how do you get inspiration for the characters you play,

yes yes this is a shameless attempt at helping me get a background for my character. but ignore that.

normally I sit down and pick one or two people I've talked to and use that as foundation, then spiral out picking more indepth personality traits, and styles. but in the end I write up a short story instead of a "background" showing the character how he is now instead of who he was then...

Basically I figure that Shadowrunners has to have something fragging wrong that makes him unable or unwilling to find other employment, Runners are not healthy well-adjusted pros that would fit in with modern black ops, if they were then the corps would snap them up in a heartbeat.


With that said to be honest, I only write down the important bits, and then usually in bulletpoint shorthand, I mean really, if your Mage was forced into the Shadows because he cut off his own fragging hand and threw it at the shrink in a manditory psyche exam then just jolt that bit down along with a couple of sentences about what broke him in the first place, less is actually more in my opinion. (Within reason of course.)

*Edit*

Clarified a point.

Decide how the character is now and try to think why he has become that way, what has influenced him thorugh childhood, adolesence, or early adulthood.

How long has he been a shadowrunner? Why did he chose the profession? Why can't/won't he get a real job and SIN?

You might want to search the web for more such RPG questionaires to help create character background. Personally I don't use backgrounds overmuch, unless something is found out by fellow players etc. Usually I just make the characters and think of behavior, values and quirks, and leave it at that. Then I build up the background gradually while playing.

I don't see the background as totally separate from the mechanical aspects of character creation. Generally, I start out with a few ideas and a general concept, start roughing out some stats, then fill in stats and background concurrently, letting them bounce off of each other. Here is where I will find out if a character trait is impractical, or if the character's background changes some of the stats. It has worked out well for me - my characters make sense, and their stats fit the background. I have seen a lot of threads with people who have started out with a preconceived concept or background, and struggled with building the character afterwards.

Personally, I like structured outlines like Bull's questions or the 20 questions, which keep my thoughts organized. Plus, even if I am suffering writer's block, I can at least work on some of the easier questions (eye and hair color, etc.). My overall philosophy is that my main concern should be: "how did this person become a shadowrunner, and how did his goals, motivations, and personality quirks evolve?" If his childhood was uneventful as far as motivating him to become a runner, I won't waste five paragraphs describing it. Instead, there will be a snippet like

I don't think that runners need necessarily be maladjusted or antisocial. Something could have forced them into the shadows. For example, a Irish Catholic gunslinger I'm working on started out as a Catholic paramilitary in Tir Na Nog fighting the heathen overlords, but ended up leaving the country when the Tir goverment started sending assassins after him. No more outcast or unable to work with others than a normal person, but he's on one too many shit lists to do anything out of the shadows.

One biggie I forgot to mention - be sure you know what kind of campaign it is before you make a character. And not just power level - look at the type of play (gritty heroes vs. gutter punks vs. hard cold pros) as well, so you can make a character who will fit in with the others.

Most of the above is good in any RPG. I get better results when I think up at least a thumnail sketch of the PC's parents. After all, whenever I meet the parents of an adult friend, I usually get a bit more of a clue about how this person got to be the way they are.

For SR, there are so many aspects of the setting that one can tap, and/or explore, via character back story. I recently wrote an outline designed to do three things: 1) justify a min-maxed elf shaman illusionist who's not a wagemage, 2) create a character who has mixed feelings about their racial, national and class affiliations, 3) create a character that has tenative connections in a whole lot of directions: Aztlan, Tir, Pueblo, Wuxing, secret societies, magical lodge politics. If the GM wants to do a story in any of those directions, there's a plausible plot hook in which this PC gets a comcall from an old associate (that the GM just now made up). There's a bit of my own family history mixed in, since I have bilingual relatives in Guadalajara and Phoenix.

Here goes:

Juanita Vargas was the third daughter and fifth child born to a wealthy, landowning Catholic family in Gaudalajara, the capital of Jalisco province, in what was then Mexico. She was also the first elf born in Guadalajara. Her wealthy landownowning family was delighted to raise such a pretty, graceful girl... but they always had a bit of discomfort with her pointed ears, and were happy when she married Ricardo Perez, the manager of a tequila distillery which happened to get most of its agave supply from Vargas farms. Ricardo and Juanita were in turn delighted by the birth in 2042 of their son Carlos, who inherited his mother's metatype. Less delightfully, the crackdown on the now-illegal Catholic church reached Guadalara, Carlos's baptism ceremony was raided, they were arrested, and only by pulling some Vargas strings were they able to get released. They relocated to Pheonix, Arizona, where Ricardo had some relatives. Ricardo found a Masonic lodge in Phoenix, but the rites were different, most of the lodge brothers were Protestant, and the social connections were apples and oranges to what they'd been in Mexico. He retained a stake in the distillery as "silent partner", and found decent work as a factory foreman. When Aztlan nationalized all non-Aztech corporate holdings, both Perez and Vargas family fortunes were badly hurt, and Ricardo and Juanity had to make lifestyle adjustments. Consequently, Carlos grew up with the social grace training and dance lessons "appropriate to his station", but a lot of deferred dreams; "next year we'll go skiing, I promise, it's just a little tight right now". His parents spat when Aztechnology was mentioned on the news, and Carlos grew up with the idea that a golden heritage had been stolen... with the complications of being a Latino Elf in Phoenix, and learning Sperethiel on his own from Matrix sources, while speaking English in school and Spanish at home. He wasn't much of a scholar nor athlete, but he was still popular, managing to combine aristocratic elegance with affable warmth and a knack for jokes. Most classmates found him attractively exotic; even with those who found him disturbingly alien, he could usually talk his way out of trouble.

At 18, in 2060, Carlos weathered a few more transitions. He graduated from parochial secondary school and entered University of Arizona, he started dating a libertine from an elvish sorority, and he Awakened. Practicing his emerging ability to create light and sound by force of will was a serious distraction from homework. Calling forth spirits from the Astral shocked his parents and dissolved what remained of his Catholic identity. Dropping out of school and barely on speaking terms with his family, he needed something to turn to, something that would accept him with fewer compromises. He found the Trickster totem and joined a shamanic lodge. With raw talent and single-minded focus, he quickly became a master illusionist, with a sideline in detection, considering those a natural balance. As a fast-rising hotshot, he got drawn into a high-stakes feud in the Phoenix magical underground, and in a duel of illusions, he ended up winning a powerful magical ring. Afterwards, though, he was worried about who might hold grudges, and chose to move on, hoping to broaden his horizons, and perhaps to meet more elves and get a sense of what Tir Tairngire is about. His family's experience with a monopolistic, monolithic state makes him wary on that topic. Indeed, his experiences with institutions of all sorts have mostly been bad news. He puts a corresponding value on individual connections.

Carlos remains intently conscious of appearances and sensations. He is sensitive to extremes of light (always wearing shaded glasses outside) and sound (he hates loud parties and honking car horns). He experiences simsense as unpleasantly disorienting, and avoids VR; besides, he just can't get an avatar to smile as persuasively as he can in the flesh. Whenever he comes across something that he might want to recreate as an illusion, he tends to study it carefully, with an subtle eye for details of hue and shadow. He'll occasionally Mask himself to see what reactions he gets as a flashy Japanese hipster, as a scarred-knuckle bruiser ork, or as a blonde, blue-eyed, jut-jawed Anglo-American. He continues to tell jokes, pull pranks, and talk his way into and out of trouble. He had a legit job for a while as a sales representative for Wuxing, and got his shockrod focus as a bonus for setting a new record for total sales in a quarter; he then quit while he was ahead.

Although healing magic is not his primary gift, it has changed his life. For a while, he took long shifts in a Phoenix emergency room, laying hands on one patient after another, incurring Drain to the point of exhaustion. As mundane doctors and nurses discovered back in the Fifth Age, there's always more patients than one can help. Since he moved, he's been earning his rent by working with a street doctor. He helps patients recover from injuries, wounds, and augmentation surgery, and his bedside manner is a plus.

He has no significant pollution allergies, but he's noticed the much higher presence of respirators compared with Phoenix, he hears complaints from air spirits, and he's been in contact with a Thunderbird-totem mage about some possibilities of vigilante action against major violators of environmental regulations. In the meantime, he's interested in acquiring money and experience, for personal enjoyment as well as idealistic purposes.

I don't buy that all once you start getting into the AA+ levels, at those levels the corps are literally nations unto themselves so saying that they won't have their own black op teams is akin to saying that the nations of todays don't.

Hell, I don't even buy that the larger A corps wouldn't have thier own teams, although by necessarity they'd have to be alot more careful since in theory they are still beholden to national laws.

One of the things I use during my character creation process is the Shadowrun timeline. After I have already decided on who I am going to play I look over the time line and look to see what major events happened during my character's life time and I determine which ones would have had an effect on them to add some of the offical fluff to my character's back ground to give it more wieght in the Shadowrun world.

Interesting question. I have been researching this very subject recenty. What I have found is that there are several places to start, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, but to get a 'good' character its' the amount of evolution you go through to fully realise them as a person.

Some people start with the background and see's where that leads and changes the charcter.
Some start with the stats, then backwards engineer the character's personality and background.
Some start with a concept they want to explore and build up from there.
This can also mean you work backwards from what the character does to who they are.
These methods can all be distinct or mixed up.
You then go into a series of questions that become more and more specific, like a series of filters refining the character. Finally it all has to make sense.

Condensed from like 12 conversations and 15 years of gaming, so it's broad brush strokes. Hope it helps.

Edited for spelling

I'm with the crew of ''have a rough idea about character, start statting them up, fill in bits and pieces as i go along''. Occationaly i come up with a really detailed bunch of stuff early; like if i know im playing and it's a slow night at work. Then ill stat it out accordingly. Most of the time, though, it's a rough sketch that gets built up. Everything has it's benefits, as said. Sometimes the rough sketch changes over time, and sometimes even splits off into two characters. This happened recently; i had an idea for a former company man/black ops type of character...who was also heavily into the occult, and was a hermetic mage. However, as i started fleshing them out...the occult-loving hermetic mage ended up going away from the former company man idea and more into the realm of a combat mage, and the former company man ended up branching off otherwise into a mundane...and so two characters were born.

And sometimes it's something as little as ''i want to play Gun Man'' and statting them up, filling out bits as i go along, especially when Knowledge Skills come into play.

When Laurence Olivier and Dustin Haufman were shooting Marathon Man, Olivier noticed that Haufman was exhausted in between takes and asked him why. Haufman said it was because he had stayed up all night because his character had. Olivier then gave the famous line "My boy, why don't you just act it?"
Everyone forgets Haufman's response, which was "Because I'm not that good."

Some people can make a character on the fly with as little background as necessary and get fully into that character right away. Others need to sit down and have their characters well thought out with pages upon pages of back story in order to understand what decisions they will make in game and why. Some people like to play caricatures, like the dumb, but lovable ork or the prissy elf. Others like layered, complex and mysterious characters who you need several game sessions before you get to know them.
Neither of these are wrong, they are just different means to and end. Some are more preferable to play, but almost all are fun to play with.

I, personally, enjoy writing a lot of back story. I think it's fun, it helps with my writing and it really brings me into the universe, even if the stuff never sees the light of day. But other players find it time consuming and distracting to have non-active choices for only a few minutes worth of dialog.
Everyone has their personal style, but the trick is to try them all and find which makes the best character, and which method you find most fun.

The only "wrong" method is the guy who never makes a character, he makes a character sheet. The guy who never talks in character and never separates player knowledge from character knowledge. The guy who doesn't understand the difference between Shadowrun and Warcraft. Be he the quite guy who never contributes to anything but combat, or the most dreaded of all player, Rules Whore of the Hill People, this is the guy you keep praying will have car trouble this week.
Don't be that guy. No one likes that guy.

more or less i start out with this crazy idea:"i wanna play darkwing duck!"
then i think about what would be appropriate to make him as close as the toon and then i stat out the toon and if i actually get to and decide to keep playing him i think up a little bit of background-story closely matched to the "official" story and then i start to flesh it out as i go and make up more as it comes to me . . more or less . . and before anybody asks: yes, i did in fact build darkwing duck with the NSRCG once *g*

...what Glyph mentioned is pretty much the way I approach a new character concept. I also agree that the available outline questions help a lot. I also agree that the type of campaign is a factor as well. Now while I am known to put a lot of detail into character backstories and yes one of them is a short novel in length (done so as a writing exercise), I do try my best to keep to the basics.

I also have to differ with Ravor in that not every runner is a sociopathic malcontent.

A good example is the Short One (#103). Her background does deal with some fairly touchy subjects, hence the spoiler tags for the abbreviated version below (the actual story is ≈110 pages in narrative style).

First I make up my mind on what I want my character to be good at and how he is going to be good at it. Then I create a character sheet. Then I wrap a character background around the character sheet. I will then tweak part of the character background and character sheet so that both are consistent with each other.

I usually start with a basic concept, usually an archetype with a twist. Then I shade in the major stats and go back to the character design and fill that in a little more. I kind of add a little (or take a little away) from each one until I have both a working concept and a character sheet to go with it. Sometimes, of course, I get the whim to do something because it's funny, e.g. my Troll Technomancer Kraken - the worst possible race for a Techno (especially with the low-level 300BP game we're playing), get excited and do the whole character sheet, and fill in the background as I go.

I only turn to the 20 questions if I have writer's block and can't think of anything more than the base theme and stats. The 20 questions are good for thinking about how the character would ask them - I always snake the inflection and philosophy of the character in with the 20 questions thing. It's a good block-buster.

I start with the original stats, I write the background and adjust the stats as the background adjusts them. I try to avoid "Oooo! I am an Orphan!" or "I was part of the military/corpsec!" for my backgrounds, as those are just too cliche. Generally, when coming up with the concept, I like to take a normal concept and put a spin on it. I often build the character off of an image of them in my head. Where did they get that scar? What does that tattoo mean to them? Why did they get that cyber? Is their hair colour natural? If not, what is their natural hair colour? When were they born, where? And then, I write it first person, leaving out the stuff I would not know in character, but that a GM might very well make use of those holes....Actually, I kind of find writing the background to be the most fun part of making a character.

...excellent point about leaving the GM holes. That has happened with several of my characters, and usually makes playing them more interesting. Leela (#104) and Violet (#105) are two good examples.

With Leela, the GM played up the mystery of why she was yanked out of Croatia when a demolitions mission in her backstory went bad. She kept trying to find out but could never get the real story. This became one of her "personal" missions (she never truly found out as the one person who knew died while protecting her from an assassination attempt). On another occasion, during a run where she was posing as a waitperson at a banquet where we were hired to bodyguard an important figure, a woman from her past (from before the war) recognised her even through her disguise and remembered hearing her recitals back in Zagreb (love that old Distinctive Style flaw). The GM also played on her Flashbacks flaw as well describing in detail what she saw when they occurred.

For Violet, The GM is playing on her paranoia and delusion that MetaTech (now a part of Neonet) is after her (she was the corp's little designer "genebrat"). At meets she has noticed corp goons sitting a couple tables away who turn out not to be associated with the person we were talking with. Often times she takes pics of them first before taking pics of the J, then runs them by her Former Company Man contact to get an ID. [In her backstory she bartered the design of an experimental commlink to a competitor in exchange for her extraction from the corp's enclave and a new identity after he parents mysteriously disappeared and MetaTech was awarded custody of her].

*Shrugs* And then we get back into the question of why aren't the Runners being snatched up to be part of corp black op teams? Viewing the Runner Lifestyle with rose-colored-image-links might be an explaination of why a young bright kid with a future could have first gotten into the biz, but I don't see the romance lasting very long, the life of a Shadowrunner tends to be short, violent, paranoid, and above all, fragging hard. And I very much doubt that the Trid shows the nastier aspects that comes with being a Runner either.


We have to remember that judging by the "normal" char gen advise on Dumpshock, most people are playing with Runners with dicepools that would land them a comfortable life in the corps, with the ones that love the "rush" being directed towards corp black-ops. (And hells, judging by the reactions I tend to get from my posts about Sixth World Society and the Pink Mohawks it seems to me that the gamestyle that people seem to want to play would also mesh with corp black-ops as well.)


Besides, it's a huge leap from having something fragging wrong with their wiring that makes them unemployable by the corps and being a 30 point mental case, although beggers can't be picky and if all of the "pros" are working for the corps then you take whatever backup you can get on the streets, just cover your own hoop as much as possible.

A person can be unfit for corporate employment without being a nutcase or an asshole. I have plenty of friends who are great people, but for various reasons, are basically unemployable in a corporate setting. So we agree there. My point is that a lot of people don't seem to think so...but I digress.

I figure most of the kids who start running with stars in their eyes die messily. A couple survive, either because they're lucky or they're smart enough to do the job right. By the time they figure out that there might be a better way, they're in too deep. Charlie can't join the Ares Firewatch because he fragged them over like 6 times in the past 3 years. Sure, he didn't know it at the time, but they still remember it.

Also, corps don't just hire based on talent. Big dice pools are nice, but how the hell would anybody know about them? It's not like you have a visible character sheet telling everyone how good you are. The closest thing to that in reality is a resume, and nobody believes what they read in those things. They go by interviews. And nobody is going to interview some SINless kid with a chip on his shoulder when they've got an avalanche of good, clean-cut corp kids with verifiable qualifications.

Your street hacker is probably twice as skilled as a corp kid of the same age. But that corp kid has test results going back to kindergarten proving that he's a computer genius, a family that's already working for the corp, and a SIN verifying his identity. Your street hacker is arrogant gutter trash that probably just wants the rob the joint from the inside. Why hire some guy off the street whose work you haven't seen, and who you have no reason to trust, because he has no identifiable roots?

What about hiring runners who Mr. Johnson has worked with? Well, that's even worse. I mean really, if you'd been hiring some guy to commit acts of terrorism so terrible that you don't even want the possibility of association with them for the past 2 years, would you really trust that dude with an access card to your office? Would you want to issue this man, who knows your most terrible secrets, an ID card identifying him as a citizen of your megacorp? Landing a serious corp job based on your running should be extremely rare. More likely, "corporate" runners are just independents with the equivalent of no-bid contracts. They get consistent work, and some side benefits (medical, weapon upgrades, etc.), but they're not part of the family.

Shadowrunners are shadowrunners for the same reason that day laborers are day laborers, and the foreign guy who pumps your gas used to be a college professor in his home country. Those guys on the corner waiting for a truck to take them to pick apples for 12 hours a day don't have anything wrong with them, and they're perfectly employable. Some of them even speak english. But they can't be employed because they're outside of the system, with no easy way to get in.

In SR, there's a way, but you have to eat crap and kiss hoop to even get in on the ground floor. You'll probably be given jobs that are unpleasant, dangerous, humiliating, or some combination of the 3, because you're at the bottom, SINless scum that the corp lifted up. For most people, that's still better than the alternative of starving on the street or shadowrunning.

For shadowrunners, not so much. Really, all you need to motivate you to shadowrun is some self-esteem, low birth, and a marketable skill. These are probably the runners who refuse wetwork, or do mostly "hooding" runs.

Then there are the activists (pro-metahuman rights, environmentalists, volunteer bug hunters, etc.) who shadowrun to make cash for their "real" jobs.

...to Perdition with the numeric references.

KK: she is unemployable by a corp in long term because of her background and Dain Bramaged quality. She can still function in the shadows as survival tends to be more based on Intuition (which in her case is above human average) than Logic. She barely has enough skill to use her commlink as a glorified cell phone and performs most of her "job related" transactions with certified credsticks. She also has a Matrix Specialist as a 6 loyalty contact to cover her.

Violet: well, she's seen enough of the corp gig while growing up that she wants no part of it on a permanent basis. Oh, she has no issue with a single specific mission, but tries not maintain any long term relations with a particular corp. Her obsessive and compulsive nature would also be something a corp would not see as an asset.

While not min-maxed, both these characters are very competent at what they do and have a professional attitude towards their work (particularly Vi).

Da Brat is probably the closest to the definition of "Street Scum" That I have. She literally did grow up on and learned the ways of the streets for a good part of her life. She is an opportunist and looks for any advantage to get ahead be it fast talking her way out of a jam, nailing an opponent in a "tender" part of the anatomy, or fleecing an unsuspecting wageslave out of some if his hard earned .

Even professional, perfectly affable and otherwise employable SINless are likely viewed as "street scum" by most, and certainly wouldn't be trusted. Shadowrun was made in the 80's, and the megacorp culture is based largely on the way Japanese corporate culture worked back then...employees were lifers. That's why you need armed kidnappers to pull them out. You don't want outsiders, even very talented, charismatic ones, mixing in with your well-oiled machine. They're disruptive, they have their own way of doing things, they just don't fit in.

Shadowrunners run a huge gamut, but plenty of them are fairly average people in terms of personality. They're just in a desperate situation. SR is presented as being noirish in many cases, and noir protagonists are regular people caught up in a storm that's manipulated by the corrupt and powerful.

At least, that's how I like to play. I suppose a game about psychotic lunatics that are always 2 seconds from betraying one another to organleggers and rape gangs might be fun. To somebody else.

I'm pretty sure you could take almost any character background and have them become a shadowrunner.

Something that I think you are forgetting is that in the Sixth World the average professional dicepool is only 6-8, so the various builds that appear on these boards will simply blow away any of the competation, and a corp would be stupid not to welcome a fairly adjusted runner into the fold. (Note that there is a difference between welcoming someone and trusting them, I expect that certain safeguards would be put into place.) Also remember that the society in the Sixth World isn't even close to being the same as today's, illegal to-the-death-bloodsports are a huge hit with the masses, people log onto a livefeed just to watch some Johnson getting geeked by a runner team, and wageslaves have to buy themselves out of employment if they want to go work for another company.


Perhaps not surprisingly I also disagree with the idea that a corp wouldn't hire based off of a Johnson's reviews, in fact I imagine that the real purpose behind some runs is to hit the corp's own building as an "interview" of sorts. Remember that everything that you've said about Runners can also be said about modern day spooks. As for not being hired because you hit the corp in the past, true, but unless you assume that the corps are willing to accept being hit by runs then the entire setting falls to pieces and "Shadowrunners" can no longer be the idependant agents that that are assumed to be.


I don't really see how your day-laborer example applies, the illegals waiting at street corners are at best comparable in ability to the legal workforce, I'm talking about the char-builds that people post on the boards that are simply off the charts in talent. (Remember I'm the one who is always pushing for lower dicepools and broader characters in Fourth Edition.)


And it only gets worse when you start talking about the Awakened, Mages have literally won life's lottery just by virtue of being born, and the corps really can't afford to be nearly as selective as they can with their mundane employees.

Fragging double-post.

I'm not quite sure where to begin, so I guess I'll just start rambling.


I have several disagreements with your arguments, first let's assume for a moment that I agree that for every street-scum Runner with massive dicepools there is a corp citizen with similair dicepools waiting to be employed. So what? My point is that if 6-8 is the average, then there won't be enough people at the upper end of the ability curve for the corps to be able to afford to be as selective as you assume.

Besides, provided that you have the resources it is actually cheaper to own and raise cattle for your meat and dairy products then it is to buy meat and milk at the store. The fact that you tend to get a better quality product is a rather heafty bonus as well. The same logic should also apply for corp black-op teams.

As for life not being a meritocracy, I never said it was, of course being a member of the corp family is going to be a factor that is weighed when deciding who is going to be hired or not, but it is not going to be the only one, and someone with massive dicepools and a history of getting the job done is going to be hired provided that you assume that people at the upper end of the ability curve aren't a dime-a-dozen.

Concerning your clerk/lawyer example, although you neglected to mention what country she was a lawyer in, I somehow doubt that she was skilled enough to practice law in America considering that a quick google search led me to a wiki entry about becoming licensed to practive law in America and there are ways for a lawyer to do so which does not require attending an American Law School. If I can learn this in a matter of a few mouse clicks then surely a skilled and talented lawyer could have learnt of it had she put forth effort to escape her "crappy menial job", even before the avent of the internet.

And an issue that you seem to be forgetting is that simsense indocturnation is a fact in the Sixth World, corps don't need to make sure they snatch up Awakened and other talented people as children, several hours/days/weeks hooked up to a computer is almost as good. But then again you are also assuming that having a previous corp history that could in theory be traced is a good thing when dealing with corp black-op teams or that especially with less and less of a Mage Population as time goes on that the corps could even afford to be picky enough to require brainwashing in the first place assuming that the Mage was loyal and that proper safeguards were in place.

*Edit 1.1*

I almost forgot, but yeah, I'd call you a cynic, today's media isn't real, the masses know that real people aren't being seriously hurt and killed on those shows, in the Sixth World, the fact that real people are being killed for entainment is what excites the masses and generates ratings.

Well, with the exception of the beheading videos, but I don't know anyone who cheered and wanted to see more of those.

If your Shadowrun is a shiny happy world where any talented person, regardless of background, can succeed if only their dice pool is large enough, then by all means, have fun with that.

Realistically though, how the hell do you tell the difference between a competent, corp-raised employee and some random street person who has a larger dice pool if both of them succeed? Does the Shadowrunner succeed with style? And if so, isn't that exactly the kind of maverick, non-team player attitude that you'd want to avoid in a full-time, true corporate employee?

You basically are arguing that life is a meritocracy, and any talented, reasonably well-adjusted SINless will of course be recognized for their talents and offered a job commeasurate with their worth.

The woman in the example I cited was Chinese, and was, I believe, in non-criminal law. Her english was serviceable, but she has a noticeable accent. Regardless of her competence as a lawyer (which I never had the occasion to test), I doubt she'd have gotten a job in her field in this country without losing the accent. If she was an ork, it'd be even less likely.

Indoctrination of adults can't possibly be as effective as indoctrination of children. Plus, if you've got these fabulously talented, independent people, why would they consent to being brainwashed? The only reason corp people don't complain is that they don't know better; they've been raised in total propaganda submersion for their whole lives. An adult who grew up independent is going to be asking a lot more questions.

And you still haven't addressed the morale effect on the regular workforce. How does it look when you've replaced the good, loyal salarymen who have given their lives and families to you with some long-haired hippy who supposedly has a larger "dice pool"? It's one thing to know that your company hires outside talent for ops that are ridiculously dangerous and prone to failure and/or casualties; it's another to be told that one of these jokers is your new boss.

As for the media not being real...that guy really did get beheaded. Britney Spears really does have serious personal problems, and we're all having a good laugh watching a human being basically self-destruct in public. We really do have TV shows where people eat raw animal genitals for money. We really do have snuff films, though they aren't mainstream. It's a short, dystopian walk from where we are right now to where Shadowrun is, media-wise. We already have a media culture with absolutely no sense of responsibility. We make celebrities out of serial killers and basically ignore the victims, unless of course they lived, in which case it's even better, since they can give us the lurid details of what they suffered. Our cop shows are as much about dissecting corpses and marvelling at the way their killer murdered them as they are about actual cops.

We're already obsessed with watching real people suffer, and watching fake people die. We're not so different from a society of people who watch real people suffer and die. We already watch dispassionately as people are lynched, murdered, tortured, etc. in other countries.

Not all SINless runners have to be people from the Barrens with skills, but no quantifiable record of them. A lot of runners can be ex-corporate, too.

The megacorporations are not shiny, happy places to live and work. They are the bad guys who are supposed to make the morally ambiguous runners seem like good guys in comparison. And you don't need the tired old "the corporation is trying to kill me" thing, either. It's more realistic to have the runner be like the old former company man or wage mage archetypes - people who had to leave when they realized just how bad their company was. They don't have to be idealistic, or wronged in some way, though. They can be burned-out black ops people tossed to the curb to deal with the post traumatic stress on their own, or simply be on the wrong side of a hostile takeover.

JonathanC

I'd be more then happy to compare the darkness of my Sixth World against anyone elses, and yes, SINless or not if a corp manages to find someone that is both well-adjusted and boasts the massive dicepools that I've railed against in other threads then that person will be hired in a heartbeat provided that there isn't some deal breaker hidden somewhere in the package. My entire point is that people who have said massive dicepools are almost as rare as hen's teeth according to the tables and examples we are given in the books so it should be largely be a moot point.

Still you ask how someone could tell the difference between a corp baby and street scum in my games, well I guess the answer would be that a wageslave and a razorboy simply aren't going to have the same skillsets in the first place. Besides neither is very likely at all to suceed.


Bob SINless isn't going to suceed in part because he was never given the tools to even be able to suceed in the first place. The best that he can hope for is to eek out a meager existance in the barrens and hopefully find protection by joining a gang and if he's lucky he'll be able to afford some secondhand cyber to get just enough of an edge to live alittle while longer.


Susan SINner isn't much better off, as a wageslave she belongs heart, body, and soul to her parent corp, she had to pay for the mandatory datajack and other equipment/ training necessary for her job, and the terms of her loan are such that she can never pay them off on her salary. Hell, she is swimming in debt as the corp uses quasi-legal simsense to push neverending lines of worthless junk for her to max out her corp issued credit on. If she is lucky she'll be pretty enough that her boss will be able to shelter her from having to start selling organs to cover her debts, at least until he tires of using and abusing her or he finnally drowns in his sea of debts. And to top it all off, she couldn't even quit her job even if she wanted to, after all there is just no way that she could afford to buy out of her employment contract.

The simple fact is that in the Sixth World unless you have something that makes you stand a head and shoulders above the crowd then you are damned no matter whether you have a SIN or not, the massive world-class dicepools that allows you to regularly pull off the nearly impossible is one such way to get noticed, winning life's lottery by being born Awakened with is another and life for these rare people isn't nearly as bleak as it is for the masses.

As for brainwashing the new hire, you are assuming that he is given a choice in the matter as opposed to being gassed one night and hauled away for "job training and placement" if management thinks it is gonig to be necessary. Sure the tactics are probably more effective on children, but my entire point is that by their very nature world class talent is going to be rare enough that the corps can't afford not to snatch them up. Mages on the other hand are rare enough by their nature that even average ones are very valuable to the corp, and world class wizards are worth pulling out all of the stops for.

And you are right, I haven't addressed the issue of moral of the existing workforce, that is because I don't think the corps of 2070 really gives a frag what their employees think, sure they have to make a pretending to care and the HR Department will issue statements designed to sooth any ruffled feathers while increasing the levels of happy juice in the water cooler (Don't forget to send a memo to accounting to deduct the extra cost from everyone's paychecks.) and reassigning or perhaps even promoting any protental troublemakers to "another branch". (In reality they end up as test subjects in some research lab or another.) Remember that the wageslaves are powerless, they can't legally quit their jobs and I'd hate to think what woudl befall anyone stupid enough to try to organize a strike or even a work slowdown.

*Shrugs* As for your chinese clerk/lawyer friend, as I said, there are paths availbe to her to be able to practice law in America provided that she was talented and dedicated enough to do so, accents are hardly an unsurmountable roadblock.

As for the media, I disagree that the trash that we have today is even close to what the Sixth World society demands and cheers, remember the stuff that is reviled today is cheered by the masses in Shadowrun.

Kyoto Kid

I agree, it is easier to "get them while they are young", but my entire point has been that the corps don't always have that option when talking about the level of talent that I am.

Since when is that stuff "reviled" today? The only people complaining about it are old people. Teenagers on the Internet love beheading videos.

And again, I'm not trying to tell you how to run your own game. But realistically, I think it's naive to think that pure talent always shines through. I'm guessing you've never actually worked in an office if you think that's how corporations work.

And you still haven't addressed the morale problems created by hiring a bunch of independently-minded, highly-intelligent street people to work over your homegrown, loyal "employees".

Realistically, any organization's power is dependent upon the people they rule over agreeing to be ruled over, or having a reason to value their comfort over their dignity. If you shatter the illusion of job security that wageslaves have, you create desperation. Hiring the next hot shadowrunner and giving him a corner office is going to turn the rest of your office into insurgents faster than you can say Office Space. It's bad enough that you've got competition kidnapping and brainwashing your wageslaves. If they start *wanting* to leave, en masse...well, that's a problem. There's no such thing as an organization that can afford to ignore morale. It doesn't exist. Ever.

Even the nazis (please don't mention Godwin) had to keep the Germans complacent, not to mention complicit, in what they were doing. They made the trains run on time and stroked the egos of Germans with the Aryan myth. I doubt Stalin would have lasted as long as he did without an ocean of vodka to keep people complacent.

Complacency for megacorps comes from job security. You do what they say and never question it because as long as you do, you're in the family. Being outside of the family is dangerous and uncomfortable. You have to find your own housing, educate your own kids, and did you watch the news the other day? Those dreadful Trolls killed another one of those nice Humanis boys.

Once a corp smashes the illusion of obedience = security by hiring a "huge dice pool" (seriously, how does someone tell the difference between a dice pool 8 professional and a dice pool 16 professional? They're both never going to fail at common corporate tasks) SINless shadowrunner and giving them the swank promotion that every corp wageslave has been working for 10 years to get...well, I don't think any organization can realistically survive that kind of morale hit.

Corps are supposed to be exclusive. Shadowrun is about being on the outside of society. If all you need to slide into the mainstream is a level of skill possessed by pretty much every Shadowrunner, then the game loses its theme entirely. Again, if you want to play that way, more power to you. I'll be over here playing Shadowrun.

A couple of things off the top of my head;


You don't hire a ( Dicepool 16 ) Runner for a job that a ( Dicepool 8 ) wageslave could manage, you hire the ( Dicepool 16 ) Runner for a job that requires his massive dicepool.


There are many ways to ensure complacency, several of which you've touched upon and none of which are shattered beyond repair by hiring the few people in the world with the massive dicepools we are talking about.


I agree, corps are exclusive and the SINless are largely damned to forever remain outsiders looking in through rose-colored-imagelinks (After all, corpers are largely damned in their own ways that aren't really all that disimilair to the SINless.) if they don't have someway to buy themselves into the family, being Awakened is a hell of a start, being world-class in their choosen field is another.


Yes, Shadowrun does lose alot of its themes when DMs forget that Fourth Edition is built around the idea of smaller dicepools and weaves a world where huge dicepools are the norm for Runners. The fact that it is even possible to build such characters using the default char-gen rules is a bug, not a feature.

I don't see smaller dicepools as the solution. There's nothing wrong with the size of these dicepools. It's just that you're making some odd assumptions about corporate culture that are based on your own (admittedly solid) logical approach to hiring, rather than the realities of HR.

Also, you're saying there are only a few people in the world with these massive dicepools, but given how easy it is to get pools that high in Shadowrun, they can't be all that rare. And I still don't understand why any corp would want the moral hassle, PLUS the cost of housing, paying salary, medical, etc. for these "geniuses" when they seem perfectly happy to pay those costs on their own and still do the jobs you need done when you do them.

Which sounds like a better deal? Hiring Munchkin McSupermage on as a full-timer, where he regularly makes your other mages feel like unappreciated crap just by existing, costs you a ton of money with his (reasonable) request for dental exams and a full checkup every 6 months, and lives in one of your most expensive penthouses that *you* foot the bill for.

OR

Offering Munchkin McSupermage a small retainer fee, that you probably pay mostly in telesma or other magical materials, for the right to call him when something catches fire and you really need a force 15 stunball to make it all right again. He pays for his own medical, rents his own apartment, and your regular employees don't even know he exists. He gets to live his life his own way, and your corporate culture remains unsullied by his love for Bon Jovi and Shoujo Anime.

Don't the Corps all have "Special Sections"? These are where I culd imagine them assigning the few former Shadowrunners they hire. These people are overseen by people perfectly willing to kill the former Shadowrunners to protect corporate secrets. The Dice Pool 16 Hacker is not going to be put doing the IT work the Dicepool 8 Wageslave is. No, he is going to be put to work souping up security. Or BEING security. The Dicepool 16 heavy weapns specialist is not going to be put to wrk as a Rentacop guard, but as part of a High Threat Response Team, like Ares Firewatch. The Dice Pool 16 spell casting Mage is not going to be put doing whatever the WageMAges do..no, that guy is going to be doing the BIG BOYS stuff. And they would not be part of the normal corp floor of people.

That said, I also doubt that the Corps would want to hire people who were former Shadowrunners first. In fact, I think those people would be the last resort. Generally speaking, to me, Shadowrunners exist because the Corps need them. The Corps do not need something that can be traced back to them, which, if they hired those runners and made them part f their Special Sections, they would be. Worse, the Corps do not want someone trying t Extract people in their Special Sections.

NOTE: I still remember a group of Runners I was with wh got WAY too high profile, and retired from running to become Freelance Security Consultants.

Sigh and another fluff thread is derailed.
Inspiration for a character is so vast in options that it is not readily quantifiable. I generaly use the concept creation method because of this.
I have made charcters from the classic, "we need a drek hot rigger!",
to " I want to play a melancholic shade of blue" as starting points.
As I said in my previous post it is often not the starting point but the final draft that starts play that counts.
After all the character creation is only the portion that get the persona to the point of evolving in play.

My first group was basically playing their and my grandchildren (well, people they assumed would be grandchildren. Since then, several relationships {including one of mine} fell through, which meant that their {the characters'} parents won't exist to meet each other).

My first character (and the source of my handle) was a college educated elf mage from my hometown who went into business with a college buddy (and later teammate), a male Cat Shaman from Milwaukee with the handle of Meow Max, developing a software RAD tool for spell formulae. Despite the fact that we were privately held (and capitalized by bank loans,) we were the subject of a hostile takeover by Aztechnology through their unofficial California Free State subsidiary Pyramid Holdings LLC. In spite we erased all related code and a special piece of prototype hardware and disappeared into the shadows, with a grudge against Aztechnology.

Some Joker, the team's Decker, was a dwarf originally from Halferville. He and Noriko, an ork Physical Adept (and survivor of Yomi), met each other while doing separate solo sabotage runs against a Mitsuhama site on Treasure Island.

This was the core team. We would tend to run through Razorboys, Gunbunnies, and riggers like Spinal Tap ran through Drummers....