Black Market Goods and Avalibility, How to easy to find and how often? Options

[D00MGIMP]

Im curious to see what others do in reguards to finding black market items in general... from cyberware to submarines.

Say a player comes to you with a list of items they want to buy with the money they have been saving up from their last few runs. Its quite an extensive list of beta/deltaware cyberware... tricked out weapons, vehicals, drones ect. I just say that they need to make constant avalibility tests and then purchase it as time passes throughout the game... However they have a 6 connections fixer. So im wondering how other GMs or groups handle a large list of items that like this as its time consuming and requires alot of bookwork.

Perhaps theres room for an element of RP with only certain items being avalible at any givin time as determined by the GM, or perhaps they find a 'arms dealer' that has a large quantity of the wanted items in stock. It does seem silly that a well connected fixer can only look for one item at a time, especially when considering items in the same catagory like headware or a group of weapon accessories. And when it comes to cyberware theres also the issue of install and recovery times...

So far ive just been doing avalibilty tests during downtimes and bringing in 2nd hand supplies or gadet-suites that may or may not be exactly what they are looking for if they try to obtain items during a run.

All in all im curious to see how others deal with this? Especially if anyone has a particularly creative or innovative way of dealing with it.

[Zak]

We have thrown availability rules out of the window in our group and replaced them with the following:

Low end blackmarket stuff can be bought on the street without real contacts. Etikette (Street) helps. So do certain area knowledge skills. Contacts help for reliability, speed and price. I.e. getting ammo for an AK is a no brainer when you know a few gangers or other street scum.

For the high end gear you need a fixer. Someone with access to the gear or who might know someone who might know someone who got a brother that...

Time is something we leave to the GM. Contacts tend to be fleshed out with details on how fast they can get certain gear and what their speciality is. And it helps the GM to regulate on how fast certain gear gets into the hands of the runners. Might not be realistic, might not be fair, but it tends to work fine for us.
You will not see rocket launchers from a car dealer for example, if you ask that army connection he might answer: how many boxes?

Important gear is aquired by roleplaying the contacts, data search/hacking or running a heist.
Because stealing can be easier and cheaper for a good runner team than actually paying for your gear (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Dashifen]

I pretty much go by the book. Generally, things take as long as the longest piece of gear to arrive unless the player wants to spend more to cover the various costs of making their fixer pay and obfuscate multiple shipments. I've never had a problem with it so far. As I've mentioned elsewhere, though, my games often encompass no more than a month or two of in-game time, so often people just don't have the time for really awesome gear and other desirable toys.

[VagabondStar]

You can always go by the book... but there is nothing to say that you can't delay or speed up the acquisition of goods for dramatic effect and balance issues. Shipments can get lost, contraband can be seized, a shadowclinic can suddenly find itself in the midst of a hostile take-over...

Whatever is appropriate.