Wanted to talk about the ways that runners can make side money, since the runs themselves often barely pay for themself.

Ways I can think of offhand:
1. The oricalchum printing press.
2. Harvesting organs/cyberware from people you kill along the way.
3. Taking what you can carry along the way (things like unrelated paydata on matrix runs, gear from people you knock out/kill, looting buildings you break into)


So, what are some other ways of getting extra cash that players can use, and what do GM's think about these ways. (Don't bring up the survival knife thing, pls pls pls)

-3Threes

Going on runs that actually pay decently.
Not getting ahead of yourself and taking a run that requires you to purchase a lot of equipment because it's clearly designed for someone other than you, you pathetic scumbag with the street-rep of an octopus.
Random crime (B&E, carjacking, organlegging on the side)
Day Jobs

~J

Drugs in gang turf. Do some random donations to keep yourself in good eyes, and the rest of the time sell it to them for less than regular street price.

one i just thought of -

some runs might give you inside information you can use to your advantage buying/selling stocks - you might need a SIN to do the trading, but that shouldnt be too hard to get

Go out and steal stuff for yourself. Fence the goods and keep the cash for yourself, screw any Johnson or anyone else.

Or you could use the time-honored exploit of buying survival knifes and selling the trauma patches out of them
knife=450 x SI of 0.75
Patch=500 xSI of 4

From the original post of this thread:

oops, sorry.

Continuing on my previous reply: One of my friends made a chemist for a PBP on an ezBoard game set in gang territory. He had something ridiculous like 30ish dice for Chemistry, and quite a few bits and pieces to make various drugs and compounds (No, not dikote, sorry).

Needless to say, the gang loved him. He got some extra special protection, just as long as he provided them with what they wanted when they wanted it. Nothing every day, but every few weeks or so he'd restock them.

Matrix Paydata runs. With a decent deck and the right contacts you can make serious

It all comes down to what the GM allows. Some GMs get uptight about the players making non-run money and arrange for any such operation to shut down. Some people just don't like characters who have loads of cash and gear.

Possibly the worst character (From a min-max perspective) I ever created was a physical adept with priority A resources. All the Nuyen, aside from basic gear, went into buying real estate and corporate contacts. The character collected about 50,000 nuyen a month rent on various apartments, and used the contacts to keep abreast of new real-estate developments to make more money. Granted at that rate it would take a while to even make a million nuyen but hey. . . it was an interesting contact.

Anybody with a shop or facility should be able to make money selling their time and skills to others. Make custom CC weapons and sell them on the street, specialize in "Special" conversions of vehicles.

In general vehicles pay the worst for making money, guns are somewhere in the middle, and enchanting pays the best. I haven't looked into programming any time recently.

With programming it just depends on what your GM lets you gat away with as far as selling the programs are concerned. It's almost always worth it to buy (or steal if youre uber hot) programming time on a Red host for programming high-force utilities.

I strongly recomend people who want to pretend to have a real life play The Sims. It's much more tailored to that kind of thinking. I prefer shadowrun, where my guy lives a life of crime and danger because he either doesn't have another choice, or can't live without the adrenaline.
Who gives a crap if a PC can invest 12 hours a day, every day and get a lot of money? I could too, but I chose to play RPGs instead, because it doesn't suck.

So you never role-play the downtime between runs? You never have players take the initiative and set up their own deals?

Not so far. Everyone has jobs and responsibilities in real life.
Shadowrunners who have the ability and desire to make a lot of money have no reason to be shadowrunners.
If you have the skills to make orichalcum, and have the patience to only do that for months at a time, then you will, and you're not a shadowrun PC anymore. There's a reason these people actually let people shoot at them for a living. Find a way to reconcile that with working a crappy, boring day job, no matter what the pay. You can't, without ignoring something.

So, leaving aside day jobs, etc, you go straight from one run to the next? What about character development?

That comes by the wayside.
My group actually accepted the next run (an extraction on Tuesday) before completing the run they were on (some wetwork on Friday. Now, they've to get to Vancouver BC, and kidnap a mob boss's daughter from her boyfriends hi security office building, without the troll tank because after healing he's still sitting at a severe wound.
They'll get two weeks or so after this one, but that's about it.
Character development doesn't have to come out side of the "run". Our party's face/sorceror met her "boyfriend" while doing legwork for a run.
Our streetsam's girlfriend is the girl from behind the counter in Foodfight from First run. They developed a relationship over time, and became lovers after he rescued her reporter sister from a Tartarus ring dungeon waiting for the Tanamous pickup.
Our rigger has a gas station/shop, which pays the salary for his mechanic buddy and provides him shop space. He doesn't really care about much but his babbies and playing cards.
The decker works on programs. Does the design, then hires other guys to do the programming because he has no desire to do that for a living. And he might sell a few hard copies of a new app, but never more that 3 or 4, because it'll stop being SOTA if everyone's got it.

They develop their characters, but no one in our group wants to pretend at real life.

hey who wants to be a millionnaire turned to "how do you run your PC everyday life"
Am i alone or players merely don't give a drek about their life aside from the runs ?

Easy way to make cash if you aren't bothered about heat - ram raid a computer store and steal a cyberdeck. Just one. Even at 30% you're likely to make a hundred thou or so.

Our players seem to like playing the downtime stuff because they feel it makes their characters more beleivable. But if you choose not to it doesn't make you, or us, wrong. Its a game you can play both ways - otherwise the rules for all the non-run-essential skills wouldn't be there. You don't HAVE to do it, but the rules are there to cope if you choose to.

So long as player-inspired runs are based off of some sort of character-based issue, then I'm fine with them. The character has a contact with Fuchi, so he does a little work for them on the side and tries to climb the ladder. I'm good with that. Of course, this requires some sort of character background to work with and gains have to be restrained to keep the game in balance. If the character gets too big for the game, then they get retired - it's as simple as that.

It becomes a problem when there is little or no character background and/or the player is only getting "run" ideas by comparing street indexes and regional markups. To all of those who GM for anyone who has or may attempt something as like the survival knife trick, there are many available options:

1. Adjust the market to reflect changes that may've occurred since that version of the survival knife appeared in 2052.

2. The company is no longer in business and the knives are no longer available at all, because they were giving away 500:nuyen: trauma patches with 450:nuyen: survival knives.

3. The trauma patches in the knives aren't of the best quality (apply modifiers or make them non-functional).

4. Who will buy a trauma patch on the street for 2000:nuyen: when they can go into Wal-Mart and buy the same thing with a handy knife for 450:nuyen:? (or "you aren't the only idiot out there with basic math skills").

5. (related to #4) Customers tend to take their dissatisfaction out on merchants when said merchants screw them over. We're talking about street customers here, too.

There are many things you can do to discourage munchkin behavior like this. GMs, stop being suckers. Players, show a little sense and restraint. Anything that is more of a metagame money making scheme than anything else must be refused.

Hell, if you have a SIN, you could buy medkits and other goods and resell them to the less-than SINless.

Hell, do a stockpile of adventuring gear () and be on call 24 hours for shadowrunners who need gear in a crisis.

-Siege

Wooo - Time to make use of the "Arms Dealer"/"Merc Supplier" contacts then!

:L

I have seen extremes in defining downtime: One GM I had in Earthdawn actually made us play the roadside perils in C. 7-8 (~equivalent 200 karma). Well.


This weekend I GMed three runs for a new group:
1. Infected Greetings from TSS18(?) (Converted to German locality)
2. Supernova from First Run
3. Brief interlude during Supernova when they wanted to buy worker overalls: Food Fight.

I didn't run the time in between at all, so we could do this and character creation in just under 12 hours.