I've had a ... situation ... arise, recently, that I need some clarification on, because this is quite frankly mystifying to me as to how I should proceed. Let me explain.
The other day, I'm running Missions for a group of new (to me) players. Character creation is done, and they've assembled themselves into a coherent team -- they've worked together before. I set up the scene, they get into the meet, the Johnson tells them how much they get paid...
Face: "No. We want ten thousand apiece."
Okay, this is a joke to the Johnson, so I laugh and tell them the pittance they're getting paid to do a simple job, and the face doesn't budge. Ten thousand, or the team walks. He isn't going to roll Negotiation. This isn't up for discussion. They either get paid way more than the Mission will give them or they aren't playing.
Okay, fine, I can't give them that kind of cash, so I tell them this flat-out. They don't budge. They don't care what the adventure says. 10K per person or they all go find something else to do for the day. Leaving me with all my preparation, hanging. They want 10K or no one gets to play. I'm not going to be bullied by players, so I tell them that no one gets to play. I always have Shadowrun Returns, after all.
It gets better.
Five minutes after they leave, the store owner comes to me with concerns that I threw everyone out of my game and was generally not a friendly person. This reflects badly on the store, and those five players represent a potential loss of revenue for the store, in the snacks and drinks the store could have sold them if nothing else. Seems my ex-players went to him and told him they were going to buy stuff, but since I was mean and nasty and threw them out, they were leaving and taking their money elsewhere. So now I have the store owner telling me to either give the players what they want, or I can find a new venue to run games.
Okay, now what? I have players who refuse to play under the guidelines set in the adventure, and I have a store owner telling me to make the players happy or else I get thrown out of the store. But I can't break Missions pay scale guidelines, otherwise when these players take their characters to a convention, other GMs are going to wonder why their characters have so much money. I know it's blackmail, but I'm stuck.
What do I do?