So, my group finished off the run pretty early yesterday, so they started flipping through the books to pick out some new gear. One of the players said "Oh, I want the Eurocar Westwind 3k... Oh, but I don't have the money for it." This began a discussion of how cheaply he could get a stolen Eurocar, which eventually brought him to the question "Oh, can't I just steal one?" I smiled, and pointed out "Well, you are a professional criminal."

So, we spent about an hour running an impromptu scenario where the players stole a Eurocar. This group has less than 10 runs under their belts, and most haven't read all of the main book, much less all the sourcebooks. I've been playing for a while, but this group is my first time as GM, I'm still holding the players hands a bit, and throwing them a lot of bones when it comes to roleplaying, since they're getting used to the system, but I'm backing off from that in the last couple games, and I'm letting them dangle completely after this. So, let me know what you think of how I ran this.

Step one: Locate a Eurocar Westwind 3K:

They decided that a theft off the street was too risky, and a car lot would be too secure, so they hit the SR equivalent of "Craig's List" and found someone selling a Eurocar in a nice, but not too nice neighborhood. Although they don't know all the details yet, I've decided it's basically out of the book, but with some worn-out parts almost ready for replacement. I've got some glitches ready to go.


Step 2: Recon and planning:

They called up the seller, got his address, and did some quick recon. 2 of the PCs went into an upscale neighborhood on a racing bike, so I made sure they were followed and had the license plate run by the cops (the character had a rating 4 SIN and fake license, so good for him) to show them the security level of the area. Their perception roll was penalized, due to their desire to leave quickly. I didn't tell them about all the security.

Step 3: Steal the thing:

Their plan was to hack their way into the seller's garage, fire it up and drive away before being spotted. The mage took a perch about a mile away on a bus stop bench. She has the hawk-eye advantage, so I let her keep an eye on the patrolling squad cars, and even managed to track a couple of the drones. One player had the insight to plan the heist for a Friday night, parking their car near a late-night party, avoiding suspicion. They ran up to the front gate, disabled the security camera, and busted the gate with a passkey. The Street Sam's player was clever enough at this point to look for any security measures he might have missed before, and was lucky enough to roll 6 hits and catch the motion detector. The hacker took out that and the other security cam and they were at the car. I upgraded the device rating of the car to 4, and the hacker wasn't quite able to get hack in without setting off the alert, which triggered the alarm. It rang for about 4 seconds before he could shut it off. I decided that normally at this point, a security spider would likely check on the car, but that the seller had canceled his subscription since he was selling it anyway. At this point, the nearest patrol car rolled a perception check to hear the alarm, but was penalized when the mage controlled one of the party goers to run out onto the street and begin verbally abusing him. The Street Sam spent some edge and got 7 hits to drive the car quickly and quietly off the property. As they looked back, they saw a light go on inside the house, but I decided they did well enough and got away with the car.

So, do you think this was challenging enough for a 85,000 nuyen car? It's not as useful as cash, and considering it would likely sell for about 25,500 nuyen (8500 per runner), it wasn't a huge haul. The group had a lot of fun with it (more than the planned adventure), and now they have a sweet ride.

Lastly, I decided to charge them 2,000 nuyen to have a street mechanic scrub the car of all it's IDs and chips, and repaint it. Does this sound like enough?

It sounds like a good off-the-cuff run to me. And some good improvisation and determination by you players.

It sounds like a great session, enjoyed by all.

Assume that the characters knew to spoof Grid Guide even if the players didn't, protect the ChopShop. Assume that the charcters knew to adjust even if the players didn't, and let them have it. Inform them... Don't let them know that they can make more money playing "Gone in 60 Seconds" or "Grand Theft Auto" than if they played Shadowrun.
DO NOT LET THEM KNOW that they can make more money stealing cars than going on runs, at least, not yet.

I'm too drunk, going to bed... may expand tomorrow if others don't.

I find if you make the street value of stolen vehicles about 10% of the list price, it goes a long way to making GTA less profitable than shadowrunning.

Here nor there in response to this post, since they weren't stealing the car for profit. This looks like it was handled well in my opinion, both by the GM and the players.

That sounds like a fun SR session.

No criticism (at least for you as GM), but here's a couple of things to think about:
-Where will your runners store it? If they're operating out of the barrens, this could be a good chance for a lesson in gangland security...
-Who was the guy they stole it from? Just another joe, maybe, but wouldn't the irony be delicious if he was a Johnson? Or perhaps a fixer... Could be an interesting side plot.
-When do your runners plan to use the Westwind? It's a bit conspicuous for criminal activity, more so than, say, a Bulldog Stepvan.

Also want to agree with what Tachi's said in regards to informing your players.

Lastly, improv runs are great and as GM, you can craft some useful tools to help facilitate more. I try to keep some grunts drawn up in excel in case my players decide its now time to start a gang war or ambush a corp convoy lost in the barrens...

One thing, though. Cars like that will have traces inside them, so they would be easy to track. They should probably find and disable those pretty quickly. Maybe that would make for an interesting follow-up.

Bye
Thanee

That depends on your run.. for an extraction that's meant to look as if the guy just went for a stroll and never came back, the Eurocar is less conspicuous in nice neighbourhoods.



You should probably advise your players to read the section in Arsenal about vehicles - it goes on about both the way vehicles are tracked, and how you can deal with that.

When I played a rigger, I'd steal a car before every run (or try to) and ditch it at the end. Using the same vehicle on multiple runs was to my mind like using the same weapon on multiple runs, you're just leaving a better trail.

One thing that will come back to bite them, and teach them a lesson about there are people you can steal from and people you can NOT steal from.

The insurance company.

Nice car in a nice neighborhood, chances are they guy had insurance. Chances are that the insurance company is not to happy about having to pay out nearly 100K on a stolen car. You figure a big city like Seattle probably has "Theft Recovery Teams". Think theft investigation and repossession.

You figure that the TRT probably is probably the equivalent of a team of Shadowrunners. They probably have moles in the major chop shops and have an operating budget of 10K to pay for bribes and expenses and still make decent money.

Hell we talk about Shadowrunners making more money stealing cars, they can probably make even more money stealing them back.

I fucking love this post

Unless you use caseless, ex-ex ammo, in which case, there will be no ammo or capsule to be investigated, just a bloody mess

The other thing to consider is that a high end luxury vehicle like the Westwind would likely involve exclusive dealers, exclusive parts distributers and an exclusive user network, similar to GM's On Star system. For example, I doubt you can roll down to your local NAPA store and buy parts for an Ashton Martin or a Bugatti. On the other hand, a rag tag bunch of street scum wander into a Ferrari dealership looking for a new clutch and people tend to notice (and ask questions).

But that's what Contacts are for

Sure. They just need to appreciate that actually stealing the car is the *easy* part.

It depends.

If you are selling it as a legit used car there is a huge amount of work to do. You have to hack a bunch of databases, forge the physical ID data plates, get it registered by the DMV as a car. Once you have done this stuff and gotten the DMV to accept it you can sell it for the price of a used car. So you can make big bucks, once you find a buyer. (Assuming you actually found all the security location hardware, and you are either paying the local organized crime boss his street tax or hiding real good.)

If you are grabbing it on order for someone else it's a lot safer, as you don't have to do all the really risky stuff, like holding it for days hoping you got all the carefully hidden security gear or placing an ad for the vehicle and trying to sell it on the street.. My understanding today is that it pays a couple hundred bucks per. Car thieves are really low in the hierarchy of crooks for a reason.

If you are running a chop shop you can also make big bucks, but you need a bunch of contacts. You need a bunch of people to buy the questionable parts, you need to pay off the cops, the locak OC boss, some way to get rid of the rest of the car, some approaches to keep from taking tagged vehicles into your facility, etc. Plus you need the skills to rapidly and cleanly take apart the car, find and remove security stuff, and all the needed gear (lifts, etc) to do all this.

Yeah, but at that point you're basically running Gone in Sixty Seconds: Shadowrun, where stealing cars is the primary focus of what the runners do (even if it's just for the one run).

For runners who just come across the stolen car every once in awhile, the 10% figure is a good middle ground between giving them something for their trouble, but not so much that they're going to retire from shadowrunning to become car thieves.