The idea is to keep them from having tons of the stuff. Obtaining illegal ammo should be hard for a beginning group.

Rolling once is probably fine, because it does take longer. Going from 10 rounds to 20-100 rounds doubles the time to obtain (interval increases from 12 hours to 1 day). 110-1000 rounds quadruples the time (interval 2 days).

P.S. Of course there are issues with ammo, but just clogging up the game with rolling, rolling, rolling is a crappy way to deal with that. Especially since it generally doesn't.

When was the last time you saw runners use 'tons' of ammo and things worked out well? Yeah, sometimes it happens, but usually when there is 'tons' of ammo involved very bad things have happened....or the GM set up a senario that assumed lots of shooting. If the later then what's the problem with letting characters have access to the ammo? Oh yeah that's right, the special ammo stats are ---insane---. So what is the real problem then, assuming there is one? The ammo stats.

Bulk discount doesn't exactly work in a high demand ilegal product. It doesn't take much of a scanner to detect a massive quanity of the special ammo. It also assumes they have that much on hand. Attempting to buy a 1,000 rounds of EXEX ammo from your dealer can be hard if he only gets that much every month and isn't prepared to screw his other clients just for you. Buying in bulk is cheeper for various reason One is you save a but load on shipping. Its easier to ship 10,000 units to one location then to 1,000 locations. However "bulk" usually means alot. I don't thing 600 rounds is very bulk. A ten thousand rounds of ammo would be bulk

When dealing with extraterritoriality you have to deal with checkpoints (which has tighter secturity and mroe scans) or border jumping, where you won't be taking a bulk shipment while trying to sneak across the border unnoticed.

oh yeah just break into the place where they make the weapons. Why not just rob a gunshop with knife? You can bet that place would have high security and quick responce from local law enforcement or even military. Every crate would have a secruity and stealth tag. (which by the way are immune to the tag eraiser) It be a nightmare to find and remove each one.
And I'd wager those guards would be using the very ammo you've come to steal.

And just how would a hacker forge a certificate that would allow them to buy all those rounds? If the security had an average logic of 2 or more, they'd see through it. Either from payment coming from a private off shore account as opposed to a corparte or military one. Or payment in the form of credsticks. Not to mention they'd have top of the line backround checks on the runners fake sin cards. If a runner happens to have a real sin the card they could just kiss it goodbye as the card would be linked to the sale of a truck load of bullets.

Not to mention buying a bulk shipment could cost you a couple million.

Maybe you think a weapons depoy storing military hardware would be low to moderate security but I don't.
If it was so easy, as you make it claim it wouldn't have availbility 12F. (I am talking about EXEX here)
I also don't think that they'd just accept the card or what ever from the backwater country and say here you go now fork over the cred. They'd do the legwork and check up on it. So near as I can tell buying from the source really isn't an option until the runners become really powerful and skilled. Or just live where its legal to carry the stuff.

Those kind of forge'd IDs are supposed to fail with a little checking, at least according to the rules.
Making valid SIN card's requires a vast underground network. Your talking about the same kind of thing. (you'd also need a valid attached sin card) your UCAS sin card won't help if the "end user lisence" is for Peru.

And if the hacker just orders it via the matrix. I think they may notice the odd shipping address.

You make it sound way to easy, like a team of four fresh 400BP runners could make off with a few million in weapons. I don't buy that.

I don't think the basics of smuggling would have changed to much in 2070. Most of that ilegal gear is bought where it is legal then smuggled to where it is ilegal.

But if you have a semi-load of illegal products then you're going to want to get rid of that semi quickly because it is rather traceable. The easiet way to do this is to sell in bulk.


Besides, there is still no good reason for any legitimate extraterritorial arms dealer to respect the legality codes of any particular nation.

The Army protects stuff well, but, a lone Ninja can sneak in, take a pocketful of stuff, then Ninja back out.

This is why you can't get a bulk discounton APDS ammo ... Ninja pockets are teensy.

...

Yuo don't wanna know about the Rocket Faeries.

"What do you mean I cant get a bulk discount on twenty nukes?"

And a fair amount of that is then stolen from guarded military depots and armories every year as well. (This applies equally to real life)

If you think it would be that difficult to steal a bunch of small arms ammunition that 'beginning runners' could not peform the task, then just what kind of runs do you think would be an appropriate challenge?

Heh, not to mention how much of it is stolen by the people who are supposed to be guarding it.

The easiest way to get your hands on this kind of thing is to find a quartermaster who is willing to "expend" some ammunition in a bogus training exercise for a nominal fee.

Ever seen an ammo depot? The ammo is in bunkers with big heavy blast doors. Locked with really good locks. With an intrusion detection system. Inside a fence, usually patrolled and monitored. Inside a military base, typically several miles inside. A base full of bored MPs hoping for some excitement.

And there is no sign on the outside as to which of the 40 or so bunkers has the ammo you might want, or where in 500-2000 sq meters of floor space in the bunker it might be, as all the pallets stacked ceiling to floor tend to look fairly alike. So you also have to break into the logistics system for the ASP to find the warehouse records.

We are talking about Forbidden ammo like APDS and EXEX. That are never shipped to UCAS stores.
Not standard ammo you only need a sin card to buy.

I do believe that Crusher Bob was referring to the ammo stored on military bases and such, which is stored and shipped and bulk.

However, one should remember that possession, purchase, and distribution are three different acts and just because one is illegal that doesn't mean that all three are illegal.
In this case, SR4 explicitly states that it is illegal to purchase or possess a forbidden item but it says nothing about selling illegal items. One could extrapolate that a store would not be committing a crime by selling forbidden weapons, only the buyer would be liable and thus stores could stock and sell such weapons with impunity.
This is even more true considering that legality codes apply only to the UCAS and not to extraterritorial facilities. In a world where every other convince store and fast food joint is the sovereign territory of a foreign government, anyone should be able to buy a grenade launcher at a retail store.


My opinion is that one shouldn't worry too much about availability or legality codes. The more hoops your PCs have to jump through to obtain vital equipment the more your game devolves into The Price is Right. When you have to roll separate availability for every 10 bullets then you're PCs are going to spend entire gaming sessions doing nothing but shopping. Personally, I ain't Bob Barker and I don't want to be Bob Barker. I'm not going to spay or neuter anyone's pets.

So I say that they should just make their lists and make one availability test for everything on it because that's faster and easier than doing the Showcase Showdown. Unless your ammo rhymes with 'buclear' it ain't worth spending so much time on.

Wow, I never ran into anyone who was in a Guard unit that actually stored ammo regularly, much less grenades. No unit I was ever in did it, as it just wasn't that hard to get a truck or a helicopter from bulk storage, which made the risk of having it on hand excessive. The 100% monthly inventory process must have been pretty fun, given the requirement to report even a single lost/stolen explosive grenade to HQDA and OSD.

Dod 5100.76-m wants much more secure arms rooms than some of the ones I saw in the Guard, but I'm not sure how effective the upgrade process has been since the early 90s.

Oh, and the DA/OSD reporting threshold on small arms ammo (under 40mm) is 5,000 rounds lost or stolen.