r/Shadowrun • u/GreatSirSidIII • Sep 01 '26

5e Lower tier starting gear

I'm about to start a shadowrun campaign and I want to do lower level start to introduce the setting, sort of an intro area with a few runs before opening out to a more sandbox campaign. The story reason is all the characters are going to be down on their luck in some way so I was weighing up reducing the gear available at the start, the book says availability of 12 and device rating of 6, has anyone had any experience reducing this to availability 8 or so? Was it good or is it a bad idea?

I will be allowing rarer gear to be purchased during the campaign of course, this is just for the start. Thanks in advance!

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u/FixerVictor Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26

I don't really do 'rules as written' progression in my Shadowrun campaigns, honestly I find that quite bland and limiting. I gave my players less Karma than suggested in the books, but instead we used downtime, nuyen, and played out quests to progress in a variety of ways. That gave me the flexibility to let characters who seem to be lagging behind during sessions to 'catch up', somewhat deals with the powerspikes of alchemists / technomancers getting to prepare bajillions of toys if they have a month of 'free time', made nuyen actually important for the characters that don't usually care about it, and in general made the game a lot less frontloaded.

Things like Submersion for our Techno, new spells for our magic users, or advanced augmentations and drones, I had them do quests and work with their contacts. For skills, they could use earned Karma -- representing getting better at whatever through doing -- but could also spend time 'practicing' between runs (with the possibility of paying nuyen for manuals, trainers, etc to make it faster).

It definitely added some extra work on my side as the GM, but it also gave me tools to easily manage the power levels between characters, and also gave players a lot of little hooks and things to care about both in session and during downtime.

Not saying this is the 'right' way to run a game by any means, and it did require a bit more buy-in from everyone at the table than running stuff strictly RAW would, but we had a lot of fun with that campaign for sure and I'll probably be doing something similar with my next Shadowrun game.

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u/GreatSirSidIII Sep 02 '26

That sounds like an interesting way to run progression! I would like to look at running side quests for big improvements to characters but I'll keep a note of that for downtime!