[Belker]

Maxim One: Pillage first, then burn.

[tequila]

I hate forgetting that one.

[Black]

pillaging is indeed much harder when the goodies are all burning.

[Silence]

Maxim Two:  Get paid.  This requires you to be living at the end of the job.

[Angelone]

Matt Wrath seems like he would be a fun guy to hang around with. I don't get the whole 99 bit, there's Becky 99 and Johnny 99 any meaning to it? Sarah would make one hell of a face.

[martinchaen]

Soooo, what with using Loyalty instead of Charisma, and Connection instead of Negotiation, why wouldn't everyone just get Connection 6 contacts? As far as I can tell, you can improve Loyalty, but not Connection, right? Presuming the formula for the various legwork activities remains unmodified except for skill and attribute substitutions, you'd use the following:

Legwork extended test (required if we don't know what knowledge skill ratings the contacts have): Connection (Negotiation) + Loyalty (Charisma)
Networking: Etiquette (what do we use for Etiquette, by the way?) + Loyalty (Charisma) + Connection
Swag: Connection (Negotiation) + Loyalty (Charisma) + Connection

With a C6 contact, getting gear becomes a 6+1+6 test, and as I understand it you HAVE to buy hits. Since you round down, that puts the maximum avail you can get at 12 until you get a C7/L2 (easiest approach, alternatively C6/L4, or C5/L6) contact, at which point you can get avail 14 items. Is this really as intended? This does throw a bit of a spanner in the wrench for cybered street sams, as a lot of the implant weapons start at avail 12 and become avail 14 if you use alpha grade limbs, which seems like an unfair disadvantage to me.

And finally, if we don't know the values of their active skills (negotiation and etiquette specifically), do we know their values for knowledge skills? If not, that makes them all pretty useless for legwork...

The way I see it, you've got to be able to use the sample contacts from the Core SR5 rulebook with skill values as-is, with the possible exception of using Connection and Loyalty instead of Negotiation and Charisma.

[DWC]

Soooo, what with using Loyalty instead of Charisma, and Connection instead of Negotiation, why wouldn't everyone just get Connection 6 contacts? As far as I can tell, you can improve Loyalty, but not Connection, right? Presuming the formula for the various legwork activities remains unmodified except for skill and attribute substitutions, you'd use the following:

Legwork extended test (required if we don't know what knowledge skill ratings the contacts have): Connection (Negotiation) + Loyalty (Charisma)
Networking: Etiquette (what do we use for Etiquette, by the way?) + Loyalty (Charisma) + Connection
Swag: Connection (Negotiation) + Loyalty (Charisma) + Connection

With a C6 contact, getting gear becomes a 6+1+6 test, and as I understand it you HAVE to buy hits. Since you round down, that puts the maximum avail you can get at 12 until you get a C7/L2 (easiest approach, alternatively C6/L4, or C5/L6) contact, at which point you can get avail 14 items. Is this really as intended? This does throw a bit of a spanner in the wrench for cybered street sams, as a lot of the implant weapons start at avail 12 and become avail 14 if you use alpha grade limbs, which seems like an unfair disadvantage to me.

And finally, if we don't know the values of their active skills (negotiation and etiquette specifically), do we know their values for knowledge skills? If not, that makes them all pretty useless for legwork...

The way I see it, you've got to be able to use the sample contacts from the Core SR5 rulebook with skill values as-is, with the possible exception of using Connection and Loyalty instead of Negotiation and Charisma.

WIthout any sort of rules for advancing the Loyalty rating of contacts that aren't Season 5 specific, the odds that the L1/C6 contact you took at creation will get any better are fairly slim.  Your better bet is to take one of the S5 contacts with a Connection of 5 at Loyalty 2 and hope you get enough to bring him or her up to L6, so you top out at Availability 16.

Your other option is to pay a PC a percentage to buy things for you.

[ZeConster]

Keep in mind that since the item itself also buys hits, as long as your contact has 12 dice (3 hits), you can get anything up to Availability 15 (also 3 hits). I decided to go with some L2/C5 non-S5 contacts, myself (I prefer L2 over L1, and both allow me to get Availability 12-15 items without added price). As for the S5 contacts with Connection 5, they all work for corps, so reaching 6 Loyalty with them seems highly unlikely (well, unless it's Simon Andrews and you're Lofwyr, I guess): this means that if you're getting Availability 16-19 items through contacts, you'll always have to pay extra.

[martinchaen]

DWC; Good advice, thanks! And yeah, I forgot about buying hits

ZeConster; that's interesting, I didn't consider the 12-15 range, for some reason I was stuck on thinking 12 was max. That solves my problem for now

I guss that means delta grade Wired Reflexes R3 is out, along with a suprathyroid gland (avail 20, really!?) and maybe even pain editor (18F) or any of the 18 avail items for that matter. Shame, cause pain editor is almost a necessity for high armor street sams, in order to not just succumb to stun damage... I guess you "just" need a C5/L6 contact to get those things, though, or pay some extra nuyen, which again is a shame because you likely won't make enough money in one season to even afford some of the higher end items.

CGL; you're such teases, showing us all this neat gear that our characters can never afford! Assuming the guidelines for Missions are followed, you can expect to earn between 5k and 20k per mission; if you average that at 10k per mission, that's 120k per season. Add in another 10k if you convert 5 karma to cash every mission (assuming you earn that much karma), and you're looking at 240 per season, not even close to getting you some R3 implants...

[Belker]

I would bet the answer is something along the lines of keeping things at a consistent level throughout the season in a way that a new character that joins a late-season mission can still be useful. Just a guess, though.

Also, per the Season 5 FAQ, deltaware will only become available if you get access to a deltaware clinic. (Which might happen, I've only read through the first mission so far).

[Michael Chandra]

If you take a 5/2 contact, boost them to 5/4 by selling out to them a few times, and pay 50% extra you can get anything below availability 20. And we don't know what the Faction Favors can do, maybe those will include an Availability discount.

A 5/6 contact sounds cute but will be impossible to get. In Season 4, contacts never went past 4 Loyalty.

Keep in mind Missions is semi-low-level, you can expect 6~8 karma and 10k~12 nuyen per Mission. And the retiring limit was 150 karma at season start in the past, even if you do 2 seasons + filler missions you'll be at most at 800k if you convert karma to nuyen every time, and that point you're retiring at a pretty high level way-past-150 character. If you want the expensive toys, then you really want to play a home game. ^_^

[Mithlas]

Some interesting ideas in these contacts, but it bugs me when I see typos or little technical mistakes popping up in every profile that I stop to read slowly.

Je stayed there for nearly two decade.

[martinchaen]

Michael; thanks, very good advice indeed.

I've reviewed the contacts again, and I'm curious about one mechanism; I presume you have to "buy" them using Karma, but with the max 7 karma per contact spend limitation in effect, how are so many contacts exceeding this limit in the document?

Do I have an outdated one, or are you supposed to be able to spend 8 karma on Doober, or Martin Tate (C5, Loyalty "max starting 3")?

[Michael Chandra]

Bull slipped up and missed the 7-max rule.

[Mara]

Chargen rules state you're not allowed to spend more than 7 Karma on a single contact at chargen - however, some of the Season 5 contacts have a max Starting Loyalty that would break this limit (Goober, Maggie, Martin Tate, Nick Ryder, Quantum Princess, Simon Andrews). Does the normal 7-Karma chargen limit not apply to these contacts?

Unless Bull lowered the Connection Ratings, they are all good. Those are the MAXIMUM starting Loyalty, not the Minimum Starting Loyalty,
and I did not see any Connection 6 people in there. (Interesting, though, considering Connection 6 is now like Connection 3 in SR4...)