I didn't do it, it was the one-armed man!, qualities for those against cyber-aug Options

[ruknabard]

The other day, while preparing for a new campaign, I had players tossing ideas at me for characters. One fella wanted to play a mage...with one arm... who was absolutely deadset against having it replaced in any way.

I'll give him props for playing a mage totally against disrupting his spiritual wholeness. But this brought on the problem of working out a one-armed negative quality. Or for everyone's enjoyment: Amputee Quality. (I think there could be a way to fit the mechanics for a lost limb to apply to both arms and legs).

As of this moment, I have NO idea how I'm going to proceed on this. I haven't even begun to ponder the mechanics for such a flaw, but I'm going to crack the books tonight and take a look.

Anybody else use something like this in their game before? If not, feel free to take a shot at it for the community's sake. I'll drop a version of mine up as soon as I'm done tinkering.

[Moon-Hawk]

Sounds like a cool idea.
I'd say he will frequently require a -2 penalty for actions which normally use two arms, but don't strictly require them. Driving without VR, climbing a ladder, etc.
Due to the nature of SR abstraction, I wouldn't try to slap a lot of penalties on a lot of specific things. For example, you could give the amputee a penalty to unarmed combat (insert unarmed joke here), but he could just argue that he's a kickboxer. It helps if no one points out that kickboxers do, in fact, punch people. Shhhh. ;-)
My point is, we're not talking about some power-munchkin where we have to worry about blocking every possible abuse. He wants to be a one-armed dude. Great. There will sometimes be penalties. I mentioned that. Thanks for wanting to RP, here are some build points for your enthusiasm. I say 5 BP, 'cause it's really not that big of a disadvantage. If he ever changes his mind and decides to get a limb, then he spends some karma to buy off the flaw because *handwave handwave* he's been so long without an arm that he has to retrain his brain. Or something.

He'll be getting enough BP from the sensitive system flaw he's going to take anyway, so he really don't need all that many more for the arm. And if you really want to take the pessimistic view: if you don't give him 5 points for it he'll just replace it with a mild allergy to goat cheese, so might as well give him the points here. :-)

In summary: Guy with no arm: 5-point flaw. -2 penalty sometimes.

[Gelare]

For the most part I agree with Moon-Hawk, but I think the quality has rather more impact than that. -2 to a fair number of tests is a good mechanical thing. However, it should be at least a 10 BP negative quality. Think about it: stuff like Ork Poser and Elf Poser are 5 BP. You're not posing anything; you actually have a stump where your arm used to be, which significantly disadvantages you in quite a few ways, not the least of which is the fact that people can sometimes get weirded out by people who don't have the appropriate number of limbs. I mean, I don't have any experience with this, but come on...it's an arm. We use those things fairly often, y'know?

[Cweord]

Also think about less obvious ways that it will effect him - most professionals shoot a gun 2 handed to reduce recoil, if he is falling in one direction he wont be able to grab to stop himself.

Even holding a bag of shopping when opening a door . . . .

Lack of a limb is a serious flaw, especially in the SR world where he will be seen as more of a freak for not having a replacement (even as a mage he could have a cloned one or a transplant with out loss of magic)

For some tasks he can help with his feet (Def Leppards drummer holds tomatoes, etc. in place with a foot when he cuts them)

This limits him in a lot of ways, 10BP should be the minimum, but discuss it with him and see what he things, he doesn't sound like a munchkin, so he may be able to help.

[Apathy]

the 'blind' flaw had different penalties for awakened and mundane, since it was so much easier for an awakened character to get around the shortcomings. I would think it would be same here. Maybe the same penalty?

[Lagomorph]

I'd say its worth -5 BP. Besides, he'll be able to take magic fingers as a mage, or have spirits get his can of pepsi from the fridge.

I'd say also that it would have a -2 to social situations, he would be a total freak for not having a cloned or cyber replacement. In SR, there is no excuse for missing a limb, since cloned and cyber replacements are common.

[Gelare]

I can appreciate that a mage might not need that extra arm as much as, say, a street samurai (and by the way, all recoil penalties should be doubled for only being able to shoot with one hand), but we're still talking about someone's arm being chopped off here, people. -2 to social tests, -2 to anything involving manual dexterity, double recoil penalties, not to mention the other various and sundry things that come from missing an arm. That's easily worth 10 build points, quite possibly more. Besides, build points these days are cheap as dirt, what with everyone's severe allergy to munchkinite and their Incompetence (Pilot Anthroform). Even if the player asked for 15 BP, I wouldn't mind, missing an arm is a far more worthy negative quality than having a system that's sensitive to something you'll never use, or having edge backfire once out of every six times.

[MaxHunter]

True. But when that Edge backfires and you used it because you failed that damage resistance test. Ouch. And trust me, it does happen.

Everybody falls down eventually.

Cheers,

Max

[Gelare]

Oh, I'm well aware. So keenly aware, in fact, that my Magician with 3 edge and Bad Luck tried three times to summon a high force spirit using edge, and three times the edge backfired. That was the saddest adventure ever. At any rate, you can always just burn edge if worse comes to worst, and statistically speaking (that is, if you're not me) that one in six chance really isn't too bad, especially not for 20 shiny new build points (with which to buy, say, two more body for those ever popular damage resistance tests).

[ruknabard]

I'm most likely going to rule the quality as 10 BP for the -2 DP to, well, pretty much anything that people generally use two hands for.

Would it be too large of a penalty to say that, in addition to the -2 DP, that the character glitches on when he rolls ones on a quarter of his dice pool? (Rather than the usual half). It seems appropriate because the chance of fumbling on an action that normally takes two hands would pop up a bit more often then. I'm just unsure as to whether that would be too steep a penalty

[DTFarstar]

I have a blind character in a homebrew game, he's a mage and giving him 20 BP for it has worked quite well. Sure, he can see via astral sight, but he can't read AR displays or use trode rigs for VR(The part of the brain that uses sight has been damaged directly, so trodes don't help. ) He can kind of drive, but not really. Our hacker usually overlays a tactical battle map for us(mapping expected positions of enemies, known enemy positions, dead/dying enemies, friends, neutrals, obstacles etc. on the fly) and Zeiner can access none of this information. He has to be constantly open to astral attack and receives a - in social situations alot of the time. Except for intimidate.

It has worked well for us. Been alot more flavorful than sensitive system and a mild allergy to corn. I mean, I can't read anything I don't know what buildings look like unless they are invested enough to have an aura. No sight is BAD.

Chris

[Cweord]

It's like most things, if you have munchkins they play the numbers, if you have role players they play the character.

It all comes down to the GM in the end, even being non human can be a major flaw if the GM plays up the racial aspect of a campaign.

I just have a simple rule with my players and warn them that anything they try and pull with their characters I will pull with the NPC's and there are a whole lot more NPCs. (It's funny, but a lot of munchkinism stopped at that point, even from the players who claimed they weren't doing it)

I can see how a mage would have better ways round loosing an arm, but having to summon a spirit every time you wanted to cut something, or open a door whilst you had something in the other hand would soon get very tiring.

[Moon-Hawk]