So the player characters are looking at splitting 10% of the total mission take with the Fixer, the information broker, the Johnson's salary, and the Johnson's hooker. And if the mission is destructive in nature, remember that if Shiawase is doing something that will impact Ares' market share that it will also impact the market share of Aztecnology and Saeder Krupp - which means that Ares is probably only going to be able to claim a benefit of 20% or less of the increased available market share from sabotaging Shiawase.

Still, while that sounds bad (and percentage wise it is - blowing up a factory is probably netting the runner team less than 1% of the lost production in raw monetary payment), remember that the numbers involved in corporate movements are really stupid big. In 1996, for example, the Ursus factory complex got the Polish government to write off 193 million dollars of its debt. A Shadowrun that increased or decreased the writeoff by just 10% would leave 193,000 to pay the Shadowrunners who did it - that's reasonable cash to a Shadowrunner team.

-Frank

[knasser]

Don't neglect the frequency of jobs. If you find you've overpaid the players, then maybe they have to live off it for a couple of months. If you want to get them more money, maybe they get a call a week after their last job. Use this to even things out in a realistic manner, if you need to.

[HappyDaze]

That last point is key. No one risks his ass 24/7 and expects to just 'get by' on the money. Make a big haul and live off of it for several months. Really big jobs might let you hold out for a year, but not if you're trying to build towards retirement. I don't usually have a team pull more than a half-dozen jobs in a year, and often less than half of that.