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[Spike]

Lets say Ares, big bad gun corporation that they are, get's hit by a bunch of Shadowrunners working for Fuchi (or whomever) who steal a prototype wizbang, which then will show up on the market under Fuchi's brand name.

Some traditions of play have the shadowrunners ducking and hiding for all they are worth until the heat blows over and Ares forgets about them, or at least forgets for the moment. Some Traditions also hold that Ares is gonna launch retalitory runs agains Fuchi in some sort of low intensity Shadow War. I mention this because these themes crop up again and again in fiction about the setting.

Revenge generates no profits, only losses.

Lets say our intrepid Runners have just busted out of an Ares facility with the prototype in tow. Sure Ares is gonna send goon squads after the prototype. They'll keep trying to recover it from the runners all the way up to the point where the runners hand it over to the Johnson. After that? They focus on the Johnson, then on the Fuchi facility where it's being reverse engineered... all the way until they realize that getting it back is costing more, and less likely to net them profit. That is how corporations think. They aren't going to risk assets ( goons) in a firefight with runners who don't have anything.

Sure: Sgt Goon, the leader of the Goonsquad might want to test his boys against some candyass Runners. Sure, Executive Meatpuppet, in charge of R&D, is upset that his toy got lost. But more likely than not, each of them values his job more than he values the hollow thrill of kicking at rats. Meatpuppet is probably more interested in damage control than revenge anyway. I mean, he just lost the billion nuyen widget after all.

Likewise, Ares isn't going to put Fuchi on a 'hit list'. Sure, they'll keep it in mind for next time, but revenge? Hurting Fuchi doesn't help the bottom line. Not by itself. No, they'll only hurt Fuchi if they can make some money from the deal. Steal a prototype project from THEM, or blow up the factory that produces the new Wizbang so their wizbang hits the market first.

There is only one measure of success in business, the almighty bottom line.

[Kyoto Kid]

...this seems kind of an offshoot of the Corp War thread.

I agree. I mentioned in the other thread that unless it is "cost effective" to pull a job against the competitor (as you say steal one of their prototypes or disrupt production to get yours out first) full blown retaliation, especially on the AAA level hurts everyone including the consumer. Now with regards to small - mid size companies not "affiliated" with a Mega, that could be different.

[kzt]

Unless Ares has sources inside Fuchi, the only link they have is the runners. So they will keep after them. They want the Johnson and the Johnson's employer. Which the runners or the fixer (which the runners can lead to) can give them. Nobody else can. So they won't stop chasing the runners until they get a better target.

So low profile crimes that don't summon security and don't leave a trail of evidence is the way to go. If they don't have any clues, they can't chase you. Say you did the job for 15K. If you cost a company a hundred million bucks and they know you name, can they justify spending a million going after you? Sure they can.

Ares would like to get the Johnson. Oh, they really, really would. But it works almost as well if they have you publicly exterminated as a deterrent to the next group of sinless street scum that are going to attack them.

Would you go after a team of runners for 100K per, when the file included pictures, addresses, aliases and contact? Why wouldn't all your loyalty 1 contacts try to collect?

[FrankTrollman]

Pretty much. The only caveats I would place on that is that a corporation's reputation is a commodity which has value, and that a corporation maintains its status not just through market penetration but also through market share. This means that if a corporation fears that it has been made to "look weak" it is generally willing to lash out and victimize someone in order to "look strong" and salvage their reputation. It also means that a corporation is willing to take a loss now in order to freeze a competitor out of the market. Standard Oil would slash prices to below cost in order to out compete a rival coming into their area - and they were not wrong to do that.

So if Corporation A hires shadowrunners to take the new lipstick formula from Corp B and sabotage the production facilities, then Corp B might very well send ninjas to go mess up the shadowrunners or the new lipstick factory of Corp A. But it would never be a guaranteed thing. Indeed, since the Shadowrunners are deniable assets and probably don't know who they are working for the security chiefs of Corp B would more than likely be willing to have a drink with the shadowrunners in a neutral location for pure socialization (although if they attempted to get the runners to divulge the security weaknesses of their own facility I would not be shocked).

Indeed, while Corp B would love to get their product back, would love to take back the market share, and would love for Corp A to just stop existing altogether, the fact remains that as long as Corp A and Corp B are both making lipstick, they have a lot of interests in common. They want the raw materials of such products to be as cheap as possible. They want to encourage cultural trends which involve wearing more lipstick (both in amount and in variety). They want to keep wages and import tariffs down. Blah blah blah. So while they compete in the narrow world of lipstick design, in the wider context they are natural allies on virtually every point. Heck, they'd probably be willing to go halvies to stop a new lipstick firm from getting their product into StufferShacks.

Once the run is over, your target and your employer are no longer your enemy or your ally. They are just rational actors in a very complex game. And while they very well might decide to try to kill you to satisfy some other objective, there's no reason a priori to assume that they wouldn't just shrug and move on.

-Frank

[Kyoto Kid]

[Spike]

[Mercer]

I agree that its all cost/benefit analysis, but sometimes cost/benefit analysis isn't as straight forward as it seems. The widget might be worth X amount of nuyen (either in R&D costs to develop, or in projected profits, money you've already spent or money you intend to make), but losing the widget might cost you more than just the widget. Corporations worry about "face" because in corporate terms, that's synonymous with money. A corporation's worth is measured by the fraction of a nuyen to the fraction of a second, the tiniest reduction in its share price can easily equal hundreds of millions of nuyen.

Plus, Ares has an incentive to punish anyone who steals from them. If every time you steal 1 million nuyen from Ares they hit back costing you 2 million, you're going to be less likely to steal from Ares in the future (or more likely to put the blame on someone else when you do it). Ares wants the cost/benefit analysis to work in its favor; if there's no disincentive for people to rob you, a lot of people are going to be robbing you.

I tend to stay away from megacorporate violence in my games. Ares and Fuchi (to pick two names out of a hat) like to play nice with one another and be able to say to the Corporate Court, "Hey look, we like each other," because everybody knows megacorporate war is bad for business. And then both megacorps have A and B level corporations who's whole job it is to rip the hell out of the other guy's A and B level corps. Those are the corporations that are hiring runners and hitting the other guys R&D installations, and when that starts to get out of hand Ares or Fuchi steps in and restores the peace.

[HappyDaze]

[HappyDaze]

[Spike]

[FriendoftheDork]

Several good points here, but I generally agree with the OP. If the game comes about revenge then the Runners are screwed after their first few jobs. Sooner or later they WILL leave clues to who's responsible, and if spent enough resources at they WILL get beaten.

Thus Corps writing off their losses instead of trying to scare off everyone from running against them not only makes sense, it makes the game playable.

[kzt]

[Mercer]

[martindv]

There are a ton of fan sites with quotes from the West Wing, btw. From Wikiquote:

[ Spoiler ]

Bartlet: What's the virtue of the Proportional Response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: I'm sorry?
Bartlet: What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why's it good? They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That's a proportional response. They hit a barracks, so we hit two transmitters.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Yes, that's roughly right.
Bartlet: This is what we do. I mean, this is what we do.
Leo: Yes sir, it's what we do. It's what we've always done.
Bartlet: Well, if it's what we do, if it's what we've always done, don't they know we're doing it? I ask again, what is the virtue of the Proportional Response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: It isn't virtuous, Mr. President. It's all there is, sir.
Bartlet: It's not all there is.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Just what else is there?
Bartlet: The disproportional response. Let the word ring forth, from this time and this place, gentlemen, you kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster! [He bangs the table]
General: Are you suggesting that we carpet-bomb Damascus?
Bartlet: I am suggesting, General, that you, and Admiral Fitzwallace, and Secretary Hutchinson, and the rest of the National Security Team take the next sixty minutes and put together an American response scenario that doesn't make me think we're just docking somebody's damn allowance!

As for the second part, Leo's response is pretty important to the discussion as well.

[ Spoiler ]

Leo: We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.
Bartlet: Well our behaviour has produced some crappy results, in fact I'm not a hundred per cent sure it hasn't induced it.
Leo: What are you talking about?
Bartlet: I'm talking about two hundred and eighty-six American marines in Beirut, I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi-
Leo: And you think ratcheting up the body count's gonna act as a deterrant?
Bartlet: You're damn right I-
Leo: Oh, then you are just as stupid as these guys who think capital punishment is going to be a deterrant for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution, and their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So, my friend, if you want to start using American military strength as the arm of the Lord, you can do that. We're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne! But you better be prepared to kill everyone. And you better start with me, because I will raise up an army against you and I will beat you!
Bartlet: He had a ten day old baby at home.
Leo: I know.
Bartlet: We are doing nothing.
Leo: We are not doing nothing.
Bartlet: We're destroying-
Leo: Four high-rated military targets!
Bartlet: And this is good?
Leo: Of course it's not good. There is no good. It's what there is! It's how you behave if you're the most powerful nation in the world. It's proportional, it's reasonable, it's responsible, it's merciful! It's not nothing. Four high-rated military targets.
Bartlet: Which they'll rebuild again in six months.
Leo: Then we'll blow 'em up again in six months! We're getting really good at it... It's what our fathers taught us.
Bartlet: Why didn't you say so? Oh, Leo...when I think of all the work you put in to get me to run and all the work you did to get me elected...I could pummel your ass with a baseball bat.

[Mercer]

Thats an excellent resource, martindv, I didn't even think of wikiquote.

Leo does make a good case of the proportional response, which is sort of the whole point of the episode, but that just enforces my point. There has to be some sort of a response, proportional or otherwise. A disproportional response might draw the ire of the Corporate Court, but as Bartlett points out, the proportional response "is the cost of doing business. Its factored in."

Responses, proportional or otherwise, are vengeful. And the cost is factored in.

[martindv]

Yep.

Which is why none of the AAAs go crying to the Corporate Court over every little run, but instead save it for when (say) the head of one AAA manages to royally screw another over a barrel through some very high-level manipulations. Plus having an AI screw the corp at the same time as the trial is going on.

[WeaverMount]

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the concept already but "Tit for Tat" is a very optimized strategy for dealing with this situation. Basically, you try to cooperate and if you are betrayed you strike back exactly as hard and no harder. Check the article for why, but, mathematically, you can't really fair better than this. Remember that the mega corps, are vast composites of agents with there own self interest. Small chucks of a Mega Corp may well act irrationally, here you might see revenge. Say you your team does an extraction from an Azzy facility, gunning down much of the on site security. You may well have killed everyone that the Security chief of Tiajuana ever trusted. The team may well suffer the wrath of that individual /at/ Aztechnology. The recourses that NP could get leveled at the players is far from game ending, and still lets you have the human touch of emotional and dramatic events.
At the executive level though. I see the corps as being so huge they ALWAYS play the numbers. And the numbers say Tit for Tat. It's simply the mathematically superior strategy to run if you only care about maximizing your grains in a completive environment.

Wiki: Tit for Tat.

So yes. I see perfectly messaged responses at the Mega Corp level. I see metahuman/personal motivation at lower levels. I think this is playable, fits the fluff, and allows for lots of good story.

[kzt]

[MaxHunter]

Besides, striking back as hard as you got hit and no harder is far from easy. People tend to overemphasize the damage they have taken and minimize what they do to others, it has to do with basic things like whether you can feel it or not, the way your senses are rigged, etc. Thus, rational behaviour is not necessarily the norm, even in large scale organizations. Eventually, somewhere up the line of command there is a human taking decisions, with all the aforementioned "problems".

Cheers,

Max

[Mercer]

This is what I meant when I said that its all cost/benefit analysis, but that cost/benefit analysis is not as straight forward as it seems. In the case of the Mysterious Stolen Widget, you're not just out the money spent to develop it (actual money) and the profits you stand to make (projected money), it also makes you appear vulnerable. This can not only affect your share price (acutal money), it can also make you a target for future runs (projected losses).

There is money in vengeance, whether its a proportional response or not. I'd say how hard you were hit has less to do with how hard you hit back, and much more to do with the negative consequences hitting back entails. Ideally, you want to hit back exactly as hard as you can without getting cracked down upon by the powers that be (whether those are the governments, the AAA's, or the Corporate Court, depending on how big an arena you play in), or you want to hit back exactly as hard as you can so that your target has to suck it up and not escalate the conflict without getting cracked down upon themselves.

Whether a response is proportional or disproportional has less to do with the magnitude of the response and more about what people will accept. This is partially because going back and forth is almost always apples-and-oranges (rarely will the loss of a x-nuyen widget mean you get to hit back for x-nuyen in damages), and because everything is based around what people will accept.

[Critias]

The problem is that if you play it so that, once the hand-off is made, the Shadowrunners never have to worry about an angry megacorp coming down on them...you lose a lot of the game's tension.

Sure, most of the time a corp that just got some widget stolen is going to realize there's no profit in chasing down the half dozen street scum that pulled one over on them. They'll upgrade security instead, tell their boss they're on top of the situation, look at their old records and design notes for Widget X, and get to work on Widget XI. Oh well, the loss of a prototype is just part of the game, and they'll go on about their business.

But -- every once in a while, maybe it doesn't work that neatly. Maybe it was the last fuck up a middle-management type can put on his record, and he knows he's going to get fired in the next couple days so he writes a few last orders to send security after the Shadowrunners. Maybe it's the first time the building's new head of security has been crossed, and he's so ashamed by the black mark on his record he sets out to see to it the 'runners pay. Maybe they're just the unlucky every one-in-a-hundred Shadowrunner team to cross Ares, and Ares has a policy of "making an example" of one percent of the street scum that steal from them (to keep their rep as a bunch of hardasses).

Every once in a while, send a bunch of corporate goons after your players, if for no other reason than to remind them Shadowrunning isn't just a 9 to 5. You don't clock in at a Meet, clock out at a hand-off, and then live a normal, boring, safe, life in between "shifts." The job comes with more dangers than just what you run into while you're actively working.

If it were easy, anyone could do it. As it is, it takes a special kind of paranoid motherfucker to run the shadows.

[FriendoftheDork]

[HappyDaze]

[FriendoftheDork]

[FrankTrollman]

If someone stabbed your sister, would you go back, get a shotgun, and put a hole in his knife?

-Frank