Just wondering what other GM's think about this. It got a little out of hand because all my players load up on explosive rounds because there really aren't any drawbacks to having it, only benefits. So I thought it was kinda fake to just have the pc's only have explosive rounds while just some of the npc's have them. So I decided to take them out of my game because they do give the pc's an advantage every time. And to my knowledge there is no real reason why they wouldn't be able to stock up on them all the time.
Would like to hear other Gm's input
thanks

I have not done anything to EX rounds. However, I don't let my players have APDS very often. However, thats related to the style we play.

Are you using all the errata on ammo?

more power to you. i had the same problem with armor piercers. i just raised the armor of most teams and gave high hardened armor to the threat response teams.

edit: blue max slipped under my radar

Explosive rounds are just plain bad.
HX is the way to go, unless you really have to save money.



They cost more (which is not that much of an issue, admittedly).
Fireballs make them blow up.
Okay, that's not that common, but for me, it's usually reason enough to go looking for APDS as soon as possible (oh, yeah, and the fact that APDS is just plain better).

Besides that, there's enough situations where you'll definitely want to carry gel, capsule or s&s rounds.



What, if NPCs aren't stupid grunts, they'll have better than standard ammo, too.
There's no reason they shouldn't.
Opposition that deserves the name will -within their financial limits- have reasonably good equipment.
Which, of course, includes better-than-standard ammunition.

If they are grunts, on the other hand, they will by definition have worse equipment than average PCs, right?
It's their job to get shot up.
Keep in mind that equally strong opponents theoretically mean that the PCs have a 50% chance to lose.
Do you really want your players to stat out new characters every second fight?
In a game where character generation takes as much time as in SR?



Do you ban smartlinks, too?

No offense, but i think you're overreacting.
SR is so heavy with no-brainers that are clearly better than standard.
The rules are so heavily focussed on customizing everything, there's no reason not to assume that standard is for mooks only.



@ maelstrome : i really dislike the idea of everybody becomming better because the player characters are competent.
Why bother with succeding at anything in such a game in the first place?
The GM will just scale up things anyway.
If i suck at everything, he may tone everything down.
This, IMHO, leads to static games with no rewards for the players, if not to outright silly situations like gutterpunks with armor worth ten times their monthly lifestyle cost.

If the PCs are that good, of course they'll wipe the floor with some wanabe gangers and the like.
If they have threat response teams on their tail that deserve the name, chances in one on one combat should be the least they have to worry about.
For characters of average competence, there will be a lot of people that reasonably shouldn't be a serious threat at all, as well as some opponents whom they simply shouldn't go up against face to face.

If the PCs prove that they can handle normal opposition, of course they'll get runs where a team with a good rep is requested, so they'll actually face tougher opposition.
But i certainly prefer an ingame explanation for an increase in the oppositions power, not "you're too strong, i'll just scale things up".
I want a world that has a life of its own and reacts logically to the player's decisions, a setting that could exist without the PCs involvement, not an MMOish metagame playground with linear challenge ratings tailor-made for the group.

Manimal, a few things worth noting:
1) Explosive only gives +1 DV. EX-EX gives +1 DV, -1AP (see Errata. Yes, pre-errata they were disgusting).
2) Having your gun blow up if you glitch badly does kind of suck (as much as it very rarely happens, I still see a lot of players get nervous about loading up large clips of EX-EX)
3) Above points aside, you're seriously telling me your players never bother with anything other than explosive? If so, a) how the boop do they ever manage to stealth anything (or to quote the CLUE Files "At least the rounds were silent when they left the barrel.") and b) why are they not being chased down by the cops big time? A lot of material in Shadowrun fluff covers the fact that most runners prefer not to leave a huge bodycount because (regardless of their own morals) it gets the cops real pissed, and it gets the corps real pissed too. Corps generally don't come after runners who hit them, because they know it just stops them from hiring the same disposable assets in the future. Rival corp sent runners to steal your prototype? Those guys were clearly good at their jobs; hire them to steal it back. On the other hand runners who slaughter every last guard in the facility (and I'm betting explosive ammo means less chance of anyone even surviving in the ER) tend to draw down corporate veangance on their heads, because it doesn't pay to let that kind of relentlessly destructive behaviour go unpunished. Oh, and lets not forget that drawing attention to yourself like that isn't exactly going to impress potential employers (even when the potential employers aren't the people whose security force you just slaughtered).

I'm not saying you necisarily made a bad call, I'm just saying that if you treat drawbacks as just what the stats say, you're going to have a very hard time running Shadowrun. It's something that comes up time and time again; just browse through some recent threads on Dumpshock; players will go on about how "X is really broken, see this math says so", and then someone like Synner will say "Yeah, but if you use it everyone will hate you." Shadowrun is more than just a by-the-numbers game, it's a world with consequences, and by the numbers a lot of stuff isn't meant to be balanced. What's more, when you start playing around with consequences, you'll find that your games are much more interesting as a result. Players will start asking themselves "Is there a better way to do this? Who are we going to piss off? What could the fall out be?" They'll start making difficult choices, start lining up with allies and enemies, and thinking about their place in the world, instead of just rolling to hit a lot.

I agree with Rasumichin. It's good that PCs in general are a bit better than their opposition; they're experienced veterans and (more importantly) the heroes of the story. Having 1 DV more than a regular corpsec grunt doesn't put game balance in danger and the kind of opposition the PCs should better avoid tend to have the best possible ammo anyway.

QFT

Burn those sentences into your heads GM's. Don't let your players tear everything up and head home without anything ever happening. If they get sloppy, make it come back to bite them. The unfortunate thing is that some (possibly a lot) and many (if not all) players in Shadowrun don't really pay attention to something unless it has a stat block of some kind.

I've got an idea. I just read a post where Synner mentioned (somewhat off hand) that he wished people here on DS would create more "resources" to be shared with others. So, let's create a resource to help GM's determine the level of "strike back" that PC's will incur on themselves after a run. We could create a table of modifiers based on what the PC's did during the run (destroyed property, killed X guards, faces caught on camera, left evidence at the scene), which would modify some dice pool (rating) of how likely this particular corp is to strike back (call it a Reciprocity rating or something). Then the GM call roll the modified DP and the hits would determine what response (if any) the corp sent after the runners. What do you think Doc?

I agree with eliminating them. But my basis would be they are stupid, as they are based on the typical comic book understanding of how guns work that is found throughout the game.

Explosive rounds are not minigrenades. They don't go Boom when you shoot things. According to the old fluff, it was more an impressive fragmentation when they hit. There's no reason why they can't be silenced, since they don't make a Boom when they hit.

BBB page 312 "Explosive rounds are solid slugs designed to fragment and explode on impact" ,yup not mini genades but really good fragmentation bullets. it is possible they may have a small explosive to help them fragment but not enough for a "boom"

Hmm... I struggle with any interpretation whereby they don't contain some kind of explosive, what with the whole "blowing up your gun on a bad glitch" thing. I'll grant that regular ammo can blow up a gun on a bad day (IRL), so yes, it's possible that explosive rounds are actually quite quiet. That makes them more useful, but, to return to the thrust of my argument (not actually disagreeing specifically, just restructuring my argument around the remaining precepts), they are still expensive, risky (if marginally), and like any high lethality ammunition they tend to leave a trail of bodies a mile wide. They have their place, partly because when you do need to kill people it's harder to take ballistics off fragmented bullets, but it shouldn't be a question of comparing stats so much as comparing uses.



Well, thank you kindly for the QFT.
As to your strike back table idea... I like what you're trying to do, but it's... Hmm. It's not something I would ever use. That doesn't mean I don't think it's a bad idea in the slightest, because it's obviously intended as a useful guideline to GM's who prefer a more by-the-numbers approach. I know not every GM is as comfortable winging it as I am, and I know that I wasn't always this comfortable just "eyeballing" these things.

My other problem is that I'm not entirely sure "reciprocity" is something that should be set in stone, per se. Not that a mechanical approach can't handle GM tweaking; some sort of table rating would working. Essentially the stuff the players do would add to the dicepool, whilst the threshold that needs to be hit for the target to call in a revenge strike would depend on how the GM likes their game, so we have a seperate little table where the GM "dials up" or "dials down" the tendancy for corps to 'come-a-knockin' in their version of the SR universe.
Thing is, you'd also need to adjust the dice-pool for who is doing the payback. Interestingly, the smaller the group is, the more likely they are to retaliate, because they can't absorb the loss as easily, and they're less likely to be hiring on assets themselves, so it's preferable to protect themselves by dishing out veangance liberally. You take a run against Winternight, you bet your ass they'll come for you. Probably with their brain-altering BTL chips to make you into one of them. That or the fish-hooks.

My point is, you go ahead and try out your idea; I'll see about throwing together some stuff of my own to go with it. After all, part of the point of players throwing resources out there is that people pick and choose the stuff that works for them.

All in all, my approach would, rather than doing a table, be to throw together a kind of GM's Guide to Payback, giving you helpful guidelines for what sort of stuff can merit fall-out, how, and why. The end goal here would not be to lay down laws about how these things work, but rather to bring a GM to the point where they can assemble a set of notes for each of the major players in their game-world, including "Triggers"; things that will likely goad the group into some sort of retaliation.

Huh. Actually, we can go better than that; Let's expand this to a document that goes through the whole process of "statting" organisations in your game, not as sets of numbers, but as a broken down list of resources, goals, wants, needs, limits, and triggers.
Resources is easy, and you could even apply a set of Connections ratings to it. So a group might have 3 in Magic, and 2 in Weaponry, indicating the Connections rating the group uses when trying to acquire those things, or bring them to bare (fail the role, and all your mages are assigned to other jobs right now).
Goals is just a list of the things that the group is actively trying to achieve; Winternight would have "Bring about the freaking apocalypse" here.
Then we get into Wants, Needs, Limits and Triggers. Wants and Needs are just a list of things that the group wants and needs. The distinction here is that "Need" means that, deprived of it, the group will cease to function. "Want" is basically stuff that aids the group in achieving it's Goal. Corps obviously Need money and loyal employees; they can't function without them. They Want reliable shadow assets, but if it comes down to want vs need, they'll abandon the loyalty of runners over the loyalty of their own employees. They also want good PR, because that helps you get money and loyal employees, but again they can sacrifice it if they have to.
Limits is a cool thing to do with any entity in your game world; ask yourself what lines they will not cross (unless the circumstances are truly exceptional). "Risk own survival" is going to be a limit for any group that doesn't have a death-wish, or a higher goal. Hence why Megas tend to avoid stuff that earns them an Omega Order, as that's a pretty big threat to "own survival". What makes groups like Winternight so scary is that they basically have no limits, and very few needs; they don't have the resources of the AAAs, but they have that Joker like aspect where their power comes from what they are willing to do to you if you ever cross them, and how little they can survive on if pushed to it. Most runners will happily take on Ares if the pay is good, but will think twice about going up against the Nordic Ragnarok worshipping nutjobs.
Triggers is the stuff that will set the group off in some way. Each trigger needs to have an attached response. So Triads will have "Dishonourable Behaviour" as a Trigger, with the response of "Seek redress".

None of this is stuff that's set in stone. It's just a way of organising your game notes that whenever a situation you didn't expect comes up involving some group in your game world (or a major NPC; it works just as well for individuals), you can just skim through these notes, and figure out the best response to the situation.

If I expand on or clarify this, I'll do so in a separate thread, so as to avoid further thread hijacking.

I'm suprised your players haven't found APDS or AV rounds.

On a side note, what book/page is EX-EX ammo in? I can't seem to find it.

- J.

first off do you assume by me saying i gave them better armor that they are just as good or better than pcs?
they get enough that if its split by half they still have a little value. second off the only people that tend to upgrade some are the heavy security. if a bunch of runners keep shooting up the place with apds dont you think the bullet catchers are going to want a little more armor. like they say the world has consequences. you keep using the same tactics the opposition will learn them and use counter measures.i also dont amp the armor to the point that apds becomes standard. normal bullets can still be very useful.

See Fabe's post, he quotes the page reference (BBB 312).

The real solution to players having specialty ammo is to throw hundreds and hundreds of mooks at them so that all that ammo gets used up and they HAVE to accept crates and crates of "regular" ammo as what they end up using most of the time.

The only drawbacks to explosive or EX-EX ammo is the price, and the rare chance of it blowing up. If it blows up, the damage isn't horrific (one "attack" worth, regardless of how many rounds go off) and it only goes off on a Critical botch. That not only means it's unlikely, it means it can be negated by spending a point of Edge. So, in other words, there's almost zero risk of having it blow up; and even if it does, the damage isn't too bad.

That leaves the price. Let's face it, Shadowrunners live and die by their gear, so smart PC's won't skimp. It may cost a lot more, but it's effective enough to make up that difference. And with rare exceptions, my characters seldom buy ammo in-game. Most of the time, they buy crates of it at chargen, and use that through their career. If you can afford the best, why buy anything else? So, price really isn't much of an object.

What it boils down to is that EX-EX basically becomes standard ammo for shadowrunners, as well as anyone who migth be a threat to shadowrunners. Normal ammunition may as well not exist.

I am a little confused by the earlier comment that, to paraphrase, said that Shadowrunners should avoid EX-Explosive ammo as it is too lethal.
I have no problem with wanting to avoid lethality. (That is one of the reasons I love stunbolt.)
So if the players want to use stick-n-shock, narcojet, etc... that makes perfect sense.

But if the players are shooting pistols with lethal ammo (regular or otherwise) I can not see why you wouldn't want to use the best ammo you can (EX Explosive or APDS.) The lethality difference is trivial, once you have accepted that you are using bullets to stop the opposition.

Yours,
Joel

What do you use at the range?
"When me and my boys are practicing shooting eartips off at weapons world, we don't use pricey ammo."

With the same argument you could eliminate medkits, tools, software and basically everything else with a rating less than 6, because how often do runners take stuff that's worse than the alternative while being only marginally cheaper? I see no problem with the hardened pros taking the best stuff and the regular stuff being there for all the regular joes.

Effectively, I do. I cannot recall ever seeing a SR4 PC buy a medkit of less than rating 6. Same goes for emotitoys, although they're another can of worms. The lower ratings may as well not exist. I haven't banned them, but they simply do not appear in game, even in the hands of regular Joes. There's no reason to buy anything but the top-of-the-line, for certain items.

In order for anyone to be a threat to a shadowrunner, they need gear to match a shadowrunner. That means EX-EX, rating 6 emotoys, and the like.

actually I think that EX-EX ammo is over rated. Sure it goes bang real good, but when you can load up with capsule rounds and put in narcojet... why bother with explosives? It puts your target out and doesn't kill him.

A corp team that's after a team of shadowrunner that is known to use narcojet ammo might not get whacked if they get caught: "Yeah, these jerks are screwing with my corp, but they're not out to kill my friends and me. Tie them up guys and take them to the holding cell" verses "These assholes killed a few of my drinking buddies!" *BAM* *BAM* *BAM*

EDIT: Also has anyone though that gel rounds are resisted by impact armor rather than ballistic? Most of the time impact armor is worse than ballistic armor.

That's another issue. Stick-and-shock, for example, is about the only round I see in hold-out and light pistols. I seldom see manabolt/manaball; instead I see the Stun versions. Sometimes the nonlethal option also pushes out normal ammunition.

Manabolt is good verses spirits and annoying trolls with uber armor...

But why not Stunbolt them instead? Same effect, lower drain. In fact, against the troll, the stun spell is even better; trolls tend to have fewer stun hit points damage boxes.

Can you kill a spirit with a Stunbolt?

As far as I know, yes. But you cannot kill a motorcycle with one.

I could be wrong.

You can't kill a motorcycle with a manabolt, either. Anything you can target with a manabolt, you can target with a stunbolt.

If the motorcycle is going through a high speed turn and you stunbolt the driver, yes, you can kill a motorcycle with a stunbolt. You can also kill a parked motorcycle with a stunbolt. If you hit the truck-driver heading towards it.

Otherwise, no. Mana spells don't target non-living/awakened/spectral targets.

But Powerbolt yes? I meant powerbolt.

/me slows down on the pirat.

Powerbolt, yes. However, powerbolt has a higher Drain. Additionally, it's resisted with Body, which is generally higher than Willpower (especially in the case of Orks and Trolls). You're better off with stunbolt.

This is especially true with Stick and shock. If I was going to ban an ammo type it would be this. If you don't actually need people dead it's the best way to go. The Electricity is just crazy overpowered (har har). First you have to resists or jiggle for a number out rounds (not IP). If you /do resist/ you still get a penalty. Electronics, read drones, just fry at GM discretion. And -1/2 AP is usually better than even AP rounds. It's also a mundanes best chance for shooting a spirit.

.... ex-ex isn't what I'm worried about.

SnS is among the best options if you need someone dead too - get them down, then cap the unconscious, twitching target with a lead bullet to the head from your sidearm at "pressed muzzle to skull" range.

Yup SnS is brutal, but often the point of a gun is making someone dead without getting into "pressed muzzle to skull" range. On the flip side I've never had a moment where I though "damn! I loaded SnS" or on the flip side as a GM though "Ha the fools they brought SnS! there mine!".

I'm a big believer in Manaball, actually. I had a character that used Manaball as his only AOE effect for years. He did have Stunbolt as his primary single-target, but he also started the game with only gel rounds, narcoject, & other non-lethals.

Why manaball instead of stunball?

It relies on the GM making people react appropriately. We determined that stun spells don't have too much of a visible kick to them - people just pass out, or at best get bruises. Manabolt and manaball, on the other hand, kill you - so people cough up blood, bones break, skin cracks and splits, etc. Doing that to a big group of people would often cause others enemies to roll those professional rating dice to see if they REALLY wanted to stick around and fight, or if the guy who just wasted four guys by exsanguinating them wasn't worth it.

Also, on a more mechanical level, a guy with an auto-injector/biomonitor/stim chem combo made my life living hell when I tried to stun bolt him down. I finally just hosed him down with an assault rifle. And also, it seems a better bang-for-buck than Ball Lightning or Powerball.

That's the reason I took Lightning Bolt. If you need to deal with pesky drones... use an industrial grade bug zapper.

Off Topic, what do you guys think of this spread of Offensive spells: Lightning Bolt, Manaball, Stunbolt

Well, you could also just take someone down with SnS, then headshot them from afar with another gun - it's not as if they can dodge while unconscious. Dual-feed magazines might make this even easier.

Well, that certainly is a way to handle it and I see that it makes regular ammo superfluous. On that account, you could then drop all but the best SMG, though. Armored vests as well, the jacket is better. Why regular knifes, there's cougar blades. I realize those examples are quite over the top, I just want to emphasize that any line drawn as to what would "reasonably" be used feels quite arbitrary.

I just think having all those "worse" choices is good for the game even (and especially when) the PCs never take them. That may just be a different style of play, though. Most regular mook the runners in the games I'm in encounter are quite a bit worse individually, and having all that "bad" stuff helps with that. To each his own, I guess.

Here's another thing about those regular choices... they are what's normally available. I mean you can't just go into the local gun shop and pick explosive ammo. Now regular bullets... not only can you find it, you'll even get a "Thank You" from the counter monkey manning the shop.

Med packs are the same way. I can easily see going into a shop that sell those kind of items and getting a rating 3 or 4 kit easy. Rating 6 is more like paramedic or professional kit rather than a normal slot walking in from off the street.

true true, I forgot about that mod as I never seem to have the slots for it
SnS is brutal. But the best load out in every situation.

If your characters are using nothing but Ex ammo then they've got way too much money on their hands, give them a dry streak so that they start worrying about making rent...

To paraphrase the de facto leader of my PC's group: "What the hell are you doing loading that stuff into an assault rifle anyway? Single shots, save money, geeze!"

Turns out that in my game, letting the players find a few mags of APDS or other expensive ammo is like tossing them some magical arrows in DnD. They'll use them when they're needed, but they'll hate using 'em

I see the stick and shock come out not versus metahumanity but against Spirits. Long range, no special weapon skill elemental effect.

SnS is banned from anything but shotguns in my game. We have been working on a lower power SnS for smaller weapons. As a note, we don't play with any of the taser like weapons either.

Just shoot them again with another round or two of SNS and overflow from stun to physical.

Stick n' Shock is one ammo type that I did house-rule, because I have to agree that it's disgusting.
Generally I just lower the power to 4. It's still really good, especially in light pistols, but not as overwhelming.

It also falls under a general house-rule I tend to use, which is to say that any ammunition resisted with Impact armour is subsonic (when you think about the logic of impact vs ballistic armour, this makes a lot of sense really), and so cannot be used in weapons with ranges above those of a shotgun or SMG (the wording is intentionally vague here; my house rules are always RAI, not RAW).

Part of the problem is the velocity of the round (I find it hard to believe a chunk of "gel" going at supersonic speeds wouldn't just tear into someone anyway), the other problem is the size; rifles tend to fire a smaller projectile at higher speeds. Great when firing a chunk of lead, less great when firing a capsule that's supposed to deliver a dose of a chemical (in fact I'm tempted to call Capsule rounds Shotgun only), or a little capacitor that shocks the target. I mean a Barett .50 will put a round clean through a brick wall from a mile away. How does the little stick-n-shock fly all that distance, at that kind of speed, and then suddenly stop when it gets to the target?

Part of why I like this rule is that suddenly SMGs and Shotguns become much more important. If the Runner's are going for a kill, assault rifles are awesome, but if they want to keep the bodycount / collateral damage down then SMGs are clearly the way to go. It also deals with a lot of the afforementioned problems with non-lethal ammo edging out the lethal options, since the non-lethal choices now limit your choice of weapon, meaning that there are some clear trade-offs involved.

Sorry, i guess i just misunderstood you.
If it is a plausible ingame response, of course it's a perfectly valid choice to upgrade secguard armor in this way.



Now that you mention, i actually have two characters that use only regular ammo for monetary reasons.
Both are mages, don't have any firearms skill (i didn't have points for that left and it seemed reasonable that they wouldn't bother learning how to be mediocre at shooting people when they allready where experts at killing them with their brain).
Still, i didn't want to send them on runs without a gun.
This way, they wouldn't stick out as mages (and therefor become primary targets) by being the unarmed members of a well-armed runner team and they could use the guns for stuff like intimidation and the like.
In case they had to give a warning shot, shoot somebody in the head or whatever, i decided that regular ammo would be enough.
Plus, i didn't risk gun explosions due to glitches, which are not that unlikely if you have to default.



Certainly, but there are people who simply cannot be a serious threat to runners (except through sheer cunning and luck).
If i generate a PC who's a professional with SMGs, he's gonna get an FN 93.
The same holds true when i stat out an elite response team- they'll get the tools necessary for their job (unless they suffer from massive budget restraints).
But if i, as a GM, stat out a bunch of gangers and decide to give them SMGs, they're likely to get the crappy Sandler TMP because that will be a gun they actually can afford.
Similarly, people with low lifestyles will rarely sport a R6 emotoy- they may have gotten a discount model for a hundred bucks.

Of course, this means that they have a serious disadvantage against the runners.
But then, they shouldn't be able to compete with them anyways.




To each his own, but if your players can't afford a box of explosive ammo, how do your sams upgrade their cyberware?
How do your riggers replace drones that get thrashed?
Doesn't this lead to completely overpowered Awakened?

By not blowing their money on the expensive stuff, taking care of their contacts, stealing/cleaning their own drones whenever possible...and of course Awakened are completely overpowered, they always have been! It isn't that they can't afford it, its that each shot sounds like a cash register to them. *blamblamblam* = *ca-chingca-chingca-ching* = less upgrades. Life is hard, chummer, you gotta keep your priorities straight.

I think he is referring to the fact that a 100 round box of Ex-Ex Assault Rifle ammo costs 1000

And if your runners are using more than a 100 rounds on a run that they getting payed less than 1000 , something has gone very wrong.

Sure, they could buy 100 rounds of AR ammo, which would last them for a few runs for only 1k , but then that'd be 800 schumkers they're just throwing down the drain for a paltry bonus. Instead of spending the money, they'd rather take called shots for a far better (and cheaper) bonus. I guess it is just all in how you look at it

EDIT: And yeah, there has been at least one occasion when they've felt the need to use a called shot with ex or ex-ex or APDS (I forgot which exactly), but again, they just don't want to spend the money unless it is needed. That's just how they look at it.

I'm sure there are more than a few runners that love the short, brutal life they lead, but I'm even more sure that the majority would love to save up enough so that when they can pull a really big score they can just retire somewhere safe. Pinching pennies is a big deal when you live paycheck to paycheck.

Maybe my players are just cheap: you should have seen the dirty looks the one player received when he announced he was looking to pickup an HVAR...

Drop Manball, and replace it with Stunball. Just as effective, with lower Drain.



The reason why armored vests still exist in my games is encumberance. It's great for those with a Body of less than 4. If you've got 4 or better, then the armored jacket becomes the best option.



Once again, you're assuming that they can't just stockpile the stuff in chargen. For 1 BP, you can have enough EX-EX ammo to last you your whole career. Seriously, if you've had to kill 500 people as a shadowrunner, you've got other problems than lack of ammunition.

As far as medkits go, I know how to legally obtain a paramedic-grade kit without much seaching. And it's legal, to boot. The people a shadowrunner are likely to encounter will either have a Rating 6 medkit or none at all. For example, the Docwagon paramedics will have a Rating 6. Joe Average will have a box of band-aids, not even a Rating 1 kit. The enemy will have a rating 6 medkit for themselves, which they might use on the shadowrunner they just captured. And so on.


Like I said before, if they've bought a crate of EX-EX during chargen, odds are unlikely that they'll ever need any more. Personally, I've never had a character who needed to buy ammo in-game, if I could buy it at chargen.

100 rounds of ammunition should last you more than "a few runs". You should not have to shoot a hundred people in a single adventure, or even a bunch of them for that matter.

has anyone ever had to buy ammo outside of chargen after they bought it in chargen. ive never seen that happen.

I have. A number of times. But then, most of our missions are not the kind that we can sneak both in to and back out of.

Come to think of it, there have been times where I've needed to replace gear. I think one character had to replace every single thing he had by the time the campaign was done.