I've been thinking about the runner-Johnson relationship, and it occurred to me to ask:
How many of you have done jobs for Johnsons who're... less than professional? Possibly a corporate fellow who's been misassigned by metahuman resources, or someone desperate enough to try hiring runners but who has no idea of the correct etiquette?

The first run my group went on, Mr. Johnson wasn't corporate in any way, shape, or form. He was an elder from the Plastic Jungles.


His name actually was Johnson, which may be part of why the council chose him to be their voice.

I run this sort of thing on occasion, a lot of people want to hire shadowrunners for various reasons, the requirement isn't being corporate by any means, just having money or somethign else in trade and some way to find a fixer. Plus even in the corporate sector at the single A and even the AA level there's not always a dedicated "business plan expeditors" department to call upon. So you get guys who have maybe done it once or twice or read up on best practices on some shadow boards and are pretty much going into it as a particularly high stakes merger or contractor meeting.

Personally i would never do a "HR Messed up" sort of scenario, that just strains my suspension of disbelief too much.

In a memorable game, a few years back, my character's first Johnson was a 10 year old girl. Corp brat, rich and snotty, but smart.

Heh, I just remembered another one: a school janitor needed some help romancing a teacher. No magic was involved, just very romance-comedy-esque. The things I do for .

I don't know about Johnson who are unprofessional (clueless is not the same to me as unprofessional), but I really enjoy non-standard Johnsons. I recently had a character of my own as Johnson. Hiring the rest of the team to pull an extraction and deliver a virus to remove her records with her corporate day job.

There is a chance some of my players in my Google Hangout group might refer to Ryna.

I used one that was right out an idiot. Thing is, it was an act, and none of the players knew or picked up on it.

They didn't get the rest of their pay, either.

Well, there was this Denver mission...

"Psst! Swordfish!"

Why in God's name would you need to hire a team of Runners - or even a Runner - to romance a teacher?

Oh, yeah. Mr Bracca. First, he's a snooty elf. Second, he's a porn director. Third, he's as obvious "rich idiot" type as it gets. "So you have to get that super secret package to an ass-end alley in San Fernando..." *stupid nervous grin*
And once he got his hands on the package, he turned out to be a raging asshole. I believe that my players won't think twice about killing him.

If all your Johnsons are sibilant corporate smoothtalkers, then you are missing a trick. These days my players are worth a lot more money than they used to be, so it is mostly corp Johnsons, but in the good ol'days, I fed them all manner of Johnsons, more than one complete newbs to boot ...

Never dealt with a hopeless person before, have you? They'll try ANYTHING.

That, and they likely saw it on the 'trid and thought it was a great idea.

I've made an adventure based more or less on that concept.

Office Futur 2000 is a small company specialized in office supplies and corporate gifts. It used to belong to Cross and was bought by Ares when Cross went down. The office supplies business isn't what it used to be with people at the office now using only a terminal, so the company is in pretty bad shape.
Mr Andrew Johnson is an Ares corporate executive. He's in charge of the liquidation of that small company. The project has been poorly managed and is way overdue. Mr Johnson is leaving for vacations and would like everything to be done when he comes back, and since he's done a few mistakes himself when handling that thing, he wants it do be done discretly. So he asks his secretary to get people to take care of it. Except that his usual secretary is on maternity leave, so she's replaced with an inexperienced secretary, who just pulled the "contractors" phonebook and called a few of them, telling them that "Mr Johnson is looking for discrete people to handle a liquidation contract".
In French, liquidation is also used to talk about assassination (not sure if that's also the case in English). One of the "contractor" was the PC's fixer.

So the PC are summoned to a briefing in a corporate room where an old guy show them a powerpoint presentation (that I've done live to my players) explaining the situation. The PC's job is to make sure the employees accept the liquidation. Some of them are pretty angry and there's a risk of them slowing down the process, or causing trouble. When the PC realize the misunderstanding and call Mr Johnson, he tells them that he doesn't care, that he's on vacation, and that the money is their if they can take care of that business without resorting to too obvious (or non-deniable) violence.

Ryna is quite the individual. Pays well, though.

Thorguild

One of the recurring Missions johnsons was a neo-hippie pothead.

"Heey, mon."




-k

Hopelessly in love janitor meets yak princess with a heart of gold.

It wasn't a "hard" run, but it was fun. I believe our GM made it up just to emphasize the need for legwork.

I shorthand the non-professional Johnson as "Mrs Smith", who is usually both the Johnson and the Client, since they don't know that there's supposed to be a level between them and the 'runners. They're usually desperate and bad negotiators, and some Shadowrunners prey on them simply becaus ethey can, but most don't even have all that much money to begin with.

It's always weird to plunk one down at a table and have the PCs go, "Look, her'es what needs to happen. You need to keep your money and not hire people like us. Go home, settle down, and don't do anything stupid." but then they see them try to hire someone else and, with a sigh, decide to get involved after all.

Tis a GREAT thing to have in your bag of tricks.

"Hey, aren't you Peace Man? I know you."

Detective Tosh Athack, worst, Johnson, ever.

So far, I've only had one group that liked him, and that was because he was willing to hang up on the REAL Johnson who WAS trying to screw the 'runners!

Heh. Actually, I can see that, especially if life has a way of throwing screwy curveballs in his way any time he tries to make a move, and he decides to hire some professionals to run interference on life's little curveballs; like having the big cybertroll intercept the mugger sneaking up behind them on a date and inform the guy politely that he wants to go home and rethink his life, or at least go to another street and rethink his choice of targets.






My players are wonderful saps, and they understand that what gets you the most karma the easiest doesn't always get you the most nuyen. They seem to prefer the Karma, so they'll do jobs even when the pay is less than stellar. As long as they figure they can make rent, they're good.

It was pretty funny to be honest. Our Mage didn't have Trid Phantasm, but did have Physical Mask... so he sustained one on himself to look like the yak princess and stay visible to her guards while they snuck out on a date.

Our face ran interference with the rigger, and my character had to do a balcony scene. You know, when the princess is in her home and the lovestruck guy is shouting/singing sweet stuff at her. Only my character was larger than the bushes around her house and had a Charisma of 2.

Also, I shot her pet cat. We managed to make it look like it was her yak suitor who did it, but yeah "catslayer" was my character's nickname for a long time.

You didn't play Dragon Age 2, did you? So much face-palm with the whole high-level adventurers and big names in the city trying to help the head of the Watch get a new man.

Come on, you can't drop a bomb like that and leave us hanging!

Why did Catslayer slay the cat?

Do you remember "There's Something About Mary"? When they drugged that little dog?

I had taken precautions, buying my character capsule rounds with DMSO and a pet tranquilizer. The cat hates everyone, so the plan was to dose it slightly to make it more agreeable. It was my fault, really, I had taken to naming my guns and brought both my Ares Predator IV (Greta) and my sawed-off T-250 (Gretchen).

My GM even asked me twice when I said "I draw Gretchen and use a simple action to Take Aim" and the other guys didn't even catch it. So I hit the kitty with Ex-Ex.

The scene was supposed to be the janitor escorts the yak princess home and the kitty, high as heck, takes a liking to the janitor (we sprayed him with something so the kitty'd be attracted to him). Instead, she sees the various smears that used to be "Maki" I think.

Thankfully, our Rigger was a somewhat decent hacker and spoofed a message from her yak suitor (typical guy, trying to move on up in the yak world by marrying the boss' daughter). It was a premature "I'm sorry your cat died" message. She stood him up and went on a date instead with the janitor so yeah... she drew the conclusions from there.


EDIT: I feel like I ought to write this mini-adventure out.

The Boondock Saints comes to mind when Rocko hits the table with the Beretta cocked and loaded...

That said, naming guns is a pretty normal thing. Well, I think so at least. My group is kind of weirded out by it.

You deserve a Karma for robbing me of the power of breath.

Putting a deerslug through Kitty would be bad enough. Hitting her with Ex-Ex goes the extra mile.



[e]And yes, you should write that out.

No, the Ex-explosive round threw the kitty a mile.

I wonder if a dragon ate it later?

"Following the thunderous blast, you find yourselves covered with a fine red mist and tiny tufts of fur float gently through the air." Terrible, sir, just awful. Hitting a cat with Ex-Ex shottie probably nixed all nine lives.

It was probably indoors at the time, so I doubt it threw it a mile. More like splattered the poor pussy all over the floor and ceiling.


Also, it inspired a Run idea.
Mr. Johnson hates Neighbor A's cat, and Neighbor C. He hires you to blow away the cat in the most gruesomely overkill fashion available to you, and frame Neighbor C.
The Twist: Neighbor A's cat is either something ridiculous like a jaguar or a mountain lion, or a paracritter.

Hell, even a Blackberry Cat is bad enough!

A BlackBerry cat won't be any threat at all if your team sends in a troll heavy to maul kitty manually, though.

Can't hack a claymore.

Do they still have Taliscats?

You splatter the cat all over the common room.

Seriously though, Tosh is pretty bad as far as Johnsons go. He never picks up the tab and threatens a lot, even if he's in an inferior position.
It's part of his charm (for lack of a better word), so all is well.

I believe "Attitude" reminds that most Johnson's are not corporate. As well, they remind us that shadowrunners often do not meet the Johnson at all, but instead have the Fixer do such. Lastly, Attitude reminds that "favors" get traded more than nuyen.

So, when we DO meet a Johnson (or a fixer) they are typically not big-corp professionals. Given the number of other potential clients, compared to big-corp, it would make perfect sense that "big-corp" is rarely a direct client represented by a Johnson. My crews last "Mr Johnson" was a hacker looking to have the guys rip off some miltech. He was channeling a pot smoking hippy, and was a long way from "professional."

Politicians need, and have always needed, "discrete assets".

Hell, in Shadowrun, sometimes a priest needs to hire a low-end crew just to get the bibles to the right church!

Wrong season, actually.

Though Tosh can be pretty bad.



-k

Hah, thanks. I'm writing it out right now, but it's getting more and more ridiculous by the word. It was a filler job, in between runs, for kicks, and it shows.

Once it's done, where can I post it here?


Oh, and the cat was on a windowsill at the ground level, I believe it was the kitchen as my character hid in a small garden just outside of it.

I actually had a lot of fun putting together an adventure I titled, "Six Seattle Shorts" for my first SR4 campaign. Five very short adventures sandwiched into a wraparound story. This sounds like it would have fit into that sort of thing perfectly. Not a full run, but a nice mini-diversion for the characters to enjoy.

Yea I have/had a lot of problems with this. For starters as bad practice as it would be the meeting with the J is part of the Shadowrun cliche' no reason to try and undermine it now.

Also while the occasional favor run is good, especially for the small time crew, favors don't (usually) pay the rent and don't (usually) get new ware installed. I don't see runners doing 'runs for favors, i see them doing jobs or errands for favors, but not full on Shadowruns. It might be a thin distinction sometimes but ther'es entirely different mindsets.

Well, i have 2GM's who alternate between playing and GMing . . And their Characters are basically Leutnants in the Gang we are in.
So they each become johnson and runner with switching roles from time to time.
Horribly unprofessional. One time they both sat at the other side of the table and argued who was supposed to work for who this time around.

I'll hit up a fixer for jobs that are well below my pay grade to see if any of them provide opportunity for the real job I'm on.

Solution: Hire each other.




That's sort-of what my players did during this run. They've come into a situation where they explicitly want to provoke DocWagon response calls (by bestowing physical peril on DocWagon customers until their biomonitor bracelets scream for backup,) and they decided that as long as they were going to be breaking legs, they might as well get paid twice for it. So they went to their Friendly Local Ancients Lieutenant and asked for a shit list of people with DocWagon bracelets that the ancients would pay to have beaten up professionally.

We have a run that is running at the same time as a convention. It just so happens that the convention and the target of our run are in the same city and are hosted/owned by the same mega corp. The convention provides us with plenty of sample data of legitimate megacorp personnel from around the world permitting us to potential locate employees we could impersonate that would have some access to the facility but yet be individuals that rarely visit the target and thus not readily recognizable. There's also potential distraction and misdirection that we can utilize as well depending on the run in question.

So far the offering I got has been uninspiring. A bodyguard job for some manager that wants to slum around the city and doesn't want people to know what he's doing. I mean, I guess we could kidnap the guy and have one of us impersonate him for the duration of the convention, but the time investment towards that job doesn't seem to work well with our main one.

Actually, it can. Influence is rather nasty.

Hm. The mention about hacking makes me think the Bastet from Running Wild is what was meant.

Blackberry cats are magical, not technocritters.





-k

Great, a Bastet and a Blackberry Cat fighting over territory in the house that they own the metahuman of.

Whoops. My mistake.

It'd be the number one most clicked on video on the 6th world equivalent to youtube . .

"In other financial news today, Horizon has announced the largest profits ever seen by any AAA-Level Megacorporation in a single week, all due to one video on the Matrix..."

Exactly! It's a nice way to mark their progression up the ladder. At the beginning their Johnsons are basically just random dudes off the street, hardly more advanced than the team. They may be low level drug runners, wanna-bes, or whatever. But you're not getting a Renraku big boy to hire a couple nobody runners to steal a datachip no one really cares about.

And at first, even those guys may seem like they know what they're doing, but as they get more savvy, they should realize that the hyperactive dude that made a point to call himself Johnson over and over, and talked about how important his employers were was not, in fact, important.