So long time player, Troll physad with ton of skills including skills to equate being a full blown medical/cyber specialist. Has nearly 18 yrs r/l playing time and feels he wants to do more then just run. He's started inventing and investing and wants to form his own corporation. His many years in the shadows has left him with a high lifestyle and small business/club owned through cutouts. Now using his false identities and large sum of cash he's trying to build a legal identity with good credit and ability to form his own corp. Obviously this won't be a AAA or even a AA but if it goes public I'm stuck trying to decide/determine how I want to handle it. Suggestions? Well aware of what could happen and how be a thorn in his side when it comes to competition and legality. I have made him well aware but he wishes to continue with his plans.


Edit: Realize this touches on a similar topic that was posted before. "Why keep running if I own a successful business, risking it all for less profit?" Because I can is the answer I'm getting LOL.

Eh, probably isn't that helpful, but I'd make what I could of the "running up to fruition" process, and then the character would become an NPC. Maybe at that point, have the players create new characters and the NPC could employ them.

I'm not much for "high level strategic" games/gaming though.

Sounds like retirement time, to me. 18 years. Oi.

The way I look at this concept is as such:
-With enough bribe money, you can get yourself a new SIN. No corporate or government sponsor should be immune to graft, in Shadowrun.
-Once you get that ident, it's a real one. It could have come from the pool of SINs the corp or government reserves for legal immigrants, or something. And it's not like it'll become invalid if someone discovers Joe the Troll used to be a nobody - obviously, he's contributing to society now that he's a small business owner, so what's the trouble?
-If the character is gonna start a company, he's going to need permits. Lots of permits. And those require more bribes. Usually you call that kind of stuff lobbying, or gifts, or 'playing politics', but we all know it's really bribes.
-If he's doing something interesting, large companies should make a play to buy him out cheaply while he's small. If he doesn't play, they could offer a partnership in his company - investment money in exchange for co-directorship. Just to ensure their money is well looked-after.
-If he's an asshole to them, they might decide they want the company anyway, and frame him for murder or something. That's only if he looks like he'll be a credible threat later, and probably won't ever cut a deal.
-If it looks like he wants to go public and they feel he could be a 'straight shooter', said corp could buy a majority of public stock and suddenly be on the BoD, or even have a BoD majority. They could keep Joe the Troll on as director of the Saeder-Krupp TrollTech subsidiary. Or, if he's made their lives hell and acted like a bastard, they might just no-confidence his ass and kick him out of his own company.

Just some thoughts.

I'm actually having an interesting time with a couple of my PCs as well. The hacker wants a job coding agents and such at a corp. I'm not quite sure how to handle this, except to ask for a resume.

The semi-legit (SINner) street doc is attempting to go through legal channels to shut down a radiation treatment facility that's suppressing a technomancer's ability with heavy doses of radiation.

It's strange, but Shadowrunners can sometimes go legit. It's definitely not what I expected from the characters.

Right, but once they do you have to ask yourself -- what now?

Are they ALL going legit? If so, they're not really Shadowrunners any more and it's time to double check with everyone that they want to play a "day in the life" game that happens to be set in 2070.

If they're NOT all going legit, you need to talk to either the horrible law-breaking scum or the upright new citizens out to turn over a new leaf, and get them to either (1) agree which side of the line they want to be on as a gaming group, or (2) explain to them this is going to mess with the overall pacing and feel of the game.

People bitched for three editions -- what, about ten years? -- because the decker had to steal the GM all to himself for a half hour to hack the Matrix once the rest of the team busted their ass to get him on-site for a routine datasteal. Imagine how many people will wander away from the table to go fire up the 360 for a rousing game of Guitar Hero because the GM's about to spend the next hour and a half playing balance the corporate checking account with someone who's decided to turn his back on his life of crime, while the rest of them are in the middle of a job.

Yup. I've had runners go legit before, even played a runner that went from legit to runner and back to legit, I just usually don't keep running the game for them. They retire/move on/become an NPC.

Basically, it's because what one character (and one player) wants to do doesn't trump the fact that there are several other people at the table. I'm not going to have them sit around watching me and the one player play Papers&Paychecks. The other part is that I wouldn't enjoy running P&P anyway, so why put myself in a situation to have to?

Following on some of Adarael's ideas though, you could have all of that going on as plot, and have the runners get approached by both sides. Maybe they're originally working for TrollTech, but a Johnson (who happens to be with Ares, should they do enough legwork to find out) approaches them and wants to hire them to sabotage TrollTech's manufacturing facility. So on and so forth. It could make for some great gaming, but you wouldn't be stuck playing "Business-run".

edit: What Crit said.

He's being a Johnson about it!

It depends on group size and playstyle. In my current group, a lot of our "runs" are not actual runs, but situations that happen in the character's "normal" lives - or are motivated by them.

We play roughly 4 hours a week, and do a lot of life/side plots, more than regular runs. We have a small group though, and those plots tend to involve the whole group, which is why we don't have a need to cut to the run.

...I agree, it is easier to do with a smaller group. When I still had Leela (#62? ....haven't had my morning coffee yet) there were only 3 regular players (we had a fourth who showed on occasion due to RL obligations). It was very easy for the GM to mix more fluff into the campaign and still keep the action going. There was also a troll physad who the GM spent time with as well. He struck a nice balance in switching the"spotlight" from character to character in the campaign each session while still moving main mission forward. We also had the benefit of playing longer sessions (starting early in the afternoon).

Congratulations on 18 years of playing time... yikes.
"I have CHARACTERS older than you, squirt!"

Basically, though, Adarael has it down pat. I'd squeeze a bit more game time into it, perhaps some early corporate intrigue, before retiring him as an NPC.

I had this happen in my game. Corp shill for Aztec wanted to start up a show called Runners, reality television about everyone's favorite antisocialists.

In the end, one of the team (Played by someone who loves such movies as Hardboiled) turned out to be the exact kind of badass that would make a great star of a show. And he was willing to be that star, so long as it helped him wipe out a branch of the triad (he was from a competing branch from the area which had been nearly wiped out years earlier).

In the end Jan (the action hero) became a living legend of sorts, spawning the phrase "Thats just Jan Chow enough to work". Harold the bastard got sent back to Atzlan by way of drug induced cab ride and occasionally gets feed from Jan about his exploits.

The characters were mostly shelved by the players wishes. When they interact with the game, i usually deffer to the players who first made them about how they want to act. And every once in a while, Jan will ride in on his bike, or Harold will give the team a bit of information for a price. But both are happy with their new characters being more like runners, and less like a corp shill and an extreme action hero.

Well, there's an easy way to get a SIN these days, with the Big D's amnesty program having been put in place by the Hef (I know, he's the playboy Hef, but I find no end of joy in these small things so give me a break...).

Beyond that, I see many great shadowruns in starting a small corp under the circumstances with the troll as the johnson/co-runner. Hey, he won't have any trouble finding a team, will he?

And ya, Adarael has a good line on it.

It is not that you can't do it, but the rules do not really get into how you would do it. I mean you could have a character who is a chartered accountant, but there really is no section in the rules for how to do it. It sounds like he would set it up, and retire.

When it comes down to it, it's the player's responsibility to keep their character's career as a runner feasible, just as much after a game begins as before when designing their original concept. That's their part of the storytelling experience.

If a player is wanting to go beyond that, he's moving away from the entire basis of this game and, unless they have a really terrific GM who loves improv and sees it as an opportunity to make things even more interesting, he should (as others have said) consider this his character's "retirement" plan rather than a "let's change the game completely just because I want to" plan.

It's like a player complaining that he wants to go invest in some land overseas and use a large portion of his profits to run for office... while playing Monopoly. When you start doing things like that, you're not playing the game anymore. You're playing something else, and no one else should feel obligated to come up with entirely new rules and scenarios just to appease that oddball desire.

Have to partially disagree with Doc's comment above, don't think theres anything in a true table top R/P game that should be "out of bounds". Gaming for me is all about imagination and having fun. What it boils down too is.

1. Do let the players go outside the box.
2. Don't let a single player monopolize time.
3. Do keep it fun for everyone.
4. Don't say no just for GM convenience, unless it also affects an above rule.

I think as long as I keep the above rules in mind I can use Adarael's pointers from above to let the player push the envelope of the mission after mission grind and add an element of personal goals and downtime living that can only enrich a long running game.

( As little side note this whole topic has gotten me thinking, our group has played dozens of rpg's and generally rotate from one system to another every few months. In hind sight the games that last longer then the others are the games were the players have a personal agenda and a life outside of the storyline. Adding a deeper sense of consequence and a feeling of empowerment and ownership in there characters lives. )

Somebody may have already mentioned this, but jumping from Adarael's ideas - you have a great opportunity to give your character some new motivation.

Let him start his company, let him invest WADS of cash in it, then have some megacorp take it in a hostile takeover and leave him on his keister.

The result? You have one very pissed off troll left with nothing but the Shadows and a vendetta.

You can't do a hostile takeover of a sole proprietorship. You have to be able to buy the controlling interest in the company. Which is kind of hard to do if the character is the sole owner, and the main asset. This would require they pay him a fortune for his company. Which would be my definition of winning.

It is one good reason not to take on vague "investors" in your fictional company.

No, but in the Sixth World they could find something that he valued more then his company and force him to sell at rock bottom prices...

Well, sure, that is done by the mafia now. But they usually choose not to pick on people who built their company on the bodies of those they killed for money. They'd rather extort from those who won't shoot them in the face when they make "the offer they can't refuse".

Although I imagine that it happens once in a blue moon today (My understanding is that the mafia tends to favor using debts as extortion as opposed to threats, but I could easily be mistaken.) by 2070 it's probably considered SOP whenever possible. Besides, if the dirty trog does shoot one of your men, then you return fire and have your Decker edit some footage showing him signing the company over.

Inperfect information makes flawed plans, if the corps realize that he is an ex-runner and that his biz is worth the trouble then they either gank him right off the bat or threaten to pull the house of cards he's built down around his ears via someone expendable. I very much doubt that a legal identity built using illegal ones would still be considered legit once the truth (Or a good enough forgery of the truth.) was discovered by the right people.

Or that a legal identity will matter much when dead hookers covered in your genetic material start showing up in your trunk/yard/hot tub.

The Corp Download shows all the nasty things that happen to legitimate small businesses (let alone the illegitimate ones). If you area a small fry in the big pond you tend to get eaten up. Especially if you look tasty.

Having a runner (or group) go legit isn't too difficult, if you let them work for it. The games I was in, one of the players started as a former Mafia Don who went to jail for tax evasion of all things. Some years later, he's out on his ass as a Joe Nobody, and having to run the shadows. I ran an ex-Lonestar jailed for beating up the wrong corp brat. Another player was one of the don's former employees, and the last was just hired muscle. The group bonded exceptionally well, and we eventually tried to retire from the shadows and run a (mostly) legit operation in the form of a small Security firm. Tons of money later, we had a nigh impenetrable facility that we could store magical items and personal effect if needed . We even provided on site security consulting and services as needed.

Honestly, it was a friggin' blast. The game didn't start themed, but certainly ended that way.

Of course, then we turned down the wrong customer's business, who took it as a personal insult against us, and he worked overtime to shut us down. In the end, we had no choice but to separate ourselves from the company so we could take it out of the sites of everyone else. GM didn't see it that way, and destroyed the company shortly afterwards, and everyone in it. Led to a long and bloody series of vengeance runs that culminated in the death of the don and us all retiring our characters so we could start fresh.

The point of this is that it's doable, but your GM has to be willing to work with you. I agree with many others here though. If a single player wants to do something, and it pulls in the opposite direction the rest of the group is, he'll need to bluebook it outside of game time, or come around to the thinking of the rest of the group. You can't hold up the whole game just because of one person's desires.