Perhaps I just missed this in the rulebook, but I was wondering how all of you decided what rewards to give your players at the conclusion of a successful run. I'm mostly thinking in terms of material wealth, but I'm open to anything. How do you choose how much to pay?

I try and pay 5k+ per person per run. Runners aren't just mooks, they're supposed to be skilled professionals (even if they don't act like it).

It is up to you completely, but for a skilled team with a good rep in my games you get 5K-30K each per run depending on skill and rep levels, and the risk of the run. I try and think how much the Johnson stands to make on the run (or whoever he is working for) and pay about 10% ie a prototype that will allow a corp to make a million (or just save that much) is worth about 100K.

You actually pay your runners? Damn... And here I was sending my runners out on suicide missions, expecting them to steal everything that wasnt bolted to the floor to pay for their squatter lifestyles.

As a side note I also vary the pay based on other things.

For example my Johnsons often have secondary goals that can get bonuses (extract the employee primarily, but certain files and a prototype would be nice), and often offer bonuses based on whether things stay stealthy or whether the runners do stuff that could bring trouble back home/get on the evening news. Maybe a bonus if the person they're extracting comes out unharmed as opposed to barely alive.

This makes sense from a realism point of view as if they don't try stuff like that into bonuses you either get runners not playing things your way or you have to try and dock their pay after the fact (not wise).

From a gameplay point of view I like that there are degrees of success.

For some examples of "cannon" payscales check out the free SR missions pdfs over on fanpro's website.

In general, missions should offer sufficient monetary incentive that the players wouldn't be better off running around town triangle buttoning cars.

With resold equipment selling for approximately 30% of market value to fences (assuming that they have contacts and social skills - more like 10% or even 1% if they don't), that means that an evening's run should take in more than 6 grand. More experienced runners should expect more of course, but runs that net less than that had better be soy milk runs where there is less danger than jacking cars at 5 in the morning.

---

That being said, here are some real-life Shadowrun takes:

• Being a security contractor in Iraq nets you $20,000 a month if you get shot at.
  
• Capturing murderer Brian Nichols nets you $40,000.
  
• Rescuing a kidnapped girl nets you $250,000.
  
• Rescuing a kidnapped girl who is really cute, or politically important nets you $2,500,000.
  
• "Misplacing" a pallet of reconstruction money in Iraq nets you $100,000,000.

-Frank

Yeah, 5,000 per runner is about what I end up paying. But those are for "general" jobs...and if a runner does 2-3 a month, they can maintain a low to middle lifestyle and have a little extra cash to spare.

Granted, I run a more karma-driven game, as I have upped the karma awards greatly. Most of the players don't have any super equipment or cyber...honestly, no one has purchased any cyber since chargen, but they also haven't really wanted to quite yet.

I throw in a "big" job from time to time, where they may make 10,000 to 30,000 per runner, but those are few and far between. And if there is equipment that they really are wanting to get, then they will look for it and I will build a mission for that...

Being found out that you were the one to kidnap the really cute girl in the first place - Priceless

Let's put it this way. If the mission is to rescue some rich Johnson's daughter and, after rescuing her, they start calculating what they could get for fencing her betaware, talking to the organleggers, and the ghouls relative to what they're being paid for the run, they're probably not being paid enough.

This is a rough one. It's changed in my campaign due to the fact costs seem to have dropped a little bit.

But the first rule of thumb is try to see what they're spending in terms of legwork. A problem may arise in that the Johnson's offer (say 3k a head, 500 up front) won't reflect the costs of doing business. If a rigger suicides a drone during the run, they might not break even (but new drone prices are so much better than before).

One way to adjust it is to offer other things to help beef up the payout. Paydata (important information that isn't related to the run but worth money), items, vehicles, drones, weapons.. they all can be fenced. If you realize you then went overboard and everyone's carrying a duffel bag full of pricey items to fence, then remember items to be fenced go for (base) 30% of their price. The modifiers and rules are found on page 303.

I usually try to offer midlevel runners 3 to 5k a head, minimum. The reason I have 3k as my minimum is that's the base fence value of a Honda Spirit. If your runners can make more money stealing cars than they would earn on a run, you need to adjust your minimums. Larger, more complex runs offer more. At the moment I'm running a metaplot that the ghoul population of Seattle is increasing, which meant ghouls were having to venture into more populated places and were attacking people in greater numbers and with alarming frequency. For a while the governement was offering bounties to help curb the attacks that were occurring all over.

Edit: I love the phrase 'triangle buttoning cars'.

I started this post when there were no replies, but my two year old son got fussy so I abandoned it, and when I returned, proofread, and hit post, I discovered many of my points were already made.

I am going to offer my team a moral choice in an upcoming session, sell an ancient artifact to a corporation, or destroy it. I was particularly proud of the Johnson's offer..

"I work for a large, very influential family. They have expressed particular interest in this item. The family's name? Nuyen, they're relatively well known. There are hundreds of thousands of them interested in acquiring this item."

Oh, I actually have a really interesting idea that I'm planning to pay my runners with next time.

Imagine this scenario:

Johnson has two jobs that need to be completed, one that involves an extraction of some person or object, and a second one where you only need to out or deny another corp of some object, which may be useful to the runners.

So, for payment of hiring the runners to run the extraction job, you give them the data (collected from a previous and different shadowrunning group), on this new tech. If the runners use it, you've denied the enemy corp from using it, if the runners sell it, you've outed the tech before the enemy corp could get proper rights meaning you can release your own version and get the lions share of profits.

It gets the runners interested in the item, usable tech, experemental tech, or new weapon systems. And if they sell it, they would get a worthy compensation. And for the johnson, you nail two runs with one team, for not paying them anything.

something to consider: it actually doesn't matter what you pay the runners for a job. all that matters is how much the runners end up having. if a Johnson pays the runners 10k for a job, but during the run they end up acquiring a piece of gear worth 100k, then they have received 110k for that job. similarly, if they get paid 10k but 15k worth of their gear gets broken or expended during the run, then they received -5k for that job.

If runs are going to seem realistic, they should have payments in-line with the benefits your employers expect to get out of them. On the other hand, you should only expect your players to take those jobs that seem like a good deal as far as labor and risk. This means that many covert ops won't get done because the payment that can be offered simply doesn't hit the cash level that someone would want to actually do those tasks.

And that's fine. Actually having low hanging fruit that "just doesn't seem worth it" sitting on the table for weeks at a time makes the whole thing feel a bit more believable.

---

From the Johnson's perspective:

Any amount of money that goes into the Black Ops department can be invested in Haitian knock-off factories to fabricate look-alike dolls of Tickle-Me-Tlaloc to be sold on the down-low to overworked moms looking for a cumpleaños present for their kid. These things are cheap to make since they are made with reanimated labor in the Carribean League, and selling them for 20% the price of a "real" Tickle-Me-Tlaloc ensures a good throughput. Every yen that your black ops department throws at that hole is going to rain 2 yen back on you by the end of the year and there's basically fuck all that Aztechnology or anyone else can do about it so long as you don't overshoot yourself and make enough TMT replicas to cut into the overall demand and give Aztechnology a case in front of the Corporate Court.

Further, any amount of money that goes into the Black Ops department can be invested in an armed resource extraction caravan to the Congo, where it will spend a few weeks grabbing stuff that isn't nailed down and then pull it out to Cape Town or the Lagos Necropolis. Even with the bribes you have to toss to DeBeers-UO or the Ghoul kingdom you're still walking away with millions of yen worth of raw materials if your team walks away at all. With barely a 20% chance of never seeing your investment again, you're probably looking at doubling your money in a month.

So if you're going to hire some no-name Shadowrunner team for something, you'd better be looking at a monstrous return, because hair-dyed spazzes in Seattle and Hong Kong are unreliable.

In part this can be mitigated with the Johnson strategy of payment upon completion. That is, if you don't pay Shadowrunner groups who fail in their missions, then the only thing you've lost is time and opportunity - which actually equates to quite a lot of money, but not as much as if you'd also given them credits out of your bank account.

But you're still looking at a turnover of perhaps 10 times your total investment or you're just going to keep looking - because there are much lower risk ways to spend black ops funds than to hand over money and information to goons from the Longbeach Sacrifice Zone hoping that they'll steal stuff you want and then give it to you.

So the player characters are looking at splitting 10% of the total mission take with the Fixer, the information broker, the Johnson's salary, and the Johnson's hooker. And if the mission is destructive in nature, remember that if Shiawase is doing something that will impact Ares' market share that it will also impact the market share of Aztecnology and Saeder Krupp - which means that Ares is probably only going to be able to claim a benefit of 20% or less of the increased available market share from sabotaging Shiawase.

Still, while that sounds bad (and percentage wise it is - blowing up a factory is probably netting the runner team less than 1% of the lost production in raw monetary payment), remember that the numbers involved in corporate movements are really stupid big. In 1996, for example, the Ursus factory complex got the Polish government to write off 193 million dollars of its debt. A Shadowrun that increased or decreased the writeoff by just 10% would leave 193,000 to pay the Shadowrunners who did it - that's reasonable cash to a Shadowrunner team.

-Frank

Don't neglect the frequency of jobs. If you find you've overpaid the players, then maybe they have to live off it for a couple of months. If you want to get them more money, maybe they get a call a week after their last job. Use this to even things out in a realistic manner, if you need to.

That last point is key. No one risks his ass 24/7 and expects to just 'get by' on the money. Make a big haul and live off of it for several months. Really big jobs might let you hold out for a year, but not if you're trying to build towards retirement. I don't usually have a team pull more than a half-dozen jobs in a year, and often less than half of that.

Also, doing a bunch of jobs in a row might not even be practical. For a lot of jobs, doing the job should be followed by leaving town or laying low for awhile, until the heat dies down.

When figuring out how much to pay runners, remember to separate your metagame calculations from how you run the Johnson. You want to give the runners enough to stay motivated but still be hungry; the Johnson wants to hire deniable assetts as cheaply as possible. So always make it feel like they are fighting for that payoff.

And also remember that Cyberpunk is like a bad Country Song thrown in a blender with a 'Nam Movie and a healthy does of LSD, by the end of it you're doing good if all you've lost is your girl, your home, your truck, and your dog.

Also remember the sucess is realitive, the Runners might barely be making ends meet, but if everyone around them is out and out backsliding, then they are still doing good. As for the idea that people won't risk being shot at to barely make ends meet, well remember that by 2070 very few people even remember the 'good old days' when you could actually improve your soci-ecomonic class with hard work and determination, now life is just a rigged lotto, the Rich make sure that they get Richer and everyone else can go frag themselves.

A note on what Ravor said. You have to pay the runners enough or they'll get miffed at not ever getting new toys and figure out they can just boost cars for more money.

But even though you're giving out money make sure they're never satisfied. Dangle things in front of them that want, keep them greedy. Fixers want to make cred too so have them actively do some dangling of new tech and the like(like when new sourcebooks come out).

Some players may be the sorts that seem to only need Karma. Keep them greedy too. Technomancers want drones, adepts want weapon foci. Everybody should want contacts (who can cost). Everybody needs training. Everbody should want better intel (also costs). New products should be coming out regularly. Even if they don't offer new game mechanics all the "in" runners have them.

And finally I'm a fan of cash to Karma. That isn't in the current rulebook I don't think. But the idea is that by living it up or whatever they can get a little extra karma. You'll want to decide how to use it in your campaign. Currently I give a +1 karma bonus for each level of lifestyle a runner pays for over "low" in a month. Note I don't make them purchase a lifestyle par se. If they're the mystic minimalist sort maybe they spend their money at a lodge on very expensive mystic meditation candles and crystals and teachers to aid them in their journey of internal discovery. Maybe another runner lives in a hole in the wall but after a windfall blows huge piles of nuyen that month out partying every night. Often I'll spend a little time RPing this stuff with them.

Besides keeping them greedy I like it because it tends to flesh out the characters personal lives.

It's true that world-wide real unemployment is over 50% in the Shadowrun fuure - so stabbing people for room and board isn't quite as unappealing an offer as you'd think.

But the PCs usually have the skills to make their own crime. And that can be fine. If the PCs genuinely want to just ad hoc criminal behavior, that can be an entertaining campaign.

-Frank

Always remember rule number 1, anything, and I mean anything you give NPCs as far as gear, vehicles, assets, tools, etc can and will be taken by your players. If you create a node which has all rating 7 programs, they will find some way to hack and steal it. If you give an NPC a supercool car, the players will find some way to make it their supercool car. If the enemy mage has a power focus 6, your player mage will find a way to obtain it for the next gameplay session. This seems to be something GMs will forget on occasion, and then all of the sudden they wonder why their player characters are geared out to their teeth.

on the note of the last two posts. It's important to remember the ecology of the shadowrunner. Corps need them for deniable assets. Independent Johnsons need them for access to any sort of "assets". But runners also need the J's for jobs they can walk away from.

See if you're a runner and you hit up corp A for corp B the heat will be on for a little bit as corp A tries to get some relevant intel. But after a while the situation will go cold and there isn't any margin for corp A to bother the characters as corp B could just hire someone else for the next run. And since any corp is as likely to use them as any other the other corps don't care. And theirfore neither does lone star. Even society as a whole just thinks the runners are cool. Ditto for the other sorts of runs that shadowrunners tend to do.

However when the runners go into crime on their own they are the root problem. And that means suddenly other corps and Lone Star take an interest in shutting them down. Other crime based organization may take notice. The heat doesn't really wear off.

Runners like to think they're immune, but it's really the don't care factor that lets them exist. If you hear mutters about just starting to boost vehicles I suggest having a run where your runners hunt down a different group of runners who thought it would be wiz to start doing Johnsonless runs where they bust into corps and just steal whatever is the most expensive stuff around. Once they set their munchkin minds to it your players will start figuring out fast that it's hard to stay hidden in SR4.

It's also important for runners to not make things personal. A varient on the above would be to have the runners track down a team that casually offed a cubicle dweller that the boss was in love with. Actually with the salaries those guys bring down it might be fun if the runners are competing with a couple other teams to see who can whack members first. Like the Johnsen gives them a measly 2k each as a retainer and informs them that two other teams are involved. The team that pissed of the boss consists of 6 members and each ones head is worth 30k to whoever geeks them. Actually that sounds like a lot of fun, I may run that myself.

Stealing a car or diamonds or something for a Johnson would be sucker work. They would pay less than a fixer if you just stole them. And doing so probably would bring down more heat. Though they would at least have someone to offer up if LS is closing in.

But just because a J asks you to do something doesn't automatically mean you aren't going to bring down heavy heat. For example if some Vory J hires you to loot all the kids out of an orphanage for lunch the drek will hit the fan if they do it. (though again at least they'd have someone to offer the cops).

But typical shadowrun work is obviously for a third party. For example just thinking through SR missions/adventures I've read in my head I can't think of any that wouldn't be pretty tell tale. Well I guess if the team backed the van up to every place they searched and cleaned them out it would look like robberies. In which case I would increase the heat on the runners.

In fact to develop an interesting backstory after each run I'd suggest sitting down and thinking about the future impact. For example what does lonestar think of what went down. Do they care. Is there going to be any heat on the runners? How long before it would die down? Does anybody even know it was them? Did they personally piss off anyone who can do something about it?

Then what would be the difference of committing a crime for yourself and committing the same crime for a Johnson? Is there some sticker that you out at the scene of the crime,"This be shadowrun"? If stealing diamonds or a car for a Johnson is sucker work, then a datasteal has to be the suckiest work. A typical shadowrun cannot be obviously for a 3rd party because that would bring down more heat on the J and he doesn't want that. Either way, working for a J or independent, you should bring down the same amount of heat.

Ok take a datasteal. It's obviously a shadowrun. What are the runners going to do with the forumla for a new breakthrough mood detecting nail polish?

Again if they steal everything that isn't bolted down (and they whip out the blowtorch for a few that are) they'd get extra heat brought down on them.

If they don't, however, LS writes it off as just another shadowrun and while Glam MORE nails LLC may be after the runners for a while. Once the situation has shaken out and there isn't anything to be gained from capturing them the heat is off.

i dunno, maybe i'm alone here, but is anyone else of the opinion that 90% of shadowruns don't result in any heat being brought down on anyone? if i were a corp and someone stole the formula for the mood-detecting nail polish i was getting ready to market next week, i wouldn't waste time trying to track down who stole it--i'd be too busy doing damage control, preparing litigations to keep the formula from being used by anyone else until mine hits the market, figuring out what holes in my security got exploited so i can shore them up, figuring out who leaked the existence of the formula in the first place, and so on. it would do me little good to find out who bankrolled the theft--that will become apparent in the very near future, when one of my competitors comes out with mood-detecting nail polish. and it would do me no good to find out who actually performed the theft, except insofar as it relates to tightening internal security. exacting revenge on the runners will only further detract from my bottom line.

Some Shadowrun Missions will go largely unpunished because the corporation in question does not want to admit that they were involved in certian activities in the first place, or for other organizations that they were bested, despoiling their Reputation. So the search for the perpetrators would have to be conducted more discreetly, eliminating some possible avenues of finding the culprits.

Of course, rewards should vary (and generally increase as the runner's street rep increases), but I wouldn't overdo it. After all, if the team is all fresh the Johnson is taking alot of chance on them. The ones who hires completely new teams tend to lowball the price ALOT - simply because they know the runners have no alternative as no one will give them good jobs.

For my PCs first job they recieved... about 50 nuyen each for a day. Of course, their first job was looking after a Stuffer Shack in the Barrens with automated gun systems and bullet-proof windows, taking nuyen from an unarmed BTL junkie, and keeping a crowd of hungry barrenites from overrunning the food delivery.

Now on their first real shadowrun they made total 16k (4 players) and they were very happy with that. Sure, it won't pay for one of their's high lifestyle, but a couple more of the same caliber will.

Their next two runs (1st in the same month as the last one) will net them 5k and 5k (for the team )only, but they will be milkruns that only takes them an evening. 1000+ nuyen for an evening is good pay, especially if you're not in a high risk, and you can get better work in a few days.

Another big dangerous mission I'm planning will net them 100k total if they do it right! But these kinds of missons will be few and far between.