I have a little problem in my campaign and was wondering if any of you out there are having it or have had it and figured out a way to fix it.

See, my group is tough enough I have to use cybered opponents, no big deal there right, the problem comes in, when they are looting the bodies, and selling off the body parts and cyberware. Now I don't have a problem with this too a point but it does get to be a bit too much money too easy.

For the most part, I try to kep the fights in locations where the runners do not have a chance to surgically loot with out running the risk of getting caught up in something they don't want, but what happens when they are able to just pack up the bodies and perform the surgery later.

I also try to keep the selling price of the ware to a minimum, 50% cost at most, normally about 25-33%, but also take into account possible damage to the ware based on what ever took them out, usually results in at least one system being unsaleable.

But even with all this taken into account, the team is averaging better than 20,000 nuyen in loot per runner per mission.

Any one else out with this problem, or a solution?

First suggestion: Read and use the rules for Fencing Gear.

What cyberware are you having to use to counter your players?

If its just adding 1 IP - try having your NPCs use either Jazz or Kamikaze instead, especially if they are supposed to be things like security guards or gangers and not emergency response units.

Second suggestion: Threaten to hit them with a few points of Notoriety. Don't actually do it, since the mechanics mean they might actually benefit, but the threat is usually sufficient.

20,000 in loot per session doesn't seem overly excessive if you have a 'tough' group.

Maybe you should be throwing higher quantities of mooks at them, and less 'cyber monsters'. Numbers can be just as challenging (even more so sometimes) than a 'big boss'.

Mabye you are giving out to little money for each run if they resort to a meat cleaver and saw on the ppl they just killed while doing the run.. Even worse.. they do it on ppl that they just just wounded..

Here are a couple of things to consider after assuming that the group has no problems packing up and transporting bodies around:

1. They won't necessarily know who has cyber and who doesn't. That means they are either spending more time sorting bodies or they are packing even more bodies into a van or something. Increased supply of bodies drives the price down.

2. Some cyber is likely to get broken depending on how the opponent was killed, bu the tracking devices their corp bosses put into that cyber tends to survive intact.

3. Even knowing a body has cyber doesn't mean that they know exactly what it has in it. They may have a street doc pay for the wired reflexes and then pocket the Math SPU during surgery without telling them.

4. They will get less nuyen if the buyer has to extract the cyber themselves. Consider surgical costs and subtract that from the profits. If that sees silly on a dead body, remember that the doc could be spending that time working on a live patient and making more... If the players have their own cybersurgeon with the right tools, this might be less of a problem, but it creates problems in it's own right.

5. On the high end, give some of your baddies betaware - it's got 0 resale value.

I rarely found it reasonable to carry bodies as loot. We had a character loot a pair of cyberlegs from a guy once, but that was something he hastily removed with 'field surgery' - not something that is reasonable with a great many of the cyber toys.

Just have their medical costs be hgh enough that it takes a big chunk out of the haul. See also rules for fencing loot. Occasionally have the buyers ambush them at the meet.

As several forum goers have already noted not all cyber is easily removed from a body. In fact, most cannot be easily removed at all. Most cyberwear is not so simple as a chunk of metal atached to a body but a series of smaller systems that hook it up with various bits of the neurological system, control systems etc. Most cyber that can be ripped out will be ripped out partially complete, possibly damaging the cyberware in the process of removal.

So even if it is detected and successfully removed, without proper facilities it is HIGHLY unlikely that the part will come away undamaged.

A street-doc character in a game I was in used to have a van with a vehicle mounted cyberware scanner and some vats of acid to remove fleshy bits from the ware. This is probably one of the few ways that serious profit could be made from cyber - a trained medical (street) professional with facilities.

As Wounded Ronin pointed out, add more RP to the process of selling gear. Generally if it totals to more than a few thousand nuyen, I make the players RP the whole deal. When its RP, theres a much higher chance of people catching a bullet.

- 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

I played a mage that used Turn To Goo on opponents, then Levitated the cyberware into Durazip baggies. The 5 grand Mr. Johnson was paying on runs was chicken feed compared to the money I was making on selling my enemies for scrap.

You could say that about virtually any shadow profession.

I think most of the ideas you'll need have been presented already, but I'd add that unless one of them is playing a cyber doc, they really won't have an idea about most cyberwear except the obvious arm leg eye and ear, and those are cheap, especially used, so you really wouldn't be able to sell them for much at all.

Yeah, I currently have a chick with first aid, medicine and homeopathic training for the party, and turn to goo for the opposition in case we need some cash, or need to dispose of a body down a sewer grate or what have you. You can store bodies in some creepy places when they are goo.

Chris

Body robbing is something I used to... heck, still do, as a player, and as a GM I've learned the best way to deal with it is not to try to nerf it or nix it, but to have fun with it. Notoriety, a bad rep, and upgunned mooks are good counters, but here is my favorite method. Have them get caught with the body parts. Surgically removing cyberware on a run is just plain unrealistic. More likely is that they'll just hack off the part or even take the whole body ("Hey, my STR 10 troll can carry anything"). Well, put them in a situation where they're caught red-handed with the parts. Random Lone Star check points are a fast and dirty way for it. Just include enough firepower that fighting seems like a losing proposition. For more fun, make it a non-violent discovery (by the Johnson, a runner's significant other, random orphans, etc.). These are often hilarious because they involve more roleplaying than dice rolling ("Well, you see, there's a perfectly good explaination for us to have a ditty bag full of 3 arms, 4 legs, and a disembodied head...")

Oh, and a note to GMs when dealing with body-robbers. One typically doesn't see this with well-off runners, but when the nuyen runs dry, watchout!

Be sure to specify! "Bring the mark back alive" includes redundant and nonvital organs.

To me it sounds like your players feel they are not earning enough nuyen on the runs, so they have found a way to supplement it.

Remember a medium lifestyle costs 5,000 nuyen a month, if one or more of your players have a high lifestyle that is 10,000 nuyen a month.

How much are they getting per month in nuyen from the johnson/fixer etc? And how many runs per month?

WMS

well so far they have done two runs this month, each has payed 5000 a pc, plus about another 2000 a pc of gear and other misc loot that doesn't involve ripping it out of a dead body, so i'm not so sure its about the money per say, i just think they got it in their heads to get as much as they can.

just checked my email, i got two of the players complaining about it actually, so it is basically just the "street doc" and the mercenary who seems to have this attitude, the fifth member of the team so far has remained neutral.

in fact one of the players is having his character post something on the matrix about what they did, and see how many jobs they will get hired for in the future?
so that will go a long way in karma coming back to get them.

Posting about it on the Matrix will only hurt the entire teams chances of getting work. That may polarize the party more, ones that take cyberware, one that squeals about it, and those that get a rep by association and get no work.

Remember there are more than one organization involved in organ legging/cyberware recovery. Like the Yaks, you operate in their territory they WANT their PERCENTAGE and have ways making sure they get it. I am not saying the Yakuza are in this, but several underworld organizations are. Also operating in such an organization's turf with out prior permission usually involves a large monetary penalty along with some physical memory adjustments, ie they get the snot beat out of them.

Nothing like having lots of underworld types come busting in, when the team is in down time mode.

Also such organizations may wish to "Regulate" such things in their area of control, and the teams efforts may have exceeded the regulated limit. Then they are basically told to quite in a manner which leaves no room for misinterpretation.

WMS

I thankfully haven't had much problems with this with my group, although I almost expected so, because we used to play D&D.

The reason? High pay. When you're getting 20-30k per person for a run picking up all those Ares Predators worth 350 nuyen (which means it sells at about 100 :y: ) isn't going to matter much. So far they've only looted enemies when they have the time, and those have only been punks and muggers anyway that doesen't have much more than a few pistols or AKs and meta links with bad or no programs.

So far they haven't "harvested" anyone yet, but they can as they have a contact at a shady barrens street clinic. Ah well, it's not going to bother me, and if they start looting exessively they will get caught or get messed with by the Yakuza or mafia. Of course, in the short run that's only going to give them more loot, but when they start losing contacts or even have fixers and Johnsons going silent on them, they'll take the hit and make some kind of arangement.

The last campaign I was in, we started out selling our opponents for scrap, just because we all started dirt poor (campaign stipulation). We had a street doc in the group, but not a good one. And our early enemies weren't very cybered, anyway. We basically had to sell 'em by the pound for ghoul chow. It was such an ugly prospect that we didn't need any GM intervention to dump the practice as soon as we could. If we could eat without spending a couple hours a night playing with a chainsaw in the bathtub, we were all for it!

Organlegging is in a lot of ways "free money". If the group takes someone out, and there is a nuyen value on the corpse, that can be hard to pass up. Particularly if that nuyen values is four times what they're making on the run.

If the group is making 20k per person per run just on cyber they pull out of dead bodies, and they're selling it for 25-33% of the worth, that's about 300k worth of cyberware they're running across. That's not out-of-line, but it is a lot of gear to expect them to pass up.

I'm not entirely sure why anyone would look down on them for that. If anything, I think the rep might help them since razroboys would be less likely to go against them knowing that these people are going to put them through a woodchipper and sell anything that comes out the other side.

I'm of the opinion that if you use something against the pc's, if you put something "in play" its fair game. If the pcs can figure out how to end up with it, then thats the reward for being tough, clever or lucky. If you think they're making too much money taking gear off or out of their opponents, use less gear. More schmoes, cheaper gear, combat drugs, buff spells and so on.

If the pcs wonder why all the sudden everybody they fight isn't worth 13 cents a pound, you can tell them its because street samurai are scared to come fight them.

Or...

The cybergoons' sponsor (corporate or syndicate) notices when said goons don't report in. They then trace the RFID tags in the cyberware.

They either find the team with a van full of bodies, they find the street doc they've sold it to, or (later) they find the recipients of the cyberware. They torture and interrogate their way back to the source, and hey presto -- revenge time!

You could say that about any piece of stolen gear. The problem isn't that they were stealing cyberware, its that they were bad at it.

I imaging a conversation similar to this:

"Honorable Oyabun, our group of assassins have not come back."
"Eh, win some, lose some."
"We think that group of shadowrunners we sent them to kill killed them."
"C'est le vie."
"We think they incinerated their bodies, and are now driving around in their car, using their guns, spending their pocket money, and making prank phone calls to their widows."
"Cost of doing business. Circle of life."
"Also, they may have taken the Wired Reflexes out of one guy."
"What?!? I have literally never been more offended at anything I have ever heard in my entire life. That is the most uncouth thing I have come across in my 37 years as a yakuza oyabun, and I regularly cook and eat babies."
"What should we do?"
"Let's get some guys together with even more valuable cyberware, and send them after this same group. I mean, what could go wrong there?"
"Well, thats why you get the big money, sir."

Cyberware is a commodity. Someone is going to end up with it. To say that the shadowrunners shouldn't take it because its immoral seems to gloss over the fact that shadowrunners are rarely bankers or clergymen. If a particular group decides not to touch cyber-reselling because it offends them, that's fine, the same way some groups won't take wetwork or do unwilling extractions. But to say that no group would try to resell cyberware or would be immediately looked down upon and doomed for doing so seems-- given the fluff of the game-- a bit naive.

The fluff of the game has organleggers reviled as ghoul-lovers and freaks (e.g. Tamanous) and specifically says that runners who work with Tamanous find it hard to work with anyone else.

And, yeah, you could extend the RFID thing with that. Looting bodies should have consequences!

Organlegging and cyber-reselling aren't the same thing though. (Organlegging is what you do after you take out the cyber.) And any street doc, who by definition usually aren't worried about the standards and practices of the AMA, can take cyberware out of a person. That money can be made at it, and that the cyberware can be put to use, means that there are people out there that will do it. That there are rules for second hand cyberware backs that up.

Let's say a group was chasing a guy who stole a 300k diamond, and he's shooting at them and they're shooting at him. The last thing he does is swallow the diamond, and the street sam shoots him and puts him right through his physical damage overflow. Now, they have a dead guy with 300k in him. Are they going to leave it for Lone Star, or are they going to figure out how to get it out? Someone is going home with that money.

Cyberware is more complicated to remove than a diamond, but surely the moral objection isn't related to the complexity. I mean, what are we saying here? Shadowrunners can kill people, they can even profit from killing people, but once they kill them they aren't allowed to do anything else? Would it be acceptable if they tasered people, took them to street docs, removed all their cyberware and then dumped them off at the ER? (Why does that seem even meaner to me?)

I agree that looting bodies, or looting anything, or shadowrunning itself for that matter, should have consequences. Minimizing those consequences are what the runners do. Shadowrunning is one long calculated risk (or a bunch of short ones strung together, however you want to look at it).

I was planning a reply but Mercer pretty much smashed the nail on the head.

The only addendum being that

There's still a bit of a moral jump from killing someone to defiling a corpse, you know?

Not for a Raven mage.

Besides in 2070, yoinking a corpse's cyberarm is no more heinous than stealing a corpse's wallet.

The fact that it can be done quickly and cleanly with the petrify spell makes mages in the used cyber business very scary.

Pros use "Turn to Goo" and wash the pieces with "water blast".

I never really understood why Turn to Goo doesn't affect cyberware, other than the book says it doesn't. It seems like if they paid essence for it, it would be considered a part of their body. If a guy with a cyberarm gets Shapechanged into a wolf, does he have a meat wolf leg, or a wolf cyberleg, or a human arm attached to a wolf body, or no arm at all? Granted, that's not the meeting we're having right now, but its something I'm unclear on.

Turn to Goo just does not exist in my games.

as for the morality of it ....

it happens like this, the opposing team is down for the count but not dead, the mercenary walks up to the downed runners and proceeds to put a bullet in their head, then loads said bodies into the back of the truck so the street doc/runner can take them back for dismantling.

to me that is simply more than looting what is there, that is straight up cold blooded butchery.

any one else see it that way, or is it just me.

all in all i just dont like it, and i plan on punishing them in some way for behaving like this, just got to figure out how exactly.

I absolutely hate that kind of attitude in a GM. Realistic consequences for a character's actions is one thing, but out-right 'punishing' them merely because the GM doesn't like something is, to me, quite distasteful.

As far as I am concerned, this whole thing is only a problem when there is a lack of communication between the Players and the GM. If the GM envisions the world in a specific way (or has a specific 'pet hate'), they should sit down with the Players and discuss the game world. Hell ... all GM's should do this anyway, as all of them envision the Sixth World working in a slightly different manner.

Mercer, your example rocks!
Menkey, now I have to look up "transcendental signified" and might become smarter as a result.

YMMV; I prefer "let's think this through for a moment, of all the many, many ways this story could go, which ones are both plausible and fun".

Characters who kill, squeamish about handling bodies? Maybe. In my group, my character is and others aren't and thus a good roleplayed debate ensued, ending in compromise. Fine with me.

Killing people just to profit from their body is exactly the same as any other killing? Not for me. If the body-handling is incidental to a case of self-defense, or even stumbling across the aftermath of someone else's firefight, that's not the same as "hey, he looks valuable, let's kill him". Because the latter is clearly a broad threat to MANY people, and triggers the same thousands-of-years-old defensive responses that resulted in wolves being kinda rare in Europe after the Industrial Revolution, and smallpox now being extinct except for lab samples.

Selling to Tamanous necessarily means bad rep? Not plausible to me; Tamanous must have some way of keeping their business contacts low-profile. Don't brag about selling to Tamanous, and they won't tell anyone that you dealt with them, and trust THEM to have guaranteed some privacy when they told you where to drop off the materials. Also, if you sell to them, you're not a competitor. Downside: they pay low rates to outside suppliers, and they get the 'ware.

Selling bodies necessarily means doing the extraction yourself? No; although handling a body at all, especially if it's bleeding, means forensic evidence issues.

Cyberware is valuable when taken from a corpse? Not so sure. For Wired Reflexes, I bet that 10% of the cost is materials, and 90% is the delicate work of surgical installation, so the materials aren't worth much after the extraction, even if you allow Goo. For a cybereye, the parts are perhaps a higher percentage of the cost, but of the 500 you pay Evo to get Eyes 1, the labor to install something that connects to your optic nerve HAS to be part of the cost. (Heck, I'm amazed that you can get neurosurgery for 500 even without electronics to install.) For decked-out Eyes 4, well, the baseline cost of surgery is under 500 so the parts must be worth thousands.

The big problem with looting bodies of their internal contents (natural and tech) is that you now have greater incentive to kill everyone that's not an ally or contact. Why take prisoners or leave 'em alive when you can kill them and pull a bit of cash from their dead body?

Running the setting to encourage bloodthirsty behaviors like stripping organs and cyber is not something I recommend for a GM. Your world will get very bleak really fast as soon as NPCs notice that the PCs have more cyber than most, they'll take their chance since that's just what people do in that sort of setting. One bribed bartender to slip them all poisoned drinks might be all it takes for the PCs to wake up missing cyber, organs, limbs, and even life (in which case they don't actually wake up). Such a thing is not punishing the players - it's rewarding them by showing that you accept their views on the game!

Accepting that something happens and encouraging that behavior are two different things.

If the PCs are discrete about their endeavors, then there is little reason for the GM to 'punish' them for their actions in contrived or non-realistic ways. An tense encounter or two during the normal course of doing business, just to show the dangerous side is more than enough to demonstrate that it might not be a good career path.

Personally, I don't see the problem. I also don't necessarily think that it automatically follows that the occasional organ or cyber-legging will lead to a more blood-thirsty game. As has been testified to by several people (in this and other threads), it has actually led to some very good, satisfactory role-playing experiences for all involved. I know this has definitely been the case for my games, from both sides of the GM screen.

Just because murder and organlegging happens doesn't mean everyone has the stomach for the job. You can go ahead and rationalize it however you want, but it does indeed sound like punishing the PCs to me. Fortune beat me to it, but yes, there IS a difference between exposing your players to the dangers of dipping their toes in dark waters and going after them because they pursued a part of the setting you dislike. The characters did something wrong, but the players are just seeing where the game takes them. Just talk to them instead if it bothers you that much.

ok, i may have spoken a little hastily, as punishing isn't my true intentions its more as i want to make sure that their actions will have impacts on the campaign either from other organleggers or black market cyberware 'dealer' or simply just from the effect it will have on their reputation, because as it may seem reasonable to do from the money raising aspect it just not the same as it is too fence whatever gear you may collected along the way.

Why does everyone assume that it's equally easy to uninstall cyberware as it is to install it?

If the cyberware has been in there for more than a few days, muscle and scar tissue will wrap themselves around each installed piece making it that much harder to pull out and salvage.

In addition, the reduced cost that second-hand cyberware has means it's that much less lucrative to take it, especially considering you'll be paid less than 2/3rds what it's worth second hand. Doctor's buying used cyberware will take money off the selling price due to the cleaning cost, the testing cost, and all sorts of other fees so that they still make a substantial profit as well. With all that, you'd be lucky to make a 30 percent return on the full book price of a new piece of the same hardware.

Considering that it'll take several hours to remove most pieces of cyberware, excluding arms and legs, which are custom built to fit a body (also lowering the value), makes it not worth it to try and pull it out.

And don't mention turn to goo, because even as a goo, you have to essentially dig through a gluey substance, which, while easier, is also more likely to affect cyberware and require an even more extensive (and expensive) cleaning to remove. It may save you time, but it should cost you money in the long run.

indeed, it should be noted that turn to goo is not the great organ-harvesting spell that everyone seems to think it is.

note that the resulting goo has a barrier rating equal to the target's body + net hits (which will be at least 1 if you succeeded in casting the spell).

i don't think it's *too* far-fetched to suppose that most people with cyber worth stealing will have at least 3-4 body (that is, while the average person may have ~2000 in 'ware, the people with 50k in 'ware are probably going to have above-average body, unless your team is regularly killing corp execs for their 'ware... which, for the record, is not generally a very good idea).

as such, the resulting goo will be somewhere between a door and a lightpost in terms of hardness (more in the case of orks and trolls). so if you're saying you can just shove your hand through a door, grab someone/something on the other side, and drag them through the door (gently, mind you, since you don't want to risk damaging it) then i guess you might be able to just pull 'ware out of the goo.

otherwise, you're not really looking at anything particularly useful (though, on a side note, i also consider that ruling to be dumb, and would houserule that goo is just goo, and wouldn't have any kind of intact 'ware in it)

You could carry around a really big sieve ...

I wasn't really intending on arguing this point, it being a joke and all, but technically, despite its barrier rating, it is goo. Being viscous, it would be conceivable that it would flow as pretty much any liquid does, and thereby Saeder Krupp's 'Mega-Omni Goo Sieve™' could possibly be a way to separate that substance from the solid cybersubstance embedded in it.

Whatever it is, not all people think the same about it. Whether it's turn to goo, or killing people just for the material wealth in their bodies. It could be for 2 cents, or two million, does how much you kill for matter if you only do it for money?

What you personally think of what the runners do, the rest of the game world can and will have lots of different opinions about it, and may act accordingly.

sure, and you could get a door through a sieve too... you just have to modify it first

my point being, turn to goo is not all that awesome when it comes to extracting 'ware. you're still pulling it out of something that is tough and presumably sticky, since it *is* goo. in fact, it's probably *easier* to pull it out of a metahuman body, for 2 reasons:

1) there are techniques developed for just such procedures.

2) the human body won't ooze back into place to fill any gaps you might make in it... or at least, not as readily as goo most likely would.

i just wanted to make the point that turn to goo is not really all that great for harvesting cyber, when you really get down to it.