The topic about cyberdeck prices made me think about the price of everything in the shadows, especially upgrading. Wall of text incoming.

It's a conceit in the game that you are poor and downtrodden, but also somehow have insanely expensive gear. The major question that keeps coming up is why does anyone even run? If you can afford even a mid-level deck for a quarter of a million nuyen, get a side job instead and live off the money you already have. The powers that be in-game should be aware enough of that possibility to make it easy to get just one more upgrade to get a little better, and to put up barriers to prevent improving your life any other way. Out of character, it is a lot more enjoyable to be able to feel like the character is improving and has a purpose. Better, a lot of the information is in the fluff.

The old Decker freeware game did a pretty decent job of that. You needed to make enough money each month to make rent, and there were benefits to getting good enough to make enough each month to pay higher rent. It's a terrible cycle that only benefits the people in charge, but it doesn't feel that way from the character's point of view. Shadowrun doesn't have much reason to have a higher lifestyle. Maybe you'll get shaken down or robbed at a street lifestyle if your GM remembers or just wants to punish you, but there aren't any rules for it. Likewise, you may be able to pay for ammo or bad weather gear or other things through lifestyle if you make the case for it or your GM thinks about it, but again no rules that I have seen. Using lifestyle to determine availability of gear or ease of travel (who builds or maintains a highway into the barrens?) would make sense, and shouldn't be terribly difficult to make rules for. The rules already exist for getting favors from contacts, and could be adjusted to make sense for getting minor legal gear through lifestyle costs. That would add one more system, but lower the amount of gear-tracking necessary. Nobody wants to go shopping for rope and a raincoat. I'm sure someone can come up with other useful benefits/problems with different lifestyles. Disease? Neighbors who call the cops? Landlord changing the rules if they don't think you can afford a good enough lawyer to fight them?

More on upgrading: cyberware upgrade paths in a book instead of houseruled would also be nice. Wired 1 -> 2 -> 3 should happen often enough that someone could have written down "x% more than the difference between the 2 pieces of ware, to cover surgery costs and replacing bottlenecks. Must be the same grade. These other pieces can also be upgraded/added to this other type of ware for x addition cost." Enough of a cost that it's cheaper to get the best right now, but cheap enough that most people will still just upgrade. And it's not like cyberware is so new that nobody has figured out how to upgrade it yet.

Cyberdecks and programs should be the same. Fluff has said that people build their own decks, upgrade what they build/buy/find, and program at least some of their own (trade/buy the rest). 4th edition tried to make rules for that (with 6 month interval extended tests for a single piece of software), but didn't get them right. Maybe make static-attribute decks that cost less and have reasonable home-building times and costs. Static attributes would allow piecemeal upgrading and specialist decks. Can only afford one upgrade right now? Why not get better at stealth and let attack lag behind (or whichever you prefer)? Less generic, lower barrier to entry, continual upgrades possible, and the current system is still available. It also allows hand-me-downs. Maybe grey ICE burnt out the best chip in a specialist decker's deck before the unlucky runner got a bullet in his/her brain, but with a cheap replacement on that one chip it's good enough at everything else for some street kid.

The other barrier to keep you hungry but able to upgrade to military-grade gear is also in the fluff. Runners can be paid in corp script, resources, favors, tradeable gear (a crate of Ak-97s), and other forms of barter or currency that works in the shadows but can't pay rent or grocery bills. This could require the most rules and complexity (not necessarily), but would answer one of the questions that comes up pretty frequently. Handwave the money you have as fitting into nuyen and shadow currency made up of whatever you got paid in. It's one more number to track without any tangible benefits, but would add flavor and an in-game explanation to the game world. Again, you have the ability to improve your gear, but not retire. Your only ability to improve your lot in life is to use the shadow currency to improve yourself/gear, and work better as a freelancer for the people in charge. They'll pay you a bit more nuyen, and you might get a nicer apartment while they profit off your work.

Thoughts?

I don't quite agree with one of your positions.

As early as the 2nd Edition Runner's Companion it was pretty clear that the typical shadowrunner was an expert, and a personal force to be reckoned with. I'm pretty sure other books said similar things, I just don't have them in front of me. If you want to run a street meat campaign, there's nothing preventing you from doing so, but in that case expecting a decker then to have anything more than a scrounged-together pile of electronics is quite unrealistic.

I do think that a modular deck construction system would make a lot of sense, and custom software creation makes a lot of sense as well. Let deckers wrestle with their own optimisations, and let them have enough flexibility to reconfigure their decks, given four hours of downtime. Maybe one setup for the legwork and construction of backdoors and planning of attacks, and a leaner, meaner one for going in hard to tap a physical line in the secure site.

I think that shadowrunners would not be working more than a job a month, and that would include legwork and planning. Charging in blindly everywhere gets you killed, fast. However, for the specialised services they offer, and the risks they take, they should be compensated on a level that a street corner BTL dealer couldn't hope to achieve. Otherwise you'd have top-flight, elite BTL dealers and no runs. It's an exclusive line of work because so few people can do it. This level of return on their efforts also means that they will have the money to maintain and improve their equipment, and live a fairly comfortable life (especially after the first few jobs) and that there would be no shortage of wannabes getting killed being stupid.

I spoke with a real world cop recently, and he told me: "Oh, we only catch the stupid ones. But that's nearly all of them." The whole point is that shadowrunners are not (supposed to be) the stupid ones. In the real world, real mercenaries ("security consultants") earn big money to put their butts on the line for mundane but important things like airfields or oil refineries. If you take a 120,000 NY salary and divide it by 12, you get 10,000 NY and that is for each runner individually. You'd have to be at street meat level for any lower offer to be worthy of consideration.

A large part of the driving force for every runner has to be the hunger to keep that edge. That will mean the fancy equipment, but it also means things like multiple crash pads and safehouses. Can't keep up the maintenance? Something has to go.

It also means access to runner havens. As I described elsewhere, this world has to be a patchwork for runners to be able to function, and for the electronic panopticon not to be able to pin them down. On the other hand, runner havens are at least somewhat lawless places that fanatically defend their functional independence, and offer something meaningful to the world at large. They will be few and far between, but access to them will be valuable in its own right.

In fact, right now I have an idea for a run in which the runners get some money for destroying a corporate checkpoint right outside a haven, but also get a big break on their rent...

One way of doing this is that a physical deck can run heavy resource programs* that can hide you very well from enemies, and that a commlink can still hack, but it doesn't have the resources to run specific programs very well. This way, in your example, you can have a deck for when you're home and can take the time to slowly work the system, but when you're on a 'Run, you go in fast and dirty. Since you're not as hidden, you have to deal with enemy hackers, but if you're good enough and fast enough you can still get the job done.

* == Make programs like Stealth, ECM, (which ever programs the GM decides) of greater than rating 3 only runnable on a cyberdeck, and that for checks to try to find the Decker have a higher threshold (depending on the rating of the Deck)


Quoted for truth.


I think that the payouts should be a little higher (20 to 25% higher) because you are dealing in a sellers market. I mean think about it, the Corps are hiring you because you are a DENIABLE asset. If you get your hoop blown to Hades or caught, then it's no skin off the Corp's nose. They just deny they ever heard of you. The flip side of this is that you have the skills/magic/gear to perform a job that no street gang or regular thieves could ever hope to pull off.

Solid idea. Me like. Maybe not exactly those terms, and we'd have to have decent commlink stats, or alternatively a commlink to deck continuum in the rules, but one way or another this one makes sense.



I know, that was just a bare minimum - what it takes to get Ralph the Runner out of bed in the morning. If Johnson doesn't have 50KNY to spend, a team of five runners is not in his budget, period. And those will be barely run-ready rookies. Real pros? Multiply that payout by a large whole number. Otherwise they can't even maintain their own edge.

Following on what KCK said, the more I see this, the more I think the decks should integrate some of the concept from CP2020, with decks having so many 'slots' and some programs requiring more than one 'slot' to run and possibly minimum ratings to use as well, like the aforementioned program needing a rating 3 deck to even attempt.

So you could load up a wider range of low end stuff or switch out loads for the heavy-end programs.

Tying together nuyens and character advancement is a bad idea.

Runners who'll spend their money on booze, whores and blackjack (or to improve their local community or fund a personal project) will get behind those who don't.
If they make enough to buy high-end gear, they might as well buy a permanent high lifestyle.
And the classical starting line of "fridge is empty, electricity has been cut down anyway, and you hear the footsteps of the angry troll landlord coming your way" rarely makes much sense after a few runs.

My solution is to distinguish the two. A simple solution would be to just use karma for character advancement, no matter if it's skills, spells or gear.
For my houserules I went for something a bit more complex. Cash received at the end of a run are lost unless the player spends karma points to turn them into "investment" nuyens. On the upside, gear bought with "invested" nuyens have a lower replacement/repair cost if lost/stolen/broken and can easily be replaced when needed. A player can still decide to buy a drone/implant without spending karma, but in that case, it probably won't last long. The "lost" nuyens can be considered spent on upkeep, recreation or some other fluff reasons.
At the beginning of a run, the only nuyens the runner will have will be determined by rolling according to his lifestyle the way it's done after chargen.

This also solves plenty of problems like "why buy expensive stuff if you can build/code them yourself?" and the related "why run when you can build/code expensive stuff for very little cost?". You can build stuff yourself, but you'll need to spend the same karma all the same to get something.

That would be a problem for beginning 'Runners. Once you get a number of 'Runs under your belt, you don't worry about the troll landlord. If he pisses you off enough you shoot him in the face... with a shotgun... loaded with APDS slugs.


This is nice except for the Rigger who's always getting his drones/ride shot the drek out of. It would also be a book keeping nightmare. The way to solve this is that 'Runners who "retires" to code/build for other 'Runners don't know WHERE their crap is being used at. A program used by a Humanis Club member to derail a train and kill hundreds might possibly be traced back to the Hacker and then you have a LOT of angry people coming down on your hoop.

@KCKitsune:
Actually my house rule fixes the problem of the rigger who's always getting his drones/rides shot. If they're "investments" (paid for in karma), he will be able to replace them for a fraction of the cost and without having to care about the availability, while in the normal rules he'd just be screwed and have to pay them again.

For the book keeping, I encourage players to count the cost of their "base gear". After every run, they just need to pay a flat "maintenance fee" that's equal to a fraction of that cost to "refill" their gear. This actually cuts down book-keeping.

I don't worry about the money issue. In my experience, it is self-correcting.

Consider the worst case: Racine the Razorgirl Runnerette goes on her first run, solo (because everyone else was in a BTL dream), absconds with the widget, collects a few extra mementoes, makes the bonus deadline, has wild, passionate, crazy runner sex with the CEO's dreamy son in a supply closet, and collects half a meganuyen from Johnson.

After paying for her main lifestyle, extra crashpads and safehouses, and sundry other maintenance items, she still has 450NY. The problem is that she can pay this to become awesome at her job, and dominate the world ... where ... uh, no. She can't.

Can she get better toys? Yes. Can she eat the soul of Dunkelzahn with them? No. She can get a boost to a few stats, spend post-cybersurgery recovery time paying hospital lifestyle, and maybe buy a new rifle and a new car. And then she has to bail her idiot team out, and still have enough left over to survive until the next run.

Deckers burn through money way faster than street samurai, especially if they suffer from fragile deck syndrome on runs, and riggers burn through way more money.

And money doesn't buy magical success.

But in the big picture, I have no problem with the idea that the fiscally prudent will pull ahead of the profligate. Let 'em. It's all part of the game. Can you survive the head job that the shadows pull on you?

How do you explain, in-character, how the Rigger gets his new gear?

Shadowrunners Insurance payout. The reduced cost is the deductible.

Like a Good Runner, State Farm is there........

The explanation varies depending on the circumstances. It can be that he's able to repair it or that during the legwork phase of the next run he'll find a roughly similar drone that he'll be easily able to steal. He can have a contact give him (or sell him for cheap) a "broken drone" he doesn't know what to do with and discover that all this drone needs is a new battery. Or maybe just that the new drone was a part of the last run's loot that hasn't been detailed (another concept behind these rules is that you don't need to detail the loot).

To me, a runner earns roughly 10k to 20k per month + extras when he's able to fence some loot.

The point is the following one: ok, you are taking risks, but you get for a few days of work twice as much than a wage slave, granting truckloads of free time.

I don't think that runners would have all that much free time.

Aside from downtime use of B/R skills, studying for their magic, honing their skills and of course medical attention, one mission would require weeks of prep time, including legwork, arrangements, practice, arranging equipment ...

It's a full life just keeping your edge.

Yes but I don't really count that in their work time.

Let's take the mage as an exemple. The guy wanna study magic, be the best in his field and so on.

He couldn't if he would work in a bureau. It's his shadowrunning that allows him to have free time to improve his skills.

Why would he not be able to improve in a non-shadowrunning environment? It behooves her Corporate masters if he improves, so your assumption that only shadowrunning mages improve is very, very flawed.

Seconded. A corporate security mage has an expense account, easy access to new research findings, a sponsored magical circle, collaborators who are on the cutting edge of cybernetic technological sophistication and the latest training ...

A street mage has to make all that happen by himself. No free lunches, no help paying for initiations, no subsidised talismongery ...

All that stuff eats free time. Just ask a modern small business owner.

The GM is supposed to give Karma for good roleplaying, and I don't think the typical murderhobo character is good roleplaying. Most characters do realistically want some gain from their illicit activities, if they don't then I expect the player to play his character accordingly.


Besides, you can have a lot of fun with lifestyle qualities

That's actually a very good point.

Higher lifestyle is very useful. Are you a face trying to impress someone? From the balcony of your penthouse is a great start. Do you need somewhere for a celeb you're guarding to lie low? A secured house is way nicer and better set up than an unheated squat where rain dribbles in through the cracks.

Bear in mind that some things that look like higher lifestyles on paper also cover things like built-in workshops, lodges and so on.

Lifestyle is very useful. Several lifestyles are like several identities - nice to have when you don't need them, indispensible when you do.

That's... not a good idea. Now if you're wealthy enough to have a penthouse, then you'll want to keep it VERY secret from your life as a 'Runner.

Now having the money to RENT a penthouse for a few days to impress that someone... completely doable.



If you stick a celeb into a roach motel, then you deserve to have the guy/gal complain his hoop off. Again, I would most certainly use a fake SIN and rent a place to hole him/her up.

It's like, who would be a better computer programmer? Who would be able to invest more in themselves? A freelancer, or someone who works for a big corporation?

I'd say it depends on the circumstances. Basically if the corporation wants to invest in the programmer (rather than just working that guy around the clock) the corporate guy might have more of an edge. The freelancer may have more freedom in some ways but will also be busy administering his own business.

ok my exemple was very unclear.

"if he would work in a bureau" => I meant by this that he had a wage slave job like accountant...

Ofc, a mage working for a corp has the exact same goal as the shadowrunning mage: improve. And that's actually what the corp wants.

However, their's no freedom. If he's a paid to cast Healing spells and work in a private hospital, he will never be allowed to use his working time to learn fireball spells.


Maybe I worded it badly. But a shadowrunner has freedom in his development and can evolve as he wishes.

A corporatist hasn't. so two cases:

> Either the guy is ageslav and he will mostly improve (or not) on his working field (like accountant)
> Or the guy works in a specialist field (mage-security-spec ops...) and he will improve (because it's valuable for the corp) but mostly on what the corp needs.

For starters, they cover not having to spend time scrounging for food or queuing up for water. Or at a slightly higher level, being able to order stuff without the "delivery by up-armored Citymaster" premium.

So, at this point in time, is there an official designation on whether the runners are more like a special forces team, or if they are more like an angry pirate team willing to accept missions and carry out the objectives in a semi-professional manner?

Because if they're more like angry pirates, I can see the lower pay and also the corp possibly hiring multiple teams for the same goal figuring that many of the runners will get bumped off.

Shadowrunners are more like an elite mercenary group nearly equivalent to a spec ops team. They will do any mission their morals/training/time/equipment/pay allows them to do. I'd like to think mission impossible and blackwater team up in the underworld.

Spec Ops team? "Top men."

Angry pirates? Everyone else.

The more I think about it, the more my hunch is that you'd have a few "top men", and then lots of pirates, who would be enabled by zones of lawlessness, weak governments, bottom-line driven law enforcement, and jurisdictional questions.

I mean, there would be so many nihilistic angry people out there looking to stick it to "the man"; that would be like a pirate factory. I figure the closer you are to valuable urban centers the more "top men" congregate there, and the further out you get the more pirates you have.

But I do not think many corps would hire layer upon layers of teams most of the time.

Remember part of hiring runners for a shadowrun is its not traceable back to papa corp.

The more bodies you are throwing in, the more chance something leads back to you and it only takes one group getting caught and rolling over on the hiring corp and the CC comes down and smacks the offending corp with penalty fees for getting caught.

And that is not counting them just tripping over each other as it would be safe to assume they would not be informed who else was in the field and this could lead to some interesting, can't call it friendly fire since they are not cooperating, but something similar.

Now obviously there are times when the corp may go all out and just hire every body in sight, but those are special situations. like an Omega Order where they get to dogpile the poor target.

Well, I could see it both ways. If a well known professional assassin gets caught, everyone will know right away that he only works when hired and someone paid a lot of money for his services. The guy will also probably have a trusted circle of contacts that can be investigated and multiple transactions back to him that might show a pattern.

If a scraggly group of armed nihilists gets caught, as long as they weren't paid in a way that can be traced back to the corporation, they plausibly could have just been terrorists or lunatic fringe malcontents. If they claim that, say, Ares paid them to do it, that's not really an inherently plausible claim, because you figure they'd just say anything to try and deflect blame after they were caught. Even the certified credsticks they have got their payment on (assuming they carried them when they got caught) could have changed hands multiple times in the barrens or possibly been acquired by a third party terrorist group prior to having been given to the team, so that wouldn't really link them to a particular corporate pay source. Maybe corporations could pay runners in certified credsticks but report the credsticks as stolen after a certain period of time passes, so that they can later claim that the credsticks were trafficked and the funds spent before the theft was detected.