Agreed. I don't think there's a static methodology for hiring help. Some jobs require a real team of professionals. Others might only need an idiot with a grudge, and a few Molotov's. Mr. Johnson hires accordingly. And while some of the process is indeed subject to negotiation, in my own games I try to keep in mind the market value for what the job entails. Murdering Joe Q. Public is a lot easier than taking out Damien Knight. Breaking into the Stuffer Shack is easier to arrange than breaking into the Aztechnology R&D lab.

At our table, and obviously this is a personal preference thing-everyone has their own style, and there is no wrong style-the players and I understand that different Johnson's will have different levels of resources available to them. Demanding an outlandish payment is just as passé at our table as low-balling is.

Oh and I like what cndblank says about the ebb and flow of work. I use a similar approach, as a GM towards equipment and weapons. Some months grenades are easier to get than others.

I never meant to imply that. It's just that in most games, and the various bits of fluff in the game, it always seems like its the Johnsons who have all the power at the table and that prices are either set in stone or otherwise ignoring the player's skills and responsibilities.

Cash rewards are treated solely as a character advancement tool where you expected to put every red cent into buffing your character, and losing those resources during the next job is not only expected but the desired outcome. I'm just not a fan of that kind of mentality is all.

But even when its the runners setting the price, that doesn't mean they can go outrageous and demand unreasonable pay checks for all the reasons I mentioned in my previous post and more. It's very much an "ebb and flow" thing there, too. If the players are stupid and start demanding crazy paydays, Johnsons will walk out of the room, their reputations will tank, and they'll soon find themselves jobless.

Honestly it's more of a perception thing than anything. Negative reinforcement vs. positive reinforcement. Yadda yadda.

*Nods*

Yeah, we don't see things too differently!

I think a quick plausibility test for payout would be:

Could the runners have accumulated the equipment they started with if they'd been doing jobs earning this much, with expenses this high, in the past?

Uh... you didn't want to do that particular check in older versions of this game...

The problem is that cash rewards should work as a postively reinforcing cycle - you get cash, you invest it, you get more cash, you reinvest it - and so on. This disregards the varying value of cash for different archetypes - for some that cycle does not work, because they have to invest karma to eventually get more cash, but the karma cycle is at least theoretically static - karma rewards are more per run than scaling with the difficulty, or at least the scaling is very small compared the increased investments necessary.
Even for cash, there is a threshold - and it's not low - at which that cycle can suddenly start working. That is when runs start bringing in loads more than lifestyle eats up. And that's very real-life-like. IRL, if you invest small your payouts are small. Invest big, the payouts are big. But it's not actually realistic at all for a starting runner to have aquired implants worth tens of thousands if he wasn't already in the cycle. So ideally, you have to create a fluff requirement as to why this finely honed professional suddenly goes back to doing milk-runs - or else he shouldn't be doing them. BUT... there are a multitude of reasons, it's just a question of using them.

For example: My groups sam/face is a single mom who wants to give her kid the apparition of a perfect middle-class (or better) upbringing. Her lifestyle costs quite a bit, so she has to be fighting to maintain it.

So the entire equation only really works, IMHO..:
- if payouts are on the scale of the characters, and this is clearly the GM's job to make sure they are. This depends largely on lifestyle, which is why characters (i.e. players) should take care to choose lifestyles appropriate to their level of professionality. Sure, the immediate benefits of a good lifestyle don't seem to be great, but who wants to hire a bum for a high-paying job? Vice versa, if your lifestyle is too high you can never enter the cycle. Of course, it would be boring if ALL jobs were paying well. It's in the nature of being a freelancer to have varying levels of income. You can earn big, but there can be some harsh stretches.

- when keeping the mechanical equivalence of cash and karma even in the game. At least at that point I don't need to worry about consistency, it creates itself. [Admittedly my perspective is very subjective in that in no groups I've played in or ran we have put great weight on the paying for tuition aspects. Mostly self-taught usually works at no extra cost, at least if you've used the skills.] So for me, cash-for-karma creates instant satisfaction, and my group agrees.

If it wasn't obvious, I'm arguing for not being too stingy with payout.

If you want to pay thug prices, you can hire thugs, but they do only thug jobs and have only thug gear.

If the kind of job you need done requires well-equipped professionals, you have to pay the kind of money that allows people to be those well-equipped professionals; if they never get paid enough, they won't ever come into existence, because they just can't ever amass enough money to buy that good equipment.

There's the "down on your luck right now" trope, but that should be the exception, because working for less money than you need to remain a well-equipped shadowrunner is a death spiral. A runner low on cash should be taking jobs that pay more than usual (with more risk than usual) to get out of the slump, not jobs that pay too little.

There's only three reasons I can think of rightaway to take bad-pay jobs;
1) You need money right now. However, since this was a bad-pay case, that implies that a) there seems to be little risk of expensive losses, b) it's a fast job c) it pays enough to meet your immediate needs d) you can't borrow the money based on expected future earnings on more profitable runs.
2) If you're basically doing someone a favor, and it's not truly about the money. Also, hooding jobs.
3) If you're doing it as a "try-out" to build a relationship with a fixer or Johnson. Which implies you won't be working for this low wage forever.

Cases 2 and 3 are okay; if you're doing Case 1 just to meet lifestyle more than once or twice, you're in the death spiral and something needs to change. Because we all know "milk runs" are never a good thing. Try to make sure the GM sees it from your point of view.

Viewpoint is important here. From the GM side, rewards look very different than from the players' side. While the GM may think he's just getting them "lean and hungry", from a player perspective it can look sucky; it can look like you're going to end up selling equipment to buy ammo rather than eventually buying cool stuff.
As a GM, try to put yourself in your players' shoes: suddenly things can look very differently!

An occasional financial crises for the PCs is okay and has great dramatic potential, but normally it has to look like a rising trend for the PCs. Otherwise they should get a better job doing something else (but less interesting to RP).

Heh, in case it wasn't obvious, I'm agreeing with you. However, what I tend to do is give the PCs a general opportunity to earn cash on the side - if they are creative. Run payouts mostly won't make them rich, they will only allow them to get by and maybe save a bit every month. For example, the last run brought something like 10K per runner in pay, but they made 15K each on the side by blackmailing a guy with a dirty secret. Actually when this group was formed we pretty much agreed we wanted to be able to do general criminal stuff to make money, too.

There is a case where good drama can be had when keeping runners fighting to get OUT of the death spiral. Maybe that would make for some excellent roleplaying, high stakes runs, and lots of tension.

For example: Through no fault of the GM (and I'm going to put this here as a safeguard ) the PCs pissed off someone big and important. They have to make a run for it, and start fresh at a new location. They have only scant cash reserves, no safe houses, few if any contacts, etc. This is a scenario that COULD be quite fun to play, and IMHO is one of the few cases where dicking your players around a bit (via a series of challenges that are at least slightly rigged against them) can actually bring some advantages. If you make a player fight for his character a bit, then the player will get a better idea of how the character might be feeling - being down on your luck in an unforgiving world.

It's a fine line to walk, and not a playstyle for every day (too stressful ), but it has a place.

I'd like to run a campaign where I very explicitly tell the player up front that money and equipment will tend to be easy come, easy go. I'll be more generous with payouts, but sometimes they'll lose a lot of stuff. (How to do that with implants I haven't solved yet..) A bit of swashbucklerish adaptiveness will be required of them.

I personally think that payout should usually be the vast majority of a runner's income. The job is basically insane; only if it pays really well will those capable of it actually do it instead of plain burglary, robbery and so forth.

Yeah, there's a lot of people out there, desperate or stupid, who want to be runners. Because they think it's glamorous. But people actually good enough to be runners are rare, I think. It takes a lot of investment in skills and gear to become capable enough. Anyone who lugs around 250K in working gear is some kind of elite, I think, and priced accordingly. If you're competent, smart, strong, tenacious enough to be a successful shadowrunner, you could make your own other options

There used to be rules, and I'll be honest I'm not sure if they still exist in 4e, that covered damage and damage to cybernetics. (So basically if a wound was bad enough you could possible ruin ware.) Not saying that's the solution mind you...rather just a tool in the box.

If the players start making more cash form the extras than the runs, logically the charcters will drift toward ingonring teh runs and focus on the side benefits. when you're planning your own jobs, there's no time pressure and you can easily ditch the whle operation if the cookir looks too tough for your tastes withotu risqking much of your credibility. While doing that on a paid run is usually very bad in that regard.

That can be a problem if the GM had planned 'regular' runs rather than freelance operations.

If only metagame reasons put the PCs on regular runs (i.e. the players know that's the adventure the GM wants to run, but IC motivation isn't there because this Johnson pays shit) then to me some important credibility is lost by the game.

Side benefits will occur now and then, but they should remain precisely that: side benefits. The main prize should be the payout, and it should be big enough that the side benefits are only a nice extra, not the real reason to go on a run. So don't let the side benefits grow out of proportion, but don't make the run payout too small either.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the runners take the jobs because the pay is adequate - let's say a 50K job for the four-man team. But adequate doesn't make them rich. Also, the sideline opportunities arise from the jobs - for instance, if you've infiltrated a politician's home once without being detected in order to do something nasty to him (on the job), then there is nothing wrong with going in again and cleaning out the safe. You've already got all the info. Or, after having the J who double-crossed them by the balls they let him go for 150K in compensation. This is the kind of thing I have to expect to improvise.

Now in other cases the players are sometimes not quite greedy enough. Last offer they never even haggled. That's sort of... completely weird and twisted.

Well.... I was playing a character (My Cyberlogician) who was an undercover operative for Knight Errant. Eventually, I was caught by MCT and was prosecuted by the Corp for Industrial Espionage (Of course, Knight Errant left me to rot, damned Corp.). 75% of my Cyber (The less invasive stuff, essence wise) was ripped out before I was sent to to prison. Really sucked. Fortunately, I plan for suuch eventualities, and was still able to escape (even if it took me 3 months of game time to do so, and required a small bit of outside help) Point is, I had to replace all the removed 'ware. Good thing the runs payed out enough to accomplish that. Even if I had to make do with non-cyber replacment tech until I could get there. It was a LOT of fun, though.

How did that go, organisationally? Were only you imprisoned? Did the GM run solo sessions for you? Or was the entire team there? As a GM I would be wary of such things due to table hazards.

I also do make a tacit agreement with my players that there actually IS a real advancement process, so basically if I beat a PC down a bit I'll make sure to compensate him at a later date. In SR I'm not such a great friend of fast advancement - because generally even exploring the full capabilities of a character straight out of chargen is something that can take a while, but nevertheless it should be there.

Organizationally, I was the only one incarcerated, so I played a second character while the GM and I went about the stages for my escape. It was all offscreen, as far as the other characters were concerned. Once the character escaped, he underwent a bit of cosmetic surgery to alter his looks and rejoined the team. They (the other characters) were completely unaware of the reintroduction of the character (all his cyber was yoinked, after all) for a good amount of play time, right up into the end of Emergence, when I accidentally outed myself by actions that I (The New Character) should not have had an awareness of.

We were running away from the Zero Zone we had just completed raiding, in an epic fight, desperate to get back to Hong Kong to help stop the eradication of the city viaof a dozen Thor Shots. Oor greatest enemy (A Senior VP in MCT) was the only one who actually had the codes to stop the launch (All the other codes had been bypaassed, and his were the hidden failsafes), and the plot villain was trying to kill him, so we had to get there to save him (how Ironic, we had been trying to kill him for over a year) so that he could disarm the sattelite before it launched. We boarded the teams Transport Plane (Previously my character's vehicle) and I just simply disarmed all the securiity features (that they had never told the new chareacter about) because he was the best pilot in the team. It was a bit awkward there for a minute (He was, after all, a Former Knight Errant Mole, that they now knew had been compiling dossiers on allt he local Shadowrunners in the city). Ooops. Oh well, it all eventually worked out. In the end, it was a great character advancepment plot, and was a total blast to play out. He still shows up from time to time to interact with those characters.