Do we really need ammo?
A not-so-modest proposal

Some of the holsters are incredibly overpriced for such a simple and required core function for a character. Mods are very expensive, so much so that some of the key ones cost as much as a higher-end melee weapon outright. Often times modding a gun will run you multiple times more money than the actual gun itself, which is very strange. Depending on what you're trying to do, all but required as an additional and rather significant tax on purchasing a replacement gun. Cleaning kits aren't expensive, but it's yet another tax on guns that exists with no parallel for melee weapons. Finally, some ammo types are quite cheap, but with others, you're literally lighting chyen on fire every couple of seconds you're in combat.

These little operational costs add up and can balloon rapidly if you want to be a very active combatant and use firearms. Sure, if you're a big kid and you're blasting the big kid bullets, you theoretically should be able to afford it, but just the fact that you can get into a fight with someone and spend several thousand chyen in ammo only for them to pass a flee check or wind up getting into a situation where the combat goes without a resolution is very problematic. It's entirely possible to blow several thousand chyen down the barrel of your gun in a single encounter.

My suggestion is to get rid of small arms ammo. Issue a UE refund to the handful of characters who have any investment in the skill. Roll the one important maintenance use case of the skill into a different skill. Or leave it and rebrand it and put a to-do sticker for adding more content to it at a later date.

If you're committed to keeping the annoyance of trying to manage reloads in the middle of eye-watering screen spam red text as some form of higher game balance reason, then you could simply make it a generic 'reload x' verb, where it pops a message out of your character dropping a mag and putting a new one in. You can keep the bullet counter stuff in the game that way. Then you'd have a 'check x' verb to check the mag status, although if reloads are a free action, it seems a little redundant to not just reload after every use.

Guns are loud, cool, and themely, and could use a bit of love in a few key areas to bring their usage up. I've always thought it was a bit odd how neo-feudal SD is in relation to other CyPu media, where guns are ubiquitous solutions to most problems a chummer might run into.

Another consideration is that ammo management outside of combat is an actual unfun pain in the ass, and I can't help but wonder the amount of item clutter random full and partially-used magazines contribute to the game.

Years ago I remember a discussion about having different ammo types, things like hollowpoints, overpressure rounds, armor piercing, or reactive ammo types. If those things are still going to get added to the game at some point then safely ignore my post here. I just saw that there was a discussion elsewhere on the bgbb about potentially combining or removing some of the unutilized skills, and munitions was specifically mentioned, so I figured I'd put forth the idea.

Agreed, I think jamming could be done away with entirely with no real loss to anyone except maybe some of the intense immersion people. Having personally seen someone lose several hundred thousand chyen of gear because they were chased across rooftops and their gun jammed, causing them to lose a fight they should have won, I have to say that I'm not at all a fan of that system.

It's entirely arbitrary RNG, and very poor gameplay mechanics.

Yes.

I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the balance on melee vs guns is currently pretty spot on. There are lots of things that guns can do that melee weapons can't. Most of the things I could mention would maybe be classified as FOIC so I won't mention them here. I dunno, could be safe, but in a nutshell they shoot from far away.

You mention the add ons being expensive, but I think you're ignoring the fact that melee weapons don't even get that option, so that's a major plus for firearms in my book. Sure it costs, but no scope available for your katana chummer sorry.

The fact that you see high-end players and NPCs rocking both seems to indicate to me that things are fairly balanced. If long-blade was that OP, I think you'd see a lot less xo3 totting badasses carrying heat. Right now I see a pretty good variance in the field of carry.

The reality is that the best firearms users slap some 50 round mags in their pistols(?!) and forget ammo is a thing (until their gun jams 36 shots later). I've never been a fan of how much fussy, fiddley realism gets applied to firearms gameplay while melee weapons are equip-and-forget-forever attack sticks however that is not to say I think melee weapons should degrade or otherwise have any of the clunky junk that plagues gunplay. It should be easy to jump into fights without thinking about cost-benefit of weapon durability/ammo reserves, and this is one of the reasons I think casual combat is dominated by melee weapons and guns skew massively towards huge magazine use.

My experience is most gun-specced characters just flat out don't fire them very often and so a lot of their skill fantasy is loading, unloading, cleaning, et cetera and deriving enjoyment from that, but I do think it's telling the pro gunkiller meta is to roll with drums of infinite bang-bang.

That said I suspect UE will cap at 1000 before firearms ever get their jank pruned.

Guns have a few nice things going for them, but people really gravely overestimate and oversell their 'unique strengths' that the vast majority of times are not relevant to the conversation. There's been a very steady and linear progression of melee characters of various types because there's both strong game fantasy for melee fighters and strong mechanical advantages. If six hungry hobos come at you as a mighty street samurai, you slice them into meaty slap chop chunks, and move on. If six hungry hobos come at you and you're Johnny Bigdick the gun solo, there's a pretty damn solid chance you're going to die. I really, seriously, cannot overstate how much a massive meta-shifter that block is, and then later on the DW parry changes were made, and it made melee weapons absolutely stupid for those with disposable incomes.

@0x1mm Drum mags do invalidate most of the silly scenarios people pitch as being cool and awesome, like dying because SD combat spam scroll made it so you couldn't see you typoed pumping your shotgun. That's not good gameplay, it's fucking dumb, and I can't believe people are advocating this as being a good thing. You shouldn't have the expectations of needing to use @macro triggers, but you're literally dumb for not doing it as a gun user. Meanwhile Timmy Twokatz types "KILL GUY" and gets to chill.

Not to go into details, but it should also be mentioned that some armors are very heavily tilted against the damage type firearms use, and when properly maintained and specialized, can literally wash a staggering amount of your damage output. Drum mags aren't a choice, but a requirement at that point, because otherwise you literally will not have enough ammo to kill someone in heavy dough without fumbling around in your inventory. Again, we shouldn't be expecting people to use legal triggers to PVP just because they want to RP someone with a gun. It is in need of some streamlining and improvements, but as you eluded to, a culture of anti-gun exists even though we're playing a fantasy game where the setting is people shooting the piss out of each other. Big dichotomy there, but I remain hopeful of change, as always.

@Adamblue9000

I agree with most of what you said. Licensing was a sort of silly handout to the hall, but I don't think anyone gets excited about literal bureaucracy RP, and if you should happen to fall on poor opinion side of the law, well, good luck getting your license approved.

I personally think licensing should be mixer only, and much more liberal than it is, because the reality of the situation is that firearms being permitted to specific object ID is in complete contrast of the rest of the game design. We want people murdering, stealing and robbing, right? Well, getting your license yanked or suspended because you keep losing your gun is very silly.

Corporates have conduct and legal obligations to maintain, letting them have guns seems like a very reasonable trade-off. On the flip side, if we want to make content for Judges, then them chasing down all the legal firearms that a corporate had when diving or falling seems like pretty great RP to me.

There's a couple (and I do mean a couple) of guns that are over-tuned. Rather than fix those outliers, we instead have a situation where guns are not great, and whenever we try and have level conversations about improving them so they are better represented, we get wacky comments about X specific thing being broken. Fix the item, and then let's talk about making guns less shitty. Seems pretty straightforward.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed that melee characters are much more likely to go roam on foot (or use a bike) whereas firearms characters are more likely to use cars or AVs and go point to point. Conceptually it's an interesting contrast in play style but really it'd be ideal for everyone to be out going around more often with all their gear in hand rather than basing out a pad/club, going to a target, and then coming right back to reload and clean a gun.

Guns need love, and I thought that a good first step would be to address one of my bigger personal issues with them, which is the financial aspect. It was an attempt to suggest improvements in ways that didn't have us talking about the larger balance problems with them, because those bigger issues tend to get pretty negative responses.

This could spiral out into a larger discussion of why these combat support classes just don't work in most circumstances, but my suggestions are not made in the spirit of harming or removing people's RP or livelihood. I brought this up specifically because I had read a thread where Slither was talking about munitions being one of the skills staff are talking about condensing or removing from the game.

Again, I'm not trying to offend you, your RP, or your character's identity, but we're talking about one of the most niche and historically underutilized skills in the entire game. The jobs for that tradeskill sit empty topside for like 5-6 years at a time, and even when people do take them, they wind up burning out because it's just not supported (and guns poopy.) Allegory about making sausage or something applies here.

The biggest problem with jams are that they are an immediate game over scenario when they happen. Your gun jams against an equally skilled opponent, you just lost your entire kit to what is simply RNG.

While there are ways to circumvent this as you said, there are a lot of situations that are not extreme edge cases in which having a gun is a major detriment. For those of us who have played the game for awhile, I think it's pretty common knowledge how often PVP involves rooftops and sewers, and even a fairly mild exposure to these spaces while keeping 'at the ready' with your firearm dramatically increases your chance of a jam.

Perhaps a better way of implementing jam mechanics in a non-gameplay breaking way is to allow them to be cleared with a verb. I realize that this too is a kick in the nuts to the ballistics tech skill and players, but honestly, the vast majority of weapon malfunctions are cleared simply by racking the slide or manually cycling the bolt or action. It's still a major downside to guns that is themely for the people who want to be OOCly and ICly gun nerdy to keep them invested, but it isn't going to literally get your character killed based on a dice roll you don't always have control over.

I'd imagine the verb to be something like "RACK HEATER" or something.

I also think that combining munitions and explosives is an extremely good idea, both for theme and game balance reasons.