Why does everyone assume that runners can't have a SIN. It's easy to get one at characterr gen and they actually give you BPs. You can now live a double life which is no more outrageous than what some people propose for their characters.

Because the actual game text suggests that you can't. Which is silly and shows a total lack of what a one to many biometric identification tool DOES, but it's in the book.

I have a reply somewhere, which is "Why being SINless doesn't work".

This is a great thread, and there have been some great comments.

Well done, all of you, for actually discussing things that are at the heart of Shadowrun.


Does the phrase 'Monty Haul' ring any bells with anyone [AD&D, min effort/max reward] ??

From personal experience as a player and ref, people seem to have odd expectations of what to expect [in very simple terms]..
..High power characters, who get paid lots of money, have lots of cool gadgets, pick and choose gear/spells/etc from rulebooks, no real consequences for anything they do, speedy advancement, no other frame of experience/behaviour apart from their own.


Since several of the people here think 5k isn't a lot of money, please deposit such sums into my bank - after all, it's such a small amount you'll barely notice it's gone


The whole point of expensive goodies, 'small' amounts of money and 'small' amounts of karma as a reward is for characters to develop over time..
..But that system falls over for several of the players here, who only have short-run sessions/etc and no incentive to develop their characters.


Powerful goodies, high skills, etc are meant to be rare and the province of premier grade characters..
..Else powerful goodies become the average [because most of the characters have to have them just to do their job].

I mean, on some of these threads professional soldiers and company men don't even have half the stuff players take for granted !!

There's more..
..But I'm off to get a cuppa !!

I wish GMs would play up just how powerful nuyen is more often. Bribery and expensive gifts can get you pretty far in life; I think it adds a fair bit to immersion when regularly having to grease the wheels with nuyen is considered just biz. My current GM gives out what sounds like big paydays but he has other criminals extort us or ask for bribes at such a blistering pace that it's really gotten a lot quicker to just pay some of the more reasonable demands off rather than just geek the fraggers.

Fair enough.

Oh, and I normally don't have a problem with 'abrasive' (I really like Doc Funk ), but it was more the wide-ranging generalization of the comments that bothered me.

As long as you apologize or claim that you never intended to insult anyone, you can insult people as much as you want on this forum.

Or add smileys after the insults in question.

There's not much wrong with what you are saying. It's all with how you are saying it.

I thought about what you wrote for a while, and really, what struck me is that you are mad at people for not being perfect in various ways. Yet, you don't take the time to actually write your rant into a calm and evocative argument.

In essence, you are as frail and human as the rest of us. We fail because you fail. Try harder, and maybe we will too.

I like the new lower runs. 5k for an easy run is great for newbie runners with the new prices for cyberware. And every team should also go through some lean times.

But besides all the things listed, you have to factor in is Expenditure, Risk, and Heat.

Expenditure: If the team uses up all of it's APDS for a 5K run, they are going to spend most of the cred trying to stock back up on what is a very hard to get product. I won't even go in to something like Missiles or decoys. Also Contacts are only going to do only so many favors.

Risk: Not Risk of death or arrest, but risk of very expensive and hard to replace gear. Hell, 5K is nothing if you have to replace a Harley Scorpion or a tricked out drone. And you could lose those just trying to get away. What about a maglock pass key that got hit by a bullet or a Comm unit that got fried by ICE. A good Rigger could lose 50K in gear on a really bad day.

Heat: Pulling a 5K run that puts the Star all over your hoop isn't smart. Pulling a 50K job that has Ares after you for a year isn't much smarter. Same goes if you have against one of the criminal syndicates. All have long memories so how much heat will the run bring down in a worse case scenario has to be factor in.

Add in factors like danger, visibility, a rush job or special skills and equipment that this set of Runners absolutely has to have to succeed...

And certain runs will be paying a lot more than 5K cause the runners will not take the job if there is a strong chance they are going to end up worse off then before.

Finally if you really need to justify it to yourself then just look at the Stakes involved.

Not every run is going to be high stakes, but some will. Getting a high stakes run is a sign the team has hit the big time.

Now on a high stakes run, would you really want to be the Mr Johnson that had to explain to your local VP that you lost a contract worth 1 million in net profit, because you went with a half dozen B team runners at 5K each and 10% upfront instead of going for half a dozen A Team runners at 15K each with a third up front so they had the cred to do things right?

Spending 100K to make sure that you get that 1 Million net profit contract is something no real Mr Johnson is going to blink at if he is confident the team can pull it off. And a Corporation wouldn't be using Shadow runners it they didn't think they could make a difference.

Even if it fails, well the runner are totally deniable and corporations spend a 100K to try to get a contract all the time. You just write it off.

Obviously too dangerous to live. Best method to neutralize them is a Panther Assault Canon to the head with multiple successes.


If the Player cross the line then the authorities will do everything to eliminate the threat they represent.

QM

Regarding bribes, during a run my group hired a helo that got used without airspace permission to hold off some responding gang members while we were taking over their main drug manufacturing/shipping warehouse. We ended up having to bribe several different people to a grand total of 74,200 really took a bite out of the 150,000 that we got in drugs for handing the warehouse over to our gang's leader.

So... bribes are good. Kept the guy using the helo out of jail.

Chris

It's pointless to talk about what the "average" pay for a run will be. Shadowrun covers such a wide variety of subgenres, and the open build system can create such disparate characters, that you could have street punks blasting someone's face with a shotgun for five grand, and an elite team of runners stealing a prototype from a secret lab for five hundred thousand, happening in the same universe.

Your best bet is to make a character tailored to the type of game the GM likes to run. DrZaius is a good example of this. He knows that characters will make around 10K a month, so he makes characters who can improve with Karma instead of needing to buy upgrades, and who don't rely on expensive gear like drones or missiles.

Hey, wait, I thought somewhere in the opening rant, someone insisted metagaming was bad.

And yet here's a GMing style that heartily encourages multiple players to metagame -- running Awakened rather than mundane not for any actual difference in power level, but because they can advance their characters that way (and know they couldn't, playing mundanes).

A little ironic, isn't it?

METAGAMING IS BAD along with I WILL BE SUCH A TIGHTWAD GM NO ONE CAN PLAY A STREET SAM OR RIGGER, all in one man's head.

4 th Edition has brought on a lot of changes.

5,000 nuyen is a lot of change for a simple run. ( Thats 50 hours of escort service btw, and not the streetwalkers.)

I wonder if people would look at 'stripping bodies' the same as other unpleasnat activites. Would players/gms allow characters to capture children to sell into sex slavery (I'm sure you could get the appropriate contact as easily as some get a Tamanous body-buyer) for extra money?

As a GM, I would. A composure test may be required for the first time though.

Yeah, but who is going to be able to get by on just 100 hours of escort service a month?

Shadowrun includes various levels of savoriness. Some characters in the world are in fact actually members of Tanamous. It's a real organization in the shadowrun world with actual people in it. It's a business. It exists because it's good business and it has stayed in business for over twenty years. Many of the people who work the low end of that organization in 2070 were actually born after Tanamous began. Hell, they may even have been born in a South East Asian fetus farm that Tanamous operated.

These people aren't just faceless criminals. They are specific criminals with names and faces and homes and aspirations, and in Shadowrun they are playable characters. If people want to play characters who are members of Tanamous, gradually working their way up the ranks and learning more of the horrible secrets behind the organization - that's fine. That can totally be done. It would be a pretty cool campaign. And it is understandable that people who want to play that campaign are more than a little offended when their play style is dismissed as "general idiocy".

Have you ever wondered why Tanamous has women in cages forced to bring fetuses to term in 40 weeks when the setting tells us that they can grow clones in tanks in only 8? There is a reason, and if you were playing a member of that organization you migt eventually find out.

-Frank

In case people seem to be forgetting...

I'm actually going to reverse my position and come out in favor of meta-gaming.

Meta-gaming has a negative connotation because people generally use it to mean cheating; the player is acting on info his character does not have in order to gain an advantage. But what if you meta-game not to gain an advantage, but to make the game better?

Having spent roughly 1/3 of my life watching players in games refuse to introduce themselves to the other characters, all while making hide and pick pocket checks, all because "that's what my character would do", I have a deep and profound respect for any player who will just get the game moving. "Hi, I'm a trained killer. Do you guys want to go camping for the rest of our lives?" That gets a D&D game moving. If the point of the game is to have layered, deep, emotional character interaction, do that. If its to kill goblins, find the f*****g goblins and kill them.

Similar theory in SR. I show up to play. I make a character, I have dice, I drive to wherever the game is going on, and I have a reasonable expectation that I will get to use said dice to determine how said character does at whatever tasks are set before me. If the GM only preps one run, I'm going to go on that run, especially if the alternative is not playing. And I'm going to accept whatever payment the GM and the negotiation rules tell me I'm getting, especially if the alternative is not playing. I may not keep playing if the GM and I are too far apart in our opinions on what makes a good game, but if I'm already at the table, I'm going to help the game along rather than think up ways to derail it.

But one thing I strongly believe is that character problems can be solved at the character level, but player problems have to be solved at the player level. That's the reverse of meta-gaming though, when people are trying to use their characters to make the game do what the player wants. That never works out well.

That is definitely one use of meta-gaming that I support 100%.

@ Mercer: Here, here!

I actually have a GM who will low-ball us with the intent that we're going to refuse a run...of course, he doesn't prepare much for runs, he just wings it.

Example: The GM has this mech drone that's pretty deadly....high Pilot, miniguns, missiles, etc. This Johnson offerred us 1000 per mech CPU that we could recover. Now, if we could infiltrate a CPU factory or something, then we'd have jumped on it, but I think the idea was that we were just going to destroy mechs and recover the CPU's. We told the Johnson to get lost, then we had a bowling tournament that ended with us being the proud owners of "Bosco's Bowlorama."

Actually, a full-on take-no-prisoners overkill assault by a small under-equipped force is likely to be effective than the defense is. Problems arise when the small force attempts to occupy territory or take prisoners. To understand what 4-8 guys with 5-10 bucks worth of equipment and a little creativity, one only needs to go to New York and take note of what buildings are no longer visible in the skyline and why.

Defenders must consider every possible avenue and method of attack and create a perfect defense against it. Attackers only have to look at the Defenders efforts and figure out where they screwed up.

Mass murder is easy. Comedy is hard.

If your plan involves dying, then yes.

If living to enjoy your ill gotten gains, you'll almost certainly end up in a shootout with hordes of cops by the time you shoot your way into and out of the site.

The entire purpose of physical security is to slow down the bad guys. Even if you are just rolling through blowing holes in security doors using FLSC, that 20 seconds per door adds up. Once you get into a shootout with the guards you have to move a lot more slowly and methodically if you plan to not get ambushed and killed.

As SR fights (like most RPG fights) are unnaturally fast, it makes sense for the response to be appropriately faster to provide an appropriate challenge.

Ours go up to 11.

A set piece bad guy set up through plot direction is a very different animal than just having ye olde security teams being thrown into a chipper shredder and having nuyen coming flying out into a heap on the other side.

I was trying to think of a condition in which I could even consider having an item drop of significant value fall into players hands and I fell upon a managed instance rather than "stock" badguys.

They probably won't come across wired 3 in a random encounter (that they can get their hands on), they likely won't jack even a nasty foe and take it from them. Its an instance where the players and the storyline meet and to signify the significance of that interaction some proverbial "phat lewts" is handed out.

I am trying desperately to even think of an instance that this has even happened in a game that I ran and am coming up dry.

A scenario where "removal from a fallen set piece foe" would likely come after capturing someone and "returning" them to a corp and the corp stripping gear from their returned property and passing some to the runners.

Either case, this sort of activity is distinctly different than grabbing every body you come across, running a scanner over them and checking their net worth on your commlink.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemingway