Shadowrunners or In-house forces? Options

[Da9iel]

I've been wondering exactly how much sense the shadowrunning profession makes. I know, don't mess with the system--it's fun and it works, but wouldn't it actually make a lot more sense especially for the big corps to raise their own covert teams in-house and off the books using plausible deniability. (I've always wanted to say plausible deniability.) Hiring outsiders just doesn't seem to make sense unless the corp is too small to have its own force, but I've seen tons of runs hired out by Renraku, Aztechnology, etc. What say you?

[Zazen]

How plausible do you want your deniability?

When you hire runners the right way, they don't know they're working for you. That makes it pretty easy to deny. When one of those in-house guys gets caught, gets greedy, or gets tracked down, that's less easy to deny.

[Connor]

unless those in-house guys don't know who they 'really' work for.

[Da9iel]

I guess you're right Zazen. I was just thinking about the old Mission Impossible shows. "US Gov't denies any knowledge yadda yadda self destruct in 10 seconds." Something like that anyway.

Connor might have a good point, but it might just be easier with the current system.

[Xirces]

I think there's some room for both, but the SR community will be very small to the point where it doesn't exist. Certainly nobody would advertise the fact and media coverage, shoe deals etc would not happen for runners (but I'm not going to start on that here).

In-house agents would be assigned more routine jobs - where utmost secrecy is not required. No matter how good they are and how unknown they are there is a link back to your corp. The jobs are also likely to be intermittent - having highly skilled operatives sitting around playing cards is not cost-efficient.

As a runner you don't know who you're working for unless they tell you or you snoop around to find out (which should be the first thing any runner does). Since there's another thread about Harlequin that shows some great examples of this.

There's also the issue of risk - if an employee is injured or killed you as the corp have to take some responsibility for it - a corp employee will have life insurance, death benefits, pensions etc. If a runner dies on the job nobody cares - it doesn't cost the corp anything and Mr J just hands over a bundle of cred at the end.

I think the best comparison is to look at modern day consultants (I actually work for an IT security consultancy). The skill levels required are high as are salaries, but a typical client will not have constant need for someone of that calibre so it makes sense to come to us when there's a specific job to do. Sure the payments might seem high (if you're paying a couple of grand a day it stacks up), but the alternative is to have someone on staff (costing maybe 100k+ a year (salary is only a part of the cost of emplying someone)). Then what happens when that person is ill or on holiday? Are they spending their whole time utilising the skills you're paying for?

Just from a purely financial aspect consultants and thus shadowrunners make sense to corps.

[Siege]

It seems unlikely that Mitsuhama would subcontract their spec ops people out to Ares given

1) cost of training
2) political ramifications if identified

Not to start the endless cycle of "yes, runners could exist" and "no, they couldn't" debate.

Although with memory wipes, it's possible mega-corps might hire soldiers who sell their bodies to the Company and agree to have a complete memory wipe upon mustering out, provided they survive.

-Siege

[toturi]

There are in-house forces, they are called company men. The problem with company men are that they are not as deniable as regular runners. Company men take jobs almost exclusively from the company they are allied with and never against that company. So unless they are really good at covering their jobs, they can be traced and the probability that they will be traced to you is higher. It might not be something they can take to court with, but now they know.

[Eyeless Blond]

Okay, so is anyone going to play devil's advocate and say that shadowrunners (perhaps better called "supplemental security/informational contractors" :D) could not possibly exist, particularly in the world as presented in the SR sourcebooks? Right now all I see is a bunch of people agreeing with each other. :)

[Siege]

Wait until Bit shows up. He makes good points for the "shadowrunners are polite fiction" faction.

-Siege

[BitBasher]

You must be thinking of someone else unless I was just playing devil's advocate some day. I don't remember ever saying that, but that doesn't mean I didn't! :D

I think that SR's in the context of the game world are a necessity because of the draconian consequences of what happens of a Mega is hit and can prove who did it to the Corporate Court. Direct action that affects another corp's bottom line is expressly forbidden by the CC.

---------------------------------
Now, to argue the other side, realistically, the amount of Nyuen spent on security alone to thwart SR's is probably FAR greater than the cash any company makes from the results of those runs. The corps lose tons of cash every year because of the SR mentality. It is a losing proposition. Furthermore the shadow community only exists because they corps allow them to. There is no such thing as the "good SR against the evil corps" because the "evil corps" foor the bill for pretty much the entire shadow community.

[Phaeton]

All this further adds to my belief that half of the cyberpunk writers of the '80s were needlessly pessimistic dorks... :/

[Siege]

I don't know about dorks, but they were pessimistic. That defines the genre.

And I don't know I'll buy needless, either. Besides defining the genre, suspense is a lot easier to develop with an oppressive atmosphere than a more "sunshine and flowers" feeling.

-Siege

[Phaeton]

Yeah. Still...Sometimes there are times when the cables of my suspension of disbelief are snapped because to me it just dant make no sense...Even fiction can seem absurd at times. Ah well. I'm nitpicking.

...As usual. :P


~Phaeton

EDIT: Hey, "Neuromancer" wasn't necessarily pessimistic---just gritty. So the genre isn't ALWAYS pessimistic...

[Siege]

I used to think that until I had brief access to the uncensored police files.

Absurd has been redefined since then. :grinbig:

I always have to look at fiction with the thought "ok, supposing this and this, then this happens...alright, run with it."

But yes, I do know what you mean about suspending disbelief, not hanging it from the neck until dead.

-Siege

[Eyeless Blond]

[Phaeton]

...Um...No habla Legalese? :? Sorry. I think that went over my head. Economics is far from being my forte...

[Sahandrian]

[FlakJacket]

I generally thought that Shadowrunners were used for their ultiate deniability whicl company men were used for jobs where the corp didn't want anyone outside the corporation to know about it.

[Phaeton]

@ Sahandrian: Ahhhhhhh...Got it.

@ FlakJacket: That makes sense. Seems like a logical rationale to me, at any rate.

[Abstruse]

Translation: When a company gets big, it doesn't have to worry about the economy. 10,000 people get laid off, the value of the dollar drops to 1/10 what it was before, whatever. Doesn't matter. They're still there and they still have the market share. As far as they're concerned, they ARE the market. Ares isn't going out of business and doesn't have to worry about going out of business. They're so spread out and control so much of the market, they have a solid base that's going to support them no matter what the economy does. Luxury clothing stores having a bad year because of recession? The cheapo place in the mall is making up for it. No one's flying because of terrorist scares? They build cars, they own the trains, they make up the losses there.

Therefore, the only real thing the megas have to worry about are the other megas. You want your competition to waste money? Start hitting them so they spend money upgrading security (Oh, you happen to own a security company like Knight Errant? Lucky you!). This applies across the board, from the MCT North American HQ in Seattle (who I believe uses KE for security as well as in-house forces) to the small subsidiary owned through 5 holding companies. You hit the HQ or the subsidiary (either one), you're taking money from the pockets of the corporation on two levels -- the loss of whatever you take as well as the budget they have to allocate to security instead of R&D or whatever.

The point of the matter is, though, why use shadow assets instead of in-house forces? In-house forces can be extracted, killed and ID'd, bribed, captured, leave a stand of hair for DNA identification, etc. You think MCT's going to pay Knight Errant to run their security when KE's parent company Ares is the reason they need to up security in the first place? Nope. So you hire deniable assets. If a shadowrunner gets killed or any of those things, doesn't matter. They ID the runner, and they don't find ties to Ares. Even if they capture the runners and get that their employer was Ares (if the runners even knew in the first place), all Ares has to do is say "Wasn't us. Maybe Renraku hired them claiming to be us." No proof, no reprocussions or reparations via the Corporate Court.

"But what if the corp gets the runners and they ID the Mr. J, and the corp connects HIM to Ares?" Easy. "Renraku must have disgused their man as one of ours. That guy was found dead -- wait, hang on...*BLAM BLAM* -- found dead three days ago."

The Abstruse One

[Fresno Bob]

Eeeeeexactly.

[Glyph]

Also remember that even the most repressive governments still have rebels, reformers, and revolutionaries. Not every shadowrunner exists solely at the capricious whim of the megacorps. I don't buy the "megacorps are all-powerful" mentality. They are monolithic entities that collectively control most of the world, either directly or indirectly, but they are not all-seeing and all-knowing. Don't get me wrong, I like the main internal conflict of Shadowrun (idealism versus realizing you are only part of the system you think you are "fighting" against).

But runners don't exist because the megacorporations smugly and compacently allow them to... they exist because of their paranoia, short-sightedness, and vicious internal battles. In a way, they are a symbol of how greed and the use of violence can cause things to escalate beyond your control. You will have runners who can eventually influence the megacorporations by their actions (think Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams). You will also have runners who are either idealists, crazies, or genuine rebels, who will choose their own targets.

[BitBasher]

Actually glyph, my statement of "SR's exist only because corps allow them to" is taken directly fromt he corp download where it's explicitly stated that should they so decide, the Megas could destoy the entire shadow market. That's a canon viewpoint.

[Phaeton]

Shadowrun is quickly beginning to have about as much logic behind it as why the Machines use the humans for fuel in the Matrix films when they really don't have to...

[Eyeless Blond]