The Cathedral clock job

Stop the clock and the whole quarter looks up. Be gone by then.

What a run is worth

The Cathedral clock job costs 16 nerve, which the city gives back in 1 hour 20 minutes. At its base 84% success chance an attempt returns about $4,479 on average, and about $280 of that goes on tool wear — the kit costs $1,400 and wears out on 20% of attempts, win or lose — leaving about $4,199 net — roughly $262 per point of nerve, before mastery, crew perks, courses and equipment move it.

It cannot be attempted without Lockpick set and Climbing rope in hand, which wears out on 20% of attempts whether the job lands or not, and a job that lands breaks one about 5% of the time on top of that.

When it goes wrong

Some failures slip away with no cell, and more of them as your mastery climbs. Either way a job gone wrong costs you some of your feel for it: the job's mastery slips back, never more than a rank at a time and never for a cat under level 5, and the surer the job and the more you had mastered it, the further it slips. The rest mean 1 hour in the cells, multiplied by your heat — a cat at 80 heat serves nearly twice as long, and the arrest costs 30 health on the way in. Bail is $50 a minute times your level, up to level 20, and a press here leaves about 12 heat in its district, less by the quiet way in and more by the loud one; heat cools by one point every five minutes, and above 80 a district still takes the job but pays half the XP and turns no clean job at all.

Clean jobs

A clean job — the critical outcome, whose odds rise as you master the crime — pays one and a half times the cash and the XP and turns up a Antique collar. About one clean job in a hundred also turns up Old Quarter signet, which is the only way that piece ever enters the city.