Now I am of the school that corporations will try to cheapskate whatever they can, if they can get away with it. From the top on down. The higher ups will probably give the Johnson 60-80% of the money requisitioned for a run, and the Johnson will always try to pay the shadowrunner team 60-80% then what he was actually given to finance the run. Kickbacks abound, and execs are just trying to grab what they can to retire in the lap of luxury.

What I'm wondering is how far do you think corporations will go? If a security force is given 3k a month how much of that do you think will actually make it to the security force? I mean I have seen companies that are subcontracted out charge about 3-5 times the actual wages that the workers who are doing the job receive and this is present day.

I'm pitching this to the SR community. How far do you think corporations will go to trim the fat? A little or a lot? Small slim shavings or like de-fatted pork fat? Will a corporation's armory be fully stocked, or will the recent shipment of assault rifles only arm 75% of the actual security force? Granted at key facilities I doubt they get away with anything like that, but lets just say it's a mid to low end facility.

Well in RL I work for a company which bills the client $400/hour and pays me about $120/hour to do the actual work - so about 30% is paid to me and the rest goes to profit and "marketing expenses". I'd say that's fairly typical for b2b billing vs. compensation.

As far as how companies equip forces, your getting into complicated supply chain management (ie. how much actual materiel is "active" vs. workforce or security objectives and so on.) In the case of security forces, for example, do employees check out equipment from a quartermaster on duty, or do they "own their own"? Does the company use it's security forces to test new equipment (the way Blackwater does with it's deployed forces in RL?) Ultimately a corporation has one overriding function - to satisfy the shareholders - but cutting costs is a sure way to enhance profitability, and that might include skimping on security in some smaller companies.

I will say from experience (having hired security for events) that security is quite expensive - even useless "rent-a-cops" generally are billed at about $100/hour each by bonded security firms (and they pay those guys about $10-12 per hour, LOL) and specialized security (LP specialists for example) are much higher - so for a low end facility security would probably be skimpy at best, and seen more as a deterrent than an actual defense.

Of course, this is based on current day experience...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the Sixth World, the land of dragons, hardened combat drones and hackers who kill eachother with lethal bursts of biofeedback, things will be different. I mean, it's a setting where nobody violates the Corporate Court's mandates openly, because to do so risks death by orbital bombardment. Installations with things to hide already use airgaps when necessary to protect their shit today, and in Shadowrun, everyone seems to have something to hide. Hell, even just the nature of the Matrix means security measures need to be taken more seriously. If Joe Script kiddy somehow gets a hold of a pirated Blackout program, he can be waltzing around the Seattle public library data haven only to up and decide to just give some poor sucker in cold sim one hell of a headache. So, yeah, the stakes are a bit higher and security's likely been jumped up a notch from the current day standard. People will cut corners, and the milk run hits will still likely be easy, because in that case it's the LoneStar Response Team you have to worry about, not the rent-a-cops.

But there's also going to be cases where the target runs under some serious failure-is-not-an-option standards. Like Mitsuhama and their Zero Zone policy (zero penetration, zero survivors). There will be runs where the opposition is hardcore, because Darth Vad-- erm, I'm sorry, the local district manager-- doesn't like it when people fuck up and nobody wants to end up being black balled from corporate employment and end up fighting with the metas out in the Barrens for table scraps.

Contract security and typical internal company security are used for different purposes and have different effective capabilites. The typical mission is totally different from the situations where you pay the BIG bucks to hire Aegis, Blackwater, EODT for security of a site or people.

Most companies have extremely strong financial controls because the shareholders are unimpressed by being ripped off. So while you can cheat shadow runners (the advantage of hiring so called "deniable assets") you can't expect to steal serious money from Lofwyr and not get an opportunity to regret it before you get executed.

The reason why people cut costs insanely these days is to make the bottom line look good. It's part of the HBS make the month, make the quarter, make the year, get the bonus and the stock options and move on to another position before the fall type of executive management.

Very little goes into someone's pocket, it's all staying in the company treasury. That's why the guy looks so good, BECAUSE he cut costs and increased profits. Typically with the plan that he'll have another job when the fact that he saved all the cash by not buying the long-lead time parts results in huge downtime and the poor schmuck who got his old job gets canned over that.

So ALL the money allocated for security either gets paid or doesn't get spent. Very little gets skimmed. It's too hard, the penalties are too high and the rewards are too low. There may be occasional people who steal 50 million from Ares, but how far do you think they usually get? This doesn't mean that some MCT exec won't decide to save a fortune by not actually installing ANY weapons in the newest Zero-Zero zone and trusting that the signs plus the rep will keep him looking like a hero, but it won't go in his pocket. He plans to make the big bucks when he gets promoted somewhere else for his amazing project management skills by bringing the project in so far under budget.

Extraterritorial corporations vary from one to another like countries of today. The level of corruption and graft in one may be thousands of times more or less than in its competitors. Being your own country (or close to it) allows for more individuality.
Its hard to say how much fat could be cut while saving freedom to be creative. Each company handles these things in their own way. Its all down to socio-economic theory to discuss which is superior.

Personally, I just look at the stock price.

Don't look at corporate entities as incorruptible and people who work there as legit. I mean the Enron execs screwed a lot of people all due to corporate trust. People were funneling off millions and making crazy ventures. Ended up costing California insane amounts of money due to the fact that Enron was playing them for chumps.

I just view the SR universe as a more messed up version of our present day situation, and people skimp like crazy on security. I mean I just feel that a lot of high end buildings now a days give the illusion of security, when in all actuality most defenses are paper thin. I don't see SR as being any different. Yes there will still be areas where security will be extremely crazy, but for the most part it's not all that hard. You don't really even have to be a pro to enter some financial buildings in Boston or SF. The lack of security I see around me today in America makes me wonder what SR would be like. Granted things are a bit crazier in SR, but still I can see corporations trying to cut costs as much as possible.

I work in security and I just have to say that very few corporations (at least those in the Fortune 500) skimp on security expenditures. It is expensive to pay for, but after 9/11 all companies increased their spending, iirc, 30-50%. Now imagine VITAS 1 & 2, the Night of Rage, the Great Ghost Dance, etc. and just think what spending for security will go to cover. Add to that the fact that Mages are supposed to be such a rarity and the almost incalcuable need to have a security mage for even moderately sensitive areas and you can see spending ramping up severely. As for low level corp facailities, they will still maintain a guard or 3 and a suite of electronic controls (maglocks, sensors and what not are really not that expensive to even a multi-million sompany) as that is currently what most facilities of sucessful companies have.

It was actually ONE guy (Andrew Fastow) and his minions who was funneling the money off. Largely because the BoD was a bunch of yes men and the other execs were convinced they were geniuses. That the whole structure was a house of cards was something that amounted to the "elephant in the room". Or an "undiscussable" "open secret". If you looked at the annual report and the balance sheet it was obvious something was at least somewhat odd, but nobody was willing to talk about it. One analyst at Merill, John Olson, was fired for merely suggesting that it wasn't the greatest stock in the world. That tended to discourage other people....

This happens. Most of the people running the company also had most of their personal wealth tied up in the stock because they were convinced they were so smart that nothing bad would happen to Enron despite it's skating close to the edge all the time.

SR corporations are nothing like actual corporations. Actual corporations don't work like the ones in SR at all. Who has worker loyalty, and is in any way intrested in keeping workers locked into their system? Entire companies today -the big 4 accounting firms, law firms, lots of consulting firms for example - are predicated on that not happening, and actually want you to leave because they need you to piss off to maintain the pyramid structure and so you hire their them in your new job.

Also, how does the entire consulting and outsourcing industry of today work in the massively paranoid world of shadowrun? Answer: it doesn't.

Why would anyone hire outside security contractors to do anything either? The big players all have their own security personnel to manage their own security. Corruption and graft isn't an option, but its also very hard to actually get personnel to do anything. Because you cannot pick up 'lateral' hires from MCT if you are Ares (except at very senior levels), if you need more junior guys, you need to actually wait for people to finish school.

You want to start a new product research program? You need to terminate some of your current ones, or wait for people to graduate from the Ares Research School and then supplement them with some you forceably and riskily poach from your competition.

So they don't work anything at all like corporations, instead they are much more like fedeual societies, with the overlords (the executive suite) running their peasant farms (whatever subsidurary you are responsible for), and the exectives all tithe fedeual style to the conglomerate in return for 'protection' (the corps security services, some IT services, some branding, though you build your own too), and your measure of sucess is not 'making money' its 'growing the empire' in terms of headcount.

I <3 you Cthuludreams for saying what I wanted to say.

Also remember that in the Sixth World for many people it is actually illegal to quit your job, so the corps have alot of leeway to do things like force their sec guards to buy equipment from the company store, and then insist that said equipment can never leave company grounds while also deducting the costs of any necessary training from the employee's paycheck.


Also remember that for the Shadows to work the way they seem to virtually everyone and his dog has to be corrupt, and Lonestar provides an excellant example of this if the salary numbers floating around Dumpshock are accurate. (I don't own the Lonestar sourcebook myself to doublecheck them.)

However, the courts then stepped in and things changed - companies must now abide by rules or face penalties, the people responsible got punished [whether they actually got punished, is another matter], etc

So, using that realworld example, the Corps aren't totally omnicient and corrupt..
..And companies like that don't tend to do well in the longterm - even if they get away with such things for a long time, the rules change and the shareholders punish people for the bad PR and the loss of the company value [indentured staff is one thing, but non-indentured staff insist on reasonable treatment, or they leave and the company is faced with mounting costs and brain-drain as staff need to be replaced].

Omnicient Corps would replace governments, which actively does not happen [there's some mention somewhere about how the Corps could have taken over when everything went tits-up, but chose not to because they don't want the responsibility and stress of having to do things like civil maintenance, pensions, social infrastructure].

Is there a reference for the 'illegal to quit your job" statement ??

Shadowrunners are just outsourced staff, with specialised skills and little accountability..
..But we have that sort of people now, so everyone and his dog does not have to be any more corrupt than the realworld currently is.

If anything, Shadowrunners would have to be more professional and less corrupt than the average person you insist on, otherwise they wouldn't get hired very often and few people would want to work with them [reputation would precede them - most of the main characters in cyberpunk fiction aren't morally destitute]..
..Which is where the concept of the Street Samurai originated.

Interesting..
..Although, most of the material I've read recently indicates that successful and longterm companies can't treat their staff as easily replaced numbers on the company diagram, though in the realworld that may only apply above a certain level of seniority.

Ask Ancient History for the name, but some nearly universally signed accords has language where wageslaves legally have to be returned to the company that they ran from.

As for the corruption level of the Sixth World compared to today, excuse me? Look at how easy it is for Runners to get their hands on the highly illegal toys that they do ... Hells, look at the fact that what you are calling nothing more then outsourced staff are given money to shoot people in the face. The Sixth World is in no way even remotely comparable to today's society.

This is a tangent as its about the real world ..
The word the use in management classes is Fungible. MBAs are taught to keep all employees fungible but not to treat them that way. Its like a giant poker game where you let them feel important but have a spare on hand. When the need arises, and its usually cost based, you replace the most expensive worker with the least. This can be outsourcing, cutting those with the most seniority or asking people to take pay cuts. As long a you kept your employees in commodity state, you're ahead of the game.

I always thought SR was just an example of an actual version of a free market. I also thought the corporate corp was created to make sure a corporation basically doesn't break the world, or try seizing other corporate assets willy nilly. Also who runs a setting where the corporations don't do shady underhanded evil things?

What I was wondering is how shady are corporations when it comes to being corrupt. I like the idea of having security buy their own equipment.

Interesting. I've never really thought about that angle before, but it certainly fits the feel of the Sixth World. I will have to implement this mentality into our adventures. Normally I keep the megacorps as well stocked as possible (or that makes sense for the situation).

If your Characters can easily get hold of highly illegal gear, it' not very illegal, is it ??


There's a phrase for people who get paid to shoot, kill or maim others - assassins, or thugs [I hear the Yaks and Hells Angels have been known to do some work in that area].

I do believe mercenaries and assassins do actually exist in the realworld..
..So I do believe that would make your 'Runners world comparable to the realworld, neh ??


As for corruption..
..It happens everyday, in many parts of the world - with various guises [back handers, easing the wheels, bribery, gifts, favours, political donations, business contracts].

In some parts of the world, it's an everyday fact of life [Africa is notoriously corrupt, tho they are trying to clean up their act].


I don't have to visit SR's 2070 to see the shit side of life, corrupt people and companies, deranged people, abuse of power, thieves, murderers, mysteries to unfold..
..This realworld has enough to keep me going, for me to just to change some of the details [realworld is sadly lacking in Magic and Metahumans] and give my Players as much fun/trouble/death/darkness as they can handle.


Personally, I'm glad you live somewhere where corruption and personal violence doesn't exist - please tell me where that is ??

It's called a First World Nation in an upper middle class rural setting. It is REALLY nice not to have to worry about seeing three murders, four muggings, and two rapes while walking to and from work in a fairly good section of town. When you get tired of having to buy armored clothing and pretending that life is so sucky in today's society you really should come visit one.