Definitely. I don't think either of us were arguing that this is a great A-OK weapon. It's just not the damning of the Cannon Companion rules that BitBasher was claiming it was.

That takes a Conceal 7 Assault Rifle, IMO.

~J

No BF/FA capability, no possibility of using suppressive fire, two-thirds the ammo capacity… unless your targets are wearing truly ridiculous amounts of armor, this is not significantly superior to any other heavy pistol, and is decidedly inferior in all ways but one (which we've already established is not of universal importance, whether it's game-breaking or not is slightly more subjective) to a stock assault rifle from the Firearm Creation Rules.

The FCR-breaking monstrosity is the assault rifle everyone is probably familiar with, with a Conceal of 7, 9M base damage code, Smartlink-2, and five points of recoil compensation before grip customization or barrel accessories.

~J

Grid guide rocks. Police don't have to do much pulling over for minor infractions.

Long coats, Duffle bags, and car trunks rock. Enough said.

Rare guns rock. Because I will put a forensics wrap sheet on your character faster then you will ever be able to raise the skill with the fire arm in hand.

Forcing weapons to require balistics testing if you want them to be higher tech then a musket, also rocks. Now you need a weapons facility.

Yes, you can make some entertaining and rather broken firearms in the Shadowrun world. Yes, they open up a can of worms perviously not in place. Thankfully, the GM is quite capable of maintaining a level of fun, even if you are running around with an assult rifle with a concealability of 9 or a hold out pistol with a concealability of 18.

---------------------------------------------
There is a counter to EVERYTHING.
I will find it and it will make some serious dead.

Two upsides or the stock AR: The extra punch for effective damage in to the armour 8 plus taregt, or actually make the Troll have to work to shrug off damage, without having to make FA noise is a definate plus. It also makes it viable to start shooting lightly armoured targets on the other side of cover such as through tables, chairs, walls, etc.

In the end would this weapon wash an entire campaign down the drain? No. But pretending it doesn't have issues???

Wow, this thread just convinced me to disallow custom firearms from future games that I GM.

The design phase ends at page 78 CC. Personally, if the Modification has a FCU cost of None and a minus to Concealability(after market), I would rule that there would be a loss of Concealabilty. There would be no loss for those Mods that are integral ( r ).

Besides, there is no Canon rule that says that the Conceal is lost or not for the Mods in the first place. There is a lot of room for the GM to make his call and still be Canon.

No, but if you do it without paying the FCU, yes. Why? Because if you aren't paying FCU but are paying DP, you can easily take out the mod and sell it. Though you might be losing money on that.

Same for the Bipods and Tripods, except that you do not get a choice to pay FCU, and needs to reduce Conc. I think that there might be case for an Errata for the Mods, since on page 78 (yes, AE you are right, I forgot that Step 3), Concealability is mentioned.

Okay, that's a reasonable ruling. I have no problem with that. I think it's worth notin, though, that you don't really get to choose with a Gas Vent either -- you either pay both FCU and DP during the design process, or you make an after-market modification and just pay nuyen.

Maybe this should be a poll but what do your characters do when not actually involved in the comission of a crime. For planning and expense purposes I consider being hired by the Johnson the "start" of the run but most of our stuff involves a LOT of legwork. What are you carrying then? My current job involved trekking all over Everett in search of some guy and I was armed the whole damn time with my favorite pistol. Concealability is huge. I would love to have a high powered pistol with a huge mag that is more concealable than my big smokin 5 conceal, 15 rnd pistol. Sure I have tons of illegal ware in my body but without a cyberware scanner, no one knows this. The pistol on the other hand...... I'd drop 3000 in a heart beat.

I'm not sure how effective accounting for the custom firearm rules in game is as an arguement, but that's the tact I would take.

One of the reasons that a weapon designed by these rules could trump one of the market standards is because unlike a Predator, these are not designed to be an easily produced, mass appeal product. What goes into making one of these should be stupid expensive (a fact that should be represented in the final price), and inefficent to mass produce.

It should also take time and proper connections. You can't just wander into Moe's Gun Store, hand him the plans, and by the end of the day you have your conceal 7 AR (so a definite no at character creation). The custom barrel with that gas vent IV built in has to be made, wires and space for that smart link II laid out. Indeed, in order to get that 20 bullet clip, you might also need custom ammunition.

Unlike a vehicle, most runners can probably come up with the funds for the weapon of their dreams in a single run, so the problem of having to face the possibilty that a player will try to get his very own custom doom cock is much more likely to arise. I feel that the system is balanced when properly handled in game, although that doesn't really bear much weight as an arguement.

Extended clip deserves a compellability modifier.

Not to mention that it should be possible to make a weapon capable of taking clips of different sizes. Consider the utility of a medium pistol (heavy end of light or light end of heavy, take your pick) with burst fire capability, a 5 round clip for compellability and a 50 round clip for when you want to make like it is an SMG. I like the idea of copying the –1 conceal per 4 rounds.

As the rules stand each gun can hold only 1 sized clip (some of the BIG guns can have a drum instead or a belt instead)

Building your oown custom weapons should be possible with the following skills and equipment

Gunsmith shop, as far as I know the biggest item of equipment you need to make a weapon up to an assault rifle is a rifling lathe witch is not beyond the scope of a shop (a facility is for mass production or parts you cant carry). Just re cheeked the rules say facility although I don’t know why.

BR for the appropriate weapon type.

Knowledge gun design.

And building your own guns makes traking you down by them harder as nobody will tell the cops you sold it and you can change the barrels yourself (or use shot rounds, ex rounds, dumdum rounds, glaser rounds or any of the other types that don’t leave a big enough chunk of bullet to do a comparison.

It dose say that the firearm customisations take up space. In fact it admits that adding something to a stock weapon can mean doing a bit of maths to workout how much FCU you have to work with. Many of the customisation options mention conceal ability (EG stock and sawed of shotgun) but some do not (eg gas vent or bipod) I would say you loose the conceal ability anyway.

Ps if you want a reason to be puled over by the cops why do you think sec guards fire light weapons at escaping vans they know to be armoured, its so they can ding up the paintwork and lights so the cops will be suspicious.

The purpose of a high compellability weapon us not being stoped by the cops. A conceal 6+ weapon preferably ceramic is what you take to places where you don’t expect trouble but want to be ready. You carry it on an infiltration run or to a meet in a bar where guns are not allowed along with your conceal 10+ armour. Use it when it is the only thing you can use. Have one ready for that time.

Lastly why not at char gen. If I start the game with a contact of a gunsmith or my own skills and tools if I have been in the biz for some time (and everything I read suggests that starting characters are not usually starting runners) why would I not have acquired or built special weapon. Something custom built that a player wants should be assigned an availability rating and if it is below 8 it should be available. It seems silly to create a character that makes guns as a hobby but doesn’t have any of his own work.

The same goes for heavily customised vehicles. Frankly the standard ones suck for most purposes (can you believe loan star dos not use broadcast encryption as standard). Of cause some customisation is all they really need.

All you really need is to be wiling to look t the design and rule yes or no based on your game style.

Edward

This thread has really broken into a couple of threads...

First, the gun. It's not just the fact that this piece of ironmongery breaks the standards which worries me. It's going to worry the corps, too. I'd imagine that the possessing shadowrunner's going to take this piece of marvelous technology out onto runs, and he's going to be at least partially visible with it. Now, your ordinary GMs at this point start realizing that the character has given himself the 'Distinctive Style' Flaw for nothing, but it goes deeper than that.

Forget the profiling; the corporations are going to see this weapon, measure its aftermath, and they're going to realize that what the shadowrunner has is -way- better than anything their corpsec goons have. So they're going to try to either reproduce it, or steal it. They're going to find out who this person is and where he got this weapon from. Because obviously it's far better than anything out on the market; the corporation that nabs this design and starts manufacturing is going to make a killing as all the militaries, all the security corps, and all the crazed gun users of the world ditch their old Ares Predators for this baby.

And it's not going to be just one corp after the PC. Other corporations will hear about this, and try to pick the guy up as well, or steal his gun, just to have something that another corporation wants, and that they can trade for gomen. That's how the zaibatsus do business, after all; if Kagetenshu Corp picks the PC up and hands him to Ares, that's a favor Ares owes them. The guy with the gun is setting himself up for a world of hurt, because he's got the gun that beats everything else.

Now, the whole thing about concealability. I've noticed two kinds of players: Those that take pains to conceal their illegals, and those that pop the heads off cops for even daring to suggest a search for illegal items on their person or property. Concealability only exists for one of these groups, and it's not the first one. They're going to do everything they can to maximize the concealability of their illegals, and as a GM, you have to work overtime to even get someone to the point of maybe being able to figure out that they might be hiding something.

So they're going to make their shiny new van look like a piece of crap, just to make sure the cops don't decide to do a spot check -- after all, if it looks like stopping it has a good chance of creating a traffic hazard, the cops are going to leave that car the hell alone. They're going to disassemble the guns, everything that they couldn't be reasonably expected to carry, and hide the parts in different places. They're going to wear somewhat fashionable trenchcoats when it's cool. They're going to get a mage to cast Improved Invisibility on their heavy pistols to get them past a bouncer. The GM may as well not bother, since he's going to have to insert some really high-powered perception dice there where it has no business being.

The other group, well, they don't care, and they're going to carry their Panther Assault Cannons on the bus, and have their vans shiny, new and mounting turret AVM launchers and machine guns. Now, if there's a situation where the concealability might come into play, then they might have to worry -- like if they have to get into a nightclub with mage guards and autoguns backing them up. Then, they'll start worrying about the concealability on their Franchi SPAS-22's and Ares Alphas. But rest assured, they're going to be ready to pop the heads off those guards and blow up the autoguns if they can't get in without their heavy firepower.

What it really comes down to is, as a GM, how much do you want to punish your players? Random searches and getting pulled over for minor infractions sounds to me like the GM just likes to mess with the players. Unless there's a plot-specific reason to pull them over, a GM shouldn't do this. If Lone Star is checking EVERYONE, cool, but if their number just came up, well, remember that there are 5 million vehicles in Seattle; the players' number shouldn't come up again in their lifetimes. If it does, then you're probably messing with your players.

I agree with your second point, but as for the first, why would the corps give a flying fig about the whiz new gun, since it's something that they could just as easily make themselves, even if they didn't happen to have a copy on hand? Anything a player can make, so can a corp, and they have a lot more resources to utilize.

A custom gun like the OP's example would be something hand made, perhaps with the gunsmith creating a set of molds just for its unique design. Cost ineffcieny of design would be one prohibition, and if it has gas vents, smartlink, shockpad, surpressor, etc all built in, that's a lot more work required per piece to assemble. Overall costs will decrease slightly if they start making multiple copies, but there are much better things to spend those nuyen on, such as security guards, or heck, upgrading their existing guards weapons to regular assault rifles. Or some strategically hung monowire. Or more guards. Maybe a barghest.

Ease of acqusition would be another factor. I'd much rather eqiup my sec guards with a nice, battle proven piece out of Ares' Discerning Shootist monthly, than the slow to produce, (even if mighty) doom cannon.

Just because the Corp has the facilities to create something doesn't mean they have the inspiration to put the entire thing together in that particular manner. For a real world example, there are lots of decent programmers working for Microsoft, yet they still don't come up with some of the things that little guys in their den work out. Microsoft tends to pounce on the creations of these little guys, usually by throwing money at them, but if that doesn't work, there are other methods. The point being that inspiration is a big part of invention. We have the capability now to do almost anything, yet there will always be another new thing that nobody thought of before, and if there's money to be made in any way from it you can be assured that the Corps (ie big business) will be there.

OK, so you have Gun Almighty but it cost many-many. I can see the AAA corps producing a limited edition weapon for their elite security forces but keep to the usual cheap-good-plenty guns for their run-of-mill guards.

Any drek hot decker could have a deck with MPCP>20, but does that mean a corp is going to mass produce THAT monstrosity?