Does one such as this exist?

As of yet, probably not, but one quick photoshop later...

All good points, Nath. I think, you and I mean basically the same, so let me clarify a bit.
By 'special skills' I meant, that even a character built without intentions of min-maxing @ 400BP is about a third better than Joe Citizen, on the crunch side alone. But in this consideration was also a mixture of soft skills, the mindset of a runner, if you want to call it that. The willingness to kill, to commit cyber and real crimes, to use magic offensively and to generally shit all over the word of the law. In short: The will to claw your way up from the gutter.
You describe the problems they are faced with, and I agree. Of course they are not only upwardly mobile, they may also take a very deep plunge, if they take a wrong step.

Here are some sources to put this discussion in perspective, if we're going to assume that today's money/pay is equivalent,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/weekinre...l&_r=1&
http://www.thenation.com/article/blackwater-cia-assassins#

Blackwater paid about $1000/day for combat duty (2007). Not a million dollars a year and not low risk, but close to your low end number.
$5 million is what the company got paid for a twenty person team of highly trained operatives, but that was for a multi-target operation to find and capture or kill hidden targets with their own security.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Bodyguard/Salary

Really experienced body guards make about $90-100,000 a year on average, so $150,000 seems believable, but probably not much more than that. Unless you're working for a third world dictator or something, in which case "body guard" might not be an accurate title.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_pol...dirt_cheap.html

It seems I drastically over pay my team for mob hits. From now on I'll tell them that it's $20,000 total for a hit job, for more realism.

Thanks for the data. I think that last article demonstrates one of the issues I've noticed with the "Runners get to name their price," argument - there's very likely to be competition for the job, so while you certainly have the right to walk away, Johnsons on the whole aren't going to be under much pressure to meet whatever price you set.



Something like this perhaps? Woo MS Paint!

Now, it's something completely different.

If that's what the players think is a fun game, then yeah. I wouldn't pay that much unless they're hired to assassinate Lofwyr, Damien Knight or Richard Villiers, but I'm not going to say "No No No, you're having fun wrong!" if that's what another group thinks is fun. I do, however, think that each team member should be pulling in at least 15 to 20 thousand a month doing Runs with that payout going up from there.

As to the comments on 'challenge', well gangs and common security forces shouldn't really ever be 'beefed up' just going by how good the PCs are. If they're that good, then they should have an easier time. On the note of knocking over Wal-Mart or a jewelry store after turning down the run, well, IMO saying no to that is just another form of railroading at worst or being a passive aggressive butt-head at best.

400 BP runners have the potential to be elite badasses right out of the gate, but you will only see a whole team that way if everyone gets on the same page and/or creates their characters together. It is easy to make characters who are wealthy, well-connected, or even both, although it comes out of a finite supply of starting points, and may limit you in other areas.

While Shadowrun's character creation systems offer wonderful flexibility and let you fine-tune your characters, the downside is that things like power and experience levels are all over the map. You can create a face who is an ultra-connected corporate lawywer, a street thug with a shotgun, a heavily augmented killing machine, an alcoholic ex-cop, a neo-anarchist hacker who rides a tricked-out racing bike, and the possibilities go on and on.

The game setting also supports a wide variety of gaming styles, from cinematic action, to noir, to street punks, to elite superspies. You can be made men, pirates, gangers, a DocWagon team - even traditional shadowrunning can involve everything from helping out freedom fighters, to finding a missing person, to bodyguarding, to delivering contraband to another party, to the aforementioned zero zones.

The downside to this versatility is that sometimes, it is harder to get everyone on the same page. This is why the GM needs to talk with the players ahead of the game, setting expectations, explaining optional or house rules, and finding out what kind of campaign everyone wants to play. I think communication is a better way of dealing with potential problem characters (or players). I have seen an unfortunate tendency on these boards for people to advocate GM dickery as a response to powergaming (which can be nothing but logical choices at character creation). I would rather tell a player "That's a bit more damage soaking than I can realistically challenge - maybe you could tone it down a bit", rather than telling him "Ha, ha! A sniper headshots you, and you die by GM fiat!"

She's cute. She'd actually work pretty good as a more realistic style mugshot for my congirl...

I, for one, regularly run characters with multiple dice pools in the 20+ range right out of chargen. Characters, that, by the numbers, should be able to reduce entire city blocks to rubble without too much effort. I'm a powergamer. It's my nature.

I still think of them as "nobodies" in the larger setting.

Why? Because this is cyberpunk.

The heroes are ALWAYS, ultimately, nobody. It's a trope of the genre. Look at any good cyberpunk fiction and you'll see it over and over. They are usually skilled, often masters in their field, but the genre dictates that no matter what they accomplish, at the end of the day they get forgotten. Sometimes they even get killed off-camera in a later story, unloved and unremembered except by a handful of people.

It's a crapsack world where you can't win, but I still love the game.



-k

Speaking of charm and wit ...

I have to agree with Toturi in the sense that a group is sitting down to play with certain expectations from the GM and from each player. If the group is not on the same page, they should discuss the differences and see if they can resolve it to a mutually entertaining outcome or, if not, consider dissolving. I have a job and don't play or run games because I want extra hours of unpaid work.

As far as the topic is concerned, I think that the different rankings should be a matter of GM opinion; a mixture of reputation from the professionalism you display in your dealings and the stories of the jobs you pulled. You may have some great stories in your history that you bring to the table on day 1, but those don't matter much until you demonstrate that your self-ascribed reputation is earned.

So, out of curiosity, if KCKitsune is still with us, what is the purpose of the classification?

I take offense at the bolded statement above. I agree that street gangers will not be pulling ex-Special Ops skill ranks just because the PCs were highly optimized. However, as a GM I will try to present challenges to my PCs. Half the team awakened? Well, even if we assume the awakened percentage among runners is 1 in 10 rather than the standard population of 1 in 100, this is a seriously magically competent team. They will probably one of the go-to teams for a magic-heavy run.
Can they write their own paycheck? No, because there are other teams with mages out there who would be interested in the job as well. Sure they only have the one mage, but he is boasting Mag 7 and 2 initiations.


As has been noted, your salary quotations are rather optimistic. Given a 6th World that has had a lot of upheaval and a number of wars, there are a lot of ex-elite soldiers out there. The streets are jungles, and the street sammies that live to rise to the top of the pile are tough SOBs, even if their bodies are half crome. Yeah, your special snowflake of a character is, technically, in the top percentile of their shooting game. Does the Johnson care about this? No, he cares that the job gets done, and gets done in budget. He doesn't have a blank chequebook, although I am sure he wishes he did. Then he could hire Fastjack's crew and forget about these clowns in front of him.
The PCs do not have the right to write their own cheque. If they price themselves above what their street rep and track record dictate, the Johnson will place an irate call to the fixer for wasting his time and go on to fixer and team B. The team is free to go rip off a jewelry store or Stuffer Shack as they see fit. Will they succeed? Quite possibly. Will there be complications (mobsters giving protection, insurers looking for the stolen jewels because recovering them is cheaper than paying out)? Not always, but also quite possibly.
Is shadow running a sellers market? Not in my book, no, at least not unless you are a Prime Runner and the J needs a zero-zero extraction that only you can do (and I understand this is the way your group plays it, high pay and high stakes). The difference in our opinions is of what constitutes a prime runner and what doesn't.

That would be the polite version of what I wrote.

OK, to start with, I would like to suggest to some posters to keep the tone of their posts to Tippy cordial and not sink to the level of personal attack, as tempting as it may be. His position is that (1) prime runners can be made with as little as 320BP (from the section advising GMs on how to design "prime runner" NPCs), and that (2) based on the skill-level table (skill 3 "professional", skill 5 "elite" and skill 7 "best in world") and creating a well balanced team of min-maxed specialist builds he likes to think that his group are Prime Runners at the top of their game. Is this a fair representation of your position, Tippy?

His position does have its logical basis, but is not "objectively right". Sorry, there is no such thing Tippy, and your arrogant assertion that you are the keeper of the sacred "correct" understanding of the gameworld is not making you any friends. The rulebook says lots of often contradictory things, and the least we can deduce from this is that everyone's differing gameworld views are subjectively different. None of them are necessarily "wrong" or "right", just different people reading the same rulebooks come up with differing opinions on how things work. These are issues we know and love to debate on Dumpshock.

The trouble with Tippy's thesis, as with so many assertions made on these boards, is that it involves selective reverence of (1) and (2) above, while being selectively blind to other parts of the BBB that suggest runners are above the level of wannabee, and just starting to get reputations as pros, or any rulebook guidelines on payment for runs. As for his food being laced with RFIDs quote, it is based on one of the flavour "hacked comments" part of the rulebook (what some might refer to as fluff) rather than a gospel hard-and-fast "crunch" rule, so YMMV.

Tippy I am not attacking the way your group plays the game, enjoy making your millions and conquering the world. But do not tell those of us who enjoy a game where there are bigger badasses then the PCs out there in the gameworld, and for whom getting the cash for that MBW3 or Synaptic Boosters 3 is a hard-earned reward for a year of gameplay rather than renumeration for a few nights bodyguard duty, that we are "doing it wrong".

To me, that's more noir than cyberpunk. Cyberpunk certainly borrows noir elements, but it doesn't always end up with the downtrodden heroes forlornly trudging off, beaten by "the man". Cyberpunk often involves the main characters saving the world, or at least changing it for the better, and a lot of times they get to ride off into the sunset afterwards. Sure, you also have stories like Dogfight, but they are not the only type of cyberpunk out there.

I think the genre of a game should definitely be part of the pre-game discussion. If you feel that the characters should never really succeed, despite their abilities, tell the players, so they can build the appropriate flawed heroes with feet of clay, rather than coming into the game with expectations of success, then feeling frustrated and railroaded.

If you've read the Ender's Game series, consider the way that Valentine and Peter build their reputation. That's done exclusively by posting things online.

I have no issues with 15-20 Thousand Nuyen/Month on Runs alone (as I mentioned, you can make 50,000 Nuyen/Month on Qualities alone). If not more. Depends upon your run schedule. If you are running one run/month, then you need all that in one fell swoop. If you run 4/Month, then you can be more flexible. Obviously, not all of them are going to be "appropriate" level runs. But that is okay, as it allows the world to really live when you have those smaller runs for your contacts/friends when they call in a favor from you.

My various characters have been on runs that lasted a few days, and netted individual team members 40-50 Thousand Nuyen, and then they have been on runs for friends/contacts that netted only 2,000 Nuyen for a week of work or more, because that was all they could afford, but it bolstered the relationship, and the character was okay with that. *shrug*

The word you're loking for is 'matrix contact' and 'group contact'. You need an interested audience for that. Haven't rerad those novels, but I'm pretty sure they don't just put them up *someplace* and suddenly everyone reads them (if that's how the book handles online contacts, then it's a crappy book).

I think the description of skill ratings given in the main book are poorly done, and should not be used for comparison. It trivial to get a skill up to 6 at start, or even later with a bit of karma, but that does not mean you are world class, as per shadowrun rules. As said before DP are a more effective way of measuring a characters ability.

While I agree in principle that a team of 400 BP fresh out of chargen characters can take on a AAA+ installation and accomplish the mission, a couple of things make it extremely unlikely.

1) the characters have to be built together to cover each others weaknesses
2) their plan must be perfect, ie. nothing can go wrong
3) to assure nothing can go wrong, a very large percentage (if not all) of their rolls have to be successful
4) they have to have superior knowledge of the installation

Given that AAA+ installations have probably multiple redundant safety measures (meaning you need a lot of rolls), their plans and security measures are as guarded as they are, and that there will likely come a time when a character will have to make a roll that is not his main focus means that going after a AAA+ installation is slightly more suicidal then surviving 7 rounds of russian roullete with a 6 round gun.

That's kinda the exact point. PC shadowrunners are not the common man or the like. They are incredibly exceptional, and they have to be incredibly exceptional to pull off the kinds of missions that they are expected to undertake. Most people just seem to be operating under the delusion that the PC's are common representatives of the Sixth World when they manifestly are not.


That's kinda the point. Success is highly unlikely but at the end of the day it is possible. Lower the BP level even a bit and it fairly rapidly becomes flat out impossible as the runners simply do not have the skills and abilities to succeed.

I don't think anyone is operating under that assumption. I think everyone would agree that 400 BP runners are well above the norm of the average citizen. That they are incredibly exceptional, perhaps, in very small skill subset (if built that way). And there is a lot of competition out there, that has a similar level of competence.



What I am talking about is that you need to make 10 or 20 tests in a row that you have at best a 50% chance to pull off. Per runner. And you have to make all of them. While it is possible it is highly unlikely. If you have that sort of luck, go and play the lottery, it will give you much better odds.

Except that they can be incredibly exceptional in a fairly broad area. One of the things that makes PC runners so exceptional is that they are operating at a professional level in numerous disparate and discrete fields of study. Your average runner can shoot as well as a professional soldier, sneak as well as a professional thief, has multiple college degrees, etc. PC runners are all high level polymaths, in addition to often being Noble Prize or Olympic Gold level in their area of specialty.


That's really not true. In absolute numbers there are fair number of individuals who can match or exceed the PC's in any given area but as a whole there are very few who are remotely comparable naturally (although with skillwires a lot of it can be faked, which is what the mega's often do).

Sure, after all of the gear and ware that unlimited resources make possible even an average person can be competitive with most PC runners in a given area, but that is usually after loading them down with hundreds of thousand (if not millions) of nuyen worth of gear. And once the PC's get access to that same gear (and they likely will eventually) they will be better than all but a handful of individuals in all of human history in a given area.


Add in edge and your odds get significantly better. And no, the lottery has far worse odds. Making 20 rolls in a row each with a 50% chance of success is approximately 1 in a million odds. Winning the lottery is upwards of 1 in 11 million.

It's been a while since I read the books, so I may not remember it quite correctly. But as I recall, they were not posting as themselves, but as online personas with bogus academic credentials. Plus, the two of them were basically super-geniuses - they were posting at quite a bit above "college graduate" level, despite being kids.

No offense, but that sounds headache-inducing.

And even then, they built up several online contacts. They weren't without contacts at all, in that scenario.

They started without them and over years they built them using their preexisting skills, until they were the single greatest will directing humanity. Peter quite literally took over, unified, and ruled the entire human species before dieing in bed of old age; and he did it by first building the contacts purely over the 'net.

Should runners expect to do the same type of thing? No, it would require (among numerous other things) something like Crash 3.0 or the Great Ghost Dance to occur that creates the necessary chaos and opportunity; and creating such an event is almost certainly beyond the PC's reach.

While that is defined by the main book, it is a stupid definition. Getting high skill ratings is trivially easy. Getting high DP (exceptional level) is rather hard in multiple areas. You also end up less then competent in others.



Again, you are stuck in the skill description rather then the actual effect. A DP is what matters. Frankly I think the authors were a bit braindead when they wrote those skill descriptions.




Per character. I stipulated that all characters must succeed on their rolls to accomplish the mission. But even a million to 1 odds don't speak in favor of the viability of such a mission.

Top end shadowrunners should have a shot at completing such a mission, depending on intel and planning. 400 BP runners should not (and do not) have a realistic chance at making a AAA+ installation run.

On topic: You don't need any Karma, technically. If people offer you runs for money, you're a pro. Of course, were talking level. I would say that enough Karma to really max out in one or two key areas for your team, plus enough to take care of any initial weak points.

For example, a mage might have started out with either awesome spellcasting or awesome conjuring, but the rules don't let both be at level 6 starting out. I would say initiating a few times, maybe upping the weaker skill group, getting those last spells you wanted, focuses, maybe one attribute that started out low, and contacts. Generally, being flat out awesome in a couple of things, and not so bad at things that might let your group down or get you killed. Like being able to run, hide, perceive, be polite, and take damage in addition to your forte.

Off topic: Even people with vast amounts of money will not overpay people to do jobs, and they will never knowingly pay more than the job is worth to them. That's simple economics. Extremely rich people pay people very tiny amounts of money every day. Johnsons are connected and will almost never be in a situation where your group is their only option. Overpaying is a bad business practice that any experienced person should avoid.

The skill descriptions have too much hyperbole on the high end for my tastes, considering the a single die is about a third of a success. They also use examples of people who have skill sets and high matching Attributes, to describe a single skill. Not all of the examples are very good, either, especially the social ones, where the examples seem to describe people with money and connections, rather than people with a face's ability to blend into different social scenes and manipulate people. Not all political candidates have social skills of 5 or 6, just people who write speeches for them and spin things for them in the press.

But even so, a skill of 6 is described as "best of the rest", with "best of the best" being reserved for a skill of 7. Sure, such skills will be comparatively rare, but so are shadowrunners.

I was thinking about this last night, and here's what I came up with.

While your skills, gear, and how much money is an important aspect of Shadowrun, I think that it all comes down to one thing: reputation.

Reputation is your resume when a Johnson and a fixer sit down to hire for a job. It's your record of what you've done, who you've pissed off, and most important, your accomplishments.

Or, think of it like an ebay seller rating: you start off at a hundred percent, and then it's slowly chipped away at it with each screw-up or negative feedback (as represented by Notoriety).

Of course, there is no scale that shows at which point one's called a professional runner. Personally I think that's a per GM / table scale, honestly, but having one in the book would be useful (see notes at the end).

When a Johnson pulls up shadowchatter about your activity - be it via Matrix, data haven, word of mouth in the network of fixers you know exists in your city but your fixer tells you totally doesn't exist - and sees, "will walk away from a table if he's not paid X per job," that rep is going to stick with you, and make it harder to get work.

(It's actually a pretty neat use of Notoriety / the Bad Rep flaw, now that I think about it.)

Reputation is based on two things - your ease to work with and your ability to get the job done. Contacts and resources are a large part of accomplishing tasks, followled closely by your own skills and abilities. No one person can do all the jobs, barring a simple snatch and grab purse steal. So you need to be able to work in a team (see how it all comes together?)

Contacts fill in gaps of knowledge / ability you don't have. Being able to say, "hey, I just found this thing, and what is this thing, and why is Ares looking to kill me over it?" to your friend the geologist is better than just showing up to your Johnson and discovering that you're playing with some martian isotope or something. Being more knowledgable is a good thing - watch auction shows like Storage Wars or Pawn Stars or to see why contacts are a really good thing.

Contacts also feed into gear. Or how else are you going to get your precious sniper rifle? Or get it past customs?

...then we get to your own skills and abilities. I don't disagree that the current numbers scale is ass, and needs to be revised or replaced with general skill pools scales for players to see. I will note that I'm not a fan of min / max warfare I see in games like Shadowrun and D&D - play the character, not the fsking stats, or leave my game. Sorry, personal peeve.

***

Shadowrun could really benefit from the clarity of having a focused statement for the world.

The corebook needs - in its first chapters - to describe who shadowrunners are, what they do, and most importantly, ask each player during character creation why it is the character is willing to be crazy enough to run. And make it worth something mechanically (maybe like Keys in The Spirit of Yesterday or something? I dunno.)

Having those statements up front is the most important part of playing this game, because it feeds into everything else. Shadowrun can totally be about gangers scraping it together on the streets and about guys who make multi-million nuyen grabs of important researchers - seriously, it's pretty wide open to that, and I wouldn't change it for the world.

But it needs to get into the headspace of why.

Discussions like this are emblematic of that problem. We have one guy stating that you shouldn't walk into a Stuffer Shack without a drone retinue to protect your ass while arguing that it's a seller's market and that runners should walk away from any job that ain't worth a million nuyen plus. I don't disagree that you can run those sorts of games, but why is that character even trying then? He's an ass to work with, and I think his local shadowfolk would roll his eyes every time he walked, talked, or posted on the local shadow node.

If we had a good scale, and could say, "okay, here you go, here's what kind of work this character would do," we wouldn't be having this multi-page argument. Hell, I'm running two games that are on opposite sides of that line - one with players working as Ghostwalker's Secret Hand, and the other a solo one on one game of runners working the European Grand Tour, trying to build rep in order to establish themselves in the shadows.

Both work really well, but I doubt that they'd fit Tippy's specifications of what Shadowrun is. Again, emblematic of the problem we have with the unfocused core.

I mostly agree with that, although I think high ability combined with well-connected contacts can give you a boost up. A street samurai with high dice pools and a Connection: 5 fixer might start out doing upper-end work.

There are parts about Shadowrun that greatly mimic our own world as has been usefully demonstrated during this rather long recession. Look at wage depression specifically. It's been a buyers market because of the level of unemployment that wages have been pushed downward.

Prime runners (by the book) actually work against Tippy as far as his statement that his PCs are the top of the list. While the stats for prime runners have rules, there are no rules regarding their reputations or regarding the quantity of prime runners that exist in a world. Consequently, there can be as many prime runners as the GM decides. The more of them that exist the more downward pressure is going to be existing on the wages of runners since the Johnson can just shop around for the team that will do the job at the lower prices.

I think part of the problem is that most folks have this idea of "Prime Runners" being what the books currently term "Street Legends".

A lot of folks I talk to are completely unaware there are rules for NPC Prime Runners in the book, because they've never used them. It does not help that previous editions used the term pretty much to mean the elite of the elite of the Shadowrunner biz, and even the 4E books seem to interchangeably use the term for both the NPC rules and to mean Street Legends, depending on who wrote the section




-k