That's possibly one of the more sensible responses I've seen, Toturi. Of course, the quality does stipulate the total amount owed, so it's not surprising that enterprising players might ask why they can't just pay off the principal.

The biggest balance problem seems that you get a double reward when you take that flaw; BPs and nuyen. It's not like being a burnout gets you all the drugs you can take, why should you get the money you owe in addition to the BPs? Personaly I prefer making the principal 10 times higher than the book states, while keeping everything else the same (ie. for 30BPs you get an additional 30,000Y, but your monies owed is upgraded from 45,000Y to 450,000Y). Admittedly now your runner needs to pay off 45,000Y a month, but it is a 30BP flaw!

@Falconer. The run that netted the chopper is a sanctioned SR Missions adventure. I can state from experience that the typical payout is about what you have experienced, but there are a few occasions when one can net a bit of extra cash by looting artwork or paydata. The chopper in question is not exactly supposed to be stealable, and I personally wouldn't have allowed the pilot to be shot with SnS, even with a longshot, but I'm quite harsh. However, the Johnson for that particular mission is an Arms dealer, so is pretty ideal for fencing the chopper.

Also, your character might have had overheads of 10,000 a month, but that's not that hard to pull together if you do a couple of runs a month. And as such seems like a pretty soft deal considering the extra cash and BPs you get to start with.

The problem here is that there are two ways to get it...

1. What the players did
2. If they disable the vehicle, the trinity have the chopper land and approach on foot. Enterprising party then ambushes them.. and still gets it.

I had expected the party to blow them out of the sky... When the street sam went for the longshot I expected a fail... The player was bored because the even more extreme combat monkeys had monopolized things combat wise in a previous mission we had played that day. So I explained what a longshot was and the player went for it. It's the same thing as taking a shot to bypass the armor... in whatever way you want to describe it.

When I ran that mission the Trinity broke off rather than get killed. The mage got knocked out by gel rounds, and the troll was unable to hit the ninja riding the getaway van's roof, but wasn't so fortunate himself. The chopper itself took quite a lot of damage from a hidden turret on the van, so the rigger broke off pursuit.

I have to admit that my players have never felt the need to make a longshot test. Maybe I'm not challenging them enough, but usually if something looks so tricky it would require a long shot they pursue some other tactic. I would categorise them as 'risk averse'.

Yah... I had planned to have the trinity break off pursuit... they just never had a chance... :/

Behold the power of the sniper and Light Machinegun adepts...

Crypto: I'm well aware of what a longshot test is. Just I agree w/ the other GM... it shouldn't have been allowed. (firing through the vehicle armor and the pilots armor, etc.). There has to be a modicum of GM fiat in there otherwise... I use a longshot test for my mage to pop some blood vessles in the targets head using magic hands giving him a stroke... (or something similarly silly).

And even then... it's a manned vehicle w/ a competent rigger. It shouldn't respond to wireless commands. If he hadn't been knocked out by the longshot SnS test, then your next problem is said decker decking into drone and incapacitating pilot and taking it over. Even then a failsafe script could easily kick in and have the thing jet off back to base and forcably close all connections (dumpshock) in case of the rigger losing conciousness. Even then, just because the contact is a weapons dealer, doesn't mean he has 100k in liquid assets to buy a hot chopper right away.

From the sounds of it your bigger problem was highly optomized players w/ some really high dicepools. And then paired w/ some overgenerous rewards. Instead of the face going against the johnson... the johnson could put his own negotiator forward as his purchasing agent. A good rule of thumb is turnabout is fair play. If someone is going to use something, don't be shocked when it's turned around and used against you and you're looking at an equal dicepool on the other side.


I don't think the quality is bad or broken... especially if the char is in a position where he can only pay it off slowly. If anything, maybe it needs something akin to player can pay off no more than 10% of loan value per month. If it costs the player a significant amount of his IC resources in game, then it's doing it's job. (which is the reason I didn't feel the decker/drone guy was too bad, I've never played a decker/rigger before either understand. I was very worried that I'd be getting slammed w/ other expenses like vehicle repairs and having to pay to replace drones, or modify/upgrade captured drones to acceptable standards. Which would have made Nuyen always a problem for at least the first year of play.

I'm sure that whoever owns the debt probably could find other ways the character could pay the interest other then cash. Possibly some task he needs done, or an annoying problem solved. But you have to ask.

I'd like to point out... that if the Trinity had disabled the PC's car... they land the chopper nearby and approach on foot.

At which point, if the PC's aren't disabled... the Trinity is dead. And the PC's walk away with the chopper anyway.

Bouncing a burst of stick n shock in through the cargo bay door of a chopper past a mini-gun to clip a pilot isn't that far out of the realm of possibility. And FWIW, how far out of the written adventure are we supposed to go? Auto-flee scripts, etc, sorry again here, but I'm used to things that come from the RPGA... if it isn't in the module for them, then it isn't there.

As for the fencing of stuff, with a negotiations adept, I don't think they care who they sell it to. Said adept will find a buyer in extremely short time. So fencing by RAW means its going to be sold. 8 CHA + 5 Negotations + 5 Kinesthetics + 3 Improved Ability Negotations etc.. + 12 availability of the chopper looking for 10 successes with a roll every 6 hours, isn't going to take very long by RAW.

All the Missions FAQ has to say about fencing is this


That's it... again, if you're trying to stay Con style friendly and not go off book, then it gets exceedingly difficult to handle this. The people who'd come looking for the chopper are dead... So who's going to come looking for the chopper? It's going to be fenced... if not at RAW's 30%, then at least in the 20-25% range.




And in SRM, where are these negotiations face adepts statted out? Sure, I can make up NPC's that throw 500 dice in a negotiations test out of thin air if I want to, but that seems to go against the spirit of missions from what I can tell.




And that makes sense... if it gets erratta'd that you can't pay more than 10% of the principal per month + 10% monthly interest... and again, if this was a home game I was trying to run, I'd probably house rule something.

It's called *stick'n'shock*, not *bounce'n'shock*. (if you want that go for the rubber bullets, they're in there under gel :)) Congratulations you hit the pilot w/ already discharged SnS rounds.



There's your answer right there, be prepared to take MUCH less for it. I read that and I see okay 20-25% value if your face is good on COMMON items. On the REALLY big ticket stuff like vehicles, you'll be lucky to get 10%. You're just choosing not to employ that sentence which gives a big GM out.

Ah, but he managed to bounce without discharging the SnS rounds. Bounce, bounce, bounce... stick, shock.

That makes next to no sense, Toturi. I'm surprised at you. There are no rules that I'm aware of for ricochetting beyond GM fiat.

He used a long shot test. He rolled edge and bypassed the armor of the vehicle. The GM just had to describe what happened and so he said it bounced off an opening in the chopper before nailing the pilot. It is better then it "magically passes through the bullet proof glass and knocks out the pilot."

Thanks masterofm, that's exactly what I said above.

And again fuzzy description of "be prepared to get way less for selling a vehicle"... All I get to compare to is SRM02-04, where 18-wheeled tractor-trailers are fenced for 50k each with a book value of 110,000 (the Nordcap Zugmachine from Arsenal is the only 18-wheeler I have in either BBB or Arsenal). Which means the starting point for a negotiations test is just under 50% on vehicles.