Tying Essence loss to loss of sanity/empathy/humanity is an interesting concept for a Cyberpunk approach, but it's clear that if you want to go this way you need to add a similar mechanism for magic. Otherwise, you're going into "ware is bad, magic is good" territory, which is a bad tendency Shadowrun often had and from the looks of it, still has.

For my home system I've merged Edge and Essence. The player needs to give a "meaning" to each point. That meaning is something that makes his personality, something that keeps him alive.
Both Magic and implants bite into it. There are variants depending on the concept of the game:
- Technothriller: ware and magic are just tools, no impact besides the loss of Edge/Essence (mostly for game balance but you can explain this by the fact that the character relies more on magic/cyber than on his luck/abilities)

- Cyberpunk: when an edge/essence point is lost, so is the character's link to the meaning behind it. While not completely gone, it gets more hazy or twisted. The character gets more and more distant from humanity as he gets more ware/power. However, it is possible to buy back edge/essence points with karma (with an exponential cost) and discover that actually humanity wasn't gone but was there all along. It is possible to spend these again for more ware/magic but in that case, the point is lost forever.

- Post-cyberpunk: When an edge/essence point is turned into a magic/implant point, its meaning is transformed accordingly. If the meaning was "rage against corporations", it can turn into "becoming stronger" to justify buying muscle replacements: the character decided that he had to become stronger to fight the corporations and slowly "becoming stronger" becomes the goal in itself. New points can be bought, but have to keep inside the same philosophy as the other ones. The magic/implants become part of the character's identity and makes him something that's neither human nor inhuman, but just different.

Yes, that was actually the basic idea. The Augmented get Humanity Loss, and the Mages get Lovecraft. The idea was to attach a cost to each initiation that progressively adds up, just as implants do. Not sure if that's balanced enough, it's still a very rough idea after all.

Your concept seems not so dissimilar to mine, after all. How do you scale how much Edgessence magic costs? Do you go by the magic attribute, and it's now hard capped at [Edgessence]?

Yes, it's one Edgessence point for one Magic point.
So it's hardcapped at Edgeessence for Technothriller (which is meant for "Shadowrun 2035", where initiation shouldn't be a thing anyway), it's hardcapped at twice that for Cyberpunk, and it's not capped (but getting very costly) for Post-Cyberpunk. But I admit I haven't thought much about the place of Initiation in all this.

I used to go this route, but I don't anymore. Often the players who will load a guy up with 'ware want a reason to use it, so giving them more excuse to be paranoid and low on self control by nature leads to disruptive behavior to the group. Unless you're playing Pink Mohawk, then you can totally have a party of remorseless psychos and still be in genre.

Same reason I don't like to see Sams with the Holy Trinity of Vindictive, Impulsive, and Combat Monster on the flaws.

Which has always raised the question to me of why? Why is there a social stigma other then service of the status quo.

But perhaps that's a separate discussion.

5th Edition already figures 'Wared Up Social Stigma into the character by using Essence to Calculate your Social Limit. No need to add more on top of that unless the player is interested in playing such a character.

Also ware got ridiculously expensive again.
And the starting money got lowered too.

There really shouldn't be. Not after a whole generation and change of people have been raised where augmentations are commonplace. Shadowrun's timeline is rapidly approaching transhumanism, and SR4 correctly embraced that. Then some turdburgler said "We're losing our base, let's try to remake the grimy nasty cyberpunk of the '80s" and lo, with the wave of the hand of an idiotic god, it attempted to be so.

So, frankly? I just ignored all of that shit. You're not gonna get funny looks with 'ware, unless you're somewhere really posh and your 'ware is something high-profile, like Adam Jensen's cyberarms. But nobody in the world is gonna bat an eye at augmented eyes, datajacks, etc, etc, unless they're like, asshole essence purists or whatever.



And that's why I went over to Eclipse Phase. The prices on augs are all reasonable, and nobody except the hardest of hardcore biocons gives one chrome-plated fuck about the augs you've got in your body.

Yes, Not sure why, but there you go. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)
SR45A had it right in that regard, thoguh they could have come down a bit on Grade multipliers.

Well, under 4th Ed rules that is absolutely realistic:
For example, if a character is driving downtown to buy soymilk and NERPS, no test is necessary. If she’s suddenly found herself in a car chase, however—perhaps she ran a red light and a Lone Star officer is in pursuit—then it’s time to break out the dice. (4A, p. 60)
Having barely made your license is enough to drive downtown for shopping (because that doesn't require a test), but challenging situations are statistically likely to not end well -- sounds good.

Things are arguably different in 5th:
Most of these things—common tasks like eating, sleeping, and crossing an empty street—are done automatically and are kept in the background of the game. When you need to do something difficult or extraordinary, or when you need to avoid someone who has got you in their crosshairs, you have to roll the dice to determine a result. (5th BBB, p. 44)
Driving to the supermarket certainly is more complicated than "eating, sleeping, and crossing an empty street". On the other hand, is it "difficult or extraordinary"? And if not, is it closer to "crossing an empty street" or closer to "difficult"?

No, I'm sorry, it's not.

The entire point of issuing driver's licenses and making drivers take tests and undergo education before getting behind the wheel is to make sure that they actually can respond appropriately in an emergency situation. Or even an ordinary driving situation; let's actually take a look at the things it says you need to roll for.

Threshold 1: Merging, passing, sudden stop.
How often do you merge into traffic when you drive? Fairly often, I'd say. Pass someone, every now and then, I'd reckon.

So according to this, every time you merge into highway traffic, you have to roll. Sure, the threshold may only be 1, and if you're not, say, in the middle of a car chase or anything, you might well be able to just buy a hit - but throw anything at the character that reduces their DP (say, moderate rain,) and suddenly they have to roll. And we all know that every highway on-ramp turns into twisted car-nage every time it starts to rain and the cops don't get the onramps sealed off quickly, right?

Yes but according to general Skill description You DON'T need to roll for standard Situations like going from A to be and this includes merging, passing by ,etc
So the rules say both ( you don't need to roll ,and you need to roll with a threshold of 1...)

He who dances with Schrödinger's Cat
Medicineman

I think from a rules perspective, as in what overrides what, the small or specific rule overrides the big or general rule. So, yeah the general rule is no test is needed to go from Point A to Point B but then the specific rule states a test is needed to merge, pass, etc. So lots of horrible accidents in the SR world. Must be why all cars have gridguide and top notch autopilot programs by default right. Oh wait... ah, there were too many people in world anyway.

There is a difference between when a test is appropriate and how the world works. Sure, in real life dangerous situations happen in traffic every day, and pretty much everyone who has been behind a wheel has been in one or more of them. Not everyone survives, but most people get away and avoid crashing. There is no need to roll dice for these everyday NPCs, so the ability can be fairly low and still be reasonable - for example 4 dice is enough to buy a single hit, and thus avoid most of these situations. The book says not everyone who has a license have a skill (being untrained, but no unaware), but that makes little sense to me - not sure how this is done in the US, but in Europe getting a license surely requires training, theory and experience to justify at least 1 rank in the skill. Average rea of 3 + 1 is thus enough in most situations, even when doing mergers and passbys, but if the driving conditions are bad (rain, high speed, uneven terrain), these average joes can and will fail spectacularly.

They could make a system to better simulate this reality, but instead they choose to focus on the players and their likely characters. You only need to roll when it's dramatic, and random dangers in everyday traffic is not fun, thus it is assumed that just getting from a-b in a normal day require no rolls, but when you do a chase as part of a run, or have to drive through the Redmond barrens while being fired upon by gangs, then you have to roll and better have a decent dice pool to pull it off.

Almost every system I have played has had some stipulation that everyday actions does not require rolls, although not everyone has been as clear about it. Still some GMs make the error of enforcing rolls for trivial things just because of reading rules too literally (or misreading them), or to make it unbelievably difficult. You want to slowly walk down a hill outside combat? Ah, roll a balance check! You need to cross a river with some current? Well that requires multiple swimming checks, or you drown. Someone has written with blood on a wall? That must be a Perception or Search check to notice. I could go on.

Or, alternatively, they dramatically lowballed the level of skill required with that stupid table, and 1 skill/3 REA is not enough to get a driver's license, it's barely enough to begin practicing driving under controlled, ideal conditions. And thus, anyone who gets out on the road with a license to manually operate their own vehicle actually has REA 3, Skill 3-4, meaning they can absorb a lot more penalties and still buy their hit before they have to roll.

We've partly done away with Essence as a concept. The whole mechanic really exists to prevent cybered-up mages, so we just reduced it to that. Each point of Essence loss reduces your Magic Rating by a point, but this is only a problem if you're Awakened. If you're not, feel free to get a fully cybernetic body. Welcome to Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex meets The Sixth World. There's no such thing as "Cyber-Zombies" - you don't die if you have 0 Essence, you just won't be casting any spells.

This is more or less what we've done. I'm about the only one in our group that's purchased the SR5 books, and we've imported a few things here and there, but we've taken a pass on most of it.

Not knowing what the deal with nano machines is, what is Eclipse Phase you are referring to?

I am surprised to not have seen anybody bitching about this yet, because OH NOES WARE OP/NERFPLZ! Make Magic Great Again!.
In my eyes, that approach is the only thing that can get Mundanes back up to competitive levels . .
But it will also break the entire infected/essence sucker system. Not too much of a Problem in my eyes anyway, seeing how sudden unwanted in game essence loss is basically the most dangerous thing that can happen to an augmented character. Be it due to drugs, suckers or critters . .

Basically, Nanites are the big NO NO NO SCARY EVIL BODY SNATCHERS of SR5.
SR2/3 had Insect Spirits, SR3/4 had Shedim instead. This time they went with a Technological instead of magical Bodysnatcher Enemy for people to be paranoid about.
"See? We are totally not doing magic run! The new big bad is a TECHNOLOGICAL TERROR! What do you mean that only makes people play even more magical characters? Filthy powergamers!"

Not if you just rule that the Infected either eat flesh or drink blood and just leave Essence out of it altogether.

Yeah, but aside from it being SUSTENANCE for them, it also is MECHANICALLY important to them.
Their Essence-Stat basically determines how strong and versatile they are, how reasonable as well.
You would have to go over every single sucker and critter in the book that has the essence drain and then see what it does for that specific entry and the re-balance the entire entry to some fixed numbers
Which would mean cascading errata all over the place . .
And the essence also determines wether or not you get turned from the essence drain from a sucker as well . .
Essence is a stat that has been around and used for literally dozends of different applications for 5 editions by now.
Fiddling with it on one end WILL break it on up to N other ends. That's what makes it so problematic.

I've already put in LOTS of work to reduce the Infected down to just Vampires and Ghouls - see here.

I left the Essence draining stuff intact in the above version, because I didn't want to get into 2 arguments at once when I was debating the need to simplify and straighten out HMHVV, but our in-house version makes no reference to the Infected either draining Essence or having some sort of fluctuating Essence score. They're just magical Critters like all the other ones (who happen to be infectious).

Yeah, that's what i meant with it cascading into 1 to N changes that then need to be house ruled as well.
You can't simply remove 90% of one variable without tinkering with basically everything else the one variable touches.

When they're NPCs only, it's working out well enough for us. The Infected exist only for target practice at our table - they're not playable.

As it should be.

If someone wants to play a special snowflake then there is a massive body of White Wolf games that will happily accommodate it and not require everyone else at the table to deal with chances of having their character end up as one of the undead fuckers as well thanks to a bad roll during first aid.