So, what's the worst thing your runners ever did to a Johnson?

Our group's latest employer was shot with an explosive round, had his car shot out from under him by a MMG, crashed into the lightpost as a result, got shot in a sensitive area with a gel round while trying to scuttle away, was shocked with electricity to disable a screamer device he had implanted, and is likely headed for the organ leggers unless he comes up with a really good explanation as to why he double-crossed us.

We hurt a Johnson's feelings once...

Man, this topic title is sooooo ripe for abuse.

Edit: I'm an idiot who didn't read the thread originator.

Well, we do have slightly different levels of detail

We're very possibly going to remove this Johnson's head with a blowtorch. Either way, what bits of him go undamaged are going to be organlegged. I'm also considering leaving his head somewhere public with a little map-of-the-world ball stuffed in his mouth, if it can be done in a sufficiently evidenceless fashion (character's street name is Mister World).

Incidentally, that was quite the shot by Blake.

~J

Oh man, don't even get me started on called shots to the junk.

Kagetenshi, that's an amazing set of things your characters are planning to do. You'll get a reputation as a group that should not be messed with halfway. A big reputation. Good luck.

the worst thing several runner teams i've GM'd have done to an employer is accept his offer of employment.

My players have never abused a real Mr. Johnson and lived to tell about it. Now they have mmade some of their employers real unhappy-but none of my corporate professional Johnsons would tolerate anything like this.

Once the Johnson is calling in strike teams to waste the runners, what a J will and will not tolerate becomes unimportant.

~J

I'm presently playing an ex-Johnson (yes, there are groups of runners listed as enemies), and it got me to be thinking. I remember reading in a couple of the books that a Johnson is a powerful person in the corporation, because you need the seniority/power to be trusted with teh information you would receive, and to be allocated/demand the level of protection you would need.

A Johnson would be a prime target for extraction by other corporations. Think about it - this is a guy who, if properly mind probed or otherwise convinced to "spill" could basically outline what the parent corporation is interested in doing, who they're targeting, where they're vulnerable and basically how they can be effectively screwed in a city or general area.

Therefore, any Johnson who is a corporate employee is going to have not just enough protection to frighten off a runner group (a couple of hard-cases with guns), but enough backup that a serious motivated well-armed snatch team would run into a concrete wall of resistance. Whenever there is a Johnson around, my players make a point of finding as much of the backup as they can, because that immediately tells them what level this Johnson plays at. Of course, not being able to spot any backup means (a) the Johnson's alone and probably working for himself or an actual mate, or (b) they're very, very good.

What does this mean for the thread, you ask? Basically, my players can screw with the Johnson if they like when the Johnson's a self-funder, or not acting for someone serious. Otherwise, they can try and they can die. The serious Johnsons in my game have more than one mage with spirits on standby, at least a couple of covert guys in the meet site who can kill with their bare hands or their ceramic knives, at least one usually two snipers if they can get them in (including guys with cut down carbines on upper floors and making a sniper spot where possible), as well as being able to handle themselves. Johnsons work in security and get senior enough to be able to take the easy duty. They are not fat middle-management types who have never seen a gun. They also have a backup van full of mean guys who struggle to hide their armour under their Actioneer longcoats and think sub-machineguns are weapons for schoolgirls.

When players in my game kill or kidnap a Johnson, the only thing they could do to screw themselves more is kill a police officer.

The reason for the existance of runners and consequently the Johnsons is deniability. If you have so much backup on a Johnson, then potentially it would be easier to trace who the Johnson is working for. Imagine a backup of 4 (1 mage, 2 close backup, 1 long gun), that increases the trace-ability of the Johnson by 4.

Also runners would want to meet at a neutral location, the presence of so much backup might conceivably scare them all off.

I disagree that runners aren’t deniable; after all, if the runners don’t know who they’re working for, or if they can’t provide any reliable evidence of it, it doesn’t matter how messy the runners’ affairs are. That being said, it’d take a massive corporate shadow operation to be worth it to train and equip a team of in-house runners; with the constant risk of one getting killed, outsourcing is probably much, much less expensive.

~J

I agree that there would obviously be Johnsons who don't have this level of protection - the guy who is hiring runners to find his missing wife, the E rated corporation CEO who has just had his pet project stolen and so on. But where it is a megacorp, I see things working like this.

Any decent sized megacorporation has a unit, which I'll call the Shadowrunner Unit ("SU"). This unit is black, as in the funds are quietly siphoned without traces and the budget isn't really defined so much as it exists. This is the unit which hires shadowrunners. The unit could be relative to a geographical area (for example, Ares Seattle, MCT North America, Renraku UCAS or whatever). The unit has poeple who run it, people who are "security" and people who are Johnsons. The security people might be from the corporate military and were "transferred", "killed in action" or "honourably discharged", or they might be military types who have been hired, who are known for their ability to keep quiet. The Johnsons are people for whom the corporation is willing to pay for ware like cultured pheremones, as it is an investment. These are the guys and girls who gave up chess with dragons because it's too easy.

As a person within the corporation who wants to hire a runner, you need to know the phone number that's not in the corporate phone directory, or the exec in HR who doesn't really have a job description but spends all his time in "meetings" and basically be senior enough for teh unit to take your calls. You tell someone who can deny it afterwards what you need and possibly what it's worth, and then you hear back later about results. You don't meet the Johnson, you don't meet the runners, and you have total deniability because as far as any minutes or meeting planners are concerned, you never had any meeting.

The point is, runners are useful enough to corporations and have been around for long enough that it would make sense to have such a unit. Having a dedicated unit also means that you could actually protect the Johnson as much as you would need to. The unit would probably have a cosy relationship with your corporations intelligence gathering assets, as there could be a quiet free-flowing exchange of information. The unit would also have on speed dial all the fixers who they considered trustworthy enough. Finally, your unit would be custom-designed to offer protection in these sorts of situations.

To answer the second point, yes of course runners would try and set the meet somewhere neutral. If they said "OK, we'll meet in the Aztechnology pyramid, what harm could it do?" then you would think again about calling the fixer who put you on to these people. The point of skilled security is not so much 'ware it's scary and a high pistols skill, but more the ability to put serious, effective men and women close enough to the meet to be useful without arousing suspicion. With cyberware and magic you can easily customise a security operative to outwardly look innocent and actually be an asset in a fight. I would imagine a professional shadowrunner would also bring as much backup as they thought they could get away with, as, honestly, it's a black meeting and no-one trusts anyone.

Put it this way: between Alex and Blake, we’ve got at least 1.5 million nuyen worth of stuff (I’m not sure if you took the million with Blake). Shojo’ll have a minimum of 400,000 between deck, programs, and gear, for a lowball of 1.9 million nuyen out of the gate. All told, in the month or so we’ve been active, our direct pay (if we’d gotten paid for this most recent run legitimately) has been somewhere on the order of 270,000. Considering that that is, or was, divided amongst up to five characters at various points, and that we’ve spent at least 30k of that on gear that, if we were corp, would have reasonably been expected to have been provided, and that our employers are only paying us for the jobs we do for them, they’re getting a pretty sweet bargain out of this.

~J

I see Johnsons as just another cutout. They are just another minor cog in the megacorp machinery. They are given the brief which they in turn give the runners, and if they are killed or kidnapped, too bad - a victim of random street violence. They get mindwiped if they are handling the sensitive stuff or unless they are high up enough, then they are given the requisite protection that Enigma seems so fond of.

I've had players stalk their Mr. J back to his apartment, plant bugs on his limo, infiltrate his home, observe him in flagrante delecto, compromise his contacts, and ultimately act to have his car firebombed. I don't know why they did this. I liked the J. He was a nice guy. Suave, subtle, rich, and carrying on a passionate affair with his beautiful elven decker--everything the players weren't. I think they must have conspired before the game to just act silly. It was not exactly a good role-playing experience.

Since then, I've made a point of using a "little old lady" archetype as the J. Makes them at least feel guilty about double-crossing grandmother.

I agree - there are obviously levels within the Johnson heirachy. There are the guys that they send out with instructions like "here's a picture of what needs to be blown up, here's 100K, come back with something or we take it off your pension and don't hire complete muppets", and then there are guys who play at teh level I have described. Hell, my present character's background is that she started off at teh high end and gradually pissed off her corporation more and more, and dropped further down the scale, until they basically said that she's not cost effective or worth it as a Johnson, but she knows too much (ominous sounds).

Some corporations would prefer to use some disposable idiot from HR (is my anti-HR bias showing?) to give them that extra warm layer of deniability. Others would say "this is too sensitive for the mailroom monkey" and use the sort of group I've described. It's variable, but the point I was trying to make is that killing or kidnapping the Johnson should justifiably be the sort of action which merits a response, which could be he pees himself over your new shoes, or it could be "the lights suddenly go out, you hear supressed weapons and glass breaking, the lights come on and you're the only one alive and you're starting down the supressed barrel of a gun".

The other thing about messing with the Johnson would be an annoyed fixer - Johnsons would be more valuable to a fixer than runners, because runners don't bring in the gravy - Johnson's do. Messing with the johnson is messing with your fixer's cred balance, which is never healthy.

Double-crossing Johnsons aren’t the sort of folks fixers (who live and die by their rep more than anyone else in the biz) would mind losing all that much.

~J

Especially if you realize that the whole point of being a "Johnson" is to remain anonymous and enlist secret help for something that, hopefully, will never be public. I can see getting a bad rep after every Johnson you meet with disappears, but if you roast one of them, where's the harm? If he was going around publicizing who he really was and what he wanted done, that's one thing. Normally, though, that's not the case and it'll just be a matter of some middle management wanker disappearing one day.

Indeed, if he's just a nobody as Johnsons go your efforts won't build a reputation. Most will only believe you have a streak of brutality and the only rep you'll have is a Johnson killer... Provide evidence that he crossed you and your rep will then become that of someone you don't want to drek around with.

And that is where Good Reputation 2 comes in.

~J

The Edge?

Yep. Don’t you love having a lower standard of proof?

~J

It comes from having a fake Japanese accent and going on all the time in public places about "ONAAHH".

Due to 80s logic, everyone will figure you were the good guy.

But you did say he screwed you. Kid gloves come off when the J tries to f*ck you over. Just be a little less... messy next time.

Too many players, especially new ones (and new GM's too) think that Johnsons are out to screw you over every run. They are not. Some very, very few are, but they do not last long (as noted in this thread). The rest are perfectly willing to play by the rules as long as you get the job done. They don't tell you everything, but then clients never do.

The problem is that all the good shadowrun stories you can tell in a bar begin with getting fragged over by a Johnson in some way. So a lot of players decide to be proactive. I've run five different shadowrun campaigns with three different groups of players. Two of those campaigns ended because the players managed to screw over enough J's that no one would hire them anymore except people who wanted them to die gloriously in a spectacular fashion. Which eventually happened. Screwing over your J because you expect him to screw you over is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, that said, if a J does screw over the players, then they should go for it with extreme predjudice.

Well... In this case, the big clue came when his people fired a missile at us.

That kind of thing tends to terminate any working relationship you might have had.

Ever so slightly. Though, to be honest, I did suspect his innocence right up until we found the tracker in the empty credstick.

~J

An associate of mine just pointed something else out to me. While not much on the street may be known about a particular Johnson, his motives, the job he's offering, etc., he does have higher-ups who will probably be in the know and who will want answers. So if you vanish Mister J, you may not automatically be blacklisted on the streets, but the J-man's superiors will probably want to know what went down. Of course, that's assuming it was a corp-sanctioned run and not some personal upward-mobility play.

Heh, no offense but the "military types" were pretty tactically retarded if that happened without any kind of extremely mitigating circumstances.

Does an Armor 5 van piloted by someone with a VCR 3 backed up by a highly competent pistoleer and a grenadier count as mitigating circumstances?

They weren't as well equipped as they might have been. If they'd had AV rounds, the outcome would have been diametrically opposite. Nonetheless, they were equipped similarly to a standard combat running team.

~J

I always treat the J with the respect due to an employer. At the same time I research him and watch for signs of uncomfortable objects being lined up behind my buttocks. If such is detected and the J is the one reasonable returning the favour is a mater of long term survival. If you frag any J that deserves it (and only those that deserve it) les Js that want to frag runners will contact you.

Plot device you might consider.

J has previously fraged up superior. He is told “here is cred go hire runners” cred for after job is a fake that will not stand up to transactions (nut what runner has a suitable cred stick reader) and a locator beacon. Send cheep (stupid) runners after first runners (pay them COD they wont survive to collect) wait for first runners to attack there J.

The hire ups get 1 job they wanted done done cheep and a troublesome J eliminated at no cost.

Will your PCs realise that the J is being hung out to dry.

Edward