It's only OP if the GM allows it to be. From page 6 of the gear PDF: Page 30 of Actions and Combat also shows that players without resources still get to spend SOME points each week, though it is weird that apparently level 1 Resources gets LESS points to spend for some reason... Some other considerations: Reputation is just as "broken". You can likewise acquire up to 5 GP worth of gear a week using it, albeit restricted to 3 minor items and a moderate one rather than splitting it up as you see fit. Secondly, time is a huge limiting factor. If time is not of the essence in your adventure, then why do the players even need to do it? Informants are silenced, crooks get away, exsurgent outbreaks happen, anything that is even remotely something the players NEED to do should have a time limit attached, rather than letting the players take a few months to stockpile an armory. Lastly, there's this small little line from page 5 of the gear PDF: "When the mission is over and the PCs move on, assume the gear is sold, left behind, passed along to others in need, or stashed away for future ops." This game is not meant to be played in a D&D style fashion where players build up powerful arsenals over time. One absolutely can play it that way, but the way the game is balanced is that they egocast into a location with what little they can have arranged on site, procure a few things on location if need be, deal with the problem and egocast back out. Or for cases without egocasting, that the players aren't playing a character that's a super ultra prepper that spends all available resources to them every paycheck on modding the crap out of their morph and preparing an army's worth of plasma rifles in their basement.

Urthdigger wrote:

It's only OP if the GM allows it to be. Secondly, time is a huge limiting factor. If time is not of the essence in your adventure, then why do the players even need to do it? Informants are silenced, crooks get away, exsurgent outbreaks happen, anything that is even remotely something the players NEED to do should have a time limit attached, rather than letting the players take a few months to stockpile an armory. Lastly, there's this small little line from page 5 of the gear PDF: "When the mission is over and the PCs move on, assume the gear is sold, left behind, passed along to others in need, or stashed away for future ops." This game is not meant to be played in a D&D style fashion where players build up powerful arsenals over time. One absolutely can play it that way, but the way the game is balanced is that they egocast into a location with what little they can have arranged on site, procure a few things on location if need be, deal with the problem and egocast back out. Or for cases without egocasting, that the players aren't playing a character that's a super ultra prepper that spends all available resources to them every paycheck on modding the crap out of their morph and preparing an army's worth of plasma rifles in their basement.

Again, as I said, it throws it in the lap of the GM to "wage a war" against the PC's logistics aspirations. Time is a limiting factor indeed... but frankly, a) Firewall has more than one cell and b) even the most hardened cells require "cooling off" time, so unless the GM (again, the GM!) decides that things are desperate, and the players are FULL TIME Firewall operatives instead of "civilian" members that band together with a conspiracy that "does not exist", then the players having a week between missions becomes hardly believable. And about the "gear gets sold over", even assuming it applies to ALL gear, not just that provided by Firewall but the one the players got by using their Resources and Rep scores at missions setup, BLUEPRINTS and other stuff like programs, ALIs, etc... are explicitely carried with the ego, so yeah, players DO accumulate gear that they take with them. Incidentally, none of that solves the "I use 2 Resources this week and get a Server, I use then that server to run Beta Forks of myself/other teammates to program blueprints at max simulspace speed, so I get "free" gear, and stuff I can sell if I want to". Sure, ALL systems fall appart once the players have enough resources to start buying the things they want, but this is so... easy, it begs the question of why the NPCs won't do all of this en masse.

Urthdigger wrote:

Page 30 of Actions and Combat also shows that players without resources still get to spend SOME points each week, though it is weird that apparently level 1 Resources gets LESS points to spend for some reason...

This needs addressing, because then it becomes much more profitable to run several identities at Resources 0 and use them to buy small stuff.

While it is mentioned that yes, player characters use that week's time to do non-PC things, you have not mentioned Forks (which can churn out stuff like blueprints or programs or ALIs... Or simply manage his rep!), which would leave them the downtime weeks to do both the "normal living" and the "gear production" (granted, the rules do not authorize this explicitely, but taking into account both the Forks and downtime actions it is hard to forbid players to do so...). As for "using those Resources means pawning stuff", I disagree. While it makes sense for Firewall to do so, since that way it can minimize the cost of all ops across the board (thus requiring less funding, thus making smaller waves to get it), for a character with Resources 4 his weekly "stipend" is more what his fortune produces (benefits, passive income, inversions...) than he "renting" what he has for extra OOooomph in the mission. Remember, at least in 1st ed it was mentioned tha Firewall would rent out YOUR morph during mission time to recoup some money too! Anyway, I find the lack of a "social expenses" chapter quite worrying, since there is no description at all about what people do during downtime when it's not "munchkining" their way to gear "godhood". What would a Resources 4 player do with his weekly downtime surplus wage? Scratch spaces. The system is big, and spies are like squirrels, always hiding acorns everywhere. Having a hidden cache of small weapons and gear, all passive and designed to spend a very long time without maintenance yet ready to be used at a moment's notice near the operations zone is quite the advantage, and, again, I find the lack of insights from the rulebook in that direction worrying: one of the "qualifiers" to be sent into a mission instead of another might very well be that Firewall knows (usually because the agent has reported so to his router) that he has hidden caches in the zone. As for the fabbing stuff... As I've read often enough, obstacles don't mean you charge until something gives, obstacles means you get creative. Personally, I would have invested the whole team into other avenues, instead of simply looking for a private-owned fabber, or an illegal one (since the private ones would be monitored anyway, thanks to that simple "control their raw materials feed". For example, making the face and the hacker run a scam to find where maintenance fabbers are, mark one (not the most hidden, but the third most hidden if possible, the second most hidden if not) as out of service, and get there to "fix" it... to fast craft a fabber to make fabbers, since that one might be hard to keep controlled (and you can get as much feedstock as you can carry once the fabber has been assembled). Granted, this increases time... but any sentinel worth his name would run a fast calculation to see the optimal production method to assemble the required gear as fast as possible (requiring to assemble X fabbers, which work at Y speed, and churn out the required items in a Z total time, for a very simplified optimal = Z/XY). In fact, going back to the "what is best to buy with your weekly allotment of money" and answer "scratch spaces", you want to have those with some feedstock (and some exotic materials), a fabber and some guns and armor (even if you are hacker!). You would then have a list of things that, while legal, can be arranged to be waiting for you/fabbed fast, like Second Skin. Reselling of requested implants can be done simply to the bodybank that lent the body, with a discount, incidentally. Finally, while yeah, public fabbers will have a stack of products to print at all times as people needs things constantly printed and recycled (it is very likely that recycling is just throwing stuff to a big facility using some chutes), a good Body Bank will have some fabbers to print gear for their customers, specially if you can arrange for that gear to be printed while you are sleeved (for organic brains, at least) and recover from the aftereffects of resleeving. Granted, there it will be legal stuff only, but to avoid that means to start the mission clock as soon as the players are briefed and egocasted, instead of when all of the players have been sleeved (in which case, players would feel pressured to use cyberbrains always!). To sum it up, a Firewall agent will have as many blueprints, ALIs and programs he can get his hands on, be it by crafting, buying or requisitioning. Then he will have a list of scratch spaces, both his an Firewall's, with a basic list of contents. Then he will have several lists of productions queues, that would be refined at full speed for the target habitat they will be operating at, so that he can equip his sleeve as soon as he is mobile, and then reach the crafting hub he wants to, where he will run his pre-programmed "shoplist"... and depending of the situation, it will all be "fast to print stuff" or "elite gear". Fortunately, RPG games mean we don't have to actually do all that bookkeeping beforehand: it can be assumed that the Player Character has already prepared his lists, and tailored to the hab, so he can proceed with that.

This is turning into less and less about how an aspect of the rules are broken, and more into "All players have infinite gear because it makes sense to me." Toss agents into a remote station and create an army of fully geared up drones and synths to fork into in about a day with exponentially cloning fabbers? Can't go a city block with tripping over a cache of high powered weaponry? Sure, whatever. Do we really need explicit rules stating things like "If at any time the player is transporting over 10 GP worth of military-grade gear roll a 30% chance for every 1 km traveled in public that they attract 1d10 habitat security (See NPC card on page xx)..." or "For every week the scratch space has been left unchecked roll 1d100. The difficulty is the number of weeks since the last check multiplied by 10. Failure means the cache has been discovered by some enterprising criminal and looted." or other such highly specific rules for cases where players try and break the rules? Or is it sufficient just to tell the GM a few handy excuses to use if players try to hoard gear, and if players REALLY insist just give them a look and say "Dude, don't be a min-maxing smartass." One can imply that, given the way the rules work, it's "perfectly valid" that the players can create all the things they'll ever need if you absolutely munchkin your way through the rules. It's also "perfectly valid" that enemy NPCs can do the same thing and have every entrance to a place watched by by a team of constantly watching infomorphs ready to unleash ceiling-mounted plasma rifles from every single ceiling tile (With the security system using physical links only from within the facility so it can't be hacked from outside). But they don't because it's assumed the NPCs are acting like people do instead of munchkining their way to godhood. Pun-pun is also completely valid in D&D using rules-as-written. Doesn't mean that's how D&D should be played or that there needs to be specific rules for that case.

If a player wanted to play a logistics-based character in one of my games, I would require that it be a bit more in-depth than "Infinite supplies on hand." I'd have them RP to set up supply lines for rare feedstock and make scratch spaces something a player has to RP out and make rolls to ensure they are indeed secure. I'd also push the player to focus on Rare items which, as a general rule, can't just be printed off at a printer and once the resources or rep test is made to "acquire" them may need further steps to actually lay their hands on it. It's not a very common role to play though, most people don't want to play a merchant making sure goods reach the people who need them, so I don't exactly see them adding a bunch of rules for it. For niche things like this it's up to the GM to determine how to run things... and that's fine. That's their JOB. More than just reciting the game's plot and setting up the board, GMs are there to decide what happens when the rulebook doesn't have an answer: To allow players to attempt anything they can imagine. Of course, attempt and success are two separate things.