Just curious how much rewards you give your players. If I didnt put up a valid range for you please post your reward. Also this is average rewards so if you are play a lot of both Epic and Street level campains vote for whichever you give out most.

Sorry, phelious fogg, I can't begin to answer within your poll. I'm assuming you mean per completed more-or-less successful run? We have different contexts running simultaneously, and the nuyen reward shifts drastically within them, ranging from close to zero to 1 M . (Haven't exceeded that yet.) The balance is based upon the environment of each part of that campaign: one part of it is played among the poor by idealists who rely on a single (small!) mensual pension and occasional (small!) donations from those they have helped, others are deeply entangled in corpo-political headgames, still others have enough power to stand aside from the superficial games (and manage to get entangled in deeper and much older plotlines).

What remains more or less stable is karma: basically as per book with book bonuses, plus an additional karma point per session of active participation per player, plus additional karma for side projects (such as coming up with the floorplans of the safehouse-to-be).

Fair enough?

Wow, thats pretty amazing. By different contexts do you just mean characters, or different runs entirely? Sorry Im just kinda easy to confuse.

Four different interlinked campaigns. (The fourth has yet to get off the ground though: that will be the corporate politics one, a small independent corporation struggling to survive amid the megasharks within the context of giri and honour.)

Nothing. I give them NOTHING!!!

I let the bastards live. Isn't that enough? Back in MY day we were lucky to get a streetline special. And the only bullets we had were the ones that we pulled out after we had been SHOT!!!

Sweet Arkelias.... I like that approach...
Talia, thats pretty neat, are all the players teh same so they see whats going on or is it all behind the scenes?

@ Arkelias

Each person has a fuller picture of "their" part of the campaign, but I don't know that any single person actually has a full picture. The aim is simultaneously challenge, character growth, and evolving a good storyline. The various story arcs wind and twirl and are networked together through contacts-in-common and articles in the news and sometimes living quarters and (once) a run. As an example, a stripper-prostitute contact from the broke-level campaign unexpectedly hit it off in a chance encounter with a sometime reporter from the epic-level campaign, and it's growing ... and just by that simple action she's acquired some seriously high-level enemies she doesn't have a clue about. She's also discovered said reporter doesn't have a real clue about daily (practical) costs of living. The broke-level idealist (he of the pension) is about to lose a stripper-prostitute contact, and possibly (a few months down the road) gain something rather different and perhaps more potent ... if she survives.

The whole thing's strange by any conventional campaign standards. The story as a whole continues to build. We all continue to be surprised quite regularly.

But I hadn't meant this thread to become about our campaign! I had intended only to explain why your categories wouldn't apply.

I have to say that my vote is 'Other'. What is the criteria for the run? Each and every job (or circumstance) is completely different, at least in my games. There is no standard reward per shadowrun. It comes down to what the characters accomplished, and how, and against what odds, and why, and, and, etc.

The question was just a general, If you give any run to a group of character what is your reward most likely to be like. I suppose I worded it incorrectly. I was just curious is people gave out semi standard rewards or not. Me for example, I tend to give out something around five karma and something around 7k to a runner after most missions, its just the level that I tend to play at. I have give 80k to a runner once along with 10 karma, just becasue the situation warented it. But those things tend to be the exceptions to the rule. If I just wanted runners to do run X, then the are probably expecting 5karma and 7k nuyen

In a recent adventure ( a getting to know the game adventure for two new players ), two new players (a human idol shaman and a fox shapeshifter wujen ) were hired by their fixer to put a stop to a ghoul gang that has been terrorizing the Brain Haven neighborhood of the Redmond Barrens. The fixer is paying 2,000 nuyen ( 500 upfront ) each. Noone is paying the fixer for the run. He simply wants to test out these two new magicians before sending on any runs for his clients. However the ghouls also have a human gang hunting them.

The complications are that the ghouls have a human gang hunting them as well. But what noone knows is that the ghouls made a deal with a nutso dwarf street doc for cyber-eyes. ( A survivor of a ghoul attack has already told them that the ghouls had strange metalic eyes ) The doc betrayed the ghouls and installed cybernetic control devices as well that have forced the ghouls to do his bidding. In addition to his ghouls the street doc also has a number of spy drones and one armored combat drone. The human gang is out-matched and unless the two magicians save them are likely to die this night. Given the neighborhood, the runners would have to start blowing up buildings for Lone Star to show up.

Now they've only completed about a third of the run. So I don't know how things will turn out. I've set the karma awards are going as follows:

1 Karma for survival
1 Karma if they manage to befriend the gang which is also hunting the ghouls.
1 Karma if they manage to completely eliminate the gang. ( shrug )
1 Karma if they manage to save the gang leaders life.
1 Karma if they manage to stop the bad guy behing the ghouls' activities

(In addition it is possible to earn a karma point for good role-playing and/or humor. It is also possible to lose karma for poor role-playing )

So 2000 nuyen each and possible 1 - 4 Karma from the adventure. ( not including role-playing ) It is possible they can raid the street doc's workshop. ( He has a wide selection of second-hand cyber-eyes ) Also the gang leader could become a level 1 contact. But this a relatively low paying run.

In another run I'm planning to run the players ( this one will require a full team )could potentially get a million nuyen payday. But it involves destroying a horribly nasty creature in the middle of the Redmond Barrens during a district wide riot with Lone Star, the UCAS military, and a large group of NAN shamans scouring the district block by block. Another megacorp has unleashed a truly fearsome blood shaman with some even nastier spirit servants to acquire this valuable creature for themselves. It's horribly dangerous and involves a number of "scenes" before the players get to the climatic confrontation. The survivors could potentially earn up to 16 karma points each.

I can't give an answer because the runs vary too much. I run the guantlet from really cheap to really big paydays. As for karma I map out what results in a karma reward ahead of time giving 1 karma point per accomplishment.

Karma rewards typically aren't set too much by goals in our group. We wander far too much for that to work. I typically use a base line of how much we've been playing that night. The longer we've played, the more karma. Then I start stacking on extra points for players who drove the story, who made the evening more fun, who made their character do something memorable (in a good way!), or who came up with something really cool. Typically works out to about 5-8 karma for a six hour session.

For payment, we tend to run with relatively short campaigns, so low nuyen rewards are a real kick in the teeth considering how expensive things get with street index. Per character earnings of 10k to 100k per task are the ball park. Most missions take about 1-3 sessions to complete, and 1-3 months of game time (including downtime.) Surgery bills tend to be high in our group, so money disappears quickly.

I tend to go cash heavy and karma light, but if my players want something, and want to put in the roleplaying i tend to just give them what they want.

Our group is heavier on Karma than cash for the simple reason that we often take two sessions to complete a run (and some karma comes from the partial session). Which is one reason the "karma for cash" rule is so important for our group.

My campaign is cash heavy and karma poor. You can make cash easy. Karma, on the other hand, is a lot harder to earn.

The Abstruse One

YES!!! I am the first to Answer #9!!! Oh, it's not because I'm an evil GM
(well, maybe just a little but not like my friend is/was)
but because I can never get a consistant game flow going. The last campaign I participated in was in High School, and we never even finished the run.

Hell, we never even STARTED the run, now that I think about it... We just survived the "get to meet each other phase" when we graduated.

I always loved this game, but I really wish I could get into it with others.

Wow, I've never played a game where only 2-4 karma was handed out! Good to see the poll, but surprising.

I normally hand out anywhere from 8-10 points per session (usually about 8 hours of gaming). My team doesn't get to hang out all that often, so I give higher rewards since we play less (bout once a month). My players all like it and that's all I care about.

I've seen karma rewards of 40 or so handed out on Shadowland, but granted, that was for SUPERLATIVE roleplaying.

Hehe, we once did a Shadowrun marathon and played for just under 20 hours straight on one of the coolest games I've ever had the opportunity to play in. The GM awarded us between 40-50 karma each and cubic butt-tons of cash. That was pretty crazy, but seemed well-deserved for the amount of things that we did in that game.

That's ummm.... 2 to 2.5 karma per hour playing. Not too shabby.

I'd say around 1 Karma per hour of real time (so around 8-12 for those all Saturday gaming sessions) with in the 25-50K a month (game time) range.

I always try to keep my runners poor. The need for money is an excellent incentive to go on runs, and having to make ends meet all the time... well I enjoy seeing them deciding what upkeep not to pay this month >;) But that's because we enjoy streetlevel play.

I usually give them around 5-8 karma for a run and somewehere around 5-7k nuyen, but I make damned sure all their gear needs repairing

Running needs to pay more that knocking over liquor stores, selling dope on the corner, or similar sthicks. Even a starting runner is very good at what they do. Going 'freelance criminal' and runner can easily manage 10K a month, with a lot less risk than running. Why stick your neck out for peanuts?

Why stick your neck out for peanuts? Perhaps peanuts is all the character is worth. Street level play is fun sometimes. Not all criminals are suave and polished. Take a look at any state penn to get a good idea of your average thug. I imagine that the ratio of master cat burglars to chiphead pickpockets would be about the same as the ratio of the rich to the poor in reality.

Conversely, I don't think there's anything wrong with playing criminals that get paid well. It is a fantasy game after all.

What I was talking about was the... what's that economic term?, marginal advantage of running. Where (runner pay - runner risk) ~= (regular pay - regular risk). So examine what someone with the runner's skills could get in a low risk job; running must pay them more than that. Since most runner's are capable of selling dope on the corner (or whatever), which is a very low risk job, compared to running, they must be able to make considerably more that those dope dealers on the corner. Assuming that running is twice as risky as dealing dope and that a successful (small scale) dealer pulls down 7.5K a month, then a runner must be getting at least 15K a month....

Now notice that most starting runners can get a much better job than dealing dope on the corner. Note that I am using dope dealer here as a sorta simple example, mostly because 'anyone' can get into the market.

edit: wrong thread.