Once deductables are calculated in, I have no trouble with the insured Shadowrun once deductables are calculated in. I think actual protection would be divided into three sectors: insurance, physical security/investigations, and freelance security/investigations. Investing too much into any one sector would be a really big and stupid risk, but you can't just really divide your budget evenly without risking "over protection" on the asset.

I think we're having a problem in our definition of loss. All business investments are done on a risk assessment based on EXPECTED PROFITS and all expenses associated with protection and with initial investment are built around expected profits. For example, if item A costs 10n after one year (investment, production, development, maintenence, protection) and can be sold for $50, then your actual profits after 1 year are 40n. Before 1 year, the profits are 0n. The item's value however is based on its expected profit of 40n and will be insured for that amount, if possible.

Same deal with companies. If a company is expecting profits of 40n and your investment is only 10% of that, and now it only rakes in 20n, that's a loss because you effectively paid 20%. Each nuyen invested earned less money than it should have.

Put aside the above numbers and let's back up...

A. Runners perform action which costs $40.
B. Colt Manufacturing incurs a $40 loss.
C. GM Financial makes a transfer payment of $40 to Colt.
D. GM Financial now has $40 less to invest in their 10-20% investments, essentially losing $4 this year in addition to the $40 paid out to Colt.
E. Colt earns their expected profits this year, -$2 for their deductable which gets paid back to GM Financial.
F. Total loss (of expected or potential profits) for GM Financial is now $42.
G. Total loss for Ares as a result of Shadowrun against Ares-owned corps = $44. The investments of GM Financial is less profitable now because of shadowruns than without.
H. Final conclusion = Shadowruns cost a megacorp money, even when insurance is calculated for the target subsidiary company.

This would be unnecessary. All of the corps will secretly acknowledge that other corps have zeroes. That's all a part of the 'gentleman's game' they play with one another. Freelancers would be a different story and would be targeted hard for the potential upsets they could cause.

Actually there was a big case of industrial espionage up here in Canada between WestJet and Air Canada too.

The movie "The Corporation," also has a self-proclaimed industrial spy. He claims that various corporations hired him to get sensitive data from other companies. He'd get hired by the target, spending some time figuring out what info and where to get it, and then stole it and left. He was never put on the payroll by the hiring corp even though they paid him. If his claimed profession isn't that of a shadowrunner I don't know what is.

Except that they are not. I still don't take it as truth that the CMIAK can or will exist to stop Shadowrunners, which is a corrolary of your set of assumptions.

In my version, the average independent runner has nothing like what you think they would. No one hires them for anything important since they have their own teams, so they have no money (which means little gear and virtually no cyber/bio) except what they can steal themselves. You might get the rare mage and/or technomancer, but they would likely be brought in by the corps' generous recruitment offers. Keep in mind that the corps would have been doing this for 50 years! The frelance talents are rookies, not prime runners. Hunting them down with your corp black ops teams isn't going to be all that hard.

The CM... - whatever idiotic thing you're calling it - is just a reading of the rules on astral communication via the Spirit-Summoner Link. Go check that out yourself.

As for not feeling my assumptions are valid, I don't really care. Live in the 80s high-school fantasy world they set up for all I care. I'm presenting an alternate view for those that are tired of the crap that's increasingly implausible.

Ah...so basically your world view is that it is a great big conspiracy by all the corporations to cover it up.

Someone cue the X-Files music for me please.

Cetiah:

You're right. We are defining our losses differently. I'm looking at it a little more as accounting loss whereas you are leaning towards economic loss. Earning less interest on an investment than you thought you would isn't necessarily classified as either type of loss. It means that you need better financial analysts! Lol.

Say that you are projecting 40M for profits this quarter based on a 10% rate. If you instead only earn 8% and as a result make (10M) this is an accounting loss. The accounting loss is 10M. The interest rate doesn't matter.

Now lets say that overall the market earned 9%. If instead you earned 8% then you have an economic loss. You could have invested your money elsewhere and made better. If you had made the 10% then you would have made an economic gain.

Accounting gain/loss only looks at the discounted cash flows.
Economic gain/loss also looks at the percentages that were used to discount those cash flows.

I think that that is where the confusion is coming up.

a group of thugs armed with predators, wearing armored jackets, and using combat drugs is dangerous enough to need an HTR, and can readily get the needed equipment to be dangerous for under 5k nuyen apiece, if they so choose. sure, you'll get them... but it isn't worth it if you're going to be facing injuries (almost a guarantee) on a regular basis, and the occasional death.

furthermore, how did this start, exactly? you say they've been doing it for 50 years, well how did it happen at the beginning? all those hurdles were still there.

you seem to be assuming that every facility is going to have people sitting around, doing nothing but waiting for runs to occur, and that this is efficient. you seem to be assuming that people can just sit at screens for hours on end and not get bored, and decide to play a game on their computer instead.

and besides, once the runners are off your extraterritorial property (and note that not all runs are even going to enter extraterritorial property in the first place), what are you going to do? you don't have the right to just shoot them anymore. you don't have the right to kidnap them and force them to work for you. you don't even have the right to search their residence, interrogate them, or arrest them.

so what exactly were you planning on doing when you do find them?

Pretty much. An 'open' conspiracy really. Even the government won't really care if everything is confined to corp property and corp personnell - it's an internal matter. Pursuit of independents is a bit trickier, but if they don't have SINs the government doesn't really have to care about them either. If they do have SINs then the corps just have the government take care of them like the terrorists they are.

Each megacorp could reasonably support a score or so operatives in total. They will be flown to wherever they are needed (you can get pretty much anywhere in the world within a day if you have the money) in numbers and with skill sets as their corporate handlers deem appropriate.

You'd be amazed at what the government will turn a blind eye to in exchange for corporate goodwill (campaign contributions, etc.). Especially if all it takes is allowing the corp to captue/kill a group of SINless terrorists.

So you've got some perfect world situation where you have unlimited loyalty from your employees who will gladly risk life and limb to chase around a bunch of yahoos.

I imagine if you could get this situation to work then you're currently running a multi-million dollar organization because you inspire greatness from all your employees.

And so this particular inconsistancy, which brings you to a froth to defend the purity of your fictional universe by throwing the setting on it's ear. You think that if indeed shadowrunners like what we think of them as did exist that logic clearly dictates that the world would eradicate them, because a corporation finds them inconvinient.

I've already given you a true modern case of real shadowruns in modern megas. You have anything other than a idealistic concept of corporate perfection that makes what you think will happen possible? If all this lies entirely on your reading of the spirit sumoner link then you're leaving out everything that matters and CMIAK never gets off the ground. You'll excuse me if I continue to use a rediculous name for your rediculously improbable organization.

why is the government going to send anyone? unless the runners are hitting the government, or the megas are paying the government more than they would have to pay their own HTR teams to compensate for the losses the government should expect.

I've moved beyond the original topic. You're not presenting any actual points, just a vague set of references. What is it that you have a problem with regarding my take on astral surveillance?

As for the rest, I believe that independents will be wiped out not just becasue a corp finds them inconvenient but because everyone finds them dangerous and they have no protection to hide behind.

Becasue they are an armed group of SINless terrorists within your soveriegh territory. There really doeen't need to be any other reason.

so are the gangs. and the mafia. and the yaks. and the vory. and much of the barrens, in fact. also the various independant criminals who are associated with those organizations. at best, the government would refer your call to lonestar, imo.

and lonestar would take a look at it, and decide it's too expensive to send someone to hunt you.

seriously, don't forget there are powerful people in the shadows, and they aren't just going to bend over backwards to let the corps come in and run the show.

1)
No, your using a false analogy. Mercs and soldiers of today are not owned by corporations competing to keep the lowest costs and achieve the most efficient benefits. If you're going to tell me you live in a local government where cost/efficiency are the highest priorities in budget setting, we're through. In essence, government divisions work by begging for money and once that money is awarded, they have to find ways to spend it all so that they can request more. Otherwise, they'll recieve a funding cut if they didn't "need it" when other divisions were asking for it. Thus, government agencies are punished for efficiency.


2)

Let's say a corp has five teams of professional shadowrunners and this gives it enough resources to conduct 10 shadowruns per month. That means that if you're not conducting shadowruns, you're not getting your money's worth. You must always be stretching your resources as much as possible, or else it becomes cheaper to hire freelancers. Suppose keeping these 5 professional shadowrunner teams costs only 2n each month, that's 10 nuyen a month to pay 5 teams for 10 monthly shadowruns.

What if you only need three runs one month, twelve the next, none for the next two months, and eight for the next?

Jan = 1 run
Feb = 12 runs
Mar = 0 runs
Apr = 0 runs
May = 8 runs

Over the course of five months, this maintenence cost for your current 5 teams would cost 50 nuyen. Plus, you couldn't even meet the demand for second month so either you can't perform the operations you want and lose competitive edge, or you spend a lot of money in month one to hire, train, and equip a new team (let's say at 10 nuyen a piece). Now you have to continue paying maintenence and SOTA upgrades on this team throughout the following months, so now the total cost over three months has jumped to 10 nuyen paid in January to maintain forces, 10 nuyen paid in january to hire a new team, and 12 nuyen each month thereafter to maintain forces. Total cost = 68 nuyen.

Consider if you could hire a shadowrun team for 2 nuyen a run. Wow, that's a lot of money. You could maintain your own team for that and have them do two shadowruns, right?

But if you hired this team (or different teams at the same cost) to perform the necessary amount of runs each month, you would ALWAYS be able to run the required amount of runs and the total cost for all 21 runs in the five month period will be 42n.

Reduced risk + Reduced risk = Good.

Even at 3n per run, it would be cheaper.

Now, this won't be the case for every instance and you could easily tweak the numbers above to see that sometimes it pays to go with shadowrunners and sometimes its better to have your own corp team.

Freelancers have other advantages:

Speed. Smaller organizations react faster with less beuracracy. If you need something done today, it's faster to hire a shadowrunner (or outside consultant) from your own money or department budget rather than waiting for a response from your memo sent to the Assistant Special Deployment Division Manager's secretary.

Cost. We've seen this. Sometimes its cheaper for freelance work, especially if you don't know how much work needs to be done or when.

Reduced Overhead. You don't pay for a shadowrunner's equipment. You don't need to pay for a training facility. You don't need to pay retirement benefits. There's a million little costs you don't have to pay that normally swallows up department budgets.

SOTA. Freelancers take care of all maintenence expenditures and are almost always at the bleeding edge of whatever's technologically available. It's cheaper for them to do, and a higher priority for them. Imagine trying to get permission from the accounting department to justify the expense of updating the thermal armor on 100 security personnell as opposed to one or two guys who would count it as a valuable business commodity.

RISK. There's always the chance that circumstances outside your control will disable your investment. A freelancer assumes all possible risk of an operation, including risks of legal infringement, accidental loss of assets (runners and gear), or environmental hazards. With a corp, each of these risks needs to be analyzed and justified. With Freelancer's there's only two risks: 1) the job might not get done (always a risk, no matter what), and 2) the job won't be worth the cost (reduced risk with freelancers). If a job turned out to have unexpected complications, its freelancers that tend to have to suck up the costs and deal with the sort of thing rather than the corp.

SPECIALIZATION. It's easier to hire someone for a specialized task than create and train a department of specialists. It just is. However, the more specialized a freelancer is, the less their employment, the higher their expense, and the higher their fee. If its a specialized service you use a LOT, and you're willing to forgoe the other benefits, then you probably want to spend the resources to become an expert, too. The more specialized a need for a freelancer is, the higher all the other risks (such as the increased cost of not using those specialists).

There are thousands of industries that work on a system of brokerage and contractors, with more appearing every year. They do it because it works. This exchange of services for profit is what makes capitalism run.

Weak. Pathetically weak.

I ask you to to clarify what you want me to discuss and you'd rather backpedal out.

Awesome, but I'm also looking at a third type. Do you have common terms we can use for that, because I've just defined it as "competitive edge".

If corp A gets a 20% return investment
and corp B gets 15% return investment (due to Shadowruns, say)
then corp A has 5% less money to pour into capitol investments. (Maybe not 5% exactly, but the ratio stays the same between the two companies, whatever number you use.) Over time we can predict the results of this and the end result is that Corp A is a AA corp and Corp B is an A corp. See the importance?

Hence, the loss of future nuyen becomes another loss suffered by corp B as a result of today's Shadowrun.

This one actually scores point with me. I don't doubt that players could and should be freelance agents for hire, but the "shadows" part of shadowrun seems silly to me. I don't really see the concept of a "SINless" person, but that's probably just because I live in America where everything about me is stored in someone's database somewhere and openly available with the right amount of money and connections. Hell, I'm sure someone who knows me can even trace me back to this forum if they really tried...

I think mostly everyone is waiting for you to realize you're backing the wrong horse in this race.

Independant shadowrunners are not an internal inconsistancy in the game world. They are not even an internal inconsistancy in the real world.

I'm not convinced you're not just trying to pad your post count. So I'll have to throw in with Cheops on this one and call it, you either won't or can't see that your insulting this game we all play is based on flimsy concepts.

so wait... when he says "that doesn't make sense" it's backpedaling, but when you say "that doesn't make sense" it's because it doesn't make sense?

you're assuming that all the corps are going to live by this agreement. that's just nonsense. you're assuming that the corps are all going to work together to enforce this agreement. that is also nonsense. you also seem to be assuming that all shadowruns will be against the megas, or that the megas care about runs against someone other than themselves... again, that's just nonsense.

the corps don't work together, unless something huge threatens them all, and then they only work together until that one thing is gone. the corporate court exists to force the corps to pretend to work together, and to make sure that nothing gets out of hand to the point where all the corps have to get together to destroy another corp that gets too threatening. the corporate court exists *because* the corps don't play well together without it.

No, it's not an insult to say "this is a great game, but really not my genre", especially in a genre as far "out there" as cyberpunk.

It sounds to me like HappyDaze just thinks something more along the lines of the "espianage / spy thriller" would work better with the setting and/or rules. It sounds to me like it would be fun.

He's insulting the genre, not the game. Let's not get confused, here.
And, please, let's try not to take this too personally.

Good point. I'd contend that corporate security - once you get to the extraterretorial level needs to be handled more like a service than a business. The corps have become governments.

True, sometimes you'll have this happen, but you can always subcontract out to lesser corps for favors or request favors from 'friendly' corps to scew a mutual rival if you don't have enough assets available.

OK.

True, but since your targets generally operate on the same scale this isn't that big of a problem. More importantly, with the interconnectivity of everything, it's possible to speed tje process up to a degree.

Sometimes, but not always. Counter with the fact that corp teams are much more reliable.

True. Very true. But consider that even freelancers need training. They compensate by higher working fees.

I disagree with the premise that freelancers are at SOTA. The corps make the toys and thye can give their people the best at cost. As far as Accounting goes...these are black op zeroes - you're just paying 1,000 for a toliet seat.

Agreed. This can be a problem. Good thing that there are thousands of SINless that you can offer the deal of a lifetime to.

I agree to a point. Skillwires can get you rating 5, and that's often good enough for those specialties that come up rarely. Locals grant several bonuses over flying in a team, and I consider this a part of specialization, but even this can be dealth with with Knowsofts and Linguasofts.

I'm not sure our modern capitaism is fully appropriate to entities that are both business and government entity in one. Of course the bottom line is important, there's a bit more than that to it.

No, backpedalling is when I ask him for clarification so I can address his points and he responds with "I think I'll stop responding to his posts and hopefully he'll go bug some other thread."

What works (to a degree) between organized crime families can work between corps. Megacorps are the big familes and the lesser corps are younger branches. Sometimes it gets messy, but you keep it in the family.

Pretty much. I guess the cyberpunk genre just isn't for me. I have too many problems with its core premise.

Good advice. Thanks.

I wasn't even aware these boards had a post count. I guess that means you're wrong.

Okay, take some time to consider this because its going to sound like a minor quibble but its got lots of importance to both our statements:

Corps have *not* become governments.
Governments have become corps.

For "laws" to be passed, enforced, protected, scrutinized, etc, these matters all fall under the rules for corporate decision making procedures, not government. Don't think of government becoming a corp and getting a name change. Think of some corp you know and imagine what it would be like if they literally ruled the world.

Corporate security is neither a service nor a business. It's an expense. And it needs to be justified. If the corporate security protects something of value and incurs less losses than the value of the item protected, than corporate security is profitable and will be used. Consult the discussion above relating to factoring in insurance and what exactly constitutes a "loss" and a "profit" from a corp's point of view.

True, but smaller corps have this same problem, only moreso. Now figure, a small company offering exacty this service. Not only does it get your business, but also the business of all those other lesser and friendly corps you were referring to. It recieves income from you and your competitors which justify its extravagent expenses (counting profit for the runners as an expense). Now since those expenses are divided between you and all those other companies, the total result is a savings for your corp when you need the run done.

I forgot one advantage: INGENUITY. We've all seen that its possible to do legwork to see how Ares Macrotech does things. You can predict their actions this way. If they hire freelancers for a job though, they recieve the benefit of a unique fresh perspective. Let's call this, Procedure. What's more, by hiring different specialists for each assignment, you can get a Procedure that is always the optimum and best for a situation, whereas corporate teams would follow whatever the corporate Procedures are.

I need elaberation on the first part of your reply. I don't understand it. Are you saying its okay to be too slow to make your runs because other corps are, too? What's to stop them from getting freelancers? Then you're not in the same scale anymore; they're faster then you and can react today if need be.

The second point is true, but that's only partial compensation. Still... true enough, for the moment. It definitely compensates for the stupid memo comment, but "faster communication technology" doesn't compensate fully for "large organizations have more beuracratic drek to jump through".

Actually, I still believe reliability is on the side of the freelancers. It's related to the SOTA, SPEED, and SPECIALIZATION comments. We're going to have to deal wtih SOTA first and come back to reliability/cost. To prove your point though, you may have to put a nuyen-value on reliability. How much is it worth to your corp? 1,000 nuyen more? 10,000? 100,000? I'm not asking you to come up with the number obviously, just try to think about it from the perspective of the corp's accountant or economic consultant.

(By the way, I assume we're defining reliability as the likelihood to complete a job and not get scragged, right?)

Freelancers require training and equipment, sure. But this cost is divided between all of their clients, not just you. You are the only one shellling out nuyen to fund your private shadowrunner department.

Furthermore, its an economic principle that the entrepreneur is the last to get paid. That is, the money to create a shadowrunner department is money that must be allocated now and pulled away from something that would have generated more profit. The longer it takes for your department to "re-make" this money the sooner you can start investing that money into profitable ventures again. Over time, you never make up this loss and its huge. For freelancers, that cost is paid upfront by the freelancer but REPAId by the clients (you and others) OVER TIME and in the meantime that money is generating interest for you (possibly enough to pay for the Shadowrun).

Corp A makes a fancy new gear at a cost of $300 and a market value of $1000. If can either give the gear to their shadowrunner team (essentially incurring a 300 nuyen loss to stay ahead of SOTA, plus the $700 profit that they could have made) or throw the gun into the market, recieving $400 in profit. Which would you choose? Essentially, freelancers are paying you to stay ahead of the SOTA curve and you recieve the benefits of SOTA free.

I missed your point here? Are you suggesting risk of loss of life is negligible? Maybe. But its clearly higher for the corps than for a small team of runners. Besides there are other risks associated with failure that others in this thread have already introduced. Do bear in mind, however, that specialization is a cost. So a group of SINless specialists (corporate or freelance) is not easy to replace.

Okay. But free will always be cheaper.

Value judgement (you don't have to reply since it doesn't directly counter your point): I, for one, would prefer to think there's value in experience so hiring highly competent, experienced experts would always be better than "experts" with less experienced. The freelancer will always be more experienced, since he performs your jobs plus jobs for others. To make up for this "experience gap" you will have to have a training program (in the case of skillwires, literally) much more advanced to make up for this loss. In game terms, freelance agents have lots of Karma and you pay a little bit extra for that whereas your agents only have what they have and if you want them to have as much as a freelancer you have to pay more nuyen to train them. Either party can use a substitute of nuyen (for skillwires and the like) but with a private shadowrunner force it costs extra and with freelancers its included (and expected) in the price.

Again, confusion here: We're not talking about an alternate form of government. We're talking about less government. Same corps, less governemnt regulation and enforcement - what would they do?

I'm not talking about the capitalism as it exists in any one country because most capitalist countries are mixed market and co-exist with government regulation. I'm talking about sound economic theory governing the decisions of large corporations run amok with too much power (not because it was given to them, but because no one exists to take it away - they have no additional power beyond what they would naturally be capable of producing under grounds of economic and social theory).

I prefer to address points individually - especially when responding to multiple poeple's posts - rather than having them lost in a single massive post. I'm sorry if that bothers you, but it's the way I do things. If I'm breaking a board rule, let me know. Otherwise suck it up.

I talked about this in several posts. If everyone is in on the same secret then plausible deniability becomes a tongue-in-cheek joke amongst the corps. You can weakly deny it and they accept it, becasue the situation can turn around next week. It's all a part of playing the game.

Not as I see it. Shadowruns are off the book operations, but they still have to conform to unwritten rules. The Corporate Court exists to deal with corps that break those rules, not to those that 'play the game' as the corps see it.

Truly deniable assets may be useful for when you really want to break the rules. Such as a Seven-7 gas attack on your rival corps' graduating class of wage mages, but such missions should be few and far between. For such things, the corps will have to really do their work to come up with someone deniable, but that's why - in my vision - such things are NOT done. They are the acts of terrorists, radical groups, and rogue elements - people that everyone wants to see eliminated from the world.

Yes and no.

Actually, for this purpose, having a crack team of "ghost" agents in your employment is better. Finding them, training them, and deploying them in secret is a lot easier than stealthfully advertising to freelancers and working through networks to arrange meetings with private "ghosts" that you can contract out against your competitors, trusting that they won't turn on you or attract undue attention to themselves (which would be slightly in their interests as advertisement for their services).

Let's face it. By their very nature, freelancers don't have any loyalty and so trusting them with something so devestating as a "black op" is risky unless you're willing to undergoe additional procedures and expenses to insure their cooperation. The more you rely on "plausible deniability" then the more this problem escalates. The truth is, anyone without a SIN is plausibly deniable and its even easier to embezzle out regular payments to ghost-ops-on-contract than it is to embezzle out spurts of payments for shadowrunners as needed, when needed.

To make the freelancer model work, you have to assume there are some factors more important than deniability (like cost and efficiency) or assume that its harder to establish a SINless network for some reason (such as reducing the number of SINless people available as a resource).

Assuming your not using your standard employment methods or recruiting people with SINs that say "proud employee of XYZ corp", it's even harder to find out the origin of a corporate ghost than a freelance agent. Even if you did mark them this way, it's very likely after a botched operation, authorities might find that XYZ corp doesn't really exist anymore and has no datatrail to follow...

So shadowrun terrorists are to shadowrun corps what modern wars are to modern government. I'm good with that. Scary idea, though. I guess that's the point.

Corporate "ghosts" would have more loyalty to a corp and been through the whole brainwashing dig. Likely their addicted to special designer drugs of the corps own design. There's so much expense involved in making your own shadowrunner department that this could almost be added in as an afterthought. Hell, you could pull resources from your standard Corporate Employee Brainwashing Division for this.

They were likely born in that corp, raised by the corp. The corp is mother. The corp is father. (sorry, I couldn't help it... I'm such a sci-fi dork...) Freelancers (current Shadowrunners) are far more likely to rat out an employer in exchange for protection and money after being caught. After all, players don't have any loyalty to "Mr. Johnson", right?

If only there was a system so that you can defend yourself against such attacks. Perhaps some territorial law that would give you total jurisdiction to attack runners while they are on your turf, or similar laws to protect runners in your employment. If only such a thing existed...

But what if the runners are not currently being protected but not on your turf? You can't take them out directly. If only there was some kind of deniable asset you can call on to fix this, or a company that you could contract with to patrol the intervening public areas and pick up shadowrunners that have harassed you with paramilitary arsenal and police authority. If only...

No matter who owns the runners, you're going to mow them down. I don't really see corporate owned runners "under protection" until the run is over and then they are protected by territorial corporate rights as the corporation gets its legal clean-up crew in operation. Or they'll let the runners get arrested and then get all the charges relieved. Maybe. That's assuming its profitable to protect them in the first place, which may be doubtful if you already have the infrastructure in place to create another team to replace them.

Your second paragraph is all true as far as I'm concerned and was listed under "INGENUITY (or Procedures)" on my Freelancer vs Corporate analysis above.

But is doesn't necessarily prove your first paragraph quoted above.

The rest of your points are perfectly valid and the double-blind aspect of Johnson-fixer relationship and the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend aspect of shadow networks were factors I didn't properly take into account.

I don't understand why you are now allowing for the possibility that a corporate created (sponsored?) shadowrunner team is not a secret. It's not like the corp has any incentive to advertise these runners and announce when its sending them on a run. They are shadow assets, just like freelance shadowrunners. Except you have secure communication instead of sending out vague feelers kind of indicating there's some work of an undisclosed nature that needs to be done.

The method of communication between the corporate shadowrunners and their corporate masters are irrelevent. Just like the method of communication between the various corporate assets and the corporate masters are relatively secure and effective channels. Maybe one of your runner teams can only be accessed in a bar at a particular time on a particular day by someone with the proper password. Maybe only by this particular guy. They're effectively sleeper agents until called. Or maybe not. Maybe they just sit in the firehouse waiting for the batsignal. Who cares? We know corporations have the ability to send private messages (more or less private anyway), otherwise it couldn't conduct business effectively, plan global acquisitions, arrange meetings between different executives in different countries, conduct a large sale, transfer money or *gasp* call security. Hell, effective communication is what the Matrix was made for! Even without taking the Matrix into account there are thousands of ways to give your messages to your employees subtly and all the techniques used by freelancers (friend of a friend, anonymous Johnson, letter that will explode in 30 seconds) are just as employable for a corporate team, if not more so because both the sender and reciever are prepared to communication in the pre-determined way, which always helps.

In summary:

You are right on all accounts, except I don't like the idea that the target knows "your corp did it" just because you sent corporate owned shadowrunners against them. Freelancers don't necessarily have an edge in this department that can't be emulated rather easily and more conveniently. Also the fixer-Johnson friend-of-a-friend network model of communication is one of the least efficient I can think of.

I'm just not getting the point. Why does it matter whether or not they are freelancers? Why does that determine whether or not you will chase them?

Ditto with corporate shadowrunners.

Ditto with corporate shadowrunners.

I don't see why it would be harder than denying anything else a corp does.
We're not talking about clean-cut uniform-wearing troops with patriotic loyalty to Ares. You may have those guys, but you send them out when you need visibility. We're talking about something altogether different; "shadow ops".

If you're declaring that as a premise, it applies to both corporate and freelance shadowrunners. I think it will be easier to persuade freelance shadowrunners to talk, personally. But if this is your premise, then that blows the whole "deniable asset" thing dead in the water.

Well, that's because I've been explaining stuff from a corporate viewpoint. Yes, people are an asset like any other and are managed like them. It's not personal. It's just the way it works.

How many companies do you know that demand an employee come in exactly between 9 to 5, completely restrict what they can do, compel them to follow a certain procedure to the letter, delegate exactly 30 minutes to each lunch, no more than 10 minutes for bathroom breaks, no more than 40 sick-days per year, etc.

Like biological drones.

Yes, but of course, now the question is do I keep this cool design or sell it to some entrepreneur on the market and then contact that individual when I need freelance work done?

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You don't have to prove costs to me. I'm the guy all for freelance shadowrunners. I'm just saying the "plausible deniability" is a setting premise and not based on any actual information, so its actually a pro-corporate piece of evidence rather than a pro-freelance. Even if you discard the premise though, its easy to assume that corps would take the "deniability risks" of freelance shadowrunners over the costs and complications of creating your own shadowrunner army any day of the fiscal year.

This is a problem of the freelancer model. In most cases, the employer doesn't know how to contact a shadowrunner, or even what shadowrunners are available for higher. The communication is handled subtly, indiscreetly, slowly, through a network of rumor and hearsay until, hopefully, the two can communicate with each other through anonymous agents.

There's no reason such a network couldn't be in place for a corporation, in much the same way that police officers have a network of informants and undercover officers.

Imagine, you know someone who knows two other people who knows two other people who knows two other people etc. Now imagine if all the people on the very outer edge of this chain know, between them, 3 shadowrunner teams and can somehow communicate effectively and form the meet. That's 3 teams out of how many people your message went through? Hopefully, they are all available.

A corporate network can insure that each chain is connected to an actual shadowrunner team, so that each time you send a message through the grapevine it gets transmitted to however many shadowrunners you've got. Also, if it only needs one, then there's no need to use the other chains insuring that the probability of having your communication intercepted is lessened.

This is true for anyone. Anywhere.
Your fixer could play an april fools joke and have his brother play mr johnson and the two of you can setup a meet and pay you to 1000n to attack this warehouse. Then the fixer could "represent you" to the target and demand 5000n protection money. Whether they pay or not, you attack as per your orders and get all the blame for the whole thing.

Who's to say? This is a very inefficient network that somehow depends on everyone being very helpful.

Not only could you prevent this by having certain procedural security protocols (rotating passwords known only to employer and shadowrunner), or special language so that the people in the chain don't have a clue what's going on, but if there is a specific chain of information than you can mix-and-match this for added security/convinience. The fixer will have the name of the target but nothing else. The bum by the sidewalk has the time of the run. The day is indicated through a publically posted Hot Date profile on a troll-elf personals horoscope node. The point is that so long as employer X and shadowrunner X now how to communicate with each other, the overall communication is more accurate and more secure over the weird criminal-grapevine that is currently assumed.

That's always possible. One of the risks you take in telling someone you need a job done is that someone else now knows you need a job done. Especially in the paranoid Sixth World of 2070 where information is dangerous. That doesn't change no matter who you are.

What does "compromise" mean to you? Because it sounds too me like you were proving the opposite point a minute ago.

It really doesn't matter. A corporate team is *not* the same as a freelance team. How can you say that to me after I just posted several long and detailed posts about all the immense advantages of freelancers over corporates?! The same to who?

They're the same communications model, yes, except in the ways that they are different. You could make them the same, but there's not much reason to. The corporate communication master-employee network has more features and flexibility to establish (but not really to change) that communications network. It also doesn't take years to establish a good network for corps, unlike current freelance shadowrunners. It's just an expense, like everything else.

Do you understand what I mean by shadow operative?

They can't be traced back to your corp, even if they are identified. It's not like they have a big flag that says, "Renraku was here". (Well... THOSE guys might; they're just nuts...)

So what? That team's gone. Lone Star's not going into a Z-rated sprawl to go get them. Even if the whole team is killed or captured, so what? They're gone now. Chalk it up as money lost, clean up your network (eliminate the outer-most ring - in the examples above, the fixer), hire a new guy and say, "look, you get the codes orders from this from the clever cypher hidden in this soduku publications and give it to this chummer over here named Ice Scythe every couple weeks"). Assets, once established, are re-usable. You can use the same training facilities, the same communications network, the same brainwashing division, the same everything, pretty much. You just lost the people (insignificant expense) and the equipment (ouch!). Nothing more. Nothing's traced back to you.

Not really. No more so than freelancers.

So what?

The word is PLAUSIBLE deniability, right? Everyone knows you did it, but can't prove it. Sounds ideal. The corporate runners would be better at this than freelance runners. But the freelancers have tons of other benefits to compensate.

But, and this is a big but, it doesn't matter if a freelancer's communications is spoofed. Nobody loses anything but the freelancer. If the corporate asset's communications are spoofed then the corporation loses.

This really doesn't work if the head of the chain is the one under attack.
In the Johnson system, it doesn't pay to attack enemy Johnsons because you could use the same resources with your own Johnsons. However, in a corporate-asset system it pays to extract enemy handlers because doing so will give you control of all of their teams.

I mean in the following sense.

Corporate team A member Rolf messes up and gets captured. Under mind probe he reveals that he works for Mitsuhama because it is a goddamn mind robe.

Freelance shadowrunner Betty gets captured. She does not provide the enemy corporation with any useful information because she has no clue who she is working for.

Corporate team B member Gushi gets captured. He does not provide any useful information because he doesn't know who he is working for.

Now, in this case there is really little difference between the freelance team and the B corporate team. The B team isn't loyal to the corp. How could they be if they don't know which corp they are working for? They aren't any easier to contact than blind shadowrunners would be. The only difference is that a blind corporate team costs the corporation more and provides more tangible links to the corporation.

It doesn't matter if the team is captured or not. It doesn't matter if they know that Shadowrunner A is Jon Jacob Jinglehimer Schmidt. What matters is if they know exactly which missions Shadowrunner A has been on if Shadowrunner A is a corporate asset. If Shadowrunner A is corporate asset then they can look at his whole body of work and determine who he works for with a reasonable mathematical certainty. When they can finger you with a reasonable mathematical certainty, denial is no longer plausible.
However, as I stated earlier, such analysis of freelancer's missions is not feasible since he will be working for many different employers.

All I've done is clarify my points and I don't ever recall having you ask me a direct question.


If your view of corporations work then why doesn't OPEC work. It is exactly the same thing. A group of nations with nationalized oil production that are colluding together to artificially keep the oil prices high. Unfortunately there is a MASSIVE incentive for each nation to cheat on the conspiracy they do.

You obviously have zero sense of business, economics, or politics in the real world HappyDaze and that's why I find it pointless to talk about these things with you. Discussing stuff with others on this thread is no problem since they seem to be grounded in reality but you aren't. Don't bother trying to continue to push your idea of SR if NO ONE else who has posted is buying it.

All in spirte of numerous people throwing actual and theoretical examples at you. You are like impervious to reality or something. Concepts that are proven true just kind of bounce off of you like some sort of imagination-teflon.

That's why I don't feel it necessary to deal with you anymore.

P.S. I tried to get this thread back on topic but apparently that won't happen.