How would people handle Getting Paid twice?
So my players finished their first mission and I gave them an interesting dilemma concerning the handing over of the data they had to recover. Basically it was meant to go to a Corp but a hacktivist group offered to pay the group for it instead. It was essentially to give one of the players a chance to fire off one of his directives. However due to some established fiction there was no reason why they couldn’t just give them the data, get paid and then go to the original corp and get paid from them too.
Of course this could cause all sorts of trouble when the corp find out but for now how should I do it? For now they’ve rolled Get Paid once for the hacktivist group. Should I just do that again and they get effectively double cred? I’m not against letting my players have a bit of extra cash early on. I almost certainly won’t let them get XP for finishing the mission again though.
I would give them a penalty for trying to fleece the information twice because the net is going to be watching that…but sure. I wouldnt give them double cred though..I would just get them the amount they invested…so 1.5 I guess?
Have them paid in secrets from Corp 2. Like the password to Corp 1’s secret desert research facility mainframe… It’s good for 43 hours till they change it.
Have the corp they were supposed to sell it to be torn to pieces as a result of the secrets being leaked early.
Have them get met by a Very Angry Corp face who’s pissed that they sold the data to his spy pretending to be a hactavist and that the ruse was meant to test the group to see if they were worth putting on retainer. They get paid once because this Corp pays its debts but their services will never be required again.
Easy, this data may be worth a lot to a corp, and they have the money to pay for a team. To anyone else, the info is just paydaya. It may be worth a cred or two, but may also anger the corp who paid to have it stolen (you know, if the other group screws up their plans).
They should definately not GET PAID (in the sense of the move) twice. They didn’t get the job, so they can’t get paid for it. Hit the streets to sell the paydaya and hope it doesn’t come back to bite you, if you dare.
If they’re going to get paid twice, they should definitely roll the move twice (although you’ll want to think about the modifier). That way they can be ambushed or set-up or not paid in full, twice!
Hamish Cameron
Yep, nothing wrong with trying to get paid twice. The odds (dice being dice) are that what actually happens is they get paid once by one party, and the other party tries to kill them. Fun and games. 🙂
Any time a team tries to scam a corp, I’m into it! Just don’t let them find out about it 😀
Hamish Cameron sounds like it would be fun in a one shot type scenario. My problem with this is that you don’t trigger the move unless you are being paid by an employer. Thus, you would have to get the job first (since that is how you gain an employer). Otherwise you are dealing with a contact, which falls under hit the street. If you didn’t get the job, you didn’t ante up your Cred to get multiplied upon payment. If you want the full rewards, you should have the full risk. If you ante 3, that raises your legwork clock. You have to do it separately for each job. Fail and you blow both jobs.
Yeah, you’d have to hack the move on the fly to account for the cred multiplier, but get the job doesn’t mention an employer, it just says “when you try to get paid”, right?
Hamish Cameron it says, “When you negotiate the terms of a job, roll edge.”
Ah, sorry, misspoke, I meant get paid.
Hamish Cameron “When you go to a meet to get paid by your employer, roll and add the number of un lled segments on the Legwork Clock.”
Huh, whaddya know! Fair enough 🙂
I think I’m going to do what Hamish suggested and do the Get Paid move again. Even though it does specify employer in the move I feel like these groups are both acting as an employer. It may have been the corp that originally gave the job but both parties are willing to pay the team.
But yes I need to work out a) How much money to give them for the second Get Paid and b) What they add to the roll. Letting them roll the +4 from the unfilled legwork spaces again seems a bit too nice. I know we’re waaaaay out of legwork now but I might say that by giving the data we can assume legwork has moved two more spaces to make the second Get Paid roll a bit harder.
Michael Barclay you could raise the clock by every Cred they ante up for the second attempt at getting paid. Essentially force them to pick between a bigger return and an easier roll.
Some of these responses seems overly complicated…
Just give the players a fixed amount of creds from the hacktivist group. No roll. Absolutely complicate the players lives for double-crossing a Corp at some point in the future because of course Corps don’t like getting played.
Unfortunately, having the players roll to get paid by the Hacktivist group that they didn’t bet any cred against while getting the job instead of the corp that they did complicates all kinds of things
For future reference just look at the twist from the sample Kurosawa Extraction mission in the book: “Kurosawa offers the team money, bleeding-edge tech, or corporate secrets not to turn him over to Mr. Smith.” In that case players don’t even try to get paid but still get some goodies (and just deal with the wrath of the corp immediately).
I think it’s great that players can make hard choices about screwing over employers and don’t end up empty handed for it (since things are going to escalate anyway they are probably going to need every bit of advantage they can get).