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This material was inspired by CyberSpace's "Black Market Program Quality Chart" and the rules presented on other sites about drug quality when the fixer fails his streetdeal roll during the acquisition process.
| Base Difficulty | 5 |
| Strength of Program | +1-10 |
| Program Size | +MU |
| Utilities | +5 |
| Controllers | +5 |
| Demons | +10 |
| Decryption | +10 |
| Protection | +10 |
| Intrusion | +12 |
| Evasion/Stealth | +12 |
| Anti-IC | +15 |
| Anti-Personnel | +18 |
First of all we need to determine how difficult it is to procure illegal software on the black market. In my games I usually just fudged this step, but I've noticed a trend to my fudging... So you can always calculate the difficulty using the table at left.
So using this system we get a difficulty of 35 (Impossible) to pick up a copy of Firestarter on the black market thanks to LiveWire at the Short Circuit (Base [5], Strength 6 [6], 6 MU [6], Anti-Personnel [18] = [35]), while a copy of Backup is difficulty 15 (Average) and probably free off a small Warez BBS (Base [5], Strength 4 [4], 1 MU [1], Utility [5] = [15]).
This difficulty has to be achieved on a Streetwise, StreetDeal, Resources or System Knowledge roll (depending on what method you are using to procure your software). Pricing is based on how much you succeed the roll by, except in the case of Resources, where a successful roll procures the software for free and in the case of StreetDeal, where all prices indicated below are reduced by 33% of the final price.
| Succeeded By | Program Cost |
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| 0-5 | 50% of list price |
| 5-10 | 25% of list price |
| 11-15 | 10% of list price |
| 16+ | Program is Free |
So what happens if you flubbed that roll? Not to worry, odds are still in favour that you picked up a copy of the soft through one channel or another... And that's really what this article was written for, right? So, if you failed the roll, your GM will roll 2D10 on the following chart, adding the amount you failed the roll to procure the warez to the 2D10 roll. No matter the result, the cost will be 40% + D10x10% (50% - 140%) of the list price for the software you want.
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