My players don't loot., Am I blessed? Options

[Canid13]

[iPad]

I was ignoring the foci as only one player gets a look in on the value of those things (grumble grumble one player allowed to amass millions when the rest of the team dont). We nicked the MAW off that ork johnson who dumped it on the roof top when that other runner team attacked (chaotic worlded their copter while they were trying to line down). I didnt know the ballista was brought, but the rest is accurate. :P

Hey if your going to use it against us then we can equally grab it.

[wargear]

In our current game, all ganger characters, we loot when we can...we gotta eat.

In our last game, all ex-spec op characters, we never looted on mission. There wasn't any time. All our 'runs were planned out almost to the second. We would get a mission from the Johnson with, say, a 2 week time frame and we'd be back to him 2 days later with the goods...including legwork time.
Good character/team design. Good player/team dynamics. Good planning. No cowboys. :)

[Canid13]

iPad, if I were going to do that then I'd have to take the gloves off and stop trying to not kill you guys. It's the only way to balance the fact that you'd be looting tens of thousands in weapons and ammo a run.

As for the foci, for the most part that character has paid the group for them. Granted, the gold bars weren't disclosed, but then again you guys need to grow backbones anyway :o)

I think I'll shut up now or my party may well self destruct :o)

[Ed_209a]

Anyone had a player scavenge cyberware by petrifying the corpse and sustain the spell while his buddies pour vinegar on the limestone statue?

It should leave just the implants.

And when the spell is dropped, you have soup to sell to ghouls!

<ewwww>

[Nylan]

thats just about the grossest thing I've ever heard

[RangerJoe]

Wow. An idea that excellent should be in spoiler tags to keep it from my players.

[nezumi]

One of my players has something close. He missed the 'turn to goo' spell, I suspect because he liked free ware. After some negotiating, I finally agreed to a spell that speeds up the decay process, taking it from years to weeks. So I guess at some point he's going to grab some cybered troll, lock him in the closet and 'rot' him until there's nothing left but dust and ware. I'm still trying to figure out if it was good or not that he needs to keep the body around for a prolonged period of time for it to work.

[Req]

Couldn't you just lock the dead troll in the closet with a whole lotta ants? The normal kind, not the big kick-your-ass spirit kind.

Saves on the sustaining time. :)

[Bob the Ninja]

What about flesh-eating bacteria for destroying the body while leaving the 'ware safe?

[Edward]

If your taking the body why not just deliver it intact and reasonably fresh to the dealer in 2nd hand cyber. Then he and you both know you didn’t frag it up. Run over him 5 times with a cyber wear scanner (a good one you looted from a reputable establishment) and he wont be able to rip you off.

Edward

[FSBO]

So FrostyNSO did you get a satisfactory answer?

[Canid13]

MRJ'sLBB has a Tanamous contact in the contacts section - so why not have someone like that in your campaign, or the Ghoul contact in the same section? Go along, drop off the corpses and come back in a day or so for the cyber.

Granted, anything like this relies on trust with your contact, but if he/she/they get the food they need to live I'd have thought it not a major sticking point. Afterall, any Ghoul with any semblence of their personality intact is gonna know you don't bite the hand that feeds :o)

[nezumi]

Hey, I didn't make the character. He just wanted something that destroyed flesh. I think, in total, he has 3 different versions, all at decent levels (sterilize and two custom spells that are pretty much specialized flavors). But he seems smart enough, I'm just waiting for the other shoe to rop.

[Enigma]

My thinking as a GM is this. My players know that if they steal cars for the point of selling cars then there will be trouble. Stealing cars to get away is fine. Geneally, where the looting is incidental (for example, steal a rocket launcher off a dead goon to blast a hole in the wall to escape) it fine - it's a plot device not an income generating stream.

The exception is things which are way too expensive to let go. Be they a focus, a cyberdeck, an obviously incredibly expensive gizmo thing or whatever, if it's hideously expensive then I let them have a go because it's there on purpose. If they are smart about it, as in make some effort to "launder" or otherwise conceal the evidence trail then it should be OK, for example paying a shaman or two to seriously ward a storage locker into which they hide the focus until the heat dies off and they can go sell it to someone. If they say "excellent, a new focus" and carry it around in their boot until someone makes a good offer, then it's the min-maxed recovery squad for them.

When it gets to the point where they'll finish a combat scene, then rip out a sack (it always seems to be a sack, not a bag, not a case) and pile credsticks, guns, ammo, grenades, armour, wristwatches, rings and interesting boots into it, then they've gone way over the line and I let them know it.

For God's sake, these people are criminals. The thinking shouldn't be "I can't loot that, it's immoral or evil" but "I could loot that, but would I get away with it, or would it be more trouble than it's worth?"

[FSBO]

I don't see it as a morality thing its is about being a pro you do the mish and you try and get away scott free. To loot out of greed risks the team and your ass.

[Kagetenshi]

To take a job you don't like the looks of because you're short on cred, or to fail a job because you didn't have enough to throw at the job, also risks the team and your ass.

You're a pro. Think about what that means. It means you do it for money. That's the difference between you and an amateur.

~J

[Ed Simons]

Like I said, there's smart looting and dumb looting and I listed my criteria before. Smart looting means you make more money on a run. Dumb looting gets you dead.

[DrJest]

I don't personally loot unless I need to. The exception is when something that's just too damn good to pass up (a Fairlight Excalibur sitting on the recently-toasted corp decker's desk) comes my way.

Even so, after some years of playing my original character (and rarely actually getting around to selling the guns nicked to survive a firefight) I discovered that I had a weapons list running to some thirty entries for guns that I would actually choose to use again (my fave is the over-and-under assault rifle/narcoject rifle scavenged during a run against Transys Neuronet - brings a whole new meaning to "Freeze or die!") plus a bunch of random smeg-grade stuff that I eventually wound up donating to a wizgang in return for them protecting my crashpad.

[blakkie]

@Ed_209a:: Do you play with geologists or something that they thought of that?

As for looting, hey it is -roleplaying- for a Racoon Shaman to snag things that fall across his path. :) But being choosy of what you take (doesn't interfere with mission, easy to carry, easy to fence, hard to track back to you) is smart running. I personally find the most use from identity theft, but it usually requires help from a decker to pull off as well as ensure that a given persona is safe to assume (no criminal record, no large outstanding debts, family is distant or non-existant).

Without looting typically we have a hard time maintaining our networth, muchless growing it. So it is somewhat driven by the GM.

As for the magically changing equipment, umm, that's pretty cheezy in my books. There are better ways to handle that. So what happens when the PC team assenses that Force 2 Power Focus and then proceeds to geek the mage? You lie about the focus as soon as they assense? If you lie does it still act as a Force 2 Power Focus...until the PCs get it in their possession? Or does it immediately become a mundane trinket as soon as they succeed a perception check?

[Canid13]

The mage in my group is smart enough to not ask what force a focus is until he's got it in his possession (ie liberated from a dead mage). At that point, I'll give him the lesser value on the prep sheet I used for the run.

An OpFor mage may have a F5 Shielding Focus, but it will immediately become F2 or F3 (depending on how benevolent I'm feeling) as soon as the mage gets geeked.

It's perhaps not strictly fair or right, but it saves me from having to geek too many PC's for running around with too many do-dads :o)

[Ed Simons]

[Kagetenshi]

[blakkie]

[blakkie]

BTW I didn't include numbers to those two limiting factors. In the case of the Shielding focus that respresents 20 Karma to bind. Certainly nothing to sneeze at. Since a Shielding focus needs to be up most of the time to be useful a Force 5 focus will put a serious kink in other foci use until the PC initates a few grades. Only one point for a sustaining focus? That's pretty crappy armor to keep you from getting geeked by someone taking you down the ol' fashion way with knife/gun/fist.