Most runs are paid for in nuyen. It's a universal currency that's difficult to trace.
However...

Wouldn't it be cheaper for the employer to pay for a run in goods they produce? If the runners agree to it the deal can benefit both parties. After all, that expensive rating 6 software that you want is probably a lot cheaper if you can convince the manufacturer' to take it off your bill at cost.

There are flaws of course, like your employer's company knowing back doors to your hardware and software, but it also means your Johnson can pay you more and have it cost him less.
Thoughts?

Why not?
There are actually times in Missions that you negotiate for cash but can get discounts off their goods. They'll sometimes give larger discounts if you take payment in goods instead of .

I see this as more an extension of The Favor System that the shadows and the fixers who run them are built on. Its often easier to get a nice piece of gear or tool you need for another job by convincing someone to give you one, than it is to buy it legally.

And it offers a great way for a Johnson to unload a potentially incriminating piece of evidence if he/she is gonna screw the runners over.

Buyer beware.

Remember, at the end of the month, unless you're spoofing your lifestyle, you're gonna need to cough up some cold, hard cash, or your landlord has you thrown out in the street.

Most "J's" are not going to pull a stunt like that unless they don't want to use deniable assets anymore. The shadows knows.... Especially when the assets survive.

True, the odds are low, but there's still the chance.

Honestly, the Johnson Doublecross probably costs more than paying the Runners their goddamn blood money would, especially if they've proven to be paranoid fuckers.

Agreed. Hiring a bunch of people because they're super resourceful badasses who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty and then intentionally pissing them off is all manner of stupid.

My runners actually really enjoy getting paid in product. One of their favorite runs was a simple side mission that paid in beer. 1500 cases of it. They barter for things a lot and used it as currency with a few of the gangs they work with. Recently had a side job where one of the guys traded some corporate vandalism and arson for connections with an anti-corp terrorist group and a truck load of ammonia nitrate. And a job where the biggest part of the pay was the Yakuza owing them "a favor" that has opened all sorts of doors for them. Though we play much closer to street level, so that might be part of it.

Unless you're corporate, of course.

~Umi

And a couple of thoughts that had come to mind when I made the above post (had to leave so I couldn't flush it out).

What if the Johnson making the payment has been replaced by an impostor who's been hired to screw over the runners?
What if the team didn't do their legwork as deep as they should have or could have with a new Johnson, who happens to be working for a corp the runners really pissed off to the extreme some time prior?

And yes, I do get what you're saying, but it's bound to happen at some point in a shadowrunner's career. The odds are really, REALLY low, but they're not zero.

Johnson can also pay them in Beta Test gear, so fresh that the markets don't even know that they exist yet! Of course, there're a few bugs, so if you could maybe fill out some paperwork for us? That'd be swell.

Access to really wiz gear being held out as a carrot for loyal groups is also VERY handy. Have one of their contacts pull two or three straight runs for, say, Shiawase, then they turn up with some awesome new bit of chrome ... BETA grade! Johnson set 'em up with top of the line doctors and custom chrome!

Good for your deckers, your street sams, heck, you can even seduce your mages with new spell formulae or discount foci.

Fantastic tool.

Mages might go for Beta grade or better 'ware, too. Plenty of mages get lightly augmented - eyes, maybe a synaptic booster, etc.

My group got paid in soymilk once...

I fail to see how this is a bigger problem when you're paid in gear than it is when you're paid normally. You end up not getting paid either way, right?

Yeah, but that post is supposed to be tied in with my previous post; "Buyer Beware".

What if an impostor Johnson paid the team with gear, which turned out to be stolen (tied to a crime, or whatnot), and suddenly *insert law enforcement Inc.* suddenly shows up at their homes looking for exactly that new gear of their's.

And taking from the story of the Kurokawa from DG & SM, a magical character gets a new and powerful focus and here comes a dragon looking for that tooth (or claw, horn, or whatever body part) of his/hers that was used in said focus's creation.

Just a few examples.

And of course the rare exception from the norm of the Johnson/Shadowrunner relationship.

Point taken. OTOH if the Johnson is going to screw you he'll find a way. Though I grant that your suggestions are very interesting... I'll have to make sure my GM sees them.

Let me guess: it was a... milk run?

~Umi

No, but it did get the group some major props for delivering it to various people who needed any kind of food or safe drink.

Now I'm thinking of paying the group in keys of Novacoke and waiting to see which one makes like Tony Montana...

Nothing wrong with some payment in goods or services from time to time. Someone mentioned you still have to pay the rent, but on occasion receiving payment other than cash makes things more interesting. The natural for Runners is to be hired by someone who has information they want/need for personal reasons.

It would help explain why the million dollar sam is running the shadows to pay rent. If you didn't pay for the ware/foci/whatever, the cost doesn't matter that much to you.

Yeah, but would YOU trust a CorpDoc?

...

Well, maybe if Tiny Tony Trog, the Troll Enforcer with a Doctorate in Cybertechnology, was watching to make sure everything went well.

Whenever your brainpan is getting opened up, it pays large dividends to have a high-loyalty contact who knows enough about cybernetic surgery on-hand to make sure they're not installing any energetic freebies.




I also reckon that the really good shadow clinics explicitly let you bring your friend(s) either into the operating room or into the observation theater, and make a point to shovel any data-collecting devices they may use during the procedure into an EMP generator, in front of you.

Even better: have a high loyalty surgeon connection with a shadow clinic

As for the OP: I think it happens a lot.
Johnson Ares offers 20k cash or 30k in assorted arms and ammo.

Personally, I'd make sure, the weapons (or whatever you get) are clean afterwards, but in my opinion it's usual for a corp to pay with its products as they have it easier to procure those and the dividend is higher than with money.
Caveat emptor, of course, as has been stated. Doesn't need to be a double cross, but the brand new cyberware you get may actually be a beta test with all kinds of glitchy things. Might just be a well-meaning J with a not so awesome product

Or the firearms might be factory seconds. The ammo listed as "Stolen" with the chemical tracers of the batch in the police computers. Or the car is a refurbished model. Or...

You get the idea.

I don't think I'd ever accept that for gear I'd actually use. Like if you worked for Ares and your J decides to reward you with the latest version of the Ares Alpha seeing as how you put one to great use. I'd take it, then I'd sell it.

If he was so trustworthy, why is he hiring you to do shadowruns?

Nuyen, please. Bonuses are fine, you can turn them into more nuyen. I'd take it to be polite, but I ain't keeping it.

Best option is the PC with the skills and equipment need to do it themselves.

I would say it's actually quite unlikely for the corp to pay with their own products, unless they don't care about everybody(potentially) knowing they were behind that run(paying with some other corps producs as missdirection on the other hand sounds more likely).
If the Johnson is an arms dealer or a shadow clinic or talismonger(for example), then payment in products is most likely much more common.

And then take the quality anyway, and say "I do all this myself ... off-camera ... *hand-wave*".

Absolutely. My Johnsons regularly pay have of the value of the run (or more!) in gear. It just makes sense. If you have something like cyber or magical equipment where you normally make a 90% markup between the factory and the consumer, that lets the Johnson keep the same incentive for the runners (more or less) but drop the cost to a tenth. Plus it builds up that sort of trust relationship that results in cheaper, better performed runs in the future.

Usually I'll let the runners get paid in cash OR twice the cash price in goods, with no availability or street index penalties. Sometimes I choose what those goods are, sometimes I let them flip through the catalog.

Everyone needs a Unicorn.

Its not the skills are the expensive, its affording the Facilities to do all that work in addition to your usual loadout.

Medical Shop 10K
Medical facility 200k

Or I can have the mobile version at 1.5 times the cost.

Augmentation pg 124

Facility, fashmility.

I'll be in an onlien game tomorrow. Sure, granted, it's a 1000karmagen game. But even without that? I've got a Battle Buddy Basic with 5's literally across the board, program and stats alike (cost around 94K ). It's not even the best (theoretical) commlink out there. And yet, I'm absolutely certain it'd do the job.

I usually offer my players a choice between X amount of nuyen or X*1.5 amount of gear and let each player decide individually. Sometimes it's a blanket "anything from the company" and other times the Johnson works for R&D or security, so they only offer Matrix gear or ammo or whatever.

Some players will take the gear while others are saving up for something specific or are paranoid, so they take the nuyen. It's always good to give players options.

Man, their talking about cyber surgery, not erasing data.

What, you can't install a home-made deltaware move-by-wire 3 with a tool kit? You obviously need to minmax your cybersurgery more!

I play SR3. Yes, it is the skills and the facilities which make it expensive.

Um. If they are, then one of THEM got confused.

In Post #33, I was quoted by Udoshi, who said "the facilities are expensive". Thepost he quoted, was me saying that hackers could take Erased, and call it "their own (off-camera) work".

You just quoted me responding to that post by Udoshi ... and I'm the one who crossed the streams?

How does that work, exactly?

Go a step or two backward in that long chain of quotes and you notice that the post you quoted from KnighAries was Quoting a post of bannockburn talking about cyber surgery.

Oh. Bugger.

:shameface:

The problem with being Erased because of your own work is that it stops working if you become incapacitated/incarcerated. Far better to have an ally or a mysterious AI doing it.



Oooooh. Potential Shadowrunner background: An AI took to a normal SINner and Erased them - everything, rendering them SINless suddenly, and they get kicked out of their corp/apartment building.

The one thing to keep in mind is that in general, the Johnson doesn't want you to know who he works for; the less accurately you can finger your employers, the more willing they're likely to be of accepting a chance of failure (though not necessarily teams who've failed them in the past). So, while they probably could save some money by offering you product from their megacorp (assuming this is a corporate Johnson) at wholesale rates, they're likely only going to do so if whatever savings this produces on their side is more than what it's costing them to keep you from making too accurate of guesses about who's hiring you after you got paid in a crate of Ares Firearms (of course, offering a crate of someone else's product as payment can be a good way to throw off suspicion, but the Johnson's likely not seeing a big savings there).

The flipside of this is availability. It's not unlikely that Mr. Corporate Johnson can have a crate of those anti-tank rounds (you know, the ones your Street Sam has been wanting to have just in case he ever needs to fight another troll in heavy milspec armor) waiting for you when you finish the run, with nothing to let Lone Star connect them to you - or even your usual arms dealer (whether Mr. Johnson's people can make that connection may be another matter). Of course, it's not unlikely that he's going to be expecting you to work for a bit less in this case; a bit less money now for the security of knowing that even if you run into something like that again on your very next run, you'll be able to put them down before they beat your rigger to death with his own combat drones next time.

As my runners tend to run once a month and do have to pay the rent etc. I almost always give them *some* cash for their run, but depending on who the Johnson is I sometimes offer them goodies in lieu of bonus cash as an option. It's all good ...

I don't see why it would necessarily be "cheaper" for the Johnson to offload some of his/her company product on runners. Due to its flexibilty, cash is always king, and if the cut-price for the goods is less than the wholesale price the company gets for it, it might actually be more expensive to them to pay runners in goods.

To me, the Johnson might offer goods if:
1) They have some heavy duty hardware they want to shift quick (and the runners are likely to want)
2) For whatever reason they cannot offer quite as much cash as the PCs should be getting, but can get their hands on some goods in addition.

"OK, why the hell did we just get paid in an ICE CREAM TRUCK?" "You're the one that insisted that Mungo go to the drop-off and pick-up payment because you had a bad feeling." "Mungo like Ice Cream!"

This is not a bad thing. This is an Opportunity.

An ice-cream truck is likely to be a large, bulky vehicle, probably a GMC Bulldog step-van. Sure, it'll likely have some of its mod slots taken up by Special Equipment (Friggin' ice cream truck!) but not all of them. It should be ubiquitous, able to travel into nice neighborhoods completely devoid of suspicion in daylight hours, and you might actually make some nuyen selling ice cream out of it while you're doing your legwork or whatever.

Nissan Coda, Ford Workhorse, or Ares Chuck Wagon more likely, if you have SotA '74. And the equipment for the ice cream is included in the Amenities upgrade that's standard.

On the flipside, Mungo probably ate all the ice cream on the way back to the group's squat.

QFT

There are some dumbass Johnsons out there though....

It seems unlikely that even a very ice-cream enthused troll could eat an entire truck's worth of ice cream on the way back to the group squat. Even if he was very excited about now owning an ice cream truck.