Whenever I do, they all have bandit masks on, berets, B&W striped shirts and giant canvas bags with dollar signs on them.

GM handwave... The ammo was APDS stuff that I wanted them to have for the run, but not for keepsies. They way outclassed the Johnson's team and it gave the hand to hand guys the spotlight for a bit. The Phs-Ad needed some love.

Magic Nanites did it.

Ok, seriously, it's solid logic to ALWAYS TAKE ALL THE GUNS!!! I've seen countless movies where the protagonists, or other people, didn't, and they ALWAYS regretted it. Or rather, they had me taking note that HAD they taken all the guns, then they would have been better off.

But yeah, that pretty much happens. It may be a D&D thing that carried over. As soon as we're not getting shot at anymore, even crap guns get picked up and sold off, sometimes for cheap, sometimes not. However, I don't tend to take clips of standard ammo, not anymore. But you still do look at that stuff in the hopes of getting lucky.

I'm assuming we're playing a different game, but look at it this way: by the time you're killing people, things have gone haywire anyway, so you can't go wrong with grabbing what you can get.

That and... I once ran a short campaign (one I found somewhere on the net, not my own) where the PCs could capture an entire freighter filled with weapons. Something like 2000 AK97s, some other stuff, and a few million rounds of ammo. Thousands of mini-grenades, too. BUT the idiots didn't think they could get it to port, so they abandoned it, I think. Everyone took a couple of AKs to decorate their living rooms.

Then again in another campaign the PCs sold off a whole ship full of goods (which they had captured from the pirates, who had initially captured it) for a bit of cash plus 1000 AV rounds for heavy machine guns. Well... very very regular AV rounds, because the idiots didn't even think to test even a single one of them... I guess that was the most expensive regular ammo they ever "bought", so, maybe it does pay to not "abstract" it, sometimes .

If the story dictates that the usually supply lines are cut, or the runners can't get back to home-base for whatever reason, then I'd definitely start making them count bullets. And foodstuffs too. I just want to cut-out the routine 'buy-more-ammos' drudgery that might otherwise happen at the end of each session.

I think it is fair to consider normal ammo as _part_ of the lifestyle cost for medium and up, and maybe even low.

The reason for this is that most 'runners are at least "good" with a firearm, and many 'runners are competition level.

Unless you are a 1-2 point weekend plinker, you have to train to stay at your skill level. The higher the skill level, the more you have to train to stay there.

Since there is no skill degradation mechanic (not that I want one), our 'runners must be shooting a LOT off-camera. Sure, some of that could be AR/VR, but not all, and that still leaves a lot of shooting. When you are firing a case of ammo per month, per weapon, why make an issue of the few mags you take on a run.


On a related note, someone above mentioned microetched ammo, chock full of RFIDs. I think that is very reasonable for the ammo that normal people go to the store to buy. If you use Nuyen instead of dollars, the price is probably the same as mass market ammo today.

Shadowrunners don't use that, because they don't want to go to jail! They buy ammo custom without any tracing features at all. That is why it is so expensive. (2 nuyen a bullet for light pistol??!!)

I pretty much run it as added in with the monthly lifestyle expense. I generally make it something like a per gun rate, but the special stuff is, well, special. Also, our troll is about to get his minigun so considering the sheer volume of lead he will be unleashing that will also get its own consideration.

I think its a nice consideration that there isn't as much focus on smaller details, like weight. Or memory space (remember your programs taking up "X" number of megapulses?). It was too much math, really, for a game. Unless you like math. Bogged it down, at least for me.

Then again, I didn';t start with D&D, as was mentioned some where else in the thread. Didn't have to worry about how much my PP's, GP's, EP's and so on were weighing my fighter down.

Your saying that some of your players actually use ammo thats not on that list of "good ammo", i just cant figure out why they would do that.
None of the characters i have build have any rounds of regular ammo, there's just no use for that stuff.

Gel rounds are always good. And I would say in machine guns that are used to lay down suppressive fire I would tend to use normal ammo.

They use plenty of 'good ammo' it's just a bit harder to get, so it usually gets saved for important operations, when its worth the investment of using something harder to find, and more illegal if you get caught.

Gunfights in SR4 are deadly enough without busting-out the APDS or EX ammo.

I dunno, regular ammo does fine on full bursts from machineguns.

Seriously, though, a wide full burst from an LMG pretty much means most opponents lose all their reaction/dodge dice. Which means the gunner's net hits will probably be in the stratosphere, pumping the DV to absurd levels. At that point, it's not THAT much different in overall effectiveness than the "good" ammo.

But yeah, in non-heavy firearms it's probably worth the extra cost for the good ammo. Assuming you can get it.



-k

That depends. If you full burst and take a -9 DP modifier to impose a -9 modifier on the other guy who has a 5 reaction, he's only down 5 dice and you're down 9.

You'll get net hits because you still have dice, but you wasted four of those dice doing nothing.

Now. If you have some RC enough to only be taking a -3, then sure, you'll get "more" net hits.

It's okay, the LMG is on a vehicle. Plus, now you're beating his armor, because net hits are magically better than extra bullets hitting them.

*cough*armorrulessuck*cough*

Either that or you're using an Ingram which magically has a 6 RC already and it's not hard to get 3 more from a gyromount or something.



Yes. Which is another reason for drone riggers to never fire anything but full bursts.





-k

I'd like to add something to the 'always take guns/ammo' school of thought. As a GM I find compulsive scavenging annoying as it requires me to determine what guns the opposition was using (I always pick the worst gun of whatever class). There are times when money is thin and I encourage scavenging by means of exposition. There are other times when I *want* a weapon to be a reward from the fight but I go out of my way to make perception tests and point out the nifty appearance of the gun. Overall, I feel scavenging slows down the pace of the game and has distracted some players from their ultimate goal (chasing the bad guy, etc) to needlessly rifling the pockets of dead people. That aside...

If you are scavenging guns and ammo off the fallen to use right then I sincerely hope your character ends up taking a dirt nap (or at least losing a hand). Only the reckless and ignorant use found firearm if given any choice in the matter. This is simply because you have no way of knowing how well maintained it is, the overall quality of the weapon, and in the realm of Shadowrun, if the gun is going to blow up in your hand. The same is true for ammo: is it what it looks like, what ballistic properties does it have, was it made in Pakistan by children? All of these questions should be answered before you ever consider picking up a gun and firing it. If you do scavenge guns and ammo from a run, please take them home, inspect them, test them, then use them.

If you can't carry all the bullets you need to a job, consider a larger backpack or a switching your gun to SA. Clearly there are times when you must pick up someone's gun and shoot it, but these should not be considered the norm.

I never looted as a ShadowRunner. It took playing another game of D&D for me to comment, "I should be looting the bodies more often."

And still never did. It in fact still felt weird for one guy (who kept getting per-raw critical glitches with his guns) to continually pick up a new one from dead guards.

Well, that depends on the level of cinematic-ness. 100% cinematic is 'never even reload', but 0% cinematic is 'every gun you don't personally maintain will explode'.

Huh? While it's true that it might detract from the ultimate mission, I would say it doesn't happen BEFORE the mission, it happens while the smoke clears. Unless a character actually ran out of ammo, which.... I'm not sure I've seen happening. In any case I don't think you need to use picked up guns directly unless you're in an extreme survival scenario, and even then I would say just make a roll in whatever firearms skill is required to look at the gun.
Also, all your safety, etc. constraints are all good and well in the real world, in SR I find them rather distracting. If you can point out rules for firearm degredation outside of the obvious - rolling critical glitches, which you can do with every gun - please do so. I might have missed them.

Concerning burst fire: Actually I think maybe not the armour rules suck, but the rules for automatic fire in general. I've always thought it's entirely unplausible that you always hit with all bullets of the tight burst - even a tight full burst -, and that you can magically increase damage on spray and pray.

Tight bursts should roll a second time for how many bullets hit, at least above a certain distance, let's say medium, and wide bursts should be capped at base DV. Of course now you have no means left to kill spirits and the like, but that's another problem that could be adressed independantly.



Oh, but doesn't it make a lot more sense to be a corpse-scavenging scoundrel in SR, rather than in games where you play a goody-two-shoes hero?



I would contend that it has nothing to do with cinematic-ness. It's not even realistic that every gun explodes, it's just stupid. If you're running against run-down rebels in aztlan, you might find low standard of weapon maintenance. (But even then, if you were to require this kind of forethought, I would expect the GM to indicate this by having a few guns explode while in the hands of the Opfor.) If you're killing red-samurai or even run of the mill KE security forces I would expect excellently maintained equipment.

I have written into the background of one of my characters that he regularly goes out and buys the crappiest guns he can find, a random mix of them, and practices with them in simulated combat.

He doesn't have a favorite gun. He uses whatever is at hand. He tries to prepare and obtain the best equipment, but he recognizes that relying on having such equipment is a weakness.

So he practices with the crap guns because someday he might need to use similar guns in a real firefight. Since he practices he at least knows the kind of problems and idiosyncrasies such weapons can have.



"Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst"



-k

Oh, agreed. I just said that I recognized the distinction, made a comment about fixing that error, and then still finding it odd.

Anyway, my group's next D&D campaign will...mmm...be entertaining. Oh, they'll still be the heroes, sure. But they'll get their faces rubbed in the muck a lot.
*Giggles like a little girl at the number of times the module informs the GM to "strip the PC of their equipment"*

Well... D&D is odd, in that looting is such an inherent mechanism. It's also not a game that even WORKS well with the established balance mechanism (level and challenge rating) if the "heroes" don't have their level-appropriate gear. And they don't get it unless they scavenge it.

In that game you are running, of course I would switch to a VoP Druid after a few sessions, but that's another story .

This is true.



Have druids made it to 4E yet? I haven't seen them, but they've got just about everything else.
Also Vow of Poverty doesn't exist any more either, and is in a book that my group never considered legal.

What is this 4E you are talking about? Surely you are joking.

I will admit that I still have issues with 4E D&D, but it does have some concept of balance. I think most of the things I don't like are things that weren't followed through with by Wizards (the zombie dogs for one, "all levels being interesting" another) but the system itself is very well constructed.

Well, if you like rubbing PC faces in the muck, play WFRP

Starting equipment: 1D10 dead rats...

4E is crap, and Wizards sucks. Pathfinder all the way.

Alrighty then. This threads been full derailed. My congratulations to all involved, we can move on to the next one.

Oh yeah, becouse obviliously professional security guards have no idea how to maintain their guns and they use ammo made by brain dead pakistanian children becouse those are just cheaper then the ones their own factory churns out by the millions next door

Probably best not to do this when you're running a drone rigger. Or a Dakka Sam/Adept

Druids got introduced in the PHB 2, along with bards (and bards are good now! especially half-elf bards)

Those pro-security and Red Sams have bio-locked guns anyway.

There's plenty of other sources of lootable guns besides Corpsec. Gangers, Mafia goons, etc. Aside from that, not every professional security team is going to maintain their weapons perfectly, it's one great way to cut-costs.


That said, I don't think I'd ever put an exploding gun at the feet of a PC, unless they were warned (via a perception test) that it might not fire correctly.

I have an Orc Bard.

He has a specialization in performance screaming.

And he can smack talk you to death. Literally.




-k

Now there was a game with no pretense of balance, haha. Had a ton of fun playing it, but at some point you just had to quit and start over because the Dwarf Warrior would become impossible to wound and the Elf or the Human warrior would become impossible to hit. Everyone who wasn't one of those just died in every encounter.

Except for the guy who got super lucky and rolled the Yahtzee of Wizard's Apprentice.

The reason I suggested using skittles or suchlike to represent ammo is this; If you're gonna make things like ammo count, help your players visualize. Whether that's mana or life or action points - seeing your pile of Stuff Counters shrink while on the run really drives home the idea of running out of resources.

But yeah, a rigger could certainly end up with a serious sugar rush *eg*

So how many bags of skittles does it take to represent 5 IPs of full-auto fire with a minigun? (75 rounds)

Rigging is hard work

Dumpshock is the result of Diabetes.

FTFY.

If they were so smart, they wouldn't be sec guards. And child labor is the definition of the bottom line (and corps love the bottom line). But more to the point, I wouldn't risk my life (or my fingers) on the assumption that the guy I just wasted was really smart/competent/well-paid and so forth...

Microetching your bullets is a monumental waste of time.

Jack middle man goes to the store and buys 10,000 bullets. He reports them stolen. Gets paid.
Rinse. Repeat.

The government is too weak to stop him. The corps have no right to stop him. They kill him, there's someone else waiting in line to take his place.

Gun running is stupid easy.

If there's another guy shooting at you, and your gun is out of ammo?

That's ridiculous. You don't do it if you don't have to, obviously, but there is still no game mechanic (I know of) that penalises such actions. (You COULD do stuff like define degredation by increasing the threshhold for glitches to 2s. Extreme degredation to 3s. But those are - to my less than complete knowledge - house rules you have to make WITH YOUR GROUP.)

Machines that produce mechanical parts have been getting more precise for decades now. I should expect that mid-level quality and better guns and ammo are reliable, no question.

That's a wildly uneducated statement. Just because someone is in security doesn't mean they're dumb, or not well paid, or incompetent.

Security companies nowadays can also cover information security as well as physical. Companies that do both get some fantastic contracts - and any security company that arms its employees is going to train them how to properly maintain and use the firearms they're issued. Chances are the firearm on that corpsec guard's body is better maintained than yours.

To not train their people is a liability in both PR and legality. A well-paid guard is a highly-trained one. A highly-trained one is more often than not a responsible one. A responsible one is more often than not a smart one, and a smart one can still get support to put one in the back of your head while you're trying to get through the door he's turned into a barricade. Always assume the enemy is smarter than you when they have the home field advantage.

If the guard is not well trained, he won't stick around when he's being shot at.

And his gun is bio-locked anyway.

Max, usually your special brand of English is interesting and innocuous, but… "brain dead pakistanian children", really? It's 'brain-dead Pakistani children', dude!

I'd agree completely - if you and the rest of your group digs on this sort of thinking, conjure-up some house-rules about gun maintenance. Unless you are routinely asking your players to roll a Firearms + Logic test to do routine gun-cleaning and maintenance after each time the gun gets fired, you arn't really simulating the whole gun-ownership experience. There's no rules in the books for this kinda stuff, and I'll venture a guess as to why: For most people, it isn't very fun.

Ignoring gun-maintenance is just one of the many things that gets glossed-over in SR. How many of you track the petrochem level of your Bulldog Vans? Oil changes? Tire-rotation? Sure, if the team was driving into the middle of the desert where there wasn't any civilization, I might add some drama by making them plan ahead for fuel-useage, but aside that, I'd much rather play the game than deal with the mundane issues that I have to deal with in real-life.

This isn't real-life, it's Shadowrun, it's supposed to be BTL.

"What makes me a good demoman? Well if I was a bad demoman, I wouldn't be sittin' here, discussin' it with you now would I?"

The brain dead part is there becouse the non brain dead ones actually produce perfectly good ammo

"Lookit me. I'm a black Scottish Cyclops. There's more <censored> than there are o' me."