QUOTE (JaronK @ Sep 25 2009, 05:10 PM)

At the same time, if you're caught you're caught. If you gave them a way to find you, they'll find you. And if you've just screwed people out of millions, they're going to kill you or jail you anyway... so it's better not to leave witnesses. Our group kills anyone who's seen us in action, no questions.
JaronK
Anthropomorphizing the corporation? That's a good way to get yourself dead. Here's the funny thing, you haven't screwed 'people' out of millions. If you haven't gone for maximum carnage, you may have screwed site security out of their bonuses this year. The corporation has lost quite a bit more, but
it does not have any feelings. The corp, whether it be Ares, Horizon, Aztechnology, or some lowly AA or A you've never heard of, is little more than a legal and social fiction. Any pretense of revenge goes flying out the window, because any
person who might want to get revenge isn't going to be allowed the resources to attain it.
Instead, the decision of whether to make an example of you falls to the same division that deals with shadowrunners in the first place. This division goes by a different name at each company, and fits in somewhere different in the hierarchy, but for the sake of argument we'll call it Black Ops.
Why would it fall to Black Ops and not Security/Law Enforcement to make this decision? Because, often, to get to you they're going to have to break the law and cross 'international' borders. That means that, once you're off company property,
they can't officially come after you at all. So if they're going to do it, it has to be with deniable assets. Either company men or true shadowrunners. So at the end of the day, the guy in charge of making that decision has good reasons to leave you alive (if you're good enough to get away, you're good enough to hire to MAKE millions another day).
That said, this is the default position. It makes a number of assumptions about the nature of the job, and there are several other factors which might swing it one direction or the other.
Taking anything that's not strictly related to the mission goals. If you're hired to steal one prototype from a secret weapons lab, leave everything else alone. It's not likely to take them long to figure out what your Johnson was really after. Same thing with paydata or, really, just about anything. You can probably get away with restocking on ammunition from dead/disabled security guards, provided you throw any excess out to avoid the RFID tracking problem. But the thing is, if you steal anything else,
you don't have an easy way to get rid of it. In the case of what you've been hired to do, either the damage is already done once you've left the scene, or it will be within a few hours once you make the handoff to Mr. J. That's the window they have to find you, in the hopes of getting their stuff back. You don't know who hired you, you have no way to get in touch with them, and the corp you just hit knows this. It would be pointless to bring you down after that. But if you've gone on an excess crime spree inside their secret lab, you've just about guaranteed you will have something that belongs to them for several days. This lengthens the window of opportunity to cut their losses, and it gives Black Ops a rumor trail to follow.when you try to hock the stuff.
This is why looting the bodies is a bad idea.
Excessive carnage. The more damage you cause in the process of getting the job done, the less you're worth. Now, this isn't going to come around and get you right away. The retribution for this comes later, as your team slowly gets crossed off the job lists of every player in town. You're already causing a fair amount of damage to the bottom line, but inflicting several times what your employer stands to make on the job reflects poorly on your boss. You can get away with this now and again, but doing it too frequently means that, in the corporate world, hiring you is not just stealing the other corp's stuff, it's sending a message of 'now, it's personal'. And as I've stated before, that kind of vendetta always ends badly for every company that gets pulled into it. So they're not going to hire you.
In the end, it's a choice. "No witnesses" is a viable way to approach it, and it may leave fewer people behind who will make it personal. But when they
do they will be willing to expend a lot more of their time and energy on bringing you down. Disabling security guards leaves a bit more of a trail, but the people left behind only have injured pride to deal with. They aren't likely to start spending their weekends trolling 'runner bars with a dynamite vest looking to blow you up in retribution.