So, I've got a player who in RL is an accountant. When he games, no matter what the system, he invariably strips every corpse for every object of any value, and then tries to sell every captured firearm or personal article through his fixer. (In a similar D&D situation, we were attacked by Goblins who fired crossbows then ran. As we were about to chase after them (They were the primary target), this player decides we need to halt, at 1000 each those crossbows couldn't be passed up! We have gone from Shadowrun to commodity trader of the seattle shadows. I'm really trying to get away from this aspect of the game. Even paying 20% for any loot he has still been planning to pay for his lifestyle this way.

I know he likes this kinda thing, but I'm looking for a good way to de-emphasize it. Any suggestions?

Tell him he's flooding the market, then set him to inside trading and running on companies he's short-sold.

Have the cops pick him up trying to dispose of "evidence."

Enforce emcumberance rules, remind him that his pants pockets aren't bags of holding, remember that looting takes time, and have a HTRT show up if they tarry too long. One can pick up a pistol or scoop out an eyeball and shove it into a pocket quickly and easily. Serious looting takes time very large truck.

How do the othter chars/ players react to that? In my group he would be forced by them to stop his constant looting and do something more useful

One quick way to rid him of this would be to use ritual sorcery on the item he sold of to track back to him. Or the cops picking him up. It sounds like he doesn't realize that those items can get traced back to him specifically.

one option would be to make sure there's rarely enough time to grab all the goods. a decent-size firefight in anywhere but the most dangerous parts of the Barrens is going to attract at least an LS drone flyby and/or astral recon. enforce the encumberance rules, maybe even assess penalties similar to excessive armor for trying to carrying around three looted ARs, seven pistols, fifteen magazines for each, etcetera.

also, remember he only gets 30% of the street value, base, for fencing the loot.

To be a bit more stern about it, if it annoys you that much - and especially if it annoys the other players - take him aside and tell him point blank: "Look, this isn't cool. You're disturbing game play, you're annoying the other players, you're distracting from the atmosphere and the fun of the game. Either stop doing it and relax into the Role of your CHARACTER (is his character an accountant too??) and have some fun playing the game, or maybe we need to figure something else out."

I'm all for going through corpses if there's time - you never know when you might find a credstick, a servicable backup piece, some ammo, or some other useful trinket. But there's gotta be a point where you grab the quick/easy stuff and get out of dodge instead of spending the whole game dealing with what's on the bodies.

Hell, if it gets too bad, make sure all of the corpses are killed in gunfights and/or by nasty damage spells. "Sorry, nothing there - it was all destroyed by the gunfire and fireball"

-Dwarf

Pk, here's my idea

You make each location on the body equal an action. (eg - shirt pockets, armored jacket (inside), armored jacket (outside)... )

So then what you do is roll a die, what ever the result is equals the amount of actions he has before someone shows up. As far as what kind of die you use, that's up to you. oh, and obviously you don't tell him how many actions he has.

so there's my idea, it's a little rough around the edges but it's something to at least work with, maybe even refine and add to.

edit: just thought of something else... Eventually, however unlikely, someone will recognize a piece of equipment...

"Hey, where'd you get that <insert item here>, my partner had one just like that before he/she was killed. I swear i'll find the bastards that killed him/her..."

You let him make 20% on his loot???

I will assume that this guy:
a) Lacks the storage space to hid 40 AKs for any significant amount of time, and so is anxious to dump these within say a week or two
b) Does not know a gun reseller, an armor distributor, an electronics salesman, a talismonger, etc. etc. and is selling all this stuff through the generic fixer
c) Does not have a negotiation/intelligence in the 6-8 range
d) Does not have the skills to eliminate traces that this is a hot item, nor to fix it up to relatively new condition

Assuming these are all true, you pay him 20%???

My players can expect 20% return on an object if they're LUCKY. Generally it comes closer to 5-8%, all told.

On top of that, where is he storing this? Generally, corp guards carry SMGs or something like, plus an armor jacket. Being generous, I'd assume you could carry an armor jacket and 3 SMGs before you start getting weighted down (this is on top of the gear he's actually using for the run). SO unless he has a drone slaved to follow along and just carry his trash, he'd better be pretty gosh-darn selective about what he's hauling or he can expect quickness/CP penalties (just like layering armor).

Final question, how does he have the time to do this? Sure, it doesn't take five minutes to strip a person of MOST of his valuables (I'm assuming we're willing to leave the boxers behind). Let's assume one minute to strip a guard of his armor, ammunition, weapons, and empty his pockets. This still leaves all the cyber, which is the really valuable part. Plus, for ten guards, that means ten minutes of dead time.

Let me reiterate this. You have just killed two guards. If they has any sort of biomonitor on them, that should mean the facility is aware that a guards are dead. You are going to stand over the bodies for two minutes grabbing $500 worth of stuff? Feel free, buddy. I had someone who wasted half an hour grabbing gear and even cyber. Guess what was waiting when he left that room? The only reason he isn't a blood smear is it's his first run.

Assuming that the group somehow managed to get themselves in a position that they could loot say $10k worth of stuff (which adds up to $500-$1,000 when they sell it) without concerns about security coming after them. If they want to waste the time doing it, what's the problem? It's only $1,000. Maybe $5,00 or even $10,000 net at worst. Won't the rest of the group want their share? If each group member got $2,000, that won't break MY game. I really don't care. If the group is covering for this guy and he gets to keep all the profits, well then that's the group's fault for being stupid and not sharing what they all worked for.

(As an aside, if he is stealing cyberware, remember that cyberware is rarely completely modular. You stole a datajack? Too bad you forgot the pricey wiring inside the brain and the sub processor. Smartlink? Haha, yeah, right. Without a hefty amount of biotech skill, the proper tools and a fair bit of time, stolen cyberware will be worth around... nothing. Seriously, the book price for something like the datajack includes the initial hardware, but even more importantly, the surgery costs, the costs of those nanites and the valuable minerals they leave in your brain, so on and so forth. Cybereyes are the same. Cyberlimbs even moreso. If you just hack an arm off or scoop an eye out, my fixer would probably pay in the area of 1-.5% of the book price unless the guy is a trained surgeon and knew how to take his time. Actually, a fixer probably wouldn't even buy it. What's he going to do with broken cyber?)

To clarify, I'm just starting GMing and the guys haven't collected a warehouse full of AK-98 and Ares Predators. However, I know this players habits, I'm trying to nip this in the bud. He is playing a face, so the he does have a solid shot a negotiations. The, Running the Shadows section did suggest 20% for loot, I just don't want to spend gametime every week negotiating the sale of guns, armor and boots, so I'm looking for a way around it. Much as I enjoy it, I simply can't have gangers mugging him every week!

That's a 20% before everything else (like the fixer's negotiation). For most characters, that brings it down to about 10%. And of course, that is assuming the weapon is still more or less like new. If the weapon has been damaged or is hot, the price will logically fall. As an aside, because of how negotiation works, might I recommend that the initial offer always be on the order of 5% anyway. Otherwise, if the fixer gets more successes than the PC, you'll end up with the fixer offering 20% on the initial bid, then 15% after negotiations. I have as of yet to see RL negotiations go so badly that you end up losing MORE after the initial bid. So make the first price a maximum possible profit for the fixer and let the PC negotiate him to something reasonable.

Beyond that, as I said, enforce reasonable limitations on how much you can carry and how long it takes to get it. The real money is in cyber, and cyber is hard to steal. Unlike D&D, you can expect organized resistance to hit a looting party in short order, which means looting is a very dangerous proposition. If, beyond all that, your player manages to loot, don't stress out too much. From what I've seen, most runs pay between $10-30K per person and, assuming no cyber, generally equipment will only haul in about $100-$5k. Not a huge bonus there. Plus the J can always specify that looting rights are part of the contract or specify no looting is allowed.

I have a number of characters who enjoy looting. Generally the 'problem' is keeping them alive when they dilly dally too long. You only have to worry if he gets his hands on a full and undamaged cyberzombie or a vehicle. Never mind, you can expect rating 10 bugs on either of those... It really hasn't come up too much for me. 20% of most OTS equipment is still pennies on the dollar.

Well, it could be worse. He could have found a way to transport the whole body quickly to negotiate and 'take inventory' with the local Tanamous chopper doc before giving his fixer a visit.

If the Australian Vietemese gangs (Target: Awaken Lands) can do it, why not you?

I might suggest taking the player aside and explaining a certain amount of the "facts of life" in the Shadows, especially if this is a first-time player. Explain that you're trying to help him role-play and suggest that Shadowrunners tend to travel light. However, if he wants to loot, suggest some alternative means of looting (i.e. if the PCs are hitting some go-gangers they might have a stash of mundane/awakened drugs or BTLs, if they're hitting a corp operation, there might be some other useful paydata which could be taken and fenced) and give him those opportunities to do so. Also, if he's hogging all the income from selling the loot, you also might want to subtly suggest that that's poor runner ettiquette. He's happy because he gets to steal loot, and you (and the players) are happy because he he's confining his theft to more valuable merch, and he's sharing the income with the rest of the party.

That's always been the best option in my experience (as a player) - finding a way to work with the problem player before flatly shooting them down.

Thoughts?

Also, never forget that guns have histories and leave fingerprints. His fixer might scoop up his newfound weaponry the first few times, but when he gets burned for some corp (or the Star) tracing a cop-killing gun or something back to him, his patience with the looting character might dry up a little bit.

Just de-emphesize it. Give every player the chance to have one gig on the side, like doing black market boxing fights or selling stolen goods. His would be selling stolen goods. Say that this will pay for their upkeep and nothing more. If they want more they have to pay for it with Karma. Now you have a perfect excuse for allowing the money for karma rule, and you no longer have to worry about the player's antics in-game.

Everything nezumi said is great advise. And also good reasons why this kind of thing propably won't net much more money than breaking into poorly protected homes on your spare time.

Do allow the looting. Runs are not like D&D-dungeon crawls, theres always backup for the good guys. Time is important.

Have the fixer suggest a wholesale price (5000 ¥ to take that "garbage" of you), and suggest sharing the earnings - to the other players. Tell him from the beginning that some items might fetch an extremly high price, but that those will very likely be traced.

(Less of an issue with SR4, where most prices are actually sane compared to SR3s cyberdecks and foci)

Good idea, I guess I'll have to make an accountant character ...
/joking

Another possible solution: give your game a higher monetary volatility
IMG characters gain money fast and lose it fast. I allow them to short-sell stock and to sell magical equipment, even people if they want to.
On the other hand, if they fuck up, they get blackmailed, kidnapped, infected with illnesses costly to cure, absolutely need that piece of specialized equipment, have to pay a rescue band to get that level three contact out of amazonia, their stocks fall etc.
If characters decide that they'd rather spend their money before the world takes it, they won't have it when they need it.

SR - where you leave your sanity at the door.

I said: "Less of an issue... compared to..."

Learn something new each day, todays lecture: "Be happy with what you have"

Whenever a player tactic becomes out of hand, turn it right on them. My advice, set him up.

A little scenario:

Set up a run where the players are supposed to take out a hitman. Johnson hires a couple of runners for offensive security reasons. He has been tipped of that an enemy of his (someone he brough to jail for example or something like that)

Mr Aikinson is a good man. He has worked long and hard to make a name for himself as one of the Seatlles finer prosecutors and word on the street is that he is untouchable. Unfortunatly, that makes him rather disliked with the criminal crowd. Hardly two weeks ago, Aikinson made on of his biggest cases, sending the son of Howard Nomark, Michael Normark to jail for posession of illegal firearms. While the charge itself was rather small, officials had been fishing for him for quite a while because of the murder of his fiance, which could never be solidly proven. Unknown to Mr. Aikinson was that his former fiances brother, Art Fester, a man involved in heavy arms smugling, had found out about his sisters murder and decided to pay him back by first publicly humiliating him and then killing him. Art has friends on the inside and Michael Normark was murdered in jail, shortly after beeing send there. This is unknown to his father, who blames the prosecutor for his sons death. Beeing an old fashioned guy, he decides to hire Filchis, a rather infamous hitman to kill the prosecutors 9 years old daughter, Aikinsons only child named Alicia.
Howard Normark secretary, Patricia Fouch, accidently listens in on a phone conversation between the two and decides to Tip Mr. Aikinson off. For fear of her job and safety, she is affraid to go to the cops, so she just places an anonymous call. Mr. Aikinson instantly hires KE to guard his daughter, but ever the career man, sees a chance for yet another big pull. So he decides to hire a couple of runners to bring the hitman down silently in order to later turn him over to the Star and make a case to bring Howard Normark down.

Behind the scenes, the thing is real simple. Find the hitman and capture him. However, you have to make 100% sure he is NOT taken alive. He fights to the death and makes a hard one of it aswell.

Now Filch is what you would call an emotional fridge. He doesnt care who he kills as long as the payoff is decent and he likes to get up close and personal. Michael was stabbed to death in prison, so thats how his father wants the little girl to go. Filch has been known for this kind of hit, delivering messages of blood of fear. His favourite tool is his knife which he likes to call Cindarella. He has used it for years and word on the street has it he used it to kill his first victim.

Make sure the players dont find out how much that knife means to him and also make sure that it is quite a piece. The knife is close to a hundred years old and beautifully crafted. I'll leave the details to you, make sure it appeals to your players and be sure to drop some hints that there is a subculture of people willing to pay good money for items that have a bloody history. One of these people happens to be Art Fester, who knows nothing of the hit. (This part is optional. I build the chain back to him so the players can come to believe there might be a bigger plot once they are in deep shit and try to sort it all out. Make sure that in the end they find out this is nothing more than a coincidence.)

Once the players killed Filch and made of with the knife (and whatever else he's carying, make sure the knife seems to be the biggest deal), you will probably be able to rely on them to try and sell it. If they have something like a regular fence all the better. In the end, the knife ends up in Arts hands.

Unknown to everybody is that Filch has quite a number of friends. Friends willing to go to quite a length to find him. Once they find out he is dead, they want to know who is responsible for that. They used ritual magic to follow the knife (modified version of Detect object) and eventually came to Art. He of course has no idea about most of the events and bravely withstands their torture for a couple of hours. In the end, Filchs friends come to the conclusion that Art is responsible for his death and kill him. They consider the Runners a tool, so they wont bother them (but they might in the future). To cover their losses, they empty his warehouse and disappear.

However, beeing a heavy arms dealer Arts death sends some waves through the shadows and a pretty radical group of terrorists is somewhat pissed that their last shipment went missing along with their contact. Eventually, some snitch tells them that the runners sold him the knife and decide that this was an elaborate plan to set him up and steal their shipment. (Again, up to you wether this group finds out that Filchs friends killed him or if they believe the runners did. They want their shipment and the heads of those who denied them to bring their latest plan of mayhem to fruition.) Sooner or later word on the street gets out that the runners are wanted by a bunch of very unpleasant fellows who dont give a damn about innocent bystanders or public awareness. Naturally the runners will be treated like they have VITAS because everyone who knows them fears both their own safety and the possible waves of public (and official) attention.

How exactly you handle the group of terrorists is up to you, but make sure the runners dont get out of all this without knowing that all their recent troubles were caused by a complex chain of events that fell in motion when they took the knife. It's imperative to make sure the players realize that the events themselves are not related to each other. This whole scenario is designed to show them that sometimes a very small thing causes huge waves because the players dont have the information to see the big picture.

In the end, they should realize that every runners gear has a history of its own and you never know which piece might hold importance to whom. Most times your better off skiping out on a few hundred bucks for fencing stuff instead of paying a couple of thousand to make waves dissapear.

Note, I made this up on the fly, so if there are any holes in the story, sorry.

All of the above measures are good and valid and I employ most of them in my games, too.

You can allso give the pc a bad rep as a looter (which leads to all the problems mentiond above and below), very bad for a face, especially .

Allso consider, that when he sells much loot regularly he will cut into the bussiness of some big boys and thos outfits dont lik competition. Just send him a couple of legbreakers, that do politely (or not) suggest, that he should retract from thair biz. If he doesn´t care, next time they wont be this polit. Maybe his loot sells will compensate for the medical cost, maybe not. If he still keeps on pissing the mobs, just have him killed, the massage has been clear.
Maybe the Mob will suffice with a cut on his earnings (say 80-90%, they are professional leaches ), so over time it won´t be worth the afford for the accountant, or it is at least less imbalancing, given the low cash. "Hay guys, we can have an extra meal at the speed burger, and we only had to loot 20 minutes under havy fire for this!"

EDIT: thnx Beaumis, you deflected another hit of the conspiracy against me

I will tell you the story of my first Shadowrun character. I took the million, and like most newbies to 3rd Edition, I didn't really have a clue how to spend it all. Sure I managed to buy a 600k Skill-wires system and a few lifestyles and the obligatory crates of ammo, but I still had tons of money left over. One of my advantages was Buy/Sell Cyberware at full price (connected I believe it is called), so I took a lot of uninstalled cyberware bits that I sold to a contact of mine for full price (which beats the usual rules for extra character creation cash). Brand new cyberware sold to a street doc friend of mine with my character playing "nurse" at various surgeries because of his high biotech skill.

Through various runs, my character became the procurement officer for the group. Lots of useful contacts who could set him up with the guy who had what I needed for sale. High negotiation. A decent safehouse to keep these questionable supplies at. Despite all this, I very rarely remember looting in the middle of a run. It might have been the fact that the situations were constantly dangerous. Bone lacing + heavy armor means you can't carry that much if you want to keep moving.

Now that I've rambled a bit, I'll get to my point. Now that I'm GMing a game, I have tried a few tricks to prevent myself from changing from GM to "treasure fairy" (as one particularly generous GM friend of mine was nicknamed):

1. Use items that are worthless to loot. Bone lacing isn't particularly easy to sell second hand, and who the heck wants to carry around a human skeleton? Cyberware that isn't clearly visible unless you start cutting into the person in the middle of a run is another way to prevent looting. Illegal substances can give your NPCs a quick combat boost, but won't provide much in the way of spoils to your PCs should they kill and loot.

2. Random police/gang/etc. problems. I roll a D10. On a one, something bad happens. I make it random to prevent accusations of being a sadist. The Novacoke you pinched from that ganger might not be as profitable as you think. The games I've played in, there have been times where the group had to toss major nuyen bits of property to stay alive. In DnD the right answer is almost never "toss it," but in Shadowrun, survival sometimes means living lean.

3. Unexpected costs. Paid the characters a bit too much for a cakewalk run? LoneStar in this neighborhood needs to balance their budget, and every vehicle now has a boot.

Earned nuyen always felt better than free nuyen.

Nuyen earned through theft is not free nuyen. It is hard-earned.

~J

By hard-earned I mean nuyen where the characters had to do something more than walk up behind a random ganger and shoot him in the head. Being a new GM, my second run was a little too easy, and the response at the end was "nuyen, whatever." It was basically free nuyen to the players, and it didn't provide any OOC satisfaction.

I think the problem Deamon has is that any challenge he throws at the player is becoming a shopping spree at Weapon's World, and the players, in situations where they can have anything and everything, value everything less. Why bother doing the nuyen shuffle at character creation if you'll just loot better stuff in the first run?

I'll echo a lot of what you see in this thread. Use cheap stuff. Use tracable stuff. Have problems come to a player.

Throw them some runs where they're required to touch nothing. Throw them some runs where there is simply no time to loot (it takes 5 minutes to get out of the facility from doing their dirty work and the HTRT will be there in . Let the whole team suffer for the player's looting a couple of times and the other PCs will quickly put a stop to it.

I've read through this thread, and there are some good ideas.

With the runners in my games, they don't loot too much, so I'm a bit lucky. But there are a few things I do anyways. The main one is that they hold onto the goods until the fixer can sell it, and the fixer will do some background checks on the weapons as well, just to see whether it is a risk to touch them (my PCs are good at cleaning weapons now ). I've had occasion where the fixer has found out where the weapons came from, and told the runners they wouldn't touch them. I'm still waiting for a situation where the fixer lines up a buyer, and the item/s go missing

Or, you might have the fixer snap up the items, then have the character receive a call along the lines of:
"It's <insert name of fixer here>. Some guys have come in and are after me. I think they're after <the item> I bought. I don't think..." <Have the call drop out here>. The character should be suitably paranoid, and if they go to help the fixer out, give them a bonus. If they shrug it off and don't care, well they may have problems with fixers in the future. This is probably a last resort though...

The problem is both my players and myself are new, so I'd rather not kill them out of hand, but I'd like to keep the flavor of shadowrunning criminals more intense. The player is sharing the spoils, so everyone else is happy with this arrangement. I'm leaning toward someone unravelling the the runners history by noticing that all of their victims guns and pockets secrataries have been lifted.

In that case, you might wanna start with something as simple as people refering to them as the "litter pickers" or something similar. Gives them an identity of a team as well.

I GMed an SR1 run in which I had security attack the team with a 2 million yen MP Laser. It was a nasty weapon, but not nearl ynasty enough to prevent the team from dropping everything and running towards the attackers to try to grab the gun. From then on I made sure that any expensive opposition toys would be part of an attack that would generate fear outweighing the players' greed.

many of the pavlovian dog training methods mentioned above are usable

but if you go with the backup option make it have a timeframe that means that if they had just looted the quick stuff they would have been okay


IRL pro criminals take everything that they can acquire quickly and is valuable... these guys aren't james bond

It isn't about punishing players for finding creative ways to make money, but making sure that player actions have consequences. This adds flavor to the game, and also makes the players feel more involved. If the players decide to stop and loot while the enemies they are chasing, those enemies now have time to regroup and setup an ambush. Walking off with 20k-nuyen worth of Novacoke might be a great way to make some money, but Lonestar Chemsniffers and pissed-off gangers (who you borrowed from) might make things more complicated. I'm not saying make every item looted into a plot device, but in a world as messy and dangerous as Shadowrun, carrying a pack full of assault rifles across town shouldn't be as easy as mowing the lawn or doing the dishes.

Hehe... I think our group's attitude towards looting could be summed up by something our GM said last week when I was wondering what to do next (I paraphrase): "Insofar as this group has a code of any kind, it's 'When it doubt, steal the car'."

Not that it ever takes precedence over doing the job and getting paid - it helps not to be stupid in anything you do - but if the circumstances are right... And for some reason, situations in which stealing the damn car is the right thing to do just keep cropping up.

If you're stealing cars, you'd better hope that you're a fast one with the transponder. Or that you're in an area with no Grid Guide.

Or you have a jammer on you. ^_^


Runners will not and should not run for less than they could make by jacking a Ford Americar once every week and having the group troll negotiate the sale to the chop shop.....

(Hmmmmm... A Trollish Face, I wonder....)

So 600 or so, times four weeks in a month, is 2400 . Enough to maintain a low lifestyle, AND a girlfriend.
(is glad his girlfriend doesn't read dumpshock )