shadowrun prices (by popular demand)
I used Shadowrun 2nd Ed, because it’s the one that was in use the longest.
Their “Gear” chapter has a whole section on lifestyle, describing the format in which you can buy music in 2050 (CDs are one of the two common formats), the kind of phone you’d buy, and so on. Unfortunately, none of this stuff has a price!
The standard unit of currency in Shadowrun is the nuyen. Replacement cybereyes cost about 5,000 Y. It’s not clear, but our hypothetical corporate secretary is likely to have monthly expenses of maybe 2,500 Y. So, cybereyes will cost him two months’ salary, not one.
Vehicle costs are also different. In CP2020, a (flying) car went somewhere between two and eight times an average yearly salary. In Shadowrun, similar cars (which do not fly) go between 1/3 a year’s salary, for a cheap sedan, to about eight times a year’s salary, for a luxury car.
There are many more listings for helicopters, but they seem to start around ten years’ salary for simple choppers and run up to at least fifty years’ salary for high-end, armored, unarmed choppers. This is compared to the armed, armored choppers in CP2020 starting at 166 times a year’s salary.
A datajack (a digital interface to the brain) costs about a thousand nuyen (under two week’s pay) in Shadowrun, or about 1,000 eb (about a month’s pay) in CP2020.
Ok, so this was a really lousy comparison, really poorly organized. I’m not sure Shadowrun is any more coherent, although I think that vehicles at least seem more affordable, which makes sense since both games imply that everybody has a car or two.
Again, the big problem is that there isn’t a lot of information about how much simple things cost, or how much spare money the average person is likely to have. If cyberware is often sponsored by corporations, that implies that it’s quite expensive. How expensive? If somebody absconds with his implants, how badly is he ripping off his employer? If he didn’t want to get a corp to sponsor him, would he have a chance?
Anyway, back to editing my own notes. Blame jcap for this digression. sort of like Shadowrun’s prices are more realistic, at least for some things.