I was skimming through the arsenal table and some of the new expansions that keep adding and adding more modifications to weapons, then I see the new gun havens books and I wonder... "who care ?".

It seems that no player would use a gun like it was sold but just as a way to provide a basic price and damage.

I am not opposed to classicals mods : silencer, laser, interface, ammo type and such.

But when you can nilly-willy adjust ammo capacity, rate of fire, type of fire, underbarrel additinal guns and such... I think we have long departed from the modding area and are in the "build your own" weapon.

Who would use a SS pistol when you can change it to a BF or even FA with massive recoil reduction ? what is the point of the Ingram and all its expansion when basically every other gun you encounter is modded to the top ? Why are the NPCs on official books never having any mods on their weaponnary while every character on forum, even begineer one got massively customised guns ?

Looks to me like things have gone out of hand.

More of a return to the 'out of hand' days of SR3, really. Gun design from the ground up didn't need rules, they just make the terrible min-maxing problems worse.

The customers.

Seriously, people keep asking for (and buying) new gear books.

So they'll keep making them.


-k

Honestly, it'd be nice if you didn't *have to* mod every gun to hell and back, so that the base weapons are indeed nothing but stat shells (and collections of 'free' integral mods). Modded weapons do cost much, much more, and in theory have crazy Avail and the requirement of a good Armorer source. I feel like lots of people ignore most of this?

I had my players go through an Armorer contact for their needs. Custom fit Bear Armor Ain't cheap. Neither is the crazy tricked out sniper rifle with the chameleon coating that lets you hide in plain sight. It also may not be available immediately. Especially Bear Armor. That took multiple weeks of effort.

Most (but not all) of my characters use stock guns. They are cheap, after all.

Style.

...

Seriously. Not everythign is about min/max-ing for the best. Sometimes it's about style over substance.

I've got a "gunslinger" character statted out. Sure, I made strong use of the Weapon Mod system. But I wanted him to use a revolver, rather than an autoloader. And I didn't go with the Super Warhawk. No, I went with the Cavalier Deputy. I added a Personalised Grip, Melee Hardening (the character has the martial art "Firefight"), skinlink, and an internal smartgun. Oh, and two levels of custom look. She's a black-enamelled, intricately gold-inlay-engraved work of stunningly-gorgeous art.

IOW, I tweaked the gun that looked mostly right, to be the gun that looked perfectly right (and also worked the way I needed it to). Really, the onlythings there that aren't essentially "accessories" or else purely aesthetic, are the personalised grip and the melee hardening.






I generally tend to either (a) make very light use of the modification rules (one or two tweaks), or (b) I make sure my character has the skills and tools to do the work himself.

Or maybe ©, I don't use the modification rules to speak of, and consider every gun to be outright disposable at the end of any run where I pulled the trigger more than zero times.

Yeah, it's looking like Gun Haven 2 is going to be on the Top 15 list longer than Safehouses was.

My players scavenged enough AKs off the ghoul ambush in Dusk that they were using them as throwaways before selling the rest wholesale. Sure they had their custom gear, but it's really nice to untraceable guns you've got no attachment to.

Which is a shame, because I'm more likely to make frequent use of Safehouses, than I will make use of both Gun Heavens put together.

We have a regular campaign going and as a break we decided to run a few "War" runs with different characters. I let them create the characters and then gave them x amount of karma to upgrade skills and y amount of money to purchase what they wanted. Pretty over-powered characters came out of that experiment. Then we went back to our regular campaign and they got the idea to try and get the weapons (or close facsimiles there of) that they were using in the War runs and found out just how hard those are to get. They have played a month in game time and the sniper rifle is still not ready. They had to find an Armorer and hire him full-time just to make all the mods they wanted.

Availability and cost are a b*#tch in the "real world" when money and time mean something!

I suppose another thing that may get overlooked is the 6 slot maximum on weapons, at least that is the max without GM say so. So long as you stick with that max, it is pretty damn hard to turn an SA pistol into a fully recoil comped full auto weapon. In fact it is impossible, given that pistols can't use gas vents and the full auto mod costs 4 mod slots unless you add it to weapon with burst fire already.
So with that in mind, I like the guns that come with extra goodies attached, like the ones in Gun Heaven 1 & 2, since those are mods I don't need to add myself and gives room to add other things I do want or need.
As for modding weapons, the time interval for the mod itself is only 2 hours. We usual rig out an Evo Meta assistant drone from Runner's Companion to do the work in a shop for us so it can work while we run. Make sure your shop has Feng Shui as a quality and add fuzzy logic to the drone plus some AR plans and you can get most work done fairly easy. Just need to make sure you have some good contacts to get some of the more exotic mods (Ceramic Components for example) but most other things are easy to get and easy to add.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

To be fair, Shadowrun has always been like shopping for guys, who are, as a general rule, far more interested in shopping for fictional guns and super powers than they are in shopping for mundane things like food or clothes.

I enforce Availability tests in my game. You want that badass piece of hardware? Roll to find out how many weeks it takes you to track one down. On the last run, my technomancer wanted to build a commlink with straight sixes in all stats, to run a R6 Agent that could teamwork his hacking with him. He won't actually have it until next run, though, due to the high Availability ratings involved.

If the gun is fed from a removable magazine, that's not a problem either. Hell, I'm going to offer my players extended magazines for the Ruger 100 - okay, maybe the company is sticking to Bill Ruger's maxim "No honest man needs more than ten rounds", but even now there are manufacturers of so many different custom parts it'd make your head spin.
To say nothing of those 50-round Glock mags. Sure, slapping that kind of magazine on a pistol is a +2 concealability modifier for the purposes of search, but when you have to reload less often...

Ya know what? I'm gonna take the opposite stand as the original poster. There aren't enough standard weapons available, NOR are there enough weapon mods! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Particularly melee. Oh gads do we need better melee weapons. Melee in generally just needs some love for the non-troll, non-pink mohawk population.

More variety in general would be good, but also more specific weapon designs and details and maybe even a major corporation or two getting into the act designing and selling their own special flavor of designer painsticks for a sort of Desert Wars equivalent melee combat trideo show or something. I'd also like to see some stun damage blunt weapons other than the sap, the taser type dealies, and the two or three improvised weapons which deal stun. More concealable melee stuff would be very nice. And I'd just LOVE some high tech melee weapons in the vein of the Super Sledge or Power Fist from Fallout, or maybe a Non-Eutactic Blade a la Deus Ex. Overall just more flexibility and potential for melee, please! I don't care if it's a suboptimal skillset lacking in range, falling short in raw damage dealing, and requiring both strength AND agility to use properly, there is just something inordinately awesome about melee combat!

Also, more and better laser weapons!

Right now Stick and Shock is vastly superior in pretty much every way - cheaper, easier to get a hold of, restricted instead of forbidden, less bulky and more concealable, no damage falloff with range which gets doubled or tripled based on visibility modifiers (in addition to ordinary attack dice penalties for range), no Exotic Weapons skill required*, benefits from skill specializations (see previous comment), same average damage, same armor reduction. In contrast, the only benefits lasers have over SnS are 1) no recoil, 2) rechargeable batteries (big whoop), and 3) can't be weakened via Nonconductivity armor mods, requiring instead high mirror reflectiveness and GM fiat. Lasers should be a tradeoff, but that means a sidegrade rather than a downgrade. They need to excel at something that other weapons don't, and currently they just fail to do so.

And more mods all around! The current Aresenal list is pretty robust, but there's room for improvement!

* Who even uses exotic weapons? The separate skills required are probably the one major reason no one I know of ever even considers them. It's not worth the karma or build points to be able to use a single weapon, or a very limited weapon family like lasers. And I don't just mean that's it's merely sub-optimal... we're talking a lot of points here for what is typically either a gimmicky weapon used for style, or a sidegrade at best.

~Umi

Well this kind of modding is perfectly in the idea I have of modding, it is mainly cosmetic with a bit of confort and use for melee. What I think is wrong is changing a weapon into another class of weapon by heavily modding it. Especially as it become a better class of weapon than the original and thus make the standard original useless. If you can mod a Pistol to be a better SMG than the SMG listed are then what is the point of the SMG list. Same for light machinegun that are subpar to upgraded automated weapons (far less recoil).

There is Min-Maxing guns and modifying guns.

I usually try to emulate something I have seen in reality. For that we have style over substance, but, I do tend to be a little munchkin now and then.

Take the LeMatt revolver from the US civil war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeMat_Revolver
9 round cylinder revolver with an underbarrel single shot shotgun round.
So, we take a Cavalier Depudy, give it underbarrel weapon (Eichiro Hatamoto II) and an increased cylinder.
Not a bad weapon, but horribly expensive since we get 225+800+500.

What about a combination gun - usually a shotgun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_gun
These will be a bit more tricky but you could take for example a PJSS Model 55 Shotgun with an underbarrel PJSS Model 55 shotgun. It would look something like this: http://www.missouriwhitetails.com/forums/f...&aid=154648

Or if you got the cash take the elephant rifle with an underbarrel elephant rifle - its only 12K. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

... sheer genius.

And it reminds me to modify the "Increased Cylinder" modification. When they wrote that, there were only 6-round sylinders in SR. It need to be either a % increase, or a flat "+2 capacity" mod. Because for a 7-cylinder like the Deputy, InCy just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Pistols can't have Gas Vents built-in. SMGs can. Nor can Pistols have Foregrips.

Now sure, I can mod a Ruger Thunderbolt with FA firing, extended clip (to 15c), a folding stock (powered), electronic firing, and a personalised grip. Plus the stock Smartlink, of course. The gun costs 3,165 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) empty. It has 3 points of recoil compensation, a base damage of 5P, and a base AP of -1.

OTOH, I could just buy a Colt Cobra TZ-118 (the smartgun model), and add some accessories (Foregrip and Gas Vent 3). Base damage is 5P, base AP is 0, and Recoil Compensation is 5. It costs only 1,150 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) and has a 32c magazine - IOW, just over twice the capacity of the Thunderbolt, 2 more points of recoil compensation, one less armorpenetration ... and otherwise the same, for just over 1/3 the cost. And the Cobra isn't even an especially-good SMG to begin with ...!

And then there's Availability to consider. The Cobra TX-118 has a 5R, with two accessories at 2- and 6R. The Thunderbolt is 12R, with mods at 10R, 4R, 4R, 6R, 4-, and 2-. Which do you think will be easier to get ahold of? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Finally: the Cobra still has six unused modification slots. It, too, can be tricked out (Electronic firing, personalised grip, 100-round drum magazine), and become a very fearsome little gun.


... except, you know, you can add the same recoil compensation to the big guns, too.

Just enforce availability and use the B/R rules to the fullest and you won't have to worry about things so much.

Stock weapons have tons of uses that your nifty little modified personal weapons don't, such as the ability to simply throw the weapon off a bridge without waving bye-bye to your hard earned nuyen. Consider holding a single weapon from that stole crate of stock rifles that you're selling to the local gangs. That way when they go out on a crime spree with their hardware, and you use one on a run, you know the cops are going to waste some time considering the gang as suspects so you can get out of town while you wait for the heat to cool off.

If you're always using your favorite weapon, you're going to develop an M.O. Even Jayne didn't use Vera in every episode of Firefly...

Basically everything _Pax._ just said. I've seen quite some hate for the modding of firing mechnisms, but if you take a closer look, they're not so very frightening at all, I think.
I make a lot of use of the modification rules. It fits my character, too. I usually use custom tailored guns for very specific purposes on the character and his drones. Additional guns from new sourcebooks add more possible variants and shells for that, if nothing else. I just read the book "A Very Private Gentleman", this contributed nicely to the work my character is doing there and gave me some great ideas for style.
Modding can get really expensive with some mods, too, so if you have to eventually dumb the gun, you're losing quite an amount of money (same goes for drones).

Another reason, guns modded out reflect a personal investment by the character into a piece of equipment. To me this makes it perfectly legal to use it to create a link through ritual spell casting if such a weapon is recovered, found, stolen, etc.

However a stock pistol used once and dropped next to the body has little to no astral signature and makes it real tough to find the shooter once you wipe down any fingerprints

Better yet, a stock pistol that's properly disposed of rather than just dropped next to a body.

Or, best, it has the fingerprints INSIDE the pistol of someone you want to be blamed for the crime. Oh, it's easy enough to explain the fingerprints on the grip of the pistol with a good lawyer, but on the parts you can only get to when stripping and cleaning the pistol?