I like looting corpses for cyberware just for the fun stuff you can do with it. Even if it would only net you 5% of it's regular price, it's still a functional piece of cyberwear for you to use, and it's completely gratis. Rip that eye out and hook it up to your flyspy for a free low-light/thermal upgrade. Take that wicked cyberarm and attach it to a Manservent. Now you're 1/6th the way to a functioning killbot.

Jury-rigging is the best.

But is it so BAD?

Whatever people have fun with, right? As long as they don't start killing people for their cyber, then it's still only questionable, not outright amoral, such as... wait, doing lots of crimes for money?

There are no new lines being crossed here. The guy denied himself sacrosanctity of his body when he put the stuff inside him. Now it's removed again, to be of further use. There's even a clear moral merit to recycling cyber.

Plus the corps do it, too, I'll bet.

Well, it's not like 'the corps do it' is a very good argument for… anything.

Oh really? That's how I justify just about everything in life.

I think a lot of GMs just find looting, particularly cyberware looting, to be... unaesthetic. Messy. Somehow wrong.

But you do need to wonder why it's happening. Like people said before, why "aren't they just professional" and refrain from looting? I think it has to do with the embarrassingly low payscale in some canon runs. If you get paid 5K to do something, and along the way you can scavenge loot worth 1K, that's pretty big. If your job is worth 20K, that loot isn't quite so relevant anymore.

What you want to avoid is a situation where randomly looting people and targets with no connection to the story is easier and more profitable than doing the actual run. It's probably a sign that Johnson simply isn't paying enough.

I think looting should be most prominent at Street level games. Suppose the team isn't seasoned enough to break into the Target Facility without Johnson supplying something, like a backdoor to the system. Then part of the payment for the run is that they get to loot the Target Facility.

At high level games, looting becomes rarer and a smaller part of the payout. Enemies are smarter, better-trained, but their equipment doesn't get all that much more expensive. For a street level runner, looting a rifle is a big deal. For an experienced runner, it's encumbrance that might jeopardize your run - completion of which is worth far more. Getting expensive loot usually means fighting really dangerous enemies, who use that loot on you.

I'm pondering altering the Lifestyle costs scale a bit; I'd like Lifestyle to be more expensive relative to commonly looted stuff like handguns and armor vests. Meaning that to get to Retirement Money for a Luxury lifestyle, it actually makes sense to invest in Deltaware.

I have to agree here big time.

I think the biggest reason that you see looting is because cash is the main means of improvement for mundane characters. I'd imagine if you had a group full of awakened, no one would care about looting, but they'd do whatever they could to gain a couple extra points of karma.

And I think this is compounded by the generally low nuyen:karma ratio in most games. An average run nets somewhere around 6 karma and 5k nuyen (before expenses). This means that in two runs an awakened can initiate, and after two runs a mundane can think get.... deltaware datajack? Another two runs, the awakened get to initiate a second time, and the mundane gets.... A cyberfoot and an empty nanohive? Three more runs and the awakened have a third initiation under their belts and the mundane finally gets to put something in their nanohive.

Now, I admit, the mundane gets to get a couple of skill upgrades in that time (almost two skills from 4 to 6), but that advancement seems so minimal compared to the huge improvements of initiation.

I've always figured that a run should generally provide 2.5k nuyen for each karma, since that is the rate you buy it at in CG. This should keep mundane and awakened roughly in line with each other, and should also provide big enough payouts from missions that players just don't consider it worth their time to scrape a few hundred nuyen from stealing corpses.

Well, yes, it's messy, and I would say it's out of place in high-level run scenarios.

However, a recurring problem I've had in SR, is that my character is too good, number wise, for the low paying runs he's accepting. Which just means he won't be able to advance without getting MORE cash. In SR3 this was even worse: With one million to spend at chargen, in a lot of campaigns you would NEVER again be able to afford stuff you got from the start. The trouble was also, that the HARD runs, those well-paying ones, often put the PLAYER out of his element - i.e. I was too impatient or just not puzzle or rules savvy enough to solve the thing the GM or module writer had concocted.

So, yeah, I guess I'm agreeing with Ascalapus.

Quick follow up as we just had our "follow up" session from the run

The troll had wired reflexes, ultrasound head implant, cyber eyes and obvious arms with stats around 10,7,6.
I got the corpse to my Street Doc contact less than a day after the run, he's connection 4 loyalty 4, he didn't have a problem with it.
the doc could only recover the arms, and they were slightly damaged from the LMG rounds I'd pumped into him.

Brand new they would have been worth 60k. I got 12k for them, but also some info that he'd been doing a lot of work for gangs lately, and there was an unusual amount of NY circulating through them. (I warned him away from selling to go gangers as he'd risk hitting the original owners)

The run itself was worth 50k total, we also stole a semi trailer that sold for 18k, some BTL's that sold for 600NY and some magical foci that sold for 27k (the magical foci came with a massive bonus for giving the contact a lead on a toxic shaman)

So yeah, all up we made more from looting than we did from the run. You might have noticed my other thread about high profile stuff, so it wasn't the most professional of runs... I think though that if we didn't steal the semi we still would have looted a substantial bonus without causing any serious risk (extracting the troll was quite easy)

Wow. If your game involves such massive supplemental income (stealing vehicles, etc.), then the scavenged 'ware certainly begins to pale in comparison.

Johnson: I know the pay's not much but...

Party: Nil sweat chummer, we haven't had a good excuse for grand theft or organ legging in ages...

Just give us the details and we'll get right on it."

I'll give you 500¥ for the ware, I got a guy that'll give me seven.

If the Johnson is selling Wired Reflexes and such for 700Y, just buy it from him. Used Cyberware already has a cost in the rules, and it's a LOT higher than that.

JaronK

If the J is selling Wired Reflexes for 700 , do everyone a favor and shoot him. Whatever he is selling, it isn't Wired Reflexes.

Heh, probably a really cheap stirrup system or other external puppet control .

My players decided to lug a body to the street doc to sell the bits and pieces inside.

They managed to get around 5%-10% of the second hand value given the amount of time and effort everyone else needs to put in to get the stuff reconditioned and sellable again.

Given the money from the run which was very low (simple drop a box off to a house type) the second hand gear was worth it ... but they characters are having moral issues with the idea of body selling.

So it will be interesting to see what they do next

I'm morbidly curious as to what kind of group generates corpses on a run as simple as dropping off a box at a house.

Box full of explosives?

As some of my players read/post on this board I will hide it ... players you have been warned.

The box was initially been delivered by another group, but they were ambushed and killed by another group before they could deliver the box. My players turned up a few hours later and picked up the box and delivered it to the destination successfully. They then decided to have a look around the place where the box was and found the corpse. The free-spirit character possessed the body and walked it near the clinic, the others carried it in and started the negotiation.

So they didn't directly create corpses.

When we picked up the box a bunch of gangers were taking a brick to it, and there was no sign of the guy who was supposed to drop the box off. We dealt with the gangers (a few combat turns of suppresive fire from a drone to keep their heads down while we legged it) and took the box to the end place.
A few hours later the house we delivered the box to exploded: at this point we got worried, and decided to investigate why the gangers were smashing the box. We discovered the body of a prime runner, and took the body to a street doc mainly so that we could hack into the cyberware (as 275bp characters we are sadly lacking in many critical skills). The second hand cyberware was just because we were there!

As an aside, the rigger had grand plans of modding up the semi to be his mobile battle beast.
I'm sure that's a pretty common fantasy among riggers. I'm somewhat glad he worked out that he'd still be spending well over 100k in upgrades to get something useful (somewhat less glad that he didn't even think about how incredibly traceable it would be)

Hehe, yeah. I think most riggers are smarter, and want a Citymaster or something instead, but yeah.

Ha! we are lucky to get a 125cc scooter (and 2 of us are trolls).

You got a scooter EACH ... and I was being generous

Looting Corpses stops the second you take into consideration, that you have to carry the corpse first. If the first person bites the bullet, because he needed to drag 3 dead guys around with him...

It's a breve new world, baby. Just buy collapsible, stackable, wheeled, self-sealing body bags in bulk. With all those VITAS outbreaks, you have to believe somebody has designed such things to simplify mass body handling. There's gotta be warehouses holding them where a few crates could just disappear for the right price.

It always amuses me how players will gun dudes down, but cringe at the idea of taking said dudes to the local Body Bin so that little Timmy can get a new heart.

Tamanous is heros, people.

A troll with 10 str and 9 body won't have much trouble hauling even a cybered up body to the extraction vehicle (I certainly didn't)

Obviously ludicrous looting won't happen but single high value opportunities, well, why not?

Unless everyone's living the high lifestyle\equivalent for their wants, and is rolling in cash with no obvious way to blow it beyond booze babes and bullets, why not scavenge what you can? Just treat it SR-Real and have the consequences come back to haunt them(if any). Some runners might be savvy enough to keep themselves from getting fallout from this, which will undoubtedly add to the complexity of their plans.

With two successes on levitate I can transport about four normal metahumans, or 1 troll + a bit. How is that difficult? Plus it gives a while new meaning to the word "meatshield".

Yes but remember "meatshield" equals "less salvagable wear" ... especially when the explosive rounds start landing

Bah, cyberware doesn't break...

That's only in living bodies. In corpses it becomes very fragile.

I also have the Fix spell, so, there!

I can just see a troll street sam sitting there in a pile of bits singing.

The ankle bone is connected to the shin bone .. the shin bone is connected to the ... what the hell is this bit !!!

Hey guys ... we have 2 heads but only 3 feet here !!!