[X] My Assistant

[Wakshaani]

Post after post after post, I'm seeing a mad level of hate-on for cyberlimbs and I just don't get it.

There's one problem ... the current limbs don't have Metahuman scaling, so, a Troll or Ork who gets a shiney chrome arm is kind of up a creek.

This, I'll grant.

But that can't be the only reason that everyone and their brother keeps saying hwo bad cyberlimbs are.

But nobody ever gives a reason!

So, I open the floor, Dumpshockers... just what the heck is it that you can't stand about Cyberlimbs?

[Dashifen]

I'll second this one. I've never understood the rancor that's around here for cyberlimbs. I guess I agree that there's not much to offer regarding them right now as an incentive to get them but that wouldn't seem to incite people to call them broken, as happens frequently.

[Kyrn]

Because they should be so very cool. According to all the fluff, according to all the background movies that helped inspire this game, according to the wishes of every gamer I've ever met, according to every single other cyberpunk gaming system, they should be cool.

But they're not. Edition after edition they keep not making it into people's characters. First they were expensive. A cyberlimb in 1st and 2nd cost around a 100k. But, you could pump the strength. That cost 150k. Per level. However you could jam all sorts of stuff into them free of essence cost, so that was cool. We felt they could be cooler.

And they got cooler when Cybertechnology introduced cyberzombies. Robocop like full borgs with limb enhancements (literally) out the ass (articulated arm). Wow! Those were cool! Problem was, nobody could play one. They were NPC only, barring a few hyper-specialized games perhaps.

3rd edition came out and cyberlimbs had more options. They had storage space, they had weird starting values, they had pages upon pages upon pages of rules. And they STILL didn't seem to do anything that a meat body couldn't do better and cheaper.

Now 4th rules. During the run-up I saw countless requests/demands for the Devs to fix cyberlimbs. They made them cheap. That was the single most awesomely step in the right direction thing they've ever done with cyberlimbs. And you can make a dude with cyberarms, legs, and torso who's fairly hot shit (like straight 7s) right out of the box. But that's about the only way to make cyberlimbs rock. (Well, besides my patented mage-cyberforearm of twink.) People want to see cyberlimbs that make them want to design characters with cyberlimbs. Cyberlimbs are cyberpunk. Shadowrun, no matter where it's gone or what it will do, has a lot of cyberpunk in its blood and many of us feel it should show some respect to that blood.

I can go on, but then I'd eventually wind up refreshing the page every five minutes hoping Augmentation's come out.

[eidolon]

The dislike of cyberlimbs around these parts has always seemed to be directly linked to the prevalence of "optimizers" on the boards.

The thinking seems to be, basically, that since a character isn't "gaining" as much awesomesauce, points-wise, for something (such as cyberlims), then said thing "sucks", and there is "no reason to have it".

My opinion is that this sacrifices a lot of good style and story for having Teh Best Runner Evar, but TEHO.

[Kyrn]

But with clone limbs available for so much less, why would a character (not a player, a player) choose a smaller, weaker, slower, less coordinated thing that's going to break down eventually?

[eidolon]

IC reasons:

Because chrome is awesome.
Because you can augment them (although rules-wise, apparently, you're waiting for exactly what you can augment them with).
Because they aren't weak flesh.
My idol has cyberlimbs.
No more bug bites.
etc
etc
etc

You don't need the book or the rules contained within to give your character a reason to have cyberlimbs, that's your job as a player.

[Dashifen]

[Particle_Beam]

However, the SR rules are here to compliment with the SR background world, and the discrepances between rules and background information are just too obvious.

The rules should help the players give a feeling about why they are so common. It's not always only the player who should find a reason. The rules are here to help him.

[Kyrn]

If my character is a troll, what in character reason is there for him to purchase a limb that won't support his bodyweight? Anyone who depends upon a product is going to make sure that product meets his needs, both now and for the foreseeable future. Most of my characters would check out the technical specs on cyberlimbs and realize, "Wait, my Grandma can actually exert more force than that with her 51 year old arthritic flesh arm!" (speaking character is an ork, but still!)

Cyberlimbs as currently written have niche applications. Many people want to see them have more as then more characters would desire substituting metal for flesh. Although the current state of affairs is more indicative of the transhumanist rather than cyberpunk direction SR is moving.

[sunnyside]

Well I think the reason for some of the rage is that cyberlimbs fit the cyberpunk setting so well. We want them to be good, we want our players to have them. But if we play RAW then those players are punished for their choice. And so we're a bit vocal in warning about them, becuase it's always rough on a player when they finally realize that their awsome concept sucks. Better for them to get excited about something balanced.

Now to be fair there are a couple things in favor of cyberlimbs. SPecifically the gyromount and the fully concealable holsters/compartments. And I guess if you want to conceal a grenade launcher it's essense cheaper to put it in an arm, though since the required cyberarm would be obvious and have it's stats at 3 I'm not sure how much you come ahead there.

However after that things get ugly. You can't upgrade a cyberlimb past rating 3 without a cybertorso. Meaning occasionally unaugmented people (and most metahumans) can be stronger/more agile than you.

And other cyberware/bioware just leaves them in the dust.

Even if you do get the cybertorso things aren't looking that good. All the upgrades take capacity. And that runs out fast so again you're sticking around in the regular people region. For example if you up your synthetic arms stats to body 5 agi 5 and str 5 you now don't have room for a gyromount or even a spur. Pathetic.

*EDIT: man the posts are flying. I started replying just after the first reply came up.

[eidolon]

caveat: Way more familiar with cyberlimbs in SR3.

I can see having issues with actual design problems, and agree that you shouldn't have to completely sacrifice having a decently built character just to have a cyberlimb.

[Critias]

The problem with cyberlimbs is the hard cap on Essence. The old problems were the hard cap on Essence and the ridiculous prices of cyberware (so at least they fixed something) -- but the hardcore maximum, ever, of 6 Essence per character is a real killer. With each limb costing an even 1/6th of your total cyber/bio ever, it's pretty tough for someone with any aspirations of making a useful character to sit down and say "Hey! I wanna spend 2/3s of my potential augmentations on shiny metal arms and legs!"

There's no room for style over substance, if you want to make someone who can do his job well enough to get by in the Shadows.

[eidolon]

[Kyrn]

Not all of us run the games.

Although I do have to admit, lowering the essence cost of cyberlimbs has never been the main point of contention that I've seen. Lowering that cost wouldn't seem logical.

[Begby]

We noted this some time ago. We play that once the limb is on, anything you add to it costs no essence, then go Deltaware for half essence reduction on the limb itself.

[eidolon]

[Kyoto Kid]

[Kyrn]

Ugh, you mean and have to like, do stuff? Ick. :sleepy:

[Ol' Scratch]

In the end it's as a few people before we wrote: Because many posters on these forums look at things from a powergaming perspective.

Cyberlimbs are only "good" for two things: Style (a big one for me) and capacity (their best in-game feature).

One of the reasons cybernetics have dropped is due directly to melee weapons being designed with trolls having maxed out Strength in mind.

As such, almost all of them have thus been rendered "craptacular" compared to options like Monofilament Whips which have a set damage value rather than a Strength/2 dependant one. Your average character (Strength 2-4) will only have a Damage Value of 4P-5P and Reach of 1 with Spurs. And you need an obscure skill just to use them properly. Compare this to a Monofilament Whip with its 8P damage, Reach 2, and -4 AP stats that require an equally obscure weapon skill to use. ONLY a troll with a Strength of 10 or someone who wastes a ton of their cyberarm's capacity on Strength (and gets a cybertorso on top of it so that they can raise Strength above 6) can match that with Spurs (the best of the cyber-implanted melee weapons). Keeping in mind that the whip only costs 3,000¥ and 0 Essence.

The only thing cyberlimbs really give you in combat is bonus armor. And while that's limited to only 2 Armor per limb at character creation, one Essence and a pair of hands and feet will give you Ballistic 8/Impact 8 armor on top of whatever normal armor you're wearing. Which is just crazy and needs addressing.

Armor aside, this pretty much means the only real combat advantage you get in combat -- melee combat in particular -- is bonus armor. And only because the rules are apparently goofy in that regard and didn't get a proper conversion from the previous edition (where the implanted armor is divided by the total number of limbs on the body; meat or cyber). If such a rule exists in SR4 I couldn't find it on a quick look, but I'm hopefully wrong.

While 8 points of armor for 1 Essence is more than nice... it's pretty damn boring, too. And hardly the reason most players want to get cyberlimbs regardless (nevermind that it was only for hands and feet, which has got to look ridiculous).

So, no real incentive to get chromed up for combat purposes. A simple, cheap, no-Essence monofilament whip > a single maxed out cyberlimb by oodles and oodles. Nevermind that cyberlimbs in the core rules can't even match the high-ends of the Strength spectrum for Dwarves, Orks, or Trolls without also requiring a cybertorso.

Thus that leaves us with the only other unique trait that cyberlimbs offer: Capacity. Sadly, this is the only real thing cyberlimbs have to offer that's awesomely awesome. Cyberarm Gyromounts are great for characters with automatic weapons. And since Capacity seems to be a universal stat now, there's -tons- of electronic sensors you can cram into one (a single cyberleg can store all the sensor functions on SR4 p. 325, plus a smuggling comparement, and still have a bit of room to spare).

Other than that? There's not much reason to get one. And even that reason can easily be done for cheaper and without Essence loss with a drone or even an assortment of damn RFID tags.

In the end it comes down to only one thing: Style. Cyberlimbs are cool, and designing a character with one definitely improves their awesomeness factor. At least in my book. Yes, there's better options from a powergaming point of view, and cyberlimbs absolutely suck when designing a combat type of character (or anyone with a Physical Attribute over 6)... but for everyone else, they definitely have something to offer, too, and are never completely useless either way.

[knasser]

[Samoth]

[noonesshowmonkey]

I think that the biggest deterent for cyberlimbs has been noted: their vanilla game effect. A cyberlimb that ends up being standard human stats (a 3, for christ sake) is really not worth having. People get a cyberlimb for the mystique of having it but they get punished for trying to be cool. As interesting as fluff is, if a character concept does not have praxis in the rules - which is to say if I can't do something with my cool idea - the idea is generally just cool and not terribly useful. Shadowrun is a game plagued by pragmatism... In fact, cyberpunk as a genre values pragmatism over a lot of things.

Anyone can say "maybe in the games you run", but as a general rule just look at the archetypes. These represent core runner concepts that everyone, a veteran or a newb, can use. All of these concepts crap all over the idea of a cyberlimb. Hell, even the "Street Samurai" has muscle replacements instead of chrome. For a few essence I can get agility and strength on top of my original BP investment? Awesome. So even the core book shies away from cyberlimbs (because they suck). There is a general standard of effectiveness that emerges in a Shadowrunning team. Anyone well below or above that standard affects the gameplay of that group. It seems odd to me that a chrome-limbed psycho should lower the standard of a group as opposed to raise it. Look to Ghost in the Shell or even the I-Robot movie (blech, Will Smith) and we can see chrome'd up limbs kicking ass and taking names. As a genre, cyberpunk has a definite trope concerning metal limbs and the current rules leave the situation rather luke warm.

As far as SR4 goes, it makes an awful lot of sense. The days of Chrome Dogs are nearly over by the 2070s and the future is begining to look a lot more like JC Denton's from Deus Ex than something out of Neuromancer. Everything is integrated and the cost of doing business is gettin shot up with some whiz chemicals or having some vat grown stuff put on you.

The oddest thing is, however, that SR4 seems like it is uniquely placed between Deus Ex style nannites and bio and the chromed up badassery of Ghost in the Shell. And yet there are no sloppy, over the top powerful, literal machines that we can augment our bodies with. I pay essence for bioware so that I have something that is the semblance of a human body (fragile, at its roots) rather than mechanical. Machines, on the other hand, are unfeeling and terrible engines of destruction. If I have a giddamn machine for an arm, it had best be capable of tasks that no human should be able to perform. In fact, I should be able to hurt myself trying to squeeze performance out of my cyberlimbs.

And as we all know, without accurate scaling, the limbs themselves don't scale for metahumans. An off-the-shelf limb is made for a human. Not a troll. If I wanted a real cyberlimb I would be a 6 foot human sporting an arm designed for a troll (shortened a touch) that has a standard strength of 5 that I have jacked up to a 9 with augmentations. We shall see if we recieve succor when Augmentation comes out.

- der menkey

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter."
~ Ernest Hemmingway

[Ol' Scratch]

What makes you think Essence solely reflects how much meat you're having lopped off? (Keep in mind that having a limb cut off costs you 0 Essence loss.)

[sunnyside]

I don't think the problem is essense cost. That seems right compared to the costs of other stuff.

I think it's just the piss poor performance.

Really it's that limbs aren't just bad, they're crushingly bad. I'm betting most players in SR who are looking at a cybered type go to the cyberlimb section, start reading, and start getting excited. Then they'll get to the detailed rules and at some point the crushing realization that their stats will actually go down if they get cyberlimbs sets in, they just CAN'T make that cool character with the strong cyberlimbs and the Mr. Gadget gizmos.

And I've seen characters in games I wasn't GMing make characters like that which were just plain sub par. They seem fun at first, but at some point they realize they can't really do anything better than anyone. Even the hacker is a better fighter than they are. And the mage and rigger are better and smuggling than the smuggling compartment in their arm. They just start getting disenchanted, unless you have a stellar GM.

[Kyrn]

So far the only characters I can think of who really benefit rules-wise from cyberlimbs are the combat mages who pick up a cyberforearm with a gyromount, a datajack, a smuggling compartment for foci, and maybe a spur, some sensors, or slight upgrade to keep up with meat Agility. Getting to roll full-auto with little to no recoil can really help make up for a low base skill.