I agree, Ultra. In the 20's the mafia developed significant power because there was a large niche to be filled, a weaker federal government, poor internal controls to protect against bribery and extortion, and more lenient laws. Most of these are back in place in SR, so there's no reason the mafia shouldn't return to a power similar to what we saw in the 20's.

And I think mmu doesn't give the mafia the credit they're due. Thousands of government employees are forest rangers, but that doesn't mean your only worry from a US army brigade is they might tell you to stamp out your campfire at night. Yes, there are mafia members who run gambling rings out of the back of pet stores. There are also mafia members who run millions of dollars across international lines, who chop limbs off dealers and debtors, and who have access to military grade arms. More legal protections, weaker government and better communications have made things easier, not more difficult, for organized crime.

Ultra reread your corp shadowfiles, in that Nestle today islisted as havimg been 20% bigger and more powerful than SK is in sr

I know that, but Nestlé is neither extrateritorial, nore does it have an army of military equiped security personal!
And I´d doubt that any corp today is pulling such big shadowstuff in a decade, as many (if not most) SR corps are pulling on a regular basis every year (if not month, for the AAA).

EDIT: Oh, and Nestlé doesn´t have cybermancies and magical vampire clone-camelions, for that metter.

With proper planning, the 5-man team could blow up the 60-man team easily. And steal all its stuff.

And what about 5 against 500 (thats only counting made man, ad to that hirelings and gangs).

Yes, a group of runners could kick organized crime out of "a part of a city" for some time. I doubt it'd be long because then the runners are on the defensive, so the yaks can set up ambushes against THEM, or just start burniating everyone who they suspect is connected with the runnes until someone squeals, THEN ambush the runners. It really isn't a long-term winning proposition. The best way to do it would be if the runners hook up with another big dog who can defend that area, for instance the mafia. I would also agree that it is POSSIBLE for a runner team to kick the Yaks permanently out of the city, just exceedingly unlikely.

Yes, a group of 5 could beat a team of 60, assuming the team of 60 was poorly organized and poorly defending. The yaks are neither. If you'd prefer a better analogy, capture the flag with a team of 5 and a team of 60 on a huge playing field, where the smaller team has a better hidden flag. It's still not a great proposition.

Five can defeat five-hundred with proper planing and sufficient momentum. The important consideration is that the five must remain offensive at all times. They must destroy quickly and fade away the second they begin to lose momentum because they will be destroyed by the opposition's superior numbers if the enemy is give any chance at coordiantion.

Te problem is that, while a small offensive force can take a city, this force cannot hold a city. They lack the manpower to defend and so any defense will have to rely on remaining invisible and causing so much damage to the enemy that they'll stay away. This cannot be guarented.

A guerilla offensives work best when the attackers can take the defenders powerbase and when the attackers are supported by a conventional force that can come in to defend and clean up.

This means that to drive the Yaks out the runners would then have to cut off the heads in such as way as to leave the Yak's businesses and muscle intact and willing to accept their leadership or they would have to ally with another organized crime syndicate that can come in and take over while the Yaks are down.

Or the runners go and start their own organized crime ring after kicking out all of the others. Probably recruiting some of the smaller sprawl gangs for muscle, and using their fixers to get the resources they need in exchange for 'protection'.

Which ring would be the best bet for playing nice with the runners and not getting pissed when they jack cars?

Easy ways to prevent looting (from my own brain and summary of some earlier posts):

* Don't equip your "goons" with equipment worth the trouble of looting. If the problem is in the volume of items making it worth looting, pick heavy items that individually don't weigh the goons down, but if the runners try to pick up 10 of them, it weighs 100 kg.
* Make the equipment harder to loot. Put most of the capability in internal cyberware that requires serious cutting to remove, or in cyberware that isn't reusable (bone lacing was a good example).
* If they're doing enough volume, you're going to attract the attention of people you don't want to attract the attention of -- law enforcement, local organized crime, etc.
* Occasionally toss in loot that's "too hot to handle." Sometimes fencers will outright refuse to buy if it's going to be too hard to move (ie, law enforcement is watching for the objects, they'll piss off organized crime, etc). If the situation gets extreme, maybe a fencer makes a mistake and buys something that's too hot to handle and ends up dead. That's one less contact the runners can use to move the items, and the runners may pick up a bad rep and thus make it harder to move in the future. (Comment: killing the contact should probably be avoided on the GM's part AND avoidable by the runners {drop hints}. It should probably only be used in extreme cases).
* If they're looting magical or prized items, ritual sorcery to find it WILL eventually come into play.
* If they piss off the wrong people, you might give them a determined enemy that finds their homes every so often. When they move, make them pay lifestyle to move to a new place. If you're feeling really obnoxious, you can really make it hurt by having the enemy find you multiple times in a month.
* If they start getting too much money from looting, you can always scale up the opposition to require nastier and more esoteric gear to drain their bank accounts. Vehicles can be very expensive to kill, for example.
* If they're too flush with cash, you can push non-paying character development threads on them that cost. My GM was nice enough to have someone damn near torture a family member to death. As a shaman whose totem demands protection of family, the retribution my character was compelled to deal out was extremely expensive. The resulting response ended up costing my character like 55k nuyen. Well-developed characters will always have hooks that can be exploited, if the GM needs.
* Destroy their vehicles, if they own them. EXPENSIVE.
* Reinforcements. Nothing stops looting faster than reinforcements with overwhelming force. You should work early to make them constantly afraid of this. Because of this factor, my character tends to only loot choice items that are either very portable and very expensive (foci come to mind), or things that are almost impossible to get on the street (AV ammunition, higher grades of armor, etc).
* As always, any regular behavior which reduces the enjoyability of the game can be penalized on the karma side. (Mostly, this should only come into play if the dude is a jerk and ends up spending lots of real time per session looting the bodies)

How big would the mafia's cut be? And what do you mean too hot to handle? A gun's a gun's a gun.

well, a lot of guns were supposed to be destroyed after ending up in police custody after being used for a crime. Being caught with such a gun could be very bad news. And not everything you're going to try to fence is going to be a gun. Signature items ("Hey, this looks like Ace's Predator. How'd you get it?") can be bad too.

As for the mob, I'd say 20%. Enough for them to get a good cut, make sure the car jackers know who's in charge, and enough to slow down their gains so that they don't become competition. YMMV.

There will be a limitation ultimately in the price. Too low and, obviously, they're losing money (and the resulting increase in crime draws more attention). Too high and people just won't report their gains or won't even bother using that particular avenue. I would expect their cut will be between 20-50%, however if they charge more, they'll offer more 'perks', better protection, more available chop shops, etc. After all, it's in the mafia's best interest that their 'paying customers' do well. Of course, the big thing going for them is what happens if you don't pay.

hyzmarca - History would seem to disagree. Barring one man with a bomb and a five hundred unsuspecting people all in one place, it is very difficult for a person to take out 500 people, even if he is armed and they aren't. Keep in mind, we have had organized crime going on in the world for centuries, yet history seems to provide no instance of a group of 1-5 people successfully pushing organized crime completely out of an area for any amount of time barring, perhaps, tremendous destruction caused through acts of war. If you can find the dozens of examples (remember, we're talking CENTURIES, not decades) of a few people without the support of a greater organization successfully driving organized crime out of anywhere, I would be quite fascinated to see it. Perhaps if Chuck Norris decided to take on such a feat...

I apologize if this point has been made. If so, I missed it.
Many people are saying that if you make things somewhat inconvenient for a syndicate, they'll just leave an area because "it's not worth it." A valid point. Bear in mind, however, that these organizations exist on a powerbase of reputation. They will be inclined to fight you, hunt you down, and make an example out of you in a territory dispute over an abandoned parking lot, simply because they can't afford to have someone make them look bad. This will make them fight for things that aren't otherwise worth fighting for. If you seriously expect to get the mafia, the yaks, or anyone else to back down and leave you be, you have to give them a way to look good doing it.

1) Bear in mind that the Punisher has benefits of narrational imperative. He wins because the writers will not kill him. Characters in Shadowrun don't have that luxury sometimes.

2) Remember that syndicates, the mob, etc. come down to the decision of one person. It's not a fragging hivemind (unless... invae mafia? Cool idea...) so really, the decision to leave an area, kill the people causing trouble, etc, is going to be down to one person. So the question is, how much gross does he lose leaving versus how much net does he gain staying? Sometimes, these are factors of emotion and sentiment more than they are money.

Simple. Make the party wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and thus, acquiring more money through looting meaningless.

Think of it as the transition from Season 4 to Season 5 in Angel. The characters went from the barely-scraping by Angel Investigations to heads of a major multinational corporation (of evil). In Shadowrun, characters could become full-time employees of a corporation, or a government, or whatever. Between Loose Alliances and Dragons of the Sixth World, I'm sure you can find an appropriate patron for the party, which keeps them in strippers and blow.

Finding better cyberware and magic becomes more a matter of doing the appropriate favors, and finding the right people. By the time you want to roll your campaign over, the street sammies are going to be out of essence anyway (and hence paying vast amounts of nuyen for incremental gains thru Delta-ware), and the real limiter on character development will be Karma.

You are joking though, right? Right?

That's not really a joke. If you're having serious issues with the fact that the characters do absolutely anything they can to scrounge up cash, making them not want for cash (and instead, want for more interesting things like being owed a favor by a delta clinic) is a pretty reasonable storytelling way to get around the problem.

Besides, who was it who said "More money, more problems?"

I guess I play a very different style of campaign from most people. I tend to be rather fast and loose with money. I run a smugglers/mercs type of game, where the characters have their own ship, and move legitimate cargo as well as illegal ones. I have no idea what are reasonable costs for them, and reasonable rewards. So I abstract away most of that part of the game, and give them small profits. It's rather annoying that all of the books on cyberpirates didn't offer anything as useful as operating costs and expenses, and Traveller-style tables on cargos and rewards.

Also, in Shadowrun before 4th Ed (and probably in 4th Ed too) money was a terrible balancing tool, because it you needed to spend exponential amounts of it to improve your character. It gets to the point where in order to upgrade your Wired Reflexes, you might as well retire. Not to mention that it takes months and months and months.

4th Ed doesn't have anything as useful as tables telling you what's a reasonable amount of money to give out in order to maintain a reasonable rate of progression. I have no idea if I'm giving too much or too little money (probably too much).

I'm at the point where I'm ready to say screw this, and move towards a White Wolf style system where people have Resources 1-5.

lol make use of RFID tags lol.

Hey guard XXX that was killed 10min ago shows his pistol moving through the 8th floor...

Or have it that a htr team is coming after the char, and the only way for them to lose the team is to escape, but doing so means they have to drop almost all of their equipment, and scrag the mission, making an enemy out of the johnson, and leaving a trail. After the first time, they wont do it again, and if they do, their char deserves to die. Plain and simple.

While I do agree it's almost impossible for anyone to get the money together to buy a set of delta wired reflexes, I think giving everyone infinite money is a bit excessive. Money is a limitation for a reason, it adds flavor to the game. Otherwise, why shouldn't they all just be jet pilots who call thor shots down on their enemies? Why shouldn't everyone just be so super-uber that they regularly kill dragons just for kicks? Heck, why do they work at all? It sounds like it stops being a gritty, in the streets sort of game and quickly becomes superheros. That said, if you WANT to play with superheros, that's fine, but I really wouldn't consider it cyberpunk any more and I'd kind of ask why you're playing SR instead of, say, white wolf.

I tend to go with Cain's suggestion, as well as through lowering costs of cyberware. Johnsons offer goods rather than cash in exchange for services, even if said goods are just the physical parts for wired reflexes and you need to find the street doc to install them yourself. You can still get the oft-dreamed off delta wired-3, but it'll take an awful lot of favors, and you had better be playing James Bond level missions. Similarly, the mage can still dream of his level 10 power focus, but he'd better be earning his keep similarly.

Unlimited resources does not equal unlimited options. There are still a great deal of limitations imposed by circumstances (starting global thermnuclear wars is bad for business) and by character concept (I don't wanna be a cyberzombie), among other things.

Corporate sellout flaw + a level 3 corporate contact, dayjob, and real SIN make a great combination for a certain type of game. Instead of fighting elite Red Samurai you can be an elite Red Samurai. If all the player characters are Red Samurai then you're in business. However, you can't play it fast and loose like a shadowrunner can. At this point you aren't a deniable asset; you're a full-fledged niable asset. You have to keep a low profile when doing things in the shadows and you have to be 100% legit when you can't keep a low profile.

Sure, you can Thor Shot an SK facility instead of going through all the bearucratic red tape to extradite an enemy but if you do the your boss with fire you ... out of a cannon ... at Lowfyr as he swoops in to eat you, your boss, and your whole corporation.

Now, at such a level your games will be more Clancy than Gibson, but there isn't anything worng with that.

There is also karma and skill to consider. A street punk with delta MBW 4 and dermal sheathing is still a street punk when he defaults to attributes on his numerous assualt rifle and launch weapon tests and delta cyber doesn't help you learn metamagics any faster.

It's just that at that point you're no longer playing a "default" Shadowrun game, so it's not like offering it up as a playstyle option is the way to help someone who's asking for advice with a "default" Shadowrun game.

I wasn't really trying to suggest that the players receive unlimited resources. I was simply saying that money is a terrible balancing tool in the default Shadowrun setting, and that making the players worry less about money is a good idea.

Making, for example, characters corporate sellouts doesn't necessarily mean that they have unlimited resources. It just means they don't have to worry about money. Their standard lifestyle, medical care, ammo, and so on gets paid. Their cybernetic upgrades and so on gain additional scrutiny, and they will have to justify them as they are investing corporate resources in themselves.

As for my campaign, I can't really run a cash poor campaign, because it's assumed that the PCs are also working as independent businessmen as a cover for their Shadowrunning business.

I disagree. Money is only a bad tool when applied to cyber because the costs are so astronomical. In most other cases, assuming it doesn't get bogged down in minor details, it works very well, IMO.

No. Street sams still purchase weapons, vehicles, ammunition, contacts, assorted gear, custom armor, medical bills, cyber repairs, so on and so forth. My decker has never had a serious problem with money shortages. I don't use vehicle maintenance rules, but as long as my rigger keeps his delicate toys out of the line of fire, he too hasn't been especially strapped for cash.

The only thing I have never seen purchased in game at full price is cyberware. There's an easy fix for that too. Apply a price drop across the board. It's a lot easier to cut the prices across the board (*.8 for items under $5k, *.7 for $5-50k, etc.) than it is to simply give the PCs bags of hard cash or make them corporate whores. There's also the fact that, as has been said, you can acquire cyber through non-monetary methods, such as payment for a run or pulled out of an enemy.

I think my problem was not familarizing myself with the rules for fencing the loot. Since no one really knows the rules and I tried to abstract it a bit and ended up making it too easy to move such items.

So.. Much.. to.. Remember....

You can still abstract it. Really, all you have to do is remind your players about the search time problems, and encumbrance issues. That alone should encourage them to focus only on small, portable, and valueable items instead of everything that's not nailed down.

I still suggest piling up the loot in front of your preferred fixer and saying "How much?".

Estimate full price, consider quantity+rarity, offer value of about 20% baseline for wanted gear. Things the fixer has no plausible interest in are either not bought at all or bought at an even worse rate. Only high value/high heat items should be fenced individually.

Consequences of looting should sometimes be shown by the effect of lost time (reinforcements show up), encumbrance (calling an athletics-test for endurance while the char is running for the exit), and occasional heat from previous owners or law enforcement (what did that gang DO with twenty assault rifles?).

I don't know if this has been mentioned as I admit I did not read through the entire thread, but there is an important thing to remember when selling the stripped gear of downed opponents. The important fact is this: that gear used to belong to someone.

Local fixer have a sudden influx of second-hand pistols and SMGs? Were they sold to him by the accountant after a gang battle? Do other gang members have contact with that fence and would they recognise any of the weapons? A fixer generally does not crap on their sources for stolen goods, however they also can't afford to cause problems in the neighborhood in which they do business. The first time the accountant might get away with it and the fixer will deflect the gang's interest, the second or third might get goons on the runner's tail. Additionally, after a point, the fixer is not going to want to be the runner's clearing house for hot goods that cause him no end of troubles.

More dangerously, although you can file down the serials and such, corp-owned goods that make it onto the street will eventually make it back to the corp. If Ares notices a lot of corporate weapons ending up on the black market in sizable lots or Novatech sees the same with hardware, they will want to know where this is coming from. A small trickle of heavy hardware into the streets keeps their runners supplied, a glut on assault rifles, LMGs, illegal matrix tech, cyber, pharma, or any other things fixers are interested in buying is not good for business. Not at all. At that point the price is depressed and gangers, thrillers, thugs, and such gain more and more access to such things, causing more and more trouble on the fringes of decent society. This hurts profits, even for Lonestar (which while seeing increased contract demand would also see a greater mean cost of resolution for enforcemetn encounters).

Keep these things in mind. People come looking for suppliers of black market goods. Also keep supply in mind. If he's already offloaded 50 hear pistols to the Redmond market this winter, the fixers probably aren't looking to buy 20 more.

Fences deal stolen goods for a living. Fixers deal in stolen information for a living, which is generally even worse. This isn't something they'll be unprepared to deal with.

~J

There's a difference between selling the guns out of a police cruiser or lifting a crate of assault rifles and constantly flooding the street market with material. Not everything you sell is going to cause problems, but the more you sell, the more likely it gets.

Fences buy things that are stolen and then move them. Usually, they don't move them in the same market. Fixers deal in infomation, contacts, and runner equipment, they have been the catch-all illegal runner Wal-mart since first edition. While they can't get you anything at any time, they have the stuff you can't pick up yourself, with enough notice.

Fixers don't get this gear from people coming to them to sell. If a fixer acts as fence and buys something, it most likely gets sent to another fixer and maybe changes hands a couple of times before it hits the street again. This is safer for all involved. You don't have people interested in where something came from leaning too hard on the fixer because he just got it from some other fixer who got it from someone selling shit off a truck in from Chicago. In most circumstances, it makes it harder to track back the sale, if you're selling to fences in the network.

It becomes dangerous on a local level if you're selling to people not in the network or trying to break in. These are the local fences that buy and then turn around and act as fixers in the same market. If the accountant has already flooded the professional fixers he has contacts with and they don't want any more 10mm sidearms, the accountant may still be able to sell to this guy. Interested parties may come looking for the seller however.

It becomes dangerous on a corporate level if you flood the market with too much of one corp's equipment at once. Fixers will keep the stuff moving around and it trickles into the market as it moves between neighborhoods and cities, but if you put too much in as a constant supply, people want to know who's supplying. This is why fences in a decent network will stop buying from the accountant after awhile, let the supply chain cool down. Also, fixers don't like the prices to be suppressed too much. You can charge three times as much for an assault rifle to a gang that ran into some money if the assault rifle is twice as rare on the streets.

If the accountant convinces the fences to keep buying and puts too many of a hot item on the market at once, corps might be able to connect the gear hitting the streets to a recent run the accountant was in, just because with so much volume, it's not trickling out. It might be trickling in Redmond, but the same stuff is being sold in Renton, Tacoma, one shows up in New York, etc.

They might not do anything the first time. Or the second time. But a dossier out there is growing on the accountant. It's only a matter of time before an operative contacts him with a big list of damage he's caused the company and tales about how it would totally be worth their while at this point to have him killed (but hey, you can work it off, we have this opperation we need a team for...).

Honestly? I think the whole concept that a single team can be "flooding the market" by doing anything other than raiding a Weapons World and selling the entire contents at once is bullshit. Think about how many transactions we're talking about here. At the level where the market is floodable, the goods are so valuable that it can be worth it to a fence to buy and just sit on the goods until the time is right (high-end laser weapons, monowhips, etc.).

~J

The original poster described a character that stripped every sellable article from opposition or encounters. Through the course of a game this could easily be multiple vehicles, dozens of firearms, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, trunkfulls of consumer electronics, and everything else from BTLs to decent wine the suit had in his apartment.

While a fixer may be willing to sit on or disperse a dozen monowhips over the course of a year (because he doesn't often run into them), what's he going to do with 10 pistols every month? The cheap illegal sidearm market is only so big. There's a huge volume of illicit firearms, but not enough demand that the fence can keep moving that kind of material.

Bodies are even more troublesome simply because there -is- the market to absorb a constant supply. If you're providing corpse after corpse to the chop shop (there's a lot of money in a street sam) then the likelyhood some interested party re: who this second hand ware used to be, will come looking after awhile.

"Oh great," says the chop shop. "Another Westwind. I know people love them, but I could make six from the spare parts I've got right now. You should be paying -me- to take it off your hands."

"Nine milimeter? I can get one of those these days for five nuyen down the street. That's street retail, you understand. If I'm making money, I can offer you a point five per."

"What the fuck am I going to do with 20 kilos of trout?"

"Hey, I know it's worth a lot retail, but thanks to guys like you, these rounds are all over the street. I'll give ya 20 nu for the entire case."