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Epicedion
I'm developing a set of rules to help me quasi-randomly generate run offers and keep track of a group's general status as a runner team. Here's a brief overview of what I'm working on, since I'm looking for some feedback on how to implement everything. I've fleshed most of it out with simple systems.

The team receives ratings in Professionalism, Street Cred, Notoriety, and Heat. Generally speaking, Professionalism rates the team's ability to accomplish primary objectives (how Mr Johnson might view the team), Street Cred rates the team's appeal to the runner community, Notoriety rates their use of unnecessary violence or destructiveness, and Heat rates how much effort is being put into locating and/or harming them. Each of these is rated from 0 to whatever.

In between jobs, a runner team has downtime before another job offer comes in -- this was a major part of why I started working on this, because I wanted to be able to make downtime a more random/realistic occurrence at least partially under the control of the players, while making lifestyle payments and job acquisition a motivating factor in running. Right now I have the downtime between major job offers set as 14 +1d6 days, minus the team's Professionalism rating. Assuming Professionalism 5 marks a fairly decent team, that means job offers would come in every 10 to 16 days, or 2 to 3 a month. Note that as a part of this system, I expect teams would not necessarily accept every job they come across.

Also in between jobs, the team is expected to be doing other things. My in-between-jobs (Interim Time) actions so far are:
Lie Low
Job Hunt
Fence/Acquire Gear
Nothing

Lying Low adds d6 days to the job offer cycle, per team member (regular) that's actively lying low. So in a 4 man (Professionalism 5) team, if everyone lies low they could expect a job offer anywhere between 14 and 34 days -- unreliable at best.

Conversely, Job Hunting takes time off of the ticker, with each job seeker rolling their Etiquette (Street) versus Heat. Successes are divided into the base time. The downside is that they receive only a single offer of lower quality than they would normally get. Which leads us to

Job Quality. Each run is rated (1, 2, 3, 4, etc), with each rating representing both difficulty and base payout, as well as the types of offered jobs. Rating 1 jobs are street level -- mercenary/guard work, trash something, and so on. Rating 2 jobs are basic runner jobs, like theft. Rating 3 and 4 jobs get up into data theft, kidnapping, and wetwork. Theoretically jobs could be higher rated, but I haven't worked on those yet.

If the team isn't job hunting, they receive d2 offers at the highest rating they qualify for (which is determined by rolling Street Cred versus TN (12 - Professionalism) with the job rating equalling 1 + successes. That is, Street Cred reflects more how hard a fixer will work for them, and Professionalism rates how easy it is for the fixer to sell the team to a Johnson. Then, d3 days later, the fixer(s) comes back with d3 jobs at the next lower rating, then d6 days after that, he comes back with d6 jobs at the next lower rating. A team is free to accept any or all of these offers, depending on how cash-strapped/insane they might be. Again, if they are job hunting, they only get one job offer and it's at one lower rating than they would normally get by waiting.

I've then standardized base job payouts, at 5000 for rating 1, 15000 for rating 2, 50000 for rating 3, 100000 for rating 4. The job type then factors into this. A Rating 3 kidnapping job would be 50000 nuyen plus (Professionalism x Rating x 250) minus (Notoriety x Rating x 200), or for a Professionalism 5, Notoriety 2 team: 52550 nuyen -- in other words, being highly professional is a bonus, but being overly destructive is a negative. Each job type gets its own modifiers (so destruction/mayhem type runs would get bonuses from Notoriety, for example).

To finalize the offer price, you roll Street Cred versus (3 + Heat), with 0 successes applying a -3d6% modifier to the offer, 1 successes applying -2d6%, scaling up by 1d6 for every success, through the positives.

Once an initial offer is set and a meet is confirmed, the in-person negotiation takes the form of normal opposed Negotiation rolls, where the team can pull 10% per net success up front, or 2% per net success received immediately (for incidental expenses, not taken out of the final payment as with up front amounts). Successes can be mixed, so if a negotiator gets 3 net successes, he might take 10% up front and 4% for expenses.

Once on a run, a team's 4 markers will change. Depending on how well/badly they do, they should receive modifications to each marker from 0 to whatever the run rating is (with options to move further based on egregious circumstances or bonus objectives). This is highly dependent on circumstances, and a run might amp up Professionalism, but reduce Street Cred (let's say they bump heads with another runner team and to get the job done they decide to fry the other team's decker).

At the end of each campaign month, when Lifestyles have to be renewed (etc), each marker has a chance of degrading. Doing well during the month helps keep things steady, and lying low helps reduce Heat.

Okay, the dog's going crazy, so I'll stop now. Thoughts?
Dolanar
it seems a great deal of effort but if you insist on doing this, a few suggestions:

Lying low: allow this to modify the "Heat" level. As is, there is no reason to Lie low vs doing nothing except that it takes longer to get another job, if it lowered the heat level faster it might make it a good option.

Perhaps add an extra step to the job of having the right person for the job, for instance, the team takes a wetwork job where they need to kill someone in a crowded place Assassin's Creed style & they happen to have someone in the group who is a master of stealth & silent kills, while that could be part of the professionalism score, I think it should be taken on a job by job basis & given a bonus to either their prof or street cred score for being well prepared for the job they take.
taeksosin
...I really like this. I wouldn't mind seeing it fleshed out even further. Are your payouts group payouts, or payout per runner? I'm guessing on group, and if that's the case, you may want to look at generating a per runner scale as well, just as an extra option for the GM. Second lying low needing to have a marked effect on heat level. Ratings for the top end of the scale will also help this as well (I like 10, but you could theoretically run w/100 or something to turn it into percentages and give me an excuse to play with my d10's biggrin.gif). Look forward to seeing more from this thread.
Epicedion
QUOTE (Dolanar @ Nov 8 2012, 07:44 PM) *
it seems a great deal of effort but if you insist on doing this, a few suggestions:

Lying low: allow this to modify the "Heat" level. As is, there is no reason to Lie low vs doing nothing except that it takes longer to get another job, if it lowered the heat level faster it might make it a good option.

Perhaps add an extra step to the job of having the right person for the job, for instance, the team takes a wetwork job where they need to kill someone in a crowded place Assassin's Creed style & they happen to have someone in the group who is a master of stealth & silent kills, while that could be part of the professionalism score, I think it should be taken on a job by job basis & given a bonus to either their prof or street cred score for being well prepared for the job they take.


It's a moderate level of effort. I'm a mathematician, so I tend to like messing around probabilistic models in game systems to produce sometimes interesting and sometimes useful stuff. The goal here is to partially supplant the GM's role in determining what run comes next, but do so in a way that makes the players be somewhat thoughtful about the jobs they approach and the way they complete them. It comes out of me not wanting to railroad the team along through a series of runs, but also not wanting to actually design full runs that the team then feels obligated to accept. Also, I'm hoping that some emergent gameplay will come out of it, shifting the focus away from individual jobs and carefully planned stories, and putting more focus on the group existing as a runner team -- stories will start to come out of who the team pisses off/on, and the notable ramifications of how purple mohawk / mirror shades they trend in practice.

I got a little rushed typing up the end of things, since my dog was freaking out. Lying Low modifies the chance of Heat decreasing at the end of a campaign month. For Heat, it falls off with a roll of Heat versus TN 6, with the TN reduced by the number of full weeks spent lying low per regular team member (that is, it's total number of weeks lying low divided by the number of team members). With some fudging about the number of weeks actually in a month, that comes out to a range of TN 6 to TN 2, meaning that if the entire team does nothing by sit on their butts eating ramen all month, they'll lose most of their Heat. That means no heavy shopping and no jobs for anyone.

I like the idea of the "right person for the right job" angle, but that would be hard to model. One way to do it would be to add to the run generation a "skill requirement" where a certain type of job might require a certain collection of skills at a minimum rating (let's say an on-site covert data theft job might require Computer and Electronics). Maybe the rating could be equal to the job rating x 1.5 or so, rounded up (Skill 2 for rating 1 job, Skill 3 for rating 2 job, Skill 5 for rating 3, and Skill 6 for rating 4). I don't like that it gets into an extra-metagamey place where jobs are partially decided on character sheet choices rather than game choices.

I missed out on explaining where else I was going with this, which is into the systems I haven't put much (read: anything) into developing yet. Basically I want to take the four marker stats and use them to influence a sort of Cool to Wild scale for how a run might go, and what might happen during downtime. I intend some mix of Notoriety and Street Cred (heavy on the Notoriety) to influence the presence/severity of The Twist in a run, while using Heat to create random events during interim periods. That is, a team with poor Street Cred and/or high Notoriety might get chucked under the bus by the Johnson or their fixer (examples: getting lied to, screwed out of payment, set up, etc) while a team with high Heat might get a Lone Star raid at their favorite bar or an arms dealer who's setting them up to get rolled by the go-gang they just stomped.
Dolanar
well, the "right skill for the job" idea isn't metagamey, insofar as, its assumed the team is told enough of the job therefore, allowing the team to take the job that best suits their skills.

On the other hand you could make this a secret bonus that the GM adds afterwards if the team USES the right skills, just because the team has the Assassin's Creed character who is perfect for the wetwork, doesn't mean they realize his skills are perfect for the job & utilize his skills.
Epicedion
QUOTE (Dolanar @ Nov 8 2012, 08:29 PM) *
well, the "right skill for the job" idea isn't metagamey, insofar as, its assumed the team is told enough of the job therefore, allowing the team to take the job that best suits their skills.

On the other hand you could make this a secret bonus that the GM adds afterwards if the team USES the right skills, just because the team has the Assassin's Creed character who is perfect for the wetwork, doesn't mean they realize his skills are perfect for the job & utilize his skills.


Maybe a Style table, that could be minor deviations from a run's basic outline and provide monetary bonuses -- stuff like ghosting a run or taking down a target in a specific way. Stuff that's not offered on all runs, but that can come up randomly from time to time. The larger the collection of nuances generated from the system, the more the specific details of a run (who, what, where, etc) can come together naturally.

While I'm generating the skeleton of a run with the mechanics, I'm still fleshing them out personally. The run my team accepted for their next session offered 5141 nuyen (it's a rating 1 job, since they're very early and street level right now -- the decker is using an Alliance Sigma deck, the rigger doesn't have a VCR yet, and the best cyberware anyone has is the specialist with a Smartlink) with a Destruction goal. So I decided it would be fun if Mr Johnson was hiring someone to trash a rare sports car -- straight up, very simple, low risk and low cost. Johnson works for some rich socialite who owns one of these cars, and only a few were made, so he's hiring a team to trash the only other one in Seattle to drive up the value of his own. As a secondary objective, he's offering an extra 10k if they can salvage the car's electronic control module, and 5k on top of that if they can hack out the module's security and extract the data. So the team can plant C4 under the car and walk off, or go the more complex route of using B/R Electronics (or perhaps B/R Car) to remove the device and Computer to hack it, and then blow up the car. Or they could steal it and drive it into Puget Sound (using Electronics and B/R Electronics to disable safety/security and Car to outrun potential tails). Or they could steal it and screw the run by trying to fence it themselves, or holding it for ransom against the owner, probably making a bunch of swift cash but taking a hit to their Professionalism (though probably gaining some Street Cred if they sell it to a semi-friendly go-gang they dealt with last run).

So I'm not trying to make things stock and rigid, rather trying to let things come along organically.
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