In SR4, low lifestyle got more expensive. 2000 So it'd better be a cheap girlfriend

It all depends on the PC I suppose, but talk to your player about WHY his PC is doing it. A little looting is acceptable, wholesale theft isnt looked on as a positive thing usually.

While I have yet to have a PC above stopping to snag a cyberdeck, I havent had one stoop low enough to harvest cyberware. But as someone pointed out stocking stuffers are usually a good bet. Good handguns, small electronics, nice looking jewlrey, drugs, are within reason if there is time.

Oh. Sorry, I still make a lot of SR3 mistakes. I'm bad.
So jacking a Ford Americar every week just about supports a low lifestyle for a team of 5. Interesting.
If they're roommates, they do even better!

Some asides...

1) The transponder isn't an issue if you have a reasonable amount of time (around half an hour to an hour), the electronics skill and the apropriate tools. If your team is without the latter two, they aren't going to get through a lot of runs in the first place.

2) Keep in mind, beyond the price reduction for damaged and used, the vehicle is also hot. That will also greatly reduce the price.

Actually my calculation only took in to account Used and Stolen, Damaged would be a further reduction.

Thats right. But that is allready some effort. Most SR gamers dont want to play only GTA.

Allso, if you are doing anything regularly, you are again going to hurt the big boys market share and thay would like to have a cut (of your profit or at your throat). So in the end you´d probably only make low, middle if you´r good. where runners usually make liw to middle if thay are regulars and high if they are good.

In the end, being a good gang of carjackers, that can affort middle lifestyle and than some, would need high technical, stealth and driving skills, good tools, own garage, specialized contacts (car fences, mobsters and snitches). So in the end you will have a low end runner team at best.

Soloution: Jack up the payment they're getting from runs. If they feel so desperate that anything not in catagory 1 (IE: Easy-Swipe) is temping them to take major risks for it, you're obviously failing to provide them with enough .

10k/runner/run leaves them "wanting for nothing"?

Let me guess, all PhysAds with Enchanting?

~J

By routine run I mean 3-5 days of work (or a one night session for completion), for a month they would have expected closer to 50k each.

I think part of the issue might be your timeframe. If you're giving runners 5 jobs a month, that's a bit excessive. The standard in most groups I've played in has generally been 1 run a month with the rare second run directly related to the first. One job a month at 10k pays the bills and leaves over a little bit.

In general, no run should pay less than the average PC's upkeep and expenditures (vehicle upkeep, ammo, etc.) plus 10%.

The game style we have typically played tends to be much lower powered than it sounds like a lot of you are playing. 5-10K per man per run is pretty typical, with extra given for certain complications (a particularly difficult target, requiring travel outside Seattle). Our group does encourage the runners to do things to supplement their base pay, though not the wholesale looting that started this thread. I'll frequently have a "bonus item" (like a box of BTLs, or some APDS ammo, or some other useful or high street value item frequently testing their moral convictions) that alert or lucky characters can find during the course of their job to boost either the Cash or Karma reward at the end. I do also allow a variation on the cash for karma or karma for cash rules to be used. My rule is that you can trade up to 1/3 of an end of run award so 3k and 3 Karma can become 4k and 2 karma or 2K and 4 Karma for an example. Another part of this low power game is that our group decided a lot of the really cool toys described in the advanced sourcebooks should stay pretty rare and exotic. When running SR3 it was common for us to expand availability restrictions as follows, you can get anything in the Base Book with availability 8 or less or in an expansion book with availability 4 or less. No item with a street index greater than 2 can be taken at character creation. I understand this playstyle isn't for everyone, but it does happen to fit the "runners won't......" comment pretty well and still work with the SR Comp payscale as well.

Ok, maybe, I was a bit unclear, or confusing because I tend to post arguments. that don´t support my personal point.

I do think runners should earn more than car thieves!!! What I was trying to point out, was that PC´s that have the means to make the same money as runners do, wont probably have the means to be a decent runner on the side.

And it´s really no big effort to kill any pc. The syndicates have the money, they have the info and they have the contacts. If they want to do an example out of a pc, they could. Assassins don´t fight fair! Usually, neither players nore gm´s like this stuff to happen, but it may be the final option, if the pc asks for it. There are planty of others, have thair contacts killed, burn thair squatt, trash thair cars, whatever.
A small group of very talented people don´t becom organized crime, because they have no organization of that magnitude. They can become made man and climb the herarchy, but if they keep pissing of some big boys, they will one day wake up and realize, they died a horrible death.
The difference betweem cutting in a mobs biz and fragging a corp or a biz is, in the latter, you go low and sit out the heat, in the former, you keep coming again and again. You are predictable => you die. Cutting into the mobs biz (what independant carjackers would do) is not like pissing of random, powerfull people (thats what runners do), it´s like robbing the same corp facility over and over again, every month (no good idea).

Enforcing encumberance rules gets most players to stop. Make some of the weapons he take be "hot" whether they were stolen or used in a crime. Set him up for murder. You can also leave his evidence (prints, tissue samples, etc) all over crime scenes. He could be questions EVERY week. Think the guy from The Mask but worse, always going back to bother him.

My take on SR criminal organizations is that they're like corporations, only less so and illicit. If they want to make trouble for a powerful, respected group of shadowrunners, they'll probably hire another such group rather than trying to take the job themselves. They're not very powerful at any particular point - they don't need to be - but they're globe-spanning organizations with a lot of resources, should something really engage their attention.

I mean, if you were to wipe out every Yak in Chicago, the Yakuza would be pissed (as would Alex, as she'd've lost her ability to "recycle" dead teammates). They wouldn't be crippled, though, and they'd be highly motivated to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

Exactly my meaning.

EDIT: UWAAAARRRRRRRGGHHH they followd me from the Armageddon threat WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRHHGGGH

Actually, if you wiped out every single Yak in Chicago, the Yak would be pissed, but you just wiped out every single member of an organized crime family in an entire sprawl.

They ain't gonna TRY to touch you, lest you move on to fry their bigger homeland fish. You have, in effect, become a Rival family, one that just achieved a victory of such magnitude that the only sane response is to back the hell off and let you have your turf.

If you wiped out every single Yak in Chicago, someone would clearly need to give your GM some lessons in how to deal with rampant munchkinism.

You'd have to eliminate stat and skill caps and increase karma payout, though, if they'll skip the stealth and go for the crazy shootout.

What does a shadowrun team have that an opposing organized crime family doesn't have (keeping in mind that organized crime can generally hire shadowrunners)?

If the mob couldn't beat the yaks when they had the home ground advantage, despite having plenty of runners at their disposal, I rather suspect that a single runner team couldn't beat the yaks all on their lonesome.

A team of runners probably can't wipe out an entire criminal organization, but they probably could convince the organization to stop coming after them by making it apparent that the cost will be too high. However, that only works if they don't put the crime org into a situation where backing down from the runners means looking weak. Criminals are bullies, and a lot of being a bully is not letting people stand up to you. Once someone does so successfully, then your reign of terror is pretty well over.

No man (or runner) is an advantage. The runner depends on his contacts, and the contacts depend on not getting their fingers broken by angry yaks. Organized crime also has access to significant magical and physical resources to trace you down. You cast a spell? I sure hope you have the half hour required to tidy up after yourself. Lost a button? Watch out for ritual sorcery. Fired bullets? Forensics come into play.

Remember also that Yaks are not a corporation. The individual cells can move and react with some autonomy. There are cells who exist only to beat other people up, including uppity runners. So all the advantages the runners have, the yaks have too. Now don't get me wrong, you could certainly HARASS the yaks for some time. Drive up their costs of operation. That's the beauty of guerilla warfare. But you can't BEAT them, because to beat them that means going onto THEIR turf where they use their rules. I would almost say it would be easier to drive Lone Star out of a city than it is to beat a well-established criminal family because, unlike the criminals, Lone Star is not supposed to randomly kill or torture people, or break laws about mind probes and watchers hanging out in your bathroom.

Lone Star is not supposed to, but if you'll check the flavour about them, it's pretty clear that they do.

~J

I agree with you, Nezumi, that attacking an organized crime syndicate is borderline suicidal, at best. I also agree that the organized crime's advantages far outnumber the runners' advantages. I just wanted to make the point that the runners were not completely without advantages, which could be exploited to make the runners very annoying.

Moon-Hawk
My point was, however, that said runners loose a big deal of anonymety and mobility, when they start regular carjacking. They become predictable they rely on contacts (even more than regular runners) and as was said above, the mog can simply convince the runners contacts that it would be very unwise to not stop dealing with them. Then when the runners start fencing thair loot themselves, they will evetually hit the wrong party and be hit by the mobs agents (quiet often to be runners themselves).

You know, to be perfectly honest MK, I just completely lost track of the point of this thread.
I had totally forgotten the carjacking aspect of it and was turning it into a Boondock Saints mob-killing-for-the-sake-of-mob-killing type of thing. Yeah, if your carjacking is pissing off the mob, even if they can't lean on you, they can lean on the chopshops that you sell to.
So, my next questions: How many cars are stolen per month in the Sprawl? Does organized crime profit from the theft of those cars, or does organized crime profit from the purchasing, chopping, and reselling of cars that independent individuals (such as runners) might steal and sell to them? Assuming the runners' stealing and selling of cars is cutting into the mob's profits, rather than adding to them because the mob is buying the stolen cars from the runners, how many cars would the runners have to steal each month to significantly raise the number of independent car thefts and impact the mob's profit?
I'm thinking that most cars are stolen by independent agents, and the mob actually makes money by buying these stolen cars, chopping them, and reselling the parts. I also think that, in the entire sprawl, a thousand or so cars are stolen each month (random number), and the runners would have to be stealing a crapload for anyone to notice the difference.

See, it seems to me that, every time someone lists how easy it'd be for a crime syndicate to wipe out the PCs, their description of the syndicate's abilities is like something out of a John Woo movie, while the PCs are still expected to play the game like it was Reservoir Dogs.

Either everyone is constrained by the gritty pseudo-relistic world, or no one is.

In 2000, the population of Detroit was 951,270 as reported by the census.
That year, approximately 27,000 cars were reported stolen, although Detroit police estimate that approximately 50% of these reports were false, so that leaves us with 13,500 cars actually stolen in Detroit that year. Or, one car stolen per 70.5 people.
Isn't the population of Seattle supposed to be something like 6 million? (somebody fact-check me on this)
Assuming Seattle has car-theft rates comparable to Detroit, that's 85149 cars stolen per year, or 7095 stolen every month!
Now, Seattle 2070 might have a different car theft rate than Detroit 2000, but you'd have to steal an awful lot of cars every month before anyone would take notice.

Moon-Hawk
Good point! I was assuming the PC´s have thair own chopshop, so they could support a middle to high lifestyle. Jacking a car a week and selling it to your local chopshop (which in turn gives the mob it´s cut) probably won´t get you into trouble (except from LS looking for you, but that´d be minor compared to regular shadowrunning), but it won´t get you much cash either, so there is no problem for the gm.
The gangsterkilling probably will be possible to go for some time, as long as the pc´s dont get too cooky and have some sort of income to support thair cause (probably hooding the mob). This probably won´t rout out the familie or clan or ring however, though it might hinder them enough so other synicates can move in for the kill (which really will only substitute one tyrant for the other, but that may be sufficiant depending on the characters motives).

EDIT:
6M is about right, nowere near as much people in 2070 Seattle are going to be car owners as in 2000 Detroid, however. Allso most cars in Seattle (mor then in other UCAS-Sprawls) are electrified sub-compacts, due to SSC environment laws binding for Seattle by the Treaty of Denver. On the other hand, crime rate is quiet possible higher.

there was an incident in Melbourne Australia a few years ago when ONE MAN did a revenge against the mafia there and took out 27 major crime figures befoe the cops got him, he is still alive and in the protection section of the prison system (where they put cops stoolies and pedophiles so that regular prisoners can't touch them) so a runner team can do significant damage

What are stoolies My english only takes me so far

A "stool pigeon", or police informant. A rat.

Reference

~J

Are you referring to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_gan...ngland_killings

Because there were 5 (from a quick read) people convicted for those killings, 2 surviving suspects who were charged, and it looks like half a dozen suspects who were later killed in retribution.

As for the earlier comment, Yaks don't need to play reservoir dogs, at least not as an organization. Unlike the runners, Yaks pretty much have UNLIMITED RESOURCES to draw upon, assuming that investment makes a reasonable return. Can the runners claim that? Yaks also have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands level 1 and 2 contacts across the world. Runners don't have that either. Sure, if a team of five yaks are caught in a building with the cops closing in, things can be pretty rough. But an organization doesn't have quite the same concerns as an individual.

The Victoria police set up a task force just to investigate the suspicious but probably natural deaths of a few organized crime figures. Surely, someone should be imprisoned for this gross abuse of government resources.

So that's what the international news says about it
the killings I refer to almost all happened in 2001-2003
they were all over the national news


EDIT: the funniestpart was some people i knew had... family... over there and they were very scared the killings would spread

Well, the canon mobs are probably inspired by el capone and the good old "family" movies. They are big, organized and powerfull.

If you don´t play it that way, thats ok, but its not canon.

The corps in SR-canon are also way more powerfull and ruthless then todays. RL corps don´t make good villains either.