So, I find that my players and I keep forgetting to have some leftover points for contacts, and I was thinking of a house rule (kinda like the 'bonus' points for Knowledge skills).

Basically, after your done with abilities & skills, you take your Charisma + all the ranks in Etiquette skills, multiply it by 4 and you get the bonus build points to buy your contacts. That insures that even the grumpiest character (1 Cha, no Etiquette) gets 4 points (2 - 1/1 contacts) and your more charismatic Faces get a wide range of contacts. As an example, the Face sample character would have an extra 40 BP of contacts (on top of the 20 BP he spent; 60 BP altogether), allowing him to have many more contacts and/or have higher connections/loyalties.

Whaddya think?

I think there's already an optional rule that contacts is Charisma*2 for freebies?

I mean, your idea is interesting, but it sorta rewards the combat characters for going straight combat. Could be good for a Face since he has more points to spend on skills or swag, but I find it overbeefs everyone else to give the Face a little more an edge.

At first I like it, but the more I think about it, the more I'd rather see a flat amount of points set aside for each character.

Basically, the voices in my head were saying this:
1) Sure the face has a lot of friends, but they're fake friends. "Dude, I need to borrow a van." "No can do, face man. Sorry. I need it later on today." When the chips are down, so many of those friends are out.
2) On the other hand, I married into a redneck family. These people have NO charisma, no etiquette, and in at least 2 cases, no teeth. If you buy the beer, they'll scrounge up a backhoe and whatever else you need and dig you a pool. You need a safe house and they'll give you crash space and loan you a spare shotgun.

So I'd either houserule that they'll get X amount of contact build points after character generation or that X amount of build points, minimum, need to be use for contacts.

Eh, I'd...really rather go with no rule instead of these alternatives, y'know? I wouldn't want to force a minimum on folks - if they want to be antisocial, then so be it but that's why every team should have a negotiator.

I don't remember seeing that optional rule, Doc. Where was it?

@suoq: Well, with 4 free BP, the redneck could have one contact with 1/3 ratings...

Don't have my books today, but I see it used/requested so often in the PbP threads I'm middlingly certain it's an optional somewhere.

It is not an optional rule.

It is, however, a widely used houserule to allow CHA*2 or even *3 as free BP to be spent on Contacts.

I like it and use it as well.

Bye
Thanee

Well, there you have it.

I rarely award free BP for contacts. Giving out Cha * 2 in free contact-only BP just means that everyone in the game is playing the same socially gimped power gamed min max characters, but with a crutch.

Contacts are (should be) extremely useful. An 8 bp contact should be every bit as important to a character as two ranks in a skill. Not all contacts are created equally, however. Having a high loyalty nobody is not that helpful. But remember, you can use loyalty and connection ratings for various dice pools, making a high loyalty or high connection contact into an excellent networking tool to help you find your way from useless to useful.

In the games that I run, players spend huge amounts of time and money on their contacts, trying to get information and assistance. They are worth the BPs (usually).

Well, the concept of Contacts has changed over the editions too, so it depends on how you want to GM.

In 3e, the character got 2 free Level 1 contacts (out of 3 levels), and additional Level 1 contacts were 5K, level 2s were 10K.

In 4e, the character gets no free contacts, and their minimum BP cost is 2. Which is rather notable considering that is the equivalent of 10K.

The 3e Face had thirty one starting contacts, for the total cost of 170K. The average starting character had 2-4 (which was probably too few comparatively). The 4e face only has 5 contacts at the equivalent of 125K. Ouch. Especially considering how much more expensive most things were in 3e, that probably works out to an equivalent of about 270K, based on the 3e Face's 1,000,000 resources and the 30BP that would have cost out of Face's starting allocation of approximately 125 using the optional 3e chargen BP system. Not an exact equation by any means, but you get the picture.

I like 4e's system of giving the contacts more detailed rating than simply Level 1-3. After all, contacts are not equal. A bartender contact is not equivalent to a corporate contact or a fixer, even though they cost the same at generation in earlier editions. Obviously, depending on the campaign a bartender might be worth more to a particular character, but in terms of overall utility, nowhere close.

But it seemed like in 1e-3e where basic contacts cost 5K, a runner was who he knew. Sure, your contacts were all fair weather friends, but that's the reality of things. Contacts were people you knew who knew stuff you might be able to use. If you had a lot of them, it meant you could put out feelers in a lot of different areas of society.

I guess it ends up being based on how you think contacts should work in Shadowrun. The Face in 3e knew a ton of people. Not very well, but enough that he had feelers in a lot of places, with a few good, solid buddies. The Face in 4e knows a few people who aren't much better than the contacts of other starting archetypes with the exception of a well connected Fixer. So, the question is, do you as a GM believe that the contacts are sort of catch-alls and you just run legwork as a "going through the motions" of rolling dice, or are contacts treated as only really having access to the kind of knowledge you believe they would and that knowing the right people is more important than just knowing people. As a GM, contacts are about the most nebulous thing out there. They can be gained essentially for free during play, or at a substantial cost, all depending on the story.

Now, some people said if you remove the BP cost of contacts, people will min/max. And while that's partially true, the rules also say that the BP cost varies depending on how powerful you want your characters. A 450BP character will already have 50 more build points than the 400BP sample Face.anyway, and a net of 25 if you gave the 400BP character free contacts. Min/maxing is done by players regardless. While I don't know if contacts should be free, there might also be a distinct imbalance in the cost of Contacts for your interpretation of the game.

To avoid confusion, I think the 3e way is better, even if it isn't perfect.

Why not instead of giving extra BP/free contacts, simply give a discount on the contacts themselves?

Say...Half price. Two contact points for a BP. That lets the Face go crazy on varied contacts and not have to gimp in the other areas, and at the same time the rest of the team can have a few effective contacts for what they do.

Well, the problem I run into is that when you're going through creation (and going down that handy checklist of how you should choose stuff: Metatype; Qualities; Abilities; Skills; Resource), you don't hit Contacts until after you've looked through your gear. And when you're shopping for gear, it's a lot easier to zero out your build points to make sure you get some decent gear. Then you realized that you don't have any contacts.

To me, contacts are import for legwork. If you don't have contacts, you can't do any legwork for a run. Think of it this way, if you don't know anybody that you can even pay for info (0 Loyalty/0 Connection), you're just as likely to get the same information if you stop grandma on the subway about the layout of MCT's lab.

And, yes, I think the flavor of the contact determines what they might know. I look at it that the contact has Knowledge skills that the runner doesn't and/or has a way to get that information for the runner (kind of 'mini-faces'). And I used the (Charisma+Etiquette)*4 formula instead of Cha*2 because I am one of those mentioned above that runners should know a lot of different people to find out stuff.

another rule suggestion i've heard involves making it multiple contact points per BP spent on it, but your contact costs loyalty*connection. so you could have several low rating contacts for the cost of 1 high rating contact. combined with a few points free (either based on cha or some other way), you would likely see a good spread of low-to-mid-rating contacts (which honestly, just about any 400 BP runner should have)

Honestly, I prefer to have limits on starting contact ratings, period. A limit of no connection+loyalty greater than 6 has always seemed reasonable for starting characters.

But yeah, BP costs for contacts are harsher than I had realized. I built my face character recently with no house contact rules, and I had trouble getting past how painful the contact section was. Alot of the house rules presented here make quite a bit of sense, and not overly punishing to legwork type characters.

It seems to me that particularly the low-rated contacts aren't really worth the BP.. a 1/1 contact isn't worth 2BP, but a 6/6 contact for 12BP could be a bargain.

And yet it seems so many of life's contacts are 1/1...

My point is, it sucks buying those contacts, because they're not much value for your BP. You'd be better off buying one 4/4 than 4 1/1s.

I'd been thinking about this. Perhaps turning it around into a point buy system closer to the old way. Don't increase the maximum resources to assist the min/maxers, but create a more valuable buy-in system like in 3e.

For example, if a contact in 3e was 5000 regardless, take that number as a baseline for like a 2/2 contact. Then subtract "money" (usable only for contacts but on a 1:5000 ratio just like resources) for lesser ratings and make higher ratings cost more. Say, a 1/1 would cost only 3K, but a 4/4 might cost 9K. This way if players want to have a lot of low level contacts, they are able to do that, but if they just want to have a handful of really good ones, they can do it, regulated by the GM. This prevents "Contact Spamming" like the 3e Face, since an Armorer, or Fixer, or Fence cost the same as a Street Ganger or Bouncer in 3e, but also prevent players from having to invest huge amounts of BP to know some useful people.