Payouts

Rewards for missions

Collections:

Payout is what your characters receive in-game as payment for completed jobs. Inside the game, it’s often nuyen on certified credsticks - an anonymous, untraceable digital currency. Other times, it might be old-fashioned cash or financial instruments like bearer bonds. Less often, it could be any easily barterable and fungible goods: high-grade pharmaceuticals, untraceable weapons, BTLs or other illegal drugs, hot RAM, etc.

Regardless of the actual form, we represent this as a number of Payout Points. The goods are sold, the proceeds laundered, and the remainder arrives in the legal side of the character’s lifestyle. Each Payout Point funds the lifestyle for long enough to take one Downtime Action. Bigger missions = more Payout = more Downtime Actions before you have to look for the next job.

Negotiating the job

Every Johnson starts with a base offer. It’s typically four Payout Points for a corporate Johnson and a normal difficulty job, but can vary for other kinds of offers – or suicide missions.

We then use a slightly modified Dramatic Task to determine the final offer. In game, this might play out in a single meeting, but is more likely to be an initial meet then a followup after the PCs have completed some scouting.

Three rounds of opposed Persuasion rolls between the team’s representative and the Mr Johnson. Note that most Johnsons are fearsome negotiators.
Each round, one other PC can choose a different skill to support the Persuasion roll. This roll is usually made against Target Number 4, rather than being opposed. It can be any skill that might reasonably apply to the negotiation (see example below.)
At the end of three rounds, tally up all the successes & raises.
1. Each one can be taken as a bonus point of Payout at the end of the mission.
2. Alternatively, if the team would prefer to ask for more payment upfront, then a success/raise can be traded for 5 LP or 10 Liquidity. (Split between the team, not per person!)

Example

Example: Alice, Bob, and Charlie are negotiating the fee for a truck hijacking. Alice takes the lead, rolling her Persuasion skill. In the first round, Bob supports by rolling his Driving skill, contributing to the back-and-forth by pointing out the model of truck being targeted is heavily armoured and well-defended against electronic and physical attacks. In the second round, Charlie uses their Research skill to pull up maps of the area and show there is no good spot for an ambush along the truck’s path, which will make the job harder. During the third round, we go back to Bob, who rolls Intimidation to play bad cop and forcefully point out to the Johnson that there’s no way they’re going to get another team assembled before the deadline.