Low Tier Firearm Accessibility
What's a Seburo?

A steady supply of cheap ones would be snapped up in no time if it were available. Some of the "usual-suspect" stores would stock them, no doubt, or else, everyone would just know someone who could get them easily.

Nightrunners walk on glass.

The entire game feels like some feudal lord and peasant simulator at times, seeing hordes of people bashing in each other's brains with bats and sticks. And dear god, the turtle meta just needs to -go-.

Some of it's a community issue, like you eluded to, but also, like, people need to loosen the *@% up and stop playing SD like it's min/max risk evasion simulator 24/7. Buy and ILLEGAL gun and go do CRIME with it, people. That's kind of the entire point of SD. Get caught. It'll suck. You'll have cool stories to tell about it, and it'll spiral out into more RP.

Without going into too much detail, I think there is a significant return on investment for firearms as a new player but it's a lot trickier of a path to take.

My expectation is the meta will shift over time as people become more experienced and even then eventually it'll shift back again. Just the way it goes.

A pretty new player can pick up two sticks, use a certain stance and dunk on NPC's for profit. You can't do the same with guns. You try that exact same thing with a ranged weapon and you're going to get pulverized because there isn't innate defensive bonuses to ranged weapons, and the sniping nerf from years back hit ranged combat (as in actual ranged combat, not in the same room) very hard. So one of the primary methods of trying to play more defensively with guns simply doesn't have the bite that it used to. It's not to say that it's garbage or something, but it simply isn't as effective in a lot of situations. And I feel that that lack of ranged bite took some of the sting out of using melee weapons.

So while I agree that it's certainly in part an IC problem, there's more going on here than just purely IC issues.

I hope I don't derail this conversation at all, but I see it brought frequently on these types of posts or something along these lines, that dual wielding is useful right out the gate as a new player.

However, just reading up on the update notes from when this was added to the game doesn't seem to suggest as much.

DUAL-WIELDING

Dual-wielding will now give you a penalty, no effect or a bonus to parrying depending on your skill with your secondary weapon for a given combat round and your combat posture. It used to give a penalty across the board. This will be a trade-off between risking more gear and getting a bonus for using it, if you master your weapons.

If I am reading this right, low skill should equal a penalty, moderate skill should have no effect for holding two weapons and there should be a bonus for high skill, but if this isn't the way it's performing it seems like it would be a bug worth investigating for sure.

Back on track though, I think firearms tend to be the more themely weapon I'd expect coming into a cyberpunk game next to swords, and they are for sure a highlight for games like Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077.

I'd really like to see more of them in use!

Techs do more than modding. Whether people pay them for the services is another wrinkle - shooters who do their own work forgo other opportunities.

Shady Guy unveils his trenchcoat full of cheap 3D-printed pistols.

Shady Guy: Yeah, I got a PopPop Defender.

Rhicora [to Shady Guy]: Sure, I'll take a PopPop Defender.

You count out some chyen and hand it to Shady Guy.

Shady Guy gives you a PopPop Defender.

Shady Guy [to You]: Good luck, chum.

Honestly, it feels like almost everyone is using swords in the mix, it's kinda strange to think about thematically.

Usually it's based on their understanding of how a character is built or just seeing 'badasses' with a certain weapon and consciously(or unconsciously) wanting to be more like them.

Lord knows I am doing my best to push this issue ICly, but it's really a demand problem. Which as I said, leads me to believe it's either a balance issue, or a big perception problem. The first isn't easy to fix, and the second seems more like a continual effort than a problem that has a defined solution.

Its illegal, uses ammo, requires maintenance, expensive, gets jammed, expensive holsters, fixers, hard to conceal, etc etc etc.

A melee or blade just works, isn't illegal, and abundant.

The extant pool of player circulating weapons makes it a semi-invisible problem, and maybe a non-issue if the current pool is large enough, but I don't think it does the entry-level guns (already with so many downsides) any favours.

This is sort of tangential to the topic, but from what I've seen I would expect firearms to become much less popular over time than they are as entry- and mid-range extant supplies dwindle and the price goes up.

In theory the rise in prices produces market pressure to warm the supply lines back up and makes their sale profitable again... except that the 'game' factor means that guns are in some practical ways just reskinned swords or knives and so they're subject to pricing pressure from things other than just themselves.

Based on that I'd expect firearms characters to go down and stay down until there was some perceived correction that outweighed the cost.

I think the game sort of reinforces this idea that firearms should be better (requiring different RP concerns, having additional costs, not appearing as often on NPCs) when they're arguably worse in a lot of ways.

From a purely gameplay standpoint I think there could very easily be Seburos issued on certain tokens in place of other weapons and you'd see no real game imbalance result from something like that, but would probably give an avenue for new characters to experiment more compared to bokkens, butterfly knives, et cetera.

I agree that it seems to be more a demand issue than a supply issue, though I think increased supply can impact demand positively. My sense is that generally, though, guns in general could stand be 'ticked up' in balance and that might make them more desirable.

Assuming they are nearly equal, the cost for a low to mid tier firearm is almost the price of a high end blade. You can open carry a high end blade almost always while in Gold and Green with no consequence. You can't do the same with a firearm without risk, for example. Being able to carry your weapon and prepared to fight always vs having to tip toe around with a firearm.

1. There is generally an accessible NPC alternative for most anything in this game. Except for buying guns. That's pretty much PC only. I know that some here might say, "But there's that one guy!" And yes, there is that one guy. And between that guy and new players using their guns in the mix is a LOT of red tape and chy loss. There are exceptions but finding a gun at a reasonable price as a new PC (especially new mixer PCs) feels like winning the lottery. We don't want to undercut PC hustle and a PC first mentality is always good in my opinion but I think that things are pretty unbalanced in this regard.

2. This is IC but it's also on The Mind and listed as common knowldge. Guns are pretty much the only weapons that are strictly illegal without a license. By taking a gun you are taking on a huge headache (especially as a mixer) and, early in the game, it's often not worth the effort. Further, there is a large number of locations where a mixer can't take a gun without taking on some serious risk that other weapons don't deliver. Not to mention that there are other ups and downs to firearms that other weapon skills just don't have to worry about but that's best to learn about ICly. Still, they are a factor.

3. Yes, there are some things one can do ICly as a PC to address this but I agree with HolyChrome that there is an OOC element here. I would mention that there are more than a few things that have changed in regards to firearm accessibility and smuggling in the last few years. Keep in mind that the game is always evolving so the tips and tricks that one might have been able to apply a few years ago may or may not apply to today.

4. This constant stream of 'melee was buffed' and 'two sticks' is misleading in my opinion. ALL ONE HANDED WEAPONS CAN BE DUAL WIELDED. This includes swords, knives, pistols and more (yes, you can parry with a pistol). It is also dependent on skill as others have pointed out. Further the specific combo has specific downsides. Yes, NPCs generally need to be puppeted before they can take advantage of some of the downsides this brings but I will say I have seen GMs puppet PCs specifically to do so in the past. I am not saying a small debuff wouldn't be worth trying but I also think that a lot of PCs just never learned how to deal with this scenario.

4. Guns are really awesome and can deliver a level of satisfaction other weapons don't. They also change the battlefield. To be fair, the scarcity of guns can in some ways benefit those who do use them as fewer PCs are aware of how they change the battlefield and suffer from it.

Counter points to a few points so I'm not just plying memes.

Firearms licenses are literally available to ALL PC's to apply for. People in security roles just have a discount or the ability to reimburse it. RP with a judge or hall employee, they are generally desperate for RP, and REALLY good RPer's.

There are multiple sources for firearms in the mix. Smuggling isn't -that- hard. There just are IC complications that are occurring for most of the major smugglers because of IC things happening.

Firearms do not need a buff on the low end. A low end firearms user will fuck up an equal tier fighter who uses other weapons pretty utterly. And this scales pretty decently as well.

There is a paradox of low tier weapons not being seen as worth it, because the mid and mid high tier options are affordable enough due too high supply.

I do not think cutting PC's out of the middle and giving that role to NPC's is the solution however. Again.

IC problems, with IC complications, and IC solutions.

Sure, anyone can waste 10K on a licensing application.

The first was a response to the post preceding mine. About Corporate Employee's and firearms licenses. RP with judges, I'm not gonna reveal the process ahead of time, but I have seen non-corpsec issued firearms in the past. And non-former corpsec.

Smuggling is easy, you just need the proper connections. IC connections, IC reasons, IC complications. There are very extremely accessible ways of smuggling things into the city. Some that even immy's can could manage. You just need to know how to get to them, or think to use them. And accept the risks of using them. ;D

The defensive bonus for melee isn't equivalent to the defensive bonus for firearms. And Firearms have many more dynamic uses and a myriad of other advantages that melee weapons don't have. The issue with guns is mostly risk averse players. Not any inherent weakness too them. Defensively or offensively.

I could see an extremely limited supply of firearms being given out to the NPC pawns, equivalent to certain disguise items lately. Pop Pop's Seburo's etc that, "Fell off the truck." That are gone extremely quickly.

I could also see the advantage of having a few gangers in each gang's memento pool spawning with low-tier firearms and the skill to use them.

This would help alleviate and adjudicate supply. And would give levers that could be cranked for staff to play with for gun supply.

It's for these reasons that a lot of the restrictions on firearms should be relaxed, especially in the mix. If they were more readily available and culture weren't that they were such immense pains to possess, they'd see more use. I'm saying this as someone who knows, for reasons I can't say, that even cheap firearms are incredibly hard to get rid of.

This is entirely an RP issue, a player issue, and it requires IC solutions. What those are are hard to go into.

I have an interesting solution to your last point.

Remove the echoing in nearby rooms for gunshots in the mix. Either replace it with a message akin too.

Just another day in the mix, as gunshots echo around you.

Or just get rid of it entirely