Buying and selling

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Buying, selling, and trading is the core of the financial economy in the game.

Game Rules Description

The universal monetary unit of Shadowrun is called the "nuyen". 1 nuyen is roughly equivalent in buying power to 1 USD today.

Completely legal purchases, such as clothing and food, in Shadowrun can be done at any store (just like walking into a Wal-Mart today). To acquire illegal items, such as guns, there is a different approach.

Generally, a PC will get in touch with an NPC to acquire an item (Fixer, or item specific type such as a mechanic or technician). They have to make an extended negotiation+charisma test with a threshold equal to the item's availability (a single number attached to the item's statistics). The user gains 1 bonus die in this test for every 25% extra of the items cost they are willing to spend, to a max of 10 dice.

To sell an item, a PC will again contact an appropriate NPC (as above). The initial price is 30% of default listed price. They make an extended negotiation+charisma test with a threshold of 10. They may add 1 extra die to each test for every 5% they choose to remove from the asking price, to a max of 10 dice.

Technical Implementation

The important different between buying/selling and trading on the technical side is that each has a different pre-condition and a different interface. Buying/Selling happens between an NPC and a PC, the NPC advertises much like a store and the price negotiation can be per item. Trading happens between two PCs and involves negotiation only over the final terms of the transaction.

As we want to enforce a concept of depreciation in the game and looting is generally discouraged in Shadowrun, we will add an extra quality to some items generally referred to as "Stolen". A "stolen" item is one that has greatly diminished value because its owner now knows that it is gone. The classic example would be some sort of high powered rifle someone pulls off of a dead corporate guard. While it would be 1,000 nuyen to buy, since the corp knows it is stolen, merchants will be less likely to pay for it. The amount of depreciation forced by "stolen" needs practical testing, but for now we will make it so it drops initial price to 15% instead of the usual 30% for selling items.

To further stress depreciation, items will accumulate wear and tear. This "damage" can be repaired, with diminishing restorative quality, over the life of the item until one day it finally just can't be repaired. Again, this is experimental, but: It should cost about 20% of the items value to completely restore it. Every time it is fixed, its total damage absorption capability is cut down by 5% (linearly). This means an items can only be repaired 20 times (giving it 5*20!*(original damage points) total damage points it can take). Implanted equipment, cyber and bioware, suffers damage, but not the linear loss of total damage points.