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Escaped gaming meme
Part of the balance of running Shadowrun is that you need to make sure that the people hiring shadowrunners are making it worth the while of the runners to just go out and make money on their own. (Though some GMs would love to have such self-starting players.)
One of the tasks at which shadowrunners excel is petty theft. In the Twilight Brigade game, one of our standard methods of information gathering was to simulate a mugging as cover for a mind probe. For verisimilitude— and profit— it was also important to make off with the person’s worldly goods, hack their credstick, and fence everything through a couple of layers of contacts. (The extra layers each charge a cut, of course, but that’s the price for making it more difficult for someone to track you down.) Using the mind probe to get their passwords, though, is one of those dangerous ways of getting greedy— it could clue the target in that they weren’t just the target of a random mugging— but taking fingerprint and retina scans off their unconscious bodies isn’t. (And if there’s a Johnny One-Spell shaman working with a gang, Mind Probe is a dandy spell for them to have.)
Car theft is actually more tricky than mugging, because it’s hard to stun a hostile autopilot. And few people recall how lethal a car is as a weapon until the autopilot decides to deal with intrusion detection by running people over. (Bringing to mind the Johnny Doppler quote, “Naw, th’ autopilot won’t aktchally try ta kill th’ car thief ’less ya click th’ Hound mercilessly checkbox.”) Though if you’ve already taken someone’s credstick, it’s amazing how often it will let you just drive the car straight into the chop shop (after disabling its network connection).
A lovely two-edged sword in Shadowrun is the secondhand cyberware market. On the one hand, player characters can clean up if they can avoid damaging that heavily borged thug and get him to a street doc for implant harvesting. On the other, if a player character starts flashing their chrome in front of gangs, they might decide that it’s well worth the risk to try and dump vast quantities of neuro-stun gas into the alley with the runner in order to harvest his ’ware. (And even if they’re subtle about their cyberware, anyone with astral perception could easily point out targets to gangs with such connections.)
One of the early runs that I put the Twilight Brigade through was financial harassment. The Johnson pretty much bribed the runners to drive up costs for another company, any way they could, which naturally included criminal operations. This involved heisting their delivery truck (I forget if it was two or three times, each time with the company using increased security), among other tasks, and making off with crates of blank data chips. The team had to take their time fencing it, though, in order to avoid driving the price down on the market. I had to figure out the price of a Faraday bag, which is a sack lined with conductive polymer that forms a Faraday cage around the contents; a Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic transmissions, which keeps smart packages from sending out their current location after they get stolen. It doesn’t stop ritual sorcery, though... that requires other preparations...
Any runners indulging in too much of this, though, had better cozy up to organized crime. The syndicates take a dim view of amateur competition, see...