Okay, so 4th edition temped me and I picked up the book. I had a lot of Shadowrun stuff before, but I never got to play so it collected dust. As my O.C.D kicked in I went out and picked up the GM screen and was looking at the random adventures. I saw the table there for payment and I was wondering, "Well okay, I get that if you roll this they pay you the standard rate for the job...but what is it?" I was wondering if there was a general rule of thumb for what a runner can expect for any given job.

It's a pretty debated topic but in all reality it works down to how you want your game to feel. That said, I believe the best balance for 4th edition was said to be about 10k per karma they get. In the my games I let them scrape by earning their spending plus about 5k each month for improvement, but my game is based in the barrens and a different feel than most.

Fundamentally there is no "standard pay" just as there is no standardized pay for criminal and mercenary work today.

A team that successfully captures Whitey Bulger gets a $1,000,000.00 tax free in a paper bag from the FBI. If a team captures Osama Bin Laden, they get twenty five million.

On the flip side, in South Korea they captured a guy who ran a killer-for-hire website where he was paid about 9 grand a hit.

That is the length and breadth of hit payments: a big important hit may be worth millions, and a bullshit hit hired out by some random dude is probably worth less than 10k. Other crime pays even stranger amounts. Turning over some drugs or BTL chips will probably net you a couple hundred nuyen. But the guy who traffics in the amount of MDMA they had in Layer Cake will make millions.

As a Shadowrunner, the simple fact is that big important people paying you to do big important things is worth a hundred times what small fries hiring you for small jobs. But the actual work involved may be exactly the same. You're pad by how important the results are, not on how difficult the job is. Heck, if you can land the job of being the dude who drives a couple hundred kilos of pixie dust across town to the new warehouse, you're looking at probably 5 figures for an hour's work that s completely non-dangerous. Unless someone betrayed you to the Star...

-Frank

It boils down to what sort of a game you're in. Do you want the 'runners to be scraping change together for another clip of normal ammo, and constantly worrying about debt, or do you want them to be running in the big time, expending drones, bound spirits and electronics like they're going out of fashion?

If you want the game to have motives beyond the next meal, you need to make the money more incidental.

Some other aspects will also affect the cost-reward balance: if you're running a terribly paranoid game, operating costs will be higher; even staying in the shadows without operating has some quite high costs in terms of burnt IDs if your interpretation of Society is quite authoritarian.

I pay with something similar to franks post but the 10k a karma rules good for a quick game and the first few after the newb runner test. Ie finding out if the team is worth anything. Also I like the nuyen to raise and fall rewarding those who don't blow it when they get in one moth you could ranking 1 mill+ then next 50K would be nice. I also find that the payout fluctuations help make the game gritter (with out harming the runners) and more real.

"It's not finding people that need work, it's finding people that can pay..." - Dirk.