what kinds of big prizes has your group received for a run?

i once got a crapton of orichalcum right before the last session which i used for enchanting and sold the rest for roughly 4.5 mil.

The last adventure of my recently ended campaign had the team setup to infiltrate and very secure laboratory. They were given four devices that would override four cameras at a time (which was needed because the team was told to not access any networks within the building due to heavy spider activity) and an AI that would give the team a 20 second window to heist a high-ranking CEO's clone.

This was setup to be a very tough grab and escape mission, limiting the teams matrix and magic activity...and the payout was 800,000 nuyen to be divided four ways. The runner with the most nuyen at that point, had about 60,000 to his name...the rest were all under half that, so this was a huge run.

Unfortunately, a session into this latest run, DnD4 came out and we shifted gears...

I must be a mean sonslitch. On average, my group gets 8-10k after expenses and 4 karma after a two to three session adventure.


BlueMax
who may have to change his name to "Big meany"

How long are your sessions? Ours are about six hours long and we get 2-3 karma per session. Our pay scale is a bit higher (when we actually get paid, which is generally about 1 in 4 sessions we receive payment for anything.) Generally the magical loots and items that we pick up off of other characters more then makes up for the lack of money.

6 hour sessions.
With the derth of published adventures, I have been erroring on the cheap side as to not give out too much too fast.

My group tends to earn a bit more money. However, they are not normal type Shadow Runners. They are more like a professional team of Freelancer/mercs. When they are getting a job, they negotiate with a daily/weekly rate (per runner), a danger pay (per runner), special pay (per runner), and expenses.

Rate comes out to 2k @ day or 10k a week. Danger pay depends on the run and how likely they are to get hurt/killed. It can be anything from none (basic bodyguard or training gig), 25~100% of base rate (snatches, B&E, etc), to several times base rate (attacking high risk areas, etc). Special pay comes in when you want them to do something very very few people can do or that most people don't like doing (Assassination or any job that requires a high rating in a rare skill). Expenses comes down to ether an open account (very very rarely) or a max number (with some up front) to cover, well, expenses. They actually are pretty good at giving a full and acurate accounting here.

I would say in an average 6 hour session, they net 10k to 20k each, plus 3~4 karma. On some sessions they net little to no cash (most character driven or Robin Hood stuff, which they do) and in others they net 2 to 3 times as much.

However, my players all maintain fairly extensive (and multiple) lifestyles, lots of fake SIN & Licenses, require paying into the group fund (which pays for group lifestyles, aka Warehouse headquarters and several safe houses, along with expenses on non-paying missions), and stock up their retirement funds.

That retirement fund works like buying a lifestyle, except that you can continue to increase it. Considering that middle lifestyle requires a mil to buy IIRC, they still got a long ways to go.

During the first Harlequin adventure we managed to steal Tir-2 (the Prince's fully-loaded Banshee) and fly it up to Concrete where we stripped it for parts with some truly hellacious Negotiation rolls when we sold them. Each character scored 200K+ on that run, IIRC. We all pooled some of this cash and started an Investigation/Paramilitary company (D4C) that made all the characters legit before we retired them at 100+ Karma.

We still use the company and the characters as NPCs in our 4th Ed game...

When I ran my SR3 game, lo these many years ago, I wasn't overgenerous with nuyen, but I did reward the runners once in a while with tech or other toys. (One memorable incident involved an assault cannon being shipped to the Redmond Barrens from Scotland inside a cow carcass.) The most expensive item, I think, was the troll street sam receiving deltaware Wired Reflexes 3 as a reward for many, many, many little jobs done for the Black Forest Troll Kingdom's intelligence service. The other players, who knew nothing of her connections (in or out of character), never did figure out why she all of a sudden got so much faster...

The Chicago CZ game I'm starting ought to prove a change of pace. "Your pay for this run is seven cans of NutriKrill and twenty-eight rounds of heavy pistol ammo. Do real well and I'll throw in a couple packs of smokes as a bonus."

we shot us a dragon ("small" feathered serpent) to sell the parts as magical reagents . . does that count?

Years back (over 10 yrs now) my mates pulled a few big score jobs. Can't remember the numbers but it was multi million nuyen deals.

One guy orchestrated a series of bank heists before he got sloppy and was taken down. Another was to steal company bearer bonds from their vault. The other was a high risk destruction run against a top secret corporate research facility. It was laid out a lot like Usual Suspects - several weren't expected to survive but they did. Another was a run into the CZ to rescue a high society chick. They were paid megabucks for the run and also ripped off a bunch of top secret data and gear from the old Fuchi building as incidentals.

Having said all that, I was very carefree with the nuyen and karma back then. But I do believe the only thing that really stops any average shadowrun team from pulling off a big score job is planning.

- J.

thats generally what i give per game but im in 3rd edition.

we did something similar i was the enchanter that got to play with the goodies.

Our team snagged a Skytrain once...

...fragged a dragon when I wasn't there and made foci from it's bits...

...found a "Mass Cannon" and managed to steal a massive armored ATV from another dimension...

...we tend to do pretty well for ourselves.

some of the characters got played while i was unable to attend.
they ran one of those more offical things . . and consequently ended up with 10 to 20 karma and stuff worth 500k nuyen . .

Even for normal shadowruns I use the mercenary contract rules from Battletech. Well, not the rules, but the ideas. It gives them something to argue about with the Johnson other than "That's too high!" "That's too little!" Not everything transfers, though.

My players add up the base pay on how long they think the mission will take and special pay (they have have Diving and Parachuting for example). They actually have a large chart for the special pay, which includes magic and hacking bits. The total is the min they will take to perform the job. They start the negotiations with a total on the high end of the danger pay increase for the job, with the targeted expenses normally about what any one of them would make unless the mission requires something like them traveling a lot, jumping out of a plane, or buying some really expensive gear. Of course, if the Johnson will cover those, they are happy.

We got a flying tank once as a bonus from a Johnson. It was cool, but overall we probably lost money on the whole thing. The care and feeding of it was a bit much, but one player essentially decided to stop buying gun skills and stared buying pilot and B/R vector thrust.

My group last game found an old safe house used by Capt. Chaos and were able to get a bunch of his old programs. The hacker/rigger was excited as hell. They were a few level 7 programs, but they were all functional only at level 1 due to being so old. It should take him a while to update.

Still he managed to trade one for a level 6 Exploit program.

My PC's got a toxic shaman to the DIMR. and i 'ahem intervened' with them in their payment so they got less than the mil. Basically they got half their pay in diamonds which they then had to fence. they were still happy considering the hassle for a big pay off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hksil-KkebQ

That's a little too much shifting gears...

distracted...by the large, bright white shirts and the infectious dancing...



Anyway, we made out with some decent pay before; six digits a couple of times. Goods are always a bonus. I paid out a million once, but it was the final run of a couple-month thing, and I figured if they made it through it, they deserved it. They made it through.

As for karma, I usually give 3-5 a week(if running one session a week.) Can go up to 6-7 if it's really hair-raising, but 3-5 is the average. Seems to be a decent rate; 4 karma a week is 16 per month, for example, and that's enough to grab a few low skills with or even initiate once. I'm more likely to actually be kinder for the first month or so; this way the gang has a little bit of Karma and loot, and feels like their getting somewhere; it might slow down to 3-4 average after that, but sometimes just getting that nice base to build on is quite good.