Figured I'd post a home brew system I've worked up for how to "buy" contacts. This is just a mechanic for buying people and making sure they stay in your pocket.

Bribery:
Tha basic value of "buy someone" works as follows: The base value is 10,000 times every level the person would be as a contact. The maintance is what you must give every month to keep the bought person loyal and is equal to 10% of the bought cost. If they miss 3 payments they must rebuy the contact.. Needless to say some people just can't be bought and some people are much easier so the GM can adjust the base value.

So here a table:

LVL1: 10,000 with a maintance fee of 1000 a month
LVL2: 20,000 with a maintance fee of 2000 a month
LVL3: 30,000 with a maintance fee of 3000 a month
LVL4: 40,000 with a maintance fee of 4000 a month
LVL5: 50,000 with a maintance fee of 5000 a month
LVL6: 60,000 with a maintance fee of 6000 a month

So if you want to bribe a border guard(lvl3) with the intent of keeping him bought it would be 30,000 as an icebreaker and then 3,000 per month. That means that you can just wiz through his guard station while he is there. But miss out on a few payments and you might get your cargo impounded to send a message.

They shouldn't be linear. The costs at the low end are WAY too high. A couple of beers a month is more reasonable. A level one contact won't really do anything significant for you. I don't think you can bribe your way to level 6, it's hard to convince people it's in their financial interest to get killed for you.

Another thing is that bribing someone on the long-term is funding informants. If you over tip they get greedy and may tip you to the other party. If you under tip they stop dealing with you.

-Chrysalis

The smart option would be to bribe them and than blackmail them once they've taken the bribe. One off payment and in some cases you're set for good.

I tried non liner and it got way to expensive way to fast. The original rules were start off at 100 per level and then and a zero for each level of contact over one. That ended up with a lvl6 contact costing 10,000,000 and I thought that was a bit much for a mob boss or internationally tied Johnson.

Might have to rework this. Its why I wanted opinions.

*Rolleyes*

1/1: 1,000
2/2: 2,000
3/3: 4,000
4/4: 16,000
5/5: 64,000
6/6: 256,000

Maintenance fee is 1/10th initial cost. Availablity is (Ratingx5).