[X] My Assistant

[BewilderedGM]

hehhe Thanks

I don't like taking things from the players they've paid for in chargen, without giving them something back. But the sheer number of contacts this dude has is nuts and let's face it...squatters?! What could he really provide? Info? Likely he's the first one running when anything happens. Money? pffttt Gear? nuh uh

[RedmondLarry]

If you want an interesting run revolving around his squatter contacts, have the male ork squatter contacts and female elf squatter contacts taken away by slavers and sold to shadowrunners on this thread. If the character wants to track down what happned to his contacts, he can.

You're not destroying his contacts ... just making it a little harder for him to contact them. And once he gets them back, the orks will have spurs and smartlinks.

[Accel]

[BewilderedGM]

What bugs me is he's spent like 100k on contacts, which is fine I guess, but I dont wanna watch him roll his 13 etiquette rolls to get to that particular level of info search success (like at 4 succs you get THIS muc info), hence I want to get him to appreciate the amount of "work" that a network like will take. Only because theyre lv1 contacts. Lv2/3 would def remember you and prolly look you up from time to time to do stuff together.

Anyways I guess a squatters upkeep a year is pitifull and I wont dock him that kind of money. I'll figure something out, I like the idea of "removing" plotwise, but its been done in my campaing before (twice) and has the risk of becoming stale and he might not even care about the loss LoL. Anyways thanks

[Accel]

Then, if the sole problem ailing you lies in the way he tries to acquire information, do the following:

Instead of allowing him to role the dice for every contact he has, have him form groups of contacts, like "street level", "corporate", "media", "military",
"governmental - metroplex", "governmental - federal", "political", "police", "magical", "educational/scientific", "technical" and so on.

He might assign contacts to more than one group, like the Professor of Thaumaturgy to "magical" as well as "educational/scientific" or the District councilman to "governmental - metroplex" as well as "political", it does not matter.

Then ask him which group he wants to query about information. Have him make one etiquette test only, for the group as a hole, but give him information with more details the more contacts he has in the group in question. That is not contradicting the official etiquette rules if you use it like this:

The more contacts he asks (with that single test) the broader the information are.

The more successes he achieves the deeper the information are.

By the way, it saves much time you better use with your whole group.

[BewilderedGM]

k thanks, good idea