| From: | TopCat <topcat@******.net> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: Corp Revenge |
| Date: | Wed, 22 May 1996 17:49:43 -0500 |
>Look, here's the REAL bottom line on corps hitting runners.
>
>If you follow TopCat's view of the world, running teams have long-term
>associations with their employers. Okay, that means the corps view them
>as assets. Okay, so if another corp wipes them out, they've (rather
>pointlessly) destroyed one of your assets. That means, FOR EXACTLY THE
>SAME REASONING, the first corp will strike back. The second corp strikes
>back again. So on and so forth, all the while destroying assets. The Corp
>Council looks down at this, and issues an Omega Order. Very bad. So,
>obviously, the smart corps won't even START such a thing. (Oh, stealing
>assets isn't the same thing as destroying them).
You've taken my thoughts to the extreme, and you've come up with an
appropriately extreme result. The Corporate Court knows that corps destroy
and steal each others assets regularly. Why don't they stop it? Because
the CC is the Big 8 and they have no desire to stop it, preferring to fight
constantly and not have any more limits imposed upon them. Now,
shadowrunners will more or less (in my SR game and the ones I've played in)
end up working for one or two corps and/or organizations regularly. Why?
The runners are a known commodity to the corp/org and if they've done good
work, they'll get more opportunity to do more good work for better money.
They may not have the same Johnson every time (or even go through the same
fixer) but the corp/org will remember work done and reward where it's due.
If that corp should find out that the runners have been doing runs against
them, they may not hire them again, they may use that info to get something
done, they may terminate the team. They can do a great deal of things once
they have that information. They'll do whatever works best.
>If the runners do NOT have long-term associations, then you gain
>absolutely zip by wiping them out. You haven't hurt the corp which sent
>them, you haven't scared off other people (hey, TopCat, you _said_ that
>there would be others out there), you haven't recouped your losses. All
>you've done is let off a little steam. No point. And if you start doing
>this regularly, then yeah, you might drive the price up of a team to go
>against you. So instead of sending in an expensive and incompetent team
>('cause only the idiots would take the job), you send in an expensive and
>competent corp team, which do a better job. Oh, and to maximise the
>effectiveness, instead of just nibbling at the edges of the other corp's
>research, you go straight in and get all of the material, wiping it
>behind you. Yep, that was a good choic on the part of the other corp,
>wasn't it? So again, smart corps don't go down that way.
Only if, as your world seems to be, the corps have no connection to the
shadows other than hiring and they never know who they hire. In your game,
the shadows seem to run the corps. In SR, the corps created the shadow
market, they run it. If they stopped hiring shadowrunners, then the
runners'd have to go out and get real jobs. If you're a runner and someone
approaches you about a run, but it's on a corp that has a rep for killing
runners that get on their grounds, sometimes following them off-grounds to
do the job, would you take standard pay?
>For the last time, as far as I'm concerned... the corporations have quite
>deliberatly encouraged the growth of the shadow community. If they
>hadn't, then it wouldn't have come around in the first place. Start with
>THAT line of reasoning, and you can clearly see that corps would NOT go
>around eliminating runners all the time. On the other hand, the runners
>wouldn't go around doing mass murder or destroying corporate assets on
>the side, because that would break the rules. Which, BTW, is an EXCELLENt
>argument for using non-lethal means of penetrating a corporate facility.
They made the shadow community, they own it, if they wanted to they could
cripple it at any time, but they enjoy the ability to screw each other over
too much to do so. Destroying corporate assets and mass murder is, once
again, taking my thoughts to the extreme and, once again, yields an extreme
result. Killing the ten guards that did see your team as opposed to
knocking them out is what I was talking about (and blatantly so). A corpse
won't be able to say a thing, while the knockout victim will. Proper spell
use along with info from normal security measures will get you a pretty good
to very good idea of who did the run against you. If the security measures
get taken out (by decker/rigger/however) then you've still got the knockout
victim to fall back on. If the victim was killed, the corp has nothing.
-------------------------------------
"I was thinking of the immortal words
of Socrates, who said: I drank what?"
-- Real Genius
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TopCat at the bottom...
