Now I had a heated debate with my wife/player over this concept being implemented and we were on the same page, so please keep it polite.
We all know that some things in game, where its the signiture pimped gun of the sammie, cyberdeck/nexus, foci or rigger captain vehicle have a shield of PLOTtainium - its a big thing when they go byebye.

Basically its the fine line of being harsh/tough to create difficultly and so fun for your PCs, so their players look you in the eye and say,
"That fragging (insert racial slur) is going to get the HARD GOODBYE!" Then spend every minute planing and plotting their revenge.

But not have the player/s stand up angrly and shout, "You f***ing D*** ref!!!! I QUIT!

The topic in question is moves like having the opporsition throw around spells like Demolish foci or cyberdeck at the PCs. Making the sharp shooters target the cyber deck or cyberware. The usual gentlemens agreement over high power rifles and sniper headshots being rudely revoked AGAINST the PC's.

For the sake of transparency, I believe that line depends on the trust between ref and player that this is going to a fun place. The character is a vehicle that takes the hits doing what the (hopefully sane) player does not. Like getting shot or worse. That line will vary from game to game but like the BBB 3rd ed says, should sweat, bleed and strive for every point of karma earned.

So would you demolish the PC foci or guns/deck mid run for a intense play game?
And why?
And mechanically/fairly- how?

Not right out of the gate, but if the players are going into a run that they know is going to be very, very difficult, I have no problem pulling out the stops. Generally, though, the payout for a run is in line with the risk attached to it, so the kind of run where high nuyen items are likely to get one-shot busted generally pays well enough to mostly cover replacements.

Either that, or the PCs done fragged up and brought the heat down upon themselves.

Well a lot would depend on the situation.

Breaking a players toys is one sure way to get a rage building.

Shoot someone in the chest and they may get mad, but mostly takes it in stride.

Shoot the shinies and they will hunt you to the ends of the earth and make your death slow and painful before burning the body and mixing the ashes with explosives.

That said, you also have to consider, if there was a mage there ready with the demolish foci spell, why didn't he just nuke the group? Unless that foci is an artefact, why is it higher on the priority list than geeking the mage or the rest of the team?

Same can be applied to the Cyberdeck, shooting the deck is good, shooting the decker is smarter unless you thought there was already data downloaded to it and your priority was to destroy the data.

Would I target a tool over a PC?

Yes, given sufficient reason to bump the device up the priority chain. But it is not done lightly and with the understanding there will be consequences. The best way to make this palatable is usually via a dramatic moment or cliffhanger so that the loss/sacrifice has some meaning to help mitigate the sting.

The exception to this rule is the Cat & Mouse Scenario and Wake up nekkid scenario, both of which are very controversial and only taken after serious consideration.

Cat & Mouse is the slow destroying of everything the team holds dear, starting with equipment working up through contact and friends. This one is best reserved for a blood enemy, because if they were not before they are now.

Wake up nekkid is one of the least liked scenarios for players and always hot argued. Party is effectively knocked out, stripped and dumped into a situation leaving them to sort their way through. This can range from being taken by the cops and jailed to bad movie plot style of literally waking up nekkid with no clue what happened, this latter of which usually will have at least half the party challenging you on how they were taken in the first place...

I am firmly against this, as this usually hits the mundane characters harder than the mages.
ESPECIALLY riggers and deckers with pieces of equipment that cost IN CHAR GEN sevel dozend thousand nuyen and in game are much more expensive and hard to come by too.

yeah, i'd need to hear a legitimate reason why someone is shooting your super expensive piece of gear and not you. i mean, it makes sense to shoot the rigger's vehicle if everyone is in it, so that one i'd be okay with (bearing in mind that if a run is putting an expensive piece of gear on the line, it should be paying enough for the rigger to risk that expensive piece of gear... if you believe in paying out 3,000 credits per run, then you REALLY need to tell the rigger that in advance, and advise him to be a rigger/car thief and never drive a vehicle he has personally paid for and make sure he's ok with that, because otherwise you have just destroyed his entire character).

so, i mean, vehicles make sense. i'm having a hard time seeing why anyone would bother shooting a cyberdeck, as was pointed out. if you can shoot the cyberdeck, just shoot the decker.

Why would anyone shoot a cyberdeck? They are like sports cars you can fit in your pocket. My character has been taking extra care not to seriously damage any cyberdecks he run across so they can loot them and sell them later, and I just assume others are smart enough to do the same. Like, if you are smart enough to realize cyberdecks are important, you are smart enough to realize they are worth something.
I sorta extend the same logic to foci, though honestly a bit more specialized because of the tradition rules surrounding them. Like, I think even the most honest guard in the 6th world knows someone who can fence these items of huge monetary investment, and seeing as they are worth like, two or three months of pay(and aren't illegal to own/sell, like a good chunk of drugs), I see more reason why they wouldn't.

Yeah. Essentially wiping out the hackers Deck leaves them functionally useless in the thing the player explicitly chose to play.

Unless you replace their deck really quick...they're not going to afford to replace it. Cheapest deck someone might realistically take on a run is about $205k, standard run is 3k...a nastier run say 6k?...that's still 34 runs assuming no other costs involved to buy a new deck.

No... You shoot the Hacker through his Cyberdeck... The only way to be sure.

Which is why the Deck Economics in SR5 are so Stupid. *shrug*

The route I prefer taking is to put them in a situation where I take away their stuff, or out them in a place where their best gear isn't on their persons.

So I either a.) it forces the player to have to scavenge for gear and make them play in a different manner then they normally would or b.) they'll start taking risks or doing things they wouldn't normally do, just so they can get their gear back.

Doesn't have as much hurt feelings result versus destroying their gear, but it creates an overall similar effect.

So here's a quick thought for people to look at:

A thief steals the Decker's Deck and the run is the group helping their friend get his precious device back. Now the obvious problem here is that the Decker is in theory going to be pretty useless on the run here so unless they have a backup deck (unlikely due to deconomics) you'll have to let them cobble an improvised machine together or give them an alternative way to be involved. Obviously, this should only happen once in a campaign and maybe once in a group, but it might make an interesting change of pace from your normal 'Mr Johnson's run of the week'.

As to destroying a PC's gear? Drones and Vehicles are going to get shot at because they're a major threat. Guns may get shot out of hands if the PCs are to be taken alive, but that's unlikely. In the action economy it is virtually always a more effective use of time and equipment to shoot the guy carrying the gear rather than the gear itself.

Hence my comment on PLOTtinum. In one case a friend of mine used his PC's deck in an armoured case strapped to the front centre of mass. YET thanks to the rules bullets bent round this obsticle?

I do appriciate the reasons though, I started a combat decker with no deck in one game, (playing up the combat part of his skills) to try and claw enough cred to get a replacement. Shady deals, hair rasing adventures and dasterdly deals followed. But I was complicite in this PC problem.

To add fuel to the debate, heres why for the foci cull. MR Christmas Tree can not be beat due to all his shiny foci buffs. Level the playing field by removing his crutchs of the craft and your magical assets/sec guards just boosted the end game win for your side.
Loss of loot revenue perhapes but better than your whole product line walking out the door and the hit to your rep as a soft target.

Stratergy and tactics always mean clear cut kill them is not always the best answer. The maxime of wounding a man in war drains more resources than a dead one, for example.

But in the Real World tm, we do this for fun. As ref you could just bovine bombard the player characters and save time.

This is a slightly different situation than the query about intentionally targeting a cyberdeck.

If the person is wearing his cyberdeck as armor, even if he doesn't call it that but a armoured case strapped to the front centre of mass is going to get hit.

If he continues to insist on doing this, nod and then when shots are fired you can make a ruling on which rounds hit him or the case and handle appropriately.

As for Mr. Christmas Tree, you do not need to destroy so much as weaken, Background counts will play havoc with this sort of thing and there are rules for deactivating foci as well under the enchanting section.

also if he is so heavily decked out in foci, you may want to check out foci addiction as overuse can cause burnout for a mage.

Has focus addiction caught up with with Mr Christmas tree yet?

In a war with another army this is very much true. Security guards vs 5 thieves, on the other hand... Yeah no. Different tactics and Strategies need to be used in different situations, and using attrition to drain resources from a runner team instead of killing them isn't a good idea.

Also, most opposition is going to be trained to shoot for the center of mass, not the small device they're wearing on their arm ect.

Foci addiction is a huge and terrifying thing in SR5, and still a major possibility in SR4, and it sounds like Mr Christmas Tree is due for some.
And both editions should have rules for shooting through barriers, I would just uses those rules for "MY CYBERDECK IS TOTALLY ARMOR GUYS" guy.

Actually I think realistically SR should have more gear destruction.

If you read John Plaster's famous book "The Ultimate Sniper" he explains why a sniper will often target gear INSTEAD of the man operating the gear.

If there's a man with a shoulder fired anti aircraft missile, you don't want to preferentially shoot the man, because after he is dead someone else can grab the missile and threaten your air support. Preferentially, you disable the missile by shooting out some of the optics or electronics on the launcher.

So if there is a decker who can turn building security against the defenders, it seems completely textbook and completely within reason for a sniper to shoot the deck. Because technically anyone with a datajack can pick up that deck and use it, especially if they have an OK Computer skill, right?

Same deal with any item of "super gear" that has special capabilities.


Besides for the act of deliberate destruction of gear, SR would be more realistic if there were incidental or accidental hits to gear. I have read that hits to the weapon in real life are quite common because the rifle is what is sticking out from cover. That's why it's now a common practice for people on elite small units such as SWAT teams to have a back up gun.

So if a team of shadowrunners takes suppression fire, how weird would it be if magically the suppression fire can only hit the people but magically will not hit any held rifles, any cyberdecks slung or in pockets, or any magical swords that are strapped to the body?

Basically, I think it would be more realistic and make planning for combat more realistic if there was always a chance that gear would be destroyed and people would then plan on taking back up weapons and keeping ammunition compatible within the team.


So my ideal would be to go hard on the gear destruction but then have the game not have mandatory combat. Make it more strategic instead of a series of movie-like encounters. Let the characters choose the risks they are going to take or spend time and resources to minimize the risk of ambush/counter attack if they don't want they and theirs to get shot up.


EDIT: It might make for an interesting game where the decker doesn't invest in the best deck he possibly can, but on having multiple "good enough" decks with offline backups of all his software so he can afford to lose them periodically or carry 2 in case one gets disabled.

It sounds like you've got some reason to destroy those things if they're making the game less fun for everyone. Generally, if I'm going to destroy the PC's stuff, I usually let them know its coming or at least could be coming. It really ups the ante on some fights when they know that there's a chance for lasting damage and effects. That sense of danger can be more fun for most groups. It really helps if it makes sense for the opposition to go after the equipment. Like FAB to take out the foci or a technomancer that has no use for cyberdecks stomping it into bits. Or maybe there's a high powered microwave emitter that fries electronics, taking out the cyberdeck, but just induces nausea in people and overheating in people, so it's used as a crowd control/non lethal option for some locations. So that you're not breaking suspension of disbelief, just to target someone's stuff.

I was helping GM that other game for a friend and running the monsters. The group heard wolves howling around their camp and formed up into their circle and sat waiting for their standard random encounter. Instead, the wolves went for their horses tied up outside the camp (because why would wolves charge a fire when there's a fine meal of tied up horse meat waiting for them). They were confused that the wolves weren't just charging mindlessly and were like "who cares about the horses?". Until they realized that they couldn't actually carry all their crap without their mounts. The mood changed instantly and there was a mad scramble to save the horses. None of them got hurt, but it was still one of the most memorable fights of the game.

Depending on the player, they might actually appreciate upping the ante, provided you're not only ever targetting them.

Have you considered forcing Mr Christmas Tree to walk through a ward, or be on an elevator that goes through one? Boom, all his foci are suddenly deactivated. No biggie, right? Try reactivating all those while under fire. Also takes down any sustained spells he has up and running.

I mean the ward could give, but at high forces it's probably taking a couple of spells/foci with it. Just as good is forcing him to disable them himself before going through a ward to avoid alerting everyone to their presence. If we're talking 4A then there are all sorts of fun special wards in street magic which will mess him up.

Take out the Decker with a rating 6 directional jammer or 2.

I call that the Rule of Second Best: You often find the biggest increase in cost is for that last bit of bump in an item's stats, especially in MMORPGs where everyone is sinking tons of money to try and buy the Best in Slot when the 2nd best is often half the cost and only slightly behind the BIS version.

While I do not deck, I do try to have backups for most of the gear, even if a bit cheaper just in case of losses.

Also, one of the most common pieces of gear destroyed in our games is armour. I mean, the entire point of the stuff is that it takes the hit instead of you so it makes sense that on a bad hit (EG a glitch on the soak check) your armour will be damaged. There were rules for this in 4A and will probably be more in run and gun.

Weapons tend to get hit if you poke them around a corner and your enemy is looking for something to shoot. If it's the only target then you bet it's going to get shot at.

It's kind of expensive but when possible I have a 'restart kit' stashed in a safehouse. My restart kit includes a credstick with enough money to buy a new SIN, some basic gear to do my job, another credstick with enough for a month's low lifestyle and petty cash, a fresh link, ect. That way if shit hits the fan and I'm stranded with nothing I have enough resources stashed away to rebuild from the ground up.

I'm not sure that the player is going to be more happy about being dead than losing an expensive piece of gear.

At least losing the gear can be part of the narative. i.e the GM plans to replace the deck with one they find as part of the same run.

that might be the case with some things, but in general, a person with a decent computer skill is not going to be a threat with a cyberdeck, no matter how good it is. the deck doesn't determine your dice pools (well, partially for defence, but a high rating commlink has equal defensive stats and costs a lot less). the deck determines your limits. the worst decker in the world with the best cyberdeck in the world is still more useless than a moderately competent decker with the worst deck in the world. it is only when it is a matter of having several moderately competent people that can use the gear while there is only one piece of gear that destroying the equipment is likely to be the better choice.

likewise, the vehicle is likely a lot less important than the driver. the piece of gear you need to disable is the rating 3 VCR in the guy's head, not the car he's driving.

especially in shadowrun terms. in a war, it's very likely the enemy has multiple people trained to use that rocket launcher. in a team of shadowrunners, odds are pretty good that anyone else driving the rigger's vehicle will be less impressive than the rigger driving a tricycle with a control rig in it. also, depending on how strictly you follow the RAW, they may not travel as fast as the rigger on a tricycle either.

as to characters getting shot being more tolerable than gear... honestly, usually not so much. the character without the gear in some cases becomes completely useless. if you are a decker and lose your deck in SR5, the odds of you *ever* getting a replacement are incredibly slim. especially with the official guidelines on how much money your team makes. now, if it's reasonable to expect that your decker has a couple hundred grand in the bank, or if your decker has persuaded the group to not sell off any cyberdecks they may have captured, it's possible for the character to function. but, the simple fact is this: because of how SR5 is set up, it is easier to replace a character than it is to replace a character's equipment.

Man, you guys are fast and loose. My groups are always going on and on about "X per day, per person, plus expenses...oh, and we get the spoils of war". Bitches be printing up expense reports and shit to give to the client. To paraphrase 'The Rock', "...but now we're mercenaries, and mercenaries GET PAID!"

By the way, it's really handy to have a character in the party have on their gear list, "Duffle bag full of duffle bags"...just sayin'.

Yeah. How is the Decker going to contribute on the 5+ runs he needs to get paid for in order to buy a new Deck.
At best he's splashed some points into a couple of combat and stealth skills but most of his skills, attributes and 'ware are going to be focused on Decking. At best he's a mediocre combat support guy with good medical skills (due to high logic), , certainly not on par with the rest of the group.

We've had characters lose gear during a run. Somethims through accident (glitch), sometimes through stupidity (taking a nodachi in the sewers). But anything really important to the character that is on the chopping block is usually discussed off-line and usually a replacement is made available within a reasonable amount of time.

At least that's how we've done it in the past.

As far as the decker goes, things must be more complicated in 5e. I haven't really GMed or played since 3rd ed and even then people hardly ever wanted to play deckers. So my memory is a bit rusty but if I recall right a lot of the power was in the cyberdeck and programs so it was much more viable for, say, some other team member to sacrifice some build points towards Computer so that he could then run over and use the deck if the team decker was down.

Also, as I recall, some IC could fry your deck, so sometimes you'd need to repair it in the normal course of play due to IC as opposed to it only happening due to snipers targeting gear. If I were the GM I'd treat a sniper round through the deck as a similar repair to the optical chips and motherboard inside getting fried since in either case you'd think it would come down to replacing a bunch damaged hardware.


You bring up a good point with the rigger. If he can be identified it would make sense to snipe him out. I guess that's the same as real life...the sniper is supposed to ID and prioritize in the following order, according to Plaster: 1.) enemy sniper or designated marksman, 2.) specialized equipment like anti air missiles or sensors on a tank, 3.) officers, and 4.) everyone else.

Thinking this through further, if I'm the corporate security sniper, let's say that I see a runner hunched over a deck near a terminal. I don't necessarily know if he's a poor decker or a great decker and I don't necessarily know if anyone else on the SR team is also a great decker. Maybe they even have 2 deckers on the team. I also have no way of gauging whether or not he's compromised building security, defenses, or how close he is to doing so.

If I shoot the decker that's obviously good, but I don't know for sure that someone couldn't run over and finish what he started. But if I destroy the deck, I feel fairly secure that that won't happen. If I don't really have time to think it over too hard or debate it and lives are on the line, I could see shooting the deck as feeling like the "safer" option if I really don't want the defense turrets to attack allies, or something like that. Considering the horrific possibility of defenses turning on me and my team, it would seem like logically the deck is the greater threat than the decker, since without a working deck, you can't even attempt to deck at all.

EDIT: So, to finalize the thought, if I were a GM today, I would simply state before the game that in my campaign snipers and others are trained to target gear in some cases and I'd point to the background or precedent of some of the info in "The Ultimate Sniper" to demonstrate that this has a basis in real world military practices as opposed to something that I'm simply making up. Next, as far as matrix stuff goes, I would either reduce the prices on decks, adjust matrix stuff so that cheaper decks are OK (for plausibility in a world where decks aren't permanent and character defining investments but rather combat equipment that get used up), or else I would (plausibly I feel) allow the player characters to seize cyberdecks from facilities that contain them as part of the security setup so that rather than having to buy a replacement deck a team could have several decks of various caliber in their possession as spoils of war at all times.

As opposed to adhering to some strange idea that expensive gear taken into combat can never get damaged.

That's like saying the Stalight Scopes used in the Vietnam War that at the time cost tens of thousands of dollars were never damaged in combat or accidentally broken because they were an important part of someone's abilities at the time and the person could get into a lot of trouble over a missing or damaged unit.

5th edition matrix is definitely different. it's been a while since i looked at it, but iirc 3rd edition cyberdecks and programs adjusted your target numbers, and your matrix attributes, so were crazy important. in 4th edition, your dicepool was determined by your programs plus your skill, so they were pretty important then, too.

in 5th edition, your dice pool for hacking is skill + attribute (usually logic), and the deck sets your limit. however, even on the worst deck you can swap your deck's attributes pretty much on the fly, which means that your limit for any given action can be made pretty high right off the bat. not amazing, but you can have a limit of 4 even on the worst deck out there (which is still 50k nuyen, give or take, with no software).

your deck's attributes also contribute to your defensive dice pool, so not completely irrelevant (especially if you can't get your defensive stats to be the two highest after taking an action), but basically... if you are not good at hacking, you're gonna fail miserably at it, even with an amazing deck. an amazing deck will generally let you use really awesome rolls, and doesn't drastically improve your chance to make said really awesome rolls.

as to someone else being a decker... unlikely. it's a pretty big investment of resources. you need 5 skills to be good at all hacking tasks (plus one if you want hardware, plus another 2 for technomancers). having a second decker who doesn't own a deck after investing so many skill points into it is unlikely. plus you also need logic, willpower, and sometimes intuition to make up your dice pools. the only people likely to have good attributes in those areas but not be deckers are magicians and technomancers. magicians already need a crudload of skills, and have plenty of karma sinks that improve them in their main area of focus (and seldom want the distraction of getting good at something they're very very very rarely likely to need to do), and technomancers don't need the deck anyways (and also actually make a lot more sense as a "second decker" on a team, since about the only thing they're legitimately great at right now is making an actual decker better at decking).

Technomancers, from my look in, can get as much benefit out of using a Deck as the decker that bought it, possibly more as the flexibility and the availability of programs changes the game for them. Then, if the Deck is shot or bricked, the technomancer can STILL keep hacking, but without the buff from their teammate's paperweight.

The other issue is that you don't want the mediocre decker fiddling around in the matrix until after the alarms are already raised.

Decking is a race against Overwatch count and the decker who rolls worse is going to lose that race. Once OC hits the target number up go the alarms.

You really want the best decker you can get doing the hacking during the stealth/infiltration/etc. parts of the run. The mediocre one can join in once alarms are up.

sure, but you'd still have the same basic problem with or without the deck. if you shoot the deck, a technomancer can hack. if you don't shoot the deck, the technomancer can hack. it's even possible the technomancer has taken the time to preemptively set up a few marks on important things on their own persona, which would provide some motivation to not switch to the deck (also the fact that certain actions can magically only be performed by the owner of something).

Which is why the SR4A Method of Hacking is superior. No Multi-Hundreds of Thousands of nuyen sunk into the required hardware. Lose a Custom Hacking Link, and you just go get another one (they are still pretty expensive, but nothing compared to the prices of Decks in SR5 - I think the one my Cyberlogician ran with ran just over 60,000 Nuyen). The Economy adjustments do not make up for it in SR5.

I had an issue with this, in one game i ran. The male rigger was an alcoholic, and the plan was to use a 'rented' van to sneak in, and have the decker set the package they wanted as outgoing on that company van. the rest of the team was nearby, but the rigger was physically alone in the van.

So, first he botched a disguise check to put on makeup to defeat digital cameras looking at him. this makes him look weird, but thats not too bad overall as long as the decker has things under control. While waiting at the gate, the player says he offers a drink from his hip flask to the guard on duty. *RED FLAG* goes up, and internal security starts to go 'wait, what?' but the decker gets the van loaded and on the move in time. the decker, however, fails to fully check security or remove camera records.

so they get tailed, and lose the 'rented' van in a firefight at a local mall where the decker stops smartphone pictures from hitting the matrix. they got the r7 goods, and are out of there... so i ask the rigger 'where did you park your van with all the drones?' he tells me his apartment (which is linked to his fake SIN). i ask if hes sure, he says yes. so we soon find lone star at his apartment. he started packing up his bag to leave the game right then and there.

now, i thought i was being nice- i politely refrained from starting a TPK fight with security at the warehouse when the player voluntatily screwed himself over hard. and yet he saw only the character creation cost of those precious toys that lone star impounded. he also strongly resisted the idea of changing his face/SIN for a good while. he was sadly in the habit of volunteering information that would screw his character over in other games as well. it was how he 'roleplayed'.

Heh... That is entertaining.

My Cyberlogician got captured by Mitsuhama after a plan went horribly south (admittedly the group was a major thorn in their side, and at least 2 of the characters had rolled over and were informing for them by that point). Accused of Corporate Espionage and with the vast majority of this High-End Beta Grade Cyber removed (along with some 40 or so drones, 3 major vehicles and assorted other gear seized), he was sent to Prison. It sucked, but was oh so fun breaking out and re-equipping and recovering what he had lost. Sadly, I retired the character after the Emergence fiasco settled down. Something about my GF wanting to hunt down the bastard that killed her. Ahh well...

Or the Decker just makes a deal with somebody. One of his contacts, the group's Fixer, or even someone shadier, to get the money. Boom, suddenly you have a plot hook to spin those five or so runs around that lets you as the GM lead the players a little into taking runs a bit outside their comfort zone.

That is true too... I'm always good with something like that.

provided you don't use the screwed up payout system that the core book recommends.

"oh hey look guys, we're running against Ghostwalker! sweet, we get a 3,000 nuyen bonus! totally worth it!"

Yeah, whoever came up with that system, really missed the boat, I think.

God, no. I still base my payouts in SR2/3 era thought processes, combined with $1 = 1 in the players' heads. It all bleeds out in ammo costs and lifestyle anyway.

seeing as how gear-based SR is, I'd consider major equipment loss would be taken as seriously as considerations for outright killing player characters. something to be done in moderation, with a lot of thought put into it by the GM, and should have a direct link to the ongoing plot.

On this I think we all agree

I think messing with a PCs gear is inherently dangerous to player happiness, but I think it can be pulled off on a case by case basis.

The key, really, is to make sure that any losses the PCs suffer have a chance to be made up.

Gunbunny Gloria has her favorite modded assault rifle blasted to pieces by a mage with an acid spell? Give her the opportunity to geek the bastard, and maybe on his corpse she finds paydata which gives the team access to a secret weapons cache, or the time and place of a major illegal gun shipment, letting the team make some profit snagging it and letting Gloria find a fancy replacement weapon in the crate marked "Ares Prototype System XF-150".

~Umi

Heheh, well conversely...

I did get evil thoughts, as a GM, when I saw that Springfield Model 1855 Reproduction in GH3.

"What happens if you kidnap some PC runners, lock them in a room, take away all their gear, and the only readily available weapons are these crates of ancient musket rifles complete with their ammo? Wireless bonuses? Hah! You don't have to worry about these weapons bricking!!!"

"Oh, and I hope you took a Firearms Design or Firearms History knowledge skill so you know how to handle these, because otherwise it's about as useful as an empty stapler!!!"

"All good, I went and minmaxed the Clubs skill as high as it would go. Hell, I reckon these things are more dangerous as Clubs than as guns!"

Also, I believe they could default longarms on that knowledge check, though granted at a penalty.

Had a Korean War vet as my History and Law class teacher. He told us a story once of how his unit was the target of a human wave attack and the big ol' corn-fed Hoss of a machinegunner ran out of machinegun ammo so he picked up the empty M1 Garand rifles of two dead US soldiers by the barrels and started hacking away with them at the charging Chinese. Heads popped right the fuck off necks, smashed skulls squirting out eyeballs, the whole nine yards...pretty intense shit, to say the least.

Ask any Korean War vet the sound they hate more than anything else and I can guarantee "Those fucking bugles" tops their lists...

I think Wounded Ronin's approach would be the optimal one from a realism standpoint. The problem is that Shadowrun's gear is so messed up, cost-wise (and mechanics-wise; too many archetypes need certain expensive gear merely to function). It should be - your gear gets trashed, you spend part of what you got paid to replace it. What is is - you spent hundreds of thousands on a piece of gear that is integral to your very functionality, and you get paid a few thousand for the run where you are risking it. If you lose it, good luck getting another one. The costs need to come down, or runner pay needs to go up, or other avenues (looting, etc.) need to be opened up.

I think a PC losing a choice piece of gear can make for a dramatic moment, although it is better to get player buy-in beforehand rather than springing it on them. Unless you really know your players. It is a crappy way of enforcing "game balance", though, and anyone deriding such a tactic as GM dickery would be right on the money. If Mr. Christmas Tree is breaking your campaign, talk to him about it. If you would like him to pare down his gear, sit down with him and work out a dramatic way for it to happen in-game. But reimburse him for the resources that he invested in it in the first place; it's only fair.

you know, rules for cobbling together a DIY deck on the fly will really impact on this. Sure the expensive deck is far better but losing it doesn't stop the decker doing their job. Also, having rules that let you upgrade an existing deck's hardware rather than having to buy an expensive new monstrosity every time you want to upgrade would be nice.

Well, considering that the intro fiction of the core book teases us with the possibility of being able to construct your deck with from a bunch of scrap, AND that the worst possible RCC is made from the stuff, I'm under the impression that the thought crossed their mind.

Well, we'll see what Data Trails gets us...

My players tend to steal everything in sight so they really don't mind when their stuff gets destroyed. The turnover leads to weekly changes in ability which they like.

It's not really a problem in my game, as am a SR3 ref. I was thinking more of it resetting the clock for further expansion IC. So precisely needing more karma/cred/favours/debt to build up the arsenal again and the surprise and hard slog of getting their making the surprise hit home. I think surprise and rebuild is inherent to gear destruction drama.
If they know its coming OC the rping dosent have the same intensity. Also returning a cyberdeck very quickly might deminish the fear factor.

I agree it is a lot safer and 'fairer' to discuss ahead of time though. But some players would rather not know to get the biggest hit emotionally IC. Trust is essential and its I think as shown by this thread, a hard call.