Well in the book you can rent access time to magical libraries, anyone got any ideas on pricing suggestions of rental of tools or shop facilities?
It's recently come up in our game, where our Rigger wants to upgrade his drones with Autosofts (skillwires for drones pg 142 R3), but doesn't have an Electronics Tool Shop required and doesn't have the cash to buy one outright.
He has a Vehicle Shop, would it be fair to allow him to try with a increase in TN due to lack of proper/improvised tools.
I'm open to suggestions for pricing of renting access/use of an Electronics Tool Shop?

0.1% of the rented kit/shop/facility’s purchase cost per hour? That’d be… 72*5¥ per drone which is a bit low. Maybe 10%+0.1%/hour with street index if not done openly?

~J

Damnit, Bodak! I'm going to wind up in Karmic debt to you!
Thank you. I'm running a group of players new to Shadowrun and in the 2052-53 era so I have been staying away from the newer sourcebooks (SSG, SOTA 2063/64 etc) to keep things simpler for them and to keep equipment somewhat time period appropriate.

For what it’s worth, I think SSG’s price is too low—is your campaign really likely to go 100 months in which you’re likely to use the rented shop or facility once a month?

Or to put it another way, is the Electronics Shop your player needs rented for a full month really reasonably priced the same as a wrist-model cellphone with flip-up screen, or a Concealable Quick Draw Holster? If you price it that way, will any character ever seriously consider buying a shop or facility instead of just renting on the assumption they’ll never get past 50 months?

~J

I figured in Street Index before calculated rental price, figuring the renter is taking a risk and charging more to rent to a sinless user. But they are doing the renting through a contact, so there's some basic trust/familiarity there. Plus the player has to make a negotiations check every month, so a failed roll could mean they torqued off their contact and loose access to the tools for a time period, or the contact might be using said tools at the time so they aren't available.

As did I, but I forgot the price multiplier for Electronics work. Still, that doesn’t change the ratio between purchase and rental.

This on the other hand is a real differentiator. If the player is staking monthly access on an 8/72 Availability test each month, that seems enough to counterbalance the low cost of access.

~J

It's exactly the same ratio as renting a Lifestyle or buying a Lifestyle. If players still buy Lifestyles, players will still buy Tools. If I'm going to be maintaining my cybereyes, I'd want my own microtronics tools so that I know what's on them (and what isn't).

For what it’s worth, we had a few people buy Squatter Lifestyles at 10k¥ a pop but it was fairly rare and probably not driven by objective evaluation, and I don’t think I saw anyone consider anything past that even in my high-level campaign where everyone got 200 karma and a formula for karma-for-cash that could give them several million to spend without sacrificing it all. That would mean that in my experience players don’t really buy Lifestyles, and would therefore probably not buy Shops or Facilities but might still buy Kits.

~J