[X] My Assistant

[JonathanC]

A person can be unfit for corporate employment without being a nutcase or an asshole. I have plenty of friends who are great people, but for various reasons, are basically unemployable in a corporate setting. So we agree there. My point is that a lot of people don't seem to think so...but I digress.

I figure most of the kids who start running with stars in their eyes die messily. A couple survive, either because they're lucky or they're smart enough to do the job right. By the time they figure out that there might be a better way, they're in too deep. Charlie can't join the Ares Firewatch because he fragged them over like 6 times in the past 3 years. Sure, he didn't know it at the time, but they still remember it.

Also, corps don't just hire based on talent. Big dice pools are nice, but how the hell would anybody know about them? It's not like you have a visible character sheet telling everyone how good you are. The closest thing to that in reality is a resume, and nobody believes what they read in those things. They go by interviews. And nobody is going to interview some SINless kid with a chip on his shoulder when they've got an avalanche of good, clean-cut corp kids with verifiable qualifications.

Your street hacker is probably twice as skilled as a corp kid of the same age. But that corp kid has test results going back to kindergarten proving that he's a computer genius, a family that's already working for the corp, and a SIN verifying his identity. Your street hacker is arrogant gutter trash that probably just wants the rob the joint from the inside. Why hire some guy off the street whose work you haven't seen, and who you have no reason to trust, because he has no identifiable roots?

What about hiring runners who Mr. Johnson has worked with? Well, that's even worse. I mean really, if you'd been hiring some guy to commit acts of terrorism so terrible that you don't even want the possibility of association with them for the past 2 years, would you really trust that dude with an access card to your office? Would you want to issue this man, who knows your most terrible secrets, an ID card identifying him as a citizen of your megacorp? Landing a serious corp job based on your running should be extremely rare. More likely, "corporate" runners are just independents with the equivalent of no-bid contracts. They get consistent work, and some side benefits (medical, weapon upgrades, etc.), but they're not part of the family.

Shadowrunners are shadowrunners for the same reason that day laborers are day laborers, and the foreign guy who pumps your gas used to be a college professor in his home country. Those guys on the corner waiting for a truck to take them to pick apples for 12 hours a day don't have anything wrong with them, and they're perfectly employable. Some of them even speak english. But they can't be employed because they're outside of the system, with no easy way to get in.

In SR, there's a way, but you have to eat crap and kiss hoop to even get in on the ground floor. You'll probably be given jobs that are unpleasant, dangerous, humiliating, or some combination of the 3, because you're at the bottom, SINless scum that the corp lifted up. For most people, that's still better than the alternative of starving on the street or shadowrunning.

For shadowrunners, not so much. Really, all you need to motivate you to shadowrun is some self-esteem, low birth, and a marketable skill. These are probably the runners who refuse wetwork, or do mostly "hooding" runs.

Then there are the activists (pro-metahuman rights, environmentalists, volunteer bug hunters, etc.) who shadowrun to make cash for their "real" jobs.

[Kyoto Kid]

...to Perdition with the numeric references. :grinbig:

KK: she is unemployable by a corp in long term because of her background and Dain Bramaged quality. She can still function in the shadows as survival tends to be more based on Intuition (which in her case is above human average) than Logic. She barely has enough skill to use her commlink as a glorified cell phone and performs most of her "job related" transactions with certified credsticks. She also has a Matrix Specialist as a 6 loyalty contact to cover her.

Violet: well, she's seen enough of the corp gig while growing up that she wants no part of it on a permanent basis. Oh, she has no issue with a single specific mission, but tries not maintain any long term relations with a particular corp. Her obsessive and compulsive nature would also be something a corp would not see as an asset.

While not min-maxed, both these characters are very competent at what they do and have a professional attitude towards their work (particularly Vi).

Da Brat is probably the closest to the definition of "Street Scum" That I have. She literally did grow up on and learned the ways of the streets for a good part of her life. She is an opportunist and looks for any advantage to get ahead be it fast talking her way out of a jam, nailing an opponent in a "tender" part of the anatomy, or fleecing an unsuspecting wageslave out of some if his hard earned :nuyen:.

[JonathanC]

Even professional, perfectly affable and otherwise employable SINless are likely viewed as "street scum" by most, and certainly wouldn't be trusted. Shadowrun was made in the 80's, and the megacorp culture is based largely on the way Japanese corporate culture worked back then...employees were lifers. That's why you need armed kidnappers to pull them out. You don't want outsiders, even very talented, charismatic ones, mixing in with your well-oiled machine. They're disruptive, they have their own way of doing things, they just don't fit in.

Shadowrunners run a huge gamut, but plenty of them are fairly average people in terms of personality. They're just in a desperate situation. SR is presented as being noirish in many cases, and noir protagonists are regular people caught up in a storm that's manipulated by the corrupt and powerful.

At least, that's how I like to play. I suppose a game about psychotic lunatics that are always 2 seconds from betraying one another to organleggers and rape gangs might be fun. To somebody else.

I'm pretty sure you could take almost any character background and have them become a shadowrunner.

[ElFenrir]

[Ravor]

Something that I think you are forgetting is that in the Sixth World the average professional dicepool is only 6-8, so the various builds that appear on these boards will simply blow away any of the competation, and a corp would be stupid not to welcome a fairly adjusted runner into the fold. (Note that there is a difference between welcoming someone and trusting them, I expect that certain safeguards would be put into place.) Also remember that the society in the Sixth World isn't even close to being the same as today's, illegal to-the-death-bloodsports are a huge hit with the masses, people log onto a livefeed just to watch some Johnson getting geeked by a runner team, and wageslaves have to buy themselves out of employment if they want to go work for another company.


Perhaps not surprisingly I also disagree with the idea that a corp wouldn't hire based off of a Johnson's reviews, in fact I imagine that the real purpose behind some runs is to hit the corp's own building as an "interview" of sorts. Remember that everything that you've said about Runners can also be said about modern day spooks. As for not being hired because you hit the corp in the past, true, but unless you assume that the corps are willing to accept being hit by runs then the entire setting falls to pieces and "Shadowrunners" can no longer be the idependant agents that that are assumed to be.


I don't really see how your day-laborer example applies, the illegals waiting at street corners are at best comparable in ability to the legal workforce, I'm talking about the char-builds that people post on the boards that are simply off the charts in talent. (Remember I'm the one who is always pushing for lower dicepools and broader characters in Fourth Edition.)


And it only gets worse when you start talking about the Awakened, Mages have literally won life's lottery just by virtue of being born, and the corps really can't afford to be nearly as selective as they can with their mundane employees.

[Ravor]

Fragging double-post. :cyber:

[JonathanC]

[Ravor]

I'm not quite sure where to begin, so I guess I'll just start rambling. :cyber:


I have several disagreements with your arguments, first let's assume for a moment that I agree that for every street-scum Runner with massive dicepools there is a corp citizen with similair dicepools waiting to be employed. So what? My point is that if 6-8 is the average, then there won't be enough people at the upper end of the ability curve for the corps to be able to afford to be as selective as you assume.

Besides, provided that you have the resources it is actually cheaper to own and raise cattle for your meat and dairy products then it is to buy meat and milk at the store. The fact that you tend to get a better quality product is a rather heafty bonus as well. The same logic should also apply for corp black-op teams.

As for life not being a meritocracy, I never said it was, of course being a member of the corp family is going to be a factor that is weighed when deciding who is going to be hired or not, but it is not going to be the only one, and someone with massive dicepools and a history of getting the job done is going to be hired provided that you assume that people at the upper end of the ability curve aren't a dime-a-dozen.

Concerning your clerk/lawyer example, although you neglected to mention what country she was a lawyer in, I somehow doubt that she was skilled enough to practice law in America considering that a quick google search led me to a wiki entry about becoming licensed to practive law in America and there are ways for a lawyer to do so which does not require attending an American Law School. If I can learn this in a matter of a few mouse clicks then surely a skilled and talented lawyer could have learnt of it had she put forth effort to escape her "crappy menial job", even before the avent of the internet.

And an issue that you seem to be forgetting is that simsense indocturnation is a fact in the Sixth World, corps don't need to make sure they snatch up Awakened and other talented people as children, several hours/days/weeks hooked up to a computer is almost as good. But then again you are also assuming that having a previous corp history that could in theory be traced is a good thing when dealing with corp black-op teams or that especially with less and less of a Mage Population as time goes on that the corps could even afford to be picky enough to require brainwashing in the first place assuming that the Mage was loyal and that proper safeguards were in place.

*Edit 1.1*

I almost forgot, but yeah, I'd call you a cynic, today's media isn't real, the masses know that real people aren't being seriously hurt and killed on those shows, in the Sixth World, the fact that real people are being killed for entainment is what excites the masses and generates ratings.

Well, with the exception of the beheading videos, but I don't know anyone who cheered and wanted to see more of those.

[JonathanC]

If your Shadowrun is a shiny happy world where any talented person, regardless of background, can succeed if only their dice pool is large enough, then by all means, have fun with that.

Realistically though, how the hell do you tell the difference between a competent, corp-raised employee and some random street person who has a larger dice pool if both of them succeed? Does the Shadowrunner succeed with style? And if so, isn't that exactly the kind of maverick, non-team player attitude that you'd want to avoid in a full-time, true corporate employee?

You basically are arguing that life is a meritocracy, and any talented, reasonably well-adjusted SINless will of course be recognized for their talents and offered a job commeasurate with their worth.

The woman in the example I cited was Chinese, and was, I believe, in non-criminal law. Her english was serviceable, but she has a noticeable accent. Regardless of her competence as a lawyer (which I never had the occasion to test), I doubt she'd have gotten a job in her field in this country without losing the accent. If she was an ork, it'd be even less likely. :)

Indoctrination of adults can't possibly be as effective as indoctrination of children. Plus, if you've got these fabulously talented, independent people, why would they consent to being brainwashed? The only reason corp people don't complain is that they don't know better; they've been raised in total propaganda submersion for their whole lives. An adult who grew up independent is going to be asking a lot more questions.

And you still haven't addressed the morale effect on the regular workforce. How does it look when you've replaced the good, loyal salarymen who have given their lives and families to you with some long-haired hippy who supposedly has a larger "dice pool"? It's one thing to know that your company hires outside talent for ops that are ridiculously dangerous and prone to failure and/or casualties; it's another to be told that one of these jokers is your new boss.

As for the media not being real...that guy really did get beheaded. Britney Spears really does have serious personal problems, and we're all having a good laugh watching a human being basically self-destruct in public. We really do have TV shows where people eat raw animal genitals for money. We really do have snuff films, though they aren't mainstream. It's a short, dystopian walk from where we are right now to where Shadowrun is, media-wise. We already have a media culture with absolutely no sense of responsibility. We make celebrities out of serial killers and basically ignore the victims, unless of course they lived, in which case it's even better, since they can give us the lurid details of what they suffered. Our cop shows are as much about dissecting corpses and marvelling at the way their killer murdered them as they are about actual cops.

We're already obsessed with watching real people suffer, and watching fake people die. We're not so different from a society of people who watch real people suffer and die. We already watch dispassionately as people are lynched, murdered, tortured, etc. in other countries.

[Kyoto Kid]

[Glyph]

Not all SINless runners have to be people from the Barrens with skills, but no quantifiable record of them. A lot of runners can be ex-corporate, too.

The megacorporations are not shiny, happy places to live and work. They are the bad guys who are supposed to make the morally ambiguous runners seem like good guys in comparison. And you don't need the tired old "the corporation is trying to kill me" thing, either. It's more realistic to have the runner be like the old former company man or wage mage archetypes - people who had to leave when they realized just how bad their company was. They don't have to be idealistic, or wronged in some way, though. They can be burned-out black ops people tossed to the curb to deal with the post traumatic stress on their own, or simply be on the wrong side of a hostile takeover.

[Ravor]

JonathanC

I'd be more then happy to compare the darkness of my Sixth World against anyone elses, and yes, SINless or not if a corp manages to find someone that is both well-adjusted and boasts the massive dicepools that I've railed against in other threads then that person will be hired in a heartbeat provided that there isn't some deal breaker hidden somewhere in the package. My entire point is that people who have said massive dicepools are almost as rare as hen's teeth according to the tables and examples we are given in the books so it should be largely be a moot point.

Still you ask how someone could tell the difference between a corp baby and street scum in my games, well I guess the answer would be that a wageslave and a razorboy simply aren't going to have the same skillsets in the first place. Besides neither is very likely at all to suceed.


Bob SINless isn't going to suceed in part because he was never given the tools to even be able to suceed in the first place. The best that he can hope for is to eek out a meager existance in the barrens and hopefully find protection by joining a gang and if he's lucky he'll be able to afford some secondhand cyber to get just enough of an edge to live alittle while longer.


Susan SINner isn't much better off, as a wageslave she belongs heart, body, and soul to her parent corp, she had to pay for the mandatory datajack and other equipment/ training necessary for her job, and the terms of her loan are such that she can never pay them off on her salary. Hell, she is swimming in debt as the corp uses quasi-legal simsense to push neverending lines of worthless junk for her to max out her corp issued credit on. If she is lucky she'll be pretty enough that her boss will be able to shelter her from having to start selling organs to cover her debts, at least until he tires of using and abusing her or he finnally drowns in his sea of debts. And to top it all off, she couldn't even quit her job even if she wanted to, after all there is just no way that she could afford to buy out of her employment contract.

The simple fact is that in the Sixth World unless you have something that makes you stand a head and shoulders above the crowd then you are damned no matter whether you have a SIN or not, the massive world-class dicepools that allows you to regularly pull off the nearly impossible is one such way to get noticed, winning life's lottery by being born Awakened with is another and life for these rare people isn't nearly as bleak as it is for the masses.

As for brainwashing the new hire, you are assuming that he is given a choice in the matter as opposed to being gassed one night and hauled away for "job training and placement" if management thinks it is gonig to be necessary. Sure the tactics are probably more effective on children, but my entire point is that by their very nature world class talent is going to be rare enough that the corps can't afford not to snatch them up. Mages on the other hand are rare enough by their nature that even average ones are very valuable to the corp, and world class wizards are worth pulling out all of the stops for.

And you are right, I haven't addressed the issue of moral of the existing workforce, that is because I don't think the corps of 2070 really gives a frag what their employees think, sure they have to make a pretending to care and the HR Department will issue statements designed to sooth any ruffled feathers while increasing the levels of happy juice in the water cooler (Don't forget to send a memo to accounting to deduct the extra cost from everyone's paychecks.) and reassigning or perhaps even promoting any protental troublemakers to "another branch". (In reality they end up as test subjects in some research lab or another.) Remember that the wageslaves are powerless, they can't legally quit their jobs and I'd hate to think what woudl befall anyone stupid enough to try to organize a strike or even a work slowdown.

*Shrugs* As for your chinese clerk/lawyer friend, as I said, there are paths availbe to her to be able to practice law in America provided that she was talented and dedicated enough to do so, accents are hardly an unsurmountable roadblock.

As for the media, I disagree that the trash that we have today is even close to what the Sixth World society demands and cheers, remember the stuff that is reviled today is cheered by the masses in Shadowrun.

Kyoto Kid

I agree, it is easier to "get them while they are young", but my entire point has been that the corps don't always have that option when talking about the level of talent that I am.

[JonathanC]

Since when is that stuff "reviled" today? The only people complaining about it are old people. Teenagers on the Internet love beheading videos.

And again, I'm not trying to tell you how to run your own game. But realistically, I think it's naive to think that pure talent always shines through. I'm guessing you've never actually worked in an office if you think that's how corporations work. :)

And you still haven't addressed the morale problems created by hiring a bunch of independently-minded, highly-intelligent street people to work over your homegrown, loyal "employees".

[Ravor]

[JonathanC]

Realistically, any organization's power is dependent upon the people they rule over agreeing to be ruled over, or having a reason to value their comfort over their dignity. If you shatter the illusion of job security that wageslaves have, you create desperation. Hiring the next hot shadowrunner and giving him a corner office is going to turn the rest of your office into insurgents faster than you can say Office Space. It's bad enough that you've got competition kidnapping and brainwashing your wageslaves. If they start *wanting* to leave, en masse...well, that's a problem. There's no such thing as an organization that can afford to ignore morale. It doesn't exist. Ever.

Even the nazis (please don't mention Godwin) had to keep the Germans complacent, not to mention complicit, in what they were doing. They made the trains run on time and stroked the egos of Germans with the Aryan myth. I doubt Stalin would have lasted as long as he did without an ocean of vodka to keep people complacent.

Complacency for megacorps comes from job security. You do what they say and never question it because as long as you do, you're in the family. Being outside of the family is dangerous and uncomfortable. You have to find your own housing, educate your own kids, and did you watch the news the other day? Those dreadful Trolls killed another one of those nice Humanis boys.

Once a corp smashes the illusion of obedience = security by hiring a "huge dice pool" (seriously, how does someone tell the difference between a dice pool 8 professional and a dice pool 16 professional? They're both never going to fail at common corporate tasks) SINless shadowrunner and giving them the swank promotion that every corp wageslave has been working for 10 years to get...well, I don't think any organization can realistically survive that kind of morale hit.

Corps are supposed to be exclusive. Shadowrun is about being on the outside of society. If all you need to slide into the mainstream is a level of skill possessed by pretty much every Shadowrunner, then the game loses its theme entirely. Again, if you want to play that way, more power to you. I'll be over here playing Shadowrun. :)

[Ravor]

A couple of things off the top of my head;


You don't hire a ( Dicepool 16 ) Runner for a job that a ( Dicepool 8 ) wageslave could manage, you hire the ( Dicepool 16 ) Runner for a job that requires his massive dicepool.


There are many ways to ensure complacency, several of which you've touched upon and none of which are shattered beyond repair by hiring the few people in the world with the massive dicepools we are talking about.


I agree, corps are exclusive and the SINless are largely damned to forever remain outsiders looking in through rose-colored-imagelinks (After all, corpers are largely damned in their own ways that aren't really all that disimilair to the SINless.) if they don't have someway to buy themselves into the family, being Awakened is a hell of a start, being world-class in their choosen field is another.


Yes, Shadowrun does lose alot of its themes when DMs forget that Fourth Edition is built around the idea of smaller dicepools and weaves a world where huge dicepools are the norm for Runners. The fact that it is even possible to build such characters using the default char-gen rules is a bug, not a feature.

[JonathanC]

I don't see smaller dicepools as the solution. There's nothing wrong with the size of these dicepools. It's just that you're making some odd assumptions about corporate culture that are based on your own (admittedly solid) logical approach to hiring, rather than the realities of HR.

Also, you're saying there are only a few people in the world with these massive dicepools, but given how easy it is to get pools that high in Shadowrun, they can't be all that rare. And I still don't understand why any corp would want the moral hassle, PLUS the cost of housing, paying salary, medical, etc. for these "geniuses" when they seem perfectly happy to pay those costs on their own and still do the jobs you need done when you do them.

Which sounds like a better deal? Hiring Munchkin McSupermage on as a full-timer, where he regularly makes your other mages feel like unappreciated crap just by existing, costs you a ton of money with his (reasonable) request for dental exams and a full checkup every 6 months, and lives in one of your most expensive penthouses that *you* foot the bill for.

OR

Offering Munchkin McSupermage a small retainer fee, that you probably pay mostly in telesma or other magical materials, for the right to call him when something catches fire and you really need a force 15 stunball to make it all right again. He pays for his own medical, rents his own apartment, and your regular employees don't even know he exists. He gets to live his life his own way, and your corporate culture remains unsullied by his love for Bon Jovi and Shoujo Anime.

[Cardul]

Don't the Corps all have "Special Sections"? These are where I culd imagine them assigning the few former Shadowrunners they hire. These people are overseen by people perfectly willing to kill the former Shadowrunners to protect corporate secrets. The Dice Pool 16 Hacker is not going to be put doing the IT work the Dicepool 8 Wageslave is. No, he is going to be put to work souping up security. Or BEING security. The Dicepool 16 heavy weapns specialist is not going to be put to wrk as a Rentacop guard, but as part of a High Threat Response Team, like Ares Firewatch. The Dice Pool 16 spell casting Mage is not going to be put doing whatever the WageMAges do..no, that guy is going to be doing the BIG BOYS stuff. And they would not be part of the normal corp floor of people.

That said, I also doubt that the Corps would want to hire people who were former Shadowrunners first. In fact, I think those people would be the last resort. Generally speaking, to me, Shadowrunners exist because the Corps need them. The Corps do not need something that can be traced back to them, which, if they hired those runners and made them part f their Special Sections, they would be. Worse, the Corps do not want someone trying t Extract people in their Special Sections.

NOTE: I still remember a group of Runners I was with wh got WAY too high profile, and retired from running to become Freelance Security Consultants.

[toturi]

[Fortune]

[Pendaric]

Sigh and another fluff thread is derailed.
Inspiration for a character is so vast in options that it is not readily quantifiable. I generaly use the concept creation method because of this.
I have made charcters from the classic, "we need a drek hot rigger!",
to " I want to play a melancholic shade of blue" as starting points.
As I said in my previous post it is often not the starting point but the final draft that starts play that counts.
After all the character creation is only the portion that get the persona to the point of evolving in play.

[apollo124]

[Kyoto Kid]

[Ravor]

[Kalvan]

My first group was basically playing their and my grandchildren (well, people they assumed would be grandchildren. Since then, several relationships {including one of mine} fell through, which meant that their {the characters'} parents won't exist to meet each other).

My first character (and the source of my handle) was a college educated elf mage from my hometown who went into business with a college buddy (and later teammate), a male Cat Shaman from Milwaukee with the handle of Meow Max, developing a software RAD tool for spell formulae. Despite the fact that we were privately held (and capitalized by bank loans,) we were the subject of a hostile takeover by Aztechnology through their unofficial California Free State subsidiary Pyramid Holdings LLC. In spite we erased all related code and a special piece of prototype hardware and disappeared into the shadows, with a grudge against Aztechnology.

Some Joker, the team's Decker, was a dwarf originally from Halferville. He and Noriko, an ork Physical Adept (and survivor of Yomi), met each other while doing separate solo sabotage runs against a Mitsuhama site on Treasure Island.

This was the core team. We would tend to run through Razorboys, Gunbunnies, and riggers like Spinal Tap ran through Drummers....