QUOTE (Shev @ Jan 10 2015, 04:06 PM)
You bring up some good points JesterZero, and thinking them through was a fun exercise. ShadowDragon touched on the price issue, so I'll take a look at the rest.
Both realistically (Seattle is perfectly placed to move hot cars into other sovereign territories, sometimes by simply turning on the car and putting rubber to road,) and, I think more importantly in this context, because the game sets a value of 30% for fenced hot goods.
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This goes back to what I was saying earlier, namely that not just any Jack can jack a car. The only ones who probably do it with any regularity are street gangs, who rely less on not being traced and more on pure anarchy in certain parts of Seattle. Runners are professionals, professionals who normally wouldn't bother with such small change as you said. The whole point of the carjack thought experiment is to serve as a guide to GMs on how to price their run payouts: if your runner can make as much or more money by doing something so small-time and beneath them, that's a sign you're not paying enough.
mmu1 said it
years ago, as in my sig. That's exactly the point of this. Carjacking should, at most, be a side gig for a Running team, or a way to make ends meet in a lean month when they only got two runs, botched one and the Rigger lost a drone in the other.
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That sounds about right. Thrill gangs, or dumb kids seeing a running car and taking it for a spin. And the only times my group has actually stolen a car was when we needed a quick ride that couldn't be traced to a fake ID. The non-pros don't have the skills and conctact to sell a car even if they do get their hands on one, the pros have more use for a temporary getaway than bothering with a chopshop.
Though, if you
have stolen a car for a getaway to be untracable, and your route with it takes you into the Barrens, you might as well hock it to a chop shop. Keeping it and cleaning it for yourself is probably more trouble than it's worth, unless it's something expensive and/or specialized you forsee a reason to own in the future, like a semi-tractor or an Ares Roadmaster.
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Depending on the chopshop contact and the group, I imagine the runners would be able to find out what cars were selling for the highest price vs. what's needed in bulk and determine what cars to steal from there. Also, I can't imagine any of the shops you're taking it to in SR would ask for a title.
You can always pay your Fixer a pittance to look that up, if you can't be assed to do the legwork yourself. Though you're probably gonna get the most bang for your buck by going after high-end SUVs, in terms of ubiquity (one RV going missing won't raise heads, but if you go after them regularly, someone's gonna start snooping,) ease of hack (System rating 2, folks!) and price, 25K, versus about 10K for the average econobox. Even if the econoboxes are currently going novahot on the black market, they'd have to be fencing at 3/4ths retail to match what you get at 30% of an SUV.
And frankly, if someone's paying 3/4ths retail for boosted econoboxes, you need to start doing legwork, because that shit is highly abnormal and it probably means that someone's desperate to find one
specific econobox, and can't think of a better way to find it than to pay every carjacker, Shadowrunner, and Joe Q. Public who wants 7,500
more than he wants his car, to haul in every econobox he can get. (Kind of like the Six Napoleons, heh!)
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I think the TL;DR of this whole thread is "Can the PCs make money off of stealing and selling cars? Absolutely. Should they forced into doing so because it pays better than the actual black ops shadow work they assembled to do in the first place? Absolutely not."
I want to quote this
so bad, but Dumpshock has a signature limit and I already have the mmu1 quote to the same effect.
Although I should point out that it's not just a matter of paying
better, it's a matter of risk versus reward. Even if you literally double the reward to 30,000
doing the On the Run adventure, you're going to wind up fighting devil rats, gangers, company men, and get embroiled in the literal middle of a brutal three-way between Vampires and Shadowrunners. I mean, it's worth doing at that price, mind you, if you're desperate for work, but you should never be desperate enough for nuyen to take a job like that (well, if you know what you're getting into, anyway,) as long as you have a Matrix asset on your team who can trivially hammer the shit out of any System rating 2 node.
Of course, there are always going to be jobs where the Johnson misleads you as regards the opposition, or where (as in On the Run,) the Johnson has no idea what he's getting your team into. But if the mission is explicitly to go and cause mayhem and risk your life, the reward should at minimum start at something that makes it actually worth your while.
(Though, again, payment in kind can go a long way. DocWagon or CrashCart might offer you a high-risk job with low reward in terms of
but if the reward also includes a year's worth of Platinum armed medical extraction, it might be worth doing it. As long as the contract starts before the job commences.)
QUOTE (binarywraith @ Jan 10 2015, 06:32 PM)
Not to mention that they're pointless for this discussion given that the whole assumption here is that a group of shadowrunners has a Matrix asset on their side in the first place, which makes shutting down the vehicle remotely a pointless concept given that part of the theft is the rigger or decker on the team already having spoofed that system to accept him/her as the legitimate owner.
In theory,
every Shadowrun vehicle which is not a motorbike and which is equipped with GridGuide has a system where the cops can remotely order a car to pull to the side of the road, shut down its engines, and open its doors. That's going to be one of the first things your hacker disables after they give themselves Admin access, just behind the legitimate owner's passcodes. And if you somehow get enough attention that the fuzz send in a Matrix asset of their own, just burn the car's dogbrain and disconnect. It's not even worth opposing Hacking rolls, let alone Cybercombat, and they won't be able to trace it to you - and if they do, hell, your hacker's in the Barrens or next to them, isn't she? Not worth their time and energy to try and do anything.
Not that you should get any attention, because all windows should be tinted, so nobody would know if a car's empty or not, and even if it is, an empty car driving itself somewhere isn't remotely unusual in 2071.
QUOTE (JesterZero @ Jan 10 2015, 07:08 PM)
Mostly I wanted to hit on the difference between selling a car for parts and for scrap, since that is something that might be immediately useful given that different SR characters have different types of gear and connections. Chop shops generally assume the burden of technical know-how, but in return they require some sort of connection with their customers to avoid getting busted. Successfully selling a stolen car to a junkyard actually requires more technical know-how on the part of the seller, since you need a way to make the trail go cold (e.g. fake ID) when it's discovered that the vehicle you sold was stolen.
Getting a chop shop/import exporter to take your car is the reason there's a Threshold 10, Interval 6hr Charisma + Negotiation test to fence your stolen goods.
It's also the reason for the Black Market Pipeline trait, from RC 96.
QUOTE (Runner)
At character creation, the player chooses one of his contacts and one type of merchandise (i.e. vehicles, weapons, electronics, armor, etc.). This contact can always buy or sell that contraband on the black market at a price that benefits the character. This guarantees a 10 percent discount when the character buys the appropriate merchandise from the Black Market Contact, and confers a +3 dice pool modifier when negotiating to sell/fence appropriate goods through the Pipeline.
Personally, I think that's a little anemic. You shouldn't have to negotiate to sell to someone you already know unless you're trying to get a better deal. Fixers, being generalists, would take anything you have, no questions asked, but for less than the 30%, because he's going to have to sell it to a black market car guy. If one of your contacts is specifically a black market car guy, he should take them for the full 30% shot. If you have Black Market Pipeline (Vehicles,) then that should apply globally; you have a pipeline, your network of contacts is always going to know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, meaning you'll always be able to find someone willing to sell to you at a 10% discount, and have the +3 dice pool modifier when attempting to fence to somebody who doesn't know you.
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Anyhow, I'll stop now. The economics of crime is a particular interest of mine, so I just wanted to try to curtail a few assumptions that seemed more rooted in GTA or Hollywood than reality. If people start talking about the payouts involved in organ-legging or contract killing, I may drop back in.
Do remember that Shadowrun is more rooted in GTA and Hollywood than it is in reality. After all, you can entirely dispense with the hacker if you have a Possession-tradition magician, who can summon a spirit, order it to possess a car, and drive it to a chop shop. So really, let the 30% number stand, for the sake of ease-of-play and player-friendliness.
I mean, unless you get off modifying the fencing price of stolen goods based on what they are, and your players get off on it, too. Whatever makes dice roll smoother on your table.