Firearms, and the ability to shoot the lights out of other players, is an integral part of every variant of DarkRP. It’s never not funny when somebody’s body ragdolls into the next wall and that oh-so-lovely suit beep plays. Unfortunately, guns are also a core source of much of the gamemode’s problems. Malicious players can slaughter the whole server before the admin blinks an eye, and that ruins the fun for everyone. So, what’s the deal, and why was DarkRP setup this way?

Vanilla DarkRP has a simple but delicate weapon situation. Other than the police (who spawn with guns), and pistols (which everyone can buy), the Gun Dealer is the only job capable of buying weapons. All gun dealer weapons must be bought in shipments – that is to say, crates containing 10 guns – at a high price. These shipments can be slowly taken out of, but anyone can interact with these physical boxes.

As a result, when playing vanilla DarkRP, gun dealers need a store or some other secure building. They buy and lock the doors, buy and stash their shipments, then open the front door. Many maps contain stores that have a secure window, allowing gun dealers to safely trade gun for money; but it’s also equally easy to build one with fading doors.

This system is very basic and easy to add to, and many modern DarkRP servers adopt the system without second thought. However, there are several crucial differences between vanilla and modern DarkRP that invisibly worsen the situation.

Economic Implications

In my primer, I emphasized the limited avenues in which you can generate money in vanilla DarkRP. This very limited influx of money similarly limits the influx of weapons, whose existence is directly tied to money generation.

The cost of violence is how much time and money investment a player needs to pay to be able to act violently. In vanilla DarkRP, if you go out and murder random people, you will eventually lose your gun, and if that happens a few times you will have nothing in your pockets to kill with. Now, there are always people who don’t care about earning money, and just want to bully others with guns or just shoot the place up. These players having leeway under the cost of violence is not a count against the vanilla gun system – in fact, it is a intentional feature. A player seeking to be violent must first earn money, slowly, through passive means, and they have to pay for the ability to do violence (in the most literal sense).

Let’s do a bit of math. The cheapest automatic weapon in vanilla DarkRP is the Mac-10, which is $2150 per 10 guns. Gun dealers charge wildly different amounts of markup, but a decent estimate is around 100%, which means about $430 per gun. Pistol ammo is $30 for 24 rounds, so let’s assume 3 boxes for a total of around $520. A citizen earns $45 every 160 seconds, totaling $1012.5 hourly. Assuming you pay for absolutely nothing else, you can afford a basic weapon and 3 clips of ammo just under twice an hour. If your sole intention is to slaughter as many people in the server as possible, and let’s say you’re a good shooter and tag 3 people per life, that’s 5-6 people per hour. Hardly a drop in the bucket.

You can cheap out and buy a pistol for much cheaper (the Glock is a whopping $160), but those things hardly kill and you really can only use them in self-defense.

Now, my math only included salary, which is one of two sources of money generation. Printers are the other method of earning money. For a $1000 down cost, you can print $250 per 100-350 seconds, and ignoring overheating that’s about $4000 an hour, up to twice for the 2 you can buy. Lovely! Except printers are illegal, and now you have to contend with the cops sniffing around for the $950 per printer they get when they blow it up. And what do you do when the cops come, what do you do? You gotta get guns to fend them off! Printers create conflict between the gangsters and the police, and fighting over printers is a completely reasonable and encouraged part of gameplay. If you waste the guns on RDM though, you are gonna be in trouble when the cops come and you are empty handed.

So, that sounds fine and dandy, but what’s going wrong now? As you remember, modern DarkRP servers have new and expanded methods of earning money. Whether it is doing some activity or having more, better printers, people can churn out dollars at a rate beyond the Federal Reserve’s wildest dreams. With all that money, they can now easily afford a large stock of guns and their ammo. Even if the best guns require an insane amount of money, committing RDM only requires an average gun – your targets are often unarmed after all. If, instead of being able to afford a basic gun and 3 clips every half an hour, you can get a gun and ammo every 10 minutes or less, now you can shoot anyone you want without worrying about your pockets, and that’s how you get a server rampant with RDM.

So, let’s talk solutions. The fundamental concept upon which the vanilla DarkRP system works is the cost of violence. If you want your server to not be a mess, you must maintain a high cost for the “average” weapon. This cost can either be financial, time-based, or both. Crunch some numbers: Barring everything else, how often can a player afford a decent gun and some ammo? How much effort do they need to put in? The exact threshold you want for a server depends on how chaotic and violent you want it to be, but I think 30 minutes is a good standard for the average server.

I have a complicated and overengineered solution of my own (typical!), and I’ll talk about it in the last segment.

Persistent Inventory

As vanilla DarkRP lacks any sort of persistent item storage, the only way you can keep these guns around is if you physically place them somewhere – such as in a building. Naturally, this encourages gun dealers to open a shop and keep their goods safe as they slowly sell their stock. The physical presence of valuables also encourages criminals to break in and steal or rob the owner (remember, crime is a good thing, it’s in the name of social interaction).

Almost every modern DarkRP server (including mine) has a persistent inventory system, be it the venerable ItemStore or any other crappy one. (Yes, fight me.) Now, gun dealers don’t have to do the risky thing of keeping their shipment boxes around – they can put them in their magic pockets and stash them in their bank. Thus:

• There is minimal physical presence of shipments, meaning less gun stores and less chances to rob or steal.
• Gun dealers can self-supply extremely easily. That is to say, someone needing a gun can change to gun dealer, buy them, stash them, and switch back.
• As players stock up on weapons, they won’t need to buy guns from others in the future, and can simply retrieve one they stashed.

The three factors all reduce the need to interact with a gun dealer, lowering the level of socialization in your server. That being said, it is also impractical to not have an inventory system, as most players expect it and it’s an excellent way to encourage players to stick around. So, here’s a few choices.

1. Make self-supplying against the rules. If you or your admins have no life and want to stare down the throats of every gun dealer ever, you can; but I’ve established I don’t like rules.
2. Adjust inventory mechanics. Players might not like it, but you can just make guns and shipments not storable. Alternatively, it’s not difficult to stop gun dealers from stashing their own guns with ItemStore (you just store a variable that is the ID of whoever bought the weapon/shipment); but there’s no readily available solution.
3. Literally do nothing. Tell the players to demote whichever gun dealer is self-supplying or not opening shops. If they’re fine with it, you’re fine with it, right?
4. Adjust the role of the gun dealer. This is my approach: instead of forcing gun dealers to sell, I created new mechanics that forces them to slowly produce guns instead of materializing them through the F4 menu. This doesn’t solve the self-supplying issue (which isn’t the worst thing), but preserves the necessity of owning a base/home.

Weapon of Choice

Guns guns guns. You’ve seen the videos: the vanilla DarkRP guns sucks balls. You can’t even shoot without aiming, when you aim it slows you to a crawl, the recoil is absurd, and they do pitiful amounts of damage.

You see, DarkRP guns were made for roleplaying. And roleplaying, as its name should imply, does not have combat as its primary focus (except specific variants). Their weapon mechanics reflect this.

• You can only shoot when aiming, so people know when you are about to shoot.
• You are very slow when aiming, so unarmed people can easily run away, and cops can easily catch up and arrest.
• Damage is low and recoil is high, so fights last longer, offering more opportunities for social interactions (from surrendering, to yelling expletives at each other, to calling the cops).

Most modern DarkRP server owners do not appreciate this approach. Most modern DarkRP players also don’t appreciate it. So, almost every server runs one of big three firearm sets: M9K, TFA and CW2.0. Each weapon base has its own minute difference in mechanics that I will not elaborate on, but there’s a common theme, in that they’re all terribly balanced. In fact, it’s not fair to say they’ve been balanced at all. Almost all server owners use these guns with zero adjustment, and by god, that irks me so much. Even well-balanced bases are not balanced around DarkRP, and tend to have low to nonexistent time-to-kill.

As a responsible DarkRP server owner, you must balance your guns. It requires no technical expertise. You unpack the files and change some values. Specifically, you need to:

• Drastically increase the time to kill. Slower killing means the police and other people have more time to respond, meaning RDM is less threatening and more social interactions can happen in-between.
• Decrease the viability of hip-firing. When you can kill just as easily when not aiming, there’s no indication when and if a person is trying to shoot you with a gun out.
• Make sure your weapon’s power correlates with its price. M9K shotguns are stupid OP and gets sold for cheap often. Don’t do that.

Planning out each weapon’s place in the economy and their expected power is the very first thing I do when I start making a DarkRP server. It should be yours too.

What About Gun Licenses?

Lastly, let’s have a footnote on the least utilized mechanic in vanilla DarkRP, gun licenses. By default, only the government can hand out licenses. (The mayor approves a license if one exists, or the police chief if one exists, or any police otherwise.) In theory, if you don’t have a license, the police can take away your guns when they search you. In practice, not only are gun licenses not part of the default laws, everybody forgets it even exists.

Yet gun licenses are a hidden gem: they can be one key puzzle piece in reducing the amount of guns on the street. Since only the government can give out licenses, they can decide who gets to use the big guns, and can revoke them on people who abuses them. I recommend one of two approaches:

1. Make owning guns (besides pistols) without a license illegal as a default law; or
2. Set GM.Config.license to true, meaning players cannot pick up guns without a license. This was the approach I chose for my server.

If you take the first approach, you will need to adjust and add some game mechanics. If you are using the default weapon checker, you probably want to make the confiscate speed much faster (people generally don’t like it when you take their guns away, and they conveniently also have a way to stop that). You can reward the police when they confiscate an illegal gun. You can also automatically mark players that are holding a gun without a license.

If you take the second approach, you might want to add a way for criminals to get a license through other means. I gave the mob boss an entity they can buy, which grants a temporary fake license that is revoked on death.

My Current Approach

Since I have the means, I have decided to go all-out and split gun dealer into three jobs, mutually dependent on each other.

• The Gunsmith can buy a 3D printer that creates guns. However, it requires one blueprint and several materials.
• The Supplier can buy factories that produce weapon materials and ammo.
• The Mechanic can buy factories that produce blueprints. They can also produce weapon attachments.

While there are a few basic weapons that can be directly bought by the gunsmith, the majority of weapons require at least three players working together, as well as one or multiple bases to host the machines in. Since I am using an inventory system, it’s very likely these players will opt to stash the produced weapons instead of selling them as is; but that also presents a risk of being ambushed on the way to the bank (where the stash is).

The prices of these machines are also rather high. While you are refunded 50% when a machine breaks, that money is dropped on the ground, so raiding is rewarding and not getting raided is preferable. This further encourages basing, teaming up, and raiding said bases.

The weapons are split into categories, with each category having 3 tiers. Higher tier weapons are overall stronger, but also require more money and time investment, allowing players to choose how much they are willing to put on the table, but also creating a sense of scarcity. Working out a high tier rifle is a true accomplishment, and the gun will be a sought-after valuable; while low tier SMGs or shotguns can suffice but not impress.

I also introduced gun licenses, as described above. If players want a license, they have to side with either the government (which they can only use responsibly), or the gangsters (and have to pay up for them). More social interaction, less gun abuse – it’s a win-win.

I’m confident that this system should be engaging, and offer an alternative to the traditional gun dealer playstyle of holing up in a storefront while hoping people need their guns. Whether it is effective remains to be seen.