Gear’s Availability Rating determines how easy (or hard,
or practically impossible) it is to acquire a needed or desired
piece of equipment. Availability is an abstract amalgamation
of factors like rarity, legality, distribution issues,
supply, demand, and so on. The letter that follows an
item’s numerical Availability Rating shows whether the
item is Restricted (R) or Forbidden (F). For this reason, the
gamemaster should feel free to modify an item’s Availability
Rating—either the numerical value, or its legality
code—in situations that would warrant it, like if the runner
is in a war zone or in a country with a restricted economy.
Standard Goods
Standard items with no Availability rating can be purchased
at your local Kong-WalMart, Stuffer Shack, or
Microdeck, or perhaps ordered online or picked up from
a vending machine. All you have to do is pay the cost
listed in the book for the item (with adjustments from
the gamemaster if she wants, according to local market
fluctuations or other extenuating circumstances she
deems appropriate).
While easy to buy, standard goods are eminently
traceable. Records of legal purchases are almost always
kept, shared, and cross-indexed; whether this datatrail
gets stuck to your fake SIN or, worse, a real one, it’s a potential
liability. Purchasing habits are valuable to marketing
companies, so you’ll start seeing AR advertisements
tailored to what you buy and what you like. And since Big
Brother Commerce is watching, remember that the Matrix
host that knows and remembers your favorite store to
buy sneakers at isn’t necessarily as secure as your commlink.
Fake IDs can be used to shield yourself from this
pervasive data-mining, but as long as you’re on the grid,
even fake IDs will accumulate profiles of their own after
long-term use. And there’s always the chance someone
can find out more about you than you want to let go.
Of course, standard goods can also be purchased on
the black market to avoid traceability, but the gamemaster
may decide that the latest copy of Miracle Shooter is
more expensive with the digital serial numbers filed off
and apply a surcharge for your paranoia.
Starting Gear
Like it says in character creation (p. 62), starting characters
may not purchase items with a rating greater
than 6 or an Availability greater than 12 during character
creation. You don’t need to worry about your
purchases at character creation going on some kind of
permanent record (although there are some qualities
you can take that would). Once the game is on, you can
beg, borrow, and steal whatever gear you can get your
grubby little hands on—at least, you can certainly try.
Black Market Goods
When you get to the good stuff, the higher the Availability
Rating is, the harder it is to acquire the item. To purchase
an item off the books, make an Availability Test.
This is an Opposed Test of your Negotiation + Charisma
[Social] versus the item’s Availability Rating. If you win
the Opposed Test, you find the gear at the listed price,
and it is delivered in the amount of time given on the
Delivery Times table divided by your net hits. If you tie
in the test, you find the gear, but the delivery time is
twice that listed on the table. If you fail the test, you can
try again after twice the amount of time on the table.
As they say on the street, money solves all problems.
If you’re willing to throw money at the situation, you
can increase your chances of finding a willing seller: 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. Even if you had
money left to throw.
If you roll a glitch on an Availability Test, your inquiries
may have attracted unwanted attention. This could
be law enforcement like undercover Lone Star engaging
in a sting operation (can you spell entrapment, omae?),
your local Yakuza deciding not to shoot straight in their
dealings, rival runners or enemies twigging to the deal,
or something similar. The exact consequences are up
to the gamemaster, but things do not go smoothly as
planned. If you roll a critical glitch, the most extreme iteration
of the above possibilities occurs, and you stand
no chance of actually acquiring the item in question.
Contacts and Availability
You probably have a fixer, talismonger, deckmeister, or
other contact find the gear you’re looking for. Contacts
are better than you at acquiring the gear they specialize
in. They spend most of their time making and maintaining
their connections to the rest of the world while
you’re out shooting corp security or banishing evil spirits
or hacking hosts or whatever you’re doing on your
shadowruns, so they’ve had time to hone their gear-acquiring
abilities. When contacts look for an item for
you, they use their Negotiation and Charisma for the
Availability Test, with their Connection Rating serving
as a bonus to their Social limit.
If the contact hasn’t done a lot of business with you,
he might ask for a finder’s fee. That’s not how contacts
make their money on reselling, though. Most of it comes
through fencing goods on the cheap.
