See. It's definitely supply. Which, if it were, page [b]273[/i] definitely wouldn't have mentioned it. That would have been too easy.

How do these middlemen decide how much profit to charge? Some items have identical availability and legality codes, yet differing SIs. If availability is the only representation of supply/demand, there's no reason for them to pad more for one than the other. Yet they do!

Perhaps the page you mention might shed some light about how they decide to raise prices on items:

"Because obtaining something illegally usually involves going through numerous middlemen, the price of an item tends to rise dramatically, especially if it is a hot commodity."

Aha! It seems that if the demand outstrips supply the price of the item tends to rise dramatically, which is done by applying Street Index.



Now, a good question is: why mention middlemen at all? I say it is because supply/demand considerations are out of the scope of a shadowrunner. You're just buying a pred. You don't get inventory listings of a hundred arms dealers and know why they're cheap. All you know is that you got charged less by these middlemen because it's not a hot commodity. The game is kept to a lower level by sticking to that, which IMO is a good thing.

So, who's up for petitioning FanPro to release a "Marketplaces of the Dark and Shadowy" sourcebook for some "realistic" market information instead of these three sissy numbers?

From what I've overheard such things as guns can in fact be sold for much less on the street then the price they can be bought for in the store. Why?


A) They were stolen. Thus selling them for anything is pure profit.

B) They were smuggled in from some place where they were much cheaper then where you are buying them.

C) If the black market is saturated with lots of handguns people are going to move them for less then they would if there are few handguns in the black market.

Street Index under 1 is very very common in real life. Ugh, I can't believe I just used a game mechanic and real life in the same sentance. Anyways, the point is, the reason why there is a black market in the first place is that you can get Hot goods for less then you'd have to pay in a store.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the only time street index should be above 1 is if the item is not available for purchase to the general public but is rather a restricted item. Anything that can fall off the back of a truck *cough cough* should generally have be sold through illegal channels for lower then store price.

No one is ever going to make money selling black market nikes for 150 bucks if the regular nikes sell for 100.

In regard to other items such as guns, computers and the like, I can only say find the seediest bar in your nearest big city and see what you can pick them up for there. I'll go out on a limb and say you won't be paying sticker price for them either.


I think Street index is a poorly designed game mechanic as a set item should never have a set Street Index but rather be variable, and up to the GM. That's just my opinion however.

Yeah, that's the big reason for the black/grey market today. You can buy legal items for less there than you can elsewhere. Right now, I'd say the biggest grey market in the USA is for *legal* perscription drugs, which are cheaper across the border. Software is probably a distant second.