Hello, a few questions/ideas Options

[Glyph]

One thing to keep in mind is that dwarves, orks, and trolls are hot stuff right out of the gate, while elves and humans are the ones who have the potential to be better in certain areas once you have some Karma. With SR4's truncated power curve and low skill and Attribute cielings, having a higher maximum rating is often worth the sacrifice at char-gen. That said, orks are still very tempting, offering a net gain of 20 points - and a Body of 4 and Strength of 3 are useful even to techie types.

[Aaron]

Magicians, too. An Ork magician with the right tradition (e.g. Buddhist or Witchcraft or anything with Intuition as a drain attribute) has no drawback from Attribute caps.

At first, I questioned why Orks were so cheap (something like 10 BP cheaper than other races or something). Then it occurred to me that, according to canon, Orks reproduce at prodigious rates. Ergo, this discrepancy may be included by design, an application of game theory to support and encourage the accurate simulation of the setting.

The reverse may be true for Elves, I imagine.

[Whipstitch]

[Pyritefoolsgold]

Having a high body counts for a lot, too. Stacked with armor, you can end up with 15-20 dice to roll for damage resistance.

[Cheops]

Here's my take on this:

Humans: don't cost points, give +1 edge, and have less cultural bias against them. Sometimes those bonus attributes you pay for aren't in the stats you want them in. In my game if you have to do anything at all with the Yakuza or about half of the Japanese J's then you'd better be a Human male (preferably Nipponese).

Contacts: I very rarely worry about these. Sure you can load them up until they are Availability 12 (which btw is what gives them capacity) but since they don't have an Essence cost they are not part of your body. As a result they resist damage with their own body (0) and armor (0). Start hitting your group with some AoE Fire or CS/Tear Gas and they'll learn to wear glasses or cybereyes instead. Having contacts melted onto your eyeball is not fun.

Availability: Once you are over about 10 you are looking at pretty long lead times. This means that the player has to be planning to get the glasses/lenses after gameplay and probably a few runs down the road. This can be hard based on the economics of your game. Could mean low or lesser lifestyle or else living together as a team. Both have issues.

[deek]

Yeah, I wanted to mention the same thing Cheops did. At chargen, you do have a restriction on availability, so there is a limit. After chargen, well, its simply nuyen and lead time, which can certainly be a restriction in and of itself.

I haven't had any players try and abuse cramming all that stuff in contact lenses, probably because of the cost and availability...I am sure if they did, obviously, their opponents could as well, not to mention having some breakages occur. And really, last time I checked, contact lenses don't last forever, so every now and then, you'd have to get a new pair, and if you were really evil, you could make it so that if only one function broke down, they all ceased to function:)

[odinson]

how about having the contact fall out at bad times. like in the middle of a firefight in an unlit room. then you could assign depth perception modifiers cause they are only seeing out of one eye. glitches on perception tests would be a good time for this to happen as well. so not only would they not see the assasin on the fire escape but when he dropped down on them they would be on their hands and knees looking for the contact.

[Cheops]

Actually even worse is if the contact doesn't come completely out but folds over or kind of dangles instead. Not only does it mess up your vision it also actively distracts you or causes irritation.

Plus cybereyes give you "natural" 20/20 vision. Even though most characters shouldn't need glasses unless you let them take some sort of negative quality they still might not have perfect visual acuity. A lot of people are walking around in RL with -1 or -2 eyesight and could benefit from glasses but don't know it. This could translate that even under normal conditions a character with cybereyes probably can see a little clearer and further than those without corrective eyewear.

Edit: I also forgot to mention the whole falling/getting wrecked thing applies for glasses, monocles and goggles. I think a lot of this stuff could potentially be glitch material not critical glitch (unless they break).

[ElFenrir]

Hehe...this is pretty interesting...in our games some of the last things we were worrying about being twinky were a pair of contact lenses of all things. I guess YMMV, but we have never had a problem with them.

For the record(perhaps a little OT), i find that NOTHING is a problem if you have a good team of people to play with. Me and my buddies have been playing for years, and things just....dont get out of hand, no matter if we use contacts, play a heavily armed merc, or a troll con-artist combat mage. I guess it depends on the group. Perhaps some people have seen more abuse than others.

All of that being said, I wear contacts IRL, as do many, and im sure we can agree they CAN indeed get irritated if they are either worn too long, get something in the eye, etc. I think this would be the only thing we would pay attention too; if someone tried to wear them for 3 days straight. They might take some vision penalities at that point, but i wouldnt start melting them to the character's eyeballs if people want to use gear thats available.

[X-Kalibur]

I've always had it set up so that if I wasn't a sammie or non-magic face, I have contacts with basic stuff (image link, vision enhance and flare comp) and then goggles for actual runs. Glasses are too fragile for an actual run and could come off as a faux pas when sitting with the J.

Orks and Trolls are both great bang for their buck in terms of BP, but they will also have the largest social bias against them, this needs to be kept in mind. Even with the Human Looking quality, because then you are just shooting yourself in the foot with your biggest allies... other orks and trolls. Elves taking it on the other hand makes quite a bit of since. Anyway, thats my 2 bits.

[Whipstitch]

Contacts shouldn't be melting to anyone'e eyeballs. Contacts are not particularly vulnerable to heat or gases, so any damage to them that you are imagining will largely be redundant because anything nasty enough to ruin your contacts will be nasty enough to ruin your eyes regardless. The big reason why you're not supposed to wear contact lenses in a laboratory setting is mostly about being able to flush the eyes after chemical spills quickly rather than any fears about trapping gasses behind the lenses. And oh, btw, the-no-contacts-in-the-lab rule is considered outdated and superstitious by OSHA. Perhaps, maybe, just MAYBE it could be an issue, but modern contacts are permeable by design and anything you inflict on runners beyond an extra turn or two of stinging is just excessive.

Anyway, as far as practicality goes and vision modifiers go, I wear the newer disposable super-permeable silicone hydrogel extended wear contacts that are good for a month or so without removal or cleaning, and they're both comfortable and reliable. I've actually pushed it to a month and a half or so of continuous wear with less issues than my old traditional lenses gave me over a weekend, and I honestly only put in a new pair of lenses because I felt like I was pushing my luck at that point. I also prefer wearing contacts for physical activities because they don't fog up, get caught on things or break. I do think the gm making players purchase new uber-contacts at regular intervals is pretty reasonable, but any other penalty just doesn't really make much sense. It'd be better to just put an arbitrary capacity limit on contacts and be done with it rather than bone your players at random intervals (not talking about glitches there, mind you, EVERYTHING is fair game with glitches).

[Rotbart van Dain...]

As a sidenote, contects actually protect the eyes to a degree... most people will notice that when cutting onions.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I've heard that before too, never really noticed myself though... Probably because I've worn contacts since my early teens. I don't really know what it's like to get eye irritation from foods to begin with.