Yes, but in a really really long running SR3 game. Plus some of the L337 ammo came out after we started that game.

*raises hand*

Numerous times. Teams travel overseas and can't take all their favorite toys. Sometimes I blow up their houses or create reasons they can't go back to their homes. Or they're hunted and have to flee with what they have.

Seriously, if your player's are arguing they're carrying 1000 rounds of EX-EX on their person, its time for another bitch slap.

- J.

my people usually carry enough to reload 3 or 4 times more than enough per mission.

Which is fine for most instances. I'm just saying there are plenty of instances where the amount they can carry will be exceeded by their ability to use or transport it.

- J.

Never encountered that. If we need equipment at the end of a trip, we either bring it with us (stowed in luggage, and backed by fake licenses where possible) or smuggle it in-country. Granted, the PC's tried to bitchslap the troll's player, who wanted to bring a case of grenades...

Still, with 3 or 4 reloads, you've got enough bullets to kill a small army. Given the accuracy of shadowrunners, even the noncombative ones, each of those is likely to hit their target. If you have to kill that many people, you're doing something wrong.

This being the main reason ammo costs are so negligible, I think.
Usually, even reasonably good shots miss quite a significant portion of the time in combat situations, and automatic weapons positively guzzle ammo as if it's some heavily addicting softdrink. A few extra per bullet would be a reasonable counterpoint, if people actually had to use the stuff, but alas, the SR rules don't mimic that all that well.

That is true. I've considered several approaches to fix that, but they stumble over the playability issue. How long do you want your average fight to last? I find it take 30 seconds to several minutes per IP per player.

I know how you feel. My group has gone through about 3 different house rule versions trying to up ammo consumption once, but they were a lot more work than such a small detail is worth.

Meh. Sounds like lazy GMing to me.

All jokes aside, in comic books the key ways where an uber character like Superman was challenged was not on one:one slugfests with equally or more superior foes. The real challenges came when he was hit where it hurts - being robbed of his powers, his human friends being threatened, innocents who couldn't protect themselves at risk, etc.

Likewise, I like to hit my players where it hurts. Shadowrun is not a game of endless ammo and I've never treated it as such. Most times, sure, ammo count is not an issue. But I recommend putting your players in a situation where they realise they might not have enough ammo and watch how they react.

I remember running Double Exposure and the final scene where the PCs find the bug lair. My PCs went in saddled for bear. Despite knowing what to expect, they were scared shitless. Ammo count, while certainly not the driving factor, I can assure you every time I made them scratch off full auto burst or take off a clip or a grenade, you bet your ass they were nervous as hell.

I guess its a case of how you use it. I'm just trying to say that forcing PCs to worry about conserving ammo is a fun way to turn up the heat on a highly skilled team that doesn't usually break sweat.

- J.

I know in the game we just had end, my GM limited everyone starting off to 3 reloads per weapon in their starting gear, because of the whole "Wow! It is easier to get my ammo at chargen? Alright! STOCK UP!" syndrome.

However, my group exclusively used Stick n Shock and Gel Rounds. We did have one player who had a clip of EX-EX, and he only broke it out for facing a big, nasty troll. The thing is, really, the Gel was the most commonly used round simply because, well...admittedly, our PCs were not Min-maxed builds..Our best pistol person had an agility of 6, with Agility Boost power 2, Smartlink, and skill of Pistols(Semi Auto) 5(+2), so was rolling naturally a pool of 15(Agility boost would get 6 dice for it, so average of 17 dice)...so, had issues hitting where the SnS would do the most effect when taking into account bad guys rolling 3-6 dice to dodge, and then rolling 5(3 body + 2 remaining armour) dice to soak...I saw that power 6 sometimes be rather marginal, since why would security NOT wear electically insulated clothes, given the liklihood of runners using SnS?

Firstly, I run an action-oriented game. Taking a cue from my SR2 experience most of the heaviest combat goes on outside of the run site itself, although everyone has runs that go south on occasion. Shooting bunches of people is common. So is shooting a hippo with a rocket launcher, but that's a whole other thing (and actually quite rare).

Secondly, I can't imagine 100 rounds of AR ammo is the same thing as 100 people shot, that's just ridiculous. 100 rounds is about 3 mags. That goes fast and only covers one PC's ammo complement. I've got three characters that regularly use firearms, ammo needs to be reupped fairly often. 100 rounds should, by my best estimate with my group, last about 2-2.5 episodes/adventures per character...


Anyone remember Twilight 2000? I think they're rereleasing it, or redoing it or whatnot. Anyway, T2k had sheets specifically for ammo tracking that were awesome, if you have the book, you should check the sheets out. Very easy record keeping.

All my players use electriclly insulated cloths, since security tends to break out the tasers first (Unless your in a really naughty area). It also helps against those nasty lightning bolt spells.

My players normally use very little ammo during a Johnson/Fixer driven run. However, for PC driven or down time games (~10% & ~30% of our total games), they tend to use a lot more ammo.

As an aside, if any of you have not run a down-time game, they can be a lot of fun. It is a mix of PC & GM driven, mostly role playing, spending time with friends and high loyalty contacts, etc.

If you have the huge skill and stats of 1 each to get a total of four (4) dice with your smartlink you have an 80% chance of hitting with each shot. So typically, with characters who have 10 dice to shoot 100 shots=98 hits.

Let's even look at it from the view of the worst ammo consumption. Assuming they only use full-auto suppressive fire, and never single shots, in order for them to use up 100 rounds apiece they'd need to fire five full-bursts per adventure. Given that a good adventure is one where you never fire a shot, that's an awful lot of area supression. Multiply that by the number of characters (3), you end up with them needing to suppress an area 15 times per game! That sure as hell sounds like they're doing something odd.

Doesn't ever seem to work out that way in my group. To be honest, I don't trust your math (although I am terrible with math myself ), especially since someone with a dice pool of 4 is going to hit about 0% of the time, after factoring in modifiers and the target's opposed roll. Even a dice pool of 10 is fairly weak at hitting a target and far less effective at keeping them down if they're supposed to be high-PR opposition. In broad daylight, against a stationary, out in the open, poorly armored ganger 10 dice is enough, but it is going to result in a lot of misses against the team of company men who have tracked you down and are attacking in the middle of the night, utilizing cover to the best degree possible while staying mobile to surround the runners. And that doesn't include spending edge, which I will do liberally in my games (can't spend it if you're dead or fleeing). Also note that 100 bullets does not always equal 100 shots...

I stand by my argument that if you're running a combat-heavy game then 100 rounds goes pretty damned quickly and most likely won't even fill up the magazine on one of the drones my players would possibly use. Clearly, it all depends on how you run your game. In the case of my players, specialized ammo is just too expensive to bother with in most situations (would you really want to use the 'good stuff' on the wannabe gang down the street?).

Your mileage will vary as it should

Again, it just depends on how you run the game. If I presented my players with an adventure wherein not firing a shot meant they excelled, they'd quit playing in a heartbeat. Combat is integral in our games, therefore, bullets go flying and ammo gets spent.

I like combat too, but lead-flying-everywhere should be reserved for the big bad guys. Against moons, massive amounts of area suppression is just excessive. Heck, fifteen bursts of suppressive fire sounds excessive even against the big bag guy!

Edit: Mooks, dammit, MOOKS!

That's no moon, it's the Death Star!

OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE.

And here I am, refraining from making a "No amount of suppression fire is excessive against the moon. That thing's frikking HUGE!"-comment so as not to derail...

If by killing you mean disrupting yes spirits, like grunts, have just one commuanal health pool for both physical and stun damage, once said pool has been filled the spirit is disrupted and won't be able to come back for about 28 day (unless someone that knows the metaplane of origin of the spirit goes on metaplanar quest to allow it to return ahead of time).
In order to actualy utterly destroy it someone must travel to its home metaplane and do the killing there.
To get rid of a summoned spirit just disrupt it and jeek its summoner, even if bound it won't come back or go free.
Also if you chose to use separate pools for physical and stun damage, stunbolt/ball still overflowes in physical so it can be used to kill eventualy someone, and the lower drain means two extra point of force with the same drain; stunbolt wins in almost everything.

Armor vest can be worn under normal clothes without showing any bulk, just like a form fitting full body armor just that doesn't stack with other armor, uses its whole ballistic rating against body x 2 for determining encumrance and has higher impact armor. In the right situations (when an armored jacket, a jumpsuit or the ritz actioneer suit are out of place) it's actualy usefull.
Speaking of knives the regular knife is pretty good, it's legal, dirty ceap, doesn't have aviability to be reached and it's realistic to carry it around for self defence; Cougar Fineblade shortblade has just one point of AP over it, costs 27,5 times a normal knife (550 , more than an AK-97 which is an assault rifle), has an aviability 5R (the AK-97 has one of 4R), the longblade version grants one extra point of damage (wich is good) but is harder to conceal, costs 900 (almost a katana, more than a monofilament sword) and has a an aviability of 7R. Being combat knives (and with a solid reputation too) they will result suspicious and potentialy attract undesiderable attenction from law-enforcers, the best knife is the Survival Knife it has the same stats of a cougar shortblade and costs 1/11 of its cost (50 ), it's legal without any license, it's readily aviable (the same of a normal knife), plausible for self defence or utility uses and has a few nice gadgets built in.
I agreed with you (having only the best takes away the possibility of chosing the best and stare down the rest), but your examples are a bit off (in my opinion).

This tends to be a big part of how I run my games. One of the best lessons a fellow GM taught me was this: "If you can find that moment where the players are all talking, in character, non-stop, for an hour, that's when you know you've done something right." There's something incredibly awesome about being able to spend entire sessions just focused on the role-play. As the GM you can stop worrying about the system so much, and just start having fun playing all the different NPCs. And even on the more action heavy side of things player driven games are a lot of fun. Players get much more invested when they're not just doing another job to pay their rent, but actually out there doing something that their character's care about, because they came up with the idea, or because they're doing something important. It's why I always like to see characters who are really connected to the world they're in; Runner's should have family, friends, people who aren't just contacts, who matter to them. Ask yourself "Do they have a boyfriend or girlfriend? Where do their parents live? Do they have brothers and sisters? Cousins? Who do they hang out with? Who do they chat to down at the gym? Who do they have on their online contact list?"
And for the record, Leofski is the fricken god-damn master of taking a one line contact description and turning them into one of the coolest characters in the game. I swear, every single contact we gave him turned out to be a hundred times more awesome when we actually met them in person.

I have only read page one but there is something that I want to add and I'm betting it wasn't covered.

Someone mentioned that if you equip the enemy as well as the players then there is a 50% chance of the players losing. On the surface this sounds right but in application it is almost always wrong, unless you are the perfect combat GM. The reason for this is that the players only have one character, and his equipment, to keep track of. Where the GM usually has 4-12 characters to keep track of on top of running the game. Because of this few GM's use NPC's to the fullest. Because of this I would say the loss percentage for evenly matched NPC's is between 25% and 45% depending on the skill of the GM and the number of NPC's.

It took me a while to put my finger on that. But once I did it freed me because I realised that I had gotten to a skill level in GM'ing that allowed me to eyeball encounters to the extent that I could predict which characters would be wounded or die. Now when you get very smart players though it gets to be a lot of fun because they throw in tactics and wrenches that are so impressive to watch unfold. That is what I love.

That being said, I've found that NPC's in combat is rarely to thier full potential, which is good for players. Is there a player in your group that seems to know exactly where to move and what to do in combat, and always finds the best way. I bet if you had that guy run the NPC's in an encounter it would scare the crap out of the group, and yield more kills on PC's. But you can't do this with regular grunts or gangers because it doesn't make sense. However with SWAT or Spec Ops groups this is exactly how the encounter should be run. Maximize all cover, concentrate fire when beneficial, move to firing angles that leave players in the open. (Now that I think about it, playing paintball for a few years has made me a formidable adversary in RPG combat) I'm not saying that anyone is running wrong, just that if you were to run combats with that kind of focus then players are screwed because they rarely can work together to be a cohesive combat group. But when they do, it is amazing to watch!

Don't recall seeing that, but I have the original T2K (a boxed set). What book was it in?

Yeah, I have to watch mysellf when doing combats...I think that 15+ years of wargaming means that my armchair generalship is better than most. I do have my off days however. This means that I can usually pick out the flaw of the PC's plan and destroy them at will. But then again, any GM can (re the Sacred F#$%&^! Cow from Outerspace) kill the party off at any point in time. That is not the purpose of the GM however, to me the purpose is to make sure the groups has a fun, challenging and immersive experience.

Hrm...coulda sworn it was in the back of the main book or one of the sheets from the box. Mebbe I'm just a dummy, 20+ years of gaming makes a lot of things blur together at times. Now I find myself wondering if it was even from T2K or maybe another of GDW's games. If you have the books on hand you can try checking out the old Infantry Weapons of the World (I think that was the title, IIRC) book, but the more I think of it the more I wonder if it was for Traveler or Dark Conspiracy. I feel certain that it was a GDW record sheet originally, and if I recall there was a sheet for small arms and one for larger capacity heavy weapons (belt-fed MGs for instance).

[rant]*sigh* I really do blame Gygax for ruining GDW with that god-awful Mythus and causing the destruction of both GDW and the old TSR, but how mad can I really be now that he's gone?[/rant]

Nobody's mentioned legality... ExEx is Forbidden ammo, so you can't take it through a checkpoint using a fake permit. It can only be used in situations where you're not going to go through an explosives detector. If you have regular ammo, as long as you appear to be licensed to carry it, no problem. If you have ExEx, your ammo will be confiscated and you might be subject to other penalties.

Also, with its higher avail, it's harder to get on short notice. And the price does start to matter when you're talking about high rate of fire weapons -- if you own an HV weapon, you're going to have to think long and hard about whether you want to spend your money on ExEx, since thousands of rounds of that starts to get expensive, and arguably isn't necessary.

So, ExEx does have real disadvantages. Though it is certainly the "standard" shadowrunner ammo for executing innocent security guards, smart teams will question whether doing that is smart in the first place. I'd expect to see ExEx on wetwork jobs, and on jobs where the target isn't human -- nobody's going to mind if you wipe out spirits, ghouls, or other critters with the baddest ammo you can find. If ExEx is used too often, and that bothers the GM, the GM can simply adjust the missions. Send the team on jobs where they have to smuggle their guns, or have their Fixer let them know that Johnsons are starting to get leery of hiring them because they always seem to blow security apart with milspec ammo, which is making their competitors take extra countermeasures to make them more difficult to hit in the future.

Excellent well written post. /me looks around for a points system

That happened quite a bit in my campaign. Probably 'cause the PCs were up against a toxic shaman who loved the Acid Stream spell. >:)

Do you have guards/police shecking what ammo the characters have in their guns often?
BEcouse that's something i have been thinking a lot, would the cops chek to see what ammo you have loaded if your licence for the guns shecks up okey.Or would they just wafe you trought the chekpoint after seeing your gun licence.

I honestly doubt cops would do that since they don't do it now. It's just too much work, especially if, 9 times out of 10, everything'll be legit.

"Jim, d'you see the size of that Fraggin Trog? If I wasn't on the clock you know I would beat him down. Did you check his weapon? Yeah, I know he has a license but check everything. There kind don't deserve to breath the same air we do."


Cops ... Bigotry? Only on days that end in y (or G for our German readers)

Not every single cop is like that!

There might be a few, but not the vast majority.

Cops, for the most part, are decent, hard working folks doing a shitty job. Give them SOME credit BlueMax.

The point about chem sniffers still stands. If the security is strong enough to include them, they'll likely pick up exEX. Of course, YMMV

Apologies. You are 100% correct. I do not mix much reality and fantasy and I meant to state that my view was tinted through how I see a dark future.

Real life cops are some of the best people on the planet.

I think even the 'Star is made up of mostly (~ 60%) good people just trying to make a decent living and providing protection to people. Now the ~40% that remains gives the rest a REALLY shitty name.

Hell, considering that my combat mage carries a rating 3 olfactory booster as a micro sensor "button" on his Lined Coat, those kind of sensors might be everywhere.

Seems like a fairly good reason for a runner not to carry exEX as standard.

Obviously different gear is appropriate in different circumstances. If your runs are mostly in the barrens, law enforcement is not a reason to not go saddled for bear. Going into the core, with its A rated zone, discretion is advised.

No, just no. There is no way anyone would put an explosive detonated by either heat or impact (the only things you could be referring to with explosive ammunition going off during a fireball) into a projectile that's meant to be launched over the speed of sound via means of a directed explosion accompanied by a sudden flash of extreme heat. Military explosives are generally very stable, a fireball would destroy the ammunition with no ill effect long before the ammo goes off unintentionally.

As to removing explosive rounds: I've been tempted to, if only because they're silly. Generally, I just refluff them so they're not explosive, instead basic explosive rounds use a projectile designed to fragment without compromising penetration, and EX-Explosive are that only hotloaded. Neither has any risk of blowing your gun up either. It may not be particularly realistic, but it's a great deal more believable than exploding bullets.

And this is why you fail Janice... Shadowrun is science fiction. Also while military explosives are generally very stable, they can be set off accidentally (I think my favorite for this would be some kind of EMP spell). There's a long history of 'secondaries' as explosives cook off or are set off by other explosions.

Now, they do have high explosive rounds for .50cal in the present...
In the past there have been experimental rounds in .30 cal.
In the dystopian future of sci-fi... no good reason why not.

Not cost effective. You can already achieve levels of fragmentation reminiscent of the round exploding (Take a look at the Mk 262 77 grain bullet in the middle) without needing a tiny and expensive explosive device to add another part capable of malfunctioning. Aside from that, the current statistical effects of the explosive rounds make little sense.

By the way, I already know of the Raufoss Mk 211 ammunition, it's strictly an anti-material round of limited issue that doesn't reliably detonate when used on personnel.

It depends on how many hits the chem sniffers get -- just 1-2 hits, and the sniffer knows it's bullets, but 3 or more, and they probably recognize that the amount/type of explosive is military grade.

All the more reason to carry stick and shock and narcojet rounds. Better than EX-EX rounds against targets that are not wearing military body armor.

Make up post!

>All the more reason to carry stick and shock and narcojet rounds. Better than EX-EX rounds against targets that are not wearing military body armor.
actually SnS is still better because that -1/2 AP starts to mean a hell of a lot.
'
>...Cops....
Almost all cops are "good-people" in the sense that they put the good of the community before there own physical safety. All cops are should be treated with suspicion because they think themselves fit to wield power over other. Doing police work for years has a high chance to warp you. I've know several cops and the worst thing about veteran cops is what being a cop for years does to you.

Also even if it isn't directly racially motivated cops do give people an amount of flack directly related to how sketched out they are.


--

On the legality of ex-ex and checking for ammo. No one checks today because in the kinds of situations that you would have those checks today, you don't see people with body armor. If you don't have body armor all real ammunition if practically identical from a lethality perspective. Even there is a spread in lethality, out of the range that actually effects behavior. But in 2070 SnS is actually pretty different from ex-ex, capsule, regular rounds.

This is shadowrun... anyone choosing to play a troll or orc (and to a lesser extent dwarf and elf) has already signed on the dotted line for racial harassment.

Seriously, troll and orc are so undercosted, they deserve every bit of RP hassle you can throw at them, easily including increased scrutiny by security.

All those 5.56 rounds you just linked have one serious problem their ability to fragment on impact is based on impact energy. Most don't reliably fragment over 200m, (50m out of a carbine) for the M855 (which is a semi-AP composite round at that). Those rounds are fired from a higher twist barrel than the older guns have (they spin faster), this means that they're closer to the material tolerance of the bullet simply spinning itself and exploding right when it leaves the barrel. As they go downrange when they hit, the sudden deceleration and material stresses are enough to cause the bullet to fragment, but this is only true for a fairly small window of energies.

Look at the FPS figure on those ballistic charts, most of those velocities are very close to the muzzle. I haven't read/heard anything out of the Mk262 which gives it anything more than a marginal increase in effectiveness. And I HAVE been on the range with the army marksmanship unit (who's been using that bullet since the 90's).

The reason you'd want a HE round is for exactly that anti-material. Or in the SR universe, pretty much everyone wears body armor of some sort. You need a round which will reliably pierce the outside, then do it's thing on the inside.

Again, I bring up this is SR and sci-fi. There's a coolness factor in play, the M211 is unreliable in hitting people today, why would this still be true in SR's hyper-sci fi setting.

Mind you, I'm not a huge fan of Ex-Ex either... to me the marginal performance increase isn't worth the IC cost and legality issues for anything except special run use. I'm more likely IC to carry gel or cheap ball just in case the star has more interest than necessary. I just don't really see any reason to ban or modify it. If someone wants to spew firecrackers downrange to announce their presence... the more power to em. It's not really game breaking, just overused IMO.

OK, so not claiming to be an expert on guns, but this would appear to be explosive ammunition, for an AK-47.
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.asp?Item=116629126

Somebody care to explain how this doesn't basically allow for us to have "Explosive Rounds" seventy years from now?

From what I've seen so far the arguments seem to be that modern explosive ammo is unreliable and expensive. Need I point out that everything is unreliable and expensive at first, and then gets more reliable and less expensive as more work goes into developing the product?

This is one of those bugbears that keeps coming up; Why do people assume, just because they still use guns in 2070, that they haven't improved on the technology?

I agree. The "it's impossible today, and thus will not be possible in the future" argument is utterly insane. It's the future, and not only that, it's the fictional future. We don't know how they accomplish particular futuristic things because the technology doesn't exist, if we knew how it worked, we could build it right now. But they do. Not being able to imagine how it would work is not grounds for deleting it from the game.

Whilst it seems strange to quibble with someone's who's agreeing with my point, I'd like to note that you're not entirely correct here. It's usually the case that we can at least predict what will theoretically be possible, even if we can't implement it now. However you are correct in that what we cannot implement is usually a result needing breakthroughs to occur in other areas of science first.

If explosive rounds aren't practical right now, is it because the theory is flawed, or because we simply don't have the means to cheaply produce reliable detonators (to pick on just one argument raised)?

In 2070 they have nanofaxes. This might not be what they would use to make said detonators, but it demonstrates that they have access to a level of precision micro-engineering that is simply impossible today. So if we assume that precisely engineering the parts cheaply isn't a problem, that cheap, stable, high powered explosives are available, and that over 100 years of development have finally worked most of the kinks out of explosive ammo (and only most; note the rules specifically account for the unreliability factor), is there anything left to say that explosive ammunition is not practical?