Moral of the story : Never make threat of violence to Shadowrunners. They get shot (and shot at) for a living. They are likely to respond to threats with overwhelming pre-emptive violence.

Their ability to do so is why they get paid in the first place.

Yep. On the other hand, launching a massive, preemptive assault on a group of Runners is a guaranteed way to get them out for your blood if they survive, which, being the paranoid individuals they are, is a statistically significant chance.

Really, it would be simpler to just tell them that they're operating in your territory, picking off marks from your gangs, but if they give you an appropriate cut of their take, it's all cool. That's how profitable business relationships can get started, and Shadowrunners are no strangers to paying reasonable amounts of protection money.

I really like the rule of thumb with johnsons car.

And you guys are dead on with how runners deal with threats of violence, in my opinion.

No, no, no. Completely wrong.

First of all, it's a mistake to think that the used car parts business is a way to get rich.

The police will get involved if a large number of vehicles go missing. Where would you be getting these cars, anyway? Eventually you'll make a mistake and that will be the end of it.

You could well be muscling in on mafia territory or worse, stealing from people who already pay protection money to a syndicate. The first thing that will happen is that chop shops will refuse to deal with you (not that they were paying you much anyway). Then the mob will figure out that you're too dangerous to negotiate with and have you killed. They are far more connected and have vastly greater resources than you. The best thing that could happen would be to manage to make a deal with them where they pay you ganger rates for street level crime.

True story! Cars are rather rare in a metroplex and it is far safer to risk an encounter with corp security, than to take the chance of local cops investigating.

So you'll be stealing cars from a public area in a metroplex? Good luck. How much money do you think you can earn doing that? How many cars will you be stealing this way?

Its not about getting rich (for that runners should invest into their own syndicate). Its about gamemaster who decide that the payment for runs is so low that It would be better to steal cars. Usually in the lower 4 digit nuyen range.

And yes, security and cops will look into large scale car heists - but usually other kind of crimes, lets say murder, extortion, kidnapping, large scale matrix terrorism, sabotage, usage of illegal heavy military weapons, combat cyberware, way to big explosives, illegal usages of combat spirits and mind rape spells, ID faking and murder (the daily bread and butter of runners around the world) tend to attract far more police/security/intelligence resources than car heists.

And how much? Well, if you go for the rules, its something around 20% from your trusted car fixer.

SYL

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/202...tneat02xml.html

This is just a bit disturbing, but not to surprising on some levels.

Maybe SedanRun™ is not so far fetched after all.

You don't even have to chop or sell it off to the fixer, some of these guys are selling back to the owner direct.

Now I have images of the team running out of a corp building just to find the rigger bound and gagged on the sidewalk with their ride gone.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing isn't it?

If you're thinking that you're going to teach the gamemaster a lesson, then there's nothing I can say.

I take the view that a corporation that gets hit by a shadowrun does not go running to an external law enforcement corporation. They don't want the negative publicity, to reveal flaws in their operational security, to encourage copycats, to endanger their share value, to inadvertently reveal what they know about the perpetrators or methods, and, most of all, to potentially expose their own dirty secrets as to why the run was carried out in the first place.

The metroplex on the other hand contracts out their law enforcement responsibilities. Lone Star/Knight Errant are eager to demonstrate that they perform a valuable public service, profiting from making arrests and getting convictions. Major property crime against the upper class wealthy enough to have cars is most certainly going to be investigated every time it happens. As opposed to doing runs against corps who won't share what they know with each other, you'll be dealing with a police force that's building a case against you over time.

Most cars have no availability rating, so by the rules the amount you can sell those for will be very small. You could focus on high-end vehicles, but expect those to be kept far more securely. Even then, they will be reported as stolen. You could run afoul of organized crime, and you may even be underestimating who you're stealing from. After a few thefts of a certain model car, the cops might even plant one for you as a decoy.

So if you're up for a game where rather than corp security and high threat response, you engage with innocent witnesses and the police, and all the public awareness and notoriety that would entail, then more power to you. Remember, that same cheapskate GM also controls how much money you can make doing this and how hard it is to pull off.

Actually I am only recommending to use certain houserules, as previously already described. Not quite sure what you mean with "teaching a lesson".



... of stealing cars? By a runner team who is apparently able to break in into high security corp facilities? Instead of murdering witnesses of illegal corp activities, blowing up factories full of workers to sabotage the release of a product, mass poisoning of metahumans to support a political claim from Humansis or kidnapping of children to blackmail the mother to swap the corp? Just to name some of the more nefarious activities runners are usually contracted. No, I do not believe that car stealing, done professionally, will in any way be more problematic, public or notorious than the usual runner activities, even grey runner activities.

If you really think that a car liberation is more problematic for a runner then the usual runner occupations which often can include multiple capital crimes, well, then there is nothing I can say and there shall be silence between us.

SYL

You mean that corrupt police force that you can bribe a small amount to pin the case on an undesirable?

I was talking about that.


You're conflating the magnitude of the deeds with who knows about it. If your characters engage in public bombing and being seen by many eyewitnesses, then yes, they should gain notoriety as per the rules.

Feel free to get the extra knowledge skills and contacts to pull it off, spend time planning good car theft, and be prepared to earn a lot less than you think you will. It depends on the GM, and she might not be thrilled at that point.

EDIT:

If you can do that to make them go away in your game, by all means do. I would argue that your return would already be small to begin with, but I really have no idea how much your characters can make stealing cars at your table.

There are different ways to see the Shadowrun underworld and especially runners.

Runners can be elite mercenaries, who could work for corps if they just bothered to fill in the paperwork and accepted to take orders, or they can be gutterpunks who happened to stumble on some cyber/deck or who turned out to be Awakened and hope they can use this edge to work their way out of the dump.

The Barrens can be like bad neighborhood in today's American cities, or they can be like favelas or slums in poorer countries.

If you consider that runners are gutterpunk who live in a place where unless you're a gang leader or mafia boss you're no better than a slave, and that there are many runner wannabes and few jobs, then you can pay runners a few thousand nuyens to risk their lives. Because it's either that, be a slave. Any attempt to change the status quo will end with them chopped off for replacement parts. It's completely unfair, but it's the sad reality in that depressing world.
It's not for everyone, but it's still a possible setting that can make sense even if there are cars and talismonger shops.

Per the Rules as they are Written (for SR4, mind you, I wouldn't touch SR5 with a 3.048m pole,) the base fencing price of anything is 30% of its retail value. Finding someone to take it off your hands is an Extended test, threshold (Negotiation + Charisma) 10, with a 6 hour interval. If the party has any Face worth the name, they can nail that in one shot, and the Face can probably rush their work, too.

Or, you know, they could just hand it off to your Face, he'll probably take it off your hands for 15-20% of its retail value.

Now, let's look at an example, shall we?

Let's take the humble Rover 2068. It has a price-tag high enough to be worth going after it over going after other things, it's also going to be cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for there to be a big market for, ahem, aftermarket aquisitions. It has a Pilot rating of 2 - that means it has a System rating of 2. Whatever IC it's going to be loaded with is going to have a rating of 2, which means that the highest dice pool it's going to be able to muster is 4.

If your team's hacker can't rip through a dice pool of 4, I don't even know what you're doing playing Shadowrun. So, basically, your team's hacker is going to take command of the car without any trouble. From there, they're going to use their admin powers to lock out the legitimate owner, and direct the Rover to pilot itself to a chop shop in the Barrens, possibly stopping by where your team are camped so you can go through it and see if the owner left any property inside worth looting.

The Rover 2068 retails for 25,000 and it's going to be absolutely trivial to take control of it by hacking. Its standard fence price is 7,500 which is, I want you to note, 3/4ths of the total Johnson award for On the Run, a mission which is going to lead the players into conflict with two teams of corporate security men, Devil Rats, gangers, a team of Shadowrunners, and fucking Vampires, is likely to take them about three to four day to complete, and will make them at least one enemy no matter what they do, and probably two.

So if the group, instead, told Darius St. Johnson to stick his idea of "generosity" up his ass, left Club Infinity, and jacked a Rover 2068 out of the parking garage, they'd have made 3/4ths of what Mr. Johnson was "authorized" to offer, for approximately one hour's work and 1% of the risk of taking his job.

If they instead jack two Rovers 2068, either both in one night or on sequential nights, they'll have pulled down 15,000 which is exactly what they'd get from Darius St. George if they not only retrieved the disk for him, but kept copies out of everyone else's hands.

If they jack three Rover 2068s three nights in a row, they'll have earned 22,500 which is more than they'll get from Darius St. George, but not more than they'll get from Risa - her offer was twice what Darius St. George offered, plus five thousand each. Assuming a team of 4 Runners, that's 40,000 but it also comes with the reputation of being someone who sold out Mr. Johnson.

Or, you can get 45,000 nuyen by jacking six Rovers 2068. With a Face who can mutli-task her search for a fence, a dedicated hacker, and the group goons to guard the Rovers on their way to whatever abandoned location in the Barrens you're using to accumulate the Rovers (and search them in) before you ship them to the chop shops, you can do that in the span of one busy night, or by jacking two Rovers a week and taking a week off. That should pay the rent, easily, even if everybody's holding down a Middle lifestyle.

Now, I'll point out that the Rover 2068? Totally not even the best vehicle to do this with, but probably the best one from a standpoint of the GM having the hardest time saying "practicality" to fuck you, because it is, as I mentioned, a high-end consumer SUV. A Nordkapp Zugmaschine with trailer has no better a Pilot rating than a Rover 2068, and has a retail value of 110,000 before you consider the value of the cargo itself. On the other hand, the kind of people who operate tractor trailers probably have overwatch hackers, so you might have an actual matrix battle on your hands to get that. But that's okay, the Ford-Canada Buffalo, a big RV, clocks in at 55,000 and has no greater Pilot. And the GMC Hermes - a delivery van, of which there should be approximately no shortage in Seattle, clocks in at 45,000 again before cargo value is taken into consideration. The Ares Roadmaster is 48,000 too.

And this isn't even getting into specialist vehicles. A Lone Star modified Honda 3240 police interceptor has a Pilot rating of 2, and a cost of 107,500 and a DocWagon SRT has a cost of 65,000 plus the substantial value of the medical supplies inside.

But yeah, those are gonna be problematic. Police interceptors don't generally leave the police yard without a rigger inside, and while ambulances are somewhat less guarded, it's only somewhat. Either way, you'd be picking a fight with an organization.

So don't do that. Point out the ridiculous money you can make stealing RVs and delivery vans, and the reliable and decent money you can make selling SUVs. For practically no risk and little chance the cops are even going to bother investigating, let alone actually set out a bait car for you.

Then ask yourselves, ask your GM, and most of all, ask Mr. Johnson, why, exactly, you should take him up on his exciting offer to risk perforation and commit dozens of capital crimes and probably hundreds of felonies and thousands of misdemeanors. After all, his entire purpose being here is to financially incentivize you to do those things, take those risks. If he's unwilling, or unable, to provide a sufficient incentive that you want to go and risk and life, when compared to the nearly zero risk and steady income of only a few grand thefts auto a month, or the equavilent of one busy night's work for a team of Shadowrunners, then he's wasting his time and yours, and you are not fellows who are keen to have your time wasted.

God this reminds me of the stories of raids on ambulances to get DMSO, in the Squirt Gun Wars.

I wish I would have been around when that was a thing.

But surely, if it's just so damn easy to steal all these cars and sell them on as easy as you would pawn your TV, why isn't every shadowrunner doing just this instead of runs?

because A)
lots of Players don't have the Guts to say no to their GM (Im talking Players and GM here , not Runners and Johnson)
B ) some of the Players don't know that they can choose not to accept their GMs offer
C) some GMS take it as a personal Insult If the Players don't go on "His Run"
D) some Players don't think that it may be easy to steal a Car because they don't know the rules
E) some Player think they have to stick to the official Runs because they don't know better
F ) the official Guideline for Runners Fees is quite low (Foodfight 5.0 offers 500 ¥ to rescue a Kidnapped Girl from the Mafia and another 500 If they "finish them Off once and for all" and if thats the official Line than it's no wonder some of the GMs get miserly ) so some Players think that its a Default Line for their Chars to have only small Money
G ) some GMs think that its quite ok to keep the Chars empty pockets and that its "Evil" if the Chars earn quite some Money. They simply don't know any better.
H) not every Char or Runner Group is skilled enough nor has the Connections for such a Heist.
Stealing & selling one maybe two Cars per Month is OK (specially in a Metroplex with 5 Million like Seattle)
but fencing more than that needs a dedicated Fixer/Fence or maybe a whole Group/Organisation.
It may be of Help if one of the Chars is a Made Man or has such a group Connection


with an alphabet Dance
Medicineman

Agree with most of MM's points there, but I said it earlier.

driving a fuel delivery tanker is profitable ... why is everyone not doing it ?
done enough times, street muggings for gold watches and creds is profitable .. why is everyone not doing it ?
being a CEO of a AAA corp is profitable, why is everyone not doing it ?

a) it's a game ... simulationist sometimes, but still a game ... I do not enjoy PnP GTA for the rest of my gaming career
b) it's repetitive as hell, why would criminals get themselves what amounts to a "Day Job" ? that's usually entirely the opposite of what being a criminal / Runner Is all about
c) take it from a Runner perspective "In Character" you'd just burn the fixer that keeps offering you rubbish paying jobs ... probably with fire

The way that car theft seems to be discussed here seems to go right for the extremes with no real thought for the external factors that 'runners don't control. Posters either comment that nicking cars and selling them is as easily done as Grand Theft Auto 1 (jump inside, drive into a chop shop, ???, profit) or that as soon as someone sets a greasy paw on a hot car 3 SWAT vans tip up and even after running firefights to get the car to your fence, once you do they either pay you buttons or you get kneecapped for not asking permission from the local mob to steal a car.

In my opinion stealing cars shouldn't be so easy to do. In a high surveillance world (which from all accounts SR4 is) tracking a stolen car by law enforcement should be trivial unless all the angles are covered by the thieves. Dispatch a squad car or a few drones once located and it should be case closed, never mind the fact whatever fixer your selling to is going to get a bit pissed off with you delivering six used Honda Civics every week and expecting 30% of the sale price each and every time. So, nicking sedans for profit I don't see as feasible. Putting together a crew to take down a high performance/high cost vehicle I can see attracting shadowrunners looking for profit. But that of course increases the risks and a GM can easily tailor that kind of idea into an actual on the fly shadowrun.

Back to the main topic, Shadowrun payment should be based on several factors; Value of target, resources of Johnson, risk, opposing forces/opposing forces the runners know about, downpayments and expenses, etc etc. Thinking about it these same factors also come into play in car heists; the better the target the better the payoff.

Also not all runs are paid for, sometimes runners are just forced into situations where they have to make the best of what's before them. And in all my years GMing shadowrun I've not come across one team that doesn't loot as much as they can in runs to "enhance" their paypacket.

Seriously, that's how the decking/rigging rules interface right now. It's that easy. Cars are Devices, which in SR5 parlance means they're online by default. Control order is Rigger > Remote > Manual > Autopilot (SR5 P265) and a lower or equal state of control cannot usurp a higher one until the turn after the higher level of control stops controlling the vehicle. So unless the parked car's got a rigger hot-seating it, it's Hack on the Fly vs [Intuition + Firewall]. Since Pilot programs use their rating for all mental attributes and Matrix attributes, a Pilot 2 car has 4 dice to resist.

A monkey with a Speak And Spell can out-hack that. 3 marks and it's yours, issue Control Device actions all day to do whatever with it, or just order it to shut down and put it on a tow truck.

Well, per 4th Edition rules and onward, the car is hack-able. If no alarm is caused while hacking, the authorities will not know that the car has been stolen at all,
save for the case of the owner noticing it right away.
Also per 4th Edition rules, you can do that from across the street, without getting near the car at all.
It should not be this easy, but it is. Tough.

The point about the Fixer I do not get. Why assume the runners want the pay on delivery? A deal can be struck. Different models can be stolen. Stealing specific models on-demand can be done.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the stealing i.e. the taking of the car from it's owner is that easy, even in SR3 (the edition I play) it's easy to boost bog standard cars. But once you have it getting it to where it's being sold and actually selling it, and then repeating the whole shebang should be the difficult part.

IRL now stealing cars is easy (allegedly *coughs*), making a living from stealing cars; now there's the trick.

But once the owner has noticed it missing, it's reported and then surveillance world comes into play.



Different models, same "class" of car. I mentioned the Honda Civic as it used to be a fairly ubiquitous model and is also mentioned in Gone in 60 Seconds if any other film buffs caught the reference

Great idea everyone.

A few extra skills could make things easier. Like knowledge skills about organized crime, street gangs, chop shops, police procedures, automotive anti-theft systems, automobile tracking by the manufacturer, used vehicle part prices, etc. Also, having team members that can use rigging, hacking, magic, infiltration, electronic warfare (for faking out anti-theft that relies upon the car being able to communicate wirelessly, e.g. if you drive it into a Faraday cage the system automatically starts working, trying to contact the driver, geolocating the vehicle, a friendly message to local cops about a possible theft, etc.), legwork on the cars and their owners before you steal them, negotiation, etc can make things work more professionally.

But still expect a disappointing payday. Since you'd be going to a chop shop, the amount of your offers should be based on the car parts they can salvage, not the entire, new, not registered as stolen rulebook value for a vehicle. Since there aren't list prices for scrap materials, the GM needs to determine that amount, but they are certainly nowhere near that of a luxury car.

I don't have 4th ed in front of me, but I remember the value being less if the market is flooded or if the goods are reported stolen. And expect that mistakes will get you pinched by the police, and that organized crime will be increasingly unhappy with what you're doing if you turn it into an operation. The parts are worthless if nobody is willing to deal with you.

And if any group told me they were just going on hiatus to do this for a few years to save up for all the best gear before actually going on real runs as a shortcut to unlimited starting resources, I'd just find different people to play with.

One final question, does the Sammy get an equal cut, even if she has virtually nothing to offer the the scheme, except for possibly someday fighting off the police or the mob when they come calling?

Surveillance:

Lone Star/Knight Errant don't give one flying fuck about John Q. Public's stolen sedan/SUV. If they happen to catch some idiot trying to hotwire it like it's 1972 instead of 2072, they'll be glad to slap the bracelets on, but if John Q. Public wakes up in the morning to discover his ride has driven off without him, they're going to give him lip service at best.

Even if, I dunno, John Q. Public reports the theft in person, having brought a couple of boxes of fresh deep-fried donuts and the best non-soy coffee he could get his hands on to the station, all their now-actually-motivated investigation is going to find is camera footage of an empty SUV turning itself on, driving out of wherever it was parked, and they'll follow it with cameras until it drives to the edge of the camera coverage, which will be somewhere in Redmond or Puyallup barrens. At that point, all they can do is commiserate with John Q. Public about his loss and provide a police report for his insurance company stating that, in all likelihood, his car has been chopped.

And even if they catch the Rover in progress, guess what?

Your man isn't in the car. He's not even anywhere fucking near the damn thing. That's the beauty of car theft in the 2070s, especially in SR4. Even if Lone Star catches it while it's still in territory they actually patroll, and care to give a damn, all your hacker has to do is wipe her Matrix tracks from the Rover's autopilot and let it shut down peacefully.

Let's say you decide to boost a Rover from the vicinity of Sea-Tac, because hey, long-term car storage is still a thing. It gets on the 509, down through Tacoma on 99, merging onto 161, heading south into Puyallup. Your physical security guys are waiting for it somewhere near enough to the Crime Mall, which is way the hell into "Cops don't go here" territory.

But your hacker/possibly rigger, the one who's remotely controlling it? She's in fucking Snohomish, sitting in a car. She never laid her own physical eyes on the Rover. Thanks to the wireless Matrix, she bounced her Matrix presence to the Snohomish RTG transmitter, down to Downtown, down further in to Sea-Tac, and from there she found the carparks and started sniffing around until she found an SUV she liked. She hacked in easily, checked its access lkogs to find out that it'd been left out of contact for a while (days, weeks,) and gave it new orders to power up and depart.

They'll never track her down. They'll never have the Matrix logs to find her, and she's mobile. Even in the event everything goes monumentally pear-shaped, she can beat it into the Redmond Barrens and nobody'll catch her.

And the Rover? IF they want to put real effort into it, they'll send a drone with a high transmitter rating, or seed the spotty parts of the barrens with transmitters, to stay in contact with the car. If not, they'll just give it orders as regards where to go: if gangers waylay it, no skin off their nose, they'll just try again with another Rover. Hell, they might just preemptively send several by several different routes and only worry about the ones that actually arrive. But once it's in Puyallups, or Redmond, it's off Lone Star/Knight Errant's radar. They're not going in there to save your damn car, even if you have a drone following the damn thing and a live feed. They're sure as hell not going in there to chase old evidence.







G) Seriously? Fucking seriously? A thousand nuyen to piss off the fucking mob?
I'd laugh in the face of whoever gave me that offer. That or do it gratis, if I decide it's a job that needs doing no matter that payment. But 500 nuyen wouldn't motivate any of my characters to get out of bed, let alone hear Mr. Johnson out. That's barely enough to consider an AR/VR meet with the job of "annoy someone a lot," you know, a meeting I could attend whilst still in bed.
H) If you don't have the skills or the connections to boost random SUVs and get it to them that will convert it into for you, you don't have the skills to do jack shit, and should maybe consider career opportunities behind the counter of a Stuffer Shack or McHughs.


Seriously, though, the point of pointing out how easy it is to bring home the bread and bacon by boosting SUVs isn't to say that your teams should all just boost SUVs. It's to point out the absurdity of the ridiculously low prices people are asking you to take in exchange for breaking into secured corporate facillities, pissing off the mafia, tangling with Vampires, etc.

And maybe, just maybe? You should actually pull the trigger on it. Next time your GM has Mr. Johnson give you a stupidly low price, like 10,000 for anything that's likely to take more than the rest of the (in-character night) to finish or is going to involve a physical altercation with any enemies armed with more dangerous weapons than light pistols, just walk away and boost two or three Rover 2068s, fence them off, divide the cash, and go back to your safehouses. Hopefully, the GM will get the hint and up the reward on the next run he offers.

no ,You should really play it
one of the Staff of McHughs (where You can find the Head Honcho )has a 50.000 ¥ Deck . Thats big Booty

when I played it, my myst Adept kicked the Guy in the Face, took the Deck and sold it later for a Rating 5 Fake SIN complete with Licenses (Big Win for a first Run)

but I like the Food Fight 4.0 much much better

HokaHey
Medicineman

Because most Johnsons (ingame) and most GMs (offgame) pay better. I know, its too easy sometimes.

SYL

In theorey? Yes of course. But then again everything what a runner usually do on runs is far more complicated and dangerous than car jacking.
In "reality" (as in "ingame reality")? Well, there is the human factor, incompetent, greedy, old tech from the cheapest bidder, working only what the internal rules allow, etc.

And of course the other crimes. Runners are only one the many criminals in the sprawl. In the same minute where you jack a For America, Eurocar Westwind or Range Rover, several bombings, murders, rapes, terrorist attacks, violent demonstrations, corp alerts, go-gangers on the higway and widespread matrix attacks are happening. Dispatch will have to choose which one to follow up: the stolen car from an unimportant wage slave or a potential kidnapping of a SIN-child.

SYL

Exactly. But it would have been nice if the baseline info for newer players who stick closer to the book had been a bit more generous.



You used Chester the E-Chimp too?

I admit I was a bit put out at first when the fixer set us up with him for this one job down LA way, but he does surprisingly solid work.

The R&D division worked really diligently on that particular piece of programming, and were understandably proud of it. I passed out a small bonus to the Department management for bringing it in on time and well under budget. Interestingly enough, it is one of the best selling items in our catalogue.

On this level, it is kind of a GM issue. The game is supposed to be about shadowrunning, so shadowrunning needs to be profitable. It's no different than D&D or WOW: if you can get more gold by grinding, people will just sit around and grind.

With that in mind, though: most people just accept what the setting tells them is correct, so if the setting is poorly done, they won't understand why the economics don't work out.

Yes, the cops care about car theft because the corps they work for are paid money to care. They are formidable and can hire great people too. But regardless, it's not much money anyway, just wasted game time.

The part that makes me most amused is that boosting cars like this is given as one of the reasons go-gangs can afford to run their criminal enterprises without the usual means of gangland funding that require controlling a neighborhood. Even the setting itself admits this sort of thing is a profitable criminal enterprise that doesn't require top shelf talent.

Wow. That's, just... Wow.

That's pretty much codifying one of the problems with running the setting - runs paying out such hilarious pocket change that the reward from Mr. Johnson is basically superflous with what a dedicated team can get from looting the places they hit.

When I ran On the Run, I jacked Darius St. George's reward up by 10,000 and even then everybody agreed he was kind of lowballing them, but for a lightweight run (which they were expecting) it was acceptable. They still wound up going out of their way to try to get more.




They "care" in the sense that they're going to put the bare minimum of effort required to determine that in all probability John Q. Public's car is gone, and then tell him to pound sand. Once they track its transponder to the edge of the Barrens, that's it, pack it in and file an insurance claim, that fucker's chopped.

With the kind of money it would take to investigate and recover a stolen vehicle that's been vanished into the Barrens - if it's still extant as a discrete car, and not a pile of parts in a junkyard - you could just buy a new one.

And Lone Star/Knight Errant sure as hell aren't going to mobilize an armored column of Citymasters to go into the Barrens, roll up on a criminal car shop, and recover your damn Rover 2068.


Now, if things are different - say, if your Rover was stolen by your jealous ex-wife whose passcodes to the car you foolishly forgot to revoke - and she drove it from your place to her place and is sitting petulantly on it, they'll go after it. Because that's an easy collar and it looks good in their statistics.

'I'm a Runner, not a thief! Well, I steal stuff occasionally, but I do not steal it for myself, I only do it for the money....
Aw god-damnit, I am a thief, aren't I? Drek!'

Brad the Voice - Shadowrunner

Well that's just silly, of course they care. They're paid to care, if they stopped caring they'd swiftly get done for breach of contract and it'd be up for the next police-company to give a flying fuck. Now of course there are degrees to all this and all kinds of permutations but to say that the cops wouldn't even take ten minutes to bring up some feeds or check basic surveillance drones when a car is stolen, then take action if that car is found is ludicrous. Lone Star/Knight Errant aren't a town sherriff with 2 horses and a couple of deputies available to police crime.



Then the runners wouldn't get paid would they? And even though supposedly it didn't take much effort it would still be wasted effort and back to square one.



Now you're in the realms of hacking into a facility to steal this car. Job's getting more complex.....



And again, no sale, no payoff. All kinds of factors you're mentioning here are suddenly complicating this easy car theft and quick sale.



Why stop there? Why not stomp your foot down and demand 100,000 , a million? It's the GM's responsiblility to create the balance they want in their game. If the player's aren't happy and take the game sideways for example going to steal cars, that's up to them. But then it's also the GM's responsibility to bring that back into line.



In WoW the questgivers (Johnson's) start by offering you a couple of silver to go and risk life and limb in their quests (runs). The payment increases as the level increases.

People are reading far too much in to the references and guidelines for payments. It's up to the GM to create the balance they want for their game, not the players to demand what they want from the GM.

They're not going to jump at the camera feeds to find John Q. Public's stolen car. We have seen, in this thread, evidence of the police today who won't lift so much as a finger even when you literally have the thieves in your sights.

And why? Because frankly, car theft is only something they're going to pursue if it's a gimmie case (like the ex-wife) or it's a really slow week. Because it takes the time and attention of at least one Matrix specialist to track J.Q. Public's Rover SUV from where it turned itself on, to where they're inevitably going to lose sight of it when it enters the Barrens.

It's a case they have practically zero chance of resolving by reuniting man and car, so at that point, all they're doing is trying to punish criminals, who are, at the very least, savvy enough to have left precisely zero traces of themselves anywhere that the camera records will show.

Meanwhile, in the same night, they've racked up five missing kids, ten kidnappings, twenty arsons, fifty murders, a hundred and eight assaults with a deadly, sixty rapes, two bombings and a partridge in a pear tree.

And like, a hundred other stolen cars.

So, sure, they could send an armored convoy into the Barrens to shake down the chop shops until they find the one chop shop with that one guy's vehicle parts in it, and then shake the inhabitants until they squeal on the guys who sold it to them...

Or they could, you know, have those people searching for missing/kidnapped people, investigating arson, murder, rape, assault, and bombs. All of which are rather more serious crimes than Joe Q. Public's missing Rover 2068.




Plenty of SUVs in the city, cops can't watch 'em all. That's the whole point - it's easy money, practically zero risk.



Parking garages are not going to have a significant barrier to "open up and let me out," and that's assuming the owner of the car didn't leave the "I've been ordered by my master to return to him, open up" codes in the vehicle's memory. Which he probably did, because when he gets back from his trip, he's not going to want to hoof it into a parking garage, he's going to want to send a signal from the terminal as soon as he clears customs and have his car waiting for him at the gate to take him home.

And that was just an example. Lots of parking garages downtown; lots of cars in street-level personal garages or even street-level curbside parking in Snohomish, or what-have-you.



And yet all of them are much, much less complicated than all the shit a group would have to go through to complete On the Run successfully and in Mr. Johnson's favor, and you only have to pull home two Rovers 2068 to pull down exactly as much as Darius St. George will pay for a job completely perfectly done. And nobody's going to shoot at you.



Both of those are perfectly reasonable sums of money to demand for some of the absolutely insane shit Mr. Johnsons will ask you to do, especially split four, five, or six ways, and double-especially if anybody's cars or drones get wrecked on the run.



Yeah, see, you completely lost all my respect when you compared Shadowrun to World of Warcraft.

For one thing, WoW has something Shadowrun does not, that being that if you actually do beef it in WoW, worst-case you come back minus a trivial sum of money and with a temporary debuff that makes it harder for you to fight for a half hour or so.



No, we're really not. Official Shadowrun sourcebooks have always had a bad, bad habit of hilariously lowballing the amounts of money that should be paid, and unfortunately, a new GM's first exposure to what's a reasonable sum of money to risk life and limb and incarceration is going to be the official guidelines, which are uniformly awful.

And frankly, it is not up to the GM to decide "the balance they want for their game". That implies possession; the game is everybody's. If the players are unhappy because they feel the rewards for the jobs they're doing are insufficient, they have a right to be unhappy, upset, or angry. Trying to correct this measure IC instead of OOC is one good way to bring it to the GM's attention. It's a particularly striking example if they walk away from Mr. Johnson's negotiating table, call their Fixer and tell him the next guy better not be wasting their time with exciting opportunities to get shot for beer money, spend the IC night boosting cars and hocking them to chop shops until they've cleared what Mr. Johnson was offering, and then tell the GM, OOCly, that they're dissatisfied with the monetary rewards and would like him to correct that in the future.

Or, you know, they could do what some players do, and LOOT EVERYTHING. Most GMs get the hint around the time a player cultivates a Tanamous contract to sell the corpses to.

The fact is if you are going to infiltrate a corp building then don't steal the paydata for Mr J steal the bloody helicopter.

That's a very good point. My interpretation is that these gangs have an interest in not having you as a competitor and would take steps against you.


The police will try to find out who is behind a string of auto thefts. Cracking big cases looks great on the news and helps to ensure that their contract is renewed. It helps the individual investigators by getting them noticed by upper management and on track for promotion. The case isn't closed as soon as the car crosses some boundary line. It's not all about recovering one car, even if the owner is rich and influential.

Your remark about mobilizing "an armored column of Citymasters to go into the Barrens" gave me an idea; I wonder how well your driverless car is going to fair. Stealing a Citymaster though, now that would be something...

They're not paid to care. They're a corporation, they're paid to make money, and providing law enforcement is just one way on paper they do so.

And as linked earlier, there's real world police departments, right now, who won't lift a finger even if you used the GPS to track down your stolen property. So it's not even unrealistic.

No, what law enforcement is going to be busy with is things like parking tickets (steady income stream) and big-profile captures. Those things will make them money, or give them good free PR. Everyday crime is expensive to solve, and has a lower profit margin.


Yes, it is up to the GM to communicate their expectations, so everyone's on the same page. However, if the fluff is bad-- runners are paid unreasonably low-- then problems will crop up. This is especially bad if grinding is more profitable.


Yeah, and there's a huge subset of WoW players who don't ever take the quests, they just spend every day grinding and selling stuff at the markets. Which is fine for a computer game, but a RPG is a social/group endeavor-- if one person refuses to take the adventure and go off to make stuff, everyone else's fun is affected.,

I think you have a very different idea of the role of the GM at the table than I do. If my players are against something I'm doing to the point of outright rebellion, I am failing as a GM, as my one job is to run the game in such a fashion that everyone's having fun.

The numbers you posted are wrong in my opinion. They are scrapping cars. You get only a fraction of that. That's assuming they'll even do business with someone they've never heard of. Someone in the crew should have the right contacts.

While many of the arguments have gone in a round about manner on this, and yes we all have focused a bit much just on cars, but the point remains that as the way it is written in game you could be running for unreasonable periods of time before earning enough to really get upgrades/new toys unless your party adds looting bodies/scavenging gear to their repertoire.
Which in itself causes a whole slew of complications and then you think if we are just robbing bodies, why not just go stealing wholesale? We are not actually saying we should all go carjacking, but rather pointing out the discrepancy in payouts.

Now an experienced GM will feel comfortable tweaking things to fit the campaign, but a new guy sitting behind the screen is leaning heavily on the book's input to start with, for good or bad.
You yourself admitted payout should rely on a number of factors, so we are in agreement that payout could use a tweak and just want something that could reflect this better for other player to use as a baseline when they are trying to determine what a run is worth.

Yes, that is the reason, why druids, warrios and mages (runners) band in a 5er groups and raid (runner crew) to clear small instances (evil corp subsidaries) and raids bosses (big evil corporatoins HQs) to loot epic items of them for the real upgrades (stealing cars or other valuable hardware). If the Johnson does not pay well. ,-)

SYL

Let's say everyone does it. The stolen car market gets a huge supply, while the demand will probably stays the same. Prices go down. People stop doing it if they can find better paying stuff (like stealing TVs).

Now let's say that you're in a situation where people in the Barrens are literally starving (which is the case according to some sourcebooks/GM) and that they are exploited either by SINners (working as very cheap illegal workforce) or SINlesses (workers in sweatshops, prostitutes, or people whose business is heavily taxed by the local gang/mafia). In that case, the very low pay for stolen cars is still good enough, and it will stay that way. The only limit is a price so low that people would rather die of starvation than sell stolen cars.

If you're in a situation where people in the Barrens can get a decent pay one way or another (which is the case according to other sourcebooks/GM), the price will finally find a sweet-spot, which will be the lowest price anyone is willing to work for (since, with our assumptions, car stealing is the default job that anybody can do).

So in any case, in that situation, car stealing will be not very profitable compared to other jobs, such as shadowrunning. The difference is what the base price will be. In the first case, Shadowrunning will be better if it pays more than what you need to survive while in the second it will need to be more rewarding than that.

This being said, there can also be other cases:

- Raising the demand. Car-stealing alone won't raise the demand above the supply, unless the other car supplies cease to exist (car manufacturers stop building cars). Unless there's some kind of huge paradigm shift (or if the hordes of car-stealers destroy all car making factories, or create a mega-virus to wreck the computers of car making factories, or get together to pass a law forbidding the making of new cars in order to support the jobs in the car-stealing industry that now outnumber those in the car making industry) this is very unlikely.

- Limiting the supply:
First solution: car-stealing becomes harder, reducing the number of car-stealers. Prices go up. We'll assume that Shadowrunning needs more skill than car-stealing. In that case, Shadowrunning needs to offer more than car-stealing to stay relevant.
Second solution: a competitor in the market gets an edge over the competition, driving them out of business. Since we consider that anyone can steal and sell car and that price are, as a result, as low as they could be, this means that either this person is stealing ALL THE CARS or that he's keeping competitors at bay with another solution, which probably involves keeping them under the bay, with cement shoes (or any similar solution, such as intimidation).

In a criminal setting, there's no limit to what one can do against the competition, as long as it's profitable enough. Violence (or the threat of violence) is often the most efficient solution. And once you've started, the only reason to stop is if you're up against bigger than you. Soon enough, there will be a handful of actors big enough to stand against one another. Just like in any other oligopoly, total competition will soon become a bad idea for them: they'll be better off sharing the market than spending all of their resources and risking what they have to get what's left. So they'll negotiate to share the market... and get rid of all competition that could endanger their activity.

This will, pretty much, always happen, especially in a criminal setting where there are no laws to limit competition. So the first solution becomes irrelevant in regard to the second: no matter how hard to do something is, there will be an oligopoly (or monopoly) dominating the market. Since there are nothing to prevent these top actors to invest in all possible fields, the biggest ones will soon control mostly everything as long as it's profitable. That's why you will have criminal syndicate dominating every criminal businesses except possibly for some niche where other actors are already there and too costly to overthrow (for example Tamanous in the organ-legging business).

It doesn't mean it's impossible for Shadowrunners to enter the dominated market. It means that they'll have to fight their way up there. If the market they want to get control of is of low value, they won't get much of a fight (the monopoly/oligopoly won't spend more to protect the market than what they can get out of it). So Shadowrunning needs to be more profitable than fighting to get access to the less profitable markets. That's when a weird mechanism comes into play.

Let's say that a group of people want to seize a market (or a the part of a market) from a criminal syndicate. Let's say that this market or part of the market is worth x nuyens. As long as the criminal syndicate spend x-1 nuyens to defend it, it's worth it for them. To defend against that group, the syndicate will need to oppose a stronger group (be it a bigger group or a better group). To make it simple, to defend against runners, you'll send slightly better runners. So slightly better runners will be paid up to x-1 nuyen to protect the market. In order for the runners to be able to get access to a market, they need to find a market where x-1 doesn't get you a team of runner better than them.

Let's consider, for a better illustration, three markets: one is worth x, the other x+1 and the third x-1. They are protected by runners paid "value-1" nuyens. We assume that the price of runners is directly correlated with their level. The runners protecting the x nuyens market (for x-1 nuyens) are of level A. We consider another team of runner of level A. They can only safely attack the x-1 market, defended by runners paid (x-1)-1=x-2, which means that they're of level A-1. So they have the choice between seizing the x-1 market (worth x-1 nuyens) or get paid x-1 nuyens to defend the x market.

So in the end, the price of a job for runners will be the price of the market they can seize (which will be the price they'll get paid for a job). A group of runners trying to get into the car stealing business will be able to make as much money as they'd make taking regular jobs.

What does that mean? If the runners start stealing cars, they'll soon run into the main competitor. They'll be able to fight or negotiate with it for a part of the business that will bring them more or less exactly what they'd get with shadowruns.

But what is that amount? That's dictated by the market. If there are runner teams that are willing to fight slightly worse runners for 500 nuyens, then it will be 500 nuyens. If no runners will get out of bed for less than 5 million nuyens, then it will be 5 million nuyens.

And then we're back to demand and supply and other opportunities. If there are few runners and high demand, they can cost a lot. If there are many runners and few demands, then it depends on what the runners can do outside of running the shadows. If they can get well-paid jobs for corporations, many runners will move to corporate jobs, the number of actual runners will go down and price will go up and stabilize around the price of the corporate job they can get. If they can't get jobs in the SINner world (because of some factors of your game world) and if SINners are more or less slaves to a small criminal elite the runners can't be a part of, then prices will be the lowest price a runner can accept before they spend more in bullets, healing and squatter lifestyle than what they get.

So once again: price of cars don't matter, game universe does.

To follow on they will take Mr J's quests for legendary rewards (deltaware move by wire 3).

Spikes, Troll Ganger turned Shadowrunner, gets 500 Nuyen per body on delivery.
Not a bad deal, really. Streets in certain areas of the city are looking rather nice these days.

That's definately the case and this thread does seem to have gone off track in discussing the merits and pitfalls of the Shadowcarthiefrunner. Personally I think some kind of chart system with baselines for the jobs and then multipliers and additions a GM can add based on XY factors would be the best to guide rookie GMs (and players) in suggested payouts.

But for me personally, letting players decide how much they want to be paid for jobs is a definate no-no unless they're absolutely top-dollar runners with unmatchable skillsets.



Not that I'm really craving for your respect or anything but I wasn't the one that compared WoW to Shadowrun, I was responding to someone else who did. The point I was trying to make is you can't compare them as they're totally different genres and gametypes. It'd be like comparing Monopoly to Scrabble simply because they're boardgames.

Actually, I think player expectations is absolutely something to consider when setting run payments.

Let's say the players come into the game expecting they'll get 10,000 or so per run. Even if a GM says they want a low-payout campaign, the players will probably object if they start with 500 nuyen a run-- that's way too low, at least in relation to what the players want. You're going to have a lot of problems, all because you didn't take the player desires into account.

As you said, there are a lot of things to consider. Player desires and expectations is one of them.