Running Full 'Borgs in SR4, Metalheads, unite! Options

[Shrike30]

One of my favorite aspects of CP2020 was full borgs. Not necessarily as a major focus of the game, but more as a feature of the world. Despite the risks of cyberpsychosis, there were those who decided to leave their meatbod behind, and go for the chrome.

Essence, of course, is a little more nebulous (and less repairable via therapy) than Humanity ever was, and the bodywork alone would normally stuff your essence down the tubes. However, going full 'borg is still doable... just difficult.

I've defined the "minimal" full 'borg as being a character with 4 cyberlimbs, a cybertorso and skull, cyber eyes and ears, a commlink, and a datajack. If you assume the low-end eyes and ears, the baseline essence cost on this rig is 6.95, with the mods costing 98,500 :nuyen:. With the high-end eyes and ears, this jumps to 7.55 essence, with 100,500 :nuyen:.

Amusingly, the low-end eye/ear borg is something you can build at character creation without having to hack the rules at all. Swapping all of the cyberwear over to being alpha grade uses 5.56 essence, and costs 197,000 :nuyen:, or 39.4 BP. Obviously, this doesn't leave much room to work with, but if you're vigorously trying to stay within the rules, it works.

The other option, of course, is lifting the "Starting Cyberwear Grade" restrictions and "Max BPs put into Resources" restrictions. While I don't recommend doing this as a general rule, you could think about assembling this as a package... a player dropping points into this wouldn't really be getting it as Resources (though you could easily restrict their max Resources after the purchase), they're getting something that's much more like a "race."

With alphaware, the high-end eye/ear borg isn't going to survive surgery (it ends up costing 6.04 essence). Even with the low-end systems, you've got less than half an essence point to play around with. On the other hand, if we allow people to go beta at chargen, the low end system ends up costing only 4.865 essence and 394,000 :nuyen:, and the high end caps out at 5.285 essence and 402,000 :nuyen:. Translated over into BP costs (ignoring the cap, obviously) these work out to 78.8 BP and 80.4 BP, respectively.

I'm going to allow players who are interested to drop 80 BP (rounding to the nearest convenient number) to become beta-grade full 'borgs, with the player being allowed to choose the specific grade of eye and ear he's got (burning off some of what precious little essence he's got left, should he want to opt for the high-end ones). Beyond that, players would be restricted to another 20 BP being available for Resources (leaving the character a max of 100k :nuyen: to begin play). This will make the 'borg concept more feasible for starting characters, and generally a larger part of an SR game. If full 'borgs aren't your thing, well, you're obviously going to pass on this option, but I thought I'd toss it out there.

The one really obvious issue with this plan is that the cyberwear the player is equipped with gives them a baseline (augmented) Body, Strength, and Agility of 3. While there are some tests which use the unaugmented values, it's quite possible that a player would simply set each of those stats to 1 at chargen, knowing that the cyber would kick them all up to 3, prior to enhancements. One of the questions i'm hoping to figure out through discussion would be if the sheer loss of essence involved more than makes up for the "free" statistics, if I should make my players buy up to 3 in those stats with BPs as if they were "real" (that is, coughing up the 90 or so BP to get those stats to 3), or if I should find some sort of point solution in the middle to deal with.

Any thoughts?