Fencing Gear, Is car theft profitable? Options

[deek]

With the recent threads on run payouts and loot, as well as the often mentioned phrase, "You might as well just start jacking cars and skip the job that only pays X nuyen", I was curious to how profitable people think car theft is.

Looking at the fencing rules, you have a base 30% asking price for any piece of gear. So that brand new Eurocar, is worth 25,500. But, looking at street costs table on page 303, there are a lot of cost adjustments. The big one (for runners, at least) is -20% item stolen. That then puts the asking price of a stolen Eurocar down to a measely 8,500...and that is BRAND NEW.

If the item is used, that's another -20%, from what I can tell, so how is anyone making money by car jacking a used car?

So, a team of four runners, stealing a brand new Eurocar are what, hoping to get just over 2K a piece? And likely have to wait 6+ hours before the money is in hand? I just don't understand how that would ever make sense to a team...

Thoughts?

[DrZaius]

I had that exact discussion with noonesshowmonkey a few days ago, and we reached a similar conclusion. Now, not having jacked cars, I don't know how many people it takes, so maybe a person could do it on their own, and that would be slightly more profitable. However, I'm pretty sure a Slim-Jim doesn't work in 2070, so there are more barriers than there are today. Who wants to bet that a Eurocar calls the cops when it's alarm goes off? Because I'd lay money on it. Earlier today I suggested that "You might as well steal cars" should be used as an example of meta-game thinking based solely on looking in the book, and not logically what it would require in the real world.

[Moon-Hawk]

'Cause they can steal more than one car. If a cheap GM is only giving them 5k for a run, once per month for an extremely difficult/risky mission, then they can do better by stealing 3 cars per month. If stealing those cars is cheaper, easier, and safer than the run, then they'd probably do that.

Of course, if the same group is getting paid for a 5k run once per week instead of once per month, suddenly they have to steal 3 cars per week and maybe that rate is pushing the boundaries of getting noticed.

If the team only runs once every month or two but get paid 25k each, then why are they going to waste their time jacking stupid cars? They're comfortable in their mid/high lifestyle and don't want to bother.

It's fine to have cheap runs if you're doing a low-level campaign, but if your payouts are small you should probably be running more often, else the life of the car jacker becomes tempting.

[kzt]

My understanding is that you tend to get a few hundred per car if you just turn it over to someone. More if you get more deeply involved. It's expensive to get papers and crap for the new title and someone has to fund that part, as you can't make money for long selling cars that get you customers arrested.

But you can steal 4 or more a day. So you are making a grand or more a day.

You can make big bucks running a chop shop, but that involves good contacts and payoffs to many people.

[Moon-Hawk]

And it's worth saying that odds are pretty low that your group of players will actually start up a chop-shop car-theft ring. Because it's not fun, but even if they don't actually do it, if they're sitting there whining that they'd be better off stealing cars, then there's a serious disconnect between what the players and GM are expecting from the game and that's a bad thing. And it's also worth saying that it's not necessarily the case that the players are wrong about what kind of game they'd like to play. ;-)

[raverbane]

I had a possession tradition mage that would used spirits to steal cars if it was convenient during a run. Helps cover the high cost of spirit binding...

[kzt]

Vehicle mask doesn't hurt either....

[Riley37]

Why not go on a shadowrun when you get an offer, perhaps once a month, and then ALSO steal cars on the other 27+ days of the month?

or hold a legit paying job under your fake SIN - and some corps issue SINS, so you can use an Ares SIN while working at Weapons World - and take vacation/sick days for your occasional runs?

My own PC is in a fast-moving campaign, and corp jobs aren't what keep him busy, it's the side plots, eg Contact-based interactions, following up on discovery of invae in his hometown, and other things that he really can't afford to put off for later.

[Moon-Hawk]

[kzt]

Sounds like a good idea to me.

[Alphastream]

It's all up to the GM and the players. If they want a regular car jack session, power to them. In all likelihood, a GM would put the stop on it just like the real world puts a stop on it. Stealing cars every day will start showing cops a pattern. They will set up surveillance and infiltrate whoever is being sold the cars and before you know it there will be a massive sting to stop the city x car jacking spree.

Good players will just have a conversation with their GM, and the other way around as well. Great players don't even need the conversation. I judged an SR Mission the other day, and a coyote adept decided to steal a car. With face skills and magical illusions he picked up a car at a hotel valet. The technomancer changed the records. I figured the worth of the car at 15,000:nuyen:, way more than the run was paying (though I agree, the final price they would get would be much lower). At the end of the run, I asked "what do you want to do with the car?". His answer: "Coyote knows a good prank must end well." He asked his fixer to decorate the car up with wild pimp style (as I liked the idea, I said the fixer had some guys learning the trade, and they did a low cost version for free). The face then drops off the car at the parking garage and checks it in with the Technomancer's help. All a great prank and no value to the team.

I thought it was a really mature move by the player, and it was tons of fun for everyone involved. (For example, the fixer was Mexican, and I had the fixer set up a prank of his own. Anytime the team touched a car control, the radio came on, tuned to the mariachi station. We had a lot of fun with that.)

[deek]

I think my "other" point got missed in all this. Looking at that table, a STOLEN and USED car is a 40% reduction, to the base 30% asking price, for a total of -10%!!!

Going just by that table, it doesn't appear possible to sell any gear that is both used and stolen, just by the nature of the modifiers...

[NightRain]

[deek]

Good interpretation...I think I will use that, then!

[raggedhalo]

I tend to do it as base cost multiplied by each factor:

So initial value x0.3 (resale) x0.8 (stolen) x0.8 (used)

That makes the 25500 Eurocar's value to a carjacker about 5k (4,896), which seems OK to me. So jacking one car is worth about a fifth of the value of a low-end shadowrun.

[FriendoftheDork]