You got me wrong, the question isn't "Why hire us instead of another team." but "Why hire runners and not your own troops/the cops/a legal PI...".

Also, at least OOC the GM should know a reason why the PCs are qualified, other than "they're the PCs".

Yes, but no more than that, really. The less you know, the less of a risk you are to the Johnson.




Well, he omits two kinds of information; A) things he doesn't think are important, and B) stuff he doesn't want you to know. If you ask questions to his face about A, that's probably acceptable. If you investigate behind his back, you might find out B, which is not acceptable.





If you can read Johnson's mind without casting directly at him, that's still bad for him. Good reason for him to insist on "no spellcasting AT ALL".



If he wants you to liberate his daughter from the Yakuza, he's a fool if he doesn't tell you it's the Yakuza. If he wants you to do a job for the Yakuza because they're holding his daughter hostage.. Well, if he didn't tell you, then he doesn't want you to interfere with his daughter.



If a Johnson doesn't want you to know who he works for, then he doesn't want you investigating who he works for. If he wants you to test security but doesn't tell you, then he probably has a reason for that. (For example: he wants to see how Full Alert security deals with runners who don't know the place is already on Full Alert. If the runners knew it was Renraku who hired them, then they wouldn't be as surprised, and the point of the operation is lost.)




As I see it, Plausible Deniability is the whole point. Shadowrunning is highly illegal, and getting caught is very, very bad for the corps. So if you had proof who you worked for, you'd have prime blackmail material.




I'm not saying that investigating the Johnson is bad for the runners.

But it's bad for Johnson, and if that makes them a liability, they'll have to go. In fact, the runners knowing too much about a Johnson could be grounds in itself to have them killed, even if the Johnson wasn't planning to beforehand. Just to cover his tracks.

"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."
"You know too much."

I tend not to discount things just for familiarity when they can result in you getting killed over them. That said, we do seem to be splitting hairs here

~J

You may have missed the memo in circulation, but Shadowrunners are routinely called deniable assets for a reason.

Runners still sometimes get hired by individuals for things that aren't obviously illegal (there is or was a subculture within the SR dev community that likes to encourage this—skimming through the first few one-off runs in MJLBB, over half don't involve inherently illegal activity in any form the runners could be aware of before the run). The questions are certainly useful for those cases.

~J

"Why ask Shadowrunners to find your missing daughter. The cops aren't what they used to be, but last time I checked, they still do that."

"I don't want the cops looking at my business."
"I don't want the cops/anyone to know I have a daughter."
"I don't want the cops looking at my daughter's business."
"I don't think the cops have the firepower that'll be required."
"The cops take too long."
"The cops might be responsible for her disappearance"
"I'm a poor SINless, the cops wouldn't care."
"Why didn't I think of that? Whoever wrote that adventure sure wasn't paying attention!"

These answers all imply something different for the run.

I think another good rule of thumb is that the price of a job is inversely proportional to how much info the Johnson is willing to provide.

To quote one of the greatest movies of all time:

Runner: "Whats in the case? Is it heavy, is it explosive, is it chained to some unlucky bloke's wrist? Are we gonna have to chop it off?"
Johnson: "All right. But I am not under any obligation to let you know..."
Runner: "If not, the price has gotta go up. I'll get you the case, but the price has gotta go up."

"No questions. No answers. That's the business we're in. You just accept it and move on. Maybe that's lesson number three."

Indeed, great movie.

Time and info are the two things that reduce the odds of disaster.

The case a. where the guy gives you two weeks to obtain X and includes a full target package (topo maps, sat photos, surveillance data, blueprints, security system specs, list of employees and their home addresses) is hugely different from b. where they guy needs to to obtain X tonight from a vague but well protected location.

They typical difference is that you don't go to a starting team with case a. After going to the effort of gathering that kind of data, you are going to go to a group of heavy hitters who have a good record of success. That kind of experienced team isn't cheap.

Highly experienced teams probably won't take case b., and if they do the cost is going to be huge and at least half will be upfront, win or lose.

But.. but.. only a highly trained teams are the only ones with even a chance to succeed at case B...

In the end, Johnson would usually rather have expensive results than cheap failure.

I forget who said it, but someone said the Johnson can get the job done cheap, done well, or done quickly. He has to pick two of those.


Generally, Johnsons should be forthcoming with helpful logistical information (or be prepared to pay extra), even if the team will usually double-check it. They are far less likely to be forthcoming with any of the why's or wherefore's about the job. That is none of the runners' business.

A good team, though, should warn the Johnson that any missing or erroneous details that change the nature of the job will void the contract, resulting in either the team walking away, or at the least, some serious renegotiating. Things such as an extraction target that they are told is willing, who isn't.

Professional Johnsons and professional runners will definitely check up on each other, as a matter of course. But being professionals, they will usually keep this information as "insurance", rather than attempting to blackmail the other party.

By my reading this means that you cast the spell on the subject (say, your face sometime before the meet), who then listens to any statements made by targets (say the Johnson in question) in range of the spell (Force x Magic meters) and is able to tell if the statements are true. It is pretty clear that the subject of the spell and the targets of the spell are two different people, in the intro to detections spells it says that you cast the spell on the magician or the subject who then gains the benefits of a new sense. So instead trying to figure out if the Johnson's lying by facing off his mighty Con + Charisma, you get to instead face his Willpower ( + Counterspelling if he's got it) with the magician's Magic + Spellcasting.

I'd say it's possible, as long as the room you are going to enter isn't warded you can cast the spell unobserved before going in. Inside you might even be able to get away with it as long as the Johnson doesn't have any way to tell you are casting the spell, just clap the face on the shoulder as you walk past him to sit down.

(Area) Thought Recognition works by casting it on the subject who then is either able to scan one person at a time or everyone around him in the area of the spell.

If I'm told he is willing and he isn't willing I'm out of there. And I'm going to expect to get paid.

I'd try to plan for the risk of a willing extractee getting cold feet. That seems like something that might happen sometimes, with no bad faith from the Johnson.

I hope you're prepared to be disappointed.

~J

I never really understood this on either side. In both cases it is kind of assumed so saying it sounds like useless bravado to me, more ganger level etiquette than professional. It is somewhat action movieish so I can dig it and think it is cool(which is a good enough reason to do it), but I don't think it is a reasonable action.

Using the Transporter as an example, the first one that is. After his car gets detonated and he comes after the bad guy he asks, why did you do it? The answer you broke your own rule, you opened the package. No useless threats, just a bomb.

On another note How do people express what lines they won't cross and when?

As an example for a character I am about to run. We are using the hero system for a shadowrun game, but it is still the shadowrun setting in the early 2050 era. I am basing my character off of Alex Louis Armstrong from fullmetal alchemist so I am having a sort of dark secret for the character. I haven't finalized exactly what it will be for my character, but in the manga he was a soldier involved in a genocidal campaign, he couldn't deal with it and got reassigned. He has always been ashamed he didn't have the courage to stand up and stop it at the time and is trying to make it right now. Anyways I want my character to have a personal code of conduct that would preclude him from missions where it involves an overabundance of slaughter for no real purpose. He has no problem killing on a mission, but he doesn't like the purpose of the mission to be wanton killing. Given that many johnsons pull the you have to accept the job before I tell you more how do you express you have certain guidelines that you wont cross, especially when I expect I may be the only runner on the team with these guidelines.

3rded. I just want to reiterate this since I see this misconception brought up so damn often.

We shoot people in the face for money. We may not get paid, but we will make him wish he had paid us.

I think you're running smack-dab into the middle of what's realistic vs. what's good gameplay. Expressing this to a Johnson seems like a great way to not get hired (aside from the possibility that the job involves what you won't do, it's also a huge additional risk if the job might involve what you won't do—a Johnson doesn't want a run to go south just because you didn't manage to stealth your way into the middle of the orphanage where the McGuffin is being held and your code of conduct won't let you open up on the inhabitants), which in turn makes it a stretch to believe that the rest of the team would tolerate your presence—every run that they don't go on because it involves things you won't do is nuyen they don't get.


I think there are problems with exacting revenge over this sort of thing automatically, but that at least makes sense—what I'm saying is that you absolutely shouldn't expect to get paid. If you walked, you achieved none of the objectives and have done nothing of value for the Johnson—most likely you've caused him or her harm. The fact that you feel like you've been screwed over, or even in some cases the fact that you have been, does pretty much nothing to make forking over the payment for the job you didn't do more attractive.

Also consider that unless the Johnson is simply dumb, they have very little incentive to deliberately screw you over in a non-lethal way unless they consider you to be no threat. It's worth at least considering the possibility that, in this scenario, they may be right.

~J

Kidnapping is both more difficult and a whole lot more serious criminal charge than sneaking someone out of a place where they are being held against their will. I'm not being paid enough to do that, and both we haven't agreed to do that and are not equipped to do it. If we do kidnap him the Johnson has us over a barrel, what are we going to do if he doesn't pay us the additional money we think we are owed? I've got enough issues without getting hit by a PD tactical team due to the guy and his family we have chained to the wall.

More difficult, sure. More serious as a charge? Even if the target isn't on extraterritorial ground I suspect you'd end up with a kidnapping charge stacked on top of a willful interference with employment contract charge (IIRC this was made a criminal offense in the 2020s in Shadowrun).

That said, there are plenty of decent reasons to bail on a run like that. It's the bit where you expect to get paid afterwards for the job you didn't do that I'm not so sure about.

~J

I'm not really worried about the place he's escaping from, they ARE going to be pissed no matter what. It's everywhere else that is a problem. Like the airport.

This is really weird. Just because you're a criminal, doesn't mean you're a criminal without any limits at all. I don't get why people think it's unprofessional to have scruples about gunning down an orphanage. Being a psycho isn't the same as being professional.

A GM should be aware of the morality and principles of the PCs. He can challenge it, but a good GM can cope with a PC refusing to carry out an atrocity. Ideally, sometimes he lets it suck to be the principled guy, and sometimes it's rewarding.

The other players shouldn't go all "you must be at least this Chaotic Evil to join the party". Not all characters have to be equally nice or nasty. Players shouldn't be telling other players they can only play completely unscrupulous characters, but some IC arguing is great story fodder (lots of great movies about criminals having trouble with their conscience and having infighting because of it.) Party moral solidarity shouldn't be that stifling.

I'm not saying you should play a Lawful Good Paladin in Shadowrun, but you can certainly play a guy who draws the line at killing innocent bystanders. If his infiltration of the orphanage goes wrong, why doesn't he pull a sleep gas grenade instead of a gun? SR has a lot of nonlethal weaponry, playing the Almost Good Guy doesn't mean you have to be ineffective.

This seems like reasonable advice for good gameplay. It has no basis in reflecting an internally consistent world.


Maybe your group just has different tastes than ours, but actually we find party infighting to be pretty uninteresting—it gets in the way of things and it's hard to play a confrontation you're not invested in when the other side is also a real person (the GM is too diffuse for me to consider anyone he or she plays "real" unless there's some bad GMing going on).

More significantly, this conflict is forced because of OOC considerations—realistically, if someone is costing you money by complaining about jobs you and the rest of the team are fine with, you're going to stop working with them. That's a little harder to do when, again, you're basically telling a player "go off and make a new character", but the fact that this doesn't happen means you've got a tension where it's no longer possible for everyone to play their characters reasonably.


Many things. First, you've got an excellent chance of still ending up with a bunch of corpses from your sleep gas grenade. Second, it's harder to use—unless you're packing a respirator, chemsuit, etc. you need to either wait for it to disperse or make sure never to use it in the direction you need to go. Third, it has few of the advantages of a gun—you still create witnesses, the opposition has a full combat turn to do things, etc. If you find yourself in this situation you can still make it work, but if you let the J know in advance that that's what you're going to do it's not at all unreasonable for them to think that maybe someone who might take a more straightforward approach would be a better choice.

~J

SR sleep gas has pretty much none of the drawbacks of real "knockout gas". It's pretty darn safe and extremely effective and predictable.

Yeah, unreasonably so. I assume they put that in for the same reason Star Trek has phasers (plot magic).

Why can't you be invested in the confrontation? If you're having fun playing a character who's not a total monster, then getting invested in that confrontation shouldn't be a problem.

And why should such a confrontation be so terrible? Suppose it's about how to do a certain job - the Principled Guy doesn't want the orphans shot. The other team members dislike it, so they take the price for the sleep grenades out of his share of the payout. Or certain types of jobs - if a character really refuses to wetwork against environmentalists, then just tell the Fixer not to call the team for those kinds of jobs. There'll be other jobs.

It gets more interesting if the GM doesn't start out by offering a morally unacceptable job, but it only becomes apparent later on. This can create a good party conflict, or a challenge to find a morally acceptable solution to the problem.



If your group had a highly effective hacker - one of the most reliable you've ever worked with - but he doesn't want the group to take orphanage butchering jobs, would you ditch him for that? Or suppose it's the only guy that the mage trusts with his body when he's astrally projecting, and he objects to a torture job, would you ditch him?
A total do-gooder doesn't make a good SR character, but that doesn't mean you have to willing to take every job. Personally, I'd trust someone with principles with my back a lot more than the sociopath who's willing to do whatever it takes.

Principles don't have to be total; you can play a guy who's okay with killing the target, but not innocent bystanders. It limits your options a bit, but you can take comfort that he's less likely to kill the rest of the team so he won't have to share the payout.



I'm not saying it's as easy as the brutal solution, but it's still playable. The game has a lot of ways to make it work; it doesn't force you to play the butchering psycho. The wealth of nonlethal solutions in Shadowrun is one of the game's strong points in my opinion.

Not really—I guess it hinges on whether staying in a cloud from a gas grenade during the same turn counts as additional doses. If you say that it doesn't then Hyper works better than I'd remembered; it has an Immediate damage code but less than Deadly Stun, so the fact that gas grenades make a cloud that sticks around for two turns doesn't make people dead; at the end of the first turn the targets probably take S stun, then at the end of the second turn they take S+3 Stun from the additional damage effect of Hyper, leaving them at a 5-box Physical wound and in no danger of bleeding out (but being caught in the edge of an additional exposure will probably kill them outright).

On the other hand, if you don't interpret it that way anyone who doesn't manage to evacuate the cloud immediately will be taking Overdoses on both turns of exposure, so they're both D stun for a total of 25 boxes of damage (10 Stun, 15 Physical). That'll outright kill most humans.

Either way, far from what I'd call safe or predictable. Effective, sure.


You know, I'm going to have to punt on replying to this bit for a bit while I figure out what on earth I meant with that phrasing. I think the general line of the idea was mostly just "maybe we just don't like intra-party conflict as much as other groups".


Right, but it's not just about the cost of the equipment—as mentioned, the less-lethal approach is less reliable, carries more risks, etc. It increases odds of job failure and of blowback. You need to start practicing your actuarial skills to make a serious attempt at putting a nuyen value on all of this, which simply doesn't sound fun to me.


But again, you destroy believability when the rest of the team that doesn't care suddenly decides to pass up all the nuyen they could be making just to keep the squeaky wheel greased. This is solvable only through actions that aren't fun (the character gets kicked out of the team) or blatant metagaming (the GM doesn't offer jobs that the player would turn down up front, and increases the number of other jobs to compensate).


How is it a "good party conflict", though? In the general case, this just devolves into the aforementioned actuarial exercise.


The first can resolve the issue, but it's difficult—in particular, it relies on being exceptionally good at something very useful, which generally takes a fair amount of cash and karma to do. It's simply not reasonable to take a typical (or even fairly well-optimized) starting character and say "but he's so good we can't afford to lose him", which means you're back to explaining why anyone sticks with the character until they get those skills. The second raises the stakes, as now you're talking about replacing two people, but it also changes the original situation—you now effectively have two people following the code of conduct (the character and the other character who won't run without the first character).


Sure, you don't have to. Having a firm and firmly-followed set of principles, though, not only eliminates whole classes of jobs but also eliminates classes of "watching your back"—I'd rather have someone who doesn't like killing bystanders but will than someone who simply won't.


Apropos of nothing, but this really doesn't follow—the rest of the team aren't innocent bystanders, and in many reasonable moralities they certainly count as "in the game" and thus fair targets. It's much better to rely on self-interest to protect you against your teammates than scruples.



Right, sure. The part where I think it gets much messier is when you try to take this route in the face of a team with no motivation to join you in it (well, assuming you try to make the entire run go like this rather than just letting the other characters kill the bystanders).

~J

You can choose to have it (Neuro-Stun, the actual 'sleep gas') predictably go inert in 1 minute. "Likewise, if a character remains in contact with a toxin over an extended period, such as being caught in a gas-filled room for several minutes, she may receive an additional dose and suffer stronger effects (or have to resist the toxin again)." It's really only by GM-fiat than you can accidentally kill someone with 'sleep gas' in SR4, though the rule fall short of flat saying 'no rollover to Physical'.

Or use Russian military surplus gas.

That's not funny

Gallows humor is the best kind there is.

Bah, someone forgot to tag the thread. I guess the lethality of the gas may be different for SR4 players.

~J

The thread itself is SR*, no?

A good summation of meet Etiquette:
Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

That's not just meet etiquette, that's getting out of bed in the morning.

No, as we just discovered—important and fundamental differences exist based on whether you're discussing SR1-3 (possibly with another division between SR1 and SR2-3, I don't remember early toxin rules) or 4, and those differences apply in this discussion.

Really, they apply almost anywhere; the SR* tag mostly shouldn't exist.

~J

Nope. It's about Mr. Johnsons. Toxin rules are barely relevant to begin with.

That's also very GM-dependent. Some GMs think that causing a lot of collateral damage is stupid because it really brings the heat down, while others apply a "less witnesses is better" approach. There have been a lot of threads about this already; groups differ.



There are lots of reasons why a group would do this, mostly they come down to "we want to keep this team member, because he's good/nice/would't want him angry/family/etc.", and there are really a lot of IC rationalizations possible. Why does your party work together, instead of someone killing the rest to keep the whole payout for himself?

Metagaming? A GM always metagames; he has to use knowledge about the PCs to know which adventure would be suitable. That applies to character power level as well as what motivates the characters as well as what they won't do for whatever reason. That's not bad metagaming; that's being a GM who doesn't randomly pick a prepublished scenario hoping all will turn out alright.

Does the GM have a convenient way to whitewash this metagaming IC? Yes: the Fixer will not make himself look bad by setting Johnson up with the wrong team for the job.



The "professionals" you describe have no reason to stick together other than make money. There is nothing they won't do, so how can they trust one another? Anything that might interfere with the party navigating any plot carefully pruned away. To me, they don't seem like interesting characters at all, they're just... miniatures...

They stick together because they make money. They stick together because they can count on the others to do their jobs and not get cold feet. They stick together because it's better than going it alone or working with people you don't know.

Sure but even if he was competent I am not sure I want to team up with the manson family. Pay days are awesome, not getting killed by a total psychopath who was supposed to be watching my back is even better. I'd much rather have someone on my team with some ethics even if that meant I had to pass on a job here and there, because I could trust him more when we were on jobs he would take. I think the kill everyone teams are much less believable, but every table is different.

Me and my group just had a discussion about that, last session. The Triads wanted us to invade a ganger's hideout that had just received a HUGE pack of heavy weaponry, so its enemy gang could have a fair fight against, but they wouldn't pay us any money (instead they would pay us with a favor a later time), my character, being a jaguar shapeshifter who did not go to the meeting because it had heard that chinese kill shapeshifters to use their organs as medicine, refused to take the job for a favor it could never collect and would only do it if he got paid (our Face ended up paying 5k to me).

The Face wanted to sell the weapons to the Mafia (without telling who was the interested party).
Our street sam who was a former Lone Star officer, would only accept the weapons sold for a group outside Seattle because he didn't want the city full of assault rifles and grenade launchers.
Our mage, who has contacts with the Ork Underground, wanted to give the weapons to them.

In the end, after a lot of discussion, we didn't get the weapons because the gangers used grenades inside the apartment the weapons were hidden and damaged the rest of the crates.

Wait, let me see if I've got this right.

Triads: We want you to infiltrate a heavily armed pack of crazies and take them all out.
Runners: Doable. What's the pay scale you have in mind?
Triads: *scribbles on a paper, hands it over*
Runners: ...This says 'I.O.U.' And it's on a coupon for a free ice creams at Baskin-Robbins.
Triads: Mm-hm!
Runners: ...Baskin-Robbins has been out of business for nearly fifty years.
Triads: But we'll owe you one! We're good for it!

They're very clearly trying to play the team...and the team took the job?

QFT

Your extractee has no guarantee your run will be a success. Xe is obligated to resist at every opportunity xyr current employer has to observe xyr. You are therefore obligated to sedate and/or threaten xyr.

Not to mention, just because xe's the target of a willing extraction *doesn't* mean you're the willing extraction.

LOL, it is even funnier if you put it like that. But yeah, it's like that, the Triads say they are honored *cough* men and will respect the deal. I just don't buy it. Besides, the Face owes big money to the Mafia and is trying to get connected to other criminal syndicates who could protect his back in case he decides to stop paying the mafia.

I was rather proud of the ice cream coupon.

I agree. I'm reminded of the 'stock in criminal enterprise' argument from a different thread. You're doing a job on the faith that it'll be paid back, but I've always been of the mind that it'll be repaid only if it's more costly for them to not do so.

It's always cheaper to just kill everyone who did the job for you.

Provided you apply enough plastique to get the job done right.

If you don't, you just entered the pilot of Leverage.