I can see it now...

"THE TRUTH BEHIND U(CAS)PS! More at 11..."

"PAPERBOY FOUND SMUGGLING FAB-3 THROUGH RURAL SEATTLE NEIGHBORHOOD! More at 11..."

UPS MAN CAUGHT SMUGGLING UNDERAGE ASIAN HOOKERS IN PACKING CRATES! More at 11.

We use the pizza guy as the test for newbies. They always get a knock at their door when they first start the game. It is very telling how a person answers the door, when they have been exposed to SR but haven't played yet. Sometimes the pizza dude is a burglar, sometimes it is a pizza dude with the wrong address but it is always funny to watch the gears turn in the hands of newbies when they can't make up their mind to kill the guy or just tell him to piss off. One guy watched his house get robbed utilthey touched his beer then he started WW3 in the living room while one guy opened fire with 2 hand cannons thinking the dude on the other side was from another corp out to get him.

PIZZA BOY SMUGGLING ILLEGAL CORPORATE DATAFILES SPOTTED IN TACOMA DISTRICT! LONE STAR IN PURSUIT! LIVE FOOTAGE IN PROGRESS! More at 11.

EDIT: Frag-o-Delux - Basically use them as the guinea pig for your 'runners social skills? Or possible lack of them, for that matter?

Yup.

My uncle introduced me and my brother to DnD, so we introduced him to SR. His first encounter was in his squat in the barrens. He did some reading on the area so he knew he was living in a bad area. He had the knock at the door and everyone in the group gets quite. He asked who it was and the Pizza Man was yelled back. Knowing there was no chance in hell the pizza boy would drive that far into the barrens to deliver a pie he told him to piss off. When the pizza guy answered back that he had to come to the door my uncle picked up a brick from the ground and through it through the cheap wooden door and knocked the dude out. He then went and checked on him and noticed it was a chip head looking for an easy score.

Also one of the fixers in our Seattle does have a front as a pizza shop. They deliver all kinds of things in those pizza boxes.

The trick is, knowing which pizzaria is the right one. We had a guy go crazy because he just had his first encounter, then a few short hors later while hanging with the gang, a different pizza guy showed up. He went nuts thinking they were coming back to get him for wha the did to the other pizza guy.

Thats a good idea...

..."Knowledge: Safe Pizzerias" as a knowledge skill... It's like some sort of twisted food chain mafia!

...I wonder if McDonalds is a AAA in 2060? Or Nintendo, for that matter?

Ahhh, right. Forgot them.

...I sense NERPS rants coming on in this thread...I sense it in the Force...Or in the digesting bits of my dinner, anyway.

The thing is we have a lot of running as in time not career path characters. One I had is about 11 real years old and he knows just about everyone. Then when other people play they all start to get to know each other through running into each other. Like say my friend chris is playing he had a character that went semi-retired and is now a minister, his then replacement character was a coked up undercover cop, which was introduced to his minister through the character I was palying. Then this guy phil has a character who would wind up going to jail for 10 years, when he got out he hooked back up with my character who was now semi retired, where I introduced him to the other group of guys, and so.

If you do a "family tree" of our shadows in seattle and a few other towns it is a very tight knit community which we have always pictured it being. Of course there are fringe and wannbes but we know most of those also becuase most of our characters that are still alove have set up shop in some form or another.

We use rep more as a guage of who knows you and how well you do the job. Some people everyone knows but yo maybe knowen for soemthing yo are not proud of.

Also this has brought some very funny and deadly tangles into our world, were some people have killed their own players because of personallity clashes. I have never had to do one of my onw in, mainly because the main character I had was a business man and didn't like killong people unless there was nothing else he could do, and really keeps an arms length from mos tof the new characters, he'll deal with them but mainly through intermediares. I have beat up my own characters for non-payment and such, but i have yet to kill one.

Sounds as insanely complicated as me and Sahandrians game...Mess of contacts and all...

@ Fortune.

The 11 year old character has over 100 contacts that he still pays maintainance on, god damn maintainence rules. Ranging from lowly street scum, they can find amazing amounts of info in the right spots. All the way to to a few higher level corp execs and government officals, even a few of the heads of crime families. Now I will hear a lot of grumbles about the corp execs I know but they are all story driven contacts that through roleplaying I acquired and have maintained. It took one year real time and about 2 years story time to get that contact and to get to trust me enough to becaome a level 1 and as time has gone on I have as close to a 3 as the GM will allow. Really only 2 or 3 are in big corps, a few are in the mom and pop category, but they too can get some amazing gear. I do a lot of pro-bono work for people for favors later. In fact one of the higher execs in a AAA owes me quite a few favors, that when I go into full retirement I will call in. In fact almost all the players in the game owes my character a favor or 4. I like haveing people owe me things.

And he still wets the bed.

Can you guess what he will retire as? Unless some of the other players have their way.

No clue here...

EDIT: @ Voorhees.

ROADKILL! To be specific...

Hey, world domination is something to shoot for for a runner, I suppose. ...Although it ain't gonna matter much when the Scourge arrives. But that's not for another few millenia, so unless you're either an IE or have some seriously whacktastic Leonization, it doesn't really matter...

Ok he is only slightly megalomaniac, he does want to own the world, too much paper work, just a relatively small portion of it.

NEXT TIME ON DRAGO---Errr. DUMPSHOCK!!!

I had a fixer get me a 65 mustang once. charge me up the "expletive"

fixed it up and used it for years. Many a run went by were someone tried to steal it. no one succeded. I was super paranoind about it.

Heh. My rigger's paranoid about his bike. Has ruthenium on it and everything.

I'd rather have a '65 mustang than that deathtrap you call transportation.

in RL I am fixing up a 75 year old truck, I don't see why it couldn't be done in SR, jsut remember that the older it is the harder it is to find real parts...

A gang of Hot-rodders would likely fix up old (10-20 yrs) cars that were mass produced and still easy to find... like early americars or something or that nature...

a gang of rich kids might fix up older cars than that... like the 60s truck restorers that you find everywhere in Texas...

-MIke R.

I ran a rigger gang called the Yuk-faced bandits once... they had a semi and a bunch of cheap bikes... great time GMing them... mostly liked the name though.

Yeah, the way I saw it, they just used the frames, and put in modern engines and tires, and stuff.

Wow. Just saw the response to my post about people interested in running the online game. I'll have to think about that. That could be very cool. However, it's been years since I ran any game online through posts or email. Although I used to hang around the WW Java chats. Be nice to have one of those for Shadowrun.