I agree with progressions . In EotE especially, it's okay to take their toys away.

Okay, if they get stolen all the time it may piss people off but, personally, I prefer my GM Sundering my weapon to spending those Advantages on criticals all the time. A few weeks back I lost a very expensive rifle* to a single enemy roll that generated two Triumphs.

The universe gives, the universe takes away.

* Experimental Geonoican blaster rifle (1200c) + Superior + Marksman Barel (modified twice for Accuracy) + Telescopic Sight. Away from book - anyone know off the top of their head how much all that was worth?

Our resident assassin had a beefed up, uber vibroknife. During a rather desperate battle, he threw it at the main badguy, sticking him in the leg. But the badguy escaped onto his ship and blasted off, knife in tow.

Not long after, when the PCs confronted the badguy in the climactic space battle, the assassin was distraught at their blowing up of the badguy's ship because that meant he was never getting his knife back.

"It's gene locked with an (approirate difficulty) mechanics check.

If you really wanted to you could sell it for 100 credits, otherwise do you really have the space to be carrying that many weapons through customs?"

The gene lock would have me raising an eyebrow.

"Does this cost hardpoints?" If yes, it gives a small limitation on how dangerous the weapon can get. If no,

"Can I buy a gene lock for my badass pistol?" Because nobody likes getting shot with their own gun.

I think the other tack you're taking is the better one, and doesn't stetch anybody's sense of disbelief. You either have to pay off the customs people or sector chief or the local crime boss who takes a hefty cut of all illegal transactions (or a combination of these). If the players decide they don't like paying the middlemen, they'll have trouble finding buyers because (being local) the buyers are the guys who the middlemen will find first.

* Experimental Geonoican blaster rifle (1200c) + Superior + Marksman Barel (modified twice for Accuracy) + Telescopic Sight. Away from book - anyone know off the top of their head how much all that was worth?

2350c plus accuracy mods

* Experimental Geonoican blaster rifle (1200c) + Superior + Marksman Barel (modified twice for Accuracy) + Telescopic Sight. Away from book - anyone know off the top of their head how much all that was worth?

2350c plus accuracy mods

Ta!

Better than I thought, actually. I thought Superior was 5000c for some reason.

"It's gene locked with an (approirate difficulty) mechanics check.

If you really wanted to you could sell it for 100 credits, otherwise do you really have the space to be carrying that many weapons through customs?"

The gene lock would have me raising an eyebrow.

"Does this cost hardpoints?" If yes, it gives a small limitation on how dangerous the weapon can get. If no,

"Can I buy a gene lock for my badass pistol?" Because nobody likes getting shot with their own gun.

Why would the gene lock have you raising an eyebrow?

If it was a Minion, that's one thing, but wouldn't it make sense for a Nemesis?

* Experimental Geonoican blaster rifle (1200c) + Superior + Marksman Barel (modified twice for Accuracy) + Telescopic Sight. Away from book - anyone know off the top of their head how much all that was worth?

2350c plus accuracy mods

Ta!

Better than I thought, actually. I thought Superior was 5000c for some reason.

It is 5000 credits.

Why would the gene lock have you raising an eyebrow?

If it was a Minion, that's one thing, but wouldn't it make sense for a Nemesis?

Smells like a GM trick rather than a mechanical reason.

It also seemed like the lock was in addition to all the other mods.

* Experimental Geonoican blaster rifle (1200c) + Superior + Marksman Barel (modified twice for Accuracy) + Telescopic Sight. Away from book - anyone know off the top of their head how much all that was worth?

2350c plus accuracy mods

Ta!

Better than I thought, actually. I thought Superior was 5000c for some reason.

It is 5000 credits.

[sigh] Helluva gun...

New total?

Why would the gene lock have you raising an eyebrow?

If it was a Minion, that's one thing, but wouldn't it make sense for a Nemesis?

Smells like a GM trick rather than a mechanical reason.

It also seemed like the lock was in addition to all the other mods.

Eh, it's a mod from DC, so not that contrived. It'll give the resident Slicer something to do, perhaps breaking the more dangerous weapon parts when he hacks the system.

Eh, it's a mod from DC, so not that contrived. It'll give the resident Slicer something to do, perhaps breaking the more dangerous weapon parts when he hacks the system.

Don't have that book yet. Sounds useful, though.

I think it'd still be enough to strain disbelief if overused.

Gene-lock makes sense in some cases, but is actively detrimental to organizational use of weapons.

A paranoid bounty-hunter who calls his gun Vera could have a locked weapon.

A gamorian guard at the hutt's palace? Not so much. No organization concerned with efficiency or resources would waste the effort. It costs money and leaders want their stormtroopers to be able to pick up a dead companion's weapon and keep firing.

Elite commandos with experimental weaponry is a possibility, but any rational leader will realize that it's just delaying the inevitable. The enemy will seize and analyze any tech they manage to collect from a battle.

People keep wondering why America doesn't have self-destruct capability in it's drones. The answer is that it isn't worth the cost. Either the force that captures one has a know-how to analyze it or they don't. There isn't much to be done either way. And having the explosives on board endangers the techs trying to service and repair the devices.

Gene-lock makes the most sense for civilian situations where you don't want your kids to shoot themselves or their siblings.

Why would the gene lock have you raising an eyebrow?

If it was a Minion, that's one thing, but wouldn't it make sense for a Nemesis?

Smells like a GM trick rather than a mechanical reason.

It also seemed like the lock was in addition to all the other mods.

If players wanted to play the game like DnD by picking up all the blaster rifles/whatever and selling it for loot, I would respond back by doing that or making it practically infesiable to sell them. Personally I would much rather say "Characters in star wars generally don't loot everything thats not bolted down. Only pick up what your going to use, though if you want the power packs you can add 25 credits for each one of those if you don't want it" and leave it at that. If that was a issue.

Personally if I was running a session I would rather talk about it then make them all mysteriously inaccessable. But I personally want people to explore ruins and do interesting things to earn a good amount of money than to have to pause the session every time someone wants to pop to market to sell things. The last selling and buying session took 2 hours. So naturally I want to keep those sessions to a minimum until they actually score something worth the money.

Last session they made nearly 25K credits by selling a golden statue, a star map to another uncharted system and a Z-95 that had been found in a state of utter disrepair. For an individual profit of 3200/3600 each plus 10000 just for the ship. so thus far cutting out that fiddly bit has paid off.

Here's the deal few want to face. Players are rational agents. They will act in their own best interests.

If you make money too hard to come by, players will look for ways to acquire it, including looting corpses for loose change and salable items. Some players will do this because they are penny pinching weirdos. Most won't want to deal with encumbrance and the math required to loot 10 stormtroopers of laminate armor and blaster carbines.

It's a tricky balance. Too much money and the game is too easy. Too little and you get players who look for anything to make a buck including doing un-fun things.

Eh, it's a mod from DC, so not that contrived. It'll give the resident Slicer something to do, perhaps breaking the more dangerous weapon parts when he hacks the system.

Don't have that book yet. Sounds useful, though.

I think it'd still be enough to strain disbelief if overused.

Oh, I get it, I didn't realize you hadn't seen it in the books.

Yeah, I wouldn't over-use it but if I wanted a brilliant and alert Nemesis to have it, I'd feel that was in line.

Here's the deal few want to face. Players are rational agents. They will act in their own best interests.

If you make money too hard to come by, players will look for ways to acquire it, including looting corpses for loose change and salable items. Some players will do this because they are penny pinching weirdos. Most won't want to deal with encumbrance and the math required to loot 10 stormtroopers of laminate armor and blaster carbines.

It's a tricky balance. Too much money and the game is too easy. Too little and you get players who look for anything to make a buck including doing un-fun things.

Aye, the balience is rather difficult and it depends on everyones expectations around the table. Our group have a huge fetish for great gear and cybernetics so it would probably require hefty paydays to come close to satisfaction. The issue is as you said that making it too easy, or indeed ridding the party of the reason to adventure in the first place is a real problem, often only tackled by ramping up the motive and the threats involved.

Here's the deal few want to face. Players are rational agents. They will act in their own best interests.

If you make money too hard to come by, players will look for ways to acquire it, including looting corpses for loose change and salable items. Some players will do this because they are penny pinching weirdos. Most won't want to deal with encumbrance and the math required to loot 10 stormtroopers of laminate armor and blaster carbines.

It's a tricky balance. Too much money and the game is too easy. Too little and you get players who look for anything to make a buck including doing un-fun things.

I pay big but I charge big. I think players like big pay days but to me justifying large costs is easy. I think ship prices are not what they should be. Parts for ships are not what they should be. So I charge big for that. I'm not afraid to shoot players down into a hard landing and then lay then up in a repair bay for time and big money. So ships aren't just the magic carpet for transportation and to engage in an alternative combat form, they're a nice money sink for me in my game.

Another direction from which to approach looting- if the characters seem inclined to loot, provide more opportunities for them to do so. Don't leave just anything available, but don't be too stingy either. At some point, the characters become known as "junk collectors", scavengers of the dead, or some other less-than-romantic nomenclature, and come to be expected to have their wares on-hand. Approached by someone looking to by a half dozen Imperial blaster rifles, the characters have to turn their "customer" away for lack of product. "But I was led to believe you guys are the go-to for illicit arms!" Suddenly, their reputation is crap. Enter, from stage right, an investigation into local black market saturation of illegal weapons, possibly with the assumption that whomever is supplying them is a rebel sympathizer...

...or attempting to muscle in on Black Sun/Hutt interests. Either way, the stage is set with plot hooks, and things could turn "ugly" for the characters very unexpectedly. This might make them rethink their looting ways. Or not.

Here's the deal few want to face. Players are rational agents. They will act in their own best interests.

If you make money too hard to come by, players will look for ways to acquire it, including looting corpses for loose change and salable items. Some players will do this because they are penny pinching weirdos. Most won't want to deal with encumbrance and the math required to loot 10 stormtroopers of laminate armor and blaster carbines.

It's a tricky balance. Too much money and the game is too easy. Too little and you get players who look for anything to make a buck including doing un-fun things.

I pay big but I charge big . I think players like big pay days but to me justifying large costs is easy. I think ship prices are not what they should be. Parts for ships are not what they should be. So I charge big for that. I'm not afraid to shoot players down into a hard landing and then lay then up in a repair bay for time and big money. So ships aren't just the magic carpet for transportation and to engage in an alternative combat form, they're a nice money sink for me in my game.

That's how our GM handles it, too. You'd think it would sting - like everyone's ripping us off - but, for me at least, it feels like we're professionals dealing with other professionals. We take down big scores, but to get them we pay for information, buy tools and specialist gear, modify our ship (we're on our second transponder mask because both the original ID and the first faked signature were getting too hot). It's like Mission: Impossible or Ocean's 11.

I agree with Aservan , too. We only turn to looting bodies when we are very short of cash. For one, that's hanging around crime scenes that we'd rather not be found. For another, it's a lot of effort finding buyers and haggling - we could be making more money doing other things.

I think it's precisely because the monetary system scales oddly that people may be wary of rewarding large sums of cash. The price for gear and weapons seems like a decent basis that feels right. When you get to ship and vehicle prices it's like the bottom falls out of the market. It makes it tough to set decent rewards of money for jobs that would allow players to buy personal gear and weapons when so few jobs need to be banked to buy a ship.

My very first Star Wars game I tried recreating an event in the EU and had all these things planned out with a huge payday at the end of it to reward my players for the campaign. What did they do? Skip all the front end and jumped right to the last scenario (literally as I had them surveying a system for the newly formed New Republic). I had the system set up with different planets with different environments and types. Anyway they jumped right to the center of the system and were going to work their way out instead of out to in like I had expected them to. So they jumped into the middle of the Imperial Remnant fleet and basically had their ship shot out from under them. Now I was intending on any of this to happen. So they get ground side and contact the Republic. They find enough salvage and equipment to resurrect their ship plus some extra goodies like droids they could re-fabricate back to functional. So by that time they have fought off a landing party, gotten the loot, and were going to make a break for it when the Republic responds to their information. Big space battle ensues and I expect them to dive in and help. Nope, bunch of mercenaries sit back and work on making sure their ship not going to decompress or getting those droids up and running. When a Star Destroyer nearby gets disabled by a bunch of ion cannons the group rush onto it send the droids out into the secondary hangar and steal all the shuttles. Then they took off and finished their survey with the extra shuttles speeding the process along. Went collected their reward and bonus from the Republic. Sold off most of the shuttles to them to purchase freighters, set up a base in an old asteroid mining base a character won in a game of Sabaac and set up a import/export business. Also went back to that system to claim salvage rights and got more equipment and parts from it. Basically they took my whole plan of epic star/ground exploration and turned it into a business venture.

Needless to say they had a lot of people gunning for them for their actions. The Empire was less than thrilled with them, the sector they were charting was actually claimed by the Hutts and they forgot to kick their profits upstairs, their base was also in Hutt space and it was actually controlled by another Hutt of the same clan. The planet they got their salvage off of found out about their actions and had the New Republic bring sanctions against them for theft. So that was how I kind of ended up just shrugging at the rest of it because revenge was had by many. Yep they made hand over fist in profits for a simple survey but the amount of plot hooks they towed away outweighed their cargo.

One thing a lot of folks forget is that even if they only operate on one planet there is still law and order on that planet. Be it Imperial, Hutt, Black Sun, any other criminal organization, or even a legitimate independent government it is there. Your players start looting the Empire of their goods and they start showing up in the black market police are going to notice pretty quick that the local gang went from cheap pistols to Imperial grade pretty quick. Empire going to start noticing some drops in numbers in certain areas they will start investigating. Eventually the players going to be answering a lot of questions some of them in the form of blaster fire.

Also if it gets too out of hand I didn't see anywhere in the book that prevented a GM from giving the players more Obligation (especially if he balances it with xp bonus) it would be sort of like a money for xp type exchange but if you have players that have to steal everything this sort of balances the cash flow they get. Also if they don't focus on paying back those obligations it could come back and bite them.

I agree with progressions . In EotE especially, it's okay to take their toys away.

Okay, if they get stolen all the time it may piss people off but, personally, I prefer my GM Sundering my weapon to spending those Advantages on criticals all the time. A few weeks back I lost a very expensive rifle* to a single enemy roll that generated two Triumphs.

The universe gives, the universe takes away.

* Experimental Geonoican blaster rifle (1200c) + Superior + Marksman Barel (modified twice for Accuracy) + Telescopic Sight. Away from book - anyone know off the top of their head how much all that was worth?

Per RAW. 1200+5000+1200+200+250 = 7850 credits

The Geonoshan Blaster Rifle from Long Arm of the Hutt was 1500 credits however.

Also the cost of the Mechanics checks to perform the modifications to the Marksman Barrel don't have a cost in the book.

Per RAW. 1200+5000+1200+200+250 = 7850 credits

The Geonoshan Blaster Rifle from Long Arm of the Hutt was 1500 credits however.

Also the cost of the Mechanics checks to perform the modifications to the Marksman Barrel don't have a cost in the book.

The gun was indeed from Long Arm.

I performed the checks myself ( YYY G Mechanics) so there were no labour costs.

So 8150c, eh? It was a good weapon.

I've replaced it with a carbine. Superior, Forearm Grip (Accuracy, Point Blank). I've bought a multi-optic sight and the gear to modify it (Perception x2), but Pash may have put us on the wrong side of an Imperial Hand, so I'm thinking an underbarrel flame thrower may be more useful.

That would be the cost if someone was to buy a stock gun and a bunch of upgrade parts then do the work themselves. If they had to hire someone to do the mods it would be more.

However, the E7 demonstrates that you can purchase a weapon with superior and it doesn't add 5k to the cost. At only 1200 credits the E7 is only 800 more than a regular blaster pistol.

For those who are worried about the whole "I pick up the blasters/vibro-whatsits/armor/etc. and haul it along to sell later" issue, just keep one thing in mind. Encumbrance in this system is both easy to track (nice small numbers), and hard to boost.

Your 'typical' soldier for hire (Brawn 2-3) has between 7 and 11 encumbrance capacity (depending on his load-bearing gear of choice). His basic blaster carbine is 3, his armor is 0-3 points when worn (depending on type). That only leaves him 4-8 encumbrance to play with before things start going down hill quickly (+1 setback per point over your encumbrance rating).

That's 2-3 carbines per character, sold on the black market, and they have to haul their loot through the entire adventure to do it. And that assumes they only carry the bare-minimum gear in the first place. Add a backup weapon, an Emergency Medpac, macrobinoculars, a thermal cloak, datapad, extra reloads, or the like, and your 'spare' capacity drops quickly.

Trying to drag a spare suit of armor along for the ride is going to be tricky. Especially without something to keep it in a relatively portable bundle.

Yes, your Brawn 4 Wookie Marauder who wields a vibroknife, packing two utility belts, a backpack, and nothing else is looking at an Encumbrance rating of 9 + 3 (11), and can haul up to 15 without losing his bonus action. But at that point, he's got +4 Setback dice on his rolls, and even then he's not dragging a whole lot of cash value along with him.

Remember, no buyer in his right mind is going to buy *used*, *stolen* gear for anything even *close* to market value of the *new* item. He's got to make a profit *somewhere* with it, and he knows it. Someone shows up with a box full of *used* E-11s, and a crate of 'lightly shot' Stormtrooper armor, to sell without the accompanying paperwork to demonstrate they're doing so *legally*? A clever 'buyer' is going to discretely signal for the Imperial garrison to show up, and spend as long as he can 'haggling' to keep the sellers occupied. A 'normal' buyer is going to *openly* call for the Imperials, and tell the seller to get the hell out of his shop.

Hang around an honest pawn shop for a while, and you'll see that even top quality stuff sold outright to the shop only nets the buyer somewhere *up to* 30-60% of the estimated value of the item because the shop has to be able to sell it for enough profit to cover the costs of running the business. (Easily sold stuff, or stuff the owner knows he has a buyer for gets the higher offers because it won't sit there taking up space for months on end.)

If the buyer doesn't think they'll be able to make a profit, or put the goods *directly* to use themselves, they're not going to be interested in the sale. Flat out. No roll required or allowed. (Uncle Owen wouldn't offer someone a bent credit for that stormtrooper armor, or imperial weaponry, for example, even if he might not actually call the cops on you for having it.)