I mean data snatchs, wetwork, bank heists, etc. etc. whatever.

How many runners out there, read the news, get info from their own contacts and make their own jobs as opposed to waiting around for the fixer to call?

I wish all crews did this. It's a pet peeve of mine that no runner crews I've played with, even some of the most talented ones, did not capitalise on their strengths like this to get the more lucrative jobs.

- J.

Well, to be fair, it's easier on the GM to hand a job offer rather than wait for players to think up the game themselves.

-Siege

Yeah but that's always the way.

Once you reach a certain point, say a couple of years of SR or something, especially the veterans here who have been playing for 10 or more years, don't you think "you know what? stuff it, let's try and organise a heist of fairlight excaliburs..." or "lets rip of a heap of universal omnitech files and find a bidder" or "lets rip off zurich-orbital"

I dunno. Anything. Don't you all dream of one day having that big heist - the final pay off job like in HEAT or something like that?

- J.

stealing lots of Excaliburs... sell, move to exotic place of your choice...
or, personal favourite: Enter Archology, grab science files and the head of a medusa, leave, sell to highest bidder, this should net you about 2-500k depending on how good the files are (the head alone should give you 1-200k really)

How do you get the head off without the whole thing exploding?

A good example of creating your own run might be going through Dunkelzahn's will and scoring a few items here and there (e.g. bagging a toxic or insect shaman for a cool 1 million nuyen).

- J.

a adept with a sword should get the head off nicely with a called shot with his weapon focus....

If I play again any time soon, I want to make up a decker/rigger (security expert) and focus on these types of jobs, especially B&E/datasnatch jobs. Either that or a very very skilled, very very specialsed decker that will probably focus on bank heists.

- J.

The problem with self motivated runs is that the players are essentially funding their own operation rather than some corporate backer. Pulling off the "big score" requires a significant investment of time and money. Which if you're looking into a big run you probably don't have. Face it, if you already have enough nuyen kicking around to finance it, why would you need to do it? The players will however conduct their own runs if they have the right motivation. An example was when some gangers were harrassing one of my character's contacts, making business for the contact difficult to say the least. While not necessary, our characters went along with the idea of teaching some people a lesson, its always good to have a marker to cash in sometimes. For the most part our group usually comes up with sidelines to make any run more profitable. Anything from petty theft and smuggling to some GTA for a disposable vehicle or organlegging. (Bodies are loot! Actually a character had a ghoul contact, to keep in the good books he periodically did some distasteful activities)

This is one thing one of my groups excels at, and the other is starting to test the water.

The first group has always made their own decisions about what they do. I only have to come up with plot on the basis of stuff they do. Doesn't mean I don't come up with things anyway, but I really don't need to. The one time I did, it turned into a campaign - I had a contact ring them up and say he really wanted to leave employment at his corp but didn't know what to do about it. He didn't really tell them why and they didn't really ask. They helped, handed him over to Novatech for a hefty fee and a few favours and then Mr Consequences came to visit! I won't bore you with the details, but while dealing with this the team have been financing their own operation smuggling, using it to pay for all sorts of things that peak their interest. But its a smuggling campaign, its much easier to make lots of money fast.

The other game is a more traditional shadowrun team. But they will occasionally do things off their own bat. The characters develop interests, especially the magically active and deckers, lots of which require a shadowrun team's special skills, and the rest of the team pitch in if it will help the team as opposed to just the individual. Even then they might help depending on circumstances.

What sparked off this rash of initiative to start with was the sub orbital crash in seattle. The team were mid job when it hit, and had to get back across town. They heard about it on the radio, figured every emergency service in the whole plex was focussed on Redmond, and went to Tacoma after the job in the team Citymaster (civilian variant, but armoured and with hidden mounts, obviously), and ram raided a computer shop. They only got a medium range deck and some programs before they figured a drone would be on the way, and split, but it netted them a good couple hundred thou even after the 30% street price.

...Which they used on cyber surgery for the sammie, but that's by the by.

If you want to encourage them, do a bit of downtime. Ask them about their character's intrests and do an encounter during one of their downtime activities. Get their interest in their character's personal lives and they might start doing things independently as a result. But a lot of people don't like to play shadowrun that way, with the downtime and all, and like the pick up and play value. In that case, when they are looking for gear, instead of their contacts coming up with the goods, have them fail but (because he's such a good chummer) tell them where they could get their hands on it, but unfortunately they'd need to break into a blah blah blah. You've instigated it, but its much more their choice whether they go for it or not than a cash offer job for an employer where rep is an important factor (and what team turns down a job? Mostly no-one wants to nark off the GM that much...).

hth

Actually, when I read the title of this thread, I thought you meant that the runners secretly set up the situation and then let themselves be hired to fix it, thereby cashing in on it.

Best advantage of players initiating thier own runs ------- You wont be getting backstabbed and doublecrossed 95% of the time by your Johnsons.

dunno, maybe it's only in the body?

It wouldn't not set it off. But it might not destroy the head if it was already seperated and for any reason didnt have explosives wired into it. How the guy survives is his own lookout, mind...

Well, what about a better example -- the opening theft in the recent remake of The Italian Job? Scuba gear, contact explosives, a few boats, some underwater equipment, a few other odds and ends...

And they scored somewhere on the order of $30 million plus in gold bars.

Admittedly, opportunities like that aren't going to come around very often at all, but that's an instance where the take was exponentially larger than the expenditure.

If you do like in Entrapment, or what normal runners do. You do a few small jobs to get the capital to do the big jobs. Runners do small jobs to buy equipment for the bigger and better jobs. Eventually you could pull off the real big score with all the gear you stock piled from other runs. Some of my runners have a basement full of gear used in a job but rarely gets pulled out, but is kept in case it is needed again, like a man portable mortarand a case or 2 of smoke and flash rounds. And somethings happen all the time, like gold deleveries, you just need the inside info. So you can plan for up to years before the final hit. I personally know a place that takes out half a million dollars a day and a few million over the holidays, and it is handled by the same people in the same way everyday for at least 8 years since I have been there except the new guy ont the route now carriers a MP5 (I guess they over heard something and stopped an attempt before in the last 8 years). So if I was a runner I could have had the equipment and the plan by now and have cultivated the inside info to pull it off, and do pretty well at getting away with it.

It is my way of hiding the fact I am posting from the lock up, damn my cover is blown.

The players have to know what is out there before they decide to steal it. If you want to foster this kind of run have fixers start dropping information on the players. One of my players had a fixer who never sold them anything other than tidbits of information, normally for about 5k a pop, 15k if they wanted to keep the information exclusive. He would call them and tell them about a big shipment of APDS ammo going to a mil base, or about some fatcat out of town decker who was hitting clubs. This started out small and built to these fees, but it worked out to be pretty equitable. And you never know where the characters will go with it. Will they hit the decker and steal his gear, will they try and make a contact, will they case the guys flophouse and sell his location to a corp. who knows! it is great.

Though I can't speak for other groups, I can certainly relate my experiences in MY group. The whole 'proactive job aquisition' thing is something I've been yearning to do from the get-go. Getting the whole group to go along with it, though, is nigh impossible. Most of the others are very much "wait for the GM to drop us a plothook" people, which drives me crazy. Now, I'll admit, I might have set my sights a bit too high initially (my first time playing Shadowrun, I wanted to hunt Blood Magi for the DF reward. I was quickly shouted down), but my group seems reluctant to take even the *slightest* initiative. I guess this sort of thing varies from person to person.

Yep, this may be the fault of their previous GMs. They see something like '60,000,000,000 reward for Vash the Stampede !? No way I'm going to let my players get their grubby mits on that!

My group has been playing for about 5 months now (once a week on Sundays), and I am the GM. The characters started out with no rep at all on the street, but have managed to get a fairly solid relationship with a Johnson that they trust (is that a rarity in most games?). This Johnson drops them the bigger jobs, but they break the bigger jobs into a series of smaller runs of their own planning designed to complete the overall run. So I guess it’s kind of a combination of “GM hands a run” and “players make their own run” so far.

A related question I have to this revolves around the “combat specialist” of the group. She has set up her own little “job” on the side, but I’m really not sure if it qualifies as a Day Job flaw or not. She has begun her own business providing the services of a bodyguard to the well-to-do out on a night on the town.

Her theory behind this was “why would a partier want a big troll in a black suit watching over them in the background when they could have a beautiful Elven girl posing as a regular party girl doing the same thing up close and personal?” She has costumes designed around a theme of what kind of “girl” the customer wants with them for the night.

She is requiring that the customer call to make an appointment two weeks in advance and has been very selective about her customers so far. She is advertised on the Matrix and in a very expensive salon/body clinic (the doc there is a contact she has earned through roleplay; I guess you could say the doc gets advertisement as well, since she has done all of the “combat specialist’s” bodyware work).

So is this more of a runner making her own runs that might be turning into a day job eventually or a day job that isn’t really restrictive enough to be a flaw, you think?

She's her own boss. She can decline clients to go on runs, right? And it is not a fixed job per se, so why not let her run with it without the flaw?

There's been a lot of static on the merits of the "day job" flaw.

In my opinion, the flaw is kinda easy to subvert and enforcing it as a penalty takes some doing.

For your combat spec, I'd just rule she makes x nuyen a week/month from gigs.

*If she doesn't work, she doesn't get money.
*If she's routinely unavailable, the jobs will start to float elsewhere.

The obvious drawback happens when a potential run conflicts with her "day" job -- especially if she's on an extended contract with a client (a week or even the weekend, for example). The catch is, the character may end up sitting out an adventure because of the day job or similar massive headaches.

If the character is just doing it for blue book material and background information, I'd just let it go as a creative way of picking up some nuyen a month.

You might even add some RP flavor like a random encounter table --> drink spilled on expensive, rented dress. Infatuated paramour challenges your "date" to a duel. And so on.

-Siege

If you want to keep the downtime and additional roleplay to a minimum (in our game we'd play it all out where possible, but you might not play the same way) you could always, rather than use the flaw, bring in the karma for cash rules to represent it. I.e., she spends karma to represent the jobs she's done and gets cash at a rate determined by the GM. If the player is willing, you could vary the money. Perhaps she starts the next game, having spent 2 good karma, 15 grand richer. That's a good chunk of cash. however, that's what's left after her employer had to pay medical bills and a bonus cos the job went sour, so she's also starting the game shaking off the last of her injuries in the form of a light wound of something. It would add flavour if nothing else. The player would have to be willing to accept such arbitrary behaviour though.

Or you can play out the occasional job and use it to link into work for the team for instance, awarding karma and maybe even cash for it. It all depends on how much detail you want to go into.

I have a player running their own secure escort service (in the form of secure transport and bodyguarding - a professional combat rigger, using much the same philosphy as you, but basing it more on the driver from Strange Days), but who had it set up as part of their character background. Hence she has the day job, but is self employed. Half her contacts are not much more than paid employees - her fixer is in fact a professional agent with some dodgy contacts, so she gets lots of legit work and hears about the odd run now and again. She picked lots of different Mr Johnsons, from various corps, to represent clients she had previously taken to shady meets and had done particularly well with. Its an ideal job.

However, whenever she spends more than a few days exclusivley on a run, her business drops off, as her agent has to say she's unavailable. If this sort of thing happens, she has to spend profits from the shadowrunning to maintain the business (offices, mechanic workshop, etc) over and above her own lifestyle costs. But I do allow the vehicle maintenance on her limo to be absorbed into the business cost rather than general lifestyle, unless it needs specific work or repairs doing.

If she manages to keep the business afloat by purely legit means in a month (or by roleplaying going out and getting legit jobs, leaving her card with potential clients etc), then I give her a few thousand profit. If not, she makes no profit, but because she's already spent money keeping it afloat, she doesn't lose any more. The flaw affects jobs she can take, the money she is able to settle for on a job, who she can and cannot work for so as not to alienate her client base, etc etc rather than financially or in other ways.

That's how we deal with the enterprising self-employed runner anyway. Hope its useful to you.

My players will never, ever do their own jobs against the corps unless they have absolutely no other option. The reason for this is that if one corp hires the SR's against another corp then the PC's are tools, the corp knows this, the real instigator is the hiring corp who they can retaliate against.

If there is no hiring corp then the victim corp will eradicate the PC's, as SR's performing these jobs on their own is dangerious and antithetical to the bottom line. The chance of the PC's getting murdered in the future is astronomically higher. The PC's are literally eliminating the mitigating factor that keeps target corps from killing them in the first place.

It's even explicitly stated in the corporate download that the shadow community exists only because the corps allow it to exist. This is a case where they would decide that the SR's have stepped over that line.

Now bank jobs and jobs against non corp entities are far more viable. Although all bank jobs will be corp jobs because all banks will be owned by megas, just like the media is.