I've found an area where the rules show some signs of breakage.
Here are the relevant rules for acquiring hard-to-find gear in play:
- The person searching rolls Negotiation + Charisma (contacts add their Connection rating as well) on an Extended Test; the threshold is the item's Availability, and the interval is based on the item's price -- 12 hours for cheap items, with most having 1 or 2 days.
- Offering to pay more than the base price adds extra dice: each 25% increase is +1 die, with a maximum of +250% for +10 dice. I'm not using this in the examples, just pointing it out for thoroughness.
- The price can be modified, by getting used gear or other such conditions. Again, not used in examples.
- If a contact is used, the character has to pay a "finder's fee" of 5% times the Connection rating.
Let's run with your typical fixer (Negotiation 5, Charisma 5, Connection 4), and no other modifiers. For simplicity, I'm going to assume that the numbers are actually rolled, using the "minus 1 die per interval" option -- because, simply put, sometimes an item just can't be found. I'll also be buying automatic hits. This means the number of hits the fixer will accumulate will be 3-6-9-11-13-15-17-18-19-20-21.
Now for specific items:
- An Ingram Smartgun X, with no modifications. Price: 650¥ (interval = 1 day); Availability: 6R. The fixer finds it in two days; his finder's fee is 20%, or 130¥.
- A concealable holster. Price 75¥ (interval = 12 hours); Availability 2. So it takes 12 hours, and the finder's fee is 15¥.
- A Mitsubishi Yakusoku MRL. Price 12,000¥ (interval = 1 week); Availability: 20F. 10 weeks, finder's fee = 2,400¥.
So far, no big surprises, that's how the numbers play out. But there are scenarios where the acquisition rules start to show cracks.
First is a call for getting something in bulk -- this especially applies to ammunition, but can also run into things like grenades, pharmaceuticals, and pretty much anything where you can't have just one. Ammo is a particularly thorny case, because it's priced in small groups already.
In this case, where you're looking around for, say, 100 rounds of regular ammo, which numbers do you go by? If you go by the base price for a single unit, then you're looking at an interval of 12 hours, but if you take it as a bulk purchase, it becomes 1 day. If you take the bulk as a single item, it will be faster to find 50 rounds (the total price is 100¥, with a 12-hour interval) than it would be to find 60 (which would make the price 120¥, and double the interval).
If modifiers are applied to the base price -- things like used gear, or a flooded market -- do you use the modified price for determining the interval? Is the contact's "finder's fee" affected by these modifiers as well?
I'm really starting to miss the equipment rules from prior editions, where they explicitly spelled out the acquisition time per item, as well as giving a modifier for acquiring it through "normal" means (because there were some items that you could actually get cheaper though the shadow markets). I'd consider digging through the SR3 books and retconning these items, but there are things that have been added since then (like commlinks).
Maybe basing the acquisition time on an item's Availability, rather than the price, might fix this a little. I think it's odd that something with a high price, but low Availability can take longer than a cheap item with a high Availability.
F'rinstance: a basic cyberlimb costs 15,000¥, Availability 4. Our fixer can get it in two tests, one if he actually rolls the dice -- but each check takes a week. By contrast, a package of APDS rounds -- just ten of them -- would only cost 70¥, making the interval half a day. The 16 Availability, though, means that the fixer would need 7 tests, but this only works out to 3.5 days.
See what I'm getting at?
