I'm running a cyberpunk 2020 game that has dual dms. My co dm allowed a player to have a barrett 90 cal through nomad family dealer. The player is wondering how much does the ammo cost. I can not find it anywhere. Can someone point to where the cost for 12.7 bmg is?
Posted Feb 13, 2022, 5:14 AM UTC
The official cost for 12.7 from Maximum Metal: It's a somewhat janky system based on 10% of the weapon cost for 100 rounds (see page 19 middle column for "Extra Ammunition"). Unfortunately, there's two weapons that use 12.7mm in MM each with different costs. So the 12.7mm Machinegun costs 2000eb. So it'd be 200eb for 100 rounds or 2eb a round. The 12.7mm Gatling Gun costs 6000eb. So it'd be 600eb for 100 rounds or 6eb a round. Kinda janky, I mean why couldn't you just buy a bunch of ammo for a machinegun and re-sell to gatling gun users for a huge profit.
In my games, the Barret-Arasaka Light 20's ammo was 25eb per bullet. Because the Barret-Arasaka Light 20 is the "spiritual successor" to the Barret sniping rifle (long before they gave us the stats for the M-90 in Home of the Brave), so set the ammo to be the same - 25eb a bullet. Even after MM came out I continued to say that Match Grade ammo for a M-90 costs 25eb a bullet.
I mean why couldn't you just buy a bunch of ammo for a machinegun and re-sell to gatling gun users for a huge profit.
That could easily happen. I was in a grocery store not long ago looking at antihistamines. Then I started looking at sleeping aids. I found the exact same drug sold as a sleeping aid for twice the price, and for half the amount of drug (once you factored in dose per pill and number of pills), so actually 4x the price. And it was on a shelf on the opposite side of the same aisle! I can only imagine worse shenanigans in the CPunk world.
"Tylenol PM" says hi o/
Ah, no wonder I had didn't remember where the cost was, its in Maximum Metal. Yeah, not exactly my favorite sourcebook.
It's not a good sourcebook. The rules are so different it feels like a completely different system with yet new terminology that you have to learn from the ground up. However, there's not much motivation to learn the new system because it doesn't feel like it gives you any advantages over the CP2020 system and in fact there's a lot of disadvantages (for example, ammo costs - would it really have killed them to just put in another column on their weapons chart to give us prices instead of this psuedo-clever 'it's a % of the cost of the weapon!" stuff? The system is designed to let you simulate power armor and tanks and fighter jets, yet it doesn't really handle civilian cars or cyborgs (two things players are more likely to run into than tanks or jets) very gracefully.
But the biggest disappointment of the supplement was Mike Pondsmith's "git gud" when he was pre-emptively answering "why is powered armor like mecha from Votoms or something while total conversion borgs are scaled to fit in with cyberpunk, aren't they massively inferior?" -- I've wondered for years where that came from. I've heard at the time Cyberpunk's dev team was split between the East and West Coast of the US and the two did things differently. I wonder MM was some product of the East Coast crowd and by the time Mike saw it, it was kinda too late to do anything about it; it was either scrap it or print it so the former was chosen. Mike's comment was basically a, "Yeah, I know. There's not much I can do about it."
That makes a lot of sense actually. Some sourcebooks really don’t feel like they were created by the same team of writers. I know sometimes people are contracted or brought in, but Cyberpunk 2020 has sourcebooks that seem to really split down the middle in terms of “tone” and “theme.”
That said, I haven’t had power armor at all in my games, but if I ever do I may just do what others have said and use Mekton rules or something.
Based on how expensive .50 BMG is here in the real world, 6eb sounds more right than 2eb. And match-grade AP .50BMG, sure 25eb sounds good per round.
As a point we have gotten rid of the 10% of weapons cost as it breaks my solo and her main guns, makes ammo WAY too affordable.
Also made no sense in the world as we have it set.
Current real world prices for a .50 BMG round in the US is up to about $3 to $4 USD per round for the cheap stuff. Occasionally you can find some old surplus stuff for less. Match grade ammo for long range precision is around twice that, maybe a bit more. Then there is a place selling (or maybe just trying to sell) Barret brand ammo for $135.00 USD per round. That is just insane.
As far as I am aware, there is not an official cost for that exact round, not even in Neo Tribes which features a rifle that fires that.
However, cyberpunk.asia (Cyberpunk 2021) lists .50 BMG (12.7x99mm) as 25eb per 10 rounds — so 2.5 euros per round.
Of course, that price would fluctuate depending on who and where you buy it from.
Edit: Check Maximum Metal as per u/illyrium_dawn 's comment.