So I was thumbing through my old copy of Neuromancer at work last night and I came to the point where a man is renting weapons out the back of a restaurant, a small cheap gun and a tazer to be exact, and that got me thinking about doing it in game as a way for a weapon specialist/collector to make some cred on the side. The question though is how to go about doing it. I mean do you charge a percentage of gun cost a day or a set amount? How much of a deposit should there be? Should there be a "Rent To Own" option. I've got a really blurry idea of this concept right now but almost anything you guys could add would help me out, I'm sure. Mix this with the Black Market Pipeline quality from RC and your character may be able to get himself set up big. If he has enough customers that is. And furthermore, what would the Star think about the practice? Would they care, officially, about the business? Hit me back with thoughts.

Haven't you ever gone and rented a gun in real life? Think worn extractors, crappy magazines, overpriced ammunition, and maybe crazy tourists all wanting to rent.

In real life usually it's a day rental for use on a range which usually just ends up being like 20 minutes of shooting if you shoot slowly. In some dark dystopian future where people might rent to carry for self-defense or what have you monthly or daily might make sense. Like, a woman has a vengeful stalker ex-boyfriend. She fears he might try something violent so she rents a gun for 2 weeks. The daily rate or weekly rate should end up being less than the cost of buying a new gun, or else she should have just tried to do that, but I imagine the gun is in poor condition, maybe it needs to be cleaned, and since she doesn't plan on shooting more than one person the rental place charges her double the regular cost per rounds for 1 or 2 mags full of regular ammunition.

treat it like renting a car today. They are going to want enough of a security that you won't just run off with the weapon.

As for the quality, that goes to a places' rep.

"well sure you can get a piece a Gino's but if you can spend just a little more, hit "Rocco's" much more reliable stuff."

Well different B/R skills can keep up with the quality of the guns, but I like what I'm hearing so far. The idea for over charging ammo and then buying any unspent back, at a much lower price, popped up to me also. But I guess what I'm looking for is an idea of a price. Let's take a look at something like the Colt America L36. It's small, it's pretty easy to get, and it's cheap at 150 nuyen. Girl wants to rent the gun for a week because of crazy ex boyfriend and his need to force her to make him aerodynamic. Now for something that small and cheap I would assume she would just want it so IF something goes down she can return the murder weapon. So maybe 50% deposit on price of gun, with a 5-10 percent of total cost per day rental. Sound like something so far?

Then we have the ganger with a grudge who has to take care of a rival drug lab or something. He wants to rent a Mitsubishi Yakusoku MRL which has an availability of 20F and a price tag of 12,000 so that he can deal with the problem swiftly. Would the above idea work well? Dropping 6,000 deposit and paying 1,200 a day for the rental?

Sorry if this seems too fine a detail to care about but my GMs watch every yen, haha.

OK, a few thoughts:

1.) The gun being in poor condition is less a problem with someone's B/R skill and more just neglect. I think most people who work at gun shops would be more than capable of changing an extractor or a magazine spring. It's just that they don't. They get paid whatever their wage is and they're not going to order replacement parts and clean the rental gun unless the boss tells them to. If we think Shadowrun and it's a seedy illegal rental place then it becomes even less likely that they'd keep the handgun in good condition than and draw attention to themselves by periodically ordering replacement parts.

To this end, I'd even go so far as to say that seedy rental guns will likely have bad magazine springs, extractors, and maybe worn out barrels. Every time the gun is fired I'd have a certain chance of a stovepipe jam or a failure to feed and the shooter would have to manually cycle a new round, which is a Simple Action and which the character only knows how to do if he or she actually has a Pistols score. Maybe there's a certain chance of a doublefeed which requires the shooter eject the magazine, use a Simple Action to clear the jam, re-insert the magazine, and use a Simple Action to chamber a new round, all of which eats up their combat actions as appropriate. The worst thing that could happen is a cartridge goes off out of battery because it doesn't feed properly and the handgun destructs and injures the shooter. The chance of any of these things happened could be increased if the gun is considered to be dirty, and if the gun is small.

We're starting to get into D&D table-rolling territory here, but then I'd roll a D6 and on a roll of 1-3 the barrel on the handgun is also worn out. All shots at Long range or further suffer from an additional +1 TN penalty due to the rifling being damaged.

Replacing all these parts and bringing the gun back into good working condition would simply require a cleaning kit, the appropriate replacement parts, and I guess a single success in a B/R skill check against TN 2 or 3. If the skill check fails it means that the extractor wasn't fully snapped into place and it falls out of the gun after several shots, which in turn basically means that the gun probably isn't a practical weapon anymore since it can't eject casings.

2.) A lot of rental places probably would not want you to do anything illegal with the gun since they don't want trouble coming to their door. So they might be okay with the girl renting it because she has an abusive ex-boyfriend, but if someone went into the store and said "I'm going to rent a handgun so that I can shoot a corporate exec" they wouldn't rent it to him. Maybe rental places generally have a policy to cooperate with any corporate or government entity that comes looking for you in terms of giving them information and helping them find you. Maybe some places have pretty low rental rates, but they take a hair sample or something and the owner is a mage who will use this to come after you if he needs to.

3.) In terms of cost I think the rental costs overall would have to be quite low. Otherwise, someone is much better off just buying their own gun. When I think about it, I'd have there be a per-day rental cost which is pretty high for what it is, but which is still a lot cheaper than buying a new gun if you only rent the handgun for a few days. Just as an example I'm making up, maybe the rental fee on the Colt America is 25 nuyen per day. It's still way cheaper to rent if you're only going to keep it for a day or two or three. But to stop you from just running away with the gun there could be a deposit worth 50% the price of the gun which you get back when you return, or if not the hair sample.

That way, if a McHugh's cook offends a gangbanger and is afraid the gangbanger will come looking for him, he can go to a payday loan center and get a loan to rent the Colt America for several days. He'll be able to pay back the loan because he gets his deposit back when he returns the gun, whereas he wouldn't be able to afford just going out and buying one with the same loan.

There are two broad categories you have to address here;

1) "Legal" gun rentals - you get the guys SIN (and you better believe you check if it's legit, probably a rating 4-6 scan). In this case, you're pretty sure the gun will be returned. The more certain you are, the more you can invest in the gun in keeping it maintained, and the lower the initial deposit. In some cases there might be "gun insurance" like you do with automobiles, but again, better believe it requires a SIN. People could probably rent a gun for a month at 20% of the initial price as a deposit (modified based on availability and restrictions and the like), and some percentage per day. I'm not sure how often you need to rotate out guns, but that would probably figure in heavily. If guns can be rented for decades, the daily rental charge will be pretty low.

2) "Less-than-legal" rentals - "some dude" wants to rent a heater for the night "to go practice at the range" or just "to bust some drek up". In this case, the guns are going to have some quality about them that makes them less valuable. They've already been linked to a crime, they're seriously broken, they're stolen or whatever. The guns will be poorly maintained. They'll be maintained well enough to show to the customer, but beyond that, the assumption is it'll only be used a few times before it's returned again, and if it fails, it's not like he's going to ask for his money back. In this case, the assumption is most guns won't last more than a few months before someone decides to just dump it. The deposit will be about 30-50% the cost of a new gun. Daily charge will likely be high, but they figure most people won't go for that, and perhaps they can automatically charge additional days of daily rental if the guy doesn't return his gun on time. Of course, they remind their customers that they'll report any missing guns to the Star (after a kind forgiveness period), so people probably pay off the difference promptly. Their business plan isn't so much to make money on the rental, but to convert broken guns into cash by selling them to those in need (and to profit by "cleaning" guns used in crimes). The customers benefit by only paying full price for a gun when they actually need to dump a weapon because the cops are on them, not every time they commit a crime, or think they'll commit a crime.

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Smart gun renters will definitely want to put in one of those Safe Target systems. . . .

Over here in the UK in real life where gun crime is still fairly rare outside of a few very specific small areas of the country and firearms are mostly illegal - generally only .22 caliber handguns, shotguns with magazine capable of carrying no more than two cartridges and certain hunting rifles are allowed and you have to apply for a license first - there is a trade in criminals renting guns for short periods. Going from memory of how it works the renter has to be known to the gun dealer or vouched for by someone they know, they pay so much to rent the gun and ammunition for a set period e.g. a day or a week, and if they actually use/fire the gun then they have to keep it and pay the dealer the full price for it. I have vague memories of some dealers being known to require that the renter stumps up the full price for the gun and bullets as a deposit and then returns it minus the rental fee when they return the goods. It seems to be mainly used by people that want to flash a gun about a bit, threaten someone with one or carry one during a deal as a precaution in case the other side tries anything.

And don't get me started on gun converters in the UK. They take airguns, and add or change certain components to allow the guns to fire live ammo. After that, they deal exactly like in FlakJacket's post.

Airguns? That's a new one on me. From what I've read I thought it was mainly old deactivated regular firearms, pre-1995 models since the ones after that are much harder to do, and the latest trend of Baikal IZH-79 pistols converted Lithuania and smuggled into the UK making it the newest gangland favourite.

That's what I heard. They have done it with old starter pistols.

In the US, I've heard of cases where a particular circle of people (hereinafter called a "gang", correctly or no) owns a particular firearm they use for "bad stuff". They'll drop the gun off at a public spot after use and leave it available, free of charge, for the next guy. The idea being, if the gun is open to whoever happens to find it, it's harder to attach it to a particular individual at a crime scene, and therefore less useful as evidence. I'd have to look it up to remember the details. The bad news is it provides competition to semi-legitimate businessmen, such as the one above. The good news is it gives younger people an easier "in" to an exciting and profitable hobby.

Well, firearms have been around for centuries, so it's really not surprising that people in the UK basically just go and make their own, despite the fact that the UK government doesn't fully appreciate the extent to which ordinary citizens need them.