[lurkeroutthere]

So there seems to be an expectation, rightly or wrongly that a lot of time the J will try and screw the team over, just because he can. Inevitably this always leads to the PC's, rather justifiably wanting revenge. While it can make for good storytelling I wonder about the the actual workings of it.

For your average corporate or organization Johnson screwing a successful Shadowrunning team out of money or trying to kill them just seems like exceedingly poor business sense. After all if they were good enough to be worth hiring they are likely good enough to make your life really unpleasant if you don't successfully off them. Likewise your financial motivations should be fairly limited, as while you might profit in screwing them over the risks suddenly go way up. In short a "professional" Johnson will almost never screw the runners over for purely financial reasons.

There are really only two options I see J's trying to backstab or kill their operatives with any regularity.

1) The team screws up and does so spectacularly, and willfully in a way that you are justifiably feeling punitive. To my mind this isn't "Missed the ambush timing on the armored truck" this is "Was at the ambush site and had the truck in site but got greedy and tried to take the whole truck instead of what was on it.

And the farm more dangerous type
2) The job needs to be pristine and have exactly zero loose ends. This shouldn't come up very often but it's something every J likely prepares for. More often then not they are going to know that it will be this sort of op before they even call the runners and plan accordingly. Ideally they will want to put the runners at ease and have them walk into a trap that's as close to perfect as possible. Also as often as possible they'll want to select a team without powerful connections or friends who will come looking for them. Indiscrete teams likely get tapped for this kind of work more often then discrete stone cold pros for this. Of course if a team is completely discrete, all the more easily for black bags to swallow them up whole.

Are my feelings way off base here or do people feel they are pretty close to the norm.

[Black]

I agree with your approach Lurker.  For the most part, Mr Johnson is not going to have the runners killed.  While the Killer J does appear in some published adventures, the majority have Mr J paying his way and giving bonuses for extra good work (and cuts for screw ups.)

Hmm... my current team has run about 12 missions of different instensity...  Mr J didn't pay Four times.

First time was the Mecurial Adventure.  The first Mr Johnson was burnt to death by a dragon... but they immediately picked up a second Mr J who did pay them.

Second time, the team was on escort duty and the subject was poisoned and the team held by the FBI... Mr J disappeared into the shadows...

Third time, Mr J was a stooge who got himself killed by the real Mr J and was used to frame the runners.  The runners still picked up a second, legit, Mr J when they relised that they had a common enemy.

The fourth, DNA DOA.  The Mr J was legit, but the runners refused to give him the recovered items, instead choosing the destroy the data and samples.  Mr J, understandably, refused to pay.  Strangely, the runners were vaguely annoyed that Mr J didn't pay them.

[Necrogigas]

Unless the GM is exceedingly vicious, the murderous or back stabbing Johnson shouldn't come into play all that often. The only times I use them is when:

A: The team fails in a spectacular fashion: an extraction became an assassination, when discretion was a mission priority the team uses a bomb, things of that nature.

B: The team tries to screw over the Johnson first; sells payday or items to higher bidder or gets greedy.

C: The mission is black ops and the Johnson wants to make sure the team doesn't leak sensitive material or intelligence.

D: The team doesn't do their homework on the Johnson, so through Hand of God it turns out that he represents a corp they've really pissed off in the past, or has ties to a discriminatory organizations such as the Humanis Policlub.

[Critias]

Mr. Johnson shouldn't fuck over the team so often that they always expect it.  Most of the time, Johnsons have to play it straight with their runners or the entire shadow economy falls apart (even moreso than it already days, under close and "realistic" scrutiny), and it certainly shouldn't happen often enough to make teams expect to be double-crossed.

In fact, it should be precisely when they don't expect it that Mr. J should have some other level of scheming going on, that will make him profit from this sort of betrayal.

[Mirikon]

It depends. If the runners get a call from a fixer, then the rate of backstabs should be relatively low. Fixers have reps to protect, and vet the Johnsons before sending runners to a meet. Likewise, a Johnson known for suicide runs isn't going to get any decent talent coming his way. Shadowrunning is a business, and constantly screwing the people who make what you want to happen happen is bad for business.

If they are going through a fixer for a job, then these are the most likely reasons the team will get fragged over:

1. They fail spectacularly, possibly including an interview with the Knights and their faces on the news feeds.

2. There is more to the job than meets the eye, so they decide not to follow through (such as if the 'harmless' compound they added to the cleaning supplies happens to react with those supplies to become a deadly nerve agent).

3. The run is a black op, of the 'leave no loose strings' variety.

4. The team didn't check out the Johnson enough, and they find themselves in a bad situation. (For example, the Johnson says he's Ares, but is actually Humanis, or working for a Dragon, or an insect shaman, or... well, you get the idea.) This kind of thing is the rarest of these four, however, as fixers do have a rep to protect, but things do slip through the vetting process.


If the team didn't go through a fixer to get the gig (someone got their names from a 'former client', they were out actively picking up work, a regular Johnson calls them for repeat business, or so on), then you don't have that initial round of vetting. This leads up to some extra ways you could get screwed:

5. The Johnson is secretly a Yak. Remember how the last few jobs you did targeted the Yaks?

6. The Johnson is a Dragon.

7. The job is a suicide run. "Hunting ghouls in the sewers? FRAG!"

8. The job is a set up, where after you collect the nasty blood magic ritual pieces, you come to the meet, and are greeted with a couple F12 Stunballs. Guess who gets a starring role in tonight's ritual?

9. The Johnson's client has decided that you know too much.

10. The Johnson is a noob who doesn't know the rules of the game.

[GloriousRuse]

Don't forget relative value to a Mr. J. To a  Mr. J working for an AAA corp, 80k in runner expenses probably isn't worth getting in a tizzy over. Almost certainly not worth the actual expense of arranging for someone else to whack the team, be they internal or external to the corp., let alone the intangibles of potential failure, reputation hits, and flat out personal risk.  500k, a cool million? Maybe - but the type of guys you pay that money to are notoriously good at not getting dead, so really unless you violate one of the rules other people listed, a crop J isn't real likely to try and screw the runners. The value of the reward just isn't worth it. It doesn't mean you'll never get a hungry J trying to shave costs and he thinks he can get away with it, or he's using the runners to launder money to himself, or other personal scenarios, but these are the exception, not the rule.

Now, as you start sliding down the scale of available assets, the idea of killing or not paying the runners goes up in likelihood. If your an small seoulpa ring branch with your back to the wall, or your a gang that really needed that last shipment of BTLs to sell a lot faster and it turns out you don't really have the money after all, or your an up and comer with a lot of balls but not much money - or any other situation where 80k of nuyen can be a major issue - now the chance for a backstab over simple value goes way up. Because it can be a major coup to get the job done and the payment back, and is therefore worth the risk.

 Especially if the organization has muscle, just not expertise. For example, a local tier 2 gang chapter may have more than enough go gangers to massacre you, a minimal cash flow, but a serious need to do something more discrete or technically sophisticated - infiltration, cracking, some mojo related shit, whatever.. Well, they know you gotta pay for what you get, and they need some first rate skills or they'd do it themselves, so they'll offer some yen, but the average runner team probably outprices what they're willing to readily let go of. And they do already have a lot of guys with guns who are comparatively cheap - troubled youths aren't that hard to find - so taking a crack at the runners seems pretty fair and balanced at this point, especially since its not like they have to hire runners monthly.

[Bastwolf]

The way my group runs, a J will only screw us over if there is something in it for him.

[Walks Through Walls]

In my game there have only been a couple of situations where the runners didn't get paid. However, in none of them was it because of Mr. J going after the group or looking to screw them.

1) Mr. J got himself killed right outside the final meet site while the runners were inside waiting for him.
2) Mr. J got geeked as they were making the exchange and they decided it was better to cut and run then get cut down trying to collect their paycheck.
3) The runners when doing more homework on the assignment decided it was outside their skill set and walked away.
4) The runners fragged the job so epically they didn't even ask for their pay from the Johnson.

The interesting thing is most of these were for a pay of 25,000 each. Since the last one they have seriously talked about negotiating down to 24,999 nuyen the next time they get offered that amount and a couple of players in the group are calling it the 25k nuyen curse.

[GiraffeShaman]

First, the reasons for betrayal by a Johnson are usually strategic, not monetary. The corps are rich, the costs of hiring runners are small change compared to the fruits of successful shadowruns, and it's just not worth the hassle to screw runners over money alone.

Second, when a betrayal does happen, it's almost always a first time Johnson and not one of the longtime professionals that work the shadows. A very common one is the mid level exec/manager who wants to take down a rival in the corp its self.  He doesn't plan to work the shadows routinely and thus has no worries about long term reputation effects. It depends on if he has a good reason to screw over the runners and if he believes they won't survive and/or doesn't believe there will be a way for them to strike back.

A pretty common betrayal reason is that the runners are actually a distraction for the "real" run. They might actually be on the same site as the "real" runner team, probaly a much more experienced team, and distracting security forces. Or they might be elsewhere, distracting corp or Knight Errant forces. Obviously, runners known for loud and flashy fights are prime targets for this kind of run. It might even turn into a career of sorts, with the runners known for surviving these kinds of things, but of course it's a recipe for a short life. Note, this isn't actually a betrayal if they tell you up front you are the distraction. (Of course some may find this insulting)

Another possible reason for Johnson betrayal is that the failure of the mission benefits them in some way. Perhaps the Johnson has designed it to appear that a rival hired the runner's team to attempt this failed run. (How dare he hire criminals to plant bombs inside our beloved corp? Outrageous!)

Previously mentioned, a very very very common one is no loose ends. Perhaps the Johnson simply does not trust the runners, or perhaps he has a code that a secret can be kept.....by exactly one person, no more.

Of course various beings like dragons and immortal elves love to create huge twisty plans that make no sense even to intelligent mortals that see most of the pieces of the plan, and this can lead to some runs that don't turn out well for the team that takes them.

Sometimes events can happen or information come to light during a run that puts the employer in conflict with the shadowrunner team. Different moral codes and thus differing reactions to these events or information. The SR novel Fade to Black has a good example of this kind of scenario.

Something also to keep in mind is how a Johnson views shadowrunners. I was reading in the corporate guide the other day that MTC Johsons often use the name "Mr. Bunraku", implying Johnsons of that corp view shadowrunners are little more than prostitutes. Of course, even with this dim view of those they are employing, they do have to worry about their rep in the shadows and pissing off influential fixers.

[JustADude]

Obviously, runners known for loud and flashy fights are prime targets for this kind of run. It might even turn into a career of sorts, with the runners known for surviving these kinds of things, but of course it's a recipe for a short life. Note, this isn't actually a betrayal if they tell you up front you are the distraction. (Of course some may find this insulting)

Oh, you can be all sorts of distracting without getting in the line of fire! You just need a Knolwedge Skill like HTR Procedures, Demolitions, maybe some Chemistry and Armorer, and a timetable. Preferably also a hacker that can ghost your camera trail while you and your team are setting up the fireworks.

Once everything is in place and the timers are set, call in a bomb threat and let the games begin.

... ... ...

And, to remain on topic, I think that your take on backstabbing Johnsons is pretty dang spiffy. Very similar to how I was thinking.

[lurkeroutthere]

See I just don't see "setup to fail" runs happening all that often. There is supposed to be a vertting process, and while street talent is cheap there are better and cheaper ways to cause a distraction that don't potentially piss off some work for pay terrorists. If money is not an object to the corps as you hold (we'll assume it is, but a negligible one compared to the fallout in most cases) it would be far more efficient in many cases to pay and brief said runner team "I need you to go here and cause as much mayhem as you care to, yes you will be cover for another job, no i'm not telling you the details of that other job, as long as you stick to your job there are no problems."

I'm not saying that J's can't cover their tracks well enough to ward off reprisals. I'm just pointing out that if you want an operation to actually be discrete a better chance of having it go off without a hitch stands to come by not giving any survivors of your deeds a reason to come looking for you. That's not to say that J's don't feel it necissary at times, even prudent to send runners into suicide gigs. I just feel "because it increases chances of my goals succeeding" is a poor one. Unless that goal is "die horribly at the hands of any runners tough enough to survive my clever ploy".

[GiraffeShaman]

That's not to say that J's don't feel it necissary at times, even prudent to send runners into suicide gigs. I just feel "because it increases chances of my goals succeeding" is a poor one. Unless that goal is "die horribly at the hands of any runners tough enough to survive my clever ploy".

Right, but this shouldn't be the standard run, nor the standard Johnson. As noted previously, quite often the betraying Johnson isn't a longterm player in the shadows. Is he stupid to assume he can betray the shadowrunners and get away with it? Maybe so. He doesn't know that the runners are the center of the story and thus have an increased chance of surviving. He might think himself quite clever if he has a plan with multiple backups. And of couse, sometimes people with money are just idiots. Certainly a one time Johnson is more likely to be foolish  or reckless than a long term professional Johnson.

The absolute main reason to do this kind of thing though goes beyond realism. The players will LOVE it when they get the satisfying feeling of capping his ass.

The more info they tell the runners and the safer the runners are, the less of a betrayal it is. There is a gray area though. They could for example tell the runners they are the distraction, but not tell how much danger they'll be in. Dimmer runners might not even realize they were tricked. They were told after all up front they are the distraction and well paid. It's also possible the runners might be ticked, but hope the Johnson has future runs that aren't so dangerous. (Foolish perhaps, but both Johnsons and runners are capable of being foolish)

You can also space out high paying runs. So when the players see a high paying run that's not from their usual fixers they might know it's unwise, but do it anyway. And hey, perhaps this run isn't a setup. You obviously don't want to be Lucy and Charley Brown with the football and make them fail all the time. It's an exception and a rarity, which actually increases the impact. I've yet to screw the runners over in either of the two campaigns I've been running. Which means it will be all the more powerful when I actually do it. "What? He can't do that! That's against the rules of the shadows!"

[WSN0W]

I've found, in both running and playing, that the J backstabs usually come when the Johnson himself is off the company reservation. There are the common sense reasons many have already covered, but for the true 'I set out from the start with a plan to betray you,' it tends to be some inter-office drama and the Runners are just cat's paws in it. Like using them to become the fall guys to make one of the Johnson's rivals look bad and then have the Johnson lead a home corp sec team to clean up the mess.

I find the more common 'betrayals' to be the last minute 'altering the deals' either by tacking on an objective or switching pay. Rarely will I have (or have had) a Johnson outright stiff the Runners, but perhaps the aluded to (or promised) betaware upgrade or new software, etc, etc gets renigged on at the last minute and instead some other (usually 'lesser' in the eyes of the PCs, even if it's monetarily comparable) compensation.

I find this works well as it keeps with the Cyberpunk feel of 'you don't really get away clean with everything.' but without causing the 'Murder/death/kill' rampage or just the sense of 'well, that was a lot of effort, risk, and expense for...well, nothing.' It works best when the Runners can even go 'Yeah, I totally get why they stiffed us that payment...and though it sucks as I'd love a T Gauss Rifle...8k does pay my bills this month' and would even be willing to work with them again...or at least call it even and move on.

The same goes for the Runners with the Johnsons when the Runners take some liberties, like keeping copies of data or find a way to make a bonus. The Johnson does the 'well, it's not ideal, but it's not worth escalating...so shaking hands, saying 'well played' and moving on is a good way to look at it.'

While exceptions obviously exist, the very Johnson/Runner relationship tends to breed people on both sides that can accept that the other side isn't going to fully do what they agreed on, but get the core elements done and still be professional enough not to be butt hurt when the smoke clears.

[lurkeroutthere]

Yea, I started this to discuss when the standard J would try and betray/stiff/cheat the runners in some major way. The answers i've gotten kind of confirm my feeling that the standard J (being one who makes their living working with black ops) wouldn't unless some pretty amazing circumstances came up.

Professionals are predictable, unfortunately the world is full of amateurs.

[GiraffeShaman]

Yea, I started this to discuss when the standard J would try and betray/stiff/cheat the runners in some major way. The answers i've gotten kind of confirm my feeling that the standard J (being one who makes their living working with black ops) wouldn't unless some pretty amazing circumstances came up.

Pretty much Lurker. The reputation thing certainly puts a hamper on it. Even if a corp had a need to screw over runners, they'd likely use a different middleman than one of their well known and long term Johnsons. That Johnson's reputation is of great value to the corp.

Pg. 29 of the 3rd edition does give a reason it could happen even with a "regular" Johnson though. "Corporate higher ups have been known to set up Johnsons just like Johnsons are said to set up runners." And the comment below it. "Neddy-Quite so. I recall a particularly harrowing shadowrun some years ago, where our Ms. Johnson engaged us in the recovery of some data. It turned out the data was worthless. Our run was a tailchaser, a feint for some operation Ms. Johnson's superior was running. She was even more displeased than we were over the whole matter."

There's some more good info on Johnsons in that same area of the book.

This does open up the possibility that competing factions in a corp riven with internal strife like say Aztechnology might purposely set up the favorite Johnsons of internal corp rivals. In fact, the whole purpose of screwing the runners over might be to embarrass or destroy the Johnson.

Another way it could happen is if you are put on the "expendable" list by a corp. Basically they tag you are a group who only has value for suicide runs and the like. This can happen due to past failures while running for them, but can also happen merely for not following exact instructions with the more hard edged corps.