Here's a scenario that came to mind recently. Let's take a Shadowrunner, say, Rigger X. Rigger X wants a Rating 5 Robotic Drone with all the cool gadgets. Unfortunately a Drone like that will cost him a cool 3 million Nuyen and Rigger X only has about 300,000 stashed away.

So Rigger X hatches a plan and investigates his target to see who has the kinds of drones he'd like to get. He gathers intelligence during his down time and then hires an actor to play Mr. Johnson for a thousand Nuyen. "Mr. Johnson" hires the team Rigger X runs with (Let's say there's 3 of them including Rigger X) to steal some drones, not prototypes but still advanced models for him. He promises a decent payout of Nuyen (Most of what Rigger X has).

Now Rigger X and his pals invade the megacorp stronghold, steal the drones, and go back to Mr. Johnson. As the rest of the team leaves Rigger X hands Mr. Johnson his thousand Nuyen and they load the drones into Rigger X's van where he'll use his B/R skills to make them unrecognizable to the Corps. Rather than 3 Million for one drone, he's probably stolen several for only a tenth of the price of one.

So, is this an immoral thing for a player to do (working with the GM to boost your character by stealing what you want)? After all, if you tried to convince the other runners on your team to go steal a 3 million dollar drone with you they'd probably want a million each to do it and think that's fair. But if Mr. Johnson offers them 150K to steal one, they'll likely go for it.

I can tell you paying people to steal corporate property is not legal

Uh, of course it's illegal. You're committing a crime. Unethical? Well, what would you call manipulating the few people who trust you, even if only on a purely professional level?

Really, to pull something like this just to get a good deal on some equipment, the character is either borderline or the roleplayer is not.

sounds like it would work, your team may get upset with you, but if your making them look different to the corp, they wont notice either

Get upset with you? You'd better make sure they don't find out or you won't make it to the men's room.

i think he was more talking "game-legal". i can't say it's not game-legal, as i've done the same thing myself.

or tell them after the drone saved there hoop, then they wont mind so much

or hire the actor, then convince them they can make more money selling the drones you don't want, keep your drone, everyone is happy and they feel like theyve gotten away with something

personally, i'd probably just pay the team 150k or so to help me steal the drones. much easier than going through the fake Mr. J hooplah, and less likely to get you drug out into the back alley by your sam and shot, when your team finds out.

What's so immoral about setting up a run for yourself? Just make a deal with them; they help you with this one, and then you help each of them with a run of their own. Maybe someone else wants to score a drek-hot SOTA cyberdeck. Maybe another character wants to get revenge on someone who's wronged that character. Maybe another one needs to score an exotic material to enchant a kick-ass focus. Maybe someone else wants to steal a priceless piece of art from the Louvre.

Running for yourselves is one of the coolest things about the game. You just have to make sure your GM is up to it because a lot of them, sadly, are control freaks who refuse to think outside the box they get to create from scratch.

Or do all the research on the facility, plan out how to get in quietly and have contacts on hand to buy the drones once you've liberated them. Then go to the group and say you've got this really easy job for them you've planned, the pice of which is one of the drones you get to keep and the others they can sell off and split the proceeds. Rather than being a bastard that has to keep it quiet or else, you've just become everyone's favourite person.

There's nothing wrong with working for yourself (well, not in and of itself, anyway). You run into problems when you need to deceive, cajole, and backstab your teammates to do it. Professional trust is the only meaningful thing in that kind of life; when you give up that, you have nothing left but enemies.

The point is that there's no need to deceive, cajole, or backstab your teammates.

unless you've been burned by Judas psychotropic black IC.

Interesting concept. Very interesting concept. I suppose the morality of it all comes down to the char and the team. BTW sounds very similar to what seems to happen in the Shadowrun Illusions short film, for those who`ve seen it.

I don't disagree that it's not necessary (or at least not absolutely necessary; naturally, different teams would accept this kind of work differently), but it exactly what this thread started off suggesting, hence pertinence. Rigger X who approaches his teammates and proposes a run in which he's paying is not the same dangerously unhinged psychopath that's willing to ensure his death and stab his coworkers in the back for some hot work-related equipment.

Why not just hire your team directly. If they're willing to work for Mr. Johnson I can't see what moral objection they would have for running for you. Also, as best I can tell the actor only gets a $1000 payout in your scheme... all in exchange for risking 20+ years in jail for the various criminal acts your team will enact. Seems to me he has a huge incentive to screw you over. "Hey, Mr. Renaku... this guy wants to pay me for $1000 to hire some shadowrunners to raid your site... do you offer rewards for tips leading to arrests?"

Pel

I say run the idea by your GM. Immoral or not, illegal or not, it makes no difference in the shadows.

It's only a problem if it causes fights OOC.

I'd be worried that the chronically underpaid "Johnson" would flee to the Caribbean League with the payout.

Sounds like ShadowRun to me.

I've had a GM who never had any difficulty with us taking off and doing things our way, or even things that we made up to do. His claim to pulling this off was that instead of spending alot of time developing a run or adventure. Instead he claimed to just develope the details of the world we interacted with. We apparently thought they went well, those are some of our groups most favorite runs.

I'm going to echo the same question I've seen above: why?

Really, ask your buds to help you make the run, or hire them. Faking a run will only make them not trust you, and people you can trust in the shadows are far too rare to be abused like this.

For all the people who asked why, I'd point out that in my first post I mentioned that other players often want a third of the proceeds for a run like that rather than settling for whatever Mr. Johnson offers, which they are more likely to do even though the Paydata/prototype is probably worth twenty times what he's offering in most runs.

Point out to your friends that the rigger often gets screwed in any run. A sammy loses a gun, he's down a few grand; a rigger loses a vehicle or drone, he's down several thousand at least.

If your mates can't handle that and demand a literal third of all proceeds, then feel free to make sure that resources are spent equally for a run. That is to say, no get away vehicle, no drone support, etc...

As a general rule when I'm a GM, I do not let the characters grow in power "too" fast. Now, I'm sure everyone has their own definition of "too fast", but this would ring a warning bell for me.

I'd put in some twist. Perhaps the hired actor owes the mob money, and decides that by letting the mob take over when the drones are delivered to him, he'd be let off the hook. The drones are destroyed in the resulting fight.

I don't think Shadowrun has ever had a real balance in characters. That's just not what the system is good at. What surprises me, however, is that the rigger didn't just sell the drones. Sure, a couple hot million-nuyen drones are neat, but you could create an entire fleet with that cash.

Yeah well keep in mind trying to find a fence crazed enough to accept drek hot million nuyen drones off the back of your truck is going to be a bit difficult.

Wouldn't it be best to dismantle them and sell off the pieces? "hey I got a drek hot <insert cool technical item here> for <insert price>. You interested?" is going to be a lot easier to offload.

While I would be tempted to go ahead with this it would be kind of hard to get away without the corp tracking it, wouldn't it? I mean a group of runners in a facility stealing data worth a couple hundred thousand may not get them hunting them to the ends of the earth, but stealing a couple million dollars worth would be a reason I imagine.

And I'm a fan of letting the team know instead of playing ring-around-the-rosy. That way they know who you are (or at least think they know who you are. ) and who they're working with without all the bulldrek and other such malarky (for a change).

Unless you don't think you can trust your team to be professional and keep their mouths shut I don't see why you wouldn't do that.

But like I said, I'd think mighty hard about it as that's going to get some serious heat on your ass. Accruing $1,000,000 over the course of a few months (IRL) is a helluva lot less likely to screw you in the end than accruing $1,000,000 over the course of a few days (IRL).

Of course if you like being hunted and this would be favorable, by all means go for it.

Oh I wouldn't expect you'd get half what they were worth, but that's still a LOT of cash. And the adventage of being a runner is you probably don't have a SIN, so tracing cash transactions is difficult. And you don't get audited.

I'd be more worried about the criminal element. If word on the street is you just succeeded in a once-in-a-lifetime deal, well that's not good.

Surely the corp will have a list of people who could back the cash for that transaction, and they're not likely to want to invoke the wrath of the corp I'd think since this IS a megacorp and count as their own country for the most part.

By cash I take it you mean with a credstick? To my understanding most cash is rather out of style and generally in corpscrip form.

Even so, there's always room for a witness or a bodyguard (and you KNOW there'd be bodyguards at THAT meet if never again on any other ) squealing, or the corp tracking you over time.

They may not get you tomorrow, they may not get you next week, but they'll get you soon enough and it won't be pretty when they do, right?

That's a good point about stealing a lot at once. Perhaps y'all could snag a drone here and there?

One interpretation of the gear rules is that the Availability and Street Index of any equipment reflects how difficult it is to 'acquire' by illicit, SINless means. 150,000 nuyen seems a little cheap to get gear that hot. The run could be real nasty.

As for the ethics side of things - what are you, runners or monks?

And?

I don't know about you, but I like drama in my games. Especially if it actually revolves around the character I'm playing or the characters being played in my game. Brings a new definition to the "run" in "Shadowrun."

Being an impartial third party just hired to do a crime gets old after awhile. I like reprecussions. I wish they had more impact on the game, in fact.

Of course, drama and plausibility, these things are incompatible.

Why not just hire a different team to do it? Same cost, same benefit, no risk to yourself or people you know.

Right, i'm not even trying to say that those things don't happen, just that there may be complications. My players are free to try things like that, but it's pretty rare.

They're more likely to do the legwork then to hire out an independant johnson to act as an intermediary to do the job for them.

Beyond a certain point of character advancement, as they gain Karma and money and gear, etc, I see it very likely charactergroups researching and initiating their own runs. It'd probably be long-term safer for groups on some level, since it reduces some of the worry of 'Who the heck are we really working for" and "Will Mr. J try to screw us?". You can worry less about negotiating price with a Johnson (I still think the rules for negotiation are a bit off in SR) and go strictly on market value of the stuff you come up with.

IF I where one of your runner buddies and found this out I would have had your head on a plate, simply because you did not do it yourself but hired a mr johnsson for it.

Is it moral, not when it comes to the corp, but runners.. sure..

Reminds me of a time when a decker of mine was interested in some property, he figured out what insurance company that landowner had (who just happened to own a car lot on that property) hacked the insurance company and expired his ensurance, then me and my runner team trashed his carlot and torched the building, suffice to say that person was in financial ruin.. I graciously called 2 days later saying I was interested in buying the property, below the market price of cource. He didnt agree with me, then I sent our covert guy to break into his appartment and get a vid stream of his family, especially his teenage doughter. Then my team send the vid stream to the family, asking for payment in a few hours or something could happen to the family.

Then I just sat back waiting for him to call me, and of cource he did. I got what I wanted and he had his family safe, its afull what you will do when you are short on cash.. aint it ? =)

Moonstone Spider:

I'm still pretty much a newbie (my character and namesake, "The Foreigner", has completed only one 'run with Sahandrian's AOL IM PBP group, and that was several months ago--I've been rather busy IRL), so I don't know if this suggestion is workable (especially since I'm not familiar with the style of your GM or your gaming group), but here goes:

How about having your group's Decker hack his or her way into the database of the corp which makes the drone(s) you want, then arranging to make a shipment --which just happens (hee, hee! ) to contain the equipment you personally want/need-- "disappear", then making it look like an attempt at theft and industrial espionage gone wrong (i.e., a rival corp wanted to get the upper hand on the corp whose property you were appropriating, and hired your team to steal a new prototype of the other corp's latest drone but, owing to a mistake in their intelligence-gathering efforts, they grabbed the wrong shipment, and then destroyed the truck (or plane, or whatever) to cover up their mistake). If you put an equal number of defunct drones of a similar type to the ones you're stealing in the truck before you destroy it, it's even possible (depending upon your GM, of course ) that the theft won't even be noticed unless someone is *REALLY* thorough in his/her investigation.

Just a basic idea, mind you, but it sounds like it could work.


Good luck with your scenario, however you decide to play it.

--Foreigner

Hey Foreigner, you been reading my playbook? Thats actually what I had my team doing since I am the decker. I hacker into an electronics manufacturing plant, "ordered" a custom set of parts for my new "business" and waited for the truck to be shipped. We let it get close to the fake adress we were using and hit it like a gang/mafia crew looking to rip off a convoy. I got 80,000 worth of cyberdeck parts and my team sold off the rest for profit. I love online shopping.

Necro Tech:

In the words of my namesake, "That would be TELLING."

Actually, I never claimed that I came up with that scenario myself.

It's such a simple (well, relatively simple, anyway) plan compared with some of the elaborate strategies I've seen posted here that it *DID* occur to me that someone might have tried something similar.

Besides, you know the old saying:

"Great minds think alike."



--Foreigner