Availability house rules, What do you use? If any? Options

[FriendoftheDork]

Hey guys!

I've been playing Shadowrun by RAW for some time, at least when it come to gear and availability.

The only rule that really limits gear is the cap of 12 at chargen. After that, it's pretty much a free for all. You don't really need contacts, all you need is a good negotation skills and/or good charisma and social modifiers. Any Face worth his/her weight can pretty much get anything in the book at just 400BPs. It may take some time, but really unless you have no downtime between runs, waiting 2 weeks for that missile launcher isn't gonna be a problem.

Some items are so prohibitively expensive that they are pretty much impossible to get, such as Thunderbirds and certain cyber/bio ware.

Other than that, there is nothing to prevent you from getting APDS rounds rather than the much weaker Flechette rounds, and the former is even cheaper! Not to mention EX-EX which does the same as flechette does only better.

Ok, enough about the imbalanced system. There are of course restricted items (usable by a licence), and Forbidden items (always black market and don't-get-caught), but they don't affect availability itself or require special contacts or knowledge skills on how to get them.

So I am thinking about making some fixes. At some point I tried to keep the 12 avail. cap beyond chargen, and only allow higher cap items on a case by case items, through certain Johnsons and fixxers, or after much time and effort has been spent in order to get them. It worked so and so but got a bit arbitrarily as some items of high power and usefulness were easy to get, while others even much less useful or even legal were impossible to get.

When I tried the karma chargen system I used a system of contacts instead, thus you could get items of availability equal to 3*connectin rating. Thus several loyalty 1/connection 6 contacts where the norm.

Now I want a new system, maybe even adjusting all the avilabilities in the book or even doing away with the whole system (but keeping R and F). Anything nonrestricted would be available to all with SINs/fake SINs, R items requires licences (fake or otherwise), and anything with F requires criminal contacts or knowledge on where to get access to them, although how that would work without contacts I don't know. I mean, can you really just prowl the streets for "usual places" and get hold of militairy grade weaponry without actually having any contacts and knowing people?

As a last resort simply up the prices on all Forbidden items and simply assume that if you're willing to pay the price, someone will sell it to you.

What do you think?