At dinner with some friends, but I'll post something to that effect when I get home in an hour

I hope Tabby included some info and did not only send the 2 photos, because Kim already forgot the address.

She pinged your commlinks with the package, including the photos and the address. When you pull it up, it shows a little countdown clock to 6pm as well.

Oh, I thought you meant Kreskin's.

Just noticed the wiki says Stalker in stead of Striker at the contacts page.

LOL, you know you can change it right?

It's because Klink was reading from the module information. I mistyped his name as Striker in an early post, and decided to just run with it instead of fixing it after I'd typed it half a dozen times.

I think that's a good place for us to all meet and get in one car - but Kreskin's going to avoid talking too much about the job in a place where the Fixer might be listening in. Once we're all at J#5 we can hop in the van and talk in relative privacy on our way to the Sioux.

Works for me

Looks like JP just put you at the hub with the rest of us. As that's a free border crossing for all of us, lets roll with that?

Yeah, well, dramatic license and all that. Just wanted to kick start things a bit.

I'm currently apartment hunting. I'm keeping an eye on the thread but my actual posting will be done a bit for a while.

Looks like things are still a bit hectic here for another day or two for me (my shift has changed 3 times in the past 5 days, in such drastic amounts that I had to have days off in between, though they weren't really days off (basically I woke up, ate, and went back to bed). I gotta get headed to work so I'll check out posting IC either from there if I have time, or sometime this afternoon after I get off work (i.e. middle of the night/early morning for you all). Looks like I'll be working days now for a bit if my schedule stabilizes.

Don't worry too much. Nothing crazy going on yet. Plus JP has your stats, so if he thinks you would have wanted to roll something, he's got your back.

Today was a good day to be away, actually, as I was roped into cleaning the garage. Four hours later, we can fit both cars in for the first time since, oh, before summer last.

Oh, and good discussion in the IC thread. Good stuff to know about one another.

Of course, I've yet to wave 25K under your noses for offing somebody.

With sleep's disrupted work pattern, I took the liberty of advancing the plot without a post from Doc. Feel free to chime in with a backdated post if you have something you want the taciturn dwarf to say to her compatriots before you arrive on-site.

Kim, I assume from the text that the mindlink is with Kreskin, as he's the only one you're touching, and who would be a volunteer for the procedure?

that sounds about right.

I posted up a question in the IC, but I intentionally delayed it by 2 minutes, giving Falcone a chance to answer Angel's question first.

Didn't notice the timestamp difference, as I was typing his answer when you posted, and it answers your question. So we can just assume you snuck it in there as well, or you can edit your post to take that into consideration.

I'll just remove it.

Also, Kim and BlackHat, the metagame reason I wanted you both to tag-team the negotiations is to perform a teamwork test on the negotiations, might as well get an extra dice or two. Don't forget to add in the street cred +1 to social tests now.

Yeah, that's right. Since he suggested we’d try a good runner/bad runner routine, I imagined he would like to be in contact with Kim without anyone overhearing. Also Kim has no clue what his plan is, but she thought it would at least start with the good runner and hopes he’ll fill her in on his plan when needed.

Trying to get a post in before lunch ends and I have to get back to work. Unusually busy day today.

(double-post)

Going to include a negotiation roll with my next post. Over the course of the conversation, I'm hoping we can have Kreskin and Angel play off one another, and basically count it as an assist. He could get up to 3 dice from Angel, so I'm going to add them to the pool, but feel free to lop dice off the right, if she ends up getting less than 3 hits on her negotiation test.

I'm also thinking about spending edge, after the fact, to reroll failures, but let's see how the initial roll goes.

Alright, I have his counter roll, just need to see how may successes Kim gives you on the roll, and whether you choose to edge it or not.

I already did edge it in my roll (and that second roll also depended on how many assist hits I got)

Very nice. So, 3 assist dice = 7 hits on Kreskin's final result.

Saw you'd rolled it, wasn't sure if you intended to use it if there weren't a bunch of extra dice from Kim.

I'll take it from here.

I was going to use it anyway (since it would have still meant rerolling 7 dice)

(day of the double-posts)

Yeah, I kinda thought that the mindlink would help with the teameffort, but the rules say it's a -2 dice

Not bad not bad. Were you saying, "papa needs a new pair of shoes" when you rolled?

By "He smiles wryly, waiting for your final yea or nay." do you mean we need to take it or leave it? or is there time for a slight counteroffer?

The way I see it, offering us more money up front only helps us in the event that we accept his job, and then bail on it halfway through (and don't fail because we died) - which is a situation I assume he'd want to avoid. Assuming we really are in a hurry (and won't be trying to save this guy over the course of a week or more), we don't have the time to hunt down any gear mid-run, anyway (and even if we have a day or two, and wanted to put a rush order on something, it would cost a lot more for us to add dice to the availability test). I don't have all the details on the job, obviously, but it seems like his counteroffer only makes it easier for us to make sure we have what we need to save his friend, if we're willing to have less money at the end of the day.

I could say as much, IC, if he seems willing to still haggle, or I could just accept since 7K for a fetch-quest sounds pretty good to me - but I don't expect we'll do anything more with the up-front money than we did during the last job.

What do you guys think?

7k is nice, 3k up front is good as well. Just ask him to cover reasonable "business" expenses and then things like ammo, rentals, bribes, etc won't cut into our individual profit margins.

I'll try, but the thing is, I don't think that's the sort of request most Johnsons would agree to. Usually, writing a blank check like that means that your team will be trigger-happy and sloppy, since they'll have an excuse to pull out their most expensive (and fun) toys, and then write them off as business expenses later on. Its much harder for him to renegotiate after the job (when we're holding the thing he wants) than it is before the job (when he can still look for another team).

In this specific case, he already said he was giving us 5K (now 15K) up front to cover our expenses, so in his mind, he's paid for ammo/gas/bribes/etc already, and he probably doesn't care if or how we split that.

That's why you say reasonable expenses.

I agree with Blackhat on that one.

That's why he's paying 7K, because reasonable expenses have already been calculated into the pay scale.

Ehhhh....

Shadowrunners are like consultants. Someone has a problem, they hire a specialized 3rd party to perform the task.

Consultants get paid $x/hr, which is their pay.

They get reimbursed for "reasonable" business expenses incurred on behalf of the customer.

Every game I've every played in, with any GM, has usually let my teams get reasonable expenses included, or well at least after they had earned some street cred. The point of expense reimbursement is to make sure the consultant actually makes money. What if we have to spend 30k to buy information. All that effort and risk to get 1k just to keep our reps to complete the job. The dude is in the consulting business. I'm sure he'll understand.

Edit - usually I'm the face tho, and typically rolling 15 dice to negotiate. So that might have some implications in the success or failure of obtaining coverage of reasonable expenses.

Edit 2 - if you feel more comfortable, I typically phrased it like this "coverage of all reasonable expenses up to $2k, which might include bribes for information, items required for the mission that are unusual, etcc"

Right, I'll ask, but legitimate consultant agencies would work a little different, since they are more accountable. They have receipts and such, and both sides can take legal action, if someone tries to change the deal afterward. Shadowrunners are only accountable as far as their reputation (notoriety) allows, and its a lot harder for us to prove that we paid bribes, or that it really was mission-critical that we tap into APDS rounds, or whatever. If you give Runners a blank check, they can come up with some awfully expensive and creative solutions to your problem, and can probably legitimately explain that all of them contributed to the success of the mission, somehow.

Your example does highlight why I think that moving cash from the end of the run to the front only helps us succeed at his goal, if we're willing to accept less net-profit. Now he's expecting us to be able to handle expenses up to 15K in value, but its still the case that every nuyen we spend on expenses comes directly out of our profit margin - so we're not going to spend that extra 10,000 (or even the original 5,000), at all. In fact, any time we happen into a situation where we could spend money to improve our odds of success, we probably won't, unless the alternative looks really bad, because, whether we end up succeeding or failing in the mission, our profit shrinks if we spend money trying.

Also, our incentive to finish is diminished, because the payout at the end has actually decreased proportionately to what we've already been given. I don't think either of these two outcomes is what the Johnson intends, so if he's up for a counteroffer, I think we can come to an arrangement that means less money up front for us (which we won't be spending, immediately, anyway), but more money if we manage to succeed to his satisfaction (so we have MORE incentive to finish, not less).

Right, what I am saying is that he has already effectively said he was paying us up to 5K for those kinds of expenses, AND that he was going to give it to us up front (as a show of good faith, or in case we don't have the cred on hand to cover the expenses ourselves)... and he has since raised that to 15K,... which sounds great... but the problem is he's doing this by taking money from the profit at the end of the run.

If we actually SPENT his entire expense-money on expenses to bail him out of his jam, we'd end up making less money than if we hadn't negotiated at all, and simply had less expense money to work with. If we don't spend the entire expense-account, then it ends up not mattering for us, because at the end of the day, we brought home the exact same amount of money we would have, anyway.

While I agree that the incentives to complete the mission with due diligence are being misplaced by frontloading our compensation, I don't (and never have) seen the pay as anything more than that. Perhaps you can swing back saying less upfront, but more if we succeed. Something like 2k up front, but 8k upon completion?

Something like that was my basic plan, but that was why I wanted to ask JP if Kreskin thought negotiations were over, and this was a take-it-or-leave it situation, or whether he thought it would be appropriate to make a counter-offer.

It sounded like his counter offer to the intial proposal upon you and Kim saying that it might be difficult and there are more unknowns than knowns at this point.

Wow, wish I could have interceded sooner. The feeling that you're getting is that the man has spent some time evaluating what this misadventure might cost his company, and decided to pull out the stops. He's an old pro, and if he didn't come up with more money after your very hard negotiations, there's probably not anything left in the well to bring out.

Maybe we lost the negotiations?

Going back to his first offer, which I've just reread a little more closely...

It reads, to me, like 7k payment + 1k expenses,

No we won, but not by much. Since he's a business man and was once a fixer, he eyeballed the job, potential cost to his business and preset a limit on total funding available for the mission. There was never a budge on the total, just the amount we could up front to handle expenses....

As long as Kreskin has the idea that we've pushed as hard as we can, we'll accept the job, but since he's playing the hardball negotiator, I'm gonna have him raise a little bit of a stink first.