[Tex Muldoon]

So I am a session with all my players working at a Stuffer Shack and Holoarcade. I thought the pay would at least pay for a low lifestyle that way i don't have a squatters. They are new to the Shadows both IRL and in game. My question is how do I make them keep the Dayjobs? They all took SINner and Dayjob qualities.

[Yorick]

all of them? wow. those guys are going to be hosed if they mess up even a little. first time they get caught on camera and dont have the hacker remove the footage, someone will know where they live and work, which makes it easy for knight-errant to find them and give them new criminal sins.

for the dayjob- make the businesses be owned by the mafia (or the yakuza or whoever) for money laundering. you cant quit, your technically low-rank employees of the mob. oh, and we need you to do a little job for us. give everyone their boss as a free contact. maybe the stuffer shack sells a few unusual items to select customers, such as weapons and electronics that fell off the back of a truck. the holoarcade could be a cover for gambling in the basement. that sort of thing.

[Ethan]

To keep both the places of occupation there could be benefits in working there. For example, at the Stuffer Shack perhaps they are part of a new delivery service? Gives them an excuse to look around places and be mostly invisible.

The holo-arcade could be a nice place to make street-level contacts.

Make it more about the money. But I suggest gently exposing the dangers of being both a shadowrunner and a SINner with a regular job. Perhaps on one of their new runs they do get caught on cam, but not by the corp--say a bystander.

Enter one corrupt Lone Star / Knight Errant officer who works in the area. He starts blackmailing the runners for a cut, but makes it appear that he's really looking out for the team. He, of course, is in it purely for the money. The cop doesn't want them to quit, he needs to keep an eye on them.

[Elizara Dane]

I really like the suggestion of having them be employed by the Family. Adds tons of really easy  and believeable story hooks. The SINner quality is a really good opportunity to teach them about how to run without guns blazing too.

The question of how to make them keep the jobs though...you could dock them karma until they pay off the quality. A little draconian but it keeps with the rules.

Though, with everyone being a legal and employed citizen have you considered encouraging them to go back to school and get their degrees? It's never too late to go back!

[Tex Muldoon]

I like the corrupt officer and the place owned by the family. They all loved the idea of having dayjobs, i could not talk them out of it. Any other suggestions would be great i have the main ideas of my story out but the world is always changing.

[Makki]

this gives the popular introduction run Food Fight a whole new point of view. Possibly your entrance into the campaign

[CanRay]

I like the corrupt officer...

Captain Renault:  "This is the end of the chase."
Rick:  "Twenty thousand francs says it isn't."
Captain Renault: "Is that a serious offer?"
Rick:  "I just paid out twenty. I'd like to get it back."
Captain Renault:  "Make it ten. I'm only a poor corrupt official."

Captain Renault:  "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"
Croupier:  "Your winnings, sir."
Captain Renault:  "Oh, thank you very much."

Do I really need to point out where this is from? 

[James McMurray]

Day Job is a negative quality. The only way to get rid of it is to roleplay it out, get GM permission, and spend the karma. Roleplay is as easy as "I quit." But without the other two steps you're at best going to be trading it for another NQ of the GM's choice. The Family aspect works well, as could Enemy ("you made the best milshakes ever, how could you quit? If I can't have your shakes, nobody can!). Maybe Hunted, as another employee swiped from the till the day before you quit and now you're the prime suspect until you clear your name (and pay the karma of course).

But if they were all excited about the jobs, rather than looking at how to force them to keep them, think about how to make sure they want to. What made they excited about the quality in the first place?

[Talmor]

So I am a session with all my players working at a Stuffer Shack and Holoarcade. I thought the pay would at least pay for a low lifestyle that way i don't have a squatters. They are new to the Shadows both IRL and in game. My question is how do I make them keep the Dayjobs? They all took SINner and Dayjob qualities.

Well, I'm new to SR myself, but I think it's a pretty solid idea.  Esp. if you take it as an "origin story" for how THESE people became Shadowrunners.

There's a couple ways to take this--

1) They have dayjobs.  They're barely getting by.  Maybe the have debts, or family commitments.  They start off doing a few "odd jobs" here and there to make extra cash, gradually finding themselves drawn deeper and deeper into the shadows. 

2) The shadows are local shadows--these guys aren't the heavily armed sociopathic mercenaries traipsing around the world--they're locals.  There problems are local, and the locals around them. 

In either case, I would imagine you and your players need to answer the question "is making money really that important?"  It seems to me that most runners have a goal of getting that 10 million nuyen pay day, where they can buy a "luxury" lifestyle, and be able to retire as one of the elite.  I can see other games where money is almost irrelevant, so that's up to you and your players.

Oh, and I'd have them invest in Fake SIN's and maybe have them come into contact with a friendly decker--just in case.

One other thing--Why did they take these qualities?  Was it something they wanted, did you encourage them to?  Did the players think they were "supposed" to? I would hesitate to "teach them a lesson" if they're new and didn't understand what they were doing, esp. if they though they were doing the right thing. 

[baronspam]

I greatly respect the urge to do something different with a campagin.

But this is a tricky one.  If they truely have the skills to be runners its hard to see them working at a stuffer shack.  And if Stuffer Shack is the best they can do, a fixer is going to laugh them out of the bar when the come looking for work.

I think for this kind of campaign to work they would probably want to be law abiding citizens but something is compelling them to act otherwise.  If they want to be runners, and the best they can do is Stuffer Shack, then they are just loosers.  Stuffer shack is the 6th world version of working at the 7-11.  If thats the day job its hard to imagine them doing anything other they ending up a bleeding pile.

What if they all work for a smaller corp, say an A or AA corp.  The sammi/merc type is in security, the mage is an intern in the magic division, the hacker is the new guy over in IT, the Face works in Metahuman resources, etc.  They get into something that puts them in danger- they see something they were not ment to see and they are on the run from the corp, they are in the wrong place at the wrong time and an extraction goes down, etc. 

Its just tricky to keep them in the job once they have "the incident'.  It is hard to see the circumstances that would let them gear up at night and do jobs and still turn up on monday morning for thier shift.  It seems like they would either bail out and be runners or go back to their straight jobs once they had the chance.

[Tex Muldoon]

-Talmor
That is exactly what i am doing. odds are they are never leaving the sprawl. You know the saying you can run for a lifetime and never leave Seattle but you can't run for a lifetime and never enter it.

-Baronspam
I like the idea of the Jackie Chan style hero you know not meaning to save the day but does.

Basic Story is that they are uncover a small takeover of the mayor of their district nothing more.

[CanRay]

There's as many reasons to 'Run in the Shadows as there are 'Runners.  For most, it's just the best job they're able to get, the best chance at getting out from where they grew up from.

For others, the reasons get far, far more complicated and complex.

[Talmor]

If they truely have the skills to be runners its hard to see them working at a stuffer shack. 

Not necessarily.  The key to surviving and thriving in the Shadows has little to do with ones skills--often it has everything to do with ones contacts.

So you could have people who are skilled and capable enough to be runners.  They don't have the contacts to be runners yet--people rarely enter the shadows deliberately, and those that do often face significat challenges.  At the same time, they don't want to take their skills to some Megacorp and be stuck wearing a suit and carrying the briefcase for some jackhole in accounting. 

But other than running, their skills stink.  They don't have references, they don't have real work experience, so the only jobs they could get were working minimum wage entry level jobs. 

Of course, once needs to explain how they came about these skills--but being ex-military or the like can justify them.  The characters being disgusted by how their nations military is now just an enforcement arm for the corps could justifiably quit in disgust (AWOL maybe?) AND refuse to work for the big companies for the same reason.

One could do a series of adventures that gradually introduce the characters to the shadows.

[Kontact]

Use it like amnesia.  Amnesia is a 10bp negative quality that means the character has 10bp of negative qualities they don't know about yet.

So, if they want to take a negative quality and then ditch it, you just replace it with a quality of equal cost.
Suddenly they are Spammed and are Thrill Seekers.

[Kot]

My advice would be: They took those flaws for a reason. And you can't really turn them into something they didn't have in mind. By choosing to play normal, working people they kinda show you the way the story should unfold. It would be a story of a group of 'average Joes' who play with the Shadows. And if that doesn't really suit your needs, consider that a prologue - during a few first games build the story so that they loose their jobs and/or burn their SINs. That would force them to abandon their place in life and start again - as shadowrunners. You could also involve them in something bigger, that would be the scope of the whole campaign while they're still 'normal' people, and make that involvement the reason why they have to abandon their jobs, homes and probably even families... If they accept that course of the story, allow them to swap those negative qualities for others, like Enemy, SINner Criminal, In Debt, and so on...