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Even if SR4 did state that, you can see it doesn't fit most GM/Groups mode of play.

No, not charting! That analytical harlot! Break down that door! Tear her graph paper up, and ruin her regression analysis forumale! That'll teach her.

I am pretty interested when you try to explain this ...

I don't. The runners can have any lifestyle they damned well please, for any reason they please. They still get the same pay.

I don't use the players lifestyle at all when determining pay for a run, I have a system based more off of the charcaters reputation. It works for my group and does tend to reward players for being frugal, but then I don't want my game just awash in cash and high end toys.

Geekake neglects to mention that his poor little team is in the middle of the "Gauntlet." 5+ runs back to back with no more than 12 hours of downtime between each job for a ~320ish BP team that had just finished barely enough jobs to get to know each other.

We'll all be blood brothers by the end of it, if we survive. Metaphorically, and literally. So much blood...

I've got the book in question in front of me.

Shadowrun Companion, page 99, Payment and Reward:

oops!

I don't take that into account.
However I've mod'ed the custom lifestyle rules from SSG, so they lifestyle costs in my group are, Unpredictable.

The pay scale I take is:

The flat rate from SR Comp (3rd Ed).

multiplied by (Street Cred minus Notioriety)

So: Rate x (St' Cred - Noter') = Final Pay.

Then I Halve it for negotiation purposes.

I'm not entirely sure what that means though I'm fairly certain it does not bode well for the bullet proof ork...

*Whistles*
What do you think it means?
And for the record you are not bulletproof Mr Saeder Krupp.

So a charicter who starts with the Scorched quality, and thus a Noteriaty of 1 would have to PAY to go on runs untill he had accumulated a point of Street Cred? Then he woudl be ALLOWED to come along, but not get paid untill he had accumulated another point of Street Cred?

A NEW charicter with no street cred OR noteriaty would not get paid at all on his first run or two as well. This could be a little rough.

Perhaps there is a slightly better way to do this?

What if the formula was Rate x ((St. Cred +1) / (Noter'+1)).

Examples:
Standard starting char: St. Cred and Noter of zero.
Makes rate x (1/1) = Std. rate for the run.

Scorched dude. St. Cred = 0 Not. = 1.
Makes rate x (1/2) = makes half the standard. (Untill he gets 1 pt of street cred, then he is back to normal)

Just an idea, but could you do this as an average? Take the average of the team's St. Cred and Noter and use that to figure out the pay?

I frequently allow the option, sometimes even have the Johnson add it as a negotiating wrinkle "You want 25% more for the job, fine but it will be paid in Ares Corp Scrip, you can use it at the company store in Detroit"

I disagree. Just have the player take Finance or Corporate Finance as a Knowledge Skill.

Looking further into the Corporate Shadowfiles SB, it even has rules for determining quarterly profit and loss for a corp based on the number of runs the players have done against the corp for that quarter. Sorta elegant I think.

Corp Script and Corp Stock are two different things aren't they? Corp Script is what the corp uses to pay its employees with - usuable at the company run stores. Script has no voting rights.

Stocks pay out divended every quarter (according to Corporate Shadowfiles) and some stock has voting rights.

To use the example in the book - A Evo (Yamatsu) Johnson pays the runners 10,000:nuyen: in Evo stock to do a run against Ares. If the run goes well the price of the Evo stock goes up. So instead of 10,000:nuyen: they now have 20,000:nuyen: - if they decide to sell it. And if they can't offload it for some reason (GM Fiat ) it'll make them think twice about hitting Evo anytime soon.

Plus, Bearer Bonds are even more anonymous than getting paid in Cert Credsticks. Bearer Bonds are physical assets - I can't imagine the actual stock certificates being put online. Records of who owns them yes, but the actual cert? Hell no.

With Cert Credsticks, you can still trace the funds from the Johnsons end. There is a record of the funds being deposited on to the credstick at some bank. With Bearer Bonds, the Johnson just pulls them out of a safe and into a briefcase. Much more secure for the Johnson.

That should be every GM's Holy Grail with or without bonds. The players are always doing things with consequences. Making those consequences real and entertaining brings a whole new depth to the game.

Sometimes, the runners don't really have a choice. If you choke their finances like I usually do, they need the cash. If the bonds are mature, they can cash them in right away. If not, well, this is where it gets hairy:

Bonds typically need a set period before they can be cashed (matured). This can be anywhere from, say, a year, to a hundred years. They earn interest on the original principal (purchasing price) at set intervals (usually a year), and at a certain interest rate, depending on the estimated stability of the company.

To break it down, Riot Jim's Hooligan Accessories, Inc. (A C- or D-class corp, also known as junk or high-yield bonds) might have six-month bonds at 12%, because they're a new or a failing company or some other risky investments in need of immediate cash flow. Ares (a AAA mega), however, offers a wide range of one year to 100-year bonds, at a 5-7% interest rate (compounded per interval), because everyone knows Ares will be around for awhile. If they merge into another corp, like Yamatetsu or Novatech did, the bonds are still valid, and still honored. You make less money, but you know you'll get paid.

There are other factors that can affect bond interest rates from year to year over the course of a long-term (multi-year) bond, but that's definitely getting into "too complex for a freaking RPG" territory.

I've been known to use bonds for my PCs, but it's a rare thing. I typically reserve it for moderately wealthy, well-established runner groups, as a tool for assisting them retire, if the player wants to.

Now we get to stocks. If I were a runner, and a J offered me stock in Riot Jim's, I'd walk. But, if I were forward-thinking and the J offered me Mega or even A or AA-class stock, I'd probably accept it and eat ramen for another week or two. These are blue-chip stocks, and almost guaranteed to climb, no matter what. Blowing up an R&D facility for NeoNET doesn't necessarily impact their stock negatively. The investor might never even know about it. Even if they do, a few pull out, but most big-money investors (and we're talking big, big money) keep their money in, knowing any mega can recuperate the loss and still make money, as well as draw more investors, increasing the stock.

And over time, everyone with money invests in the Big Boys. It's a sure thing. And the fact that everyone with money invests in it makes it a sure thing. Investor types are the long-term, no-risk types. That's what diversifying your portfolio is all about. A solid foundation of low-yield, low-risk bonds, maybe half your total investment. Then a graded investment of mid-to-high-yield "junk" bonds with ascending risk. Then stocks, the riskiest investment, starting with blue chip, and peaking with a few 0.30Y per share companies you expect to do well.

Corp scrip gets into a whole other situation, again. At best, the runners can hope to offload the scrip to a fence at 50-70% of it's original value, maybe. If the percentages are good, I'd take it, and offload it with a fence. It's cheaper for the J to pay the runners in commodities they already have cheap access to, such as corp scrip, bonds, stocks, etc. But the runners have to examine those payments, like they would any other.

For the record, I pay my runners in certified cred, gear, and favors, for the most party. I almost never use other means unless it's an NPC characteristic. But hey, you may enjoy having some knowledge of the subject to spring on your unsuspecting players.

That's why I picked up my worn copy of Corporate Shadowfiles at the used bookstore over the weekend - just to toss my players a curve once in a while.

Say a Johnson pays them in Stock Certificates for a Class A corp. A couple of runs later (if they haven't sold them) another runner team from a different Mega is gunning for the runners since they've found out the runners have (or did have) the stock.

What are the runners going to do? Try and maintain control of the stock, try and ditch it, sell it to someone else, or just go underground until this latest corporate takeover is complete?

Much more fun than the 'standard' double-cross by their Johnson.

OK, not to quibble, but what time-frame are we talking about here? Ever looked at the original twelve stocks that made up the Dow Jones Industrial Average as described in 1896? Guess how many of those are still part of the expanded 30 stocks that make up the DJIA in 2006, 110 years later? ONE! General Electric. Those stocks were the Blueist of the Blue Chips, yet most have either disolved, gone bust, or been folded into new companies what grew much larger then they did.

After crashing in 1929, the market finaly bottomed out in 1932. It took untill 1954 before the market had recovered to pre-crash levels. If you were bought stock in early October of 1929 you would have had to hold onto it for 25 years before it was worth what you paid for it, and that does not even take inflation into account. In 1954 your money would only have bought about 64% of what it bought in 1929.

To cite a more modern example, look at IBM; long considered one of the best deals going. (They don't call it "Big Blue" for nothing) In the last five years IBM's stock has fallen from $120/share to about $80/share. At one point it even briefly fell below $60/share. (a 50% loss in value in just over a year) It recovered back to it's present level, where it has mostly stabilized, but how would you feel if your bank account suddenly was half the size it used to be. Stocks are not banks boys and girls. The size of the company does not matter, they can go up, and they CAN go down. (Note here, I have resisted useing Enron as an example. That was caused by fraud and corruption, two things that would NEVER happen in the Shadowrun world.)

Students of the stock market (and other markets too) use the term "beta" to describe the volitility of a particular stock as compared to the market as a whole. Large stocks typicly have lower "beta" values then smaller companies, but beta is a statistical measure based on HISTORICAL data. As the prospectus says: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

- The Chromed M.B.A. (My graduation was Saturday)

You're absolutely right. But, as I stated in the quote you mentioned, I'd eat ramen for a week or two. With the assumed next action of cashing in.

However, in the event of a reasonably well-off runner looking for investments, a megacorp is a different animal than IBM or a similar modern corp. A megacorp has their hands in everything, from textiles to technology. Even a catastrophic failure in their public speciality will probably mean only a temporary (few years) drop, at maybe 10-15% presentation value.

Stocks are volitile, from an investment perspective - I agreed with you in my OP, while describing portfolio diversity. But it's certainly more stable than a C or D class stock in the same example. A runner considering retirement would most likely grab it and extract Dr. Whoever like they're done a dozen times before.

Congratulations on graduation, by the way.