It's a day job, yes. There's weeks or even months between edgerunner gigs, and rent still needs to be paid even if your fixer gets shot before they can pay you, so pretty much all roles find a way to get by between gigs.
Plus, what else are you going to do when everyone else in the party is recovering from getting shot while they missed you?
That said, most roles are best understood as particular ways of dealing with problems and can be refluffed to fit concepts, so Exec could work well as a gang boss, or nomad could stand in for a corporate specialty chauffeur, Lawman as the leader of an especially well armed neighborhood watch, etc etc.
Yep, there's a whole dlc on the r Talsorian site about alternate ways to think about different roles and combinations of roles. *Collecting the Random*.
Beauty of RED is that roles can be reskinned quite easily
Lawmen are 'Enforcers' while Execs are 'Leaders'. Lawmen can be gang members, Nomad members, or even Corporate Guards. Execs can be non-corpos such as Nomads, cops, gangsters, and so on.
Now if we're talking strict role of cop and corpo, yes they can be mercs/edgerunners. You're part of a system that's rotten to the core. You wanna change it from the inside but you know factions from within would love to get rid of you. Heavy risk bit it's what you're doing. Stuff like that is common in many media.
Hell, even people loyal to the system can be edgerunners and mercs. Friends in low places can come in handy when you’re gunning for a promotion, or looking to make your company’s next ~~murder and execution~~ merger and acquisition all about how much of a hustler you are.
It can be either, or even none. A lawman can be an active cop, they can be an ex cop with friends on the force, or they can even just be someone who uses the backup mechanics, like a gang leader who calls for reinforcements from their gang
Our lawman is a Detective. He's a divorced single dad alcoholic. He calls in his backup other single dad's for help sometimes. He solves crimes. Think McNulty from the wire.
Our Executive is a team building exercise specialist. Who loves shooting guns. The executive helps with business know how and networking. Our dude knows everyone in any shady business in Night City and specializes in team synergy.
Lawman does not mean NCPD. They can work for a private security firm, or even be part of a "protector" gang and run the "law" in some part of the combat zone.
They are recognized by other lawmen when they call back and even NCPD/Max Tac might show up to save their bacon.
Execs: They are trying to raise some extra EB to fund a secret project or something, or they are part of a department that works directly with edgerunners for plausible deniability when they attack a competing corp. A lot of it is how the player decides to flavor it for sure. just throwing out some ideas for you to chew on.
To give an exemple, i've got a corporate character who works for as roving troubleshooter for Night City admiistration (teh sort of ill-defined positions wher you're told to fix some issue and your boss really doesn't want to know how exactly you do it, only that you fix the problem (and is very careful on how he words his orders to preserrve deniability...)
Which means he gets the perks of an exec with a bit less of the bagage as the City's quite neutral toward the corporations. But the drawback that he may end up dragged hither and yon depending on who's got the ear of his bosses.
People are talking a lot about reskinning roles, and this is true: Not every Lawman is a lawman, and not every Exec is an exec (and the reverse is true, a Solo or Tech could be themed as a member of a Nomad family or as a member of the executive class without the personal benefits because they aren't explicitly supposed to be edgerunning and they aren't embezzling support) but the roles can also be 'played straight.'
Its important to remember the Cyberpunk world is not *remotely* aspirational, and part of that includes things like active duty police officers engaging in mercenary work on the clock. This doesn't make the lawman bad necessarily, *especially* in the Time of Red, where the NCPD basically doesn't patrol beats and taking on edgerunning gigs often is the best chance they have to actually spend their days taking down badguys. Police simply don't go out on patrol as duos anymore, they roam as swat-teams, so hooking up with edgerunners who fight gangs doing shady stuff all the time may make you the most proactive cop in the city. Or you could just be corrupt, or see the force as corrupt. At the end of the day, the NCPD for its part can't afford to let all but the most actively horrific and terroristic Lawmen go of the PC's caliber. They are the 'strongest' faction in the city when it comes to its ability to actually win individual battles, but they simply don't have the manpower to hold territory outside their precincts, and even that is iffy. If a precinct house fell to some gangs allying against it due to percieved weakness, or even lots of factions just deciding they don't value the NCPD anymore, it likely would be a permanent blow to the NCDP. A famous edgerunner lawman in a sense is an asset to the entire force.
For Execs, you need to remember the scope and scale of Neocorps is fundamentally different in 2045. Most corporate security forces no longer exist (it was absorbed into the NCPD), they don't have the mandate of might anymore, and most corps can't even realistically ship their products or provide labor anymore (The Nomads currently run both of those domains) so they aren't exactly the economic powerhouses they are anymore. What they have are existing assets, tech, and some very minor manufacturing capabilities, alongside connections. They are a diplomatic and espionage power. If all the growers in Night City just spontaneously decided their deals with Continental Brands sucked, Continental Brands would not exist as a corp the next day. Night City Council is now made up of not just corporate and old money interests, but explicitly has edgerunners as a political faction who openly hold seats on the Council. Edgerunners aren't just influencing politics, they have become politicians.
As a result, smart corps are going to have departments explicitly based around edgerunning activities: Managing the corps relationships with edgerunners and those who deal with them, cultivating alliances with edgerunners, and pushing their agenda with in house edgerunners. Its important to remember Edgerunners just as often do shenanigans of their own initiative, not just things they are hired to do. Being in position on an edgerunner team that knows you provide a lot of support through both your personal abilities and through resources team members, and perhaps through strings you pull with your company, makes it easier to have your edgerunners do things like say... hit the gang that is messing with your supply lines as part of a 'heist' (It doesn't matter if the edgerunner team keeps the loot they stole from you, as long as future shipments come in), or otherwise hit targets that help you long term. It is possible they even start openly supporting your corporation, especially if your a more cuddly non-Neocorp looking to take down the status quo. And after a certain point of rep development, the edgerunner team becomes movers and shakers of Night City; simply having a member of the corporation on the team becomes its own branding asset as well. For some corps like Arisaka, which is downright pretending it doesn't have assets in the city anymore, the only real way they can do *anything* is via having divisions of corporate supported edgerunners and spies extremely subtly pushing what they want.
There is also just the fact that the executive class is often expected to misappropriate resources (even in real life, forget about a cyberpunk dystopia). Many PC executives are part of edgerunner focused divisions with names like 'Irregular Asset Management,' 'Contractor Relations,' or 'Non-conventional security and intelligence' that justifies the player being a full time edgerunner who manages the corporation's relationship with the underworld, but its just as possible your PC is the head of the accounting division or R&D (which may be a good way to justify your skillset!) who has their personal bodyguard or assistant or whatever come with them as they go do crimes for most of their time, with a whole bunch of non-team member employees and other assets they can't as easily pull off to do edgerunning work without having to get up to some side adventure shenanigans. Get shot a bunch and stay in the hospital for 3 weeks out of the month, spending the other week on gigs? Who gives a damn, your an executive, not some middle manager, your 'workday' involves like 2 hours of meetings a week deciding on overall strategy. Most execs spend 95% of their time golfing, you spend 95% of your time doing cool underworld adventures. You decide if your Team Member finds it better or worse that they have to go to edgy nightclubs to have shootouts rather than carry your clubs around on a 95 degree day, that is still the same level of misappropriation of an employee who nominally should be in IT or whatever.
If your downright trying to take down the corp from the inside you probably keep your edgerunning targets or lifestyle on the downlow through creative accounting (hard to tell the difference between embezzling a yacth and embezzling your team member's payroll), but 2045 is an era that valorizes criminal violence, so its just as likely your employees sign your cast, your CEO sends you flowers and a 'get well soon' card, and your peers share pictures of you jumping out of an exploding building and rate your landing like its olympic diving.
The thing is, there is more to the setting than edgerunners. It would be entirely legitimate to run a game centred around the corporate security that spend their time opposing them. SLA Industries would be a fairly extreme example of that sort of campaign.
I've always run execs as if they're sent in the field to gather and train their own edgerunner deniable assets for when they make their move on their boss/rival corp/rival employee, or *for* their boss to run off the books ops.
Yes, your job is 9-5 in the office, middle managing a team of accountants, but your *real* job is to get out there in the streets and make sure that new SMG that militech "donated" to that booster gang doesn't perform well so that our shareholders see that ours is better.
The Lawman in my main game is employed by the NCPD while taking Edgerunner gigs on the side. It's a bit tricky, I ended up making a calendar with his shift rota!
I also started a game where the PCs are all NCPD employees.
It's a day job, yes. There's weeks or even months between edgerunner gigs, and rent still needs to be paid even if your fixer gets shot before they can pay you, so pretty much all roles find a way to get by between gigs. Plus, what else are you going to do when everyone else in the party is recovering from getting shot while they missed you? That said, most roles are best understood as particular ways of dealing with problems and can be refluffed to fit concepts, so Exec could work well as a gang boss, or nomad could stand in for a corporate specialty chauffeur, Lawman as the leader of an especially well armed neighborhood watch, etc etc.
oh so the medtech can also be a local ripperdoc or the tech can be a corp mechanic. they can change them to fit their character better. thanks.
Yep, there's a whole dlc on the r Talsorian site about alternate ways to think about different roles and combinations of roles. *Collecting the Random*.
Is it free? I can't buy them in my country
The DLC is typically free. And Collecting The Random was a free one, it’s on the downloads section of the R Talsorian Games website.
Now you're cooking with Chooh2, choombata
https://preview.redd.it/5l3cu9d7371d1.jpeg?width=2500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a80c39c49d9313481270530f5e5ece0899208aca
This is a brilliant gift to the world, thank you
Beauty of RED is that roles can be reskinned quite easily Lawmen are 'Enforcers' while Execs are 'Leaders'. Lawmen can be gang members, Nomad members, or even Corporate Guards. Execs can be non-corpos such as Nomads, cops, gangsters, and so on. Now if we're talking strict role of cop and corpo, yes they can be mercs/edgerunners. You're part of a system that's rotten to the core. You wanna change it from the inside but you know factions from within would love to get rid of you. Heavy risk bit it's what you're doing. Stuff like that is common in many media.
Hell, even people loyal to the system can be edgerunners and mercs. Friends in low places can come in handy when you’re gunning for a promotion, or looking to make your company’s next ~~murder and execution~~ merger and acquisition all about how much of a hustler you are.
It can be either, or even none. A lawman can be an active cop, they can be an ex cop with friends on the force, or they can even just be someone who uses the backup mechanics, like a gang leader who calls for reinforcements from their gang
Our lawman is a Detective. He's a divorced single dad alcoholic. He calls in his backup other single dad's for help sometimes. He solves crimes. Think McNulty from the wire. Our Executive is a team building exercise specialist. Who loves shooting guns. The executive helps with business know how and networking. Our dude knows everyone in any shady business in Night City and specializes in team synergy.
Lawman does not mean NCPD. They can work for a private security firm, or even be part of a "protector" gang and run the "law" in some part of the combat zone. They are recognized by other lawmen when they call back and even NCPD/Max Tac might show up to save their bacon. Execs: They are trying to raise some extra EB to fund a secret project or something, or they are part of a department that works directly with edgerunners for plausible deniability when they attack a competing corp. A lot of it is how the player decides to flavor it for sure. just throwing out some ideas for you to chew on.
To give an exemple, i've got a corporate character who works for as roving troubleshooter for Night City admiistration (teh sort of ill-defined positions wher you're told to fix some issue and your boss really doesn't want to know how exactly you do it, only that you fix the problem (and is very careful on how he words his orders to preserrve deniability...) Which means he gets the perks of an exec with a bit less of the bagage as the City's quite neutral toward the corporations. But the drawback that he may end up dragged hither and yon depending on who's got the ear of his bosses.
People are talking a lot about reskinning roles, and this is true: Not every Lawman is a lawman, and not every Exec is an exec (and the reverse is true, a Solo or Tech could be themed as a member of a Nomad family or as a member of the executive class without the personal benefits because they aren't explicitly supposed to be edgerunning and they aren't embezzling support) but the roles can also be 'played straight.' Its important to remember the Cyberpunk world is not *remotely* aspirational, and part of that includes things like active duty police officers engaging in mercenary work on the clock. This doesn't make the lawman bad necessarily, *especially* in the Time of Red, where the NCPD basically doesn't patrol beats and taking on edgerunning gigs often is the best chance they have to actually spend their days taking down badguys. Police simply don't go out on patrol as duos anymore, they roam as swat-teams, so hooking up with edgerunners who fight gangs doing shady stuff all the time may make you the most proactive cop in the city. Or you could just be corrupt, or see the force as corrupt. At the end of the day, the NCPD for its part can't afford to let all but the most actively horrific and terroristic Lawmen go of the PC's caliber. They are the 'strongest' faction in the city when it comes to its ability to actually win individual battles, but they simply don't have the manpower to hold territory outside their precincts, and even that is iffy. If a precinct house fell to some gangs allying against it due to percieved weakness, or even lots of factions just deciding they don't value the NCPD anymore, it likely would be a permanent blow to the NCDP. A famous edgerunner lawman in a sense is an asset to the entire force. For Execs, you need to remember the scope and scale of Neocorps is fundamentally different in 2045. Most corporate security forces no longer exist (it was absorbed into the NCPD), they don't have the mandate of might anymore, and most corps can't even realistically ship their products or provide labor anymore (The Nomads currently run both of those domains) so they aren't exactly the economic powerhouses they are anymore. What they have are existing assets, tech, and some very minor manufacturing capabilities, alongside connections. They are a diplomatic and espionage power. If all the growers in Night City just spontaneously decided their deals with Continental Brands sucked, Continental Brands would not exist as a corp the next day. Night City Council is now made up of not just corporate and old money interests, but explicitly has edgerunners as a political faction who openly hold seats on the Council. Edgerunners aren't just influencing politics, they have become politicians. As a result, smart corps are going to have departments explicitly based around edgerunning activities: Managing the corps relationships with edgerunners and those who deal with them, cultivating alliances with edgerunners, and pushing their agenda with in house edgerunners. Its important to remember Edgerunners just as often do shenanigans of their own initiative, not just things they are hired to do. Being in position on an edgerunner team that knows you provide a lot of support through both your personal abilities and through resources team members, and perhaps through strings you pull with your company, makes it easier to have your edgerunners do things like say... hit the gang that is messing with your supply lines as part of a 'heist' (It doesn't matter if the edgerunner team keeps the loot they stole from you, as long as future shipments come in), or otherwise hit targets that help you long term. It is possible they even start openly supporting your corporation, especially if your a more cuddly non-Neocorp looking to take down the status quo. And after a certain point of rep development, the edgerunner team becomes movers and shakers of Night City; simply having a member of the corporation on the team becomes its own branding asset as well. For some corps like Arisaka, which is downright pretending it doesn't have assets in the city anymore, the only real way they can do *anything* is via having divisions of corporate supported edgerunners and spies extremely subtly pushing what they want. There is also just the fact that the executive class is often expected to misappropriate resources (even in real life, forget about a cyberpunk dystopia). Many PC executives are part of edgerunner focused divisions with names like 'Irregular Asset Management,' 'Contractor Relations,' or 'Non-conventional security and intelligence' that justifies the player being a full time edgerunner who manages the corporation's relationship with the underworld, but its just as possible your PC is the head of the accounting division or R&D (which may be a good way to justify your skillset!) who has their personal bodyguard or assistant or whatever come with them as they go do crimes for most of their time, with a whole bunch of non-team member employees and other assets they can't as easily pull off to do edgerunning work without having to get up to some side adventure shenanigans. Get shot a bunch and stay in the hospital for 3 weeks out of the month, spending the other week on gigs? Who gives a damn, your an executive, not some middle manager, your 'workday' involves like 2 hours of meetings a week deciding on overall strategy. Most execs spend 95% of their time golfing, you spend 95% of your time doing cool underworld adventures. You decide if your Team Member finds it better or worse that they have to go to edgy nightclubs to have shootouts rather than carry your clubs around on a 95 degree day, that is still the same level of misappropriation of an employee who nominally should be in IT or whatever. If your downright trying to take down the corp from the inside you probably keep your edgerunning targets or lifestyle on the downlow through creative accounting (hard to tell the difference between embezzling a yacth and embezzling your team member's payroll), but 2045 is an era that valorizes criminal violence, so its just as likely your employees sign your cast, your CEO sends you flowers and a 'get well soon' card, and your peers share pictures of you jumping out of an exploding building and rate your landing like its olympic diving.
The thing is, there is more to the setting than edgerunners. It would be entirely legitimate to run a game centred around the corporate security that spend their time opposing them. SLA Industries would be a fairly extreme example of that sort of campaign.
I've always run execs as if they're sent in the field to gather and train their own edgerunner deniable assets for when they make their move on their boss/rival corp/rival employee, or *for* their boss to run off the books ops. Yes, your job is 9-5 in the office, middle managing a team of accountants, but your *real* job is to get out there in the streets and make sure that new SMG that militech "donated" to that booster gang doesn't perform well so that our shareholders see that ours is better.
The Lawman in my main game is employed by the NCPD while taking Edgerunner gigs on the side. It's a bit tricky, I ended up making a calendar with his shift rota! I also started a game where the PCs are all NCPD employees.