So, yet another question. If you play that you have to pay back the karma for a quality, and play it by the book that you have to pay it back as soon as possible (No long term pay it back over the next 60 runs plan or anything similar), would you ever get the quality? It gets you a few extra BP that you could get via other means and some nuyen, but in exchange your character doesn't improve for the first 10-15 runs and doesn't make money for a while either.

Hmm, that might be another option, instead of the 0 BP In-Debt quality, you have the In-Debt quality roughly as it is now, but instead you simply have to pay 10% of what you borrowed every month forever (Basically you aren't even making minimum payments, but the person is 'letting it slide' because they can press you for the occasional favor and having you keep paying a little bit every month is better than killing you or anything similar since you'll eventually pay off more than you were loaned.)

Well, I can kinda see what he means. There is actually an increase in the cost of most gear if you reason that R and F stuff fall under the 'hard to obtain' and 'police crackdown' categories which increase the price by 10 or 50%. Then time can be a huge issue, as if you want something 10,001+ (Most ware) it takes a week per roll, and something with say an availability of 15 requires 15 hits on an extended test which is subject to the reducing dice. So unless you have the pornomancer or someone helping you out finding the stuff, it could easily take months or be impossible to find. Even with 15ish dice it could still take about a month.

So yeah, I can see some validity to the argument that chargen nuyen is 'worth more' than in play nuyen. Of course I'd imagine that alot of GMs don't enforce availability so strictly, and even fewer are likely to charge you extra like that for R and F items.

So, yet another question. If you play that you have to pay back the karma for a quality, and play it by the book that you have to pay it back as soon as possible (No long term pay it back over the next 60 runs plan or anything similar), would you ever get the quality? It gets you a few extra BP that you could get via other means and some nuyen, but in exchange your character doesn't improve for the first 10-15 runs and doesn't make money for a while either.

Personal opinion. If a player took this negative quality in a game I was running, I would actually prefer they do not every pay off the In Debt Negative Quality. This quality is an essential part of many story motifs in noir. It represents the character's always owing something to somebody for whatever reason. Being beholden to someone and the actions to work around that are an essential part of character motivation and story. Han Solo was In Debt. Tom Regan in Miller's Crossing was always In Debt. It's a classic trope. Makes a powerful tool to have a character make a Run they might not normally take. Characters that drive plot always get more karma.

Did a player character walk into ShadowrunnerMart with 250,00+ nuyen and buy everything at once?

Now I have this great imagine of a massive store filled with dozens of AKs and rocket launchers and big bins of grenades and a clothing section that is filled with armor... and a back section with a sign "Restricted Gear" hanging over it.

Crime malls do exist, minus the "restricted gear" section - that section is kept under the tables of vendors, in their vans, or offsite.

Crime malls do exist, minus the "restricted gear" section - that section is kept under the tables of vendors, in their vans, or offsite.

The availability cap of 12 is just an arbitrary number for balance reasons. I doubt that the Game World knows about it. Of course there are items that aren't on the shelf and have to be ordered.

If your just talking about items you need a license for, what's the purpose of a crime mall anyway?

So you can ignore that pesky license thingy.

Yeah, but its funnier this way. XD

Exactly. I was thinking something more along the lines of a Walmart sort of feel, with litterally 2-3 dozen of everything lined up in perfectly ordered lines, a big checkout area with plenty of lines, so on and so forth. Not some back-alley run down looking flee market like crime malls tend to be.

Personal opinion. If a player took this negative quality in a game I was running, I would actually prefer they do not every pay off the In Debt Negative Quality. ...Being beholden to someone and the actions to work around that are an essential part of character motivation and story. Han Solo was In Debt ...