[Pollution]

Keep in mind that looting cyberware is

A) difficult to do on your own.
B) pretty time intensive if you're going to try it on your own.
C) Pretty conspicuous if you're driving around with a pile of bodies in the back of your van to take to a clinic to sell.
D) Illegal as HELL
E) Will get you 1 point of Notoriety per instance (or per corpse).
F) will be very interesting when K.E. or L.S. happens to notice the blood oozing out the back of your trunk/van doors when driving to drop off the bodies.

I wouldn't suggest that anyone try to do this.  Being a Ghoul is a BAD idea.

Runners aren't the good guys, but they're not ghouls for Ghost's sake.

[spuwdsda]

Recall the 'Eye Witness' adventure. Runners could end up with a neat contact to the ghoul community.

Just deliver the meat and collect the salvage as payment. Win-win.

[Bull]

Kraaken:  Be sure you have the Season 5 FAQ.  They cover fencing rules more in depth.

And guys, seriously.  I'm leaving looting/fencing stuff alone for teh time being, BUT...  If it starts becoming a problem, I WILL institute new rules to deal with it.  And no one will like it.  Making a couple extra grand per run is fine.  Doubling (or more) your pay every run is not.

Pay scales and karma awards are set how they're set to provide relatively even character growth, so that two characters that played 10 adventures each are going to have had about the same amount of character growth opportunities and resources (Though obviously not all growth will be equal, depending on how/why you spend your resources).  If one player spends half the game looting and twinking out his contacts so he can fence the loot for maximum profit, then one character is at a serious advantage over another, and that's not fair to the campaign as a whole.

For home games, whatever.  Anything goes.  But for general Missions play...  You guys need to dial it back.  This isn't D&D.  Looted items are stolen items.  And stolen items are very traceable.  Smart runners don't steal a lot of drek taht can get them traced and burned, and contacts can and will sell you out.

[Critter]

Keep in mind that looting cyberware is

A) difficult to do on your own.
B) pretty time intensive if you're going to try it on your own.
C) Pretty conspicuous if you're driving around with a pile of bodies in the back of your van to take to a clinic to sell.
D) Illegal as HELL
E) Will get you 1 point of Notoriety per instance (or per corpse).
F) will be very interesting when K.E. or L.S. happens to notice the blood oozing out the back of your trunk/van doors when driving to drop off the bodies.

I wouldn't suggest that anyone try to do this.  Being a Ghoul is a BAD idea.

Runners aren't the good guys, but they're not ghouls for Ghost's sake.

I thought Notoriety was only issued once for each notorious act. That was if for example you were go go into a room and kill eight people in cold blood you only get one point of notoriety for "Cold blooded murder," as opposed to 8, one for each murder.

Am I misunderstanding this?

[KraakenDazs]

Good enough, and thanks Bull/ all for your input/quick replies! For the fencing, i checked the faq this week, but all i saw was a refenrence to the regular fencing rule, which end up giving more than the earlier 10/30 % rule of thumb i'd read about, so i wanted to double check.

 A quick chat with our group as basically our GM saying this.

He's lenient if we take extra time to loot stuff we'll actually use. For very high priced items, *if* we get them/the Missions already dont have a plan to deal with it, it'll likely be damaged enough so spare pieces end up costing near the fencing price anyway.

He's reticent about the idea of us starting to loot like crazy, or trying to make an extra nuyen *everywhere*, looting every single ares pred and copper wiring in the sprawl ( )  so we should not be too surprised if those muscle toners die out, or if a cyberdeck's been damaged to a point where you'd have to put in the nuyen equivalent of refencing it to fix it, if it doesnt become a whole pile of junk in the process. Seems pretty fair, we'll see how it goes. Maybe Daddy only needs one Harley Scorpion.

The original argument pretty much came out of a discussion about ''Riggers realistically could loot/hack/cntrol drones, magical folks could steal foci (albeit with a karma cost tag attached to it, why shouldnt the sammy exploit the cyberware in opponents''. I guess it was a logical argument, and we'll likely divide an honor system/nuyen-debt equivalency so everyone's happy and gets equal shares.Another quite fine argument our group is quite willing to accept it ''Missions are meant to be fair, so dont abuse it''. It then degenerated in a (well, not-so heated..) argument about cyberware in opponents being equal-opportunity plunder for all groups to start with, since they were in Mission stats and not an ''out of our way'' option.

I'll still bring the advil, but we'll try and behave

..Guess we'll shelf the ''Concealement/improved invis on the bodies/chop shop fence/rigger with an ambulance'' ''Strip-everyone-to-their-marrows-and-then-some'' operation until an home-game.

Works fine, i only picked up Stun spells in the end. But the Sammy..well he didnt bother to buy too many gel rounds

[baronspam]

There are very practical reasons for not going loot crazy.  Runners survive by not being worth the time and trouble to track down.  If you break into a corporate lab and steal some paydata, thats one thing.  The guys you hit know that three hours after the job you have handed the package off to your employer and spending the resources to hunt you down and punish you doesn't get the package back. 

On the other hand, if everyone in the facility is dead and mutilated because you carved out their cyber eyes, harvested their organs, and opened their skulls with a bone saw to get that implanted comlink for a couple of hundred extra credits then the mark is going to be furious.  You made it personal.  Bob might have just been the security lieutenant, but he had a wife and a kid and he ran the BBQ at the division picnic last summer, and the team turned him into a pile of cold cuts.   For practical purposes corps have unlimited resources.  The office supply budget for a AAA corp is more money than a runner team will collectively make in their entire careers.  They can put 100 guns on the street tonight to hunt you, more if you give then 24 hours.  They can re-task spy satellites, bring in forensic and magical trackers, turn hackers looses with milspec gear and agent programs that can find any paper trail the team has left, ever.  They literally own the cops, they have the receipt from when then bought that company with the law enforcement contract last year. 

Anyway, my love of hyperbole may be running away again, but you get the idea.  The corps always have more resources.  And even if the victim of a run isn't a AAA corp a criminal group, or even a large gang will still be able to put enough bodies on the street to outnumber the runners.  Even if they are not highly skilled, 14 guys with assault rifles put alot of bullets in the air.   Be a professional, keep it impersonal.

[ZeConster]

I'm curious: what tools does a GM have to stop someone from making a character with Resources A for the sole purpose of getting it killed so the others can scavenge its remains?

[Bull]

Pimp slap to the head of the player, maybe?

Seriously, that shit is just simple common sense and table etiquette.  GM should put his foot down and say "no way in hell", and have a talk with the player(s) involved.  And if that doesn't work, ask them to leave and not return (And if at a convention, pass it on to the other GMs and talk with the convention organizers to let them know why you're booting people out of your game.  They're usually pretty understanding).

[Bull]

To add to that, I think that people make the mistake of thinking that because we try and set up rules to make Missions as balanced as possible, and to try and streamline and "automate" downtime to remove the necessity of the GM, that the GM has no power.  They're just there to read the adventure and roll dice.  And this is NOT the case.  They are the GAME MASTER.  Their job is to make sure everyone has fun, sure...  But they're also in charge of the damn game. We spell it out early in the module that the GM is supposed to be in charge, is supposed to change things as needed to challenge the players.  GMs should not be eating shit from players "because the rules say X".

Everyone should be having a good time.  GMs should not be abusive.  But at the end of the day, they are the final arbiters of the game not the players, and they need to realize this.