I do suppose that after reading the rules concerning buying equipment and experimenting them many as myself thougt that they were rather annoying and tended to punish teams wich weren't socialy good .My team is basically a team of killers and hence have no real social skills. Also I tried to imagine a town were they would be stores in which the sellers wouldn't…sell. So I came up with this idea ,although imperfect :
Let us not complete forget these Inquiry tests but rather imagine them as being the search of the best deal rather than any kind of deal. So in order to have the best price you'd need to look for the item ,but if you're in a hurry or have poor social skills you could get the item automatically but for a higher fee based on the availability of this item.i
I was thinking of perhaps a 5% addition per level of rarity or something and Very Rare Items not being available.

This is as I said not a complete idea as I just got it but the reason I posted it i I wanted to know what fellow game masters thought of it.
Thank you,
B. Kaedran

I'm using a hybrid system, combining the rules from DH, RT, and OW.

In my game my players are using characters built using the OW system. The OW system uses logistics for getting equipment which is very similar to the way ascension and RT handle getting gear which is roll your logistics/profit factor modified by the availability of the item. I'm running a DH game though so the characters are pretty low power to start off, they started off with a logistics of 10(you generally start around 40+ in RT). You still need commerce or inquiry to find the item you're looking for just like in RT with the same difficulty modifiers and everything. The gear is only out of the OW rulebook however as I don't really want my players getting super exotic items unless there is a story reason and I think the availability of the items is more appropriate. I then advance the players logistic score by 5 every time they would gain the equivalent of a DH rank. OW gives out roughly double the XP DH does though so I've doubled the XP numbers required for a "rank". They also getting small +/- to their logistics based on how well/badly they do on their missions.

Example:

Sgt Joe Johnson is a freshly rolled starting character with 600xp spent on advances. His logistics score is 10. When he has spent over 1000xp he'll go up a "rank" and get 5 more added to his logistics score. He's on scintilla which has a population of over 40 billion! and he wants to get himself a bolt pistol. Well according to the OW armoury a bolt pistol is very rare. So we look at the Rogue Trader chart and see that it will take 1d10 days of searching and a -10 on his commerce or inquiry test to find. Well lets assume he rolls a 01 and finds it in 5 days. He then needs to roll against his logistics. He doesn't have the crazy amounts of money a rogue trader does so he's not going to get the +30 for it being a single item. He gets -20 to his logistics for it being very rare. That puts his logistics at -10 making it impossible for him to afford.

However he gains 5 logistic rating every time he hits a new rank which in our case will be at 1k, 2k, 4k, 6k, 10k, 15k, 20k, etc…. So when he hits rank 3 he has a chance of finding the item, possibly even sooner as he can get as much as +3 logistics for a mission that went exceptionally smoothly. By the time he's a rank 8 acolyte he'll have a logistics of 50 or more making that bolt pistol very easy to get.

This may be a little slower than a regular DH character would be able to get the item but because they're created using the OW rules they players start out with gear that is generally well above what a DH character can get. For example my tech priest player started with an omnission axe, the weapon specialist has full flakk armour, a lasgun, and 4 fragg/krakk grenades, and the medic has full flakk, a combat shotgun, and can very easily patch people up where a DH character doesn't gain medicae till at the earliest rank 3-4. They also generally have more starting wounds. So overall I think my players are pretty survivable but the crazy powerful gear shouldn't enter the game too early either.

Baalkaedran said:

Well, I think that the sort of stuff you would find in a gun-store would be the stuff with high availability. I'd say that a small town of less than 10,000 souls might not even have a dedicated gun-store (but the local trader would likely have some poor rifles, stub revolvers and ammo).

But in a populated area (mid-size town, ca 50 000 souls) there would be shops selling all sorts of stuff with at least Common availability. Finding such a place would be a Routine test (Inquiry +20), and you'd be eligible to receive Assistance by two other people, bringing the test up to a +40. Even a killer should be able to manage this.

The more exotic stuff probably won't be found in a store, so your image kind of falls apart. Military grade stuff isn't sold to civilians in Dakka'n'Ammo stores across the Hive, they have to be procured through channels. Official or underworld, you probably need Contacts (see IH Chapter 9). With just a few 100 XP you too can have a man in the right place, who can procure rare firearms normally not available for purchase by the unwashed masses.

We're used to be able to buy whatever we want in a (relatively) local store, or ordering special gear from the internet. Unless it's illegal to buy, everything is available to modern man. For a price. But not so in the 41st millennium. This will vary from world to world, but the Imperium is modeled upon a medieval European lifestyle, and there were no hardware stores in your local village. There was no mail-order. You wanted a spade? You went and found a blacksmith, and bartered. You couldn’t find a blacksmith who would barter for your apples you were SOL.

So you’re in the Deblan Heights, Sector 7 of the 3d level of Spire Banthus on Sibellus. It’s crowed enough, as is most habitable areas of the hive, housing several hundred thousand souls in just a few square kilometers. There are several vendors of arms (for personal protection, and for your sacred duty should enemies of the Imperium ever threaten the rightful rule of Baron Von Denbar), but why should any of them have Heavy Bolters for sale to the civilians living here? No soul here could probably ever afford one, nor should the uppity commoners ever have the right to own such a holy item of righteous wrath and the Omissiahs might. It would threaten the ability of the Magistratum and the Adeptus Arbites to police the sector, might give the Baron sleepless nights, and as such work to undermined the safety and sanctity of Imperial rule.

It wouldn’t be in the stores even if the owner somehow got his hands on one. These things are built on-license, to order, and all belong to powerful organizations like the Imperial Guard or others who you do not want to piss off.

Having on for sale would mean awkward questions asked.

Of course, in this place there will be someone who knows how to get his hands on one. But finding this person, and convincing him to trust you enough to deal with you, now THAT is going to be a Difficult task. (as per the table on p 126)

That’s how I understand the system. That just means that messing about in Deblan Heights isn’t the best way to equip your crack team of secret agents with Heavy Bolters. Ascension brings in the Influence and Requisition rules, which works like Rogue Traders Profit and Acquisition rules. Until you get there, use Contacts.

Thanks for your replies !
Droma ,I sadly have to say that your system will not work for me as I don't have the OW and RT books,and your system seems rather complex ( not criticizing though!) but thanks for sharing!
But Darth Smeg ,although you have been rather helpful 'round the forum I have to say that you didn't get my point :
My comment is what it is ,an image and nothing more I didn't try to summarize the DH world in that sentence but was more intended as a slighlty comical and ironical remark. I do agree that some items ( depending on nature ,availability , the world you're on etc…) won't be automatically available or available at all but I take a Hive where there is a whole spire dedicated to selling ,why the **** couldn't you find a laspistol ,a sword or whatever! I just think that they wanted to highlight DH's hardship but still this get's in the way . I prefer to understand this Test as a search for the best price.
B.Kaedran

Sure, I do get your point. And I guess I should have prefaced my rant with an explanation that it was just my view of the rationale behind the rules as written.

As for your las-pistol example, you'll notice that the availability rules (and the table on p 126) say that the test becomes one step easier for each order of magnitude of the population. The table stops at 100 000, but in Rogue Trader the tables extend through 1 million and up into the many billions.

If you did find an entire spire (much more than 1 million people) dedicated to selling, a laspistol (Common availability) would be an Automatic success. Which kinda agrees with your point: In a sufficiently large market, you WILL find any mundane item you are looking for.

The Inquiry rules really only matter if you are looking for rarer stuff, or in smaller markets.

Having said that, I agree with your experiences, and mostly say to my players that when in a hive they can find things of Scarce availability automatically.

Yeah my system is pretty much by the book rogue trader except with a much lower starting profit factor and without the 30 bonus for an individual item to represent the fact that DH characters start off as pretty low level minions instead of a wealthy RT dynasty. So if you want to judge based on that RT says in populations that are 100,000+ anything up to plentiful is automatic to find.

All classes should get Inquiry at level 1.

As for availability, in this case certain Peer talents can be useful like Administratum, AdMech, Underworld or (in some cases) Ecclesiarchy.

Perhaps I should give more details about the system I'm trying to create.

My goal is to help players get better gear more easily at their expense though.
They have the choice when searching for an item to either look for it the way the rules lay it out (i.e ab Inquiry Test) OR pay a higher price but get it automatically. With these rules the Inquiry Test represents the search for the best deal .
On a purely mechanical level this is how it would work:
-First of all Items Rarer than scarce are definetly not automatically available (that'ld be too easy even for my taste),and so are illegal ,too advanced ,Exotic Items specific to a world etc… It is still ultimately up to the GM to choose which item can be purchased this way .
-The price would increase by five per cent per step (i.e Abundant :+5%,Plentiful :+10% etc…) which for me "punishes " the players enough for choosing the "easy way"

B. Kaedran

It's your game so do it however you want. I think most of us don't really see the point in making getting gear easier for the players especially if you're running it by the book DH as it's by far the easiest system to get gear upgrades in. DH only requires the roll to find the gear and after that as long as the player has the cash they get the item. All of the other systems generally require 2 rolls or have some other restriction in place.

It's also very easy to just have your inquisitor gift the players with an item when they do well on a mission or when they reach a high rank or just give them mission specific gear. If you haven't run DH before either I really suggest not making it easier for players to get powerful items as you really won't know how best to challenge your players at that point, they'll simply crush your sessions.

After reviewing the rules and taking into account your comments I realized that it isn't so bad . However ,I have another issue about money but I'll make another topic about it .
Thanks a lot ,it really helped me!
B.Kaedran