Stealing a car Options

[Shemhazai]

Thanks for the detailed perspective.

You could make your world such that car owners can't afford monitoring, that geolocation isn't accepted by the masses, and that people don't tolerate annoying messages saying that their car has lost connectivity.

Spoofing the car to make it appear to still be safe and sound, or hacking the anti-theft system are reasonable ways to get around the issue.

Regarding payout, I don't see it that way. To me it looks like some players aren't satisfied with what they can get power-wise out of character generation. To take min-maxing to an extreme, just pick Magic E and Resources D. Min-max Attributes, Skills and Edge. Then once the game has started and you're no longer restricted to starting gear availability, begin your career as a thief and simply steal until you make enough money to purchase the high-end things you want. Advocates of this will insist that it's risk-free and highly rewarding. After that, they can begin going on runs with the power level they want.

[Bearclaw]

A decker good enough to be a professional shadowrunner is elite, right? It SHOULD be almost impossible to secure things from the elite. Otherwise, there is no point in being elite, and the whole game/world is stupid.
Mostly a professional shadowrunner should only feel challenged when breaking in to a black site hidden in the alps or extracting a guy from the Azzie pyramid in Seattle. If jacking a nice car on the street is a big challenge, you are just not very good, and therefore shouldn't be getting paid 15K for a nights work. Because if you can't steal a car, while literally millions of other people in the world can, you also can't hack the your target's security system. And if you can hack your target's security system, but you can't steal a car, it's because the GM doesn't want you to steal a car, and he's cheating.

[Sengir]

If you own a car, and you own and agent, you could instruct the car to offer the agent 3 mark on the vehicle. Now the agent can always spot the car if it is on the matrix.

Hmm, do three marks suffice for automatic spotting?

The problem is that agents can't be run on Commlinks, so this option isn't available for your average car owner.

I try my best to ignore the rule that decks can't run Common Use programs...but since the OP mentioned this being for Missions, he probably has to abide it

[Shemhazai]

A decker good enough to be a professional shadowrunner is elite, right? It SHOULD be almost impossible to secure things from the elite. Otherwise, there is no point in being elite, and the whole game/world is stupid.
Mostly a professional shadowrunner should only feel challenged when breaking in to a black site hidden in the alps or extracting a guy from the Azzie pyramid in Seattle. If jacking a nice car on the street is a big challenge, you are just not very good, and therefore shouldn't be getting paid 15K for a nights work. Because if you can't steal a car, while literally millions of other people in the world can, you also can't hack the your target's security system. And if you can hack your target's security system, but you can't steal a car, it's because the GM doesn't want you to steal a car, and he's cheating.

Not such a challenge, but using other people's cars as your preferred joyride when going on a run introduces more things that can go wrong. It's arguably reckless behavior. Why not just get your own vehicle that has all the loose ends taken care of?

To address your argument, I've heard that line of thinking before. In 5th ed, skills go to 12, but starting characters are limited to 6. So no, not all shadowrunners are elite, but any team should be able to get a stolen car. Should they choose to do that, they should at least make some effort to prevent getting caught for it. If nobody on the team has any helpful knowledge skills like identifying suitable cars, or knowing when the cops patrol; if nobody thought to disable nearby security cameras; if witnesses weren't taken into account; if the runners actually jack the car in person; if this is done repeatedly with no attention to detail and a general sense that you can just take things because of how cool it is to be a runner, then yeah, complications will arise.

If the team took the car theft as seriously as they would a high-level extraction, then of course they would get away clean. Too bad used and stolen car parts can't be fenced for much in 5th ed.

[Bearclaw]

Which is fine. My first mission, we boosted a bread truck to take into the CZ. It turned out to be a good choice because we ended up with the back full of gangers we helped out of a sticky situation. The GM felt that fencing stolen cars was outside of what Missions was about, and I didn't disagree, I just dropped it, and we'll let the universe decide where it ended up. My character didn't care.
The second mission had a real rigger, so I got to do what I do best. Look for signal's and hide behind the giant troll.

[BlackJaw]

Hmm, do three marks suffice for automatic spotting?

Icons with your marks on them can not hide from you. You can always spot an icon (like a persona, or a car in this case) on the matrix if it has at least one of your marks on it.

Three marks just makes it tougher to remove.

[Sengir]

Icons with your marks on them can not hide from you. You can always spot an icon (like a persona, or a car in this case) on the matrix if it has at least one of your marks on it.

The way I remembered it, only the owner got the automatic spotting. But you are right indeed: You can always keep track of your marks, so you can spot an icon you have a mark on without a test, no matter the distance. (p. 235)


@Shemhazai: A stolen vehicle can cause unwanted attention, but so can taking an identical car to different crime scenes. I'd say it biols down to a question of the character's personal style, both ways have their pros and cons.

[Smash]

Sedanrun isn't an artifact of vehicles being too easy to sell/steal. That's completely getting the wrong end of the stick, and trying to make vehicles harder to steal to fight Sedanrun is treating the symptoms (badly) not the cause. Sedanrun is an artifact of the risk/reward structure of Shadowrun sometimes being messed up, in that 'runners are basically severely underpaid by default, compared to the prices of things in the world (and also, to be fair, some illegal things are way too cheap in the SR world). But that's a whole other thread. Suffice to say, vehicles are plenty hard enough to steal in SR without resorting to making it harder than the rules already allow. Obviously if the players try to make a living stealing cars and not doing 'runs, that's not because of the cars or the rules.

Let me start by saying that I agree. but....

One of the original premises of Shadowrun has been lost with this line of thinking. The way runs used to work was the Johnsone would say "I need you to do this. Take this access code and this information that gives you a one off window to get into A". The pay would suck but the benefit of the run was not so much the pay, but the opportunities the Johnson has afforded you.

A run I just GM'ed was for the group to break into a delta clinic and steal an arm for the Johnson. The Johnson knew about the arm and knew that there would be excess stock and reduced security (due to unusual circumstances). So the crew was able to break an and grab a few pieces of gear (Not deltaware) that they could re-sell later on. This is something they couldn't have otherwise accomplished on their own.

So running should be about the indirect benefits making the pay worthwhile. Stealing cars and selling them doesn't allow for this. All that being said, the rewards offered in the base book are crazily low.