AAA's have Technomancers in their employ. They likely rate the TM's time by their own costs, so telling a technomancer to go on a resonance realm search -when they feel that the oppurtunity costs justify the undertaking- is entirely plausible. There's nothing at all esoteric about using employees in the best interests of the company.

In other words: it isn't the poster trivializing, but the corporate culture which needs to be able to charge the correct project for the techno's time

Pretty much.

Hence why I said that the formula he was probably looking for, for Faraday Cage coverage, was the surface of a rectangular prism; 2ab + 2bc +2ac to get the total amount of material you'll need in square yards.

But this is a fuck-up of RAW, honestly. The guys who wrote that shit either didn't feel like doing the maths and just said "fuck it, cubic meters," or they thought that working out the surface area of a rectangular prism would be more maths than their players wanted to go to and so just said "fuck it, give 'em cubic meters and let 'em take it in the shorts if they want a faraday cage."




It's equivalent (spookily so, in fact,) to sending a magician on a Metaplanar Quest.

That's not something you trivialize by just slapping a pricetag on it like you do erecting a ward. Magicians can die on those quests, so can tecchnomancers. They can also fail, just like TMs.

It's not something to be undertaken lightly, especially for random acts of fraud. It's the kind of thing you do when some Runners have just erased your only copy of 10 years worth of research into something that will let you bring Rating 7 Cybereyes with Capacity 24 to market.




I beg to disagree.




And again, you're talking about something directly analogous to sending a Magician on a Metaplanar quest. Will it be done if nessessary, yes.

But even if the potential fraud costs much more than the hundred grand a good VK quotes for a resonance realm search, you have to weigh that against the possibility that your employee - your very rare and valuable employee will get themselves killed, or go braindead from failing to return.

It's not like throwing a couple of mooks into the Barrens and telling them to go get something back. If mooks are a dime a dozen, magicians are one to a dollar, virtuakinetics are probably one to a tenner, given how rare they are (and how little they trust the corps, for good reason, so there's a premium on how many will be working for the suits.)

I guess we just don't see the resonance in the same way. It's indicated that knowledge searches are undertaken in resonance realms specifically, and my reading of it was akin to a plane of knowledge. Grand libraries and such. Given that such a place only exists where things are leaning more towards 'good', (As dissonance is the matrix 'evil' and seeks to destroy knowledge), an actual knowledge search, after gaining access to the realm in the first place, is more the pain in the ass of finding the information stored under the screwy decimal system, if at all.

This differs from metaplanar quests greatly. Wheras a mage is sent to go search for... fuckin whatever it is they go search for, once a TM has access to the realm, it's like going to the library. Again, that's my reading of it though, and I'm often told I see things different then everyone else.

As far as cars, Lee Iacocca was far ahead of his time, as far as Shadowrun is concerned. His quote on the Pinto? Fabulous. "Safety doesn't sell." AAA material, through and through.

Oh, I agree that the RAW should price it by the square meter. But what's written is, cubic meter. *shrug*

And if the RAW was amended, then yes, 94m^2 at 100 each, is more money than 60m^3 at 100 each.

Exactly. When you can assign modest monetary tags to the undertakings that used to be epic and mysterious, you can safely say that the undertaking has been trivialized. There's nothing special about it, it's just another tool in their set, with its own costs and benefits: it becomes ordinary and trivial.

Which is exactly what any accounting department in a major multinational would insist upon as soon as HR approved the technomancer's contract. You gotta think like "them."

When discussing the changes to the system's fluff? I do not really think so, no. When deciding on their actions, sure.

That's basically my point.

I agree that carjacking isn't without its risks, but is it more dangerous than shadowrunning? Going after the carjacking ring is something you would do for a shadowrun. However if you're doing it as a professional carjacker, that's it. You're got your better paying criminal job as long as you can keep it*. If you're a shadowrunner, you get a month's pay and have to go raid Mitsuhama's Downtown Zero Zone next month because some dude in a themed bar will pay you.

Also why doesn't shadowrunning has it own unstoppable union? After all, shadowrunning requires a contact network as complex or not more than carjacking so people have to know you're muscling into the shadowrunning jib. While it makes less than nearly all other fields, there's still enough profit. You're also regularly going to be pissing off a lot of a people with the resources of whatever the local crime syndicate can get as well. If they're planning on killing you for being competition, they going to do the same if you ruin their life's work or take their shadowrunning job.

*- You might be going "aha! What about the next guy?" The answer is that he's very unlikely to be anywhere nearly as skilled or have the capital of a shadowrunner team. A mildly optimized (as in "high dice pools are better than low dice pools" optimized) shadowrunner team is top of the line in terms of skills in a wide variety of fields and has a million worth of nuyen in stuff. Most people aren't going to have to have the two million nuyen (1 million to train the guys and another to outfit them) to out awesome you.

This is verifiably wrong. Read the rules on pp174ff of Unwired.

Bullshit authoritative stance aside, thanks for the page reference. 173 is where I got the info, and it's pretty much coincides with memory, minus the part about info trading.

I'd like to point out that this kind of route is almost certainly how a lot of Fixers get their gear off the open market and into the black. If a bunch of runners want to do this, basically all they've decided to do is take the onus of equipment ingestion onto themselves rather then rely on their fixer to do it for them. The time it takes to make this kind of thing happen is pretty much exactly what Availability numbers are for - taking the time to make it less suspicious.

That said, there are a number of things that should be accounted for.

Issue One: don't trivialize the risks or the depth of the task itself. You can hack a loading system and say "Put pallets 1-20 of commlink response chips onto a truck. Send them to this address" and you can also hack the reporting system to say "Pallets 1-20? Not commlink response chips. Cheap optical fiber imported from Kowloon, being sent a completely different address." You can even (tediously) hack the delivery drones to report they actually went to that other address. But here's some of the shit that will get turned up as soon as the University of Washington CompSci department wants their commlink response chips, only to discover they don't exist:

1. UW asks for their chips. The facility tries to ship them. Flags go up saying "We don't have any, order some more from the supplier."
2. Facilities manager makes a face. That's n nuyen worth of shit that just went missing, since he knows he should have some in stock - statistically he shouldn't run out until next month. So he checks the back logs.
3. Backup storage indicates they were there yesterday. Today says they're not. He tells IT to run a comparison analysis, see what went wrong in the system. It says "Hey, there's a bunch of optical fiber that wasn't here yesterday, it got shipped to a warehouse on South Lake Union."
4. The manager is annoyed at this point, but is assuming it's some kind of database fuckup. He calls the warehouse on SLU, asks about the fiber. They haven't heard of any fiber. "Huh," says the Manager, "That's odd. The drones say they went there."
5. The manager tells IT to check it out. IT, being suspicious, decides to check the GridGuide records for the drone serial transponder locations, and also to check their commlink access logs for which WiFi towers they accessed along the way. The GridGuide request with Knight-Errant will take a while, but it's fairly routine. No hurry - the shit's already gone, they're just doing investigation after the fact.
6. Because the drone driving logs weren't wiped from the GridGuide main system, and because the drones weren't spoofing their Matrix access to give telemetry and delivery time back to the home office, Gridguide gives a different location for where they drove, and the matrix access point logs bear this out - as they switch from wireless tower to wireless tower, a locational path appears.
7. IT tells the manager about this. The manager, realizing this was a theft, decides to report it to Knight Errant and corporate HQ as such. He has a drink, because this is not good news.
8. Knight Errant, knowing that the shipping company's happiness is worth a little effort, decides to investigate. Even if they don't do much, they can hand it off to whatever private security the shipping company has on retainer. So KE pulls all camera footage for the drones around the area, interviews the building owner, and scrubs the building.
9. Armed with video of the face - something that almost certainly can't be avoided in 2070 - KE runs gait and facial analysis on the video, constructing likely baseline profiles and alternate appearances for the individual. They don't get any forensic data for shit, sadly, but they get a general idea that some shady shit was going down. What's more, if the Face came via a route that also has cameras - such as along most surface streets - they can trace him back to where he came from.
10. KE tells the company what they know. They set low-level, minor surveilance over the areas they tracked the Face to and from. They inform local building owners of the scam, and let them know to rent the place out - but to let KE know if anyone wants a short-term rental of their building. There might be a reward in it for them, from the company. The company, in turn, beefs up security in that city's matrix systems - pay for a couple part-time security spiders, make sure there's a physical tag on high-value crates that needs to be double checked by a warehouse employee if it's being moved out, etc.

So it's not like.. you're boned. But it's not invisible, because anytime someone loses a lot of money, they start looking into it as soon as they notice.

Issue Two: Don't assume availability tells you all you need to know about the goods. Just because something is availability X and you roll well doesn't necessarily mean you can scam it in wholesale amounts. The game system isn't intended to model stockroom filling/emptying. It doesn't matter how well you spoof a system, you just can't steal more than 5 Ferrari 458 Italias from Ferrari of Seattle, because that's all they actually have. The same is true for trying to steal, say, more than a certain amount of Rating 6 commlink response modules - there is a limit to how many are available on hand at any one location. I could see there being 10, sure. 20? Maybe. 30? Probably not. The availability 16 number means more than "hard to get illegally". It means "hard to get in large numbers."

Don't let that limit your fun, certainly. But while it's quite believable to steal several crates of pretty sweet commlinks, stealing several crates of, say, Orichalcum? Different story - because there aren't crates of it to be had, despite the fact that it's not restricted.

Issue Three: Don't forget the search power. It's fairly simple for a company to hire a magaician to summon up a spirit with the search power - the financial cost is much lower than projected future losses. And spirits have the search power. And the search power doesn't have to find YOU. It just has to find any of the goods you've sold to someone else, if those goods have any unique defining features. In part this depends on your GM's leniency for allowing a serial number to be conisdered an identifying feature. Not the be all end all, but with an interval of 10 minutes and a probable die pool of 6 to 10 dice, it can help them track down people that can lead back to you via the chain of custody for the item in question.


All that aside, I think this is totally fine for runners to pull; as others have said, most GMs grossly underpay the runners in their games, because let's face it - you wanna be James Bond, you need to make a lotta money, especially with the cost of deltaware cyber. They wanna do crimes like order sushi and not pay? More power to them. But don't gloss it over, because actions have consequences, and NOTHING about stealing large amounts of good is riskless, even if it seems like it is at first blush.

Very well summed up, Adarael.

How dare you state facts with references, UmaroVI.

OP Here.

This thread has taken a lot of turns, some more acrimonious than I've liked. It's also got a lot of great info in it.

Also, 'Thanks!' to the people who said they liked the idea! I hope everyone enjoyed reading it.

I checked with a real estate consultant in a metro area about the rental rates. He gave me info in dollars, for 2012 rates. First, the rental agent/owner wants to rent to you for a year or more; a month is going to be the shortest he'll go. That works for the runners. Second, the agent is going to give you a big surcharge since you violated his comfort zone in the first part; this will probably be a 100% or more bump.

As I described the "office", this will be "flex-space". That describes a finished (pretty, carpeted, dry-walled, etc.) area in the front for your white collar people. In the back is an unfinished (industrial, girders, concrete, etc.) area with a roll-up door for big deliveries. These are very popular, and ubiquitous. These places get about $6/square foot/year.

A 1,500 sq.ft. place would then get $9,000/year. The consultant because you are doing some weird timing, they'd probably want $2,000 for the month. I asked if this would be a special find, and he said no. Anyplace that had vacancies and didn't have a firm contract for the immediate future would take the 2 grand for the month. If a nuyen is a buck, then this space could be had for 2k. 3k would probably cover any gaffs the face made.

As to the coverage of security and other ways that the hyper-advanced society of 2070 could detect criminals: I agree. Despite the fact that Britain has spent a LOT of time, trouble, money, and civil rights CCTV'ing themselves, they've had very little reduction in crime. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/2071824.stm "A new report has said that closed circuit TV cameras have limited impact in the fight against crime.") But stuff will get better. And by 2070 you can theoretically expect that everyplace in civilized areas will have 24/7 multiple cameras. Software recognition and unlimited storage would then indicate that everything could be reconstructed, and every thing everyone ever does would be common knowledge.

It just doesn't jibe with the premise of ShadowRun. It's not fun. And it precludes the idea that there are people and a whole subsection of society dedicated to doing this kind of thing.

In fact, when I was in college I ran a game set in the kind of future. The players all quit after 2 sessions. "Too grim", "not fun". Those were the comments from my departing players.

So I also wanted to estimate the cost of the total run in dollars. What does the consensus of dollars to nuyen run?
$2,000 - Office rental
$500 - IKEA furniture
$600 - Workers : 24 hours @ $25/hour - Cleaning, assembling IKEA stuff, dogsbodies.
$1,000 - Faraday cage : 10 cubic meters. Cramped, but doable. Comfort is not the object.
$1,000 - Bribe to get in the Fulfillment Center. *Shrug*. I've never bribed anyone. It's a guess. Probably a high one.
$100 - Flowers, danishes, chuff to make the office look officy.
$100 - Uhaul cargo van: $19.95 plus $0.59/mile. Highballing it. I kinda want the van to drive a bunch of weird miles.
$300 - Faked stuff cost + delivery + COD charge.
$50 - Lysol 19oz cans. $5/can.
$300 - Disposable comlink.
$20 - Acid.
$0 - Tag eraser. My character has a tag eraser.

I get right near $6,000.

I did not include disguise, as the character I'm thinking of is a mage with illusions for that. You can also add whatever you like for the ID.

Have a great evening!

Thorguild

Adarael's post makes me glad I bought Erased...

Thorguild

Erased is indeed a godlike trait.

A full scam team of Erased 2 characters could make this a cinch. It literally doesn't matter how much evidence you leave, it'll all be gone by tomorrow.

Fun fact: You can buy it for 20 Karma post-chargen, even. It's like Initiation for thieves and con men!

Going by its description, a good hacker should be able to pull off something similar. And minding that skill rating 6 is a world-class hacker, well...

Fun fact: it isn't just for players!

I've banned Erased before. It takes too much control away from the GM. Short term imprisonment and any type of interaction with authority without a position of power ("Okay, we caught you trying to steal from our labs. Deliver the Mr. J to us and we'll forget this ever happened") become impossible because the players think/know they'll be stuck in a paperwork loop.

When the only bad thing that can happen to a player is death, they'll die a lot more often.

Well, the GM would have to specifically let you do so. Is he likely to? :/

I can't speak for all GMs, but I would under the condition that it came with a Run or specific storyline involving securing the services of someone with the expertise to put the Erased system into play.

With a good explanation for it, I don't see any reason to say no, honestly. It's as valid as anything else you do during nebulous downtime to improve your character.

That's what I'm saying, though: Erased is already an issue even at chargen where it's somewhat constrained. The GM should be very leery of the *whole* gang suddenly having 'good explanations' for it. I may not have been clear about the balance factor in my question; good explanation goes without saying.

Is it any worse than taking Debt and expecting to not pay it off with Karma, but just cash?

Anyway, skip over my post and go to his, sure! It is something deserving of its own quest, there is your balancing factor. Characters want to be Erased? You're going to have to find someone that specializes in such a service and work out an arrangement. Another balancing factor is that it really doesn't have to be permanent. Systems can be upgraded or patched, weakening the Quality or eliminating it altogether. Granted, this isn't something I'd do unless the players were seriously abusing it or a story demanded it (in which case it may be a temporary disruption), but given the text of the Quality, it is a possibility.

You mean, 'is it any worse than basically the worst thing I can think of?'? Anyway, I skipped yours because yours made sense and didn't need comment. Hehe.

lol, on both accounts!

Geeze, stupid Friday before a three-day-weekend, I'm so bored I'm refreshing DS constantly (along with a few other sites) just trying to kill time Which is dumb because if I'm going to ignore work, I should at least be working on something for one of my games.

Why in the world wouldn't you be able to pay off In Debt with cash?

I mean, that's kind of the point. You're not in the hock to Buttercup (hopefully!,) you took out a loan from some ruthless, but fair, people.

If you stroll up to their place of business and smack down an ebony credstick with 100% of your outstanding balance gleaming on the front, 100% authentic... Why in the world wouldn't it be then paid off and discharged in full?



[e]And, more to the point, if you provably discharged your debt in full and they tried to hit you up for more, they are at that point no longer collecting what is their due, they are extorting you for money on absolutely no justification. The correct response to which is not to pay them with Karma, it's not to pay them with nuyen, it's to pay them in hot lead.

Gee a large criminal enterprise with the means and will to actually enforce you to pay your debts to them is not going to engage in more criminal activities such as extortion after you have paid the debt? Or such as making some extra money by selling your information to the highest bidder (such as when some corp is actively looking for you and you're trying to hide in your safehouse). Hope you budgeted for hush money afterwards.

It's not a matter of hot lead... hot lead will only get you in deeper problem unless it's part of a larger strategy. A strategy which probably awards karma (which I'd force you to pay towards eliminating/reducing the quality). The rest of the PC's would get karma as normal for going along.

The problem is the quality is effectively a group contact in it's own right... and a powerful one at that. One you just pissed off by shortchanging them on interest. You owe them money. Simply paying off the money DOES NOT ERASE THE QUALITY. The rules make this clear. The only way to buy off negative qualities is with karma. So while you may no longer owe them cash, you still own the 30BP negative quality with a current balance of $0. And a 30BP negative quality is a big one, expect it to keep causing you problems for a LONG time.

Overall this is one of the worst qualities in the game. There's a big reason it's banned from missions and you're not realizing it.

What Falconer said. Bottom line is, it is a Negative Quality. It takes 2x the BP benefit in Karma to remove.

Two examples of dealing with In Debt:

Character A was indebted to the Triads for helping her get out of town and return to her sisters. Upon returning home to big sis, big sis got the Triads off her back by paying the debt off, however now Character A is indebted instead to her sister. Her family doesn't ask her to pay off the debt so much as they use it to influence or punish her, in grand familial tradition.

Character B had two In Debt Qualities. Paid the financial and Karma cost on one initially, now nothing hanging over that character's head. The second one was paid off, along with Records on File and Dayjob, with story and Karma (PCs as Johnsons, extracting themselves, yay ).

Paying your owed amount ahead of time, thus denying them interest (which is how they make their money) will tend to piss off folks.

That's why Credit Card companies call people who don't leave a balance on their cards "Deadbeats" (Supposedly.).

I should add that as a GM I would allow a character to alter their In Debt quality to another quality if it makes sense.

Hypothetical: Character uses a real, valid SIN to secure an auto loan with a legitimate lending institution. Pays off the car loan, but guess what? Your credit history just became easier to track, take Records on File.

Another good way to slowly work off the quality is to have the organization blackmail the PC into being a debt collector. What you're philosophically opposed to busting kneecaps?

There's a lot of ways to do this just be creative. The key is to toss out karma, and earmark that karma towards paying off the quality.

BEcause you're also supposed to paay off Negative Qualities with karma. In Debt, included.


Assuming that loan sharks (or worse, COLLEGE loan sharks) are "Fair" is basically asking for a bullet to the back of the head.


Because they'd rather you paid interest every month for the rest of your life, then beat the balance out of your wife and kids once you're dead?

Face it: most "loans" you're going to get as a shadowrunner, are going to be from crime syndicates. They don't want their "clients" to pay off the principle of the debt. They prefer the nice, steady income the interest generates. And they don't bother with simpel Repo men, they have large Ork and Troll hardbodies with a penchant for bone-snapping on retainer.


BWA HA HA HA ... yeah, you have fun with that.

Quite Simple Really. To eliminate a Negative Quality, you must purchase it off with Karma. AS A GM, I would never let you eliminate your debt financially without a commensurate (and Concurrent) elimination of the Karma Debt. It really is as simple as that.

Go ahead. The character still has a Negative Quality for the equivalent amount of BP. Player or GM can figure out what it is.

The "fluff" of the "In Debt" being an amount of money doesn't take away from the mechanic of X amount of negative BP being used to buy a certain amount of character build.

An alternative is to say, ok, you pay off the debt with cash, lose an equivalent amount of karma/BP from your character please.

It's not like the Character got cash to begin with when choosing that Negative Quality, they got BP to use.

The crime syndicate doesn't want cash back, they want the BP/Karma back. The cash was just the interest.

In fact ... I now have a sixteenth houserule. I'm rewriting "In Debt", to read:

The character is indebted to a third party, usually an underworld
syndicate, large gang or corporation, chosen by the player
with gamemaster approval. For every 5 BP taken, the character
receives an extra 5,000¥ at character creation; this money can be
above and beyond the normal 50 BP cap for gear. The character
then owes her creditor monthly payments of 750¥ for every level
5 BP taken. If the character is unable to pay that interest amount
each month, the creditor may send someone looking for her.

Not the startling absence of any "final balance due" amount in there (while the interest payments remain exactly the same for any amount of money acquired). No, you just get X nuyen now, and owe Y nuyen per month until the end of time ... or until you spend Karma (and perform whatever other action(s) the GM determines are required) to buy off the quality.

Surely we can skip the whole In Debt thing in this thread?

House rule for the forum rules? Instead of no religious/political talk it's "No religious/political/in debt quality talk"?

Actually, in this case, the existing rule would be "no threadjacking"

Actually, that's not bad. I would consider also allowing it for other obligations with equally serious consequences for not paying, like a sick child (hospital bills every month), being blackmailed by an unknown party for hush money, or the like.

Those sound good, UmaroVI.

I think one one of the simplest changes is to just make it a non quality, just use the money related rules of it as a way for player to get extra "cash" in chargen that has to be paid back ingame.

You know what happens to crime syndicates who try to extort Shadowrunners?

They wind up on the hit list of people who are, let's face, it very powerful, very stealthy, and very portable. Sure, you may be able to crush them, but they're also capable of slipping away and surgically cutting your head off if you choose to pursue this game.

The Shadows are full of dead Runners who pissed off dons... And the graveyards for people whose names end in vowels have their share of dead Dons who've pissed off 'Runners. Maybe not as many, but there's also a lot fewer Dons out there to start with. Honestly, this shouldn't come as a surprise; fragging with people who commit violent acts of mayhem professionally is a bad idea, especially when you're clearly and egregiously in the wrong.

So when Mr. Runner walks in with the full amount of his debt to you in a credstick, and is fully paid up on his outstanding interest to boot... You let it go. You pocket your money, call it a profit made, and you don't instigate something that could turn very bad for the Family. Same as for Mr. Johnson - paying the Runners their blood money is always going to be cheaper and less trouble than trying to screw them. In this case, it's letting them pay you off free and clear that's going to be cheaper than making an enemy by trying to bleed them.



At the end of the day, everybody wants the same two things.
1: They want to make their nuyen.
2: They want to live to spend their nuyen tomorrow.

So yes, you could try extorting Mr. Shadowrunner. And maybe he'll pay you. Or maybe he'll rally his team to his side for this egregious treatment and decide to show you how Shadowrunners deal with people who play fast and loose with their money. Even if you win, in the end, it's going to have cost you a hell of a lot more than trying to bleed the guy for a monthly stipend would ever have been worth.

Pretty much what SD said.

The Mafia is scary to average people. The father putting the occasional bet on the football game, with a wife and kids, has a reason to be afraid of the mob making a few house calls.

The Runner who just extracted a guy from a fucking Arcology? With no known address, vehicle, or job? With elite level skill in inflicting death? Yeah, that's the guy that takes down the all-too-public Mob bosses.

Like you said, like I said.

Compared to the drek the Runner did to get the money he used to pay you off in the first place, exacting revenge on you for trying to cheap him will be simple. Your sources of finances are known to him; they are sources he can hit hard, especially since he's likely to have access to exotic means which are frankly beyond you, exotic means like heavy artillery concealed inside a panel van, or a magician chummer who can summon Force 7 Spirits of Fire to start burning your operations down. Sure, you have the nuyen to put a price on his head, but he has the means to take your head, too.

So really, is bleeding him for a monthly "interest" charge on a loan he's paid in full worth that kind of risk? It's one thing if he's trying to ignore what he legitimately owes you, that's a matter of honor, of reputation, of face. You let Mr. Shadowrunner slide on that, and sooner or later Mr. Football Bet thinks he can slide, too.

But it's quite another when he pays you off in full and you say it's not enough.

When you do not also pay off the Karma Debt, it ISN'T Enough. You are taking a quality that MUST be paid off in Karma as well as in Nuyen. Don't complain when the characters get harrassed when they do not pay off that Karma Debt. You knew that was how it was going to be going in.

This cuts both ways, though. If someone picks up a negative quality in play, don't they get extra karma for it?