...so I have an interesting question

One of my characters has two contacts bought at level 6 loyalty (described as being friends for life). At this level, the BBB says such a contact would do anything (maybe short of actually taking a bullet or combat spell) to assist the character. Given this, I would think the the contact and character should then also get along with each other well on a more personable level.

Now the character in question has a the Uneducated quality and a low logic attribute which are described in as her suffering from a severe learning disability that was aggrivated by her being abused by of her racist father. The contact in question is actually a long time friend of the character (a former decker now turned hacker), who knows her since her father abandoned the girl at the age of 12. In her backstory he became aware of what she went through and always treated her with compassion and looked out for her, becoming kind of a helpful "Big Brother". This as the set up at chargen.

However, whenever I have her call him during a mission he tends to be impatient, rude, and abrasive, not beaviour I would expect from someone who is considered a "friend for life" (during the last mission he was perticularly callous, telling her to her face she was "stupid" - not very good PC-Contact relations).

When a character puts out that much at chargen (in this case, 6BPs for Loyalty + 3 for conection) one would think that the relationship should mean more than just extra bonus dice to the Etiquette/Negotiation test. After all, at this level the contact is supposed to always be there, willing to help in whatever way he or she can.

I guess, what it comes down to is where is the line drawn on Contact personality? If, as in the case of this character, it is detailed in the backstory and an intergral part of the character's design concept, shouldn't the player's input count for something? If not, there seems little purpose in taking a contact above say loyalty 2 or 3

Yeah, through roleplay I guess she could simply dump him, but is seems a frightful waste of BPs that could then have been spent elsewhere.

Hmm... I could only see a L6 contact insulting a PC if it was expected for the PC to throw insults back in jest.

Ork Contact > 'What do you want, you short fragger?'
Dwarf PC > 'Shut yer fang filled glory hole for a second and I'll tell you!'
Ork Contact > 'Heh, been a while since I heard that one, chummer. How ya been?'
Dwarf PC > 'I'm ok except for I'm running short of ammo, think you could help me out?'

If you can make new contacts and improve them over time... you can burn old contacts just as well.

If you want a 6 to stay a 6... treat them like one.

depending on what the character was doing, it may very well be in character to call them stupid.

after all, if he's like a big brother, he may get extremely frustrated when she takes risks, he may be as much saying it out of worry as anything else.

that being said, it doesn't sound like that's the reasoning behind it. i would agree with you that a loyalty 6 contact should probably not be callous, abrasive, etc. unless of course they are Uncouth, in which case that's just how they are

...the character had requested a simple data search. Afterwards when he tried to explain something she didn't quite grasp that was when he levelled the insult.

Again, he knows of her slight handicap and given the realtionship could have been more civil.

The contact, Seamus Harper, was somewhat patterned after the character of the same name from the series Andromeda. Like his namesake he is a bit of a social klutz, but still a fairly decent fellow with a sense of honour and respect, particularly when it came to the ladies.

For me, the CONNECTION rating generally doesnt change. But the LOYALTY rating changes. If you call and harass the contact too much then it will go down. Same with never calling. Contacts need feed & care. Which means if you dont take care of them they dont take care of you. If you (my players) work at bettering the relationship with their cotnacts, then they will get better ratings. But you do something stupid and the number goes down.


dog

KK, sounds like you have a need to talk to your GM.

I agree that a loyalty 6 contact should be there for you, specialy if you have a decent backstory.

Hmm, unless your GM is trying to get you to do a run, to help your contact, who was using the only way he knew to tell you that something was wrong, without letting the bad guys surveilling him know.....

Without knowing the GM's take/side/reasons, I would say that in your position I'd be irritated about how the contact was being portrayed.

Do you have any other examples you could give as to the NPC's personality at other times?

It could be appropriate if there was a reason that the PC was and would be unaware of, but in general, a contact with ratings that high in my games (the equivalent would be a level 3 with good backstory, IMC) is on pretty darn good terms with the PC. For those tense relationships where the level of service is a three but the NPC hates the PC, I rate them low and then the story gives the reasons they'll still help. Just by definition though, at least in SR3 (and it sounds like SR4 has the same idea), if an NPC hates a PC's guts, owe them or not, they aren't a level 3 contact (or 6...or...I'm getting confused. ).

...Harper has pretty much acted rather surly ever since the character started play. I tried to point this out before, but again to no avail. In KK's backstory, he was always acommodating and gentlemanly towards her, almost to a fault. He knew her talents, the fact she was truly SINless (basically she was declared dead in according to TT records - long story) and realised she wouldn't have any future outside the SlNess community, so her chioce to become a runner wasn't the issue.

Basically, if he ever was (or became) uncouth for whatever reason as Jaid suggested, she would have dropped him in her backstory and the BPs would never have been allocated for making him a contact.

I know that the world in 2070s is a tough place, but that still shouldn't mean everyone you meet is a jerk.

It might just mean your GM is a jerk.

...we've had contact personality issues since SR3. Is just that SR4 finally has a more of a framework for Contact-PC realtionship which while pretty straightforward (at least to me) I feel isn't being interpeted properly.

Tell your GM to either have the contact start treating your character as he was written in the backstory, or remove that mention and demand to recover the BP wasted on a contact that is treating you like shit despite the fact they are supposed to be almost willing to take a bullet for you, and have a new contact.

If possible, talk to your GM out of game session, without the other gamers around, so that he doesn't feel pressured.

Email works too for some.

The only thing I can think of that MAY explain what KK is experiencing is that he bought the contact at too high a Connection. The GM rolls for Connection and fails, oops the contact is not contactable but the GM wants some RP for the contact and the PC, so he makes as if the contact is very busy and wants to brush off the PC, hence the response, the GM coudl say that despite the contact being VERY busy, he made time to pick up the PC's call(because of high Loyalty), just that the PC kept calling at the wrong time. Which is why Connection 4 is good enough in terms of game mechanics, 50% chance of the Contact being around and 4 more dice(1 hit if you are using 4 dice for 1 hit) to get what you want.

...again, the contact being busy is one thing. She would have understood if he simply told her "I'm busy right now, I don't have the time." However in this case Harper did the search for her and called KK back later with the results. The insult was a direct response to her not readily grasping a difficult concept due to her flaw.

Harper has a Connection rating of 3.

...thanks to all for the response.

I agree, this is an issue that needs to be discussed with the GM.

Just for the record...

When I GM, I always take loyalty (contact level in SR3) into account as to how the NPC deals wit the PC and I base the contact's personality off of how the player describes them a chargen. I like the players to enjoy the game and in such a cold impersonal world feel that they do have a person or two they can count on (unless they state that the relationship is supposed to be adversarial).

6 build points are a major investment into the contacts loyality. Any offensive behaviour should at that point be in jest or an expression of substantial and important disagreement.

As a GM I´d also take loyality in account for rp-ing said contact, but I´d require the player to describe his relationship to this contact (and I forbid contacts with both ratings at the upper end pregame).

Something that might help here is to remember that gruff words can be drowned out by actions. Some people have a tendancy to talk like total jerks, but after awhile you learn to tune it out like it was an ascent.

Remember that Loyalty is the contact towards the PC, NOT nessarily the other way around. Although they do expect the PC to step of for a FOF. So the contact may consider the PC a friend for life just by virtue of being one of the very few people that'll put up with his crap. As such that should inpact the level of difficulty in asking for a favour for a friend (that at level 6 should happen fairly often). I would personally treat putting up with that shit as a favour each and every time I picked up the phone.

EDIT: I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes Loyalty could be more dependability than friendly.

yeah ok so everyone can jump on my case now as I was the jerky gm.
almost all of my npc's are gruff.
in this case, I explained that the npc was being brutally honest (and in a metagame semse I am trying to get kk to pay off the uneducated flaw and raise her logic above 1. since this combination of flaw and lack of logic makes it difficult for the character to do anything, even things like operate a commlink, which in this situation was part of why the contact was calling her a "dummy" [i believe those were his exact words], since she had a hard time answering the commlink.)
That being said, the contact has never charged kk for anything, and she calls upon him every session to spoof her data trail and do a large part of her legwork via data search . And if the shit ever hit the fan, the hacker would be there to pull kk's fat out of the fire. (to the best of his ability of course.)
In my mind, loyalty plays out on many different levels. The person who smiles at you all the time can be a backstabbing asswipe, while you're best freind can often be the biggest asshole in teh world to you. Sometimes their trying to get a point across, sometimes that's just the way they are, sometimes they're having a bad day.

Good to see the GM's perspective. If you'll notice, what you've said was raised as a possibility multiple times. Turns out they were right.

Still, there's no such thing as too much communication in gaming groups.

(Well, outside of things that are TMI in any situation...)

[Edit] was in a crunch for time & being constantly interrupted.

...the Uneducated flaw was a central part of KK's character make up and her backstory (we also have another character who recently joined the group with the same flaw). This is a personal challenge I made for the character and I agree, she does need to find some way to compensate for it (which is part of the reason Harper was bought with such a high loyalty rating).

...sorry that this became campaign specific. The original intent was to discuss the player's input on contacts and how much weight it had in the way the GM set the contact's persona up. Unfortunately there seem to be no hard and fast rules as to contact creation. Hopefully this will be taken up in the Runners' companion when and if it ever comes out.

Seems to be that the campain-specific discussion had quite positive results.

I don´t think there need to be rules for contact creation stronger than those in the core book. What needs to be stressed is the importance of contact discussion as part of GM approval.

There are two possibilities:
1.) I get only ratings and name from the player. Fine. I´m free to do what I like, as long as it fits the ratings. Friends should generally behave like friends in this regard. To indeed join the case of the fool, I unterstand his reasoning.

2.) I get name, description, personality, backstory (bullet points only. short enough for playing notes). I rate the contact based on that (or suggest modifications to make the contact work better). The list does not need to be complete, I´ll fill the gaps. Except for high-powered-and-befriended contacts, where I either get an acceptable backstory or just say "NO!".


We did something else in addition to the contact system. All players had to start the game as beginners in "the Redmond Shadow Szene" and have ties to the local Finnigan mafia clan. They know where to buy weapons, where to upgrade cyberware, who deals in what etc.. All for free. I decided how to tie them in. One is an actual made man of the mafia, one was a thief sometimes working for them... As a result of all characters knowing the same people, differences in behaviour are easier to portray. Given that contacts were predefined and infrastructure present, exactly ONE player bought contacts on her own. We consider this approach a good improvement to our previous style of play (several players of 10+ years), as it provides a strong background for the team as a whole, independend from individual histories.