Originally Posted by NanbanJim
Targan and the others have said it quite well, but I couldn't help put my 2 cents in.
Michael, there is a way to make the campaign more "advancement" style: Make it what we called in Shadowrun a "gutter campaign," where the PCs start with nothing and you carefully mete out slightly improved gear to them by ensuring their opposition would only likely have limited gear.
A good way to do this may be with the PCs as refugees stuck in a pogrom (work camp) in a para-rural area of a higher gun-control state, say, the western bulge of Illinois (a quick Googling of "Illinois map population" told me that). In a twist of irony, the clan in the "Big House" have all caught something airborne and rather terminal (the vector for this can be a campaign element), and so while they have the bullwhips, the beating sticks, due to local law and personal need they never were all that well armed to begin with--just lucky. A couple pistols a rifle and shotgun or two would be the "big guns."
That setting is ready for the PCs to make their break from their weakened guards... and the disease could also keep the PCs from getting that far.
Add in some personal motivations, eg the PCs families were all sold to similar local pogroms (hobby farms/ranches, maybe a gravel pit and/or peat mine). Perhaps all of these were seized by the lackeys of Chicago "philanthropists" who, after the end of real central control, "stepped in" and offered to help those city dwellers starving and stranded a way to get 2 meals a day and a roof... in what turned out to be slave labour (or indentured servitude with no effective law enforcement to ensure the release after term).
This removes urban PD from the equation. National Guard may patrol on occasion, but would generally want to GTFO by this point in time as fast as possible... and potentially trigger-happy, since there's nothing worth them protecting out here (these pogroms would barely dent the governor's needs), but handfuls of people (the Philanthropist Network) very interested in keeping prying eyes away.
After freeing a half-dozen pogroms, they'll be lucky to have any longarms with even assault-rifle ergonomics, much less select-fire capabilities. Explosives would be Molotovs, improvised explosives (eg fireworks, dangerous enough in their own right), and perhaps some dynamite from the mines. You control whether or not they get better gear (and if it's available, remember they have to pry it off from someone already using it). And yet even if you don't provide better gear, it's believable enough.
If you want to "upgrade," you'll have to deal with bandit/slavers by lead or trade, assault the NG patrols (which should probably be a moral quandry, especially if they capture an NG survivor who can explain that, "hey, it's not personal, we just learned to shoot first or die for not doing so, I got a wife and wait, aren't you Uncle Denny from Becky's side of the family??"), or...
Well, the list goes on, but that's months of campaigning down the road.
That's one way to merge classic tabletopping with a modern availability curve.
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