What should I be getting paid?, Going Wages for Shadowrunners. Options

[nezumi]

[Ed Simons]

[Dawnshadow]

IF a someone won't GM the game the I the player want to play.. yes, I leave.

Usually, it's a question of style, but not always. If I'm not fond of the style of game being run and I'm feeling like I'm not getting the advancement ability that I should, then it's a pretty sure thing I'll walk. If I'm enjoying the game, then I'll probably continue -- and make it pretty clear that I'd like to advance faster. Doesn't mean I will advance as fast as I want, but it does speed things up a little. I loathe playing the exact same character long term -- and getting paid not enough to upgrade anything really bugs me.

Now.. advancement in Shadowrun is decided by 2 things. Nuyen and Karma. Karma awards? High karma pay outs are fun, and advance all characters really fast. (Even metalheads, despite opinions to the contrary. Double digit skills ARE good things, and all stats at RML or higher, unaugmented are useful.) High nuyen games advance all characters fast too -- more so the metalheads, unless there's karma for cash, because foci take karma to bond.

[Modesitt]

Thanks for putting this thread up - I almost forgot about it.

[Kagetenshi]

Yeah, for that kind of run I'd go in the ¥90,000-¥120,000 range. I'd still only give ~30% up front, most likely, or more in the form of non-liquid assets.

~J

[Edward]

If you think that a 5 jackrabbit a month crime spree will be noticed buy the star you really don’t have a very high background crime rate in your game.

The biggest time I can see these problems coming up is when a player wrights up a million nuyen character with 25K in monthly fixed expenses and then finds out the average income is going to be 10K per player per month. The GM really should be telling the players what there characters are used to earning before character creation. Of cause there can be player to GM discussion on this point to come up with a game style that will be enjoyed but that figure should be known.

[Swing Kid]

I just read all of the posted replies, and I must say, there is some great information there. I am interested in seeing more actual numbers if anyone has the time. Lets assume for this discussion that we have the following team:

Street Sam
Shaman
Combat Mage
Decker
Rigger

Now, lets assume that this team survives a ten year career, and that in that career they went from untalented nobodies (new characters) to top-notch, top dollar professionals, and that their reputations and talents rose at a rate that each year they were 1/10th more talented and 1/10th more respected in the shadowrunning community. Remember, this is just to calibrate actual earnings, and yes, I realize that this cannot be used as a definitive fee-guide, as there are still other variables.
So, with this assumption, what should the first year version of this team (team, not individual) expect for a B&E Prototype steal that would be considdered moderately difficult for this team (Say, stealing the secret recipe for Ninja-Burger's new McRonin burger)? Then, what could the 10th year version of the same team expect from a B&E Prototype steal that would be considdered moderately difficult at that point in their careers (say, stealing Deus's CPU). How about on their 3rd year, 5th year, and 8th year? What about wet-work runs, insurstions, or all out investigations.
I am not honestly expecting anyone to draw up an excel chart showing these ranges, but I would be interested in the forum's ideas on the subject. Think of it as Mr. Johnson training 101.

Thanks again for the help.

[Slacker]

Its going to take a hell of alot more than 5 Jackrabbits to make up 25K. Think about it this way. When you steal a car off the street it is a used vehicle. According to the Rigger 3 build rules that takes off .60 of the Markup factor on it (subcompact car's normal mark-up factor being 1.00). That means in the case of a jackrabbit 60% is taken off retail price before you even get the car to a fence. There are many things a fence/chop-shop have to do to prevent the car being traced back to them and to sell it off somewhere else. So to sell it to a fence at 20% of current legal value of the car might still be quite a bit, but let's just say you do sell it to a fence at 20% of current value.

New jackrabbit (E) costs 15,500 :nuyen: . Now take off the 60% for it being used. That leaves its current legal value at 6200. Now reduce it to the 20% you may be able to sell it to a fence for and you are only getting 1240 :nuyen: . And that is being generous.

Who the hell is going to want to buy a stolen Jackrabbit anyways? If you are willing to take the risks of owning a stolen car you either want something with class or some piece of shit that is dirt cheap because you can't afford jack.

[Crusher Bob]

The aftermarket for stolen cars is not in whole cars but in parts... That's why the places you take the stolen cars to are called 'chop shops'. The component parts of a stolen car are much harder to id than the whoel stolen car...

So, jackrabits, the most common car on the road will have a large market for spare parts. The cars are broken down into parts and sold to mechanics who then pass them off as new or re-manufactured parts.

So stealing 5 jackrabits a month (a no risk activity) gets you enough for a middle lifestyle. Running, which is much more dangerous and requires much more skills and equipment better pay a lot more than stealing jackrabbits does...

If you can steal ford americars instead of jackrabbits, you make even more money...

[Crusher Bob]

Looking at some handy dandy crime statistics for Atlanta, GA there were around 1,975 cars stolen every month there in 2002.

Our all singing all dancing jackrabit stealing team of 4 guys, stealing 20 rabits a month (to make middle lifestyle) would only account for around 1% of the number of cars stolen than month.

[Kagetenshi]

[Johnnycache]

My take on it has always been if you set up a character to have huge expenses, but don't buy yourself the high-level contacts and infra-structure you need to maintain them, you set yourself up to lose your starting equipment. It's not my fault as GM if you bought a bunch of shirts and no hangers, dig?

Also, I let players bargin, to a point, and if they bargin well, they get more money. I tend to also give tiered rewards - "get the paydata" pays ten grand, "don't kill anybody" is a bonus, "don't be seen" is another bonus, "Don't make a copy and sell it to someone else" is a third, etc, so the good players get more money. Basically, the higher their percentage score would be in SC:Chaos Theory, the more of the max fee they get.

I make even top notch characters work cheaply for a new fixer or johnson at first. - - What the characters are trusted with by their associates is almost as much a factor, in my mind, as what they are capable of, so I see nothing wrong with "Hey, go strong arm Vincenzo, down at the Kit-Kat, he's been runnin' numbers outta the back and it's BS. You settle him good, I'll give youse a little walkin' around money, trow you a bone on sumpthin' else" type missions.

I like to screw with their headmeats a little, too - maybe offer them discount cyber from that company's specific line of toys, or have an Ares Johnson show up and pay them with 15K worth of Ares product instead of 10k cash. I also like to make them make a little B&E mini run for supplies, if they insist they need something key to a run that's a little exotic.

There's also a social factor-I think the players should be bound by the characters they chose to make. If you've seen the (mediocre) Shaft remake, you'll remember the character Peoples - he was a tough, elite, successful criminal, but he had that old "etiquette 1(3) (criminal)" going on, so he had to find someone else to extend his social reach. If they make a team that's all :nuyen: 1,000,000 cyber-butchers or a ritual circle unto itself, and no handlers,(I call this the "lecropolis" effect after that ATHF where one guy says he's there because "[he's] the only one that looks normal enough to go into town and buy food), they're going to have to roleplay a solution to the social problem they gave themselves. They chose to have characters with no social, financial, or practical acumen when they bought themselves that 6th die in submachine gun instead.

I actually had a party once that was three sammys and a mage. They ended up taking over a street-level BTL gang because they needed rides. See, none of them took a drive skill, none of them were social enough to get contacts to do it, they didn't want to continously pay drivers, and they couldn't just take the bus to jobs - so I told them they either took BS 'protection' type jobs until they got the karma for some 'life skills' or they figured out how their characters would actually solve that problem. After about ten OOG minutes of scheming, the mage (the 'smart' one) says "Why don't we just . . . make someone do it?" and we were off. The funny thing? They had an effing BLAST subverting the gang, so it all worked out. :D

They point being, those players built characters incabable of securing employment commensurate with their capabilities, characters really only fit to be someone else's employees - instead of making fleshed out characters, they made min-maxed thugs, so I didn't feel obliged to give them work that would pay their way.

If they really won't work for what I'm paying, to the point it turns into a member measuring contest between me and them, I offer them something worth huge bucks, and make sure they earn the fee. A run that will pay for a panzer doesn't seem like such a great deal anymore when you suddenly realize dealing with the opposition actually requires a tank.

I pay the players and let them fight about the split - shadowrun, to me, is a caper movie with trolls, and a good caper movie should have a fight over the split.

[shadow_scholar]

My current group of new players are just starting out, so they're the low men on the totem pole, but they don't mind. They realize it takes time to build up some street cred and get a reputation, but in the meantime the paychecks are gonna be a bit small. The thing is, they're all mundanes, so when they need a mage I decided not to give them a standard mage-for-hire, instead I set them up with a Free Spirit who isn't interested in cash, he's more interested in getting their karma. So if they need that magic that badly they have to part with some of it, so they try real hard not to have to use magic when they don't absolutely need it, but magic is so damn handy they're often really torn about it. Little does the dumb troll character know, but I had them go against an adept with a Force 4 weapon focus Katana, so after defeating the guy he's got about half a million nuyen just sitting there without realizing it while he finally just bought his first cell phone and still eats soy-ramen. Ah the things you can pull with new players who aren't familiar with the world yet, plus, that adept will come calling again one of these days to get his focus back.

[Edward]

Kagetenshi
The problem with paying an amount that makes sense is that you can wind up with a teem consisting of a rigger with 25K in expenses, in a teem with others that have low expenses and will happily do low risk low pay runs, its about making shore that the teem has people that do the same level of work.

Johnnycache, I disagree with you one a few points.

First you talk about having the infrastructure and contacts to maintain your equipment, knowing a mechanic doesn’t help if you cant pay for parts, and nearly every character has a fixer contact one would assume that fixer is his regular employer and knows the characters capabilities. Even if it’s a level 1 contact that just means he wont do you any favors, not that he thinks you’re a street punk that cant do jobs worth real nuyen.

A sliding pay scale is a good idear but its the average that matters much of the time

Top notch characters will have difficulty living on those cheep runs, and there starting fixer contact should be giving them better, only if they had to move base city would I expect them to have to prove themselves starting anywhere near the bottom, this should be strictly a part of a plot, not the default. If I had a regular employer that gave me 30K and was asked to do a job for 500 (what your arm bending is worth) I would refuse.

Alternative payment types can be risky, usually it will only be taken when the characters have enough money to pay there fixed expenses, to many characters 15K in gear is worth 5K because that is all they could sell it for and they need to pay the rent more than anything else.

Your 3 samys and a mage game is an extreme example, but I assume that each of them took one of there 2 free contacts as a fixer that knew the kind of jobs they where good at and such. That is the person that would be getting them jobs, without a good negotiator they will not be payed as well as they might and they may have some issues with legwork (although a Decker contact will take care of that for a share of the payment) but they will be getting jobs a teem of that type can do marching teems to jobs is what fixers are for,

Your teem with the car problems made one critical error, they should have purchased cars with auto nav (or even pilot modals) not great in vehicle combat but will get you to the meet safely, one of my favorite characters had a sports car with a drone pilot and voice activation, the character had no driving skill or rigging ability but the car would respond to commands like “take me to 23 market street” and “get me away from the shooting”, and as that character would say “whets the point of having a chick magnet car if you have to keep your eyes on the road”

Your right you should have to earn your pay but a fixer contact will know what you can do and set you up with jobs that mach your abilities and pay accordingly.

Edward

[Glyph]

Plus, cars are part of Lifestyle expenses (unless you have a Low lifestyle, and even that gets you a decent mass transit pass - you may wind up walking a few blocks, but you should be able to get to most areas). How many of the basic book archetypes have a vehicle skill? Not many. You don't really need a car skill unless you are involved in a high-speed chase.


Personally, I think GMs need to be clearer on what is or isn't "normal" pay in their world (filtered through what the character would know, of course). It would prevent a lot of misunderstandings if the GM added things like "That is a bit low, even for a snatch-and-grab, but you are expected to negotiate it up a bit."

Also, the whole group should coordinate a bit on the general power level and professionalism level of the group. It's not so bad if the street adept gets more money than he's used to, but it is bad if the rigger or face can't meet their normal expenses with what the group takes in. A bit of metagaming at character creation is fine, if it gets everyone on the same page as far as what to expect.

I think that, as professional criminals capable of pursuing other lucrative careers (legitimate or otherwise), doing dangerous work that also requires creativity, planning, and reliability - they should be making pretty big bucks. I understand the appeal of keeping the power level in check, but too much metagaming stinginess can lead to players who are bored and unmotivated because their characters are stuck in a perpetual rut. I think the life of a professional criminal should be more one of highs and lows - get a million one day, have your penthouse firebombed the next day.