[X] My Assistant

[Ravor]

Lifestyle costs may cover alot of things, including dining out and staying in fashion, but unless ARSE (Having troubles ordering it, PayPal and Battlecorps had a glitch somewhere and I'm waiting to get it straightened out.) changes things in no way do they even pretend to cover equipment upkeep. If they did then there would be guidelines on what level of lifestyle was needed to upkeep different pieces of equipment, after all you can't expect a Rigger's "low lifestle" to cover keeping her T-Bird and various other expensive toys in tip-top shape, or a squatter Street-Sammy's cyber from going on the frizt from lack of repair.

[Ryu]

I hate to say that, but a drone network strategy does not work in a low-paying campaign.
Even with Arsenal, lifestyle does not cover anything in the way of runner gear. You have to repair drones on your own cost.

A bit off-topic, but the question begs itself. Why do you run against weaker targets than you could handle, if you are lacking money all the time? With that kind of preparation you can handle augmented guards. My campaign pays 20k¥+/run, enough to aquire new gear once upon a while.

[MaxHunter]

adding to the threadjack, once my runner players got too good for their normal opposition they started getting hired for tougher and more pricey runs. Now their characters are much more affluent and also desperately running away from Ares hit squads with much better gear and stats. But the game is so good, ah!

Cheers,

Max

[djinni]

[kzt]

Then look at freelancing. Jewlery stores, for example....

[Ryu]

I´m talking 20k¥ per run and runner, quite a bit more. Quite a few campaigns don´t have runners struggling for medium lifestyle. If mine did, I´d give any rigger fair warning.

Your campaign seems to focus on runs against ill-prepared security forces. How about telling your GM that you are going to steal something valueable? A collective of six runners at the 400 BP level can easily beat lightly augmented guards. Especially with that supporting drone network. Unaugmented security would be quite boring for my group.

Some things you´ll need to deal with:
- Helmet or Googles with vision enhancement, flare compensation and smartlink.
The guards will spot your drones, flash grenades don´t work, and they hit better. Deadly for small drones. You´ll need to be careful coordinating the position of your drones.

- Automatic/ heavy weapons. Makes that positional data on the guards much more important. I recently threatened my group with ONE enemy, using a full-auto combat shotgun. On the upside, selling captured gear starts to be profitable.

- Enemy combat drone networks. Great for replenishing your number of drones, but very dangerous. Radio signal scanners should be rather common here, as the operator will have electronic warfare skill.

- Enemy mages can have drones shredded. OTOH, the spirit tasked with that is not trying to shred you. A toss-up.



My impression is that you can deal with all this. What kind of members does your team have? The configuration of your support network somewhat depends on that. My friend is running it this way:
- blimp drone over the target facility. Gives fair warning of arriving reinforcements. Also the prime candidate for being shot down, once it is noticed.
- microskimmer scouting ahead. Can often avoid destruction, but if it can´t, whoever entered the room first, instead of the drone, would be in a world of hurt, too. If this one survives, it can relay information to the rest of the team.
- Steel Lynx / Doberman as mobile cover. Especially with your low money, see Arsenal for better armor. While that position is boring for a samurai, you can leave a drone behind to cover your retreat. Anything that frees up a samurai for a fixed investment under 10k¥ is good. Weapon of choice is an assault rifle with underbarrel grenade launcher.
- MCT Nissan Rotordrone, same weapon, max armor. Mobile suppressive fire.
- Microdrones as spies, depending on the run. A human is much harder to infiltrate.

The key trick is using active target aquisition with the combat drones, nicely creating auto-updated positional information for the whole team, as long as sensor lock is not broken. Gain: indirect target aquisition for runners without LOS, info on the strategy the guards use. Depending on the sensor suite setup, you also get info on the guards equipment. See MAD sensors.