So my group played a pre-made mission last week and went rather well. We have a basic idea of how the mechanics work now. One thing I noticed in the pre-made is that every person we encountered had specific gear on them, predetermined in the mission plan.

Last night we started our GM's campaign/storyline, and I realized we just eliminated the opposition and drove on without checking their bodies. Mind you, it was pretty linear that way, we had to keep moving. Though I still wonder what could have been cherry picked from them.

My question is basically, what sort of gear or items would be common place to find on a random henchman? Obviously they would have a weapon, because they shot at us, but what else could be found?

Also, as an added bonus, would it be common to award characters with a higher loot from baddies for completing a particularly difficult part of the story, like a "boss fight" or climatic play session end?

I tend to avoid giving out special gear for a 'boss fight'. It isn't WoW afterall.

Looting is a thing to be handled with care. Sure you can go ahead, grab every comlink, AK97 and combat boots. Your usual connections won't have that much interest in it for several reasons. If you are not careful you pick up the wrong kind of equipment and get tracked down because of that.

To avoid that, the usual paranoia is the key: Check for tracking devices, kill RFIDs, etc. As said: Handle the loot with care and it will pay out in the long run, just dump it on some fence and it might get you killed or busted.

It really depends on your connections what kind of gear you can get rid of. Most fences won't care for just another Ares Pred or some dated comlink without interesting data. A comlink could however be of interest for identity theft.

And it really depends on your GM what you can get away with. There are lots of thread in this forum debating looting and the repercussions of it. Speak with your GM what his position on the matter is - all the theory from a forum is nice, but when your GM will screw you over for selling a dead mans chest to Tamanous then you better don't take it in the first place.

CommLinks/Pocket Computers (PDAs, iPods, Whatever), guns, armour, credsticks, and boots are typically quickest. Wallets of holos is a nice touch, just to show the 'Runners whose families they just destroyed by shootin' "Daddy" or "Brother" and leaving him dead in the gutter.

It all depends on who the minions you pwned are. If they're Corp security, they're going to have standard issue crap and it's all going to be tagged as the property of the corp. If they're gangers, they're going to have a mishmash of crap that won't be tagged, but probably won't be of the highest quality either. If they're other runners... well, you may have hit paydirt with that one.

If it's a shipment of Organized Crime's supplies...

You just found yourself in a world of hurt!

Loot? Organs is where it's at, chummer. Don't be so wasteful as to just take a few pieces of gear. Scour them for usable and resellable stuff outside and inside. Grind the rest up and sell it to ghouls by the pound.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, Longpig Burger. It's what's for Dinner!

nothing much, maybe a credstick with some hundred nuyen tops or car-keys or something like that . . mostly the weapon they use, some spare clips for the weapon, maybe some key-cards . . if they have external communications and especially in SR4 if they have external comlinks maybe some passwords or communication-protocols or something like that . . nothing fancy . . and even if they have higher grade gear implanted, as long as nobody has a cbyer-ware-scanner i don't think there will be much looting *g*
once or twice some magazine they were reading, or some energy bars for eating . . maybe a bottle of coke or a can of beer . .

Once, in another Cyberpunk game, we got a bag of groceries.

We were happy with that.

Once we looted a collection of porn recordings. Only to discover our Troll Mage to be starring in most of them. One of the more disturbing finds in my shadowrun career.

- Zak

Really depends on whether or not your GM is pro- or anti-looting.

Many GMs view looting as the provence of "the other game" with no place in SR. Such GMs will usually ensure that nothing you find on enemy goons is going to be worth much. This can be done with various combinations of substandard gear, RFID stealth tags, distinct designs that would draw too much negative attention, and less than helpful contacts (Fence: "I'm not in the market for murder weapons this week... get lost").

If your GM is pro-looting (or at least sees it as a legitimate income) you might find anything from run-of-the-mill commodities (ammo, grenades, "disposable" handguns) and low-priced but easily movable items that can be sold for a few extra bucks(low-end commlinks, weapons, etc) to high-end swag (tricked out drones or weapons, armor, etc) and valuables (credit accounts, vehicles, pay data).

At any rate, its a good idea to frisk corpses simply to find clues if nothing else.

had to deal with both extremes of the spectrum . . one GM had us attacked by people using something like the ruger thunderbolt . . and after we had gotten rid of them he simply ignored our declarations of looting and went on with the trainwreck that was his run . .
other GM was so gleefully evil about giving us ANYTHING that was worth SOMETHING . . we once stumbled upon a half full storage facility for drones and advanced electronics, rigger/decker-stuff and a little cyber too . . one transport in good shape which we could have used to bring home several hundred thousands of euros in addition to our salary . . but none of us could either crack open the transport nor drive the transport and we were kinda in a hurry we thought . . so we went out empty-handed and after the fact he told us that we were not really in a hurry because the pursuers had actually lost us and the sounds/lights we saw from inside the facility had nothing to do with us . . if we had actually CHECKED up on our pursuers we would have had time to even order someone else over with one or two EXTRA Transport to cart it ALL off . .
yep, he's a good GM, he gives us exactly the needed length of rope to hang ourselves with ^^
but he's also fair, if he fucks up, we get the reward if we're smart enoug *gg*
once we managed to knock out the enemies rigger, put some ECM measures in a bag and bound the bag over his head and simply drove off with the vehicle he was in . . including several drones *-*

I had a cybersurgeon in the party I was gming for. After beating on some smugglers, they took the bodies in to the boat's galley and started looting the ware.

"That's a mighty fine coat you're wearing... And nice Cybereyes... And a nice cyberarm... Oh, and are those Nike Cyberlegs?"

My group recently 'looted' a Citymaster & Gauss Cannon. It was also our getaway vehicle for that particular encounter.

You mean Longpig Burger. You're what's for dinner!

I'm of the pro-looting GM category. If some asshole tried to kill me and he's got nice stuff, now I have nice stuff. Provided of course that I have to the time to strip all the crap off him and all his gear isn't broadcasting "I'm Stolen!" rays everywhere.

The main limitation I impose is enforcing what I consider "reasonable" fencing costs. If you want to move a whole bunch fo Ingram Smartguns you nabbed off those corpsec guys last week you better be ready to either:
a.) Wait until your fence gets around to moving them for a decent portion of their cost.
b.) Accept the 10-20% blue book value because you need the money right fucking now.

You obviously could sell them for more if you know people who are in the market for whatever you're trying to fence but than you have to worry about all the crap you're paying the fence to worry about.

Over my dead body!

...

Oh, right, that's the point.

If it's truly nice stuff on the body, and we're out in the barrens with massive wireless gaps where MORE wireless gaps are no big deal, I usually just turn on my modified looting jammer that broadcasts at a high rating with a low radius and head home. Otherwise, if its something my tag eraser can't accomplish then I usually leave it.

After grabbing all the loot, even if you don't sell it to a fence, just give it bartering/favors to some gangers.
If your characters are neoanarchist, all the better, arm the gangers, more chaos and such.
If your characters are not, well, find other reasons.

Kill 'em all! Take their stuff!

Stab you're buddy!
Er wait... wrong game

And honestly, if players can't find a "worthy cause" for a crate full of looted, possibly tagged, AK97's... they need be trying harder.

As a GM, I don't mind looting, provided it's done sensibly. I've never had players actually organleg or strip cyberware, tho'.

But yeah, if I am opposing my party with some decent armaments or gear, then I fully expect those things to come into the party's possession. The regular stuff I consider good sense are weapons and ammo, comlinks, credsticks, passkeys etc. Often my party will collect at least a few of the guns and any usable ammo off the deaders. This is to frequently supplement their own gear becasue if they had to shoot some guys, the plan's already gone wrong and they KNOW they are probably gonna be in a massive firefight.

Generic possessions to loot:
Corp Sec grunts:
armor
comlinks
guns
other weapons
ammo
personal credsticks
combat drugs
passkeys
I frequently like to toss in some soprt of personal item... sometimes something really obscure. Maybe a nice smooth shiny rock the guard carried for a lucky charm? Stuff like that. This can occasionally create hilarity as the characters try to figure out what the hell the item IS...is it important? Valuable?

Barrens/Gangers grunts:
Weapons
ammo
credsticks
drugs
keys to vehicles
useless crap


Also, I had an adept that played in my world. He had a knowledge skill of art appreciation. If they broke into someplace swanky, he'd always be on the lookout for any small nick-nacks that were "Art" that he could steal. He was good about it not interfering with the major mission and he regularly supplemented his running income with his loot. A few hundred nuyen, here a grand or two there. Soemthings he kept.

The biggest looters I had were the troll go-gangers I ran... they stole anythign that wasnt nailed down. Stuffer shack food...bikes, cars. They kept ALL weapons and were building truly a small amory. They had an old hispanic man and his entire family that would take any and all vehicles off them for about 20 percent list price. The crap guns they sold to other "friendly" gangs for 20-30 percent value. The good stuff went into their vault in the bar they hung out in and their "cubhouse." Once they hijacked a Shlitz Thick & Crusty (the troll beer of choice!) semi, off loaded all the beer for their bar and then welded plate iron onto it to make it a battering ram. They loaded up themselves in the back on their Harleys and, in conjunction with a friendly affiliated orc gang, slammed it through a stronghold warehouse the Ancients were using. Once the truck was inside, the bikes came roaring out and they decimated the elves. It was a good day for the Redmond Barons. They had a LOT of "slightly damaged" Rapiers to sell to Senor Manny that day. One of them, of course, wound up being mounted abouve the bar for a trophy.

Vlad

Despite playing DnD for the last...however the heck many years...my group has been pretty responsible with the looting. 90% of the stuff they loot is, get this, bullets. That's right, bullets. So when I want to hook them up, as in the last ran they did, APDS rounds make them squeal with delight.

Now, there had been talk for a while about using turn to goo to pick up all the best in cyberware, but they've realized that it is too much of a hassle. Plus it is sticky.

I let players loot armor but I usually try to remind that this is, typically, the very same armor the just got done pumping 30 round of APDS into. It's probably not going to be worth all that much.

I also stipulate that security/milspec armor is custom tailored/built so they might need to drop a few bucks to get it fitted (to get all the cool encumberance reduction). This also drives down the cost of the armor on the open market it's still fitted for whoever.

I've actually never had a problem with looting screwing up a game. Of course I've never had players get into organ legging or stealing Americars...

Wait until they hit the Shadow School's Advanced Medicine and Autoshop Courses.

I've never had looting really derail a game, but as a GM I find it a little anticlimactic and metagamey when players who just finished a fire fight are like "cool... what do we get?" I want them to image the breathless pause, the sweaty palms, the adrenaline-fueled shakes... the reaction their character should have after a near death experience. I want them to think about the implications or how the fight advances the plot or where they can run to next. An immediate switch to looting mode just takes the realism out of it for me.

Yeah, that's a good point. I've only had a few cases where players actually had time to sit around picking through fresh corpses looking for cool swag. Usually I'll mention that their drawing a crowd, sirens wail distantly, or the gangers 30 friends finally showed up.

I also try to avoid just giving them an itemized list (although I might do that in big fire fights) usually my players give me an idea what they're looking for "Okay I grab his weapon, his grenades, and his commlink." Not "I strip him naked and pawn his shoes"

There are some looting scenarios I hadn't even imagined in here, those are hilarious. I hadn't even thought about snatching cybergear, that would make for some funny faces in my group.

GM: "He's got Titanium bone lacing."

Biff: "SWEET! Toss him in the furnace, we'll smelt him into bars!"

That would at least be a good way to hide the body. lol

Most furnaces would just change the colour of the titanium... But you could fish the bits out of the ash, use drain cleaner to etch out any bone char that remained and rearticulate the remaining lace into a really cool modern art sculpture...

...

OK, sick, twisted ideas are forming. And I thought the one guy that was taking "Taxidermy" as a hobby skill was bad. Making artwork out of Titanium Bonelaced Bones would be... Weird.

And probably sell in the market, too!

Take the bones out before putting them in the furnace. The rest of his flesh is worth more than the titanium would be.

This is a great solution! And the really sweet part is it doesn't have to be a "body" before the furnace chucking. You can use the furnace as a prop in your extended interrogation skill test.

Vlad

Could also use tubs of lye but I guess it's not as intimidating as a furnace.

Pig farm full of New Boars.

I think lye is less intimidating up until the point where their buddies face starts falling off.

I just let my crew walk away with four White Knights from a record company media storage facility in the middle of no where. the job was a "Favor" job and happened to be in the area they were in anyway. so the LMG's were pretty much the paycheck on that run. ( well, that and the joy of watching 18 kilos of rating 15 mil-spec plastic explosives make a reeeaaalllly big hole in the ground).

In a related story , Metal Attic Media stock took a plunge today after their main Masters vault exploded . Company spokeswoman, Elissa Mornraven called the loss "catastrophic" but assures the stockholders that backups for most of the data is being gathered from various other facilities. " We would never be silly enough to put all of our eggs in one basket." She said at a press conference earlier this evening. " As a subsidy of Ares, we pride ourselves in keeping our house in order. This setback ,although not anticipated, will be handled with the efficiency and professionalism that has brought so many talented artists to our labels."

Looting is a fact of life in my games. just don't be stupid and you just may pick up some extra
on a side note, they were smart, moved the guns quickly,only getting 25% value. By the time anyone even discovered the LMG's were missing they were on their way to Denver.

sorry for the crappy typing. keyboard d dying.

Ahhh, a quick trip to see Wu.


Vlad

The part I'll love is when it turns out that it's the buddy (who's face is falling off) who had the vital info. Imagine the 'doh' expression on the player's faces.

It can be disturbing when the runners are contemplating rolling Joe Corp, cracking open his skull for his cranial commlink and selling his meat to the neighbourhood ghouls to pay for beer and soypizza on poker night. But I guess they are usually paid to shoot people in the face, so an element of antisocial or outright psychotic behaviour is to be expected. When they decide that mugging and stealing cars is an easier method of making money than running it's a problem.

I have had the occasional problem with runners wanting to score teh epix lewtz. As has been suggested, I try to control this with personalised gear, tracking RFIDs, and fencing difficulties. Usually I can keep them moving too fast to stop them stripping bodies of all value, because I don't much like all the book-keeping.

One thing I've never really understood is quite what the point of organlegging is. In a world where you can grow a clonal organ, or replace it entirely with 'ware, where is the demand for Billy's lungs? The surgery is exactly as tricky to carry out, and you have all the added difficulties and expense of anti-rejection drugs. The highest price a second hand piece of meat could possibly reach is going to have to be far lower than the equivalent piece of 'ware, so where is the profit? Sure you might have a lot more widespread organ failure due to pollution, and hence a market of economy, but unless the cost of the drugs and the surgeon is negligible next to the cost of the organ, why would anyone cut corners for a piece of uncertain provenance and reliability?

Used bioware and cyberware is where the money is at. As for normal organs, some people can not afford cloning as it used to be quite expensive. And not everyone has access to cloning technology. And then, sometimes you don't have time to clone an organ.
Yes, those markets are shrinking.
And then there is the value of raw meat. Who told you those RatBurgers are really rats.

Because cloning tanks are expensive, not just to own, but operate. And not every back-alley doctor is going to have access to one. But he's got access to the drugs (Or cheaper, street alternatives), and skills that he can no longer use officially for whatever reason (I like the description in the Chemistry Chapter in Arsenal! It really portrays how some Street Docs are!).

As well, not everyone has time to wait for cloned replacements. It takes, what, a MONTH, maybe TWO to grow a lung or two? If you got a breath-ful of Nanite Rippers that tore your old set to shreds before your own security nanites got to them. You might have days, maybe only hours! Those spare parts look good then!

Finally, any operation is going to have you on immunosuppressant drugs, even if it's cloned tissues from your own body. The sutures alone would be attacked, and those need time to heal and dissolve before they get torn apart by the body's own defence mechanisms.

In essence, the people who use second-hand parts are the desperate ones, the ones who can't afford to go to the higher-end Shadow Clinics that have cloning facilities, or the ones that can't afford to wait for replacements for health reasons.

And there's more than enough of those to go around to keep the second-hand market going.

Finally, as inexpensive as synthetic blood and vat-grown O-Neg is, it's still cheaper to bleed some bugger dry, run it a few times through a toxin filter, and use that. Toxin Filtering is optional depending on which clinic you go to, so hope you don't pick up a new habit if you go to the wrong one!

Perhaps cloning is expensive, but there are a number of cyber organs or equivalents listed in the books, and fluff in augmentation seems to suggest that cyber organs are quite prevalent. Are the costs of anti-rejection drugs and surgery so low that the limiting factor is the cost of manufacturing 'ware?

And selling people as food isn't going to be all that profitable. Wholesale meat can't be all that expensive. I'm pretty sure that persuading the police to turn a blind eye to your long pig abattoir is going to cut into profitability a hell of a lot.

ETA: I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any demand for stolen organs, but I'm having a hard time mentally justifying the scale of things so far described.

Really?

Explain why everything's made of Soy then?

Oh, wait, I remember that someone already did, but not in this forum. And it's a good explaination.

My point is not that meat is cheap, just that I don't see the costs of running an illicit abattoir to be low enough, and demand for meat of uncertain origin high enough to make harvesting people for food profitable.

Hehe. I do like that link too.

Hey, if all you had to eat was Synth-Foods... How much would you pay for a REAL Hamburger?

And, honestly, you grew up eating Synth-Foods, do you even know what Beef tastes like? You know what "Authentic Farm-Like Beef Flavouring" tastes like, but we all know that it's not like the real thing.

...

Maybe I should switch that to Pork.

Me personally? I've been a vegetarian since I was 5 because I genuinely don't like meat, so not a great deal. I don't even like meat textured soy, regardless how close or otherwise it is to real meat. I have eaten meat from time to time, but I still don't like it.

I guess our biggest contention is how much you could potentially sell meat produced from people for on a wholesale basis. In this case you can't really go for volume, since it would make it easier for law enforcement to catch/stop you, and the easier it would be for them to shut you down for some good PR, the larger the bung needed to make it worth their while. You also need to keep the operation hidden from snoopy news types, since they would bring public pressure on law enforcement to shut you down, regardless of your bribe. If you're running a low volume high cost business, you are still trying to undercut regular animal farms, or supplying to folk that want to eat metahumans.

And that's why we have Z-Zones! Where cops and newsies never go.

And look at that, they're filled with people that noone cares about, too! The SINless! Walking meat on the hoof.

Am I saying wide spread, no. Ghouls mostly, yes.

But it certainly beats filler to make the real farm meat last longer.

That's not how I see them working tbh. I don't think they (Tamanous) actually retail the meat. They probably dump it to ghouls working for them as part of their payment. But I can see some surplus being sold as cheap meat.

Edit: This was a reply to ornot, not CanRay.

Again, I can understand some small market for organ legging, and 'long-pig', and all the rest. It's the apparent scale that I find hard to explain, and without the scale there's no discernible profit margin, since the price per unit of an organ must be lower than the cost of a cyber replacement, else noone would buy them in preference.

When my group has a run somewhere like a lab or somewhere equally technical, my sammy downloads a bunch of sales catalogs, and lets his 'link digest them into a database that links model numbers to sales values. He then looks at an item, and whirr-click, he knows if it is worth taking.

That said, we don't take the time to strip much from sites. We only skim the cream off the top.