Essence & Bio-Index in SR4, penny for your thoughts Options

[GrinderTheTroll]

A small forward: So I really liked the whole Essence aspect of SR, the more stuff you put in your body, the more detacted from the rest of humanity you become. The part that kinda bugged me was the introduction of Bio-Index. It does introduce some neat ideas, but now you've got extra complexity to worry about and special rules, blah blah, bleh.

My thought: I am hoping in SR4, they restructure Bio/Cyberware costs (radios and commlinks oh my!) to use the same attribute and maybe up the Essence cap to 9 (Bio+Essence in pre-SR4). This means you could afford non-delta items costing over 7 essence (Move-by-wire anyone?) at some point aside from just running your fingers over them and dreaming.

I just don't see why it's that important to have 2 seperate but similar attributes for items that roughly do similar functions.

Maybe more inline with SR4 rules: Completely remove the cap on Bio-ware/Essence expenditures, and introduce penalties based how *how much* junk you got in your trunk passed a threshold. Maybe, "for each point (round up) over 9, remove two dice from all health and social related tests", for example.