Just needs Knowledge skill - Counter CSI or something similar to screw that up.

In fact, the Covert Ops Protocol skill in Ghost Cartels should help too. Just a matter of who has more dice.

For GMs thinking of using things like Biometric Safety, maybe the various Security Design/Procedures/etc would help against that and should make sure someone in the facility has got that skill in the first place. When the runners kidnap/Mind Probe/Influence/pornomancer him to find out how to get into the facility, they could also get how to bypass such countermeasures too.

Also:
BBB=Big black book=SR4 Main Rule book

When I'm wearing my "Nice GM" hat, in these situations, I usually just stop what I'm doing, look the offending player dead in the eye and ask them "Are you sure?".

This is usually enough to stop the most absurd behaviour.

- J.

Honestly, why is the PCs picking up some extra frickin' guns such a big, huge problem? I thought it would be about the PCs taking everything not nailed down, and carrying a saw, a spoon, and a beer cooler to harvest choice bits of cyberware from their foes.

Now, it's possible you've been making it too easy for them - not ever using RFID tags, ignoring encumbrance, letting them sell the guns too easily for too much, and giving them plenty of time to grab whatever they want. If that's the case, then following the common-sense solutions that others have put out here will greatly ameliorate the problem.

But seriously, while nabbing loot should not be effortless or risk-free, it's not really that big a deal if the runners grab a few extra weapons off of the guys they've geeked. They should occasionally be losing their own gear, or getting it damaged, so it balances out in the end.

If it's not nailed down or on fire it's fair game. If I can pry it loose it wasn't nailed down, if I can douse it then it wasn't on fire. And my character was stealing EVERY gun could he could to start his Rent-A-Gun business. The question is more what to do with the goods. You might just turn them into thieves instead of runners.

I don't see why fire is an issue here...

The only time I've ever had a "problem" with a player taking everything that wasn't nailed down was when I ran a campaign with a DND player and it was his first SR game. Actually it was the other players that told the guy he was an idiot to grab the "loot". It turned into an angry monkey sort of situation.

Angry Monkey Experiment:
A study done in the 60's had a room filled with monkeys, a lader with a sensor switch on it, food at the top of the lader, and the sensor switch hooked to cold water sprinklers that showered the entire room. The monkeys learned very quickly that if they touched the lader to get the food they got doused in cold water (hence the angry monkey part). After about a week of doing this they took one of the monkeys out and replaced it with a new monkey. It went straight for the food but was cut off by the others and beaten. Over time all the monkeys were replaced until none of the original monkeys were left, but still any time a new monkey tried to go for the food, it was cut off and beaten by the other monkeys (even though they didn't know why climbing the lader was bad).

One problem you run into with biometrics on guns is that they're wired to tiny little computers. Tiny, little, hackable computers.

Wow, I'm completely opposite. I encourage looting! "Heck yeah you can take that guys body armor. And his cyberarm looks expensive too!" Look, runs pay jack. Have you seen what pay they offer in the SR Missions modules? It was something like 4000 to 7000 nuyen. For days worth of very hazardous work. Screw that. The only way to make money is to grab loot (gear, cyberware, data, etc) and sell it.

Way back I had a player who regularly filled his truck with dead bodies to later be butchered for cyberware scavenging. Ah the good ol' days.

I use the quote from Heat in is you have to be able to in 10 seconds walk out the door and never have to look back.

I think it is the same with the looting, if it is causing monkey trouble then you should not loot. However if there is no monkey trouble than looting is fine. Sometimes the only way you can get a gun through customs is to steal one there.

-Chrysalis

4-7K wow your GM is generous. I would be lucky to get a couple K for most of my runs.

I've heard that before, though I was told it was a fire hose. *Shrug*

???

If you can start with $250k a year and make an average of $2k a run after expenses , and average two runs every three weeks, you're looking at $70k a year. After you include middle-class living expenses, this is not exactly a flashy lifestyle - and god forbid you're a rigger with his perpetual need for new vehicles ('cos the old ones went kablooey.)

The designs and configuration for an aftermarket car tuning company's Corvette upgrade represent easily a good $500,000 in R&D. You'd think that their competitors would pay $50,000 so that they could launch a slightly cheaper but identical product at exactly the same time.

It depends. A couple of K per person every week is alright. 7k per person per week is generous. Me? It depends on the Johnson. 10k per person for a high risk job that can be completed in 1 week is not unheard of, 1k for a weekend's bodyguard job has been done before.

start stealing and selling cars.
one car should more or less equal one run.

Quite. Even if you only get 500 for it, that's still 2 cars a night to be more profitable than most of your runs.

at a much lower risk.
and more opportunities too.

And thus we return to the "Stealing Americars" discussion.

Well Put...

Don't we have to update that to "Comet Boosting" these days?

Gotta admit it has a better ring to it...

Hey, I actually got all the other PCs involved in that now that I am playing. Of course, we're playing a group of street thugs and such forming a gang, so we don't really do normal runs. But we have been jacking the hell out of cars and bikes. And we're selling them all to a Mafia owned chopshop, which is taking the mobs cut before they pay us. Helps avoid problems don't cha know.

playing as a part of a street gamg IS a lot of fun...

Yep. And the dice pools all seem so... tiny. Hell, my muscle Ork (he's no sammy, but trying) has 8 dice not counting specialization or smartlink. I think the only guy throwing more than 12 dice in any area is the Adept and he throws 15 dice for piloting his bike. Ether we start the combat (with massive amounts of full auto fire) or we run like hell if it is started by the other guys. Feels way different from the group of Sammys and Adepts who slaughter hoards in a couple rounds.

The Mercury Comet is the Ford Americar, just the Luxury Package for having the Mercury Name. Like the Lincoln Spawlcar is the ultimate version of the line.

Well, that's what I called the Lincolns, anyhow, and my group likes that.

So far, my group has a Customized Jaguar that they boosted from the Mickey Mouse SWAT Team (No, I'm not joking. They had the ears on their helmets and everything.).

When I start that campaign up again, and finish it, I might try a lower-powered campaign where the group is all that's surviving from a Gang, and they have to return to their position of power the long, hard way. Where starting out with "Comet Boosting" and "Jaguar Jackin'" is what you do before breakfast, to get money FOR breakfast.

Put some "Punk" back into the game.

i find the biggest curb on looting is time.
Fencing is not a major issue with the absurd face in my group. Okay he's not exactly a pornomancer, but he's good enough to fence stuff reasonably fast. I do warn them that if they try to carry 4 or 5 longarms they'll begin to accrue penalties, not to mention the need to strip them of rfids and spyware in the smartgun...
Boosting cars is not as lucrative as all that. The market will dry up, law enforcement will crack down and you're still only making 500 nuyen split 5 ways per car.

But back to time... In a corp facility not only will everything be tagged, but the resources they can bring to bear should be able to destroy any running team, so in and out before that comes to pass should be the goal. Vs street gangs, not only are the gang unlikely to have much of value, but survivors may come back with friends and bigger guns, or better yet, said gang enjoys the patronage of a syndicate. Hence hanging about is not recommended.
An example from my game: the team had just knocked over a Vory organ legging operation, while they were loading the guards' guns, the organs and a dozen frozen embryos into their truck they came under rocket fire from Vory heavys and a bunch of their tame gangs. They still managed to make it out, but they didn't have time to strip everything, and the Vory are out for their blood.

Not as fast as you'd think. I live in the Auto Theft Capital of Canada. And just last month we celebrated something that hasn't happened in over a decade: "No cars reported stolen in 24-hours."

Of course, people have started to not even involve the Police, as they usually get back something that used to be their car, and was a Homeless Person's "Apartment" for awhile. After it got totally smashed up.


Skinny Pete: "If there's one thing I know, it's never to mess with mother nature, mother in-laws and, mother freaking Ukrainians." - The Italian Job (2003).

This is a prime example of why you should be careful in your looting ways.

Deja vu indeed.

- J.

If you want to curb looting, just pay your runners better. Then they won't have any incentive to steal petty junk from whoever they meet on a run.

Ditto... Though I still tend to dynamicallyreplace gear (for things that have broken or become useless on the run... ie. picking up a functional weapon to continue shooting) while the run is in progress... usually these items are then discarded as the run completes to avoid the unpleasantness of being tracked...

Yeah, picking up Weapons to shoot with is something else than picking them up to sell them.

Agreed... Used a last resort, when you have absolutely no other options available to you...

I was reading this and it sounded familiar and I had to laugh when I figured out why - AC/DC's TNT. Or was there actually someplace that used it as T&T?

On the original topic... Ways I have seen looting curbed involved hearing a ticking and, if that wasn't enough, finding a timer counting down with seconds left. Dropping the group in fluid, like an ocean, lake or or river, or even a deep pool of stuff in a sewer, or vats of liquid like beer, fat, oil, blood, etc.. The sound of sirens approaching.

I like the idea of positive and negative reinforcement where being quick and doing the job avoids conflict. I se too many GMs decide something attracts attention for a running firefight to escape in the nick of time. If something is always alerting security and the group is always getting into shoot outs, you are negatively reinforcing the positive actions you desire. How will the group see any difference between random conflicts and conflicts arising from taking too much time due to looting?

My infiltrator goes in with his hold out ad stick and shock and capsule rounds but fi it hits that fan he'll pick up a gun to use. There and then. Might sell it after might clean it up and maybe use it a few more times or might brake it down tag erase it and dump the parts in a river. He will loot stuff however but normally its the shiny stuff like prototypes and the flashy expensive guns and drones. He has an AI pc on his comlink to grab paydata as well and get round security. His looting is not just getting it all in a bag and running its much more selective. But if hes grab a few large prototype and trasport to get it out hot he might go for the small extras and corpses/unconscious guards. To sell to other corps, ghouls and the other infected or just for the wear. But only if he knows hell make it out safely. With the main goal done.

As it's refering to Trinitrotoluene, I'm willing to bet that AC/DC got it right and had it as TNT like it's supposed to be.

Which, by any other name, blows stuff up real good!

To a certain extent you have already made my point. Many cars are stolen for fun, joyrides and whathaveyou. The most commonly stolen cars, according to my brief research, are older more common cars, which makes a certain amount of sense. They're easier to find and easier to steal.

However, cars stolen to be sold on are typically the higher end cars, which automatically relegates them to a minority of all stolen cars. This again makes a lot of sense, since the work required to export and/or forge new documents is the same regardless of the type of car.

All of the above points to a relatively small market for stolen cars, although expensive parts of a car may be stolen, since they are easier to move, this is not the cause of the majority of vehicle crime, however.

It is naive to believe that a group of runners can make an indefinite living from selling stolen Mercury Comets, or even Comet parts. Supply will exceed demand, driving the price down, and you may even raise the ire of organised crime groups that object to the runners muscling in on their operation.

Technically, you create your own demand by stealing the parts in the first place.
let us say you steal half of a car . . the owner needs a new half of parts.
so he has to buy them somehwere. and that somewhere has to get them too.
there you step in. basically, you sell the parts back to the owner through a middleman.

That brings you closer to getting rumbled, since suppliers can be audited, and the part's history might be tracked. The overheads involved are not inconsiderable, so the profit margin is slim. Basically the reason car crime is not more lucrative than running is the same reason most people don't go through the trash to find old bottles and cans, and sell those to recycling firms.

There's no reason not to allow runners to loot some things, but point out the weight/profit value. And keep a tight hold on who they can sell stuff to, and for how much.

I don't think that simply paying more is the answer. There is a fine balance between nuyen accumulation and karma accumulation, so if you pay more, you need to increase karma awards. As the power level increases the type of game changes, which might not be your intention, thus shortening the duration of your campaign.

No. Wrong.

There are many many people out there (usually homeless & jobless) who make a living stealing cars. They're paid $500 per car, so they tend to steal six or seven a night. I don't know about you, but MY job doesn't pay me that much ($3000 a night), you could do that once a month and live very well ($36000 a year, or roughly equivalent to a full time, $18 an hour job).

Who do they sell to?

Chop shops.

It's far, far easier to wipe the history of a chopped part than it is to forge documents to a whole car. Oh, that's a bumper. Where'd you get it? Well, I am a mechanics shop, yes? Yes, but where'd the bumper come from. Oh, that one came off of one of my other customers, he was replacing his bumpers with some newer ones, you can see this one's kinda dinged up, but still usable. I see...and who was this customer? Oh, John Noname, here's his address. So John, your car got new bumpers? Yup. Like 'em?

Or you simply take the stolen cars and sell them in the Barrens (where the police won't bother looking for a handful of stolen cars) for a few hundred nuyen. Yes, there are plenty of people there that can afford them but don't want the hassle of a legal purchase a SINless might have to go through. Remember that a big part of SR is that lawless zones exist, so make them work for you.

Please refrain from flatly contradicting me without offering any indication of proof. I can point you towards the crimes statistics I looked up (albeit with little depth) if you so wish.

Do you know anyone that makes a living selling stolen cars to chop shops for parts? You say "many many", so let's assume 10. I can readily believe 60 cars are stolen a night, in a big city but I can't see all those going to chopshops. However, I also notice you refer to dollars, so you presumably come from the other side of the pond, where anything is obviously possible, but how much demand can there be for used car parts? When was the last time you bought second hand bumpers? How many bumpers is a small autoshop going to sell in a month? Over here the biggest cost of replacing anything in your car is the labour, the parts are practically a gratuity, especially in older cars, which my figures say are the most commonly stolen. Perhaps that's because the parts are all stolen.

I've not denied that there is a market for stolen cars, I just don't think it's as large as is being claimed, and this "if you don't pay the runners a gagillion nuyen, they're better off stealing cars" argument is tired and old and unsupportable.

@Happydaze: Plenty of rich folk live in the Barrens? Where did they get their money? Probably crime, so they can just as easily steal their own car. Even if you do find people prepared to pay 500 nuyen a car, you'll need to steal 10 cars (easy enough) and find 10 punters (not so easy, it's not like they're likely to be frequent repeat customers unless they drive like Mr Magoo) to earn enough money to pay your cushy mid level living costs. I think you're being pretty generous offering 500 a car too.

Nothing beats healthy paranoia.
Besides, it's sometimes better to loot gear and use it on runs, as opposed to your own, so that Lone Star will have a harder time matching bullets to guns to shooters.
And really, can a character have too many weapons stashed?

Not trying to start a typical dumpshock argument, but his facts are pretty straight. The going rate for a stolen ride no matter how expensive... even mercedes and lexus and the equivalent is about 500. Growing up with a lot of shady characters and being one my self for a while it's true. There is also a million dateline specials with under cover footage and snitches and professional car thiefs tell their stories. The tricky part comes in as just your average everyday hood is not going to be able to sell a stolen car. Depending what area your in there will be a form of organized crime that will be the only buyer and if you dont know who or where the ride is worthless. These groups have the access to locations, the tools, and the means to ship em out of the country.

OH, just found this too

http://www.gaa.qc.ca/en/car_theft/overview.asp

Automobile theft is a widespread phenomenon in industrialized countries. According to Interpol, 3 million vehicles are stolen in the world every year. Worldwide, the profits from the sale of stolen vehicles are somewhere in the order of US$19 billion.

The numbers I heard were from a radio story. Unfortunately it was long enough ago that I don't know if it was NPR, PRI, or a local show. Or what show. The host of the show spent a night with cops posing as a stolen car buyer (chop shop or whatever) in order to get faces of the people doing the stealing and the names of people they normally sell to (IIRC they weren't making arrests that night, as they were trying to find the buyers to bust them--no buyers, no thieves).

They were paying $500 a car, as that's what the thieves normally got and they'd see the same person several times a night (I'd say between 4 and 8 times). I don't recall of the same thieves showed up multiple nights in a row though.

and now we seem to be back at the car-boosting thread, rather than discussing how to stop rampant looting on the part of the players.
Although stealing vehicles is probably the easiest way of looting stuff possible, i have yet to have a player in my games who has even had it cross their minds for some reason. They only ever seem to want the shinier stuff that the corps keep around their facilities

Why do runners run?
Why do car thieves steal cars?
Why do you do that thing that you do?

I always wonder why I'm not the boss, apparently it's simple as deciding to just be that...

Interesting read ICPiK. I maintain that my point is valid, since that page does state that most thefts in Western Canada are opportunistic, that is for joyriding or some other non economic reason; which is pretty much what I have read about the situation local to me. I shouldn't be surprised if organised vehicle crime is more limited in the UK since there is less demand for right hand drive cars. Types of crime obviously vary by region.

To put that 3 million in perspective, there are apparently over 800 million cars on the road globally, and over 70 million new cars sold every year. I have no idea how much that's all worth, but I suspect it dwarfs $19billion. I guess this does make the global car market huge, and even a small chunk of that economy being illegal is still a pretty big economy. It is, however, distributed across the world, which spreads it prety thin. Furthermore, Interpol cite organised vehicle crime networks being responsible for chop shops and stolen to order cars. I don't think this is likely to change in SR's 207x timeline, so my other point about the Syndicates having a stranglehold on vehicle crime - and not wanting interlopers - holds true.

The car thief is being paid for the service of stealing the car, not for the value of the asset they stole. The asset value is being realized by the syndicate.

No it probably has changed much, but on the other hand, Fox might have finally picked up the Russian show, The Intercept.
(I'm still feverishly trying to get a hold of one episode).

Fair enough, but you might try being a little less intractable and confrontational when engaging in forum debate, it raises fewer hackles.

The Intercept? Dear lord, that's incredible!

@DireRadient: I wasn't aware that was in doubt. My argument is that car theft is not a viable alternative to running your players can adopt if they think you're not paying enough.