I do have to admit that being able to actually go 'I pay X to get a new barrel installed' would give me a good reason to have an Armorer contact and prevent my ballistics from being tracked, just like how you can say 'I'm paying 1 grand to replace my tires after that run'.
In a home game, that's probably the kind of thing that a GM should be rewarding with extra Karma, extra Edge, or some other sort of "cookie" for good role-playing. In
Shadowrun Missions, I'm not exactly sure what the GM could do to reward it since that format is a little more restrictive... But it definitely should be encouraged.
I've just spent ¥15,000 on my Neo-Tokyo
Missions character to buy a "SHTF Stash*" Given the structure of
Missions, I know full well it's probably something that will absolutely never come up, but I've been playing
Shadowrun since 1991 and its just a habit I've developed for all my characters: as soon as I can afford it, I build it and never look back. Because in the world of
Shadowrun, a professional `runner should expect to get burned, double-crossed, hung out to dry, or otherwise screwed over. To quote one of the Patron Saints of Shadowrunning:
"A guy told me one time: 'Don't ever let yourself get attached to anything that you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" -Neil McCauley, Heat
Professional `runners should probably also be ditching their weapons after any run in which they have to use them. Maybe not something as rare and expensive as a Ranger Arms SM-5 or something so generic that doesn't leave distinctive trace evidence like a combat knife. But even in a world where caseless ammunition is standard and every third sararīman and barrens squatter has an Ares Predator tucked in their waistband, the amount of forensic evidence that a firefight leaves behind is massive. Professional `runners should either ditch their weapons or pay a trusted contact to monkey about with them to change their ballistic fingerprint (nanotech would be amazing for this).
However, it's not necessarily something that a lot of players would find fun if it were a regular part of game play.
Shadowrun is already a very complex game, both in terms of rules and in terms of narrative structure. Many players just want to do the cool cyberpunk gun-fu they saw in
The Matrix and have a sweet neo-noir meets kung-fu meets blaxploitation swordfight like they saw in
Kill Bill, Pt. 1, they don't want to spend table time role-playing days upon days of planning, meeting, prepping, and strategizing about this sort of thing. I mean, yeah, some of us really love that shit, I consider
Heat one of the best movies ever made about
Shadowrun. But, yeah, it's not something everyone is into.
My philosophy as a GM is that players who "go above and beyond" to enrich our collective enjoyment of the game or even make some sort of sub-optimal choice that is a temporary set-back for their PC mechanically just because it's keeping in character for that same PC narratively shoudl be given some sort of "cookie" from the GM.
*
Three to six months of Squatter Lifestyle, a burner commlink, a fake SIN that that's never been used for anything else, a cheap motorcycle, a change of clothes, and a couple of concealable weapons. Buy it, stash it, and pray you never need it.