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So, in the past week or so, we've had one thread from a GM whose PCs are at death's door and unable to catch a break, and another from a GM whose PCs are waltzing through Poland as if on vacation, taking called shots at NPCs' arms because the players have figured out how to exploit an optional rule. It's not too hard to see where the problem lies here.

The PCs are a small party of soldiers cut off from friendly forces. They are without resupply and their force is too small to provide for its own protection. They ought to be running scared and avoiding contact. If they aren't, then it's on you to put the fear of God into them.

Problem is, my players rarely flee ... if the encounter is hard enough, it's more likely to result in a TPK. Also, short of sending MBTs at them, my players lack the knowledge of modern era weapons anf vehicles to actually be affraid of anything smaller than a MBT.

To limit the loot, you could try the inverse, which was my suggestion to have the NPC party break contact, so you have fewer decisive engagements for the amount of ammo your PCs expend. If parties of 10 - 15 NPCs are incapable of breaking contact before the PCs kill them all, I suggest playing the NPCs as if they have some tactical sense. Why did the NPCs set up a position without a covered withdrawal route?

Also, if the players don't have the sense to avoid or break contact with forces that clearly outgun them, then give them fair warning. If they fail to heed it, TPK them.

One ATRL and 2 sniper rifles is apparently enough to devastate 3 BTRs and 2 BMPs...

How much ammunition did they have for that ATRL? And after the first round from that ATRL, why wasn't every weapon firing at it to suppress the gunner? If the PCs fire an anti-tank weapon, both remaining BTRs ought to be dumping 6 ammo dice on it, both BMPs will be firing at it, and that gunner ought to be reconsidering his choices even if they all somehow manage to miss.

From another thread:

For called head shots, I rule mook NPCs don't get to roll CUF at all and are automatically supressed. That way, the PCs are willing to take the -2 and aim for the head, even if the target has a helmet. Otherwise they always aim for the arms, because of no armor and they know a crit will incapacitate the NPCs anyway.

Suppression is powerful. Why are you making it automatic? If your players are gaming the system by aiming for the arms, knowing a crit takes down an NPC, stop using that optional rule. The NPC combat rules exist to make life easier for the GM. They're optional and should be discarded where they cause balance problems. I don't use automatic suppression, I give NPCs group morale, and if my players started going for the arms to get crits I would penalize the ever-loving &^%* out of that behavior because there is a reason armies do not train soldiers to aim at the arms. The arm is a tiny target and you can only aim at one out of two.

I know this will come off as harsh, but it's hard not to be. You say you have no difficulty making things hard on your players, but at the same time you deal with them gaming the system by making more realistic behaviour easier, instead of by making gaming the system harder.

This meant that the players only got the loot off of two enemies, neither of which had their main weapon equipped (their weapons were in the vehicles).

I keep trying to point out weird little rules that might be playing into the issue and making things easier than intended just in case they are being overlooked. It is easy to do that in the system.

For example, how many rounds are your snipers using to line up their sniper shots? Slow aim is a slow action which means you cannot shoot in the same round you take it. I found myself wondering if your snipers are firing in the same round they are aiming, thus the ease of called shots to the arms.

It sounds like your players optimized toward ranged combat quite heavily, which makes sense. That's something a lot of players new to T2k will do. When players do that, however, it becomes incredibly difficult to have mastery in other skills. In my experience, it's incredibly rare to find a player with A/A in multiple skills. Usually if they have one A/A, some of their other skills will be quite atrophied just as a result of the character creation system.

I think it may have been mentioned earlier, but I'd lean into that pretty heavily. Players with low stamina will find themselves taken out by disease/cold pretty easily. Medical, Tech, Survival, Driving, and Persuasion are all critical skills for at least someone in the party to have, with a combat skill, mobility, and stamina being important on the individual basis. Even with 6 PCs, you're not going to have an expert in all of those areas, and definitely not if 4 of them specc'ed hard into ranged combat skills, even if the players go for the most efficient group make up possible (one medic, one leader, one heavy weapons, one face, one driver, etc.). If the group does have expert levels in all of those, then I'd wager something went wrong in character creation.

Now, I don't mind players with a good plan and a powerful build "winning" encounters, meaning surviving and taking out most bad guys. I was just wondering how people handle the loot that might come out of such an encounter.