I found myself almost hijacking another thread, so I decided to open this one.
This is about how you have your players interacting with contacts: Roll it away? Roleplay it with heart drenching detail? Are the characters in their own right? Numbers to provide rail guns and plastic explosives to the players?
Now, contacts being one of the most awesome mechanics in a game, I find myself often "dumping them" BP wise when I am making a character. I think that contacts are overpriced in the lower end (connections 1, loyalty 1=2 bp=10k yens=1 specialization=1/2 of a quality) and overly cheap in the high levels (A connections 6, loyalty 6 fixer... can get any piece of gear easy, won't betray you and will even stick his head out for you and to give you the best jobs, or if he has the means, would loan you up to 500.000 yens in gear=12 Bp, slightly over 1 attribute point). To fix this I limited the contacts connections, in such a way that they can never start higher than 4... But instead of a wider contact net, players often simply go for one very high loyalty/connections contact, and drop the rest.
What is your experience in this area?
On the other hand,players got to choose, in my campaign, when they started to play their characters, three extra freebies:
a) What is the character's urban legend? (This means, what rep will he/she accrue as street cred rises. This is a means to help me roleplay and portray those NPC's that have heard of the character, including his contacts. As an example a mage in a game stated that his legend was that he used magic that didn't cause drain. This opened up for good roleplaying situations)
b) How does he deal with his contacts (Are they afraid of him/her? Are they indebted to him/her? Is he/she indebted to them? This also allows me to portray even more how the player deals with the contacts)?
c) May be related or unrelated to contacts, but relevant to the character: They had a cinematographic bias in their favor: Sam Street could throw a coin that would always land inside the jukebox and would play a song of his choosing.
John Mc. Social would always run into people he knew... almost anywhere he went to (No, he doesn't get a free contact everywhere, but rtahr would have situations like this: when he's hiding a dead body in a gas station's bathroom and he's washing his bloodied hands... an ex girlfriend accidentally comes in the wrong bathroom and finds him with his shirt all bloodied up... she worries because she thinks he may have hurt himself and she tries to help him with his wounds. Hilarity ensues. Etc.)
Rose Emo would always have a shadow on her face which would enhance in a dramatic way her looks.
This was not an abusable mechanic, but rather a fun one to use, to enhance the campaign's flavor.