This is presented for open commentary by the community - I have no real agenda. The events here (for the record) mostly amused me, and did not (to my knowledge) upset anybody in the group.

Two sessions ago, the runners were working with a new fixer. (Bad things had happened with the previous fixer, and that worthy was hiding while some heat died down, but in the mean time he had passed their contact information on to a new fixer.) The team is mostly a discreet action team with barely raised stats, and little rep.

For context, the team operates in South Florida. I took some liberties with canon to determine that global warming and hurricane action had raise sea level enough to disrupt a lot of land reclamation in the area, and that the return of nature owing to the Awakening had done some of its own mangrove, sawgrass and gator oriented reclamation.

The team is all human, consisting of a latina infiltrator, a swamp redneck drone rigger/hacker (more rigger than hacker) and a very unfrocked catholic priest mage with an elemental-summoning habit.

The new fixer hooked them up with a Johnson for a low-risk, high-discretion job. Right up their alley. They meet Johnson, who spins them a story about being in the lingerie fashion industry, and wanting samples from hidden R&D/design facilities run by the competition. The timeline's a little tighter than the runners like (48 hours) and there are two locations: Jacksonville, and Boston. The pay is on a piecework basis: the more they get (stockings, panties, garters, bras, bustiers, whatever) the more they get paid. If they can only hit one location, so be it, c'est la vie ... it's all in how much money they want.

OK, cool, they agree, the redneck and infiltrator start up the coast in a powerboat (they decided to just do the Jacksonville location) while the ex-priest gets busy doing initial scouting in the astral.

At first, things check out. There's the location. Large building in Jacksonville, covered in ivy but very low apparent security. Lots of people inside ...

... young ladies inside ...

... and it looks residential ...

... near campus ...

.... wait a darned minute. He checks information on the address.

It's a sorority.

This is a panty raid.

He calls his team and fills them in. They say frag this drek, and turn the boat around. They start to do more research, specifically on Johnson. Since they hadn't let the grass grow under their feet, it doesn't take all that long to find Johnson, and pick up that he's bragging to his bros about how he found the fixer through his daddy's connections, and you just have to know how to handle those kinds of people.

This is the last straw. Screw the panty raid. These fratbros are about to find out who you can, and who you should definitely not push around.

I draw a tasteful veil over a scene of unimaginable but very discreet violence, largely featuring stunballs, collecting all their commlink data, personal identification, and very embarrassingly posed pictures - oh, and the removal of the key funding source of the fratbros from their room: Deepweed and novacoke. Yup, they've been doing some amateur dealing on the side to fund their activities.

Endgame: the runners save the hides of the four stupids from some very opinionated local mobsters, and now have the contact information of the father from whom the fratbro son stole the fixer's contact information.

They didn't get paid for the job, but after explaining to the fixer how this Johnson should have been checked out a lot more carefully, the fixer is smiling and nodding a lot, and not making waves.

Last session, the same fixer hooks them up with a deal. This Johnson is legit, he's worked with her in the past, no funny stuff.

The deal is simple: persuade some people, on a generous three week timeline (well, three weeks is the drop-dead date, not a general plan) to sign on the dotted line, selling a successful, small-but-growing smallish closely held corporation to its much larger (A rated) competition.

The back story is that Johnson wants this done discreetly so as to hide some past shenanigans involving the setting up of this corporation in which Johnson is actually implicated. A quiet buyout makes all the shenanigans moot, everybody's happy. The runners don't start out knowing this, but did piece it together over the course of the session: Johnson is motivated, and this stuff is real.

The team is slightly puzzled when the first shareholder/owner they contact is blithely delighted to sign without so much as a hint of coercion, and they're just planning to blanket contact the rest of them on the theory that this is some really easy money, when they get a panic call from Johnson saying the deal is changing, and she desperately needs them to first force all the shareholders to (unanimously) strike a poison pill from the closed corporation's bylaws.

The team locates, and mentally uses one of the partners just enough to get the nasty background. The poison pill in question would have changed a quiet takeover to a huge, public, all-night lawsuit-o-rama with Johnson's name featuring heavily.

The team thinks for maybe two minutes, and decides that the sudden morphing from a no-muss-no-fuss job into a break-kneecaps-until-you-see-the-light musclefest is not on. They call the fixer back and informs him of what went on, and that they don't appreciate bait-and-switch. The fixer thinks for five seconds, ask them if they do wetwork jobs. Answer: NO. (Some of them might have, but the ex-priest answered that one for them all.)

No aftermath yet; it hasn't come about.

Hope you enjoyed the yarn.

As GM I have no problem with runners doing this sort of thing. As a player, I have done this sort of thing. Sometimes a job just doesn't suit the team or a particular member. Of course if it is the only job on the table that can kind of screw things for the session. On the other hand, you can also just flip the story you have planned and have the runners dealing with the fallout of not doing the job themselves. I firmly think though, that the players should feel they have the option to bail on a job they don't like or that isn't one they would normally do.

I should make clear: I had no problem with it, I had plan Bs anyway, and I rolled with the events as chosen by the players.

There will (of course) also be consequences, but that's inevitable.

There are consequences for just rolling with a bait-and-switch job or misleading Johnson, too; the team could find themselves underpaid and knee-deep in drek, and get a rep as pushovers. Personally, I think they handled it right for an up-and-coming, no-nonsense group that wants to get a rep as pros, but not people you jerk around.

Re: the panty raid, I'd have just made a trip to Victoria's Secret or Frederick's of Hollywood, grabbed everything in the bargain bin, taken my purchases home, taken off all the tags, and then thrown them in the dryer for an hour (so they no longer looked brand new). And voilà - present them to the stupid frat boys, who are clearly too dumb to even suspect my own bait-and-switch.

Excellent idea. Of course they might get a little suspicious when the sorority girls don't react the way the frat boys expect them to.

Yeaaah. When the Johnson is gonna jerk you around, you jerk back.

As I see things, when I'm playing, if the Johnson changes the mission parameters mid-mission, either the price goes up dramatically, or the deal is off, we keep the advance and the J swings in the wind.

Hey, as long as you've been paid by the time they get suspicious, it's not like some frat boys can really do anything about it, except for perhaps reflect on a lesson about being jerked around by people they tried to jerk around.

The sad thing is?

If the Johnson had been upfront about what he was doing - and, you know, provided that he actually could pay - a lot of teams might well have just done it. Considered it good for a laff, easy money to do something amusing.

You know, you're probably right. Plenty of runner teams would find it an amusing, no-risk job for some easy money - as long as they were told in advance what the job really was.

As a minor counter-point: when do runners ever get told exactly what the job is? If a job seems completely above board and straightforward, expect a trap.

This is the reason my group prefers the "Japanese Method" (see SR4 Corporate Enclaves, p. 107) of working for a (more or less) trusted Fixer, not Mr. Johnson. We were doing that for a few years before that book came out, and don't really understand why anyone does it the normal canon way. We have a policy of never meeting Mr. Johnson if we can help it. Safer for us, safer for him. If you have an illegal career, why would you continually reveal your identity to an ever-increasing number of criminal strangers? That's just crazy. Do everything through your Fixer - he's the go-between who shields both sides. It's also his job to check out the job Mr. Johnson wants done, and then selecting the team in his "stable" best able to do the job. If the job goes sour, you look to your Fixer first, because it was his job to make sure (as much as possible) that the job was clean before hiring your team to do it.

Not to mention, this has just become an overblown cliché in Shadowrun. Mr. Johnson will almost always betray you, even when just being upfront would make more sense. How do any of these guys survive continually pissing off professional criminals out for revenge?

mr Johnson isn't (or at least wasn't always) used to refer to any person who is hiring you.

it was generally referring to an individual who acted as you're describing fixers... someone needs something done, they get in touch with a mr Johnson (who may or may not work in some capacity for some organization or another, depends on the mr J) and mr Johnson calls you.

fixers are people that can get you stuff. mr Johnson is the person that can get you work, and the person you call when you need a job done. there is almost assuredly going to be some crossover (a fixer has to know enough people that at some point you can pretty much just say "who you know that does X" and they have a couple options, and mr Johnson likely has given jobs to or accepted jobs from many people who can get you stuff), but the whole point of mr Johnson is to be an anonymous person that any investigation stops at before reaching back to the actual employer.

After they get a reputation for shooting Johnsons who pull a bait-and-switch on them in the dick.

Some teams just plain won't put up with it, and are up front about it. It makes their rep, and Johnsons know what they're getting into and go with other teams if they're going to be shady. It can cut into the profit margin, but some teams feel it worthwhile.

I like the idea that a no nonsense team that builds that rep will get steady work, but not the highest paying jobs. As they're curbing there own risk in the future but that also means reducing the potential gains.

nm

Shoot a Johnson's, well, Johnson and you accomplish one of two things. Either you establish that you will not broker any shady double-play, or the runners get a visit in the night from some very enthusiastic CorpSec assets looking to bust SINless head.

My Johnsons tend not to be the casual toss the asset into the mulch type. They need the runners. They do not need them to the point where they take shit, however, or will broker incompetence or disrespect. A runner is a dirty little secret, an asset that is trusted with enough information to do the job. Why is a luxury some will share, but most will not. And Johnsons will at times leave out elements of the run they do not seem critical in the form of background information. Say that another team will be at a satellite site, and if that team fucks up security at both sights will elevate. While the detail is important to a runner, it either does not occur to the Johnson that it is, or they made a calculated risk (knowing that a team would take exception to having to trust other assets). In such cases if the runners ever do discover the deception they have several options. They can soldier on and get the job done, collect their pay and go on with life (whether they work for the Johnson or not is their call). They can confront the Johnson professionally about the need to know information such as that in the future, in which case the Johnson is usually receptive (unless they have soured the relationship in another way). Or they can alternative burn their bridges, go ham on the Johnson and face fallout.

The key for runners is to understand that in the grand scheme of things they hold cards, but the house always wins when it comes down to it. They are the stewards of their relationship with a Johnson, and if they are professional and avoid being overly aggressive towards the Johnson, they will be treated as professionals. Rare ever is the double cross run in my playbook, and it usually only comes when the runners have given the Johnson a damn fine reason to employ it. Should they simply prove incompetent they will not be hired again.

Which version has the Johnson waking up tied to a chair in a basement with a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling by the cord? I mean, it could be done subtly and with only implied threat.

Edit: On topic: Does anyone else find runners are more likely to walk away than take advantage of the situation if they have an obviously novice Johnson?

It also gives you, as the GM, license to screw them really, really hard once in a rare while so they can have the joy of planning out a suitable revenge. Such things make action movies.



Absolutely, they always seem to come to the conclusion that the Johnson doesn't really know what he's doing or who he's pissing off, and expect it will catch up with them instead of him.

Generally speaking, the Johnson Doublecross is a stupid trope.

Especially for the canon payouts with the stated intention of profiting thereby. Frankly, the cost of arranging the doublecross is usually going to be astronomically higher than just paying the professional criminals what you agreed to pay them.

Even if you're looking at a payout of over two hundred grand, though, chances are that if they're the kind of people who can pull off a 200,000 job, you cannot profitably doublecross them; not only they will have taken steps to ensure that if you screw them, whatever the objective of the Run was is destroyed in the process (if it was some kind of extraction,) thus meaning you're left holding a huge bill with nothing to show for it, but chances are that to do the doublecross, you're going to need heavy assets.

Those assets, 99 times out of 100, will not be other Shadowrunners. No Shadowrunners are going to take a job to be the muscle in doublecrossing another team, and if they do take the job, chances are that they mean to triple-cross you and turn you over to the other guys, on general principles if not for the possibility the other guys will throw some nuyen their way. After all, taking out a double-crossing Johnson means one less Doublecross Johnson to doublecross them.

That means you're going to have to use corp assets. Non-deniable corp assets, which means that if any of them get killed (a lot of them will,) you're going to be paying death benefits and explaining to your superiors why you got several good company men killed instead of just paying the damn deniable assets what they were contracted to be paid!

And that's assuming you win the doublecross. Lose the doublecross, and your best-case scenario is you take a bullet in the firefight that ensues. Worst case scenario results in you waking up tied to a chair with a flickering lightbulb and some people who want to ask you some very pointy questions with some very sharp knives, who aim to keep you alive until you stop being both a source of information and a source of amusement. At which point you and the chair get dumped off in Ghoul territory, or Glow City or somewhere.

And that's if they're feeling benign. If they're not feeling benign...
Hey, you know how Doublecross Johnsons like to install cranial bombs in Runners they get the better of? Street cyberdocs can install those, too.




[e]So, basically? The Johnson Doublecross is a thing that doesn't really happen. I mean, it does happen, but only very, very rarely, and usually only because the Johnson discovered the group were trying to pull a fast one on him or something. It's generally not worth it to try and doublecross the professional criminals, and professional Johnsons know this. So they have no problem with paying an upfront commensurate with their expectation that the group will delivery; they have no problem putting the remainder in escrow, and when it comes time to deliver, they pay out without begrudging the group what the job was worth, providing the job was actually completed.


Where things get sticky, though, is when the Johnson fucks up.
That happened to me in a D&D game last night, in fact. The Johnson wanted my group to sneak into a cult service, ascertain that they were, in fact, a cult of no-goodniks worshipping the (bugfuck crazy) Fey goddess of the setting as her intel indicated, and if so, eradicate them.

The Johnson fucked up. It wasn't a cult worshipping the Fey goddess, it was a cult worshiping a bunch of fucking demons. We still had to wipe them out, along with the demons they were summoning, which almost got my animal companion killed, but she fucking stiffed us since we hadn't actually committed the violence she had contracted us to commit, we'd committed entirely-different violence on our own initiative.

I was salty about that. And I (or rather, that character, at least,) has resolved to demand half up-front, no refunds, on any future work for that person. Unfortunately, she was too powerful and too highly placed for us to fall back to the physical violence default clauses which are typical in such arrangements.


You can also have fun with the Johnson being a non-professional hiring a group because they're desperate; Think the guy from Jurassic Park III.
Some groups might just ice the guy when they find out he can't pay what he promised. Others, however, will see opportunity; maybe he can't pay them upfront, but now you can extort some major favors from him, or you can arrange for him to pay you over time, and probably more than the original amount agreed upon.

Adventurers can be halfway/semi organized in some D&D settings. I'd go around trashing her rep amongst all the other adventuring groups, and tell them that "Miss X" welches on her agreements, so never take jobs from her. Do enough of that, and good luck to her the next time she wants to hire a group of adventurers to do some dirty work for her.

I always saw D&D adventurers like biker gangers with a delusion of grandeur. Since basically they are mounting up, raiding the homes of orcs, kobolds etc., murdering them for the lulz uh I mean EXP, and taking all their valuables.

So, it kind of becomes like, what would have happened if the Hell's Angels had indeed been deployed to Vietnam like one of their leaders had suggested, only to be betrayed by the President as politically deniable assets?

You're going to end up with an awesome campaign scenario there! I can see it kind of like the A Team gone really dark.

That's a really bad idea in this specific situation... At least, for this situation.
See, she's the head priestess of the local temple of the goddess of secrets, and they pay really well... When they do pay. They stiffed my last character out of like, 2K "cooperation fee" which was payed to the other members of my group because she (my other character,) refused to just slaughter a Fey priestess who was basically minding her own business and insisted on taking her alive for containment. So the bitch paid a 3K "live capture" extra fee to the whole group... But paid all the other characters 2K extra because they didn't rock the boat...


So yeah, I really don't like this bitch. But she's too highly placed to start running a campaign to trash her rep. Plus, she probably has enough clout with my character's guildmistress to have the guildmistress come down on my character if I do that.

Drawbacks of a setting where epic level adventurers are so common that they formed a little god-slaying army and killed a shitton of the setting's gods, and forced the rest to agree to have their power limited in exchange for not dying: there's always a bigger fish, and there's enough bigger fish that even if the fat merchant who pisses you off is a level 3 Noble, he can always just pay an adventurer 5 levels above you to go crump you good.

For now. Thats the beauty of adventurers. They get more powerful while NPC's do not. Eventually the debts get paid.

Yeaaah, but right now, we're level 9. By the time I could actually do anything to this bitch and get away with it, we'd be so high level that she wouldn't be worth our time.

I mean, I did get paid... Just not by her. It was a solo session, my character partnered with an NPC a few levels above her (and minmaxxed like a boss,) to do the job. The NPC has been just accumulating cash from her own jobs and hasn't known what to spend it on.

The thing is, neither I, nor my character, were all that upset about not having the money; I was upset that the questgiver/Johnson had reneged on a deal. Apologetic or not, it still pissed me off.

So, like I said: from now on, demanding an advance from that Johnson, no refunds unless a third-party arbitrator decides it's warranted.

Find another priest whose god hates oathbreakers to geas her.

I can't take action that strong against her, even if I wanted to. My guildmaster needs info about something that this woman has.

But still, lesson learned: This one cannot be trusted.

I guess I don't see a huge amount of trouble with the scenario. I mean I'm sure some teams would have just taken the money for the panty raid and called it a day although the fact that it's fratbro's manipulating "those people' probably set their teeth on edge.

I have never been a huge fan of "the J calls you up and significantly changes the parameters of the mission and just expects you to roll with it" it's always struck me as relaly bad writing esspecially when module writers do it (the recent one with Frosty in Lagos is a perfect example, it goes from a bodyguard mission (that you can't bring any heavy weapons or explosives on...because reasons) to mcguffin recovery. I just had my moment of "people really tolerate this?"

"Fuck you, Pay Me" should really be the runner mantra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8

When it comes down to it, how do you know the person calling in the middle of the run is really the Johnson? Considering all the stuff you can do with spoofing video feeds in SR why would it not be possible to spoof a Johnson call?

For some reason I've always remembered a line from one of the ARMA games: "All changes to the mission must come in writing from the employer."

Nothing prevents that from happening. I've never seen it happen in game and never done it as a GM but I tend to play my Johnsons as guys who want a job done by professionals and are willing to pay for such. Only when the players screw the Johnson does he or she return the favour. Now this changes if the story calls for it, like the Johnson is trying to do a scorched earth campaign on something but otherwise I avoid the whole Johnson screws the players cuz reasons trope.
I also assume without ever stating it, that the Johnson and the runners exchange some sort of pass phrase during the meet to verify each is who they claim. They agree on another once the job is accepted and use that when contacting the Johnson once the job is done. Could it be spoofed? Sure but it isn't as likely.
I do like the idea of a spoofed Johnson though, some rival cutting into the action for some reason but I'd also provide the players the chance to spot the problem too and deal with it.

While it could be done, the spoofer would have to know several key elements to make a successful spoof, like who the Johnson/fixer was, the aspects of the mission the runners were actually on and so on.

If your op has already been that compromised, you have a far bigger problem already.

Very true.

I've got 2 wordings for the same solution:

My SR:HK idiot character learned the lesson from Gobbet "Fire solves all problems."

Alternatively, "When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down."

Put the murder in murderhobos. Which, I guess, is agreeing with your suggestion that it isn't profitable to screw assets on the pay. Unless you're some important priestess with no internal enemies in your temple of secrets?

Eh... At this point, there's a complicating factor involved: The Johnson knows information my Fixer needs, and isn't willing to aggressively interrogate out of her.
Also, my Fixer used to (and occasionally still does) Run for the Johnson, and trusts her.

I think I would have responded we would carry out the original contract unless paid a termination fee. The new requirements are clearly a new job which can be negotiated or turned down.

Runners are people, they have to make decisions like people they aint' machines.

Often times harmless jobs/favors can have side effects if ya don't think them through (even if it's having a old buddy that remember you had knowledge sets, from years back asking ya to scare some paranoia into a couple rookies... leading to sleep deprived posts on forums about things you shouldn't talk about that could lead to government work release programs..)

Sometimes, runners do the homework... see the real problem and it's all about the money
Some runners have codes

It all boils down to they are people, Fixers/Johnsons/Primaries/etc have to understand that. Some may get upset but oh well. Even buddies have to understand that too (and be willing to accept a punch in the face even if nothing happens)

Reminds me of the "You don't need to know" scene in Ronin. "You want amateur hour? The price just doubled. In our accounts, right now."

Your Johnson tries changing things up like that? As said above, "Fuck you, pay me." One thing that has always make me shake my head is how the assumption is that the 'Runners are just gonna BOHICA and the world keeps on turning. It ain't like that on the streets or the merc world. You get paid for your work, and if you don't pay for your work you soon a rep for it that means that you will never get work again.

The last time a Johnson jerked one of my groups around? We hunted that little bitch down and found out who told him to screw us. That guy ended up dead too, along with anyone that got in our way. The idea that that you can hire highly trained and motivated individuals with state of the art equipment and weaponry to do your dirty work and screw them without killing them dead, Deader, DEADEST has got to stop in these published adventures.

Screwing with Shadowrunners isn't exactly the Chinese way to long life, it's like screwing over the bunch of spec ops people. It just doesn't end well...

Remember, you don't want a body-count if you can help it.

People get stunned/knocked out/tied up, they get embarrassed. They get geeked, their friends and family comes looking for payback.

So if the Johnson received orders to screw you? He's not the guy you actually have beef with, he was just a cog following orders, slap a tranq patch on him and dump him naked in an alley downtown at 2 AM.

The guy who did order a screwing, though? Turn that sonofabitch into ghoul chow.