Buying A Contact?

By countrugen, in Game Mechanics

Posted at

This may be a bit late in the development process to include this as an option, but I think the "Buying a Contact" element of Shadowrun 4th Edition would be perfect here and encourage and empower the players to help direct the game story. The way it works is fairly simple.

A "Contact" can be bought with XP or money or destiny points or some such other method. A "Contact" has two attributes that a PC can pay for with their XP: Loyalty and Influence.
Influence: scale from 1 to 5. 1 is a Contact with very little influence and 5 is a contact with incredible influence.
Loyalty: scale from 1 to 5. 1 is very little loyalty to the PC in question and 5 is ultimate loyalty.
There is a 3rd attribute of course, that of "Occupation." The PC would choose that. The Occupation could be anything.
By way of example:
Influence(1) = local waitress at a bar.
Influence(2) = local owner of a bar.
Influence(3) = regional owner of an entire line of bars.
Influence(4) = national owner of an entire line of bars.
Influence(5) = politician in charge of all bar regulation in the country.
Just throwing this out there! :)
Thanks for reading!
Posted at

That's a good idea. And at this point it's definitely too late, but that would have been a good talent for a politico or scoundrel.

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I like the idea as well, and something like that could be added in a later supplement (or the later games), but nothing is stopping you (or anyone) from adding it as a home brew option. I would be ok with that as well in my game.

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I could also see this as a gaming session-based contact where you could spend a FP(s) to aquire.

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Thanks for the input fellas. I've decided to incorporate this into a future game (after we've gotten playtesting out of the way) but I'm leaning towards credits and FP expenditure as the method of "paying" for the contact.