I would imagine this is a major point in Lone Star contracts. If they don't get at least a percentage of fines, Lone Star has very little motivation to collect them.

That depends. If the Corporate site was extra-territorial, then the run was not in Lone Star's jurisdiction. It's not their problem in any way.

The Corporation could hire Lone Star. OTOH, if Lone Star uses resources that the City has been paying for in their contract, legal issues might become rather complicated.

Lone Star is not going to let Knight Errant wander all over their jurisdiction hunting the alleged perpetrators of a crime that occurred in Knight Errant's jurisdiction. In fact, it's very good for Lone Star if Knight Errant fails in a high profile case.

Of course, many Shadowruns won't be high profile cases, as the Corporation that got hit will want to keep knowledge of the run from reaching the general public. After all, loss of public confidence could result in reduced sales and lowered stock prices.

Why would they waste all that time and effort tracking you? Certainly, they'll try to catch you before you hand off that paydata/prototype/research scientist/whatever to Mr. Johnson. But after a very short period of time, tracking you makes no sense whatsoever.

Individuals within the Corporation may divert hard-earned company resources in a personal vendetta, but they will tend to be retired with extreme prejudice if this is discovered.

Long term vengeance is expensive and gains the Corporation nothing.

That depends on how you portray your Shadowrun world. Certainly the Corps want to appear to take care of their own, but ultimately it's all about the bottom line and they're perfectly willing to expend some security guards to achieve their goals. And corporate security who refuse to perform will be terminated, likely on both senses of the word. After all, if the Corp is extra-terratorial, the only rights the gaurds have are the rights the Corp allows them to have.

It's a bit different for Lone Star, since both they and anyone attacking them are much more open to public scrutiny. Obviously killing a Lone Star officer makes for a very short career as a criminal.

But even killing corporate security is usually a bad idea. That typically puts all of the security guards on what Sun Tzu called 'desperate ground', where their options are win or die.

But once the Runners have gotten away, tracking them down is a waste of time and nuyen in multiple ways. If you really are concerned with your employee's morale, you can just tell them the responsible runners were hunted down and eliminated. If you're really wanting to go all out, you can even show them photos of the smoking corpses of some hapless SINless types of the right gender and metahumanity. That's a lot cheaper, easier, safer, and faster than hunting down the real Runner team.

But hunting down the Runners is wasting resources in another way. Shadowrunners are deniable assets. Shadowrunners good enough to get past your security are good enough to get past a rival Corp's security. That makes them valuable denaible assets who you'd like to hire.

After all, there are hordes of psychos, idiots, wannabes, and incompetants. The more good Runner teams a Corp skrags, the more likely they are to end up with the dregs the next time they go hiring a runner team.

Maybe so...they never really say. I guess that's up to each group.
But they do give us room to play with by saying that LS is under review of re-placement in Seattle.

Regardless of who's jurisdiction it's in, Corps don't follow the law. They make it.

SR3, p12, Shadow Activity:
"In Shadowrun, the megacorporations make the laws, and the tend toward laws that favor themselves. Any shadowrunner knows that the corps will bend or break the law whenever they need to. When the corps choose to break the law, shadowrunners get involved as deniable assests."

Which is why I was saying that they may not personally chace you, but a running team that they send very well might, and that team won't care about you being alive or dead if it's not listed in the objective.

Oh yes, they can.
But then again, legal issues can also arise about Lone Star's lack of proper enforcement against Shadowrunners.
So much so that the Shadowriders actually are mentioned in the SR3 as being re-introduced for Corporations to hire out of Lone Star and use.
Bascially, Seattle got sick of the entire LS staff being mis-used and re-instated a specific section for Corporate Law enforcement for hire for specific tasks such as chasing runners.

They may not like it, but it's going to happen. And if they don't want it to happen, then they're going to have to stop eating donuts and go after the guys that Knight Errant is willing to go after.
Hence, another reason why LS is being looked at for replacement.

By high-profile, I was refering to "big-level" crimes. As in, not the crimes that a common thug does. I wasn't refering to the crimes that end up on the trid.
The crimes that runners do are high-profile in a sense because they get the attention of the Corps. That's a pretty big thing.
I agree with you, I don't think they'll often end up on the trid, and I think that LS cherishes anytime that Knight Errant screws up as I'm sure the opposite is very true.

Well...like I said. If your team has seen sensitive information or things, then they aren't going to sleep well knowing someone out of their control is out there with that info, and especially when they know that it very well might be up for sell to the highest bidder.
And you've taken a prototype...god help you. That's not just something they are going to be ok with your team having the knowlege of.

"Yeah, we were runnin for a guy a few weeks ago. He wanted this thing from Areas, some kind of combat suit or somethin. Anyways, let me tell you, I don't know much about that stuff but this thing was wild! We couldn't help but play with it. When we used that thing, we nearly wiped out a small army with it. It has almost everything you could want. Shame that we had to hand it over to our guy. Wish I could've kept it."

That kind of thing right there to the wrong ears is extrememly dangerous to a Corp who's tried hard to keep things on the low about their prototypes.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As to the running debate on whether Lone Star will do anything to catch runners.

I think it's a silly idea, personally, to assume that everyone in the SR future is someone with the lack of personal morals and sense of duty to justice.
Sure, the Corp itself may not give a shit.
That happens today in Law Forces.
But there's always a decent number of folks, thankfully, that do actually give a shit about doing their law enforcement job for the reasons outside of money.
For the reasons of Duty and Responsibility to Justice of the Law.

The questions of whether the Law is right or not are entirely up to the individual to have opinions and beliefs on.

But in no means am I ever going to believe that an entire police force, corporate or not, is going to be 100% corrupt into a pattern of not giving a shit unless there's money to be shown.

And I'm not ever going to think that Seattle, or any other city, would go along with such a force not giving a shit about crime in this manner.

And I will always believe that if runners could get away with crime because Lone Star doesn't care, then there would be complete and utter chaos that come in the form of the highest rise in crime that you've ever seen in the existence of the modern and future world.

If I know they won't chase me, then I'm not going to even think twice about taking the job, and on top of that, the jobs would cost a hell of a lot less to do because you'd only be factoring in the dangers of getting the job done and not the dangers of getting caught as well.

Why do you think the prices quoted for shadow jobs in SRComp is so cheap?

Lone Star does care enough to curb the worst excesses of shadow crimes and to prevent lawlessness in most parts of the city. However, considering that there are Z-zones in the Barrens as well as in other areas, there is a already very high rate of crime, it is just that the average citizen is not aware of it.

You could ask Art... How much damage can someone do if all he cared is bringing down a AAA?

That's irrelevant to my points. Lone Star is also Corporation; a Corporation hired to perform police services within certain areas. Extraterritorial Corporate sites are not part of Lone Star's coverage area. In fact, they're off limits to Lone Star as the other Corporation doesn't want the Star on site, poking their noses around. Lone Star is no more responsible for apprehending people accused of crimes on an Extraterritorial site, than modern day Seattle cops are responsible for apprehending people accused of crimes in Vancouver.

To quote New Seattle p.108, "Lone Star's coverage ends where a corporation's property begins."

Of course, the actual situation in Shadowrun is less likely to result in Lone Star-Corpsec cooperation than real world Seattle-Vancouver cooperation. First, the corporation the Runners hit is unlikely to admit the run took place, let alone tell Lone Star about it. After all, publicity of the run is bad for the Corp's image, and if they let anyone, including Lone Star know about this, the odds of the press getting ahold of it increase significantly.

Besides, Lone Star probably has an adversarial relationship with most Corporate Security. After all, the Corporation could have hired Lone Star as their security force, but they didn't. And now Corpsec wants a favor from Lone Star.

I don't see what your point has to do with the quote, but of course the Corporation will want to hire 'deniable assets' to track down a Runner team. After all, Corporate Security doesn't have police powers in an area under Lone Star jurisdiction. Better to have those 'deniable assets' commit assault, murder, or kidnapping on Lone Star turf.

As to Runners hunting Runners, the smart hunter team will try not to kill the other Runners unless it's necessary. After all, if you get a rep for willingly greasing other Runner teams, you can expect the same treatment when its you turn to be hunted.

It's only lack of proper enforcement if Lone Star is failing to apprehend people for crimes committed within Lone Star's jurisdiction. As I've said, Runner activity on an Extraterritorial Corporate site is not Lone Star's jurisdiction and it is not their responsibility to solve it.

I suggest you reread that section of SR3, as it says something completely different from what you think it does.

SR3, p.316, "As part of Lone Star's effort to hang onto its contract, the corporation's Seattle head, William Loudon, has begun hiring shadowrunners to handle less-than-legal missions meant to curb the worst excesses of organized crime. He recently re-established the Shadowriders, a covert black-operations division of Lone Star Seattle, to handle the corporation's shadowrunning needs."

It's covered in more detail on p.76 of New Seattle. The Shadowriders is not other Corporations hiring Lone Star, it's Lone Star hiring Shadowrunners. It's not the Seattle government re-instituting a section of corporate law, it's the head of Lone Star Seattle re-instituting a secret and illegal subdivision of Lone Star. The Shadowriders were not re-instituted to hunt down Shadowrunners, they were re-instituted to hire Runners to take on organized crime.

If it does happen, Lone Star has the perfect right to arrest those Knight Errant personnel for a large variety of crimes. There's a nice section about jurisdiction on p.75 of SOTA 2064. If Knight Errant wants to legally hunt runners on Lone Star turf, they will need to go through a lot of paperwork. And considering Knight Errant is trying to take the Seattle contract from Lone Star, I don't expect Lone Star to be very cooperative.

To repeat my basic point, crime taking place on extra-territorial corporate sites (Shadowruns) is the responsibility of the governing organization of that site and any security forces it hires, not of Seattle or Lone Star, the security firm Seattle hired for the area it controls. Lone Star is only responsible for dealing with crimes that occur within its jurisdiction.

Killing the runners does not solve these problems. Who cares if the runners have seen something sensitive and/or illegal? They're not going to tell Lone Star and if they did, Lone Star has no right to search your extra-territorial corporate site.

And considering they are Shadowrunners, they've already sold any stolen info to a rival corp as that's why the Runners were hired in the first place. Killing the Runners later will not change the fact another corp has copies of your vital data, and that dozens of people besides the runners now know the information.

The same is true for prototypes. The real problem is a rival corporation, the one who hired the Shadowrunners in the first place, now has your prototype. And unlike the Shadowrunners, the other corp has the skills, manpower, and technology to reverse-engineer the gizmo, undercut your market share and cost you hooping scads of nuyen in lost profits.

That's a completely different problem, with the Runners acting very unprofessionally by talking about the run and trying out the prototype. And killing them once the combat suit is gone still won't solve your problem, now everyone on the streets already know you are building a new combat suit.

First, I never claimed that everyone in SR lacked personal morals or a lacked a sense of duty to justice.
Second, that has nothing to do with my point. Lone Star cannot legally investigate crimes that did not occur in Lone Star's jurisdiction. That means most Shadowruns, as the crime(s) did not occur in Lone Star's jurisdiction.

Exactly. This is not a police force the way we think of it now. It is a for-profit corporation. Those in charge will hire the minimum number of personnel they feel are necessary to fulfil the contract. They will apportion the corporation's resources based on how important the people of any given neighborhood are, as shown by the Zone ratings on p.111 of New Seattle. And those in charge will not be happy about spending money on a case that has little chance of being solved. Those employees who don't understand these facts will find themselves unemployed.

Note that I never claimed this. But Law and Order is not the model for Shadowrun police corporations either. Try watching the Untouchables, Young Guns, or Bubblegum Crisis or reading Batman, for more appropriate examples.

Note that I never claimed this, either, though it's partially true. Neither the Seattle Government, the Lone Star corporation, nor the average citizen of Seattle cares about what happens in the Barrens unless it might pose some potential threat to them. They don't care what happens to the SINless, either, unless they wind up dead on the front doorstep.

p.111 New Seattle - "The law never notices a problem in a Z-Zone - they really don't care what happens there."

Some crimes are easy to solve, and other crimes are not. Lone Star as an organization will not be willing to spend time and money on trying to solve cases that have a low chance of being solved, unless the victims are someone important.

I didn't claim that, either. To quote what I actually said:

And they don't care about solving every crime. The existence of Z zones proves it.

Well, it would explain the pay rates listed in the Shadowrun Companion.

But that's not what I said, either. Corporations, including Lone Star, do not stay in business by wasting money. The amount of time, money, and manpower they are willing to spend chasing you depends on the odds catching you and what they can gain by doing so.

For a Corporation the runners hit, they can only gain something from chasing you until you get rid of whatever you took. If they haven't caught you within the first few days, they won't gain anything by catching you later.

For Lone Star, they won't gain anything more for arresting a runner committing a crime, than for arresting anyone else committing a crime. If the runners are stupid, they'll add to Lone Star's arrest record. If the runners are smart, their case will soon get buried under Lone Star's growing pile of unsolved cases.

Smart runners - the ones who make efforts to conceal their identities and avoid leading clues or piles of dead bodies and heaps of wreckage behind them - are far more likely to be caught because of bad luck than because of additional effort on the part of Lone Star or other security corporations.

Which is good, because Shadowrunning is risky enough in the first place.

and on, nothing was aimed at you at all.
That's why it was under a horizontal divider.
I was addressing the entire discussion that had a somewhat over-tone of saying that no one cared so we can all do it.

Anyways...
Yes, I agree with about every one of your points.
I think we're both really saying the same thing, but I think that I was too rialed to see it.

As to the Shadowriders...hmm. Never read it that way before. Thanks for the new perspective. That should be interesting.

Excellent points. Smart runners will avoid casting spells that have obvious effects, erase signatures, and prefer casting spells on people or objects who will be leaving the site (The other runners and their gear).

Since magicians are in theory rather rare, the average criminal incident will not involve them. If there's no obvious evidence that magic was used, they are extremely unlikely to have a mage investigate the site.

All of this is what makes hitting private dwellings in a AAA sector so much fun!

What kind of security have you usually given these? Electonric and physical? I look at 1-2 million dollar houses now, and.. well suffice it to say I have boosted my security in my game.


As for hunting players down, I have found two things that work out. ((I agree, most corps cant spend the time and effort to track down assests they may use again). So, they sack the exec who screwed the pooch, who then in turn (if he/she cant get another job) spends a couple hundred K in making the players lives miserable as they can.

If they dont get sacked, even 10 - 50K will buy you a few folks who are willing to at least lob a gernade or two if they can find them players. Another 10 - 20K will buy you a few ears in the city. And, better yet, you as the exec will want to backtrack, figure out what was done, perhaps by who, so you can avoid it happening again. From there, you keep an eye open for that day to come when you think they will bite again. Just depends upon how badly someone got fragged.

The other option I have used is what social club are you a member of? So, Mr Exec is a member of the Knights of Columbus. THey in turn have an inner circle. He turns it over to them to investigate and one day... BOOM. Again, just depends upon how badly the players screwd someone, and how much evidence they left behind.

As to the LS street grunt, most people wont throw away their lives for money. If they dont think that backup is coming, or that they are in over their heads, then.. well in the old fantasy games we called it a morale check.