[Crimsondude]

Short answer to this will be that if runners fail to pay their taxes, whatever they end up being.  Failure to do so results in serious financial audits, fines, and possibly jail time.  All of which are BAD for Shadowrunners, because IRS auditors with cyebrdecks are nasty, and they will figure out you have sources of unclaimed income from illegal activities.

The IRS has a black ops division and a former head of that division now runs the entire UCAS intelligence community. The taxman is not one to be fucked with in the UCAS.


For runners, the lightest punishment would probably be imprisonment.

[Bull]

Honestly, the tax tacked onto the SINner qualities is just overkill. An extra money sink and additional crud to keep track of for little to no gain for the game as a whole.

Not Overkill.  As it stands, SINner really doesn't actively *do* very much as a negative quality, other than ensure runners are extra paranoid (Which they should be).  A money sink means there's a valid reason to allow it as a negative quality, since it's going to come up rarely, if ever, in a Missions game.  Since dealing with that SIN usually means seriously derailing a game that's frequently on a VERY tight schedule.

[All4BigGuns]

Honestly, the tax tacked onto the SINner qualities is just overkill. An extra money sink and additional crud to keep track of for little to no gain for the game as a whole.

Not Overkill.  As it stands, SINner really doesn't actively *do* very much as a negative quality, other than ensure runners are extra paranoid (Which they should be).  A money sink means there's a valid reason to allow it as a negative quality, since it's going to come up rarely, if ever, in a Missions game.  Since dealing with that SIN usually means seriously derailing a game that's frequently on a VERY tight schedule.

I'm just of the mind, I guess, that some disadvantages/flaws/negative-qualities are more passive by their very nature and that taking proper precautions should be able to mitigate ill-effects in most circumstances. Then again, I also think that making use of those taken should be done, but done rather sparingly rather than poked and prodded all the time.

[Bull]

For Missions, it needs to have an ongoing, regular game effect. Except for home games, GMs for Missions don't have time to tailor things to do stuff with players flaws.  And if a flaw never gets yused, never comes up, it's free points.  Right now, SINner is basically like that.

Bull

[All4BigGuns]

Then perhaps maybe altering that portion to where it's Missions specific? Seems like a good compromise to me.

[Michael Chandra]

So two options come to mind:
- Fixed Tax Amounts, where at higher levels they are smart enough to realize you're hiding some cash and tax you at higher amounts. Could be 500, 1000, 1500, 2500 or 500, 1000, 1000, 50 and the second option combined.
- For Corporate SINners, penalties at interacting with contacts of other corps, at the highest level higher penalties and lesser penalties to non-corp contacts. Like a -1 and -2 to interact, I dunno (which would include Swag tests).

[Bull]

Ok, we've been talking about it behind teh scenes, and the percentage is supposed to apply to all income, Shadow or otherwise.  the reason being is that in Shadowrun, money is almost entirely digital.  Which means it all gets tracked.  Even those certified credsticks get tracked.  So even when you're dealing on the black market, things have a way of being traceable.  When you're SINless, you can get away with this, because you don't leave a record behind.  the only advantage there really is to not being a part of the system.  But when you're a SINner, you're part of it, even if you keep your shadow life separate from your SINning ways.  And the IRS (or the corporate equiv) watch money VERY closely. And if they see you with money or expensive things that you shouldn't afford, they're going to start digging, and then you're in trouble.

Keep in mind it was the IRS took down Capone and a number of other crime bosses, while the cops and the FBI couldn't.

So the long and short of it is, SINner means you MUST pay taxes on all the money you earn off each Shadowrun.  Payable at the end of each month.  This will get added to the FAQ in the next revision.  If you took SINner, you can drop it and take a different negative quality, or just go into Karmic Debt and pay it off.

And yes, this makes the quality not very worthwhile to take.  It's going to add a fair bit of record keeping to things.  But that was the intention of the flaw, so we'll stick with it. 

And yes, you can argue that runners would find ways to keep things hidden and secret and only pay taxes on part of their income, and that they use Fake SINs for a lot of stuff, and etc, etc etc.  But keep in mind that if you have to burn or drop a Fake SIN, you also don't currently lose the money attached to it either, because that would be nasty.  So if we start diving into one end, we have to start wading through the entire pool. and deal with the upsides and downsides of shadow accounting.

We might see some advanced rules dealing with all of that in the future.  But if we do, it's down the line quite a ways, and will likely be optional rules and will likely be a lot of added complexity.  So for now, we'll stick with things as is.

Bull

[Michael Chandra]

So... No taxes on material rewards and item trading? That opens the way to special negotiations with Johnsons and other players. Not in Missions, sure, but in normal campaigns.

[Bull]

in non-Missions games, GMs are open to interpretations and house ruling.  We don't quite have that luxury

[Crunch]

Ok, we've been talking about it behind teh scenes, and the percentage is supposed to apply to all income, Shadow or otherwise.  the reason being is that in Shadowrun, money is almost entirely digital.  Which means it all gets tracked.  Even those certified credsticks get tracked.  So even when you're dealing on the black market, things have a way of being traceable.  When you're SINless, you can get away with this, because you don't leave a record behind.  the only advantage there really is to not being a part of the system.  But when you're a SINner, you're part of it, even if you keep your shadow life separate from your SINning ways.  And the IRS (or the corporate equiv) watch money VERY closely. And if they see you with money or expensive things that you shouldn't afford, they're going to start digging, and then you're in trouble.

Keep in mind it was the IRS took down Capone and a number of other crime bosses, while the cops and the FBI couldn't.

So the long and short of it is, SINner means you MUST pay taxes on all the money you earn off each Shadowrun.  Payable at the end of each month.  This will get added to the FAQ in the next revision.  If you took SINner, you can drop it and take a different negative quality, or just go into Karmic Debt and pay it off.

And yes, this makes the quality not very worthwhile to take.  It's going to add a fair bit of record keeping to things.  But that was the intention of the flaw, so we'll stick with it. 

And yes, you can argue that runners would find ways to keep things hidden and secret and only pay taxes on part of their income, and that they use Fake SINs for a lot of stuff, and etc, etc etc.  But keep in mind that if you have to burn or drop a Fake SIN, you also don't currently lose the money attached to it either, because that would be nasty.  So if we start diving into one end, we have to start wading through the entire pool. and deal with the upsides and downsides of shadow accounting.

We might see some advanced rules dealing with all of that in the future.  But if we do, it's down the line quite a ways, and will likely be optional rules and will likely be a lot of added complexity.  So for now, we'll stick with things as is.

Bull

Are you sure that's appropriate for the general FAQ? For missions sure but that's kind of a ridiculous ruling for a non missions game.

[KarmaInferno]

This thread IS talking about the Missions FAQ, not the general SR5 one.



-k

[Crunch]

This thread IS talking about the Missions FAQ, not the general SR5 one.



-k

Just making sure, Bull has made some announcements about the general FAQ, and he's generally said the missions FAQ when he meant that.

[Bull]

in this case, this is coming from the writers who worked on SR5.  This was the intention, and this was the argument made.  I can see the point, though it's harsh.  but then, I'm strangely ok with that, since this is a Flaw, and one that has traditionally been somewhat abused.  Flaws are bad, Flaws should be things that punish your character, and should only be taken when appropriate for your character, not just to squeeze out a couple extra points.

The White Wolf guys used o have a term they used, Flerits, whcih was an amalgamation of Flaws and Merits.  It referred to any Flaw that either had no real in game drawback, or could be used "offensively".  Shadowrun has had a few of those over the years, things like Combat Monster and the like.

[Crunch]

in this case, this is coming from the writers who worked on SR5.  This was the intention, and this was the argument made.  I can see the point, though it's harsh.  but then, I'm strangely ok with that, since this is a Flaw, and one that has traditionally been somewhat abused.  Flaws are bad, Flaws should be things that punish your character, and should only be taken when appropriate for your character, not just to squeeze out a couple extra points.

The White Wolf guys used o have a term they used, Flerits, whcih was an amalgamation of Flaws and Merits.  It referred to any Flaw that either had no real in game drawback, or could be used "offensively".  Shadowrun has had a few of those over the years, things like Combat Monster and the like.

I REALLY hope you'll reconsider. Having a SIN has all sorts of drawbacks in a real game with a GM. Mandating a missions style bookkeeping convenience for ordinary games is really... unwise.

[ZeConster]

The easy solution is sharing a Lifestyle with one of your SINless teammates, and letting them 'handle' the majority of your cut, putting the nuyen in their name and letting them handle the purchases while you receive enough official income to convince your IRS that you're not hiding things from them. And of course, if your SIN is from another country (my planned Missions character, for example, travelled to Chicago from the Athabaskan Council on the trail of his father's killers, and for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, has remained), how are they going to tell the difference? Send someone over to another country for an audit?