Here's a house rule idea.

A false contact is the same as a contact, someone the PC knows and can call on for help. The difference is that the PC's relationship with the contact is a lie - I'm Lone Star Detective Weintraub; No, Baby, I'm not sleeping with anybody else. If the contact discovers this lie, they will become an Enemy of the PC. Let the Contact roll INT + Connection once a month, with a threshold of their Loyalty, to discover the lie.

False Contacts cost half, round up, of regular Contacts.

Not quite sure about the provided example... did I miss something?
Though it is an interesting idea...

I don't like it. If the player wants to do this kind of thing, they should take Big Regret and then losing the contact should be roleplayed. I mean, lying about how many other sentients you are sleeping with shouldn't realistically make someone hate you enough to become an Enemy. An Enemy is special - they go out of their way to turn up and interfere in your character's life.

Including if the PC chooses to deliberately reveal the truth to the contact on their own accord?

Pretending to be a police detective and pretending to be sexually faithful are just two possible examples of lies relationships can be built on.

I'd like to live in the world Heath Robinson does .

Yes, the contact becomes an Enemy, even if the PC reveals the truth themselves. Otherwise, PCs will take all False Contacts at character creation, because they're cheaper, and then spend the first game session going around explaining to their contacts that they haven't been telling the truth.

Excellent, another person who wishes to be a Brit. I have but a few pieces of advice. Don't drink in inner city pubs. Put the milk in second. Be serious in all things - we have a reputation to keep. Oh, wait, that's an Ad Hominem. A very patronising Ad Hominem that tries to imply that your position is the more wordly and realistic attitude.

Remember that Enemy means that they turn up on a regular basis and try to make your life miserable. Most people do not do that because they expend their resources in doing this. There are three kinds of people who actually do turn up like that: those whose job is your harassment (parole officer, for example), those who see profit in preventing you from acting freely (a business rival, for example), and those who have had their pride or status offended by your actions (the manager that you took down a peg in view of his entire department). Duty, money, and social status. These are the motivations that drive people to harass you on a regular basis.

Lying about your fidelity does not offend any of these. Nor does pretending to be a cop unless you get caught by another cop. The question you should ask yourself is "could this make a rational person try to kill me every time they see me?" If not, then it's not all that reasonable that they'd be an Enemy when the lie is discovered. In fact, very few situations could do that.

Because stabbing someone 50 times is really hard work.

I don't see why the contact should cost any less. Ostensibly, you're not doing this without the character's knowledge, so it's not like "surprise! story hook" or anything.

Of course, if the player wants to deliberately take a contact that's lying to them about who they are, I'm going to ask one question immediately: do you want to come up with who/what they really are, or do you want me to?

The answer to that would tell me if I would have them charge it as a contact, or if they would get a "free" quality because of the situation, or perhaps both.

For my games, I just don't see a purpose for this.

i think you've misread the concept.

think of it more along the lines of being a 'dark secret' flaw, but applied only to that one contact.

Actually, I kinda like this, and I see the point. Contacts are generally someone that know who and what your character is, THey may not know a lot of personal details, but they're not something you're going to lose over a small fabrication. Especially if they have a loyalty over 2. Hell, at loyalty 4+, you could actively work against them and they might overlook it.

The False Contact, on the other hand, is someone that could have a very high loyalty to you, but there's on detail, one fact, something that will turn them against you. I'm not certain I'd go so far as to make them an Enemy, but as soon as that one detail comes to light, boom. Doesn't matter if they were a rating 6 Loyalty. You just lost them. They won't trust you, won't return your calls, and maybe will work against you, depending on the lie.

Examples:

Kathryn Anderson - Connection 4, Loyalty 4 - Secretary to a Renraku Vice President who you've been sleeping with and "dating", in exchange for access to her boss' personal records and computer access. She thinks you're serious, that you're only involved with her, and that you plan to quit the biz and settle down with her. Of course, that's just a lie. You've got two other secretaries at Renraku and Aztechnology, plus a research assistant at Evo that all think the same thing.

Kevin Jacobs - Connection 2, Loyalty 5 - Knight Errant Patrolman. When Knight Errant took over the contract for Seattle's law enforcement, there was a period of confusion and adjustment, and you managed to take advantage of that. You convinced Patrolman Jacobs that you were Lt. McNulty with Knight Errant's Undercover division. Jacobs now feeds you inside information whenever he can find it for you, thinking he's helpinga fellow officer. But if he ever finds out the truth, he'll not just cut you off, he might even turn you in for impersonating an Officer.

Wow, yeah. I really like this concept, actually. Could be a lot of fun, and could be a fun themed face character, who's got an enormous web of contacts bought on the cheap, but all of which are strung together by lies. If you're not careful, the entire web comes crashing down on you.

Granted, as a GM, you'd have to be careful not to let players abuse this, and players have to know that their discount comes at the price that they could lose any and all contacts at a moments notice. But as long as all parties are cool with it, awesome.

Bull

My false contact is Cake, because everyone knows its a lie.

I like it, except for the enemy part. I think you should lose the contact (which, half price or not, still cost build points which are now gone), and they should be hostile in the future, but I wouldn't make them enemies. At least, not "enemies" as a specific type of NPC in the rules. Enemies in the sense of former associates who will now resent you and possibly work against you, yeah. But as a half-cost contact being replaced with a full-point enemy? No, not worth it at all, especially since they will almost inevitably make a good roll, and the PC likely won't even be aware of when, exactly, the contact "turned" on him.

Does that make the Weighted Companion Cube a false contact who succeeded on it's roll to detect your lie? Your relationship was build on the mutual understanding of no incineration. You bastard.

It's a good twist on the Contact front, and could make for some interesting roleplaying sessions.

Glyph has a good point - in my original suggestion, the danger of losing the contact might be too high to make the contact worth even the reduced cost. Of course, rolling INT + Connections against a threshold of Loyalty would make high Loyalty, low Connections contacts the best choices for False Contacts. But that only makes sense. Somebody with Connections 6 didn't get there by getting conned.

An alternative might be that every time the PC asks the contact for help, the PC is required to succeed at a resisted CHA + Con + Loyalty roll, to perpetuate the fraud. But that could be abused by PC faces slinging 15 dice against false contacts rolling seven.

Another issue I hadn't considered is how the deception is infectious. If the chief bartender at the club is your Loyalty 4, Connections 3 false contact, and he believes you're an entertainment executive when you aren't, he'll be introducing you to people as an entertainment executive, and now you have to fool those people, too.

Poor Weighted Companion Cube.


However, I think in this case it was you that figured out that the Weighted Companion Cube was not your friend, so you had to incinerate it.

A further problem is that doing this gives a lot of power to the GM as to when and how to blow the whistle, setting things off in a cacophony of failing contacts. Not really saying anything constructive, I know, andI'm sorry about it, but something would need t be thought in terms of mechanically restricting the chaos.

And the Weighted Companion Cube was actually a REAL contact that you THOUGHT was a false contact, because GLADOS told you so. Except that it ate your cake, that thieving piece of shit.

I like the general idea as well and think Jaid may have had a good idea. I would be tempted to handle this by having the player pay for the contact as usual and then allow them to take a contact-specific negative quality reflecting the 'dark secret' that the character is keeping which is is severe enough to ruin the relationship. From there, if the relationship gets ruined, the contact can go away and the 'dark secret' negative quality could be modified to reflect the fallout, be it converted into an enemy or a debt or whatever.

I'd limit it to one Contact however, so you don't end up having half the game dominated by the difficultuies brought up by the character's lies. It could be fun, but more likely, it will end up with the other players getting tired of the attention on one guy's contacts. Handled as a quality instead of 1/2 contact points I think would be a good fix. And I would leave the true nature and tweaks up to the GM.

Enemy doesn't have to be supre serious as a neg quality. Maybe one of the twists could be that they're just constantly in the way, getting under the character's skin, perhaps not even maliciously. Think - Wayne's ex-grilfriend from Wayne's World.

Id use this, with the above mentioned changes. though I would seed the idea in to a players head then wait for them to ask me for it. So much more rewarding when they know they did it to themselves...

Make it a 5/10/15 point Flaw. Every 5 points effects a different contact, maximum of 3.

And really, I dunno, I don't see this being potentially any worse or any more time consuming than any other flaw a character takes. It's all about what the GM puts into it. It coudl easily be just "Contact X no longer returns your calls, mark them off your sheet", or it could turn into it's own plotline. <shrug>

And I think that's what makes it great when it gets set up like this. It gives both player and GM the flexibility for the sake of the story, which is always something I cared more for instead of the game degenerating into pure numbers contest. Working the flaw in either fashion (a dead contact or a new enemy) gives the GM the ability to pull out those "social landmines" and hurt a runner that is even advanced in karma and experienced in the shadows.

After all, you are who knows you. (or admits to knowing you)

Looks like this concept has morphed into a fairly interesting and workable house rule... I like it...

I did read that backwards. I read it as the contact telling the character the lie somehow. I could see it the other way though.

I kinda like the concept. It adds a whole other dimension to the contacts, and should make the character think twice before calling them up for no good reason. I think I'd go with a 10 point flaw and make the contact's loyalty and connection ratings sum to 8. If the lie is revealed you loose the contact, but the fallout would be all IC/RP. To use Bull's example, all Kathryn needs to do to totally fuck the PCs world is tell her boss (which by the by illustrates another point: if you use the enemy rule, it doesn't necessarily mean the contact is the enemy you gain...).