This is for the non-DMs.




Now, for Levithan? Take the goddamned cash. Just take it. Drop the whole 250,000 on upgrading your Decker, have him get into the faccility's systems, remove the security evidence of your team, then sell everything and everyone, including Wuxing, upriver to Cross Applied Tech. Offer your services in getting the faccility back - and name YOUR price, this time. Make it cheap enough to be worth their while in hiring you, but name your own price. And when you bring it to Wuxing, in all the chaos, nobody'll notice if a few more trays go missing, or their contents got scattered during firefights, and a lump off of each tray went MIA. Those Wuxing crooks, eh?

No decker?

Okay. Well, while the suicide bomb idea is certainly tempting...


Remember that you have money now. You can do something amazing.

You can hire one of those criminal Shadowrunner guys, I hear they're nasty but great at what they do, to do the decking for you.

Remember. Don't ever, under any circumstances, attempt to betray the decker. Chances are he's set up a dead-man's drop somewhere that'll land you out of the frying pan and into the deep fat fry.


Failing that? I dunno.

BTW i think i should add Altheas that i hold my opinion in part because i have made this type of mistake myself, more than once in one form or another to varying degrees. Yes, i've been a D.I.C.K. Likely a good number, if not all of people offering this advice have at one point or another.

You ment well. I don't think you are a fool. You certainly don't come across as one. Being a GM is a tough balancing act, and it's tough to filter out normal player whining from stuff signaling a real issue. I'm really just trying to help out by tossing in what i've taken from my own experiences.

P.S. I also have, after realizing i'm being a D.I.C.K., occationally overcompensated by being too generous. But i'm sure Leviathan or other players won't try to guilt trip you, or use the opinions expressed on this board to browbeat you into an unhealthy submission.

Reminds me of a particular time...

Our group had been targeted by CATco for ages, because we extracted one of the Seraphim from their wierd semi-psychotropic Black IC 'psychological evaluation' teams, as he was a PC and had decided he didn't feel like being a company man and having his brain fiddled with any more.

After about 3 or 4 years of dodging (and occasionally pasting) CATco spies and the odd ops team, we figured we'd reached an equilibrium with CATco - we stay outa their hair and don't cost them money, they don't mess with us. Well, CATco decided that wasn't quite right... so they inserted a very trustworthy spy into our contacts, stole ten tons of money from us from our anonymous Malaysian Bank Accounts, and (I think, but don't remember) launched a renewed attempt to kill us for knowing too much about Seraphim policies. We survived much poorer and very peeved.

So in response, we rigged a bunch of frames up on dummy systems, and penetrated CATco's main host, and crashed it. And kept it crashed for about a day, too, because we first crashed the host, then the power grid it was on, and then all outgoing lines, et cetera. Probably the riskiest matrix action we ever took, but I think the amount of money it cost them got the point across.

"Do not fuck with these desparate people. Push them hard enough, they have nothing to lose."

This is one thing I think many GMs forget about Runners. Runners want to live, want to get paid, want cool goodies and want freedom. But they are fundamentally desparate people who cannot be counted on to submit when they're pushed too far. Prod a group of professional spies, killers, thieves and con men far enough, and things have a very high probability of getting messy.

Which is why corps very rarely directly confront runners. They just snipe them or bomb their homes or call the cops on them when they're least expecting it.

I agree you should be getting paid at least double what you are, but threatening Wuxing directly isn't the solution. Rather, take what you can COUNT (the 250,000 yen) because a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush and all that. If Wuxing acts like jackasses on this, find out who authorized the mugging. Single THAT man out and send a message. Frame him. Get him *fired*. Rob him of resources. But unless it's the entire corporation or division, leave them alone; it won't be worth the trouble of catching you if you haven't damaged the company image. And you probably won't, if they know some middle management jackass resorted to mugging, because it's tacky.

In the future:
-If a Johnson does not offer what you believe your time is worth, haggle him. Explain your credentials to him, your abilities. Suggest that if he's sure this run can be pulled by people just out of high school, he hire them and not pros.
-If the Johnson tries to strongarm you, or threatens you, note to him that by virtue of being a Johnson he's obviously expendible to his company, and you could make more money than he's offering by simply shooting him and his bodyguards, stealing their guns, cars and equipment. Sometimes this is a good idea, sometimes it's not. If nothing else, it'll make him sit up and take notice that you're not going to be dicked around with. (NOTE: Always make sure you know where his backup IS when you try this tactic. Also, try not to do this in any sort of decently secure area.)
-If the Johnson continues to threaten you, shoot him, his guards, and steal their stuff. This may make you enemies. But you can be damn sure future Johnsons will think twice about trying to threaten free agents into taking a job. Also, if you spread a recording or account of the Johnson's tactics around the Shadows, you can help ensure his bosses will get drastically fewer favors from the Shadows.
-If the Johnson won't budge on what you feel is an unfair price, walk. Tell him to call your mutual contact when he's ready to make a sensible offer. If running will not pay for upkeep of your life, or otherwise does not cover costs of a run... why are you running, ICly?

The list can go on forever. Obviously, these are not hard and fast rules. Just general tactics I've used in games before. And yes, I've wasted a Johnson and his buddies when he tried to threaten us into working for what amounted to for free. It was nervous, yeah. It was scary, yeah. But nobody's tried it since.

Adarael, i respect that post. You have excellent suggestions in there. However i do still feel that they shouldn't just hand over one or the other. They were just feed a classic huckster pitch. They were given two options as though they are the only two available, and these are both options respresenting a loss to the team (either way giving up something they have) but framed positively. A double diversion from the real question they have just been asked, if i may put it crudely: "May I f#ck you like my bitch?"

If they choose either option they were explicitly presented with they are answering "Yes." Once you tell someone they can f#ck you like their bitch you ARE their bitch, you will stay that way, and once word gets out you are going to be everybody else's too. You can't claim non-consent if you don't say "No".

Further by offering a business deal you establish with more certainity where the head is of the person calling the shots on the other side. I'd recommend selling both the tray and the safe and offering them an explicit discount for the package deal. Say 250K + 250K - 60K for the discount for a total of 440k. So the get to buy a raw material that their company uses as part of their business, plus whatever it is in the safe for around 200K. Given the facility it was lifted from that's not even vastly out of line for laid out and partially paid up front run, and the runners took the risk on the cuff....while doing a favour on the side for the SOBs.

That's just bad business to directly risk your own assets (mage etc.), burn up a contact that just did you a favour, and risk the ire of a pissed off ripped off 'runner team to attempt a risky attack to gain whatever is in the safe, which they have already openly stated a belief of it being worth at a minimum 200k, and near nill chance of recovery of the goods on the tray.

All that when they have the option to buy goods at a reasonably fair value? If the Wuxing guy flat out turns this down you know he's either a batshit loco cowboy or just plain vanilla batshit loco, and that sends them down the path you laid out. If he takes it, or comes back with a reasonable counter-offer (perhaps even showing creativity by bringing something new to the table) then greed had just momentarily urged him to probe and see what he could get away with. EDIT: And you are smiling because you just fenced your own haul for a solid price, make sure to thank them for doing business and quietly to yourself forgive them for their temporary transgressions.

OOC: The GM says the team should grow some nads and negotiate more? Then i guess it's time for the team to put out and negotiate or shut up. Yes that is metagaming. But so is saying "you guys don't negotiate enough", and so is bringing a Deus Ex Machina to the table. *shrug*

P.S. Back IC: I would NOT flash the explosives. You don't do that unless you are good and ready to follow through without hesitation, so you only do that when it's damn good and worth it. There is a difference between a willingness to fight against hard odds for small 6 digits & self-respect, and a willingness to out and out kill yourself over the matter of small 6 digits. One is someone to be reconned with, the other is a loose cannon to be avoided.

Well, before seeing these posts (this was a couple of days ago now), I did offer to sell both the tray and the safe to the Wuxing dudes. Assuming the rest of the party agrees to the sale, Wuxing is happy to pay us 600k for them both..

600K?

Okay, let's think here.

Tray = 250,000
(600 - 250)*100 = 350,000

Now, assume that they're taking a big chunk out of the total value of both...

Conclusion: They really desperately want whatever's in that safe. We know that whatever it is, it's Orichilum. Since she knows what's in it, she wants it bad. Ergo, it's something big, bad, magical, and expensive, and Wuxing wants it.

This is probably a good resolution. If they're willing to pay that much, odds are it isn't something you particularly want to try to hold onto anyway.

It does raise the question of why they offered you the choice in the beginning… perhaps they were hoping you'd take the known quantity over unknown rewards.

~J

Yeah. Chances are that if you hold onto the safe, then

A: Wuxing will make you one more offer: All of it (safe and tray) for your lives.
B: Wuxing will just wax you all and take it all anyway.
C: Wuxing reluctantly lets you have it, and then you find out it's something super-hot, beyond your ability to contain, and is like a beacon for Great Dragons/Shedim/Immortal Elves/Horrors/Something Else That Makes You Wish You Were In The Renraku Arc And All You Had To Play With Was Insane AIs.

I realize I'm a little late to be chiming in, but runners need a rep - and you do low-paying, crap jobs to build a rep and keep you afloat until the big ones come along. And if you're paranoid about not leaving a trail for someone to follow back to you, the character never has the same face long enough to build a rep of any meaning.

The GM gave you a nice option as opposed to upsetting a corp, getting black marks all up and down your unofficial resume and is moderating the legitimate paranoia with viable playability. You could meet him halfway.

I knew a player who wanted to retire his Shadowrun character and instead roleplay the PC making and selling maglocks to gangers. To me, that kinda defeats the purpose of the game.

60k for the year is a bit on the low side, but what's the projected power of the game? Street level runners? Million-nuyen samurai? That's the one drawback to freeform character gen - a street level runner can easily find himself in the same crew as a multi-million nuyen character that needs the GNP of a small country just to meet his monthly expenses. And the GM gets caught in the middle.

-Siege

And are you or anyone else having fun when the game degenerates into "us versus GM?"

Besides the fact that you will lose every time, at least in character, what's the point?

Yes, you unleash hell on unsuspecting corps - great, well done. Now the corps have incentive to pool resources to hunt down the terrorists. Oh, wait...that's you.

As for having contacts in Tanamous...um...ick. Actually hanging onto a corpse long enough to dispose of it on a regular basis is asking for trouble, depending on your usual type of job, I suppose.

-Siege

Did you shake the box, maybe guess how much what's inside weighs?

Just a thought. After all, a grenade isn't going to weigh as much as a chunk of the good stuff, and neither is c4, c10, etc.

-Tir