Run Payout, Extracted from Edition Discussion Options

[ShadowDragon8685]

Surveillance:

Lone Star/Knight Errant don't give one flying fuck about John Q. Public's stolen sedan/SUV. If they happen to catch some idiot trying to hotwire it like it's 1972 instead of 2072, they'll be glad to slap the bracelets on, but if John Q. Public wakes up in the morning to discover his ride has driven off without him, they're going to give him lip service at best.

Even if, I dunno, John Q. Public reports the theft in person, having brought a couple of boxes of fresh deep-fried donuts and the best non-soy coffee he could get his hands on to the station, all their now-actually-motivated investigation is going to find is camera footage of an empty SUV turning itself on, driving out of wherever it was parked, and they'll follow it with cameras until it drives to the edge of the camera coverage, which will be somewhere in Redmond or Puyallup barrens. At that point, all they can do is commiserate with John Q. Public about his loss and provide a police report for his insurance company stating that, in all likelihood, his car has been chopped.

And even if they catch the Rover in progress, guess what?

Your man isn't in the car. He's not even anywhere fucking near the damn thing. That's the beauty of car theft in the 2070s, especially in SR4. Even if Lone Star catches it while it's still in territory they actually patroll, and care to give a damn, all your hacker has to do is wipe her Matrix tracks from the Rover's autopilot and let it shut down peacefully.

Let's say you decide to boost a Rover from the vicinity of Sea-Tac, because hey, long-term car storage is still a thing. It gets on the 509, down through Tacoma on 99, merging onto 161, heading south into Puyallup. Your physical security guys are waiting for it somewhere near enough to the Crime Mall, which is way the hell into "Cops don't go here" territory.

But your hacker/possibly rigger, the one who's remotely controlling it? She's in fucking Snohomish, sitting in a car. She never laid her own physical eyes on the Rover. Thanks to the wireless Matrix, she bounced her Matrix presence to the Snohomish RTG transmitter, down to Downtown, down further in to Sea-Tac, and from there she found the carparks and started sniffing around until she found an SUV she liked. She hacked in easily, checked its access lkogs to find out that it'd been left out of contact for a while (days, weeks,) and gave it new orders to power up and depart.

They'll never track her down. They'll never have the Matrix logs to find her, and she's mobile. Even in the event everything goes monumentally pear-shaped, she can beat it into the Redmond Barrens and nobody'll catch her.

And the Rover? IF they want to put real effort into it, they'll send a drone with a high transmitter rating, or seed the spotty parts of the barrens with transmitters, to stay in contact with the car. If not, they'll just give it orders as regards where to go: if gangers waylay it, no skin off their nose, they'll just try again with another Rover. Hell, they might just preemptively send several by several different routes and only worry about the ones that actually arrive. But once it's in Puyallups, or Redmond, it's off Lone Star/Knight Errant's radar. They're not going in there to save your damn car, even if you have a drone following the damn thing and a live feed. They're sure as hell not going in there to chase old evidence.

F ) the official Guideline for Runners Fees is quite low (Foodfight 5.0 offers 500 ¥ to rescue a Kidnapped Girl from the Mafia and another 500 If they "finish them Off once and for all" and if thats the official Line than it's no wonder some of the GMs get miserly ) so some Players think that its a Default Line for their Chars to have only small Money
G ) some GMs think that its quite ok to keep the Chars empty pockets and that its "Evil" if the Chars earn quite some Money. They simply don't know any better.
H) not every Char or Runner Group is skilled enough nor has the Connections for such a Heist.
Stealing & selling one maybe two Cars per Month is OK (specially in a Metroplex with 5 Million like Seattle)
but fencing more than that needs a dedicated Fixer/Fence or maybe a whole Group/Organisation.
It may be of Help if one of the Chars is a Made Man or has such a group Connection

G) Seriously? Fucking seriously? A thousand nuyen to piss off the fucking mob?
I'd laugh in the face of whoever gave me that offer. That or do it gratis, if I decide it's a job that needs doing no matter that payment. But 500 nuyen wouldn't motivate any of my characters to get out of bed, let alone hear Mr. Johnson out. That's barely enough to consider an AR/VR meet with the job of "annoy someone a lot," you know, a meeting I could attend whilst still in bed.
H) If you don't have the skills or the connections to boost random SUVs and get it to them that will convert it into (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) for you, you don't have the skills to do jack shit, and should maybe consider career opportunities behind the counter of a Stuffer Shack or McHughs.


Seriously, though, the point of pointing out how easy it is to bring home the bread and bacon by boosting SUVs isn't to say that your teams should all just boost SUVs. It's to point out the absurdity of the ridiculously low prices people are asking you to take in exchange for breaking into secured corporate facillities, pissing off the mafia, tangling with Vampires, etc.

And maybe, just maybe? You should actually pull the trigger on it. Next time your GM has Mr. Johnson give you a stupidly low price, like 10,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) for anything that's likely to take more than the rest of the (in-character night) to finish or is going to involve a physical altercation with any enemies armed with more dangerous weapons than light pistols, just walk away and boost two or three Rover 2068s, fence them off, divide the cash, and go back to your safehouses. Hopefully, the GM will get the hint and up the reward on the next run he offers.

[Medicineman]

G) Seriously? Fucking seriously? A thousand nuyen to piss off the fucking mob?
I'd laugh in the face of whoever gave me that offer. That or do it gratis, if I decide it's a job that needs doing no matter that payment. But 500 nuyen wouldn't motivate any of my characters to get out of bed, let alone hear Mr. Johnson out.

no ,You should really play it
one of the Staff of McHughs (where You can find the Head Honcho )has a 50.000 ¥ Deck . Thats big Booty (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

when I played it, my myst Adept kicked the Guy in the Face, took the Deck and sold it later for a Rating 5 Fake SIN complete with Licenses (Big Win for a first Run)

but I like the Food Fight 4.0 much much better

HokaHey
Medicineman

[apple]

But surely, if it's just so damn easy to steal all these cars and sell them on as easy as you would pawn your TV, why isn't every shadowrunner doing just this instead of runs?

Because most Johnsons (ingame) and most GMs (offgame) pay better. I know, its too easy sometimes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

SYL

[apple]

In a high surveillance world (which from all accounts SR4 is) tracking a stolen car by law enforcement should be trivial unless all the angles are covered by the thieves.

In theorey? Yes of course. But then again everything what a runner usually do on runs is far more complicated and dangerous than car jacking.
In "reality" (as in "ingame reality")? Well, there is the human factor, incompetent, greedy, old tech from the cheapest bidder, working only what the internal rules allow, etc.

And of course the other crimes. Runners are only one the many criminals in the sprawl. In the same minute where you jack a For America, Eurocar Westwind or Range Rover, several bombings, murders, rapes, terrorist attacks, violent demonstrations, corp alerts, go-gangers on the higway and widespread matrix attacks are happening. Dispatch will have to choose which one to follow up: the stolen car from an unimportant wage slave or a potential kidnapping of a SIN-child.

SYL

[Sendaz]

Because most Johnsons (ingame) and most GMs (offgame) pay better. I know, its too easy sometimes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

SYL

Exactly. But it would have been nice if the baseline info for newer players who stick closer to the book had been a bit more generous.

A monkey with a Speak And Spell can out-hack that. 3 marks and it's yours, issue Control Device actions all day to do whatever with it, or just order it to shut down and put it on a tow truck.

You used Chester the E-Chimp too?

I admit I was a bit put out at first when the fixer set us up with him for this one job down LA way, but he does surprisingly solid work.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

You used Chester the E-Chimp too?

I admit I was a bit put out at first when the fixer set us up with him for this one job down LA way, but he does surprisingly solid work.

The R&D division worked really diligently on that particular piece of programming, and were understandably proud of it. I passed out a small bonus to the Department management for bringing it in on time and well under budget. Interestingly enough, it is one of the best selling items in our catalogue. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Cain]

But surely, if it's just so damn easy to steal all these cars and sell them on as easy as you would pawn your TV, why isn't every shadowrunner doing just this instead of runs?

On this level, it is kind of a GM issue. The game is supposed to be about shadowrunning, so shadowrunning needs to be profitable. It's no different than D&D or WOW: if you can get more gold by grinding, people will just sit around and grind.

With that in mind, though: most people just accept what the setting tells them is correct, so if the setting is poorly done, they won't understand why the economics don't work out.

[Shemhazai]

Yes, the cops care about car theft because the corps they work for are paid money to care. They are formidable and can hire great people too. But regardless, it's not much money anyway, just wasted game time.

[binarywraith]

The part that makes me most amused is that boosting cars like this is given as one of the reasons go-gangs can afford to run their criminal enterprises without the usual means of gangland funding that require controlling a neighborhood. Even the setting itself admits this sort of thing is a profitable criminal enterprise that doesn't require top shelf talent.

[ShadowDragon8685]

No, you should really play it; one of the Staff of McHughs (where You can find the Head Honcho) has a 50.000 ¥ Deck . Thats big Booty (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

When I played it, my Mystic Adept kicked the Guy in the Face, took the Deck and sold it later for a Rating 5 Fake SIN complete with Licenses (Big Win for a first Run)

but I like the Food Fight 4.0 much much better

HokaHey
Medicineman

Wow. That's, just... Wow.

That's pretty much codifying one of the problems with running the setting - runs paying out such hilarious pocket change that the reward from Mr. Johnson is basically superflous with what a dedicated team can get from looting the places they hit.

When I ran On the Run, I jacked Darius St. George's reward up by 10,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) and even then everybody agreed he was kind of lowballing them, but for a lightweight run (which they were expecting) it was acceptable. They still wound up going out of their way to try to get more.

Yes, the cops care about car theft because the corps they work for are paid money to care. They are formidable and can hire great people too. But regardless, it's not much money anyway, just wasted game time.

They "care" in the sense that they're going to put the bare minimum of effort required to determine that in all probability John Q. Public's car is gone, and then tell him to pound sand. Once they track its transponder to the edge of the Barrens, that's it, pack it in and file an insurance claim, that fucker's chopped.

With the kind of money it would take to investigate and recover a stolen vehicle that's been vanished into the Barrens - if it's still extant as a discrete car, and not a pile of parts in a junkyard - you could just buy a new one.

And Lone Star/Knight Errant sure as hell aren't going to mobilize an armored column of Citymasters to go into the Barrens, roll up on a criminal car shop, and recover your damn Rover 2068.


Now, if things are different - say, if your Rover was stolen by your jealous ex-wife whose passcodes to the car you foolishly forgot to revoke - and she drove it from your place to her place and is sitting petulantly on it, they'll go after it. Because that's an easy collar and it looks good in their statistics.

[Bertramn]

But surely, if it's just so damn easy to steal all these cars and sell them on as easy as you would pawn your TV, why isn't every shadowrunner doing just this instead of runs?

'I'm a Runner, not a thief! Well, I steal stuff occasionally, but I do not steal it for myself, I only do it for the money....
Aw god-damnit, I am a thief, aren't I? Drek!'

Brad the Voice - Shadowrunner

[Siygess]

Surveillance:

Lone Star/Knight Errant don't give one flying fuck about John Q. Public's stolen sedan/SUV. If they happen to catch some idiot trying to hotwire it like it's 1972 instead of 2072, they'll be glad to slap the bracelets on, but if John Q. Public wakes up in the morning to discover his ride has driven off without him, they're going to give him lip service at best.

Even if, I dunno, John Q. Public reports the theft in person, having brought a couple of boxes of fresh deep-fried donuts and the best non-soy coffee he could get his hands on to the station, all their now-actually-motivated investigation is going to find is camera footage of an empty SUV turning itself on, driving out of wherever it was parked, and they'll follow it with cameras until it drives to the edge of the camera coverage, which will be somewhere in Redmond or Puyallup barrens. At that point, all they can do is commiserate with John Q. Public about his loss and provide a police report for his insurance company stating that, in all likelihood, his car has been chopped.

Well that's just silly, of course they care. They're paid to care, if they stopped caring they'd swiftly get done for breach of contract and it'd be up for the next police-company to give a flying fuck. Now of course there are degrees to all this and all kinds of permutations but to say that the cops wouldn't even take ten minutes to bring up some feeds or check basic surveillance drones when a car is stolen, then take action if that car is found is ludicrous. Lone Star/Knight Errant aren't a town sherriff with 2 horses and a couple of deputies available to police crime.

And even if they catch the Rover in progress, guess what?

Your man isn't in the car. He's not even anywhere fucking near the damn thing. That's the beauty of car theft in the 2070s, especially in SR4. Even if Lone Star catches it while it's still in territory they actually patroll, and care to give a damn, all your hacker has to do is wipe her Matrix tracks from the Rover's autopilot and let it shut down peacefully.

Then the runners wouldn't get paid would they? And even though supposedly it didn't take much effort it would still be wasted effort and back to square one.

Let's say you decide to boost a Rover from the vicinity of Sea-Tac, because hey, long-term car storage is still a thing. It gets on the 509, down through Tacoma on 99, merging onto 161, heading south into Puyallup. Your physical security guys are waiting for it somewhere near enough to the Crime Mall, which is way the hell into "Cops don't go here" territory.

But your hacker/possibly rigger, the one who's remotely controlling it? She's in fucking Snohomish, sitting in a car. She never laid her own physical eyes on the Rover. Thanks to the wireless Matrix, she bounced her Matrix presence to the Snohomish RTG transmitter, down to Downtown, down further in to Sea-Tac, and from there she found the carparks and started sniffing around until she found an SUV she liked. She hacked in easily, checked its access lkogs to find out that it'd been left out of contact for a while (days, weeks,) and gave it new orders to power up and depart.

Now you're in the realms of hacking into a facility to steal this car. Job's getting more complex.....

They'll never track her down. They'll never have the Matrix logs to find her, and she's mobile. Even in the event everything goes monumentally pear-shaped, she can beat it into the Redmond Barrens and nobody'll catch her.

And the Rover? IF they want to put real effort into it, they'll send a drone with a high transmitter rating, or seed the spotty parts of the barrens with transmitters, to stay in contact with the car. If not, they'll just give it orders as regards where to go: if gangers waylay it, no skin off their nose, they'll just try again with another Rover. Hell, they might just preemptively send several by several different routes and only worry about the ones that actually arrive. But once it's in Puyallups, or Redmond, it's off Lone Star/Knight Errant's radar. They're not going in there to save your damn car, even if you have a drone following the damn thing and a live feed. They're sure as hell not going in there to chase old evidence.

And again, no sale, no payoff. All kinds of factors you're mentioning here are suddenly complicating this easy car theft and quick sale.

G) Seriously? Fucking seriously? A thousand nuyen to piss off the fucking mob?
I'd laugh in the face of whoever gave me that offer. That or do it gratis, if I decide it's a job that needs doing no matter that payment. But 500 nuyen wouldn't motivate any of my characters to get out of bed, let alone hear Mr. Johnson out. That's barely enough to consider an AR/VR meet with the job of "annoy someone a lot," you know, a meeting I could attend whilst still in bed.
H) If you don't have the skills or the connections to boost random SUVs and get it to them that will convert it into (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) for you, you don't have the skills to do jack shit, and should maybe consider career opportunities behind the counter of a Stuffer Shack or McHughs.


Seriously, though, the point of pointing out how easy it is to bring home the bread and bacon by boosting SUVs isn't to say that your teams should all just boost SUVs. It's to point out the absurdity of the ridiculously low prices people are asking you to take in exchange for breaking into secured corporate facillities, pissing off the mafia, tangling with Vampires, etc.

And maybe, just maybe? You should actually pull the trigger on it. Next time your GM has Mr. Johnson give you a stupidly low price, like 10,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) for anything that's likely to take more than the rest of the (in-character night) to finish or is going to involve a physical altercation with any enemies armed with more dangerous weapons than light pistols, just walk away and boost two or three Rover 2068s, fence them off, divide the cash, and go back to your safehouses. Hopefully, the GM will get the hint and up the reward on the next run he offers.

Why stop there? Why not stomp your foot down and demand 100,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) , a million? It's the GM's responsiblility to create the balance they want in their game. If the player's aren't happy and take the game sideways for example going to steal cars, that's up to them. But then it's also the GM's responsibility to bring that back into line.

On this level, it is kind of a GM issue. The game is supposed to be about shadowrunning, so shadowrunning needs to be profitable. It's no different than D&D or WOW: if you can get more gold by grinding, people will just sit around and grind.

With that in mind, though: most people just accept what the setting tells them is correct, so if the setting is poorly done, they won't understand why the economics don't work out.

In WoW the questgivers (Johnson's) start by offering you a couple of silver to go and risk life and limb in their quests (runs). The payment increases as the level increases.

People are reading far too much in to the references and guidelines for payments. It's up to the GM to create the balance they want for their game, not the players to demand what they want from the GM.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Well that's just silly, of course they care. They're paid to care, if they stopped caring they'd swiftly get done for breach of contract and it'd be up for the next police-company to give a flying fuck. Now of course there are degrees to all this and all kinds of permutations but to say that the cops wouldn't even take ten minutes to bring up some feeds or check basic surveillance drones when a car is stolen, then take action if that car is found is ludicrous. Lone Star/Knight Errant aren't a town sherriff with 2 horses and a couple of deputies available to police crime.

They're not going to jump at the camera feeds to find John Q. Public's stolen car. We have seen, in this thread, evidence of the police today who won't lift so much as a finger even when you literally have the thieves in your sights.

And why? Because frankly, car theft is only something they're going to pursue if it's a gimmie case (like the ex-wife) or it's a really slow week. Because it takes the time and attention of at least one Matrix specialist to track J.Q. Public's Rover SUV from where it turned itself on, to where they're inevitably going to lose sight of it when it enters the Barrens.

It's a case they have practically zero chance of resolving by reuniting man and car, so at that point, all they're doing is trying to punish criminals, who are, at the very least, savvy enough to have left precisely zero traces of themselves anywhere that the camera records will show.

Meanwhile, in the same night, they've racked up five missing kids, ten kidnappings, twenty arsons, fifty murders, a hundred and eight assaults with a deadly, sixty rapes, two bombings and a partridge in a pear tree.

And like, a hundred other stolen cars.

So, sure, they could send an armored convoy into the Barrens to shake down the chop shops until they find the one chop shop with that one guy's vehicle parts in it, and then shake the inhabitants until they squeal on the guys who sold it to them...

Or they could, you know, have those people searching for missing/kidnapped people, investigating arson, murder, rape, assault, and bombs. All of which are rather more serious crimes than Joe Q. Public's missing Rover 2068.

Then the runners wouldn't get paid would they? And even though supposedly it didn't take much effort it would still be wasted effort and back to square one.

Plenty of SUVs in the city, cops can't watch 'em all. That's the whole point - it's easy money, practically zero risk.

Now you're in the realms of hacking into a facility to steal this car. Job's getting more complex.....

Parking garages are not going to have a significant barrier to "open up and let me out," and that's assuming the owner of the car didn't leave the "I've been ordered by my master to return to him, open up" codes in the vehicle's memory. Which he probably did, because when he gets back from his trip, he's not going to want to hoof it into a parking garage, he's going to want to send a signal from the terminal as soon as he clears customs and have his car waiting for him at the gate to take him home.

And that was just an example. Lots of parking garages downtown; lots of cars in street-level personal garages or even street-level curbside parking in Snohomish, or what-have-you.

And again, no sale, no payoff. All kinds of factors you're mentioning here are suddenly complicating this easy car theft and quick sale.

And yet all of them are much, much less complicated than all the shit a group would have to go through to complete On the Run successfully and in Mr. Johnson's favor, and you only have to pull home two Rovers 2068 to pull down exactly as much as Darius St. George will pay for a job completely perfectly done. And nobody's going to shoot at you.

Why stop there? Why not stomp your foot down and demand 100,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) , a million? It's the GM's responsiblility to create the balance they want in their game. If the player's aren't happy and take the game sideways for example going to steal cars, that's up to them. But then it's also the GM's responsibility to bring that back into line.

Both of those are perfectly reasonable sums of money to demand for some of the absolutely insane shit Mr. Johnsons will ask you to do, especially split four, five, or six ways, and double-especially if anybody's cars or drones get wrecked on the run.

In WoW the questgivers (Johnson's) start by offering you a couple of silver to go and risk life and limb in their quests (runs). The payment increases as the level increases.

Yeah, see, you completely lost all my respect when you compared Shadowrun to World of Warcraft.

For one thing, WoW has something Shadowrun does not, that being that if you actually do beef it in WoW, worst-case you come back minus a trivial sum of money and with a temporary debuff that makes it harder for you to fight for a half hour or so.

People are reading far too much in to the references and guidelines for payments. It's up to the GM to create the balance they want for their game, not the players to demand what they want from the GM.

No, we're really not. Official Shadowrun sourcebooks have always had a bad, bad habit of hilariously lowballing the amounts of money that should be paid, and unfortunately, a new GM's first exposure to what's a reasonable sum of money to risk life and limb and incarceration is going to be the official guidelines, which are uniformly awful.

And frankly, it is not up to the GM to decide "the balance they want for their game". That implies possession; the game is everybody's. If the players are unhappy because they feel the rewards for the jobs they're doing are insufficient, they have a right to be unhappy, upset, or angry. Trying to correct this measure IC instead of OOC is one good way to bring it to the GM's attention. It's a particularly striking example if they walk away from Mr. Johnson's negotiating table, call their Fixer and tell him the next guy better not be wasting their time with exciting opportunities to get shot for beer money, spend the IC night boosting cars and hocking them to chop shops until they've cleared what Mr. Johnson was offering, and then tell the GM, OOCly, that they're dissatisfied with the monetary rewards and would like him to correct that in the future.

Or, you know, they could do what some players do, and LOOT EVERYTHING. Most GMs get the hint around the time a player cultivates a Tanamous contract to sell the corpses to.

[Shortstraw]

The fact is if you are going to infiltrate a corp building then don't steal the paydata for Mr J steal the bloody helicopter.

[Shemhazai]

The part that makes me most amused is that boosting cars like this is given as one of the reasons go-gangs can afford to run their criminal enterprises without the usual means of gangland funding that require controlling a neighborhood. Even the setting itself admits this sort of thing is a profitable criminal enterprise that doesn't require top shelf talent.

That's a very good point. My interpretation is that these gangs have an interest in not having you as a competitor and would take steps against you.

They "care" in the sense that they're going to put the bare minimum of effort required to determine that in all probability John Q. Public's car is gone, and then tell him to pound sand. Once they track its transponder to the edge of the Barrens, that's it, pack it in and file an insurance claim, that fucker's chopped.

With the kind of money it would take to investigate and recover a stolen vehicle that's been vanished into the Barrens - if it's still extant as a discrete car, and not a pile of parts in a junkyard - you could just buy a new one.

And Lone Star/Knight Errant sure as hell aren't going to mobilize an armored column of Citymasters to go into the Barrens, roll up on a criminal car shop, and recover your damn Rover 2068.

The police will try to find out who is behind a string of auto thefts. Cracking big cases looks great on the news and helps to ensure that their contract is renewed. It helps the individual investigators by getting them noticed by upper management and on track for promotion. The case isn't closed as soon as the car crosses some boundary line. It's not all about recovering one car, even if the owner is rich and influential.

Your remark about mobilizing "an armored column of Citymasters to go into the Barrens" gave me an idea; I wonder how well your driverless car is going to fair. Stealing a Citymaster though, now that would be something...

[Cain]

Well that's just silly, of course they care. They're paid to care, if they stopped caring they'd swiftly get done for breach of contract and it'd be up for the next police-company to give a flying fuck. Now of course there are degrees to all this and all kinds of permutations but to say that the cops wouldn't even take ten minutes to bring up some feeds or check basic surveillance drones when a car is stolen, then take action if that car is found is ludicrous. Lone Star/Knight Errant aren't a town sherriff with 2 horses and a couple of deputies available to police crime.

They're not paid to care. They're a corporation, they're paid to make money, and providing law enforcement is just one way on paper they do so.

And as linked earlier, there's real world police departments, right now, who won't lift a finger even if you used the GPS to track down your stolen property. So it's not even unrealistic.

No, what law enforcement is going to be busy with is things like parking tickets (steady income stream) and big-profile captures. Those things will make them money, or give them good free PR. Everyday crime is expensive to solve, and has a lower profit margin.

Why stop there? Why not stomp your foot down and demand 100,000 nuyen.gif , a million? It's the GM's responsiblility to create the balance they want in their game. If the player's aren't happy and take the game sideways for example going to steal cars, that's up to them. But then it's also the GM's responsibility to bring that back into line.

Yes, it is up to the GM to communicate their expectations, so everyone's on the same page. However, if the fluff is bad-- runners are paid unreasonably low-- then problems will crop up. This is especially bad if grinding is more profitable.

In WoW the questgivers (Johnson's) start by offering you a couple of silver to go and risk life and limb in their quests (runs). The payment increases as the level increases.

Yeah, and there's a huge subset of WoW players who don't ever take the quests, they just spend every day grinding and selling stuff at the markets. Which is fine for a computer game, but a RPG is a social/group endeavor-- if one person refuses to take the adventure and go off to make stuff, everyone else's fun is affected.,

[binarywraith]

People are reading far too much in to the references and guidelines for payments. It's up to the GM to create the balance they want for their game, not the players to demand what they want from the GM.

I think you have a very different idea of the role of the GM at the table than I do. If my players are against something I'm doing to the point of outright rebellion, I am failing as a GM, as my one job is to run the game in such a fashion that everyone's having fun.

[Shemhazai]

....spend the IC night boosting cars and hocking them to chop shops until they've cleared what Mr. Johnson was offering....

The numbers you posted are wrong in my opinion. They are scrapping cars. You get only a fraction of that. That's assuming they'll even do business with someone they've never heard of. Someone in the crew should have the right contacts.

[Sendaz]

People are reading far too much in to the references and guidelines for payments. It's up to the GM to create the balance they want for their game, not the players to demand what they want from the GM.

While many of the arguments have gone in a round about manner on this, and yes we all have focused a bit much just on cars, but the point remains that as the way it is written in game you could be running for unreasonable periods of time before earning enough to really get upgrades/new toys unless your party adds looting bodies/scavenging gear to their repertoire.
Which in itself causes a whole slew of complications and then you think if we are just robbing bodies, why not just go stealing wholesale? We are not actually saying we should all go carjacking, but rather pointing out the discrepancy in payouts.

Now an experienced GM will feel comfortable tweaking things to fit the campaign, but a new guy sitting behind the screen is leaning heavily on the book's input to start with, for good or bad.
You yourself admitted payout should rely on a number of factors, so we are in agreement that payout could use a tweak and just want something that could reflect this better for other player to use as a baseline when they are trying to determine what a run is worth.

[apple]

In WoW the questgivers (Johnson's) start by offering you a couple of silver to go and risk life and limb in their quests (runs). The payment increases as the level increases.

Yes, that is the reason, why druids, warrios and mages (runners) band in a 5er groups and raid (runner crew) to clear small instances (evil corp subsidaries) and raids bosses (big evil corporatoins HQs) to loot epic items of them for the real upgrades (stealing cars or other valuable hardware). If the Johnson does not pay well. ,-)

SYL

[Blade]

But surely, if it's just so damn easy to steal all these cars and sell them on as easy as you would pawn your TV, why isn't every shadowrunner doing just this instead of runs?

Let's say everyone does it. The stolen car market gets a huge supply, while the demand will probably stays the same. Prices go down. People stop doing it if they can find better paying stuff (like stealing TVs).

Now let's say that you're in a situation where people in the Barrens are literally starving (which is the case according to some sourcebooks/GM) and that they are exploited either by SINners (working as very cheap illegal workforce) or SINlesses (workers in sweatshops, prostitutes, or people whose business is heavily taxed by the local gang/mafia). In that case, the very low pay for stolen cars is still good enough, and it will stay that way. The only limit is a price so low that people would rather die of starvation than sell stolen cars.

If you're in a situation where people in the Barrens can get a decent pay one way or another (which is the case according to other sourcebooks/GM), the price will finally find a sweet-spot, which will be the lowest price anyone is willing to work for (since, with our assumptions, car stealing is the default job that anybody can do).

So in any case, in that situation, car stealing will be not very profitable compared to other jobs, such as shadowrunning. The difference is what the base price will be. In the first case, Shadowrunning will be better if it pays more than what you need to survive while in the second it will need to be more rewarding than that.

This being said, there can also be other cases:

- Raising the demand. Car-stealing alone won't raise the demand above the supply, unless the other car supplies cease to exist (car manufacturers stop building cars). Unless there's some kind of huge paradigm shift (or if the hordes of car-stealers destroy all car making factories, or create a mega-virus to wreck the computers of car making factories, or get together to pass a law forbidding the making of new cars in order to support the jobs in the car-stealing industry that now outnumber those in the car making industry) this is very unlikely.

- Limiting the supply:
First solution: car-stealing becomes harder, reducing the number of car-stealers. Prices go up. We'll assume that Shadowrunning needs more skill than car-stealing. In that case, Shadowrunning needs to offer more than car-stealing to stay relevant.
Second solution: a competitor in the market gets an edge over the competition, driving them out of business. Since we consider that anyone can steal and sell car and that price are, as a result, as low as they could be, this means that either this person is stealing ALL THE CARS or that he's keeping competitors at bay with another solution, which probably involves keeping them under the bay, with cement shoes (or any similar solution, such as intimidation).

In a criminal setting, there's no limit to what one can do against the competition, as long as it's profitable enough. Violence (or the threat of violence) is often the most efficient solution. And once you've started, the only reason to stop is if you're up against bigger than you. Soon enough, there will be a handful of actors big enough to stand against one another. Just like in any other oligopoly, total competition will soon become a bad idea for them: they'll be better off sharing the market than spending all of their resources and risking what they have to get what's left. So they'll negotiate to share the market... and get rid of all competition that could endanger their activity.

This will, pretty much, always happen, especially in a criminal setting where there are no laws to limit competition. So the first solution becomes irrelevant in regard to the second: no matter how hard to do something is, there will be an oligopoly (or monopoly) dominating the market. Since there are nothing to prevent these top actors to invest in all possible fields, the biggest ones will soon control mostly everything as long as it's profitable. That's why you will have criminal syndicate dominating every criminal businesses except possibly for some niche where other actors are already there and too costly to overthrow (for example Tamanous in the organ-legging business).

It doesn't mean it's impossible for Shadowrunners to enter the dominated market. It means that they'll have to fight their way up there. If the market they want to get control of is of low value, they won't get much of a fight (the monopoly/oligopoly won't spend more to protect the market than what they can get out of it). So Shadowrunning needs to be more profitable than fighting to get access to the less profitable markets. That's when a weird mechanism comes into play.

Let's say that a group of people want to seize a market (or a the part of a market) from a criminal syndicate. Let's say that this market or part of the market is worth x nuyens. As long as the criminal syndicate spend x-1 nuyens to defend it, it's worth it for them. To defend against that group, the syndicate will need to oppose a stronger group (be it a bigger group or a better group). To make it simple, to defend against runners, you'll send slightly better runners. So slightly better runners will be paid up to x-1 nuyen to protect the market. In order for the runners to be able to get access to a market, they need to find a market where x-1 doesn't get you a team of runner better than them.

Let's consider, for a better illustration, three markets: one is worth x, the other x+1 and the third x-1. They are protected by runners paid "value-1" nuyens. We assume that the price of runners is directly correlated with their level. The runners protecting the x nuyens market (for x-1 nuyens) are of level A. We consider another team of runner of level A. They can only safely attack the x-1 market, defended by runners paid (x-1)-1=x-2, which means that they're of level A-1. So they have the choice between seizing the x-1 market (worth x-1 nuyens) or get paid x-1 nuyens to defend the x market.

So in the end, the price of a job for runners will be the price of the market they can seize (which will be the price they'll get paid for a job). A group of runners trying to get into the car stealing business will be able to make as much money as they'd make taking regular jobs.

What does that mean? If the runners start stealing cars, they'll soon run into the main competitor. They'll be able to fight or negotiate with it for a part of the business that will bring them more or less exactly what they'd get with shadowruns.

But what is that amount? That's dictated by the market. If there are runner teams that are willing to fight slightly worse runners for 500 nuyens, then it will be 500 nuyens. If no runners will get out of bed for less than 5 million nuyens, then it will be 5 million nuyens.

And then we're back to demand and supply and other opportunities. If there are few runners and high demand, they can cost a lot. If there are many runners and few demands, then it depends on what the runners can do outside of running the shadows. If they can get well-paid jobs for corporations, many runners will move to corporate jobs, the number of actual runners will go down and price will go up and stabilize around the price of the corporate job they can get. If they can't get jobs in the SINner world (because of some factors of your game world) and if SINners are more or less slaves to a small criminal elite the runners can't be a part of, then prices will be the lowest price a runner can accept before they spend more in bullets, healing and squatter lifestyle than what they get.

So once again: price of cars don't matter, game universe does.

[Shortstraw]

Yes, that is the reason, why druids, warrios and mages (runners) band in a 5er groups and raid (runner crew) to clear small instances (evil corp subsidaries) and raids bosses (big evil corporatoins HQs) to loot epic items of them for the real upgrades (stealing cars or other valuable hardware). If the Johnson does not pay well. ,-)

SYL

To follow on they will take Mr J's quests for legendary rewards (deltaware move by wire 3).

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Or, you know, they could do what some players do, and LOOT EVERYTHING. Most GMs get the hint around the time a player cultivates a Tanamous contract to sell the corpses to.

Spikes, Troll Ganger turned Shadowrunner, gets 500 Nuyen per body on delivery.
Not a bad deal, really. Streets in certain areas of the city are looking rather nice these days. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Siygess]

Now an experienced GM will feel comfortable tweaking things to fit the campaign, but a new guy sitting behind the screen is leaning heavily on the book's input to start with, for good or bad.
You yourself admitted payout should rely on a number of factors, so we are in agreement that payout could use a tweak and just want something that could reflect this better for other player to use as a baseline when they are trying to determine what a run is worth.

That's definately the case and this thread does seem to have gone off track in discussing the merits and pitfalls of the Shadowcarthiefrunner. Personally I think some kind of chart system with baselines for the jobs and then multipliers and additions a GM can add based on XY factors would be the best to guide rookie GMs (and players) in suggested payouts.

But for me personally, letting players decide how much they want to be paid for jobs is a definate no-no unless they're absolutely top-dollar runners with unmatchable skillsets.

Yeah, see, you completely lost all my respect when you compared Shadowrun to World of Warcraft.

For one thing, WoW has something Shadowrun does not, that being that if you actually do beef it in WoW, worst-case you come back minus a trivial sum of money and with a temporary debuff that makes it harder for you to fight for a half hour or so.

Not that I'm really craving for your respect or anything but I wasn't the one that compared WoW to Shadowrun, I was responding to someone else who did. The point I was trying to make is you can't compare them as they're totally different genres and gametypes. It'd be like comparing Monopoly to Scrabble simply because they're boardgames.

[Cain]

That's definately the case and this thread does seem to have gone off track in discussing the merits and pitfalls of the Shadowcarthiefrunner. Personally I think some kind of chart system with baselines for the jobs and then multipliers and additions a GM can add based on XY factors would be the best to guide rookie GMs (and players) in suggested payouts.

But for me personally, letting players decide how much they want to be paid for jobs is a definate no-no unless they're absolutely top-dollar runners with unmatchable skillsets.

Actually, I think player expectations is absolutely something to consider when setting run payments.

Let's say the players come into the game expecting they'll get 10,000 or so per run. Even if a GM says they want a low-payout campaign, the players will probably object if they start with 500 nuyen a run-- that's way too low, at least in relation to what the players want. You're going to have a lot of problems, all because you didn't take the player desires into account.

As you said, there are a lot of things to consider. Player desires and expectations is one of them.