I read this post and had to agree. Then I started trying to think of ways that we suspend our disbelief. I'm hoping others can add more ways, or even more problems of why criminals/shadowrunners would soon get caught.

1. A big reason and one I think people keep getting away from is if it is financially feasible to even try to apprehend the perpetrator. Say the victim decides to find the shadowrunners. Fine, they find them, they apprehend them. Now what? Whatever they did or stole is likely long gone or cannot be undone by the culprits. Chances are the victim knows who hired the runners just by figuring out who benefits from it. It's the basis for why shadowrunners exist in the first place instead of corporate black op teams. They are just a layer of deniability.

2. Yes, in a perfect world, there are cameras everywhere, and ways to track everything. But the world of SR is hardly perfect. Cameras cost money to install and maintain. First they need to be budgeted to even install them, so a cost analysis needs to be made as to whether or not they make sense, then some greed and corruption get thrown in as to whether the approved hardware actually gets installed or if several of the folks involved say it got installed and pocket some nuyen, or if they install inferior hardware or even facsimile hardware that only looks like the hardware (think of all the domes that supposedly have cameras inside.) Then, even if the real deal, real good tech gets installed, will someone shoot it out or steal it? Then there's stuff like acid rain and pests that like to eat stuff, especially awakened pests and nuisances.

In Star Wars, someone pointed out to me that they made the technology seem like it had been around for ages by having it break down and having used droids, etcetera. I look at SR as the same thing only put greed as a big factor as well as a more hostile mother nature.

They don't get away with it. In my games your life span is limited, and directly related to your usefulness as an expendable tool. But we don't go for the so called "Pink Mohawk" style of game either.

In my games you can get away with a lot-expending the resources to track down every criminal act isn't conducive towards the bottom line; sometimes the crime in question fits someone else's goals; if you're busy distracting my opponent's why not let you eventually burn their bottom line; but yeah if you pop your head up you stand a chance of getting pounded down.

In our games few criminals live to see retirement.

Paul, you're in the prison business? Just thinking I recall this and how it should heavily influence your outlook.


I almost forgot a HUGE reason: Extraterritoriality. “Extraterritoriality”, meaning that any land owned by the corp is sovereign territory only to the corp and immune to any laws of the country within. Why would one sovereignty care about a crime committed against another sovereignty? Or help, or if they did help, give it much priority or resources?

Right on both accounts. I work on a Gang Task Force, and I also do some other things-and between my experience (Both at work, and with other Law Enforcement Agencies) and the experiences of people I know the one common factor is that lot's of people get away with stuff all the time; but the ones who get caught either pop up on the radar because they did something big or they were dumb.




A variety of reasons. Some of the time you can count on this-but to count on it all of the time is inviting disaster. Sure Ares could care less that you murdered an Aztechnology Security Goon-but they can stand gain by catching you for several reasons:

• Publicity. "You couldn't do this but we could."
• Publicity. "We're Ares, and we catch murderer's. Period."
• Publicity. "Ares let's stone cold killers go."
• Catching your ass can give them something to trade to a rival. "We have what you want. Now what will you trade for it?"
• Convenience. "Mess with the big boys and end up dead. we're an exclusive club, and sure we mess with each other-but you're not in the club."

Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list, and obviously your mileage will vary. Extraterritoriality has it's ups and downs. A smart runner will make use of it, but not couunt on it.

Oh I wasn't saying extraterritoriality was a free pass at all. And I agree, there are reasons for cooperation.

But I think it is a huge reason shadowrunners have any hope for existing.

Take an example of a murder in another country, especially one without extradition or that we are not on amicable terms with. Would this country even be aware of it? Would the country where the murders were committed even alert us? (Especially if it made them look bad.) How much help would they expect? How much help would we give? I'm sure for different crimes the answers would vary. But I think about a lot of suspense/terrorist fiction and getting into the country is a big point and it seems like it is a race to get out of the country after the deed is done or after the plan has been foiled. I like to think extraterritoriality works in a similar way.

There's no need for that much disbelief suspension.
This is one of the basis of the concept behind Shadowrun.

First of all, there's something important to take into account.
Shadowrunners don't exist: They live under the radar, in places where there is no law enforcement, no cameras, no IDs. The best bet to find a trail to a runner's location would be Magic, and even that might have problem with the background count.
Shadowrunners are professionals: At least, they know how to lose a trail, they know they need a ward to be safe against spirit search and so on.
This makes Shadowrunners difficult, and costly, to search for. It's not impossible, you just need enough time and/or money on hand.

Now that you've got that in mind, let's move on.

Why don't corp catch the runners who ran against them?
Shadowrunners work on contract: Once the stolen prototype is in the hands of the rival corp, catching the runners won't bring it back to you. The only thing you could do to get it back (besides hiring shadowrunners to do the opposite thing) is show the corporate court that your rival corporation stole it. But Shadowrunners are deniable assets. Even if you caught the runners, you wouldn't be able to prove a rival corporation hired them.
So catching the Shadowrunners once the mission is over isn't worth the cost.

This leaves law enforcement, who are actually paid to catch them, even if there's no prototype to recover. There are two things to take into account here:
1. Nation states are down, crime rates are up: A good police force is costly to maintain. Catching high-profile professional criminal isn't something prioritary for you when you have little money and especially when you have go-gangers with assault rifle and rocket launchers attacking people on the highways. Shadowrunners don't cause as much trouble to your city/state as gangers do, they're much harder to catch and, in most cases, they're lesser known than gang leaders.
2. Extra-territoriality: "We're looking for the terrorist who blew up bat. B last night. From what we know, they were firing from an Aztechnology territory and are now hiding in UCAS territory. Don't forget that you're working for Ares, not Knight Errant, even if we've got the contract, the Sprawl isn't your turf. I've heard that they've had enough with some of our colleagues treating them like underlings and it won't be easy getting them to co-operate. Oh, and we've got the UCAS feds wanting to take over the investigation because many UCAS citizen were killed in that attack. Problem is, we don't want them nosing in our business. We'll try to slow them down as much as possible, but don't look for any coorperation on their part. Oh wait. I've got a mail from Internal Affairs and... they say they'll handle the investigation?! There's no way we're letting them take all the credit we deserve!"

Explanation here:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/689/panel3.jpg/

I wouldn't underestimate #2. It takes time to sort that stuff out and even then it might lead to nowhere. "What do you mean that our ballistics experst got it wrong and no one was there." (Ares Shows proof via math and lasers). Aztechnology responds "Yeah but our cameras in the area show no one's there and well that means your investigation is flawed." (Video of location pinpointed by KE as the shooting spot shows it as an empty balcony at the time of the attack). 3 weeks later after going back and forth, KE drops it as they would need to get high powered lawyers involved to investigate the balcony.

Aztechnology later discovers the feed was hacked, but decides in the interest of not exposing this flaw in their security decide not to tell KE/Ares.

Actually, I think this somewhat ties to a trend from the last 10 years or so. When cyberpunk came out, it presented a dystopia. Whats a dystopia? A place where everything that could possibly go wrong, had. It is insanity and lunacy of a broken system.

By definition, a dystopia cannot exist. It is unbelievable. Systems do not break. They are tested and the parts that fail get fixed. Nobody would just let it go along, broken as it is. So, when you delved into cyberpunk, you accepted you were in a fictional realm where the running joke was "lets see just how fucked up things be". Players accepted this, and perhaps more importantly, so did writers.

Somewhere along the ones, the trend veered off course. People wanted everything explained. Everything had to make sense, all the way up to the root cause. In this symbiotic relationship between readers and writers, writers started writing less cyberpunk and more "logical progression", albeit a bit cynical. And if you try to go a bit creative and back into cyberpunk roots where shit just happens because it's cool that way, people will reject it as "that could never happen".

Soooo... Thats where I think we are. Shadowrun was built on the premise of a future that is impossible, which we slowly tried to skew back not something we think should be possible. It's not terribly cyberpunk anymore, because cyberpunk is impossible and dysfunctional, and people today don't like that.

That it's impossible is what I like about cyberpunk. I love how broken the world is in those instances. If I wanted real life accuracy I'd go do it in real life.

The part regarding cameras made me think of what someone else here posted a long time ago. I know I'm gonna butcher this, but it was along the lines of something like "Big Brother has ADHD and is on sensory overload".

And don't forget other lines that've been around for years: "Truth is stranger than fiction." & "If it can happen, it will."

Two of the things they bring up in the books, which act to ameliorate the surveillance that is present everywhere, are data balkanization, and data overload.

Data balkanization: corporations are paranoid and protective of their intelligence, and tend not to share with each other.

Data overload: the information you need is out there. Good luck sorting through all of the worthless drek out there to find it.


That said, I still think the best you can do is rationalize things enough to slap a veneer of verisimilitude on Shadowrun. The good thing is that shadowruns actually owe a lot more to crime dramas and action movies, and anyone familiar with either of those should be used to high-octane adventures that don't make much sense if you slow down and think about it too much.

There will be a point where some exec looks at the numbers and decides that trying to extract a measure of blood from the runners will cost more than simply starting over from scratch.

Don't forget that Shadowrunners aren't always out there committing crimes. Sometimes they're out there solving crimes, albeit this will likely be extremely rare. Smart LEOs will be able to see the difference and leave runners alone if possible, though corrupt LEOs or those with a grudge might just arrest a runner for whatever reason they can figure.

Now if a runner's being stupid and flagrantly breaking the law regularly then they should expect a pair of stainless steel bracelets and a criminal SIN once they FUBR.

I think there is something to the idea that almost all law-enforcement is run by for-profit companies and as such they're more concerned with the bottom line than enforcing the law. That means the laws the do enforce will likely be the ones that directly affect their bottom line: keeping gangers out of nice neighborhoods is a biggie, the public likes it and the LE corporation can point to it and say, "Look at the good we do." Shadowrunners are hired by corps (generally) to hit corps (generally). As long as what they do stays in the shadows, there isn't much incentive for law enforcement to seek them out.

On the other point: by definition, dystopia cannot exist, but neither can utopia. They're ideals, one is too good to exist and the other is too bad. But between lies the spectrum.
That, to me, is a pretty good rundown of one of the primary elements of SR (or cyberpunk in general). I don't think it's unimaginable, but even if it were that's not necessarily a knock against. The world of today would be considered unimaginable if you were to go back and try to explain it to people in the 1950's. Times change faster than people.

I think Backgammon made an interesting point.
Though I guess you could make a dystopic cyberpunk universe that'd still be pretty much believable. That's what I try to do in Style Over Substance.

I don't work in law enforcement like Paul but I do work in IT security and I know a thing or two about the Matrix side.

We see a lot of stuff, now, with people getting away with all sorts of crimes. Many people already believe proceeds of cybercrime and economic warfare now outstrips the drug trade. Hyperbole or not, these people ARE getting away with it.

I don't see how people can't get away with it in future. Between fake SINs, hiding your astral signature, metamagics like Masking, spirits who can manifest/posess (or bipedal drones), fire guns and leave no evidence I think nothing is outside the realm of plausibility if you're very creative. At our table we're having a field day attributing blame for our crimes to our enemies and having a ball. We have made mistakes along the way but very few that would get our characters nabbed IMHO.

- J.

Oh, the camera thing, I forgot to say something about that.

So, back on the cyberpunk thing - one of the things about cyberpunk iks the failure of the system. You have advanced technology (that's why its in the future) which we go like "wow, thats awesome, thats so advanced". So why do shadowrunners get away with it? Because those high tech gadgets are broken and nobody repairs it. Because the guy looking at the camera is getting a blowjob and isn't looking. On the surface, it's a shiny apple. On the inside, it's just broken. That's cyberpunk. With the exception that if you piss off someone powerful, suddenly, all those gadgets that are normally broken, get fixed and turn against you. It's a 2 tier system. Normally shitty, powerful all of a sudden.

Transhumanism Noir. Never overlook the (meta-)human element

There is another element to think about in the whole dystopian future line of reasoning. The idea that the shadows are actually a better purer more honest world than the governments, megacorps or even organized crime. The straight world is run by the corrupt and full of sycophants, drones, and wage slaves. Most of the truly honest, creative, and talented people are either ground down or forced out.

The A list are all independent contractors as are most of the B listers. That means that the vast majority of corporate security forces and even government police and military are C list mooks or worse. The same is true for their magical and matrix assets as well.

This justifies why the world's greatest computer programmer is hacker working out of the basement of an abandoned building. It also explains why no one in the corporate world can catch him.

Unfortunately, that's a very common misconception.

Looking through the source material [rules, scenarios, fiction], many of the people involved are legitimate and paid up members of society.

The misconception [and the main reason I gave up on SR] is that shadowunners are all criminals - completely ignoring the archetypes and characters that are private investigators or special ops, for instance.

Realise that a shadowrun runs the gamut from illegal to semi-legal and the characters involved becomes a much broader spread, and the activities involved become less black and white.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

@Backgammon

This is not true. Afrika is a real life dystopia. A whole continent full of it.

The point is, for such a setting you need reasons why it is this way and this gets more and more difficult if you introduce modern technologie.

It is like a having an episode of enterprise in a real fucked up world, torn apart by war. With everything which comes with it.
You can't really make it a dystopia because you have this bubble of "we have a lot of spare time and our livestook is provided to us by technologie and we can overpower every faction we dislike". Can't run like that.

Same thing in Shadowrun. As soon as you make things shine, well they are shiny.
It is the same thing as running horror adventures with Paladin like characters. Burn in the light of my god/godess abomination! Sort of missing the point.

Shadowrun has a lot much too shiny toys. Some geneware, production technology, healing magic, unlimited energy due to fusion and so on.

Cross Shadowrun with Fallout and you got a dystopia of hell!
And it would be believable.
Think of one shadowspirit running a town...


To get back at the getting away point: Here it is exactly the same thing. Much too shiny toys, making work easy.

Lets look a simple example(low tech for easyer understanding):
You are a small tribe and you want to steal food from the big tribe. (More or less what SR do)
This is easy if a village are some huts and in one is the food to steal. You sneak in the village, knock out the guy guarding the food and get away.
Now they are building a wall. Of course you may now use a better tool to hit the guy over the head, but the wall will block you on your way out and in.
They are using fire to see in the dark. Of course you may use fire too, but this might just call for a much more violent reaction. And so on.

As it stand physical crime gets more and more difficult with raising technology. You are always on the lower end.
(Magic in SR actually increases this problem, due to the way it is balanced)

An agent won't look at porn, if if is supposed to watch the feeds. A ward will alert the mage, who build it and so on and so forth.

That's a pretty ugly, broad, brush you're painting with.

I have always liked the cyberpunk style. However it originated 30+ years ago now, and is now getting tired. Modern tech has surpassed fiction.

In 1980 a 1 gig hard drive cost $40,000 (1.1 million adjusted for inflation) and was the size of a kitchen refrigerator. I just bought an 8g thumbdrive for 10 bucks.
The 1982 Cray 2 supercomputer had the processing power of a PS3, needed its own dedicated 3 phase power line, and was liquid cooled. My ps3 should be liquid cooled...
In 1984 the idea of a city wide CCTV surveillance system was still fiction and was felt very big brother esk (CCTV was used, but on a small scale).

Honestly, it was written from a different world, and the moment you look closely at it, it all falls apart. So just shrug and say "Yeah, but HEY, Dragons and shit.". Works for me.

90% accurate though, as soon as you step out of the tourist centers . .

My only problems with Suspension of Disbelief with Shadowrun is Astral Space and Hacking.

The idea of Shadowrun I still think fits in well with a future Dystopia where Corporations rule and countries are mostly meaningless political lines. I think Blade pointed out many of the reasons why Shadowrun works.

Shadowrunners themselves are deniable assets. If you've been the victim of a sabotage, why would you bother hunting down and prosecuting the saboteurs unless it would lead you to the person who hired them? Unless you think those Runners "know too much" or that they might get hired to hit you again in the future, you're better off going after the rival corp, not the Shadowrunners. Even if you catch the Shadowrunners, the corp who hired them will just hire a different team for the next job. Then when you're sabotaged a second time, the board of directors is going to take a real close look as to why your reaction to the first event was so ineffective.

I think it helps remembering that the world of Shadowrun is practically post-apocalyptic. Billions of people have died as a result of VITAS and various other disasters. Some areas of the world are modern city sprawls, and others are burned out ruins. There are LOTS of places out there in the world to disappear in, even in the sprawl.

As I said in the beginning, my two issues are Hacking and Astral Space.

Hacking, I brush off as "this is cyberpunk". Realistically, hacking wouldn't be nearly as "easy" as Shadowrun makes it out to be. What a Hacker can do in a few minutes would realistically either not be possible, or take weeks or months of programming, social engineering, etc. But, we WANT to be able to hack stuff, it's cool, so we allow it to happen.

The second is Astral Space. Spells I don't have a big problem with. They can be worked with. It's the fact that Astral Space brings with it a total destruction of privacy that I don't think is evident in the Shadowrun world. There's no way you can have enough Wards for all the trouble Astral Projection or Spirits can get you. The Astral security in the game world is impractical to use on a large scale, meaning just about everyone's lives are out there to be observed by any Awakened.

I don't have a really big problem with either of these though.

I wholeheartedly agree!

IMO, Shadowrunners get away with what they do largely because the police aren't police anymore. They're a corp. They're not going to waste resources anymore than any other corp out there. Because of the weird divisions in jurisdictions, the lack of local government law enforcement, everyone safeguarding their own intel, and everyone looking only at their own bottom line, the legal system is quite broken.

Joe Average accepts this because he or she has to - the Corp looks after their interests, or (more likely) no one does--so keep your mouth shut and your ass covered. Rich folks don't accept it - they pay for better service, and if you screw enough with them you're toast and you get to meet Bubba the Love-troll. The corps don't care because they cater to their own, and the breakdown means that they can do what they want - within reason. Shadowrunners accept it because, well, they'd be out of a job otherwise.

This break down of the system is the original reason Shadowrunners exist; both the black trench coat mafia and the pink mohawk crowd. They're just different levels and expressions of deniable assets, and for the most part it isn't worth the corps' money and time to chase after them.

That, and as was said - there is simply so much information out there that it's a pain to try and sort through it all. It's like searching google for the word 'fu' when you want to find a specific person with that name, only at the same time you are chatting on facebook, watching two newscasts, playing chess and word feud simultaneously--all while on the overcrowded subway on your way home from a very long, strenous day at work, being rubbed up against by a sleazy clown.

This is something I guess very few people have problem handwaving. Because it just works like that in this world.
More "indirect" stuff is not that easy.

Agreed. Do an image search for "president of Zimbabwe mansion". That's how the guy at the top lives--in a nation where the per capita GDP is about $400-$500 a year.

Backgammon has it absolutely correct.

The setting is dystopia. That means it's all broken already; broken for the runners, broken for the corps, broken for everyone. If you're a corp, that means your security work is sabotaged by middle managers trying to make their competitors look bad, computer systems which your techies don't understand well enough to properly patch, police who rob YOU, and a boss who will literally have you dragged in the back and shot for passing a negative report up to his superior. Shadowrun shares a surprising amount with Paranoia.

But I'll also say, shadowrunners are pre-eminently replaceable. If you're a Johnson looking for someone to bust into your enemy's show room and grab the prototype, you don't care if they die. You don't care if they're idiots. You don't even especially care if they fail. They're cheap enough that you can just toss 'em. And even if a group of runners is publicly crucified, there's still a thousand more dudes out in the barrens who are willing to risk that at the chance of wealth, underworld fame, tail, or just a chance to flip the bird at the man. There is no punishment you can invent which will stimy the number of potential runners, or even significantly increase their cost.

Corps hunting runners is like sniping pawns as a chess strategy. You squish the pawns that happen to be in the way, but otherwise you should probably be paying attention to the queen.

To take that analogy of chess further, pawns that can be replaced pretty much as needed.

Systems can break down, and have in the world we are currently in. Examples include: Laos, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, and North Korea. All of these countries, at one point, had functioning societies. They are all collapsed sinkholes now. There was no repair when the parts of the system failed, because those in leadership had "More important" things on their mind.

Now look at the Shadowrun timeline. Starting in 1999 to the present day, there has been turmoil, economic collapse, near war, magic disasters, worldwide disease epidemics and twice the world information networks have been destroyed.

Shadowrun is not "The Modern day with cybertech and magic" Only a comfortable middle-class upbringing would make someone that blind. Shadowrun is after the collapse. It is a true dystopia, with walled enclaves holding peace and serenity at the expense of freedom, while death and disease rings the outside. It's not "How fucked up can we make it?" The world IS actually broken. What you're fighting for is who gets to rebuild it.