Luckily from 5000 meters the radiation threat is pretty minimal. And if a 1000 kg laser guided bomb explodes in a house full of runners in the barrens and there are no reporters, did it really happen?

Change barrels alot? why not just use EXex so there are no bullets left intact to analyze.

Hehe, playing Saint Row the Third gave me a new mental image on EXEX in use. There if one max mod one of the pistols, the rounds become explosive (and damn effective against non-armored vehicles!). Pop a couple of those rounds into a target and they go ragdoll...

Another reason to buy the Colt .45.

booze or peacemaker?

Booze and Automatic (The pistol referred to in Saints Row that fires explosive rounds is based on the M1911A1.). The booze is for pouring on the curb for authors and fictional ShadowTalkers that came before us. (Well, I'm not about to drink it! I'm Canadian, I have some taste in beer, thankyouverymuch.).

Because with ExEx you are able to analyse the composition of the explosive used and there won't be a lot of ExEX ammunition to throw around.
Beeing able to match a bullet to a murder weapon if you find it is nice, having the bullet finding the shooter is even better.

Probably because they like CSI-type shows, my PCs took to changing barrels without any suggestion or encouragement from me, that and to make the sammie feel the few BP he ploughed into the Armourer skill were points well spent and to give him something to do in downtime.

Not sure you are right about EX-EX casings being untraceable though, (probably because I like CSI-type shows) I would have thought that 2070's CSI teams would be able to use CG to reverse explode the shell fragments and recreate the shell, micro-groves and all, but that's just me.

Irion brings up a good point about forensic footprints from explosive residues. I think it would be more applicable to home-brewed ammo, but would 2070's CSI Seattle could track back such-and-such a residue to a given batch of bullets produced for Bob's Bullets franchises or whatever?

Perhaps this is all a touch theoretical, as who knows what 2070's forensic tech will be like, and I imagine cost considerations would preclude their usage in all but the most serious of cases, but opinions anybody?

@Midas
ExEx you do not get in every wallmart. 12F means it is quite hard to get and it is kept track of.
So if you go to a company and ask where there ExEx ammunition is going to, they better know it. Regular ammunition, you won't be that lucky.
And with all the nanotech in shadowrun, there is a good possibility that there is even an ID on every single bullet.

Homebrew ammo can be a different mix every time, meaning no real traceability. Stolen EXEX chemical analysis would only indicate where it originally came from, but that gives no proof the current user didn't just by it from a fence (as is what probably happened). If it was a legal purchase, then it would depend on if there is only one small manufacturer and records are required by law, or if ammo purchases are like today where no records are kept and if EXEX can be bought at ammo-shack. Of course justifying the spending of BP is a fine reason to use a skill.

SR3 has it as weapon. So I take it that you think the (as RAW) expensive nanotech would be used in ammo, something usually sold as a commodity, meaning its all about price? Do your players even run in the shadows? or just use mages and hackers from afar?

Isn't TV great!

No. CSI has caused major problems with juries as forensic experts have given testimony and Jury Members will go, "That's not how they do it on CSI."

The show makes me cringe, like the "Insta-Matic DNA Machine" and other such wonderful things that allows a case to be solved in an hour (including commercials) despite taking painstaking days and weeks of work and maybe providing some evidence. Fingerprinting a room alone... *Shudders*

And that's if you're in a city that has a CSI Team with even a tenth of the equipment as they have on the show (Some of which is provided by actual companies for product placement.).

One thing they got right I knew about a week or so before I saw the episode. My mother was working at one when they had "A creepy guy" looking for the "largest pot possible". She asked him questions pertaining to cooking, and he just sighed, showed his credentials and said, "I need the best pot to boil the flesh off a skull. There's a piece of equipment that I'm supposed to use, but it's apparently less useful and more expensive than a big enough pot. And I'm near the end of my budget, so... I found about the pot on a forensic examiner's forum, and..."

To her credit, she didn't ask me to look for the forums for Forensic Examiners.

I was discussing TV as inspiration for game, not real life. Great now that you
''ve depressed the hell out of me I need to go have a Thanksgiving Day domestic dispute.

Oh, for inspiration it's great stuff! I also suggest Leverage. Just had a few issues with that particular show. Still doesn't stop me from watching it.

And Thanksgiving was last month. Have a happy domestic dispute!

Be sure to have a bottle of rum first. I hear being drunk before the holiday dispute is key

Only in Canada, OUR harvest season didn't end a month ago, but just recently. Would it be a correct guess that you like burn notice as well?

Wrong holiday, but it's in the feeling. And anyhow, the decorations are already out.

Well, I like Burn Notice. Most of the time is great, with people running for cover and stuff, until you see an episode where Michael and Fiona take an entire russian death squad while hugging and kissing behind NO COVER while the russians are...

Early Burn Notice, when Michael was Ghetto and stealing Cell Phones to do his stuff. And fighting with Duct Tape more.

Thought so, when I visit my parents I end up being forced to watch way too much of it, my mother loves it.

So does mine. So I have to watch it. It was better when Mike was Ghetto. Still, I like Bruce Campbell's character and Mike's Mom. You can tell where he got his skills, that's for damned sure!

I can't stand the main character, but Campbell is the only shining light, I just wish he was an S mart worker...

Had a metal hand, chainsaw, and a double-barreled shotgun?

Speaking of, it should hopefully be soon time for a new game, and they nailed it nearly right the last time. They needed Ted Raimi in it.

In my game, there've always been a few different reasons for not sharing information between corporations.

The big one, of course, would seem to be "If I share this with you, you know where my security features are, and are not, and can guess based on what I don't show you, where my important stuff is," but with the amount of editing available in Shadowrun, this is probably not as major as most people think. Cameras are everywhere, all the corps have to do is edit out what they don't want to be seen. Plus, It's doubtful that a shadowrun team will flee to a high security facility when a corp-owned mall would be better, after all. The majority of footage would therefore be from a public setting, and not all that risky to send over through official corporate channels.

The real reason I don't believe corporations share information on runners who flee to their territory? If Ares gives Evo such footage now, when some random shadowrun team wanders into a gun store to hide from pursuit... what excuse does Ares have a month from now, if another team seeks solace the same way but is working the run for Ares itself? Even if there is a legitimate reason as to why security can't be shared in the future (For example, some shadowrun team blew up all of our cameras for that area, whoops!), after having been shared in the past, you'll set the other corporation to wondering why the data is not forthcoming now. This is especially true if the run involves an object that the other corporation knows you might be interested in.

Further, same situation... a shadowrun team flees Evo and hides in Ares territory. Ares can give up that Shadowrun team in exchange for similar considerations from Evo, sure, but as someone pointed out: that's one less team Ares can contact for the hit they want to run on Evo a couple of months down the line... and that's one less team with (successful) Evo experience.

Also, if Ares starts to get a reputation for turning Shadowrunners over to the other corporations, well... fewer of the 'good' shadowrun teams will want to work for Ares. After all, if there are 'contract' options available to the shadowrunners (and with good teams, I'd imagine there are) then why would they pick the company that is known for blabbing to the other corporations? Said corporation ends up either not getting the quality they want, or paying far, far more to hire that quality. If every quality shadowrunner you work for starts demanding risk pay just for working for you, well... you're at a competitive disadvantage.

Even in a case where the shadowrunners accidentally kill a security guard, I doubt the corporation would want to try and bargain with another corporation for information on the runners. They might hire a hacker to steal the security footage, sure. They might hire a PI to find out what team performed the run, even. Both of those options, if involving a suitably discreet hire, would be less 'painful' to reputation and less costly to the corporation in both the short and long run. After all, retribution doesn't decrease the cost of replacing those guards, or upgrading the security features of the site.

On the other hand, finding the shadowrunners through unofficial means, such as a PI or security footage datahack, can turn those same shadowrunners into an asset. All the corporation has to say is "We have evidence that you killed these three people. Now, we can broadcast this to all of the private security databases we can think of, and leak the information to quite a few of the people who might hire you... and make life a little more difficult for you, for some time... or we can come to some arrangement where you do this little thing for us, and we forget those deaths ever happened," This is an easy way to turn the death of your employees into a corporate asset, something I think all corporations would look to do.

Before someone points out, "Well, the shadowrunners could just disappear for a bit, wait for the heat to drop, change their IDs, etc." yes, the shadowrunners could... but the damage would be done to reputation as well. If the shadowrunners are ID'd in such a way that they could be identified to a database, even under an assumed identity... well, fixers would see these runners as incompetent, or a risk. The threat is to hit the shadowrunners where it hurts: Their professional reputation and their future paychecks, not through the (supposedly) low risk of prosecution.

However, if Evo gets this footage from Ares in an official manner, and a couple of weeks later the same team hits Ares for a project that Evo is interested in, then Ares is much more likely to connect the dots. The shadowrunners are only an asset if Ares never realizes Evo was able to ID and blackmail the team in the first place.

Anyways, this is just how I've always run it, I suppose, and my reasoning behind all of that. My .02 nuyen, and I suppose my first post. Sorry for the thesis!