I would point out that some Shadowrun Missions characters will be lucky to make that much money in their entire career.

And some of the Missions involve opposition that needs anti-tank weaponry to take down.

Now, Missions does have a bit of a reputation for being a bit stingy with rewards sometimes, but you seriously are running at a power level far far in excess of most folks. If that works for your group, cool, but be aware of that.



-k

Yeah, some people play that way. Others look at the fiction and use the rules to replicate that game instead of bending the world around whatever mechanics he found.

The fluff is as bad or worse.

Seriously, have you been tag erasing all your food before you eat it? Do you tag erase all your clothes? Do you use a different gait on every run against an Ares subsidiary? Do you use any commercially available matrix program or matrix hardware? Do you have your ware built from raw materials by people you trust intimately? Do you use a commercial smart link system?

Then if you haven't been screwed, by the fluff, your GM is treating you with kid gloves. Virtually all food has RFID tags inside of it, virtually all clothes are RFID tagged (and the road is an RFID tag reader thanks to GridGuide, as is virtually every comlink you pass). Data Balkanization and data overload don't apply when discussing something as rare as runs and within a single corporate structure, if you didn't change how you walk and showed up on camera in multiple facilities then Ares knows that you did both jobs. All of the commercially available software provided by the corps is riddled with back doors and trojans that are uploading anything and everything from the system they are on to the parent corp for analysis (that NeoNet firewall your comlink has? It's uploaded all your files to NeoNet, including things like your cybereyes recording of your meeting with Mr. J). Commercial ware is likewise riddled with backdoors and hidden spy programs. That Ares smart link system you are running is uploading gun camera footage of every shooting you have committed right back to Ares Corporate just as soon as it get's within range of an acceptable transmitter (like GridGuide or someone's Ares comlink).

----
That is fully fluff supported shadowrun in the Sixth World. Now think about what you would have to do to be remotely safe and independent running in that world.

Meh ? That's completely absurd - Ares might be a big and nasty corp, but there'd 9 others just about as big - there's simply not enough room, ressources and money on the planet to support anything like that sort of cash flow, the various AA and lesser corps and the governments all at the same time''today the USA's PIB is about 15% of the world's econmy, which would make the AAA alone 150% of it. Something's fishy here).

I grant you that on paper Ares and it's ilk might show that much value, but if today's economy is anything to judge by, most of that will be esoteric financial assets that translates as far less at ground level in hardware, peoples and places. Basicaly a lot of big numbers bouncing around the computerizd finance system with a relevance on the phyical world close to that aof a hamster running in it's wheel (i'm exagerating here of course, but that's the idea)

I really didn't want to get into this. It's your game, you can play it the way you want. You asked my opinion and I gave it to you. I even prefaced it with the fact that it's just my stupid opinion based on what I dig and is worth precisely what you paid for it: nothing. There is no particular reason for you to care what I think, but you asked so I thought I'd share.
But since you insist...


You take away a die after every roll. That's 78 die total in 12 days. That's 26 hits on average, or 19 bought. Not enough.


You can? Where is that a rule? Oh, you mean in Unwired where it says you can buy a hacked Lifestyle for half the cost. Just because it costs that much to buy, does not mean it costs that much to sell. The basic price for fencing gear is 30% of it's value. In this case that would be a Middle Lifestyle at 1,500 nuyen, if the GM lets you which he shouldn't because there is no rule for fencing services. The only thing close is selling a permanent Lifestyle.
But let's say such a thing were possible. That means there is someone, or likely multiple someones, out there with a bunch of comlinks with a bunch of copied Agents puking out Lifestyles 24/7. To me, that makes it a mass marketed item as common as leaves on trees. No sale.

But even if you were to do that, you're GM is still sleeping on the job because he isn't sending you any trouble. Where are the utility companies and police knocking down your door when they find you're cheating them out of nuyen? Where are the AIs coming in to nest in your node or the hacker gangs trying to IC you for needling in on their territory? Not only is your GM letting you get away with murder, he's sending you the bodies, buying the bullets and burning the corpses.
Oh, and most importantly, he's not following the rules. Either as written, as intended or even as imagined by anyone who ever picked up a pen to write a Shadowrun game.


Again, that's 24 hits on average. 19 bought. Which wouldn't matter because you can only do a 28 day circulation ritual on your Magic score worth of reagents, which is 6.
And where is she harnessing this gold? Is that not a mission? Are there not corps and nations on top of that? That's like saying I can just go and grab some gold from the river. Even then, not all gold is a reagent. Reagents have a higher inherent concentration of mana than normal substances, which means harnessing them in intruding on someone else's mineral rights. Which you can do, but that's a run! Can your GM honestly not come up with any complications for stealing reagents?
But let's say she got her 6 reagents. Firstly, that's all she's doing that month because she's got to check on them every 8 hours. That means no runs and pretty much nothing else that month.
Don't know where she's getting this raw gold, much less this reagent gold, but let's say she's lucky. That means she's turned 60k worth of gold into 120k worth of gold. That she can now sell for 30%, or 36k.
God help her if she bought the stuff. Even at the 20% discount that means she bought 48k worth of gold to be sold for 36k. God help her if it's not gold, because nothing else turns a profit.
So if you can get your hands on 60k worth of gold reagent, that's not a bad deal. But getting your hands on that much reagents worth of gold should be a big deal. A very big deal. the next highest reagent only gets you about 2k a month.

The same sort of thing goes for "bodyguard duty" or "conning people" or whatever other imagined scheme you've managed to bully and brow beat out of your poor GM. There is a reason rules for getting free money isn't in the book. Its because the game isn't called Fixer or Wage Slave; it's called Shadowrun. You are a Shadowrunner because no other life will have you. All the rules for that stuff's cost are at the expense of game balance for Shadowrun. The rules for what Fixers or manufacturers earn aren't there because that's not what you do. To paraphrase Malcolm Reynolds "You do the run. You get paid."
Money is one of the things a GM uses as incentive. If you convince him that you get free money for doing nothing(other than saying "I do a thing. Give me money.") then money shouldn't be a factor in your game at all. Shadowrunners should be sweating the rent. Especially at 400BP. Less so as they get better, but if money is never a motivator for Shadowrunners, why is it there?

I get that y'all play fast and loose with the rules, which is your right. Do whatever and play however you want. Paint yourself yellow and call yourself Banana Man for all I care. But don't say "This is how Shadowrun should be" when clearly it's not how it was written, intended or played by anyone but you.
Especially from a group that's not good enough to pull off a single run from Missions.

You do realize the losing a die with each subsequent test is an optional rule, right Fortinbras?

Loosing a die per roll is an optional rule, a widely held and much loved optional rule but an optional one none the less. Then again it's a wash as you probably shouldn't be allowing agents to buy hits anway.

I'll consider it an optional rule when I find a GM who doesn't follow it.

EDIT: I'm clearly kidding here. I was pointing out that the GM needn't bow to the idea that a runner can write his own ticket for doing nothing. He has options and should use them. In any event, it just changes the hypothetical Lifestyle sell to 3k instead of 1,500.

I don't use that optional rule, myself, but then I don't see the point, as if they take long enough to do it (which is what extended tests show) then they should succeed at the end. The way to show how difficult it is is found in having a higher threshold (which tends to be higher for extended anyway).

As to the money issue, I agree that these guys are making too much, but it works for them. (It does remind me of the one game in SR3 I was in where the GM was foolish enough to put us on retainer for a corp at 2 million a month. We didn't even have to do crap to get it either, really.) That said, I think the 'sweet spot' for pay--let's use the starting 400 BP characters--should be somewhere between 12 thousand and 25 thousand per run, going up from there as they get more experienced. This gives enough for all those little expenses--which can add up quick--lifestyle costs and enough to seriously save for gear upgrades (which is character advancement just as much as karma spending for skills. Karma awards, in my opinion, should be 5 karma per session--not per run (in case a run spans more than one session).

I agree wholeheartedly. Do what works best for you and your group.
All I ask is that no one call anyone else idiots because they don't play the game like you do.

That goes for you as well. You're incredibly hostile towards Emperor Tippy.

Also, you're wrong about enchanting rules. Emperor Tippy was talking about going from raw reagents to refined ones. The 28 day cycle is for going from refined to radical.

That isn't the rule, it's an option a GM can use if they feel so inclined.


It's a service that you can perform and that has a high market price. Whether or not your GM will let you provide that service in game is irrelevant to the character; it's still an option for them.


Requires saying "I don't like you following the rules so I'm going to just arbitrarily throw shit at you.". Hacking a lifestyle is allowed under the rules and what you discuss is what happens on a glitch or critical glitch; which buying hits prevents from occurring.


So your GM is arbitrarily allowing enemies to track you/find you outside the rules? Nice. If the enemy can, under the rules, track or find you then the GM should let them and they should deal with you accordingly; but they have to be able to do that tracking under the rules.


No, you are the one who apparently doesn't know what the rules as written or intended are considering that you think an optional rule tweak is the rule as written and intended.



Wrong, read Street Magic page 81. It's only radical regents that need a 28 day circulation, not refined regents.


That is what you have contacts for. You can buy it from the corps, and there are plenty of other regents that you can refine (although none with as extreme a profit). The amount you are refining is peanuts on a global scale, it's not enough to even be a real blip on the radar.


You only sell for 30% if you fence your goods pretty much immediately. Getting a higher price isn't particularly difficult, even under the rules much less in roleplay.

Except there are plenty of rules for getting essentially free money.


No, you really aren't. Unless you have done enough bad shit to get the entire Corporate Court to want you dead then at any time you can walk into pretty much any megacorp and walk out in a new nation with a new DNA print, new finger prints, new retinas, a new SIN, and a new job pulling in a High or Luxury lifestyle. You have a valuable skill set that the corps wants and will pay for.

You might not find such an option acceptable and that is fine but you still aren't running because of a lack of options.


No, Shadowrunners really shouldn't be sweating the rent. If they are then they choose to be doing so. The list of ways to make money really is simply too long. Even in fluff. Netcat does Resonance Realm searches for a 100K a pop (which is virtually all pure profit), as just one example. That's 10 months of High lifestyle.



You are the one playing fast and loose with the rules. And what I have said is how shadow run is written both in the rules and in a good chunk of the fluff.


And you get this idea where?


And yet that is what the books place their wealth and revenues at.



Our average profit per runner is around that level. Most of the mission price ends up eaten by consumables. If you are only spending 25K per run total (and not just as the characters profits) then you can't even afford a high end fake SIN for everyone in a team of 5.

Meaning you should not be allowed to buy those hits as buying hits is only supposed to be used for stuff that doesn't have negative consequences for failing.

Everything has negative consequences for glitching. There would have to be negative consequences to not meeting the test threshold for buying hits to be against the rules, and there aren't (you simply don't get the benefit).

Buying hits should generally be used to speed up gameplay, not merely to avoid things like glitches.

It's also only supposed to be available when the GM says it is, not when the player WANTS to use it.

Again, the reason you're getting these responses is because your game operates at a LOT higher level than most other folks, with a GM that seems to be overly generous and permissive, then you act as if this were the norm.

It's not.



-k

Don't feed the troll.

To answer the original question, as with most things the quicker it needs to be done the more it costs. About 20% or more depending on how quick the Johnson wants the job done.

You said you can't do a run in under a week, which is how long a Missions run takes at minimum. Let's look at Season 2, because it's free. You couldn't do Parliament of Thieves, Best Served Cold, The Grab, Thrash the Body Electric or any of them, really because they all have time limits. You'd pass on those missions or insist on getting paid 40 times more, which isn't in the budget of those Johnsons. In the world of Shadowrun, your team just isn't good enough to do those runs.

It's understandable. Shadowrun is meant to be a hard game and if you just aren't at that experience level, I get it. Some people just need to take more time to learn things than others. Your team isn't capable of running any of published adventures. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes we all need a little help, and in this case your GM gives you free money and makes the runs super easy because y'all just aren't at the level that some of the rest of us are at, but he doesn't want to discourage you from playing the game. I think that's commendable.
Just understand that the rest of us play with, let's call it the difficulty set on a higher level. The GM doesn't give us millions of nuyen for free and plays using a stricter version of the rules. Some even play RAW. No one is saying that your way is wrong, it's just not the way the rest of the world plays the game.
Best of luck with your millions of nuyen, though.

I like to say there is one simple rule in Shadowrun.

Rule #1 There are Shadowrunners.

Anything that breaks rule #1 has to be considered with extreme care and is likely not quite as strict as it might look at first glance.

So, if you find something, and think it through, and it basically ends in "Shadowrunners could never exist like that!", you break rule #1, so your assumptions must be wrong, because rule #1 definitely isn't.

Bye
Thanee

You never get found? WTF? Corporate hit squads never have knowledge skills of knowing what's going on in the shadows and who is capable of what yet corporate Johnsons know who to contact when they have 4 million sitting around in their sock drawer? People are capable of putting 2+2 together even without leaving evidence behind.

If it's so easy to hack a lifestyle why not have the runners show up at home and all their stuff is missing because someone stole from them to hack their own, it's not breaking the rules to throw challenges at your players. They're not the only ones in the world who take initiative and try to tackle problems.

I wasn't trying to attack Tippy and I didn't say he was "having fun wrong". He's welcome to have games where a million nuyen or even a billion is thrown out by a Johnson. I was just trying to point out that he plays a very different game than most people on here and that usually isn't clear until about ten posts in, when the criticism has already started.

To use an analogy from the other game, Tippy plays (as I understand it) at Epic levels where everything is save or die and everyone is min-maxed to the extreme and the goal is not to clear a dungeon and get rich but kill the St. Cuthbert and take his place among the gods. And I think most people on here are playing closer to level 10, where they could just retire by crafting things for a profit for the rest of their lives, but part of the suspension of disbelief is ignoring and the other limits of the rules. I agree with him that if you step back and think about it, shadowrunners at a certain level aren't in it for the money (it's why my last game was 300 BP) and there are rules that let you essentially get infinite money given enough time. It's because Shadowrun is a game world and would not actually function the way most of the missions and setting says it does.

Could you be any more condesending.
His team could most likely do any of missions adventures in their sleep as those aren't that hard, but they wouldn't like to,as they can't for sure to know that the mission would be that easy and thus refer to have more planning time.

The point was that the team COULD NOT do those runs in their sleep. They would be so far out of their comfort zone that they would be paralytzed with indecision. And it is so very hard to argue that point, as they cannot even go to the stuffer shack without taking 97 different precautions, along with having their hacker hack everything between their doss and the shack and then along their evasion routes to get back to their doss. Sheer Lunacy amounts of paranoia at work there.

They would spend so much time dealing with their paranoia that the mission would go completely unfulfilled.

Emperor Tippy: I admire your knowledge. I only disagree with a minority of what you've written in this thread. If you tried your hand at writing Shadowrun material, I would take a look at it.

Originally, I wrote that the Johnson should give you a final offer of four times the original amount. That was mostly because I thought that 100K was a little low for a seven person team with an excellent reputation. Now that you've gone into more detail about how this hotel was built like a nearly impregnable fortress, I think that the original offer was a lowball. If the Johnson was really testing you to see if you would take the job for a song, then I understand how getting a far higher price without negotiation could be possible.

If the Johnson wasn't trying to pull a fast one, maybe a better original offer would have been 400K. Then do negotiation as normal, with a premium for the 27-hour deadline. If his ass was really on the line, then maybe a reasonable final offer would have been a cool million. The premium would depend on the situation and what the Johnson was able and willing to pay.

Personally, I think 4M was way too much, but you did say the Johnson's life was on the line, and he had access to millions. However your GM wants to have things is fine with me.

A few more quick questions: what would have been the consequences of accidentally exploding the roof directly on top of the celeb, killing or badly disfiguring the star in the process? What percent of the suite collapsed? Would a reasonable critical glitch have been the death of the target?

Not Tippy, but i would assume his team has a professional demolitions expert, so the hole on the proof most likely wasn't much bigger then what a man in full military gear needs to drop through with out hassle(if you have seen the first Underworld, think of the scene where Selene cuts a hole around her in the floor to get to the bottom floor, thats about the size i'm picturing for what they did whit the breaching charges)

Are you even reading what he said about the extremes they go through to keep themselves hidden? If you leave no witnesses, ritual links or anything taggable behind, how would a corporate hit squad locate you? The Johnson contacted their fixer, not the team.

So, how does the fixer contact them? Huh? If ANYONE knows how to get hold of them, there is a weak link in their security. At which point, they can be found.

Yes, precisely.

But not only that, nobody is perfect. If they get 5 successes on "cover up our tracks" than someone else could get 6 to find them, etc. Unless you play that saying you're doing the things automatically means they're successful but I've never gotten into that level of detail. I guess it's fairly common for me in games to do things like say "I'll use street/shadowrun knowledge to see if I know anyone who wants Mr X dead that is capable of doing whatever was just done." And then with a few successes the GM gives you a name or a couple names. No reason the PC's aren't subject to stuff like that too, the random investigator checking them out to see if they were the ones that did something recently. Ever read/watch Absolute Power the main character is a jewel thief that witnesses the President murder someone while stealing jewels. Then he escapes but when they go to get security tapes showing the President murder her they realize the jewels were missing and the tape gone. He left no evidence at the scene but very shortly the investigator is checking him out to see if he did it because he was one of the few people capable of it. It makes for a good story with drama. It's not "screwing" the players to let their street cred come with some drawbacks. Heck, I think it's a fun session to have the blame pinned on them for something they didn't do. It'd add a lot of drama to have a nosy PI trying to pin something on them while they're innocent but trying to do something else illegal at the time.

But like I said, it's fine if he wants to play that way but I don't like the holier than thou attitude where if you steal luxury lifestyles with bots and resell them there is no repercussions or if you spend your downtime making money using some services rule. To me it's akin to a D&D Wizard saying "well, I it costs a few hundred gold to have a 3th level spell cast so I'll spend my downtime every day selling spells and with 30 days between adventures it means I'm far wealthier than everyone so you're all doing D&D wrong if you don't do that.

Some of us like to spend our money and time on ale and whores, it doesn't mean we play wrong.

I don't know how their group does it, but if I wanted anonymity, I'd set up various dead drops. Matrix ones would be wandered by agents in a random pattern, the data switching hands between several agents before making its way to a commlink isolated from any other matrix equipment in use by the group (which would have its wireless access turned off immediately when a package was received). Physical ones would have cameras pointing at them from Stormcloud drones (with vision magnification on the cameras to check identities of the person making the drop, and get a look at the package). For the physical pickup, the package would be checked for tags, chemicals, explosives etc by a drone before being conveyed to a safehouse (and a jammer would be in effect on pickup).

I said that we won't generally do a run with a time limit of less than a week, not that we couldn't. If, OOC, we were told that the kind of precautions that we normally take weren't needed then we could blast through any of the Mission runs without any hassle. IC however our characters will never have that assurance and so if we bother to roleplay our characters then they won't do those runs. There are times to risk your life, there are payouts sufficiently large that a 60+% chance of death is acceptable, none of the Missions payouts get anywhere near a sufficient amount for even a 10% chance of death to be acceptable.


...
Please let me know the last time your GM sniped you with an anti-shipping laser from 20 kilometers away because you failed to realize that a protest at a subsidiary of the corp you were hitting (100 miles away) would cause the corp to divert an inbound military vessel to the corp facility that you were hitting.

Please let me know the last time your GM wiped out an entire team of runners that had been in-play for years of real life time because a single guard got inordinately lucky and managed to survive a whole 2 combat turns longer than your worst case estimates.

Please let me know the last time your GM had you get fried because you didn't realize that a few corp nanites etched a secure RFID tag onto the soles of your boots when you were conducting a run.

We do not play remotely easy. If you don't plan for everything and fuck up in even the smallest of ways you are highly likely to end up dead in our games.


You can run in a world that plays the fluff and rules to the limit. It just requires that you do things like plan runs for days, weeks, or months and spend hundreds of thousands (or even millions of nuyen) on consumable gear. Yes, it precludes doing cold hits on even moderately secure facilities unless you have hundreds of thousands (or millions) of nuyen to blow on gear.


We get found when we fuck up and either manage to piss off someone with the resources to throw at finding us or make a mistake. But when you do full genetic reprints after a run, go no where without a nanopaste disguise, use personafix chips to change your gait, burn all your gear after every run, have your technomancer perform an erase data ressonance realms search to erase every trace of your involvement in the run, use different identities for every run, etc. it becomes very difficult to manage to track down an individual or team. Could a megacorp do it? Yes. Would a megacorp do it? Not unless we personally pissed off Damien Knight or the like to the extent where he, personally wants us dead and doesn't care about the cost (and not cost in nuyen but cost in favors, corporate risk, and preventing valuable assets from doing other more profitable things; a technomancer can resonance realms search for us or for some corp/government secrets worth hundreds of billion of nuyen, for example). And one reason we investigate so thoroughly before doing a run is to ensure that our run isn't likely to personally hack off anyone with the resources to make finding us possible, and why we still go out of our way to lay down false and deceiving trails.


The Johnson contacted our fixer. Our fixer said "Be at this address at this time." to him. He showed up and found himself facing a nondescript individual who placed two comlinks connected by fiberoptic and without wireless capability with connected trodes on the table. Upon placing one set of trodes on his head the individual placed the other on his own head and the meeting proceeded to take place via direct neural interface. At the end of the meeting the individual swept both comlinks, the trodes, and the fiberoptic cable into a bag and dropped some Demolisher nanites in that proceeded to turn the comlinks into dust.

The individual was a human form drone that our face was jumped in to through a tight beam laser link network that linked him from over five miles away and the drone had it's own self destruct charge. The Johnson did not have anything to really go on if he wanted to track us down besides what our run for him was and how we accomplished it (at least what he can learn about how we accomplished it).


You aren't hacking a lifestyle from other individuals, you are hacking a lifestyle from the corps of various kinds. And the rules say how easy it is (or how incredibly difficult, just because a PC character can do something doesn't mean that it is remotely easy).


It's not sheer lunacy. Sheer lunacy is trying to be a runner and not taking similar precautions. It's simple fact that every megacorp or major organization has far greater resources than any runner team. If the corp can target you then they can and will deal with you. The only thing you can do to keep yourself safe is make it more difficult to locate you. Even the smallest sliver of information can be enough to break an investigation wide open, so don't leave those slivers.

I might end up publishing some stuff but that takes a time investment I'm not too keen on making at the moment.


Mission failure, the fixer returning the Johnson's money, us being on the hook to our fixer for the cash.
A very small percent.
Yes, however that was very, very, unlikely to occur.


By leaving a nondescript message on a public board that is viewed by millions of people every day.

We see the message and contact the Johnson by going to a specially configured comlink network that places thousands of comcalls from all across the sprawl all at the same time (using hacked comlinks of wageslaves) to thousands of other comlinks all across the Fixer's sprawl along with image and data uploads to the matrix. Both us and the fixer have high end agent's that know what words and data to take from everyone of those comcalls, image uploads, and data uploads, and then recombine it to ours/the fixers viewing pleasure. It's, of course, all encrypted by a one time pad.

Seeing as us and our fixer are the only ones who know about our communications protocols and it has never entered the electronic realm, and that both of our comlinks (all hardware and software) and filled with proprietary software and protocols deliberately designed to not place nice with others, and are still only used for this single purpose, it can generally be considered secure.


Yes, communications and the hiring process is the weakest link in our security.


There is a reason that we go out of our way to have no street cred, our Fixer has street cred, we have separate identities that have street cred and that are carefully crafted to not be linkable to our runs, us and our team does not have street cred. We can literally work for the same Johnson half a dozen times and have the Johnson never realize that he hired the same team for every run.

So your Knowledge: Shadowrunning check is going to throw back "The Fixer known as Anyanka is the one most likely approached about a run of this caliber." and if you want more info then you need to crack our fixer. Considering that said Fixer is a Loyalty 6 contact who is the primary fixer for megacorps and nation governments (connections 6), with a laundry list of favors and blackmail material to call on, getting info out of said fixer is extremely unlikely and difficult.




The right kind of idea.

I'm surprised to find myself agreeing more and more with Emperor Tippy (at least the reasoning - and since this is basically him against most of Dumpshock, I can understand where the aggressive attitude comes from).

Perhaps a variation in degree (I don't have enough Rules Fu any more to analyze the pricing he listed for what a runner can do), but in general, while he sounds somewhat insane, he's making fairly logical sense. And no one really seems to be debating his logic with more than "That's not how it works" or "That's not what Missions says" or "That's not how I think the game works" or a disassembling of one rule or the other (And I'm actually going to make a thread outside this one to discuss those bits).

A 5 attribute + 5 skill (which I assume most base runners have in one combo, at least, especially those built via standard BP rules) represents someone who is an Expert (the description of 5 skill is "Star status: your expertise gives you a reputation." The athletics example is an NBA star. Technical is a top scientist. Social is a corporate VP, or incumbent politician. Knowledge is a master's degree) in skill, and has a superior human attribute. A 6/6 represents someone like Peyton Manning (who makes something like 18 million a year), the Wright Brothers, the President of the US. So if you're a runner with 5 Agi and 6 Athletics, you could be a master of professional sports. You aren't one of the Gods, but you're certainly someone in high demand. If you have 5 Cha and 5 Influence, you could be a VP or a politician, making millions a year. Doing a run where you beat up a street thug for 10k nuyen does seem a bit of a waste of your time. The idea that you have an entire team of people who are effectively a top tier professional sports team, or the equivalent of the team on Leverage who are picking up scrub work is kinda odd. In fact, I really like Leverage as an example - look at the things they do. Look at the assets they burn, the lengths they go to, the scope of what they do. Could you imagine the team of Leverage doing Food Fight in anything but a comedy episode?) Alternatively, let's take a group like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, etc in Deadwood. They're probably 5/5 characters, and they take down entire gangs.

We play runners who have dice pools of 15 as lovable goofballs who screw up as much as they succeed sometimes. Yet that represents the sort of dice pool that Richard Branson probably runs with when he's managing a billion dollar empire. Bill Gates might have 6 Log and 6 computer. And so does your rigger, who falls asleep during runs.

Ghost who Walks is an example of 6 in Firearms. He's an idol, but really, many of our characters are his equivalent.

It's something to think about.

And re: Paranoia: I think Emp Tip might be overly paranoid, but at the same time, I know a dude who did network security. He has two routers for his home internet, one forwarding through an IP mask and IP/MAC filter to the other, and several other tricks between that are beyond my understanding. Just to run his Xbox. If he had to put his life on the line, I suspect he'd go far far beyond that. It's not entirely unreasonable.

And for your hacker to control every node at the Stuffer Shack is, given the dice pools involved, pretty much the equivalent of resetting a voice mail password.

I'm not sure I'm really interested in playing at the level Tippy is suggesting (the idea of doing 15 practice runs in VR over years doesn't really appeal to me), but I'm also not sure he's not the one playing RAW, and we're all engaging in a shared (and hugely enjoyable) set of house rules (or house conceits, I guess).

And re: Agents buying hits, etc - buying hits is just an abstraction anyway. It's meant to represent about what you'd get on average over time. Sure, you might occasionally glitch. You also have Edge. You might occasionally roll 80% successes too - in the long run, doing the rolls is basically the same as buying hits. I agree that the interesting bits would be the glitches, sure, but you can make general statements like he made without too much hand waving, and be supported by probability, I think.

This thread is comedy gold.
I shortly considered answering after the first posting, but then someone came and wrote something I could've wrote, so I abstained.
Since then, I've laughed more with each wall of text.
Seriously, guys: You have different styles of play. Agree to disagree and move on. There is no right and no wrong here, but I find it hilarious how each 'side' tries to argue their points.

To add something constructive: I would have let your team roll for negotiation. 100k is obviously a lowball estimate for 7 runners, but going up to 4mil (let alone 10mil) is, in my eyes, a no-go.
A Johnson in my games would (depending on his professionalism) offer between 10% and 20% more than 'standard rate' (whatever that may be for a prime runner team) and may then allow for another 10-20% depending on negotiation successes.

Concrete example: Ace Team X takes 20k each for a standard run. The Johnson is in a bind and needs it done NOW! He offers 22,5k (nice round numbers) and the runners can go up to 27k (translated to between 500 and 1000 nuyen more per net success).
I also use similar modifiers as were already posted and approve of those wholeheartedly. Extra wishes cost extra money, after all and that should be understandable for a professional Johnson looking for a pro team.
Now, here's the kicker: I look at what the Johnson is paying in total. In the example above, taking a team of seven, this would amount to 189k nuyen, if we assume max hits and the J. maxing out his credit limit.
WHY is there a credit limit? Because the illegal operation needs to be worthwhile for the Johnson. He pays someone to commit a crime for him, and this is dangerous. So, in my eyes, he needs to make at least 3 times what he offered, or, in the given example around 570k nuyen, be it in money, favors, knowledge or whatever. If his profit margin falls below that, he'll simply tell the runners "Thank you for your time, now take a walk."

Usually, I plan payment in a run according to the karma I'll be giving them in the end, to eyeball the amount. A relatively easy run worth 4 Karma may pay 10k nuyen, while a hard one may pay up to 30k. This figure is further modified by a) street rep (the higher it is, the higher the base payment, I usually eyeball 1k per point) b) notoriety (same as with street rep. a team known for sometimes going overboard with their violence will suffer in their payment when they're offered a stealth job) and c) the environment I want the run to play.
Examples for c) may be:
- A ship on open sea. Difficult to get there means higher payment.
- Offered by a dragon. Runners don't like to work for the lizards, higher payment may soothe the nagging feelings of doubt
- On another continent. Travel arrangements, comfort zone, getting gear, all modifiers.
- Hostile environment. If you go to a toxic zone, special equipment is needed and health hazards abound.

Another concrete example of my thought process in creating an adventure:
Ace, the super pro gunslinger has 10 street rep. He also has a knack for leaving signs of his involvement, because he's arrogant. So far his arrogance has not caught up with him, but he's got 3 notoriety.
He's offered a run. By Hestaby. He needs to go to Chicago and get a thingamajig.
I expect the adventure to rake in between 8 and 10 Karma, so I go with 9 as an average. 9*2500 = 22500 base value.
Now, this is a dragon offering it, so I'll add 10% to the base value, getting us up to 24750
Chicago isn't the friendliest of places, but the runners are able to bring their own gear at least. Another 10% => 27000
Then we have Ace's street cred of 10, bringing the final number to 37k? That's a bit much. Let's go with 500 this time, 32k. His notoriety won't get in the way, being in Chicago he doesn't need to be real subtle.
So, 30k is what the Johnson finally offers, because Ace has another 4 guys in his team and 150k looks good on the spreadsheet. Maybe they'll negotiate him up to 35k, but this is the Johnson's limit in this case and he won't go higher, as he needs to make half a million for his boss.

This being said:
A team saying flat out "4mil or nothing" would get nothing in my game world. If the players complain, I'll tell them "Well, if you think, you'll need a military jet, maybe you'll need to re-think." I would also give their street rep a hit because a) the group is obviously unable to think outside the box (which is a highly valued soft skill) nor inside the box (defined by the monetary offer) and b) this is no way to conduct negotiations (except if they're hostile, at gunpoint or with a hostage at hand).
This is not railroading. As a GM, I put a lot of effort into giving my players something playable, but if they chose not to accept the job, I'll be a bit annoyed, but not petty enough to punish them for it. It means I've made a mistake in assessing the players and / or characters. It just means, I need to re-think my adventure offering.
I punish them because the in-game action was stupid.
Disclaimer: This is MY way of handling things. If your GM works with what you give him, it's good for you. Also, the situation probably wouldn't arise where you overstep those bounds, because you and your GM are all well used to the world you're playing in.

But disagreeing/debating is fun and better than checking work emails.

Planning for a trip to Stuffer Shack (using your group as the contact.)

Brick's Mom says "Boy, go get me some soybeer, I'm running low."

Brick knows that the nearest stuffer shack is in a rough neighborhood known for violence erupting on an hourly basis.

Brick calls Cascade and asks her to put the Stormcloud in the air where it can hover over and keep an eye out, and have one of the Mixcoatls gassed up in the courtyard ready to launch. Since this is normally the case anyway, this is just a way of saying "hey, float that blimp over here and don't get too distracted by Galaxy of Starcraft."

Brick then calls Cassandra and says he's going to the Stuffer Shack and would like company, and if she's going then treats are on him. Lacking anything better to do since she's not punching people right in the god damn face for money, Cassandra hops in the Roadmaster and goes along for the ride.


Brick and Cassandra go into Stuffer Shack, start shopping, they comm the rest of the team and ask if they want them to pick anything up while they're out.

Then the car bomb in the parking lot explodes, ripping the front of the Stuffer Shack out, and a bunch of street-level runners bust in and start demanding that everyone hand over the elf and her kid. Cascade sees the explosion on her blimp, tells everyone the shit is going down. Alex orders whatever Spirit he has on hand to fly out and render aid, while Brick and Cassandra are having a shoot-out. Cascade gets the Mixcoatl in the air, while Angelrat starts furiously hacking the StufferShack to see if there's anything she can do.


Congratulations, your "planning" paid off. You have backup on-scene, in the Matrix, in the Astral, and in the air, all for the low price of making a few calls before you went on your soybeer run.

This is true.

As long as people realize we're talking about different ways of entertaining ourselves in a distraction we all love.

Plus, I only wish I could get to Dumpshock at work.

And this is what everyone seems to be missing: The group WANTED the Johnson to say 'too much'. Their game world is far more unforgiving than most people find fun to play in, so doing a run like this is a higher risk than they really wanted to take. Saying '4 mil or don't let the door hit you on the way out' was supposed to be a way to decline while saving face.

I only wish I didn't have access to work emails from a smartphone/commlink 24/7... heh.

That's why I keep two comms. One is running a corporate OS and publically available, but I mostly just leave it alone. The other is a home brewed open OS with upgrades. That one runs in hidden mode, and is firewalled off from the other, and is what I use.

Occasionally Mr J gets upset that he can't reach me though.

You do realise that the expected profit for pretty much every single corp run is at bare minimum millions(more likely tens or even hunreds of millions)

Been enjoying this thread, although as a disclaimer I will state that I remember Tippy's previous thread with all its hyperbole and retarded logic.

In Tippy's defence, I would point out that they are playing a sort of ultra-black trenchcoat meets pink mohawk game where vehicles, armour, weapons and multiple R6 fake SINs are burned after each run. This sort of thing adds a lot to run expenses, so they should be getting paid more to cover these expenses and run at a profit. Unnecessary and uneconomical given the market constraints in most peoples' gameworlds, but YMMV.

Like Ben, I also think 100K would be a bit of a lowball price for a high-profile extraction, given that the security is pretty good and they PCs are probably going to have to lie low for a few months after the run. But whichever way you cut it 4 mill is way too high for most everyone except Tippy's enabler GM.

For a Johnson to have 4 million in readily available assets for a run budget, he/she is going to be worth at least 10 times that, probably much more. Whichever way you look at it, there number of people with that sort of personal worth are going to number in the thousands worldwide, and none of them are the sort of people who the mob would ever think about threatening with death (if they have dealings with the mob, they probably have so much mutual business that relations will be pretty cordial). And to top it all off, super-rich folk who are worth tens or hundreds of millions aren't the sort of people who throw 4 mill to the first person who asks for it - such generosity precludes them ever assembling that sort of cash in the first place - the super-rich tend to be super-miserly as well. Even if the PCs are the only team available in Seattle (or wherever) on short notice, prime runners around the continent would be willing to jump on a plane for a 24 hour job for a cool million (and when I say prime runners, I don't mean 400BP characters).

In my game, a rush job would usually entail a bonus of 20-50%, depending on how rushed and how dangerous the job is. Ideal conditions for the PC side (the Johnson knows and trusts the runners, noone else available etc) could push the price to 2x or possibly 3x normal but no more.

Still, sounds like Tippy and his krew had a blast, and I for one am jealous of his 24-esque extraction job!

No, I don't 'realise' that. It may be true at your table, but certainly not at mine. And this is (again), where styles of play differ.



How is it saving face if you make an outrageous claim? I get that the group didn't want the run, but saying basically "LULZ GIEF ALL THE MONIES" is not an elegant way of saying "no". An elegant way of saying no is saying "No. This is not our style, go find someone else."
Again: Difference in style of play. So what goes there, doesn't need to please me. Not judging here, just giving my view based on my game world

I would point out that I have seen similar occurrences happen, sometimes more than once, in Shadowrun Missions.

Well, it wasn't a ship laser, it was a sniper firing something powerful enough to one-shot a troll in heavy military armor, but as I said, similar, not identical. And yes, players have had to assault fortified military grade bunkers on several occasions. At least once with just five minutes warning.

And as said before, a typical Shadowrun Missions character can expect to make a quarter million nuyen over the course of their entire play career, nevermind in one job.

Some folks have been playing SRM characters for nearly ten years, nevermind two.

I for one, play a SRM character that at an given time has a couple of dozen plans for possible scenarios randomly happening to him. Paranoia in the extreme. With limited resources, it means you have to get creative instead of just throwing more money at it.

Again, it's not how you play your game. It's the way you present yourself, like your way is the only proper way to play Shadowrun.



-k

Karma, I would like to point out, in counter-point to that, that published Shadowrun adventures expect players to take ridiculous risks for laughably small amounts of reward.


Even for On the Run - the starter mission - real pros would laugh in your face if you offered then ten grand to go through what the players ultimately wind up going through. They might hand it over to Mr. Johnson in the end out of respect for a struck deal, or concern for their reputation, but even so, I doubled Mr. J's offer without en eyeblink and my players still thought it was a little low - before what they went through to get it. (They wound up clearing some 37K altogether and a big haul of gear and were satisfied, though.)



So please, don't point out the Shadowrun Missions stated awards as a good example of how much nuyen runners should be making, especially when CGL keeps pushing books with all these juicy, ridiculously-high-priced toys to play with.

If you're happy commiting enough felonies to get you the death sentence in twelve nations/megacorps for soybeer money, so much the better for you, but not for me. There's a huge world of expensive toys to play with, most of the good ones cost several multiples of what you just suggested was reasonable for a Runner to make over his entire career.

Missions has horrible payouts, for some of them the mission payout doesn't actually even equal the amount that you are expected to spend on the run if you complete it how the book indicates the players are likely to do so.


A sniper rifle is maxing out at about 3 kilometers range. That is well within the sensor reach of our overwatch and was planned that way on purpose; find the longest ranged sniper rifle, max the range, double that, and make sure that you have every sniper perch inside that range under surveillance.


And SR Missions have the worst payout scales imaginable.


Good for them.


There are plenty of reasonably likely scenarios that you simply can't counter without a piece (or pieces) of gear with a significant price tag.


I only bother to argue against how others play the game when they have already attacked how I play the game and have made claims that are either flat out false or at best deeply flawed.

I asked a question at the end of my OP and in the title of this thread. Many of those responding to this thread haven't bothered to answer it. One of my previous threads saw a grand total of 2 people answering my OP question over a four page thread.

If you don't want me to point out the problems and unbelievability of your play style than don't attack how I play first.

Please tell me what the heck are the corps paying you to acquirer, that has expected profits in under the million range.

Short answer: A lot.
Longer answer available when you seem genuinely interested and don't just want to scoff at inferior or different assumptions. So, have a nice evening.

No i'm seriously interested to see that list, because i honestly can't think of anything to place on a list like that.

Corps themselves? As in an actual, "the corporation itself wants you to do this so that we may make money" run? Essentially none of them. If things go deeply south, as they very occasionally will do, and the worst-case scenario is that the Runners in question get picked up by the Star or the company they were running against, and they offer to spill their guts in exchange for their own lives (as they likely will,) and they've done enough legwork to know who's actually footing the bill, you're going to have massive[/i[ amounts of egg on your face at the [i]very least. The likelihood of reprisal Runs being sent against you is very high, and God help you if the target was a AAA, because they can actually petition the Court to censure your ass for it.

And you're going to risk all of that for less than a million nuyen in profit? If so, the accountant who authorized the use of deniable assets on the job should be fired out of a cannon.





Now, that's only if the corp in question is doing the run themselves; it might be an employee, acting on his own initiative, who's playing Mr. Johnson, with less well-thought-out end goals, or simply smaller vision. Your Johnson might not even be corporate, who knows.


But extracting a major name simstar to make them work for you? You stand to make hundreds of millions. Cheaping out on the guys you hire to do so doesn't pay. If they have the reputation of getting the job done and you're asking them to do it in a way they don't normally operate and they say "four million." You give them the four goddamn million.

That's one consideration but another is whether or not others are capable of doing the work and willing to work for cheaper. I, for my games, always viewed SR characters who are "fresh out of the 400bp box" as expendable assets where if they die you haven't risked much and if they succeed you can profit considerably. But if we're to bust out the economics briefly it's not enough to have a data chip with a new software worth a billion nuyen. You also need the production and distribution capabilities, consumers, etc.

For example IRL as an IT/Server guy I could steal a copy of various products off the server we spend quite a bit of money developing, products that will end up making millions once they're sold to the customer. But they're only worth millions because someone has a factory to build it and contacts with Wal-Mart to distribute it, etc. The percentage of value added by the thief/runner/me isn't a very big portion of the millions so it's not like I can demand half the money from some company who wants to know how to build a better mousetrap.