Did you write "A Leg of Hope", or just steal the list?

When I ran this for my group the runners intercepted and entered the ship before port, including the obligatory "Troll-sammy eats assault gun round, walks away with light damage"-scene. Luckily for me, they thought they would not manage to maneuver it to a place where they could sell the entire ship. If they had, that could have well been the best paying run yet. Interestingly enough the run specifically allows actually doing that, IIRC.

I was checking the good old Blackjack's words of wisdom and remembered this thread about the problem of cash. It also links with the "cyberscavenger" dilemma.

So I leave you with the link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000917151705/....dumpshock.com/

My bad, the link I was aiming for, and which leads to the Home page, is set on Blackjack's Corner and under the "Big Buys" title. Its my bad, and I can't, for the life of me, seem to get the link lead to where I want it to.
Sorry for any inconveniences.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to link to an actual thread..

Try this one:
archive.dumpshock.com/bjcorner/ShowBJ.php3?page=bigbuys.htm

One of the ways I have seen a game implode was due to low pay.

Things were fine for the first few games, despite the low pay because the jobs were fairly low risk and the overheads for the job were small. Then things started to pick up but the pay did not. The GM was overheard to have told the group that he wanted their characters to stay hungry. That started a revolt which began with the street sam and rigger jacking and selling every vehicle that they could lay their hands on and things began to spiral out of control. Somewhere along the line the GM came here (yes, Dumpshock here) and complained that his players were looting everything. Armed with various such "reasonable consequences of their actions", he addressed the symptoms of his game and ended up with a dead game.

Hmm, while that system sounds just about alright, I must say I don't like this guy. I haven't been around here long enough to know him, but from skimming a few of the archives that were posted here a while ago, he seems like a pretentious ass - making up rules on the fly, etc. So I personally take his advice with a grain of salt.

Blackjack has been one of the best shadowrun resources for a long time, when there were no dumpshock forums and for things shadowrunny you had to go to webpages where individuals like him would post their thoughts.

Sure he speaks with a "moral" superiority, but what he says is worth thinking about. If you check his posts you'll see he has discussed some of the odlest and ever returning discussions that often come up in here. And I relly like the solutions he gives to most problems: whatever you do, do it for the sake of the plot.

Now saying he makes up rules is irrelevant -in my point of view- because that doesn't invalidate the good points in his arguments. His GM style is something that concerns him and his players. The rules he invokes can be used in your game or ignored, that part is up to you, and to implement them in the way you prefer.

Also, in many ways the kind of Sahdowrun world that Blackjack runs is the one I usually reflect in my games. Pretty dark and gritty, low-pay, low-life, high-tech, dangerous world. His advice has been invaluable in, what my players and I consider, good games and times. The good thing about it is that you can take what you want to use and ignore the rest...
I know what my choice is, and simply wanted to bring some old-school ideas (SR2) to the table.

P.S: Not trying to start a flame war or anything 7.62, I see your point and I simply wanted to say why I like him.

Ya, I get all that, those are fair arguments.

And since I don't have to game with him my reseverations are largely irrelevant. It's just his tone that irks me, so reading is less fun that it could be.

I have been playing with a group for about 30 years now, and it was felt strongly by the group (and I agree) that the GM is in charge of the game: not a set of published rules. It is the responsibility of the GM to adjudicate issues and the rules are guidelines to help him. If the case in question is either not covered by the rules, or the rules do not give the game effect that the GM wants or is confortable with, then it is the duty of the GM to deal with it. It is rare to make up rules on the fly, but if the result is undesirable, you can expect a discussion between the players and the GM on how to achieve the effect that the GM is after. If the players want a different outcome, they can talk to the GM about it, but the GM is in charge of the game.

Edit: I also realise that not all games are like this. If you want a RAW game you can expect some craziness in the game, and I know that some players like it RAW.

I tend to fall on the "It should pay more than stealing cars or they'd just steal cars" argument. That's not to say that there shouldn't be significant overhead, just that the pay should be in some way commensurate with the risk if nothing else than to prevent the runners quitting and finding some other way to make a living. If they want to live like rockstars, they'll take the dangerous jobs and probably won't last long, but if they're really damn good they may start making their way up the ladder. The lifers who are thinking about the law of averages and not take those jobs are probably still going to get by and save up relatively little.

My players usually get a run about every two weeks of game time, unless they're still recovering from the last one or something. I think about the lowest I pay is 10-15k total, which was what On the Run was worth if I recall, and I sort of took that to heart as a good number. For easy mode stuff, that's what I pay. Your average datasteal or extraction on a reasonably guarded corporate lab is going to be maybe 30k, although I do remember them once doubling the pay, effectively, by going for kidnapping the lead scientist on top of that. They were creative and took risks to go the extra mile, so I figured they'd earned. Top pay is going to be about 80-100k, and that's the stuff that my players have learned to say, "Man, this sounds risky, but I could use the money so bad..." and debate with each other over whether to take the job. I've only done a couple runs of that sort, and I treat them as out of the ordinary. Anything paying higher than that my players probably wouldn't touch, just too hot. When I got to the part in Ghost Cartels where Kaz was going to offer them a quarter million plus to off a major mob figure, I had to improvise, because I know the shaman at least would have been like, "Shit, man, I have a family. I'm washing my hands of this." I'm pretty sure everyone except the strung-out razorgirl who doesn't know when to quit would have reacted similarly, actually.

That may sound like it'd add up pretty quick, but the overhead keeps it down remarkably effectively. This is especially true as the overhead often scales with the difficulty of the job. They have to replace vehicles that get IDed or destroyed, change out their IDs, pay for medical care when they get shot up, and protect themselves from retaliation or opportunistic urban predatory behavior from other shadow players. On top of that, half of them are usually addicted to something, and that costs money. Also, they have a tendency to not want to live in a complete hellhole. The only ones that really accumulated money in my experience were the magicians, slowly (and quite deliberately, in the shaman's case, as it was her kids' college fund and the money for raising them), and the hacker, who hacked his lifestyle and really wasn't well developed enough as a character to have real goals for the money; in retrospect, the real problem with that character was he had no good reason to run the shadows. But it was one of those things where the player gamed with us because she was an old friend, but she wasn't my favorite person to game with.

MMOs call them money sinks.

[tangent] [/tangent]

Roleplaying is a money sink.

Blackjack is Branson Hagerty's web persona. The smugness started as his way of venting his frustrations that build up from idiotic players he dealt with (since he can't seem to find someone else to run the games), and turned into a way for him to vent about all the idiots in the hobby that email him stupid questions or said stupid things at cons as well.