[HobDobson]

How potential shadowrunners can start from the scum side of the street:
(More like, how NOT to start out?)

Technomancers like Proxy can make big money if they play their trons right! However, when you're on the hook with a loan shark over upgrades, and a friend asks if you could get a couple of lowlifes together for an easy "cleaning" job, there you go. (Questionable life decisions  )

Max was an orc changeling living on the streets who just wanted to afford dog food. Eventually enough money for some biochem projects he'd seen on YouTube would be great, but at least there's money for homemade explosives now. (Cash, something to do  )

Mads/Matt/Al1ce had a set-back in therapy and hit the streets to hide or something. With a SIN issued by Ares Macro-Technologies. Right. That works. Because no one's ever going to notice a blond caucasian 'brat with a frackin' crewcut in South Detroit. One that never got bullied at school after the freak "gas leak" explosion. But he and Max got along! (Chance, knowing a guy who knows a guy  )
 
Blaine was just another UCAS vet with a dodgy record and no prospects for a paying job. Not entirely a "people person", and in dire need of "structure" and cash in his life. Several months and much karma later, he may have finally shot more people than knifed. (Down on one's luck  )

Red ... we kind of got his cousin sent to State lockup for a dime or two. But by that time we had a few hundred nuyen between us, so the money was good? Now our enemies are his enemies too! (Misguided sympathy for the underdog  )

Preacher. His cousin didn't do so well working with us either, but the UCAS is still the Land of Opportunity, at least for bounty hunters who don't mind a bit of car theft and drug running, yeah? Or at least one who needs to never be seen in France again. (Cash, 'cause it's a job  )

GoGo was a B&E gal making her way up amidst a smuggling operation. Being one of the survivors of a police sting, and a potential witness, we brought her with. If we hadn't, maybe Scotland Yard and Interpol wouldn't be after her now. (Failing to look more carefully at that one-way ticket out of town.  )

[Senko]

On another angle.

Rex sophisticated heir to the Reinhardt Fortune figured he'd prove his bad boy rebellion creds by hanging out with a few kids from the rough side of town. Afterall if they started something he could finish it. Sadly what they started turned out to be not an abandoned building complex but rather a hidden test facility for Lofwyr that was experiencing a slight glitch. Now the others are dead, his face is popping up on most wanted signs as armed and dangerous, his dad's disowned him and there's that annoying voice in his head that wont shut up. The others are dead right? its just he keeps getting glimpses of Tex-Mex's face in the mirror.

[Lorebane24]

Given the way the game handles character creation the only way in my opinion to represent a brand new to the running world is either have a group fully in agreement who purchase mostly non-running skills artisan vs automatics or run a street scum campaign where you have other skills but only represent the running relevant ones.

Judging by our own campaign, starting at "street scum" is one of the better ways to explore 'running from the ground up - especially with a table full of folks used to D&D/Pathfinder. Since neither the PCs nor the NPCs are tricked out with cyberware and munitions, the setting's a little less lethally unforgiving of mistakes.  The risks and rewards do ratchet up with time.

However, "a guy who knows a guy who dated the sister of his best friend's former roommate" would be an IMPROVEMENT. Lately, it's been one prospective Johnson or another so desperate that someone gave them our team's contact info.   

I've found the problem with the "street scum" setting is that it doesn't affect where your attributes or magic can start at, so you end up having spellcasters who are just as tough while it is nearly impossible to make a samurai or something that can keep up with them.

I'm going to try and start something soon where no one starts as a shadowrunner, but I'm going to have them use the "sum to ten" character creation variant from Run Faster, with the additional caveat that no one can take priority A, and availability on starting gear is capped at 10.

[HobDobson]

I've found the problem with the "street scum" setting is that it doesn't affect where your attributes or magic can start at, so you end up having spellcasters who are just as tough while it is nearly impossible to make a samurai or something that can keep up with them.

Our campaign's based on SR4A, so "street scum" chargen came out to 300 points base, 150 points max to stats. Also, "Here's 1,000 nuyen. Don't spend it all in one place, or on anything over availability rating of 6. Loans are available!" 

(SR5) Run Faster's optional point buy method can be scaled similarly. Instead of 800 points, maybe try 600? I think the life module method also lends itself to flexible capping.

But security guards and the cops? They're still built on a base 50% higher, and they usually don't like freelance magicians very much.

[Senko]

AH right there's street scum and then there's the other one which modifies the priorities you can spend that's the one I was thinking of, nice catch.

[GloriousRuse]

As many have mentioned, it is assumed that you have gotten on past the initial entry and are already immersed. However, for a "realistic" look at becoming a primetime runner:

1) The game world has an underlying assumption that there is a thriving not-quite-black market in specialty shadowrunning services which is allowed to exist tacitly by the corporations because they all use them, and by the government because they're either too weak to stop it, they also use them, or they figure that if sovereign corps want to kill each other quietly who f***ing cares - did you see how many ridiculous overplayed 80's gangs and mafias are tearing around Seattle making REAL problems? With that in mind, in the SR world making this sort of connection is easier than circa 2016 real world. So, some flexibility exists. From here lets look at some paths in:

2) The most "realistic" path for hi-end shadowrunning is that you were already an expert at something. The reality is that a "tough life on the streets and willing to kill" makes for a great disposable sicario, but those 18 dice in your primary represent a lifetime of investment, usually with someone else footing the bill to actually train you to that standard. We're talking firing thousands and thousands of rounds for a sammie until its second nature to hit  a meta sized target every time while moving across a room, working not just at DOSing a website but actually Stuxnetting things for a hacker, etc. .

In reality you don't wake up that good at 18, and you very rarely get that good just by self learning - especially on a topic that isn't exactly public access or publicly practicable. Usually there is a larger, cutting edge organization that helped you out to get you to "Shadowrunner" levels. Bank robbers in real life look more like "Hell or Highwater" or "The Town (minus the excessive firefights)" than they do "Ocean's 11" for precisely this reason.  Its also the reason why if you actually gave everyone at the table one to three seconds to call their action during a round, mostly you'd just get a lot of people screaming "SHOOT! SHOOT!"

In this case, the runner would be in their 30s or 40s, coming off a long professional build and now finding themselves free market. In the real world, this usually means selling your services to a consultancy that has some strong ties with your community to begin with. In SR world, that would translate to being referred in to the game, or asking around to old mentors, leaders and so forth. As a matter of fact, it's quite likely that you would end up in a consultancy that worked in the corporate sphere for a while longer, and that would be where you either decided to break off with some friends or go solo once you knew your way around a few likely clients.

Thus, the most "realistic" shadowrunner is probably someone in their late thirties to early fifties who isn't a physical powerhouse, but is well connected enough to actually land in this field, can think cooly in any situation, has a lifetime of practicing the multitude of skills needed and applying them, and can professionally deliver two in the head every time, on time.

[GloriousRuse]

3) But that's no fun! I want to be a rebel from the streets or a mafiaoso or whatever!

That's understandable. Now, you can approach this a few ways:

A) You can accept that the term "shadowrunner" is nebulous, and that while we all like to envision a beyond-SWAT team for hire in a cool dystopia, most "runners" are far short of that. So go ahead, call yourselves runners and get in to it however one might get in to crime in general. There's really no reason not to. You could even make a leap that the organized syndicates of 2072 are powerful and savvy enough to build mid level shooters. In reality, this is not that true, the willingness to commit crime at all is the defining mark of a criminal gun for hire, not a particular skill in the craft. They get away with it because the average person is not expecting to be conned, robbed, gunned down in a grocery store, or have their ID stolen. These are the types of "runner" that would "realistically" end up coming in because they owed a bad payday loan and knew a guy. If you're willing to liberties with how people actually learn (I.e., assuming killing a peasant makes you a better swordsman than practicing every day since you were eight, ala the RPG classic idea of XP) it's even possible that these guys would eventually get pretty good. Not in any real way humans work, but its an acceptable jump for gameism.

So from that perspective, being in the right neighborhood, family, or social circumstances to pull you in to a gang or organized crime before conveniently not owing them loyalty anymore by narrativium, could get you there.

Alternatively, it not too uncommon for "OGs" and others with a rep to go freelance in the real criminal world, especially if they didn't become leadership and got tired of dicing with sixteen year olds. These guys would have some rep (mostly for being loyal and dependable, not wildly skilled, but we already jumped that bridge in the name of gameplay) and the initial contacts in the criminal community that you could then spiral up. The upward spiral almost never happens in reality, but in SR semi-permissive economy of criminal skills, it might. Given the corporations are directly tied to many of these elements, it'd even be possible to spill over into corp interest or catch the eye of a "fixer."

B) You can assume that internecine warfare on the "shadow" side of the economy has gotten so intense and traumatic that you really are getting highly skilled professionals out of it. In reality, this would predicate society collapsing into a near apocalyptic state, followed whoever has the most/best killers becoming the new government and then enforcing law. But, if we look past that blithely...then yes, you could argue that people would be sitting there, watching for the extreme talent to rise out of this ceaseless underwar and then inviting them or pulling in friends.

C) You can assume that everyone else isn't actually that good, and these dice rolls are mostly propaganda. Cops win most shootouts with criminals, but to be honest you wouldn't have to work very hard to get better at combat shooting that the average police officer. So your "runner" skills aren't really SEAL Team Six, they're just quantifiablly better at these things than most people and honestly, who really even defends against "slightly better than average" in a corporate or criminal setting?

In this case, hey, you do crime. The assumed economy of criminal skills is there. So, by virtue of being a supply where there is demand, you inherently get commodified by a fixer after you've worked with a crew.

4) Democratization of criminality. Once upon a time, if you wanted to be a drug dealer, you had to know a guy and do supply chain stuff and probably hook up with an organization. These days, you want to deal coke, you can get some sent to you via any number of very easily accessible dark net sites.  You want to be a hacker? No problems, there's a thousand forums where you can do that as of 2016. (Pro tip: don't do this in real life: you can). You are now in business. Extrapolate that to a user friendly, all pervading Matrix in a gritty SR world. You want in, you look for it. Someone is hiring.You'll have to build rep, not unlike most dark/deep internet communities do now, and eventually the nature of your services will involve you meeting people. ta-da! You're running! Of course, you probably had a lot of false starts, got screwed over every now and again, and most of you almost certainly got caught, killed, or out of the business when it proved to be hard and scary - but if you're in character gen, you obviously made that cut.  No idea where you got your 18 dice, but one of the above might work?

5) You can just ignore reality and do what is fun. Runners exist because they exist, and fixers sell them to Johnsons because the environment is just that permissive.

[Senko]

Hmmm with regards to B I can see how the corps would deliberately manipulate things so that there would be areas that would produce skilled fighters probably not as good as their elite troops but still very dangerous they can hire. If somone's fighting for their life from their earliest memories then they'll pick up something or die.

[Overbyte]

2) The most "realistic" path for hi-end shadowrunning is that you were already an expert at something. The reality is that a "tough life on the streets and willing to kill" makes for a great disposable sicario, but those 18 dice in your primary represent a lifetime of investment, usually with someone else footing the bill to actually train you to that standard. We're talking firing thousands and thousands of rounds for a sammie until its second nature to hit  a meta sized target every time while moving across a room, working not just at DOSing a website but actually Stuxnetting things for a hacker, etc. .

Most of my characters don't start with 18 dice in anything. More like 12. Unless you are an adept or something and then you have magic boosting natural talent. And magic is a great excuse for just about anything. 

In reality you don't wake up that good at 18, and you very rarely get that good just by self learning - especially on a topic that isn't exactly public access or publicly practicable.

The key word here IMO, is "rarely". Shadowrunners are a rare breed. Only about 1/2 of 1 percent of the population (according to some calculation that someone did long ago).
And most of them, as you point out later in your post aren't 18. They are probably in their (late) 20's at least. And usually they had a previous career where they learned some of those skills.
But people who do something as a hobby are often more dedicated and more skilled than the average person who does something as a profession (like programming or even shooting a gun).
Actually.. really no one "shoots a gun" for a living and police officers are notoriously poorly skilled with a pistol in general. I was reading recently that police have a 40% hit rate inside of 6 feet.

[Senko]

Its because of the game mechanics punishing anyone who tries to be good at a couple of things raning down to poor at a few others instead of amazing at one thing and useless at anything else. Pesronally I prefer to play a game where your specialized main skill is 12-14 dice, secondary skills are 9-10 and you may have a few 4-6 for other things of interest rather than what you should do mechanically which is pump one or two skills to 18 and have everything else default.

[GloriousRuse]

Whoever calculated at 1% is massively incorrect. The US currently supports about 35k personnel that are "shadow runner" levels of good (despite the hype, most of high-end organizations are analysts, support personnel, managers, etc.). Lets give some state and municipal agencies the benefit of the doubt and double that. We'll even throw in an extra 30k private sector types - programmers, NRA shooting champs, etc. etc. . 100k all together.

Now, we'll just imagine every one of them for four generations  is on the market. 400k potential "runner good" people in a nation of 330M.  0.121% of the population.  That's assuming of course that every single "runner level" professional decided he wanted to embrace a career of ongoing criminality when there are plenty of other well paying jobs. So...lets imagine the thrill of running is JUST THAT COOL THAT ITS WORTH COMPLETELY SACRIFICING EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIFE FOR...and say, 10% of these cats actually go that route. .012% of the population.  Now, we say that in the actual US about 3.3% of the population is criminal (slightly over 11M), though that of course mostly accounts of crimes of a far lesser nature.

Understand that with the full might and resources of the largest defense/security/intelligence industry in the world producing "runner good" people, the US could, with an average return to criminality, generate...wait for it... 0.0039% of the population as runner good criminals.

So, if we want to go "but I learned on the streets" route, and accept that this is very rare compared to actually getting these skills elsewhere...call it one in a thousand? Then the modern US would have 13 "up from the streets" people at "runner good" levels. 

Which leads us to one of two conclusions: either most runners really AREN'T "runner good", especially the street rats OR there are no where near that many runners in the system.

We know as a SR premise that there are plenty of runners in the system. Therefore, most runners are probably slightly better than average criminals with delusions of grandeur.

[Senko]

All the more reason for my 12 in your main skill and that's with a natural advantage of 6 in a stat.

[Overbyte]

Whoever calculated at 1% is massively incorrect. The US currently supports about 35k personnel that are "shadow runner" levels of good (despite the hype, most of high-end organizations are analysts, support personnel, managers, etc.). Lets give some state and municipal agencies the benefit of the doubt and double that. We'll even throw in an extra 30k private sector types - programmers, NRA shooting champs, etc. etc. . 100k all together.

Where did you pull these numbers from? 35,000 that are "shadow runner levels of good"? How do you define that and why 35,000?
Anyone can be a shadowrunner at nearly any skill level. I once had a character that was a history professor that became a shadowrunner by necessity. He had nearly no useful skills to start.
Obviously the exception, but my point is that there is probably no such thing as "shadow runner levels of good".

Looking back at my spreadsheet (I have one for creating the overall runner population) I see it says 1 in 5000 people are runners.
That makes for about 1200 runners in Seattle. That's not all that many, particularly if you break it down by archetype or race.
If you assume 10% of runners are mages that's only around 120.

OK.. I found the original reference for my number... so rewriting what I wrote here..
The original was from the 2nd Neo-Anarchists Guide to Everything Else (NAGEE).
The article was called "The Economics of Shadowrunning". I'm not saying it is gospel or anything, but had some reasonable logic.

For the interest of people here I will cut and paste the article below the original author was Earl A. Hubbell
His article was written way back when it was 2050. The population of Seattle is now around 6 million not 3 million.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract: Statistical analysis applied with some wild assumptions demonstrates
1) Shadowrunners are not generally a significant force and
2) They are an economic preferred alternative to 'in-house' operatives, despite general unreliability.
 
Seattle of 2050:
Population : 3x10⁶ individuals
Corporate affiliated: 1.5x10⁶
Below Poverty: 1x10⁶

Thus, we see economically independent units compose 5x10⁵ individuals. We rule out the 'Below Poverty Level' population, as any significantly skilled/cybered/magic unit will be aggressively recruited/have entered poverty voluntarily/will not be counted in standard census.
From the UCAS census estimates, we have approximately 1% of the population having 'significant' cyber-enhancements (so called 'samurai', 'riggers' or 'deckers') or significant magical enhancement ('physical adepts'). Full mages compose approximately .1% of the population.
Thus, there are approximately 3x10⁴ units of significant personal power in Seattle. Of these units, 3,000 are mages. Due to aggressive corporate recruiting, it is estimated that only 10% of the 'significant' population may be considered 'independent'. Thus, we have 3x10³ significant units, of which 300 are mages.

For obvious reasons, counting this population is difficult, however, it seems that only approximately 20% of this final group engage in high-risk operations (the remaining 'independents' belonging to various 'normal' occupations).
Thus, the 'significant' population available to 'shadowrun' consists of merely 60 mages, 60 skilled 'deckers', approximately 120 riggers, 120 physical adepts, and 300 samurai (numbers do not add due to some overlap in categories, and approximation errors).
Given the near-necessity of 'magical cover' on any significant operation, we see an operating population of approximately 100 'teams' of runners within Seattle, composed from a pool of approximately 600 'powered' individuals, and approximately 2,000 skilled personnel in various 'support' positions (so-called 'fixers', 'detectives', 'security consultants', 'cannon-fodder'...)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was more, but I didn't want to make this post much bigger. 

[GloriousRuse]

When I say "Runner good" I meant the average moderately optimized 5E build that has neither completely munchkin'd it, nor thrown away the dice pool in the name of RP. Depending on your table, 12-18 DP in primaries.

Alternatively, we could go with any primary DP of 12 or more, given the average careerist should have 7 (3 AVG stat, 4 "reasonably professional" skill ) before bonuses, and 12 implies the ability to perform at levels that for the normal un-augmented human would be considered "exceptional."

Which takes us back to "how do you become a shadowrunner". If you assume an average character build, which is both exceptional in nature and connected/willing enough to operate in super high risk corp on corp ventures with a reasonable expectation of success and deniability for Johnson, then there aren't many "realistic" ways in because of the organizational pre-reqs you typically need to get those skills (if we went with one in a thousand can self teach to the level of exceptional without resources, mentors, facilities, or a paycheck to support that training, we have 1.3 "up from the streets" runners in Seattle.)

If you're willing to call anyone who will do crime on the freelance a runner, then the original question become much less difficult - you can become a runner by virtually any means you can become a criminal. But there's no indication why you would be invited to play in the big leagues other than the game requires it.


----------
Re: numbers

The current publicly declared size of US Cybercommand  (4k)
The current publicly announced strengths of Delta, DEVGRU, FBI HRT, and about 1/4 credit (which is generous) for the service SOC communities (18-20k)
The estimated strength of clandestine and paramilitary portions of the CIA minus support staff(Mazzerati's number's mostly) (5-6k)
A rounding up of about 5k from where that estimate would land just to give benefit of the doubt.

 -----------

As for the stat analysis: he has 660 runners in a pop of 3M, which as you pointed out becomes 1320 in 2072. That's .002% of the population. Which is actually only 2/3 of the rate I guessed it in at using US current criminal stats versus the initial estimate for four generations of employees. So, it looks like we're in close agreement despite our methodological differences - which would mean runners probably ARE that good, which in turn would mean there are very few "up from the streets" stories available.

[Senko]

Except the average moderately optimized 5E build isn't the average runner. They're the guy's who've been there, done that often enough and succesfully enough to have built a small reputation and have a general idea of what they're doing. The average runner is probably closer to street scum (modified priority version) rules in their abilities hence the trope of them being expendable.