[Stoneglobe]

So as with all previous editions I've played/owned (1st, 2nd & 3rd) it seems to me that 5th edition has fallen into the same trap concerning payment for runs. Basically that the runs pay far too little to actually warrant any runner accepting the job. I've generally found that multiplying the nuyen offered  by between 10 & 20 times actually makes sense.

Let's face it, why would anyone who had the money to chock their body full of cyberware, purchase a cyberdeck, run a full suite of vehicles/drones or spend years developing their magical skills even think about getting out of bed to put their lives and tech on the line for the measly cash on offer according to the rules and adventures. The costs to upgrade, repair and replace gear seem to far outweigh the money to be made.

Then it raises the question, where did all the street samurai, deckers and riggers get the cash in the first place? Sure being ex corp/military can explain the cyberware as could former criminal syndicate but it does kind of make everyone have the same rational/background. I guess it would also be fairly easy to sneak out a cyberdeck when you left as well but what about all of those vehicles/drones a rigger loves to use? How do you explain getting all of those out when you do a runner?

For me it just makes sense that the payouts should be that much greater.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and opions

[Xenon]

Do your missions pay 20 times as much karma as well?

If not then i would prioritise attributes and skills (and magic and race) over resorces and just buy resource heavy investments after a handful of missions....

[All4BigGuns]

Do your missions pay 20 times as much karma as well?

If not then i would prioritise race, attributes and skills (and magic) over resorces and just buy resource heavy investments after a handful of missions....

Twenty times the pay would only equate to four or five times the karma. Really, a run giving 15 to 20 karma and paying around 50,000 per runner seems to be the best advancement rate to actually see measurable advancement.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Twenty times the pay would only equate to four or five times the karma. Really, a run giving 15 to 20 karma and paying around 50,000 per runner seems to be the best advancement rate to actually see measurable advancement in my opinion.

Fixed.

Stoneglobe;
Run rewards are always going to be a table specific thing.

Some people like playing the equivalent of superhuman beings who could take on a megacorp and, with a significant amount of effort, topple it. Seriously, there's a thread for this very thing on this forum right now.

Others like playing the archetypical shadowrunners from the novels, people who seem to barely get by on a month to month basis.

Others still enjoy playing street scum gangers, people who can't even afford good weapons not to mention high-end cyberdecks and the like.

There's no "right" way to play rewards. The core book provides a guideline for how the core book lays out the game. And you'll note that the sample characters tend to have much lower dice pools than a lot of the characters on this forum, so it's all about the GM and players working together to create some sort of balance in terms of advancement. From a GM perspective, this is to my mind very much about managing expectations.

[Xenon]

Really, a run giving 15 to 20 karma and paying around 50,000 per runner seems to be the best advancement rate to actually see measurable advancement.

I would prioritise race and magic at your table

[All4BigGuns]

Really, a run giving 15 to 20 karma and paying around 50,000 per runner seems to be the best advancement rate to actually see measurable advancement.

I would prioritise race and magic at your table

Don't see why, that rate on both provides decent advancement rate for skills, gear and attributes. Though the numbers I gave does seem to be more three or four times (20 to 25 being four to five times). The numbers awarded for cash need to be much higher than the numbers awarded for karma because the costs are exponentially higher.

The twenty karma per run mark allows an attribute of three to be raised to a four in one run (pretty good advancement rate). Any skills you want to raise won't eat up an entire run's karma until you are going from nine to ten, so you can raise a critical skill to your archetype and still have some left to raise a less critical skill or start branching out into other areas.


If you increase karma by 20 times, then you're looking at 100 karma per run, and that is just too much.

[Reaver]

You really want to have THIS argument? Did you even search the forums to see how this goes? (Guessing not).

First off. You get paid by what the johnson wants to pay. NOT what you feel you are worth. Just like today in the real world. (I am sure there are ten of thousands of people out there that feel their time is worth two or three or even fifteen times what they are getting paid). Now you can always turn down the job, which means you make NO money. And next month, you get to cover your living expenses out of your pocket. And the same for the month after that, and the month after that... until you go broke.

Which, when you look at the general starting cash of a player you essentially are. (You have a few hundred to a few grand left over and a hopefully, a few months of lifestyle paid up front). After that is gone, you better have something coming in, or something to sell if you want to eat.

Also, keep in mind that to the average Johnson, you are a litteral piece of shit. You are scum. You are in fact the very symbol of everything wrong with the world. And there are lots of you. If you won't take the run at the pay offered, someone else will. (And you end up with a rep for wasting Johnson's time, which in turn makes getting the next job that much harder)

As for jow your characters hot their initial gear, that is up to the players. Tes it usualky falls back on the "I'm ex <insert flavour here>" but i chalk that up to a lack of imagination on the player's behalf.

Maybe they were a street punk that ended up catching a Fixer's eye. That Fixer paid for the character's gear and cyber in exchange of runs (also explaining his skill set).

Maybe she was a low-life stock clerk at an Evo med tech facility and made off with a bunch of cyber to have installed to begin her career as a razor girl (using the excess cyber to pay the street doc for the surgeries.)

Point is, there are lots of ways they ended up with their shit that doesn't involve them having a cool million up front, nor the classic, unimaginative "I'm ex <insert flavour here>"


Then there is the mechanic side of things.

3 archtypes rely on cash for advancement (Deckers, sammy, riggers)
3 archtypes rely on karma for advancement (face, technomancers, mages)

By increasing the cash rewards, and not the karma, you accelerate the growth of 3 core archtypes while leaving 3 floundering. The face, mage and techo, while have things they CAN buy, see their most growth from the investment of karma.

While Sammies, Deckers and Riggers get the most growth out of a new piece of gear (be that cyber, bio, items, weapons, drones) by increasing run payments by 10 or 20 times, you are basically allowing 3 archtypes to advance in power after every single run, while telling 3 other archtypes they have to wait several runs for growth.

For arguments sake: lets assume 2 runs a month. If the average payout per character is $5,000 and 5 karma.

At the end of a year characters have made:
$ 120,000
120 karma.
Which is a fair bit of both. Cash characters have to be economical in their purchases but can get some nice stuff with their cash. The Karma can go towards improving their weaker areas and strengthening their primary skills. For Karma based characters, the 120 karma with mostly go towards increasing their primary stats (Res and Magic) and towards their primary skills, making it a toss up for shoring up a weak point, or improving a primary skill. While the money is nice, it will mostly go towards lesser useful items (lifestyle, clothing, reagents,) things that don't really augment their abilites (with the exception of the Face)

If you change the payouts by x10 or x20 you end up with:
$1,200,000 (2,400,000)
120 karma.

Now your riggers, sammies, and deckers ultra happy as everything they could possibly want is available because they have money to throw around. While your mages technos and faces flounder about. Sure they are swimming in money, but in terms of their growth, they are stunted out. A platinum commlink may look pretty on that mage, but it isn't going to help him cast any better. AND he has over a million in the bank!

●●●●

And what reason do runners have to run the shadows after a year? In your game? They are mega rich! Why bother getting shot at? Take your year pay, move yo a tropical island and dtink umbrella drinks on the beach all day!

[All4BigGuns]

As an addendum to my previous, if there are several Awakened or Resonant characters, going to 25 to 30 per run could work as well so that they can still raise those skills/attributes and perform their "power stat" increasing (Initiation and Submersion).

Providing a good and speedy advancement rate should be the number one priority.  Sluggish advancement is the worst thing that can occur with a game.

[Dal Thrax]

I think the issue here is that Nuyen are not meant to be adjusted for inflation, while most readers simply use Nuyen as a stand in for priced in modern dollars or Euros.  If you figure $1 in 1989 = 1 Nuyen and run if through an inflation calculator http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5000&year1=1989&year2=2015  you find that a 5,000 nuyen run should have the value of around $10,000 today.   This does mean that a middle class lifestyle in the 6th world cost about $120,000 today, while a lower class lifestyle is around $48,000.  Given what has happened to the American middle class over the last thirty or so years, these assumption might be about right for the U.S. in 1989. 

[brasso]

I think lowish pay kind of reflects the gritty nature of the game, runners are often quite desperate people in a desperate world living from moment to moment. However, as folks in the thread have mentioned this is a kind of 'table preference' aspect to the game.

I don't know about anyone else's group, but missions and pay is only a part of the game. Our group steal cars, loot cyberdecks, guns and gear, even sell the dead bodies for organs, used cyberware and even as food for ghouls, knock over drug dealers, get shot, get looted, have their cars stolen, have to pay medical bills, and have their condo blown up (2 days into paying for it). Money can go up and down in just a couple of sessions - easy come, easy go. I wouldn't get too hung up on runner pay. Being a shadowrunner shouldn't be like having a job, it's more of an "entrepreneurial" activity

[Dal Thrax]

The problem comes when runner skills and gear mean that they can make more in some less threatening form of illegal work.  Why go into a zero-zone from $10,000 when you can make the same amount smuggling goods across a lightly patrolled border.

[Overbyte]

I think there are a lot of variables to what player rewards should be. As people pointed out though, as a GM you have to balance nuyen rewards versus Karma awards and/or allow for exchange between the two so that Karma-based chars (Mages, etc) can advance at the same rate as as nuyen based chars (deckers, etc).

I don't find that the runner motivation to do runs is really as big a problem, at least in my games. After all, in the end, players are playing to play. They just want to have fun. And they want to see their characters advance. If they advance too slowly however, they get frustrated while if they advance too quickly they achieve all their in-game goals and want to switch characters. So you have to try to strike a balance between the two.

[Reaver]

The problem comes when runner skills and gear mean that they can make more in some less threatening form of illegal work.  Why go into a zero-zone from $10,000 when you can make the same amount smuggling goods across a lightly patrolled border.

Because smuggling goods across a border pays exceptionally less then shadow running?

Don't assume Shadowrunning is "low" paying. Its dangerous, it requires skills, and more importantly it requires contacts and other elements of the shadow community. If "smugglers" are expecting any work from the Running community (which IS their bread and butter) they have to work within the budget of said Runner community.


Meaning, if a run pays XXX
Smuggling pays xxx
And so on down the list.

[Mr. Black]

And please understand that the Nuyen/Karma calculator in the BRB is really meant for Missions play and is very standardized for that reason. All Missions characters need to be on the same pay/reward level, so that no one group "breaks" the format.

[halflingmage]

Rewards are a balancing act.  If you pay too little the players will refuse jobs and just start their own enterprises, stealing cars, hijacking, breaking into places, running contraband, etc.  If you pay too much then the characters will get too comfortable and turn down jobs as too dangerous or not worth the reward.  You want the characters to be hungry but not starving.

As to how they got starting gear, make it part of the backstory.  Were you a military or government operative and they paid for the gear?  Did you have to fake your death to get away from them?  Or maybe you have the Wanted quality for running out with all that chrome.  Did your deck come from your mentor?  Did you loot it from a security spider who caught a .30 caliber round to the datajack?  Maybe you were the new kid in a experienced group and they hit the big score, they retired and you bought yourself a fancy cyber deck and some augmentations with yours.  Just some examples.