In a recent game, many of the players asked me, "how many runners are there?"

To which I replied, there are probably quite many here in Seattle (base setting), but they'd be rarer in some areas and more numerous in others. But then, it got me to thinking. What would be the average ration (in 2070's Seattle) of runners to sararimen?

I'm thinking in terms of:
Magicians (any type)
Mystic Adepts
Adepts
Razorboys and Gillettes
Hackers
Riggers
other specialists?

How many would be professionals? How many are just wannabe's? How many are near retirement? How many would be up and comers?

You see, if the ratio of runners to people is high, then there would be more of them competing for the same jobs which would result in lower salaries, too few and then they become conspicious.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=20063
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=22284

Both on the second topic page!. Even if for some reason you do not understand the phrase "search", you should have been able to find either of these in under 30 seconds...

I consider the numbers in either thread to be way, way, way too high.

The line between runner and criminal is pretty hazy. What's the difference between a contract killer or a cat burgler and a runner? Is the question "How many people act like runners?" or "How many people act like runners and are as skilled at their criminal activities as a well-built 400BP starting character?"

I imagine that the Barrens is packed with 250BP-equivalent runner-wannabe thugs. They just never got it together enough to hit the big time.

Hey, my old Shadow Census table.

Yeah, some said the numbers were too high, some said too low, some people didn't care. It's really a matter of scale. How many Ultimate runners in a given city is dependent on the needs of the particular game. Those were the numbers I used to keep my campaign internally consistent, but specifics aside, I think the basic theory of it is solid.

For my table, Seattle's 3 million (registered) population came out to about 500 runners. About 20% of these were starting PC levels of higher, so in Seattle's active runner community, there would be about 100 people who were on par with the PC runners starting out. That's less than the average capacity of a mid-sized restaurant, so you couldn't even fill up the local Applebee's with the Competant or higher rated runners in Seattle. I don't think that's excessive, but your mileage may vary.