A few months ago, while playing a game of SR, my character needed an amp to really kick out some wattage. While being stuck in a one horse town, the best I could get was a few level 4 amps. Not knowing much about amps personally, my character is supposed to be a tech wiz. He had a fair bit of tools with us, so I hypothesised I could bash the 3 amps together and get something a little higher maybe a 7 or 8 rating amp. The GM wasn't sure and I didn't feel like pushing the issue, seeing that I am not that familiar with amps.

I had to come up with another plan so we dropped that angel. Later while flipping through books trying figure out what I wanted to buy with my hard earned cred, relising that I was far from getting a spiffy new toy, a maglock passkey, I have a 4 but things got dicy during the last run so I wanted something better. So I was curious I have and electronics B/R skill of 6, why couldn't I build one? I mean the a circuit diagram could be easily found on the Matrix, and I could hire a decker to write the software for it, I think my small computer skill of 4 would not let me get a high maglock program. So if I some how got my grubby hands on a circuit diagram, and the software to put into could I build Maglock Passkey of 7 or 8?

I can hear you guys already huffing at such a sugestion, but Build is the first word in B/R. I am a wierd person in our games, if I was allowed to build one, chances are I would not sell one to anyone else. So effectively I would build one for my self then just shelf the specs, to never see the light of day. The thing is our games sometimes have big winfalls, but usually 95% of that winfall goes back to Hospital bills or paying off the bookies. So I look to cut corners however possible. We also play with a lot of freedom in our games, some character very rarley go on traditional runs, most times they are doing off the wall stuff to supplement their real/legitamite jobs.

How would you handle building gear from scratch, my GM usually fights tooth and nail about not letting things into his game, but sometimes he lets me get away with murder, so much so I put restrictions on myself to maintain the fun level.

I would make some kind of availibility test for the parts, shouldn't be to hard to find generic parts, then do some major research test for the specs, then have a decker/progrmmer do a programing test for any software that maybe needed, then some sort of final assembly test. I would use a version of the bug chart in Matrix for the software and final assembly, I can't remember if the Rigger 3 has a prototype bug check, I think they do for turbo charging, but I would have make something like that. So everytime I use the key/whatever I built, I would have to do a check to see if it went buggy, but after so many uses and patches it basically has worked out all the bugs. I figure it should work something like the building tests for building a deck.

I believe something like this could be fun to have in the game, riggers build cars/drones, deckers build decks/software, mages build foci/spirits, what does the Tech Wiz build? They have rules for doing everything but building electronic gadgets. Unless I missed something? This could work for a lot of skills not just electronics, is there rules for making a sword in the game? I have a shaman that is looking at building his own sword, he is having a forge and everything built in his house, well back yard, so he can do all sorts of things.

Just curious as to how you would handle this. Am I off my rocker?

I see no problem with that.

Try writting something up, using the matrix rules for building a cyberdeck as inspiration, there is even rules for parts and software you can use there.

Also I see no problem with you selling the stuff you make, considering the time and such in the Matrix book its often better to have someone else build it, even tho its a bit more expensive.

I don't have my books on me at Work, but I believe there's a brief blub on building tech from scratch in the main 3e Book. I'll post later when I get home

- Wailer

Actually, I've tried to build my own maglock passkeys (in game) and couldn't find numbers for it.

Given the price range for passkeys and the number of people with B/R skills, there might be something else that's complicating the process, but that's just supposition on my part.

The only thing they've listed so far for B/R skills is the Customized Firearms table for weapons like silencers, custom grips and so on.

-Siege

The BBB includes times but no costs for building things from scratch. Pretty much you have to make something up and get your GM to approve it if you want a "craft" system for SR.

As far as I know, there are three major things to consider:

How much are you making from scratch? For instance, with a computer, it's easy to buy a motherboard, some chips, a case, a monitor etc. with just a kit. With a shop you could probably by a few broken monitors and put them together into a new one, but you have most of the subcomponents already. You could flash your own BIOS etc. However, with a shop, you CANNOT make your own chips. You'd need a facility. I don't know what all is in passkey thinger, but I'd bet there are some chips in there you can't get normally. There's likely to be some computer code as well. If you have an electronics facility, get the computer code and the schematics and you should be okay. Otherwise, where do you plan on getting an illegal processor built for a very small market which doesn't read the classified?

How much time and skill do you have? Obviously, more complex stuff is tougher to build, and it certainly takes longer. You could probably build a car in a shop by yourself (it wouldn't have any computers in it) but it would take years. The stuff you're talking about is stamped out by huge facilities which moves pretty fast once it's gotten started. Making a custom one will take weeks to years, depending on what it is. Plus, keep in mind, these make a profit because they're mass produced. The time and money required to make 1 buy itself will outweigh the benefits you'd gain.

How diverse are your skills and shops? This goes back to the passkey thing above. If it requires computer code, you need to make it yourself. If you don't know how to program, you need to get it elsewhere. The CC gave a good example with guns; to make your own gun you need metal shops, chemical shops, plasic shops blah blah blah. With a facility made for that express purpose it may or may not be a problem (it's likely they get certain parts premade from somewhere else). For a keycard spoofer, you'd probably also need the ability to craft metal, plastic, silicon and computer code.

Can you build stuff from scratch? Sure, but it costs so much in time and money, it's not worth it.

Home made stuff will also tend to be bulkier and possibly not as reliable as mass produced stuff. Repairing it is also complicated and deviating from the standard design enough to really reap the benefits with some electronics (maglocks, for instance) can be quite difficult.

The rules for making your own ammo can easily be applied for most anything else you want to make.

The first thing you need is an appropriate Kit, Shop, or Facility. For most mundane items, that requires General tools unless the item clearly fits into one of the more expensive categories (such as Microtronic, Vehicle, or Computer tools).

Once you have your tools, you pay an average price of 10% the legal price for the item (though I'd probably apply the Street Index cost if the item in question includes any non over-the-counter parts).

The test for constructing the item is identical to it's base Availabilty score, and the base time is derived from the same source. Successes can be used to reduce either the base time or the amount of materials you needed to construct the item (allowing you to save 5% of what you paid for your supplies per success to a minimum of 50%; the cost for your base tools are never reduced in this fashion).

And that's pretty much it if memory serves. It makes for an excellent starting point to determine what you need to do to make your own gear for items that don't have their own special rules (such as vehicles, foci, and cyberterminals), each one at the GM's descretion.

Example: Say you want to try and make your own Maglock Passkey (Rating 6). That's a 60,000 (180,000 on the streets) Microtronics item with an Availability of 12/10 days. Since the actual components are probably fairly easy to buy at Radio Shack or its equivalent, I wouldn't apply the Street Index cost.

So with that in mind, you would need to buy a Microtronics Kit (1,500 ) or Shop (15,000 ) and then spend an additional 6,000 for all the parts and schematics (or whatever) that you need. You then make your Electronics B/R test with a TN of 12 and a base of 10 days worth of work to not only build it, but program it and whatnot. Let's say I'm a rather remarkable Tech-Wiz and manage to score 3 successes on that test (thanks in part to an Aptitude and Microscopic Vision mods). I can then use those successes to reduce the time to 4 days (10/3 = 3.333, rounded up), reduce the cost for my supplies to 5,100 (6,000 - 15%), or anything in between by splitting the successes.

Make sense?

Maglock passkeys are never made in mass production. Thier components might be, but the item it self never would be. This is expressed in it's high as hell cost and high as hell TN to get.

it takes many skilled hours to make it, and high chance of f-ing it up. Do you really think that Ares has a factory which they pump out 50,000 rating 10 maglock passkeys an hour? Helllz noo.

Terminator 2, the thing John connor used to hack ATM machines and doors. is good example of what a maglock passkey would look like except 60 years in the future it wouldn't be as bulky and have so many wires sticking out of it. It would have some, but not many.

Thanks for all your input. One thing about chips though, I am by no means an electronics guru, in fact it is just a very small hobbie in my life right, hoping to get better. You can actually buy jsut about any processor or chip out there right now, you just have to know what it is and who makes it, basically if have a schematic and know how to read it, then you could get any chip you need directly from the supplier. You would probably need some form of ID for soem of the chips, but anything short of classified stuff is availible. I have a couple of books on electronics that give the suppliers who manufacuter tons of these things, one regular eprom chip I seen in a book understands up to 53 commands.

The main problem though that I see is getting a schematic for the device unless you plan on engineering the whole thing from top to bottom. Also the algorithms to spoof the system would need to be found or written. As for as building the components you can get schematics for chips to allow you to design a circuit so you can call up imbedded commands and such. So you can with very little say a descent shop could build this stuff.

An electronics shop, maybe at the very most a facility would be needed to build these from "off the shelf" product. You may need one or two proprietary chips that are spceifcally made for the spoofing algorithm. If you need to make a chip then I would think a Microtronics shop or facility would be needed. And of course maybe a chip burner from the Matrix book.

Of course like it had already been pointed out a home made maglock pass key will be bigger, but with a facility you should be able to amintain a reasonably small size, I mean you are not going to get a passkey the size of a pack of cigarettes but neither will you have to carry around a lap top.

The maglock passkey is just what I thought of first since my current charater is a buglar, but I will start looking into exsisting rules and different fields of B/R, and maybe come up with something. If anyone else has some ideas about how to do it please share, as I am lazy and it might be awhile before I finish this thought out.

Which brings up another idea could a prog be written to spoof a maglock with a deck? A deck has a lot of processing power and it already spoofs codes, how hard would it be to have a prog in the deck, an extra FUP attched to a passkey shell or swipe card so you can spoof a maglock?

The joys of "Electronics Theory" or a similar knowledge skill. You could design and build prototypes and test them against store-purchased maglocks. Security Design might even add some complimentary dice.

Not to mention you could either buy, acquire or build schematics of maglocks which would help you figure out the best way of bypassing them: sequencer, passkey, etc. And most of the chips could be re-created using burners and home-brew code commands. If they sell chip burners, they have to sell blank chips.

I would imagine Ares does make maglock passkeys -- its easier than waiting for your Spec Force to crack it the old-fashioned way. As for mass production, however...

As for the "spoofing" idea, it's valid but non-decker programs have been lacking in canon supplements. Basically you're creating an add-on for your deck that allows it to hook up to a maglock and act as a sequencer (with the proper program). Reasonably, you could just run a plug from your deck to the maglock and click "enter" to run the program (rather like the Terminator reference).

-Siege

Edit: As far as I know, there isn't any definition of how big or small a maglock passkey is and we don't know what's involved to make one work. It could actually be the size of a wrist computer or even a pack of cigarettes. /Edit

I have designed small computers from AND and OR gates.
I have designed integrated circuit logic chips.
I have developed and sold computer software.
I am familiar with supply and demand.

When you buy a mag lock passkey on the street, manufactured by someone who built and sold 5000 of them, you are paying for
a) the parts for your passkey
b) the manufacturing costs of yours
c) the distribution costs of yours
d) 1/5000 of the total advertising
e) 1/5000 of the total design cost
f) some profit percentage for the manufacturer.

Typically (f) is between 2% and 15% of the item price for commercially successful products. The higher (f) is, the more likely it is that someone will make a competing product and price competition between manufacturers will bring it back into this range. For a highly illegal item like this, (f) might be up to 50% of what you pay and its the police that keep competition low.

By building your own, you leave out costs (b,c,d,f) but you are stuck with the full design costs. Assuming that (e) makes up only 1% of the costs of a mag lock passkey on the street, designing your own will only cost you 50 times what it'd cost to buy one on the street, plus parts. (This is assuming your time is worth at the same rate per hour as the guy with Design Skill 6 and B/R 6 who works for the manufacturer.)

Sure, you can make a cheap design where you only spend 20 times as much, but then your key will only do the most common types of maglocks, perhaps 70% to 80% of what's out there. Your passkey will be a prototype that weighs 10 times what the manufactured one does and does not incorporate feedback and improvements from thousands of users of previous models.

If you want to sell two or three on the side, go ahead. You'll have to compete on price against the products that are already out there, so you won't make back much of your design cost on each one. To really compete, you have to set up a manufacturing line (b) and put so much effort into it that you're no longer playing shadowrun.

So, how I handle players making their own versions of equipment: I tell them the above realities, and give them a reasonable TN for making the design, and then give them a base number of months to design it. The base time in months is (20 to 50 times street price, divided by 5000). Roll a DESIGN skill for this one, then a separate and simpler B/R skill to put it together from the design.

A competent shadowrunner could steal a maglock passkey in less than a month, but then we'd have to create a run just for this one character just for this one item. The higher the rating passkey, the tougher it'll be to find one and tougher the people are who have it. This might be a fun adventure.

Stealing the design for a good maglock passkey will be a harder run than stealing a good maglock passkey.

Any designs for maglock passkeys that you might run across or buy will work fine for the maglocks of 20 years ago, but no one lets a valuable design get loose. If it does get loose, the maglock companies will incorporate protections against that design in an instant.

After discussion, my players have always agreed with me. We jointly decide that playing the adventures is what we want to spend our time doing, and equipment costs and acquisition times are simple because WE THE PLAYERS don't want to spend a lot of our time doing it. None of us want to add rules that would turn Shadowrun into a game of designing and building equipment.

(P.S. This is all based on a game. Maglock passkeys don't work in real life because (a) security computers don't send signals back to the passkey readers indicating what part of the input is valid and what part is invalid, and (b) the security computer shuts down the passkey reader after 3 to 4 invalid inputs and signals for a security guard to go check that door. We all use Maglock Passkeys because its a game and we want to play it this way.)

Well in our games we do stupid stuff like try to steal gear for our selves. Just doing a job for the Johnson gets boring, doing it because our characters have a vested intrest in it is funner, at least in my opinion. I mean what does your team do when the Johnson isn't calling, do they just sit around the house waiting for the call. The book adventures are also pretty boring also, I have ran through a lot of them, when we are doing things that our characters directly profit off of seems more appealing. How many dragons can a guy do a job for or other super spirits. But when a run pays 50,000 for the team is so damn boring and frustrating. How is your character to live and make a profit? Stealing gear and doing the Johnson run is more profitable.

And stealing the schematics for an electronic device is no more difficult than anything a Johnson pays you to steal normally. If a maglock schmetic is impossible to steal why doesn't the corp hide all its secrets with them?

And if you steal all the design work what are you out? Putting together a deck should be infinatly out of reach of the runners by your reasoning. I mean they would have to design the Hardening from scratch which would take years, the MPCP alone would take two or three decades.

Companies clone each others work all the time corporate espionage is a major problem today in real life. And if the schematic is stolen then the corp has to admit their system is now vulnerable and it is going to cost a whole butt load of money to fix the problem. When they could ignore the problem, I mean if a corp produced Maglock pass keys are availible, who is to say the maglock company doesn't play it off as someone used a stolen corp manufactured passkey.

I just don't see why a person could not build electronics in their garage like a rigger builds cars or a decker builds decks. Designing new security measures into new products is par for the course, so as the sneak thief I would have to try and keep up.

Luckily my character rarely gets hurt, so I usually have some time on my charaters hands while the rest of the team recoups. So he has many hobbies he works on during the down time, andafter training.

I use passkeys everyday for work and I have a whole bunch of cards for a whole bunch of different areas, and I always get them mixed up and no matter how many tries I stick up to the reader it never shuts down, it just will not let me in.

And why you brought real life Security systems I don't know. I am just trying to expand on the system that is basically in the game for building so many other things, why not electronics?

You could make money off of your B/R skill, but it depends on what you're making. Decks would be pretty easy, just like custom made computers are now. You buy the chips and boards wholesale and preferably en masse, you don't worry about shipping, taxes or advertising and just pocket the difference. ASSUMING that sequencers and maglock passkeys can be made from off the shelf parts and ASSUMING you can get your hands on the schematics (and if one of those is true, it's likely the other isn't), you could probably make them for a tidy profit. In this case we would assume that (b) manufacturing costs are closer to yours because they're not being mass produced and (e) design costs are nil, because it's stolen. Assumedly the price for them would be high because they're so illegal, driving off competition, in which case you could make a tidy profit IF you find a buyer (who's not really a cop). But that's a lot of assumptions.

I would NOT assume that you could make a profit making cars from scratch. Car manufacturers sell their cars with only a very small markup because they make the money back selling parts for 8-12 years. However, customizing cars would be good. You probably won't be able to compete with anything mass produced either, unless there's some benefit from their being handcrafted. Code would be hard to sell too because, unless it's something really basic or made for a custom job.

That's the catch:

We don't know how or why maglock passkeys are so fragging expensive. When you break it down, anything can be duplicated to achieve the game mechanic of Rating 1 to etc. And just about every reason why they might be expensive is another explanation that punctures a hole in it.

Is it cost-prohibitive for game balance? Then just say "nice idea but no" and leave it under the umbrella of game balance issues.

Is the maglock passkey missing the required Unobtanium to make all the blinky lights flash and spin? Well, that explains it.

But as for tweaking gear, it's not any different than the samurai mounting sights and accessories or the rigger fiddling with his vehicle or even the decker and his sexual fetish.

-Siege

Still thankful for the replys, but really I have no interest in making a profit off of these designer knock-offs. I was making a joke about the late night infommercials, saying learn to do X, for fun and profit. In reality I am looking for a way to basically cricumvent SI and to some extent Availablity. Some of these tech toys runnners and especially my character as a burglar needs, and taking jobs that pay 50,000 for 4 to 5 team mates just really doesn't lend itself to buying a 200,000 mid-range toy. Help you if it gets damaged for whatever reason, being shot, lightning bolts, or just dropping it off a corp roof, then all your work to scrounge up that kind of money is gone. I can see that they would want to make it exspensive so not every joe runner is running around with a passkey to slip past everydoor, but the cost is just amazing, I mean just raise the availibility. Again I am not in the market to make a profit, though my might sell one to a friend, but he is in no way looking to make a electronics company in his basement, he is just looking to increase his per job net profit in the costs of doing jobs.

It's not a matter of whether or not you're trying to make a profit or not -- once a precedent is sit, it's just waiting to be exploited.

The questions posed here are the ones the GM needs to answer to decide whether or not to allow the idea to proceed.

The concept is logical and reasonable, but neither are required for game mechanics.

-Siege

I see no reason not to allow characters the ability to make and sell anything they have the skills to.

Dealers in illegal equipment face many challenges, not least of which include the Law, Competition, and Greed. Thus the steep mark-up in price.

Selling to a fixer/fence or such will net you no more than if you stole the item.

I see two issues with this:

The first is campaign balance: I will make it EXTREMELY difficult for someone to build something that (if you are looking for a rating 8 ) is availability 16 simply because you might not stop here.

Why? If you can build and sell something that is rating 16 Street index 3 and sell it easily there is no point in running, you can sit down and build and sell those devices and never have to worry about money.

I understand that you are saying that you aren't going to sell them. Fine, someone decided that the target number to obtain this device is 16 SI 3. That makes it very hard to obtain further, it's available via permit only, a permit I have a hard time imagining being issued to anyone other than a government or law enforcement agency. Correspondingly, the parts to make it are also going to be very hard to obtain, and in order for the GM to keep the game working right they must continue to be very hard to obtain, real world aside.

Second, as far as stealing a design and or parts: When I was in the Marine Corps, one of our communications personnel lost an encryption key. That key contained an encryption code that will never again be used by a NATO country because it was immediately invalidated as soon as it was determined that it could possibly be compromised. Within 24 hours every major NATO command had invalidated that code.

Now, I don't think that maglock passkeys are held to quite the same standards as NATO encryption algorithms, but as these are given a permit rating there is some (gawd knows what) valid reason for them to be used by someone. If a design is stolen, law abiding company X, who probably provides these to government agencies and or police departments can certainly ensure that methods of countering their stolen design are made available.

======================

I am posting what I think because you asked how we would handle this. My answer: As I indicated above, I would make it really hard (in my game I just wouldn't allow it.) I reward players with Karma and money. If they can make whatever they need then they don't really need money and that takes away half the point of the game.

I guess if you still want to do it I would suggest to your GM that the availability of the parts be no less than 12 (without modifiers) and that you need a roll of 12 on a B/R test to make a rating 16 device (I come up with 4 easier as a rough estimate, anyone see anything in cannon which gives something better?). I would also make this take a time to build at least the first device of a period equal to the time it takes to normally obtain said device. Additionally I would not allow someone to roll more than once during that build time to make it.

Using this logic I would make this (for a rating 8 maglock passkey):
Target 12 to obtain the parts.
Target 12 to build the device.
Can only roll once every 10 days you devoted to building the first such device.
After that I would probably make it easier to make additional devices were I to even allow this.

But it's a bad idea.

Syndyne, SSG gives rules for counterfeiting money, and it's easier than that.

From the point of view of maglock design, if you make your own the biggest advantage is that you can impose a penalty to anyone attempting to crack the case since there are no reference materials available.