How much Karma do you need to be a "Professional" Options

[Ghremdal]

Except that they can be incredibly exceptional in a fairly broad area. One of the things that makes PC runners so exceptional is that they are operating at a professional level in numerous disparate and discrete fields of study. Your average runner can shoot as well as a professional soldier, sneak as well as a professional thief, has multiple college degrees, etc. PC runners are all high level polymaths, in addition to often being Noble Prize or Olympic Gold level in their area of specialty.

While that is defined by the main book, it is a stupid definition. Getting high skill ratings is trivially easy. Getting high DP (exceptional level) is rather hard in multiple areas. You also end up less then competent in others.

That's really not true. In absolute numbers there are fair number of individuals who can match or exceed the PC's in any given area but as a whole there are very few who are remotely comparable naturally (although with skillwires a lot of it can be faked, which is what the mega's often do).

Sure, after all of the gear and ware that unlimited resources make possible even an average person can be competitive with most PC runners in a given area, but that is usually after loading them down with hundreds of thousand (if not millions) of nuyen worth of gear. And once the PC's get access to that same gear (and they likely will eventually) they will be better than all but a handful of individuals in all of human history in a given area.

Again, you are stuck in the skill description rather then the actual effect. A DP is what matters. Frankly I think the authors were a bit braindead when they wrote those skill descriptions.

Add in edge and your odds get significantly better. And no, the lottery has far worse odds. Making 20 rolls in a row each with a 50% chance of success is approximately 1 in a million odds. Winning the lottery is upwards of 1 in 11 million.

Per character. I stipulated that all characters must succeed on their rolls to accomplish the mission. But even a million to 1 odds don't speak in favor of the viability of such a mission.

Top end shadowrunners should have a shot at completing such a mission, depending on intel and planning. 400 BP runners should not (and do not) have a realistic chance at making a AAA+ installation run.

[Shemhazai]

On topic: You don't need any Karma, technically. If people offer you runs for money, you're a pro. Of course, were talking level. I would say that enough Karma to really max out in one or two key areas for your team, plus enough to take care of any initial weak points.

For example, a mage might have started out with either awesome spellcasting or awesome conjuring, but the rules don't let both be at level 6 starting out. I would say initiating a few times, maybe upping the weaker skill group, getting those last spells you wanted, focuses, maybe one attribute that started out low, and contacts. Generally, being flat out awesome in a couple of things, and not so bad at things that might let your group down or get you killed. Like being able to run, hide, perceive, be polite, and take damage in addition to your forte.

Off topic: Even people with vast amounts of money will not overpay people to do jobs, and they will never knowingly pay more than the job is worth to them. That's simple economics. Extremely rich people pay people very tiny amounts of money every day. Johnsons are connected and will almost never be in a situation where your group is their only option. Overpaying is a bad business practice that any experienced person should avoid.

[Glyph]

The skill descriptions have too much hyperbole on the high end for my tastes, considering the a single die is about a third of a success. They also use examples of people who have skill sets and high matching Attributes, to describe a single skill. Not all of the examples are very good, either, especially the social ones, where the examples seem to describe people with money and connections, rather than people with a face's ability to blend into different social scenes and manipulate people. Not all political candidates have social skills of 5 or 6, just people who write speeches for them and spin things for them in the press.

But even so, a skill of 6 is described as "best of the rest", with "best of the best" being reserved for a skill of 7. Sure, such skills will be comparatively rare, but so are shadowrunners.

[ravensmuse]

I was thinking about this last night, and here's what I came up with.

While your skills, gear, and how much money is an important aspect of Shadowrun, I think that it all comes down to one thing: reputation.

Reputation is your resume when a Johnson and a fixer sit down to hire for a job. It's your record of what you've done, who you've pissed off, and most important, your accomplishments.

Or, think of it like an ebay seller rating: you start off at a hundred percent, and then it's slowly chipped away at it with each screw-up or negative feedback (as represented by Notoriety).

Of course, there is no scale that shows at which point one's called a professional runner. Personally I think that's a per GM / table scale, honestly, but having one in the book would be useful (see notes at the end).

When a Johnson pulls up shadowchatter about your activity - be it via Matrix, data haven, word of mouth in the network of fixers you know exists in your city but your fixer tells you totally doesn't exist - and sees, "will walk away from a table if he's not paid X per job," that rep is going to stick with you, and make it harder to get work.

(It's actually a pretty neat use of Notoriety / the Bad Rep flaw, now that I think about it.)

Reputation is based on two things - your ease to work with and your ability to get the job done. Contacts and resources are a large part of accomplishing tasks, followled closely by your own skills and abilities. No one person can do all the jobs, barring a simple snatch and grab purse steal. So you need to be able to work in a team (see how it all comes together?)

Contacts fill in gaps of knowledge / ability you don't have. Being able to say, "hey, I just found this thing, and what is this thing, and why is Ares looking to kill me over it?" to your friend the geologist is better than just showing up to your Johnson and discovering that you're playing with some martian isotope or something. Being more knowledgable is a good thing - watch auction shows like Storage Wars or Pawn Stars or to see why contacts are a really good thing.

Contacts also feed into gear. Or how else are you going to get your precious sniper rifle? Or get it past customs?

...then we get to your own skills and abilities. I don't disagree that the current numbers scale is ass, and needs to be revised or replaced with general skill pools scales for players to see. I will note that I'm not a fan of min / max warfare I see in games like Shadowrun and D&D - play the character, not the fsking stats, or leave my game. Sorry, personal peeve.

***

Shadowrun could really benefit from the clarity of having a focused statement for the world.

The corebook needs - in its first chapters - to describe who shadowrunners are, what they do, and most importantly, ask each player during character creation why it is the character is willing to be crazy enough to run. And make it worth something mechanically (maybe like Keys in The Spirit of Yesterday or something? I dunno.)

Having those statements up front is the most important part of playing this game, because it feeds into everything else. Shadowrun can totally be about gangers scraping it together on the streets and about guys who make multi-million nuyen grabs of important researchers - seriously, it's pretty wide open to that, and I wouldn't change it for the world.

But it needs to get into the headspace of why.

Discussions like this are emblematic of that problem. We have one guy stating that you shouldn't walk into a Stuffer Shack without a drone retinue to protect your ass while arguing that it's a seller's market and that runners should walk away from any job that ain't worth a million nuyen plus. I don't disagree that you can run those sorts of games, but why is that character even trying then? He's an ass to work with, and I think his local shadowfolk would roll his eyes every time he walked, talked, or posted on the local shadow node.

If we had a good scale, and could say, "okay, here you go, here's what kind of work this character would do," we wouldn't be having this multi-page argument. Hell, I'm running two games that are on opposite sides of that line - one with players working as Ghostwalker's Secret Hand, and the other a solo one on one game of runners working the European Grand Tour, trying to build rep in order to establish themselves in the shadows.

Both work really well, but I doubt that they'd fit Tippy's specifications of what Shadowrun is. Again, emblematic of the problem we have with the unfocused core.

[Glyph]

I mostly agree with that, although I think high ability combined with well-connected contacts can give you a boost up. A street samurai with high dice pools and a Connection: 5 fixer might start out doing upper-end work.

[StealthSigma]

Except that Shadowrun IS NOT OUR WORLD. Get over that Emperor Tippy. What goes on in our world is not a good comparison for what happens in an SR world. *sheesh*

There are parts about Shadowrun that greatly mimic our own world as has been usefully demonstrated during this rather long recession. Look at wage depression specifically. It's been a buyers market because of the level of unemployment that wages have been pushed downward.

Prime runners (by the book) actually work against Tippy as far as his statement that his PCs are the top of the list. While the stats for prime runners have rules, there are no rules regarding their reputations or regarding the quantity of prime runners that exist in a world. Consequently, there can be as many prime runners as the GM decides. The more of them that exist the more downward pressure is going to be existing on the wages of runners since the Johnson can just shop around for the team that will do the job at the lower prices.

[KarmaInferno]

I think part of the problem is that most folks have this idea of "Prime Runners" being what the books currently term "Street Legends".

A lot of folks I talk to are completely unaware there are rules for NPC Prime Runners in the book, because they've never used them. It does not help that previous editions used the term pretty much to mean the elite of the elite of the Shadowrunner biz, and even the 4E books seem to interchangeably use the term for both the NPC rules and to mean Street Legends, depending on who wrote the section




-k