How do I influence players to not pickup every gun of every goon they kill?

Pay them more money for discretion. Discretion carries a high premium.

Why would an employer mind if weapons of killed goons are taken?

You could wait until they're nicely weighed down and then have them run for their lives from an excessively large swarm of bio-drones down a poorly series of winding tunnels and start penalizing encumbrance by modifying their movement rate. For extra bang-for-the-buck, have some of the swarms carry bio-bombs - the individual explosions won't do a great deal of damage, but it might encourage people to run like all hell before an explosion hits something really flamable. Running little monofilament cords between members of the swarm is an option too.

Or, if you're wanting to enter Utter Bastard GM Mode, start slipping stealth/tracking RFIDs into the better weapons and pieces of kit. Link them to a biomonitor so that a tracking signal is activated upon death of the registered user and have the Star or worse turn up at inopportune moments until they get the hint.

My usually end up looting something off of the opposition, even if it isnt their guns (which are usually worse than their own). Doesnt happen as much in shadowrun compared to other games (in my Scion they always took part of the corpse with them as a trophy if it was titanspawn...). However, even if they do look shit-loads of stuff from the goons, they probably cant sell it for very much. Remember, they probably cant flog it at its full cost and they need to split earnings from such sales between the group in most cases.
As for non-gear looting, i like giving them stuff they cant sell . Last game, i sent my players on a job which brought them into a cyberware clinic (...where they happened to be making a cyberzombie...) and after the gunfire stopped, they decided to take some shiny stuff before skedaddling. But who are you going to sell an invoked memory stimulator and parts for rating 4 betaware muscle replacement to?
The got some other stuff too, and it ended up being around 15k worth of stuff each (there were 3 runners), but that was because they were REALLY lucky with their searches, and its not often you get a situation like that. They almost ended up getting snagged by the backup high-threat response team as a result though

EDIT: Just thought of something you could do to stop random gun pick-ups. Just because the original owner of the smartgun is out for the count, doesnt mean the corp security cant fire it once you put it in your pocket...

For goodness' sake. There are fatigue rules, if they weigh themselves down too much you start applying them. See how the Sam likes it when he's up to 6 boxes of Stun without a single damage test and can't do any more running for another couple of hours.

Because weapons can be traced when used in other crimes (whether through serial numbers or RFID tags) and the last thing a Johnson wants is law enforcement somehow tying his crime to some other crime and having another excuse to look at his crime closer.

But come on, it's the Loot loot loot that makes our boys get up and shoot!

^ And that is why every runner should carry a tag eraser at all times

I just apply the Street Costs table (p.312, SR4A) to the fenced price. Suddenly it's not worth it anymore.

Indeed, as I said, discretion.

Of course, using a gun looted off the local "street gang" (or taken off the body of some other "victim") is a good way of keeping law enforcement looking for someone else.

looting is common but yeah, they have to carry this stuff, also after a while they will start to clank and if pockets are stuffed with loot it maght be harder to get to the stuff they need.

We had a player who was constantly looting guns. The first time he did it the gun was better than his.

The second and third time he did it because his gun jammed up and, well, he did loot it off a corpse.

We also looted an auto-shotgun off some corpse which the sniper was very keen to have.

(Sniper rifle = shotgun skill? That's silly).

Thread reminds me of a day when sitting around in the lounge I overheard discussion about some other game (D&D?) and looting the corpses. Oh, it was Anima Beyond Fantasy. Anyway I said, "You know, we need to loot the bodies in ShaodwRun more often. We keep skipping out on all the goodies."

Just wait till they get the idea to take the bodies with them too.

About 700 a pop to a ghoul! ;D

If they're lucky, they'll pull in 10-15% of the 'face value' of a gun. For a 10lb gun, that generally means about $50 - and that's assuming they take the time and footwork to find a buyer for that price. If you aren't paying them enough that hauling a hundred pounds of guns for $500 while under fire seems like a good idea, you should consider upping how much you're paying. I fully expect PCs to steal firearms they don't have access to yet. But why they would stop to pick up ANOTHER Ares Predator is beyond me (and generally they don't - they literally have two dozen Ares Predators gathering dust in their safehouse, waiting for a buyer).

I will say though, I've also stopped accounting for standard ammunition. I assume they always have enough, because it's cheap, and a pain in the butt for me to account for. This reinforces the uselessness of picking up a fourteenth Ares Pred.

If you enforce proper selling rules, they'll still collect for a bit, but once they're sitting on literally a pile of hot evidence, they'll start rethinking things a little bit.

Double post

Especially if the hot evidence can call home and transmit full trideo record of everything that happened during the run and in the safe house.

Tell them they're getting paid less because they're looting too much. Then pay them more once they stop. If you want to run a street-level game, talk to them BEFORE they make characters.

I've found that the more street level the game is, the more likely looting is. PCs start off poorer and get paid less, so they look for anything they can get to make ends meet. Often times they will end up like the crazy whack job gangers in movies, with a gym bag or five full of guns in their hide out that they pull out when the Star shows up to arrest them.

What happens when you loot that smartgun that's smarter then you are?

It shoots you in the face and calls Lone Star/Mafia/Vory/etc. to collect the reward money they've put out on you.

-paws
Damn AIs.

The "Magic" talking sword. Just take a sword, add a built in Commlink, Custom Look 2, Personalized Grip, and let an AI move in. If the built in Commlink has speakers, the sword will even talk to you. Just give the AI the Lilacor personality as seen in the "Lilacor Mod" in the Elderscrolls games and your good.

"Heh... hehe... heheheh.. I just gotta say... YOU SUCK!"
*mumble* "Lord of Murder my ass... I should be the Lord of Murder..." *mumble*
"Hey, you know... my last owner... he became a God. Yea, unhu, thats right. Stick with me..."
"Ohhhhhhhh... lets go kill that over there!"
"Cuz I'm T&T, I'm dynomite... I'm T&T, I win the fight... I'm T&T, I'm a power load... I'm T&T, watch me explode..."
*Random played theme music, Conan movies are a good choice*
"Donk, got your nose... Oh, that looked painful, tell me was it painful... "

CSI.

Which is also the thing that will ensure that the Shadowrunners don't want to try another 'Run, and work at Call Centres that don't check into your SIN too close.

Discretion is one.

Weigth encumberance another. Time, being chased by multiple bad guys (or one really big bad one like a spirit).

Although if I were wearing my 'Assh*le GM' hat, I'd let the RFID tags in the items stolen allow groups of NPCs to rock up to their favorite hideout. I think having their base of operations being blown up once and the entire party sour on one guy for ruining it all would send a not so subtle message.

- J.

Heck, depending on the group, just start throwing a big batch of dice behind the screen everytime they start looting. If they're not completely thick, one of them will probably metagame it out and suggest a change of plans. If not, well there's been plenty of suggestions here for applying negative reinforcement.

Tag Erasiers don't always work ether. Just stick some hardened stealth tags in em.

Wow. This thread made it to the second page without any reference to the Search Function?

If they are in a corporate owned facility almost everything is tagged and it's position can be tracked, all the employes have a biomonitor wristband to track them and check their health conditions, sensitive gear (security gear, weapons, keycards, anything valuable) is tied to a biomonitor/container/location/whatever, if said gear has the owner killed/is taken out of the container or location without autorization an allarm is raised and it start broadcasting the position of the runners making their way out much more eventfull (the drones WILL know where to look for the runner); this can be resolved using bags made of wireless inibiting fabbric, but that kind of bags should be used for the important stuff (the one you are supposed to aquire) and going around loaded with several of them is going to cause some eyebrow to raise, the runners also need a wirelessproof place for storing the loot untill it has been cleaned.
Let the players know that looting is possible if safety misures are taken, but it's just not worth the time and effort.

Search Function of what?

Have you seriously tried to use the search? Most of the time, five hundred bazillion things pop up that have no relation to what you were searching for at all.

Ah, that Seach Function..... which happens to be almost a topic in its own.

Still on page one for me.

The sound of Lone Star (or your sprawls equivalent) sirens rapidly approaching is usually all it takes to discourage looting. If you aren't in a sprawl where authorities are likely to arrive quickly, then using the Advanced Safety mod from Arsenal on the first few guns the team attempts to loot should be helpful as well. If they don't notice the gun mod, so much the better, when they try to use the gun for the first time and it does not fire, that will give them a quick wake-up call. Fences won't buy the gun with the mod, and if they sell it to someone on the street for next to nothing, then that person is going to be looking them up when the gun does not work.

Two pages of posts.

He probably adjusted the number of posts he canveiw at a time, rather than using the default. I changed it to 100/page and its showing page 1 for me.

-paws

Speaking of the Search function, but otherwise totally off-topic, can someone tell me what RAW stands for? I've seen it several times already, and the forum won't let me use it as a search term because it's less than four letters.

An advance search for "loot" or "looting" using the "search topics only" feature yeilds only about a dozen threads, most identical to this one. But that's cool.

RAW = Rules As Written

Also related:
RAI = Rules As Intended

Rules As Written.

Just start having security personal with biometric safeties on their weapons. This effectively makes them useless on the black market and to the runners. You can even be nasty and have a one time shocker for someone picking up the weapon that doesn't match the biometric code. I had a GM do that to use when we started picking up Lone Star guns. After two or three weapons we got the hint and never picked up another weapon ever again.

http://xkcd.com/242/

You are right, my own eyes deceive me... or maybe they got hacked!

But I still only see one page of posts for me so far in this thread.

Lawgiver them!

"Cool! A Ruger Thunderbolt!" *Boom* "Cool, I can get a cyberhand now!"

Me too, it's a post per page think.

So true, so very true

My group actually loots stuff to deal with CSI. Now, we're SR3, but after a battle we collect all spent casings, cleanse the area of magical residue, take all the guns and as much armor as we can, cast Fashion on the armor to make it look like different armor (and occasionally so it can fit us... thank you free medium security armor), cast ignite on all biological matter and all areas where we've been, clean up that magical residue, and occasionally bleach for good measure.

And hey, now our entire group has matching security armor, making it much harder to figure out who the mage is that they have to geek.

JaronK

My solution is a sort of "all of the above". While I'm not entirely sure about the street prices rule (if a used gun costs seven times as much as its' resale value, fixers must be loaded), I can definitely say that after hacking the biometric security, wiping the (hardened) tags, and finding someone willing to fence guns with 'Shiawase" stamped into the side, it's probably not worth the hassle.



Actually, this is from Baldur's Gate II. I think I muted the game for a while....