Questions about availability and using contacts;
One of the first things I'd be looking to buy for my character is the Pain Editor bioware implant, which has an availability of 18. The highest rated contact you can get is someone like Dr. Martin Tate, and he would presumably be able to get this piece of gear but at extra cost. The first question is:
1. How much extra do you have to pay per extra dice?
Page 418 describes how you would do it as a player, so I presume this is a similar situation:
"For every additional twenty-five percent of the item’s value you are willing to pay, you get an additional die on the Negotiation Test. Once you get up to 400 percent of the item’s value (12 extra dice), throwing money at the problem doesn’t get you any more dice."A contact like Dr. Martin Tate (C5/L2 at game start) would get
Connection 5 (replacing Negotiation 7),
plus Loyalty 2 (replacing Charisma 5),
plus Connection 5, for a total of 12 dice, or 3 automatic hits. And this is where things start to get really confusing.
2. How do you round dice rolls when buying hits? As per page 45:
"To buy hits, simply count one hit for every four dice in your pool, rounded down."
In other words, how many automatic hits does an item with Availability 12, 14, 16, 18, and 20 get? 3, 3, 4, 4, and 5, respectively?
3. As a follow-up to the above, what effect (if any) does tieing the availability vs Swag test (page 388) have? For example, would a contact with 12 dice count as winning against all items with availability 1 through 11, but as tieing with all items with availability between 12 to 15?[/u]
4. If yes to 3, how does delivery times work in SRM; as per usual according to page 418?If yes to 4, some of the "relatively" low-cost 'ware items just became very, very hard to get. Let me illustrate with the example I'm specifically curious about;
12 dice vs Avail 18 for Pain Editor, standard grade. Base cost is 48k.
To reach 4 automatic hits (18/4 =4.5, rounded down to 4), a character would have to pay and additional 48k (100% extra, as 16-12=4 * 25% per extra dice), with a delivery time of 2 weeks.
If buying alpha grade, an additional 8 dice is required, for a total of 200% increase and a delivery time of 2 months. This would (hopefully) include the 1 week recovery time from 'ware installation, unless those costs are hidden somewhere I can't find.
Last question;
5. Can you initiate a Swag test with a contact before you have the cash (i.e. Payable on Delivery), or do you have to wait until you have the funds available to do so (i.e. Payable on Order)? The latter could potentially increase the delivery time by 2 months.
I'm also surprised that the change to using a contacts Connection and Loyalty in place of Negotiation and Charisma was made, particularly when all the contacts we have at our disposal at character generation are fully statted.
In comparison, if using Martin Tate's statline (N7+L2+C5), the availability out of chargen would still be >=15, but it would only take 50% more (2 dice) to tie the availability roll of Avail 16-19 items, or 150% more for Avail 20-23.
While I understand that SRM is designed to be a somewhat low-level campaign, there are far more unbalanced items out there than some of the high-availability items. For a "mere" 90-100k at chargen, I could drop the two cyberlegs on my street sam and buy a single-person helicopter outfitted with a medium machinegun and 10.000 rounds of APDS ammo. Not very subtle, but it would be a great one-trick pony! I guess the reason I'm a little miffed at this choice is that this choice only seriously affects cyber-heavy characters; while it will prohibit F6 power foci and extremely advanced cyberdecks, the price of these items alone puts them out of reach for most campaign characters. In terms of 'ware, however, this mechanism puts a LOT of things out of reach that normally would just have required a little saving and planning.
Why even bother including the paragraph about betaware being available, when it adds 4 to the availability and thus excludes nearly every R2 item in the book because of price? Even something as reasonable as an olfactory booster would be very impractical to get at Rating 6 betaware grade, as it would be priced at 24k * 1.5 = 36k, with a modified Availability of ((3*6)+4=22), meaning a character would have to add 8 dice (or 200%) for a total cost of 72k. As the average runner can expect to earn between 5-20k per SRM adventure, that means a full 12 mission season earn the character 120k or so on average, presuming they do well.
The price hike 'ware took in SR5 was expected, but the way contacts are handled certainly makes me question some of the decisions made for SRM. I apologize in advance if this comes across as a rant, as I am just a little frustrated with the way I perceive this particular part of SRM having been handled.
That being said, I still look forward to playing, but I will be cursing every time my high-armor character gets knocked unconcious due to stun damage; in fact, I would like to make a request for characters to be able to invest in stock, because my character will need a lot of stim patches!
