How do you handle the availiability of legal Items ?

the availiability tells you
1) how hard/difficult it is to get a certain Item at the black market
2) wether it is legal,restricted or illegal
but what about Legal Items (f.E. Comlinkparts or legal electronic Gimmicks) with a high Avail. (12,15,20,40 )that You want to buy in a Store or via the Matrix ??
What about restricted Items You own a License for ??

with a licensed Dance
Medicienm

Personally, I've always treated those like high-end sports cars or high-end custom tailored shoes/suits. Anyone with the available resources can buy them, but it simply requires a lot of time till delivery. Where you buy them doesn't matter, as long as the character beats the availability roll.



The same. In some cases, I might call for a license test beforehand.

If You have the Cash and can pay why an availiabilty roll ?
whats the Ingame explanation ?

HokaHey
Medicineman

I see those items as "Build-on-demand" or "We need to mail order it from HQ". For example, a high-end comlink part may be something that isn't in stock, but is still sold to customers who request it. The availability roll merely determines how long it will take to have it built/delivered.

E.g.: Paul Pornomancer wants a new luxurious yacht after his last run went exceptionally well. Paul decides to purchase a Harland and Wolff Classique III (from Arsenal),a perfectly legal yacht with an availability of 12. Paul rolls 6 successes on his first roll, 4 on his second and 5 on his third. The yacht company tells him they'll have his new yacht delivered to him in three weeks.

Norman the standard a Streetsam with CHA 3 and Etiquette 3 and 2000 ¥ needs 4 Days to buy standard "off the Mill"diving Equipment ?

HokaHey
Medicineman

I agree that is silly. There should be far fewer items that actually have an availability.

Note that Negotiate is used to procure equipment. Etiquette does jack squat.

Doesn't matter ! give him CHA 3 and Negotiate 3 the Result is the same

HougH!
Medicineman

You can always pay more to get additional dice on the test. Diving equipment is not standard gear in the 6th world, after all, given all the water pollution. Contacts can also get the job done, and there's always the party face who might be willing to help out.

As i remeber it Availability was only for when you bought items through a black market - I.E, when you didnt used a legal SIN.

I would require a fake SIN roll instead against say RatingX2 vs 2 for mundane items.

Only in rare cases would i say there is a long delivery time.
Perhaps add +1 to the difficulty per +10 availability (luxury cars can be a tad more difficult to procure legally).

4 days is perfectly fine for procuring legal diving equipment.
I say the time needed to GET stuff has the needed LEGWORK built in.
So, asking around who needs what, finding out where to get it, going there after having made sure all licenses are in order and buying it and maybe giving it a little test-run before buying it . .

(luxury cars can be a tad more difficult to procure legally).

Luxury Cars (those from the BBB) have no availiability at all

with a luxury Dance
Medicineman

Those prices are not luxury range

Well, by RAW there's no way to legally buy legal stuff with an Availability rating.
It only tells you that you can just buy stuff with NO Availability rating (a.k.a. "-") without any test and what the test looks like to find stuff on the black market.
It never talks about walking into a shop and buying, for example, image-linked contact lenses (Availability 6).

And having someone with Charisma 3 and no Negotiation take 2.5 days to track down something something like that is just ridiculous. Of course, contact lenses probably only have an Availability rating so players can't easily put every mod into them.

The fluff reason is that you are sinless, you can't go to a store and get stuff like the SINners do. Runners have to go for copies, stolen or other "tax-free" ways to obtain their gear or find someone to buy the item for you and few want to do that.

Sure you can go into the Jack's Huge Guns store and try your luck with your fake sin but chances are that you'll just blow your 4-5k SIN instead of getting that 250nuyen warhawk a little faster.

SINless don't exist in the system, have no credit card and the stores don't accept cash, that is why stuff takes days to get.

What if the character is a sinner?

You have to consider that this "roll" does not account for the surroundings.
Standing in the best diving shop in the whole UCAS makes it much easyer to buy it right off the shelve. (Than hanging around in the barrens trying to get the stuff through a some middleman)

I mean the argument could also be made the other way around: How silly it is to get the low availability stuff delivered in the middle of the jungle.

The rules are for a generic situation. (So they won't apply in 9 of 10 situations comming up at your table)

And the other side is, you just have to pay more and you get it.

Thats probably a problem with the player-perspective to see the listprices as something they are entitled to.
It is not.

Look at buying a comlink the same way as buying a notebook today.
You can just buy the next you find, but this will probably mean you pay more for less.
Or you can search and compare, get information from other customers, search for the best price and so on. That is taking time...
And the slimmer the market the harder it is to find cheap...

Yeah, the roll isn't for "finding the gear at a specific shop", it's for "finding the gear".

Part of the time required might be locating that specific shop in the first place.




-k

There's just this tiny little problem that companies selling legal stuff do something called advertising.
So, while getting a sales clerk at Drones'R'Us to sell you the drone that you actually need might call for social interaction; if you know what you want, say a Shiawase Kanmushi, what's the Availability Test supposed to represent if you're just ordering from Shiawase's matrix site?
You get it sooner if you enter your billing info more charismatically, add smilies to your name?

Now, but if you ask the guy in the forum more nicely you he might thing he also wanted to buy a new one and start looking for it. And because you asked nicely he gives you the lists of where to buy this good and cheap commlink you are looking for.
To order it, won't be the problem. Right. But to get the name, will be.

The corebook seems like a mailorder cataloge out of the futur sowjet union.
Only one modell, only one price.
Thats not how it is ingame.
You will have probably millions of different comlinks. Some with missleading advertisment, some with inefficient chip design, some with an inefficient system or a great CPU(on paper) but the cash of the CPU is too small and so on.
You need to find the comlink which has raiting 6.
THATs the problem. And you need to find it for a decent price.

The catch is: it's not specified how exactly you go about procuring an item, merely that better negotiate rolls indicate a more efficient (as in "less time consuming") method of purchase. Joe Average orders the drone via standard matrix procedure, and has to wait the average time. Paul Pornomancer calls the hotline/visits the store and charms the salesclerk, thereby getting preferential treatment. I've witnessed the latter firsthand.

As for the other possible modifiers in this instance:
-Buying extra dice=Express order
-Glitch=stock completely sold out/long waiting list