[Wish]

I'm a beginning GM with a fairly large group (5-10 depending on attendance), and I'm not sure how to go about rewards. I'm starting off the campaign with a one-shot scenario that was designed to be played at a convention, and I'm not sure how realistically the money rewards (or any money rewards given by future campaigns) will balance with the amount of players I have or the long term goals of the group. The scenario that I've got has the reward at ~35,000 nuyen total for successful completion.

Is there some kind of table/rule of thumb for recommended monetary rewards, especially for beginning characters? This scenario should only take one session to complete, so it seems that 35k might be a bit high, even after being split up.

[Mantis]

For a first run, I'd aim for between 2000 and 5000¥ per character depending on just how much of a whirlwind of death the job is. You could grab the Denver Missions (Season 1or 2 I think) from the Catalyst site to see how they do the rewards. They use something called Table Rating which is based on average karma in the group. Generally the pay is some set value multiplied by the TR. The more karma you have on average, the more you got paid. It worked out OK for the first time we ran that campaign.
A rule of thumb I use for snatch and grabs is the idea that a Johnson would have a max budget for runners of about 10% the value of the item. He'll low ball to start and they can negotiate up from there.
Once you get some experience and see what players want to buy and just how long it takes to get you get a better idea of how much cash to give. One thing to try to avoid is giving out so little that they start to look at boosting cars or similar things to make money. Too generous and they start dumping jobs they don't want to do or else they can buy their way through. It's a fine balance between the two extremes.

[foolofsound]

Sigh. Check out the Pay in Shadowrun thread for the whole argument on the subject.
(http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=8640.0)

Generally, the consensus is to pay your runners pretty well (5-10k a run starting), but to make sure they have to work for it. If your runners start looking for ways to make money on the side (stealing cars, looting equipment, selling corpses) you aren't paying them enough.

[WSN0W]

Also pacing is a factor. If they have 3 jobs total every 2 months, then they will stress about money more. If they are doing a job a week with one 'big' job they are doing side preparation for until finishing it up at the end of the month (so 5 jobs in a month) then they can afford less profit per run and still not feel stressed to make rent and buy ammo and STILL feel like they are banking enough for rainy days and improvements.