Is the essence loss applied _after_ you have bought the magic attribute or before ?

ie do you loose 10 bp thanks to the essence loss..

ie max at 5, bought 5 but it goes down to 4..
OR
Just reduces your maximum at chargen, nothing else happens ?

Both have their merits.. but Im leaning towards the first example..

It reduces whatever you bought it up to, as in it reduces your rating instead of the cap.

Example: If you got your magic up to 5 and via cyber/bio it gets reduced to 4.

Said player's cap would still be 6, unless of course you initiate which raises the cap.

You lose some of the magic you bought. So, if you buy your Magic up to 5, and get .5 essence worth of cyberware, your magic drops to 4.

Calypso

yeah.. after some discussion thats the conclusion I have come to..

However the cost is still as if you had 5 points. Effectively 5 is your 'natural', and 4 is your 'augmented'. EDIT: Well not really that either, it's basically set up to screw over the awakened/techno PC hardest for taking 'ware. ;(

This has come up before here, i'm trying to find the quote as it is buried in an awkward place.

@mfb: Unfortunately page 264 doesn't mention what happens with essense loss as it only discusses a limit of 6 + Initiate Grade, which is not the case as page 62 says the limit is lowered by essense loss.

i believe you are thinking of a recommended ruling on these boards, blackie. more specifically, i think it's in the stickied magic thread, and it's a ruling suggested by hahnsoo... i think.

anyways, calypso... i think you're getting the question wrong.

what he means, is:

if i have lost essence at character creation, do i lose a point of magic and a point from my maximum, or just a point from my maximum.

the answer to which, IMO, is that you lose a point from current and maximum.

Also note that cyber and bio benefits to mental stats do not apply to the limits or freebies that you get at character creation.

i.e. use your natural intuition + logic for the free knowledge skills, etc.

The example of Michelle on page 74 shows that you purchase Magic before you lose essense.

So the idea Frank and the rest are espousing is that Essence always goes down, never goes up? If you put an implant in and lose 0.5 essence, you can't take it out and regain the essence? Why not?

Or are you saying it'll go back up, but the loss of Magic will permanently stay down? I don't see the point of that. It was always my idea that cyber/bioware simply suppressed Essence and, by extension, Magic.

The only "perma-Essence drain" I thought happened when you became addicted to drugs and BTL's or got drained by a vampire.

I'm not sure it covers this in SR4, but it does in SR3.

If you get ware, and then have it removed, your essence/magic do not go back up. Basically, it leaves an essence "hole" that can then be filled with other ware.

Calypso

How I understand it:

~~~~~

Full Magician Steve spends 15 BP for the quality and gets Magic 1. After that, he diverges into three alternate dimensions where he does one of three things:

1) Steve does not increase his Magic rating any further in chargen. He picks up a pair of cyberelbows for .2 Essence. His Magic cap goes down from a 6 to a 5, and his current Magic goes down from a 1 to 0. He is now burned out, and can no longer use magic. Bad investment, Steve, but at least you're allowed to start with the restricted magical skills.

2) Steve, in chargen, spends 30 BPs and gets a Magic of 4. He picks up Articulated Earlobes for .1 Essence and now has a maximum Magic of 5 and a current Magic of 3. He spends karma later to raise his Magic (not by initating) and now has a current Magic of 4, but his uninitiated cap remains as 5. Later he spends more karma to raise his current Magic to 5. This is also his cap, and he cannot raise it further without initiating first. After his first initiation his current Magic is still a 5 but his cap is 6.

3) Steve, in chargen, spends 65 BPs and gets a Magic of 6. He later initiates once and then buys his Magic rating up to 7. Then, after a particularly forgettable vacation at a BTL pusher's mansion, he loses a point of Essence. His Essence is now 5, his current Magic is 6, his maximum Magic is 6, and his Initiate Grade is still 1.

Ignoring the fact that the 2n of ammo has to be fired by a weapon that costs reasonably more, weld by a character who is traditionally a bit more skilled and experienced, and so on (afterall it was just a silly example), I find the idea of an removeable implant permanently destroying your essence/magic/soul to be a bit ludicrous.

So a person goes through normal life (perhaps installing minor cyberware like a datajack), then one day finds out he is Awakened. That's the gist I got out of how Magic comes to people from the blurb in the History chapter: "Out of the blue, some people were now able to incinerate others with a thought (even if it knocked them on their keisters afterward)."

If they gained the Magician quality at this time, they'd begin with a Magic rating of 1. They then go through life building up Karma to improve said rating, or pretending like it didn't exist.

Of course, then those who installed a datajack would gain the Trait, suddenly having a Magic rating of 1. Of course, their 0.1 essence loss equates to a point loss of Magic, so it instantly reverts back to 0, they lose the trait, and are burned out. Joe Blow then leaves to get a bite to eat at the Stuffer Shack. He would never have the opportunity to improve Magic, because as soon as he gains Magician quality, he loses it again.

Potential spoiler from "Never Deal With a Dragon":


So I figure he had to have gained Magician, the essence loss dropped his Magic rating to a temporary 0, and as soon as he spends the karma (roleplay/drama-wise, unknowingly to the character!) to raise the "real stat" to 2, his temporary 0 becomes a 1 and voila, he can cast magic.

In the section about acquiring positive qualities through gameplay it specifies the Adept, Mystic Adept, and Mage qualities should NOT be giving out as awards or available via karma. It also says, GMs can pass them out if they so choose (if they really really want to) but players should never be able to purchase them after chargen.

@blakkie: In this case, Frank Trollman is correct. You don't purchase Magic with Karma based on the pre-reduced value. You purchase increases with Karma based on the current value. This paradoxically makes cybered mages/adepts easier to build up to their maximum Magic attribute.

@Veggiesama: If your essence is ever reduced, then it cannot be regained unless you are a critter with the Essence Drain power. This is one of the many core concepts of Shadowrun, and it is listed explicitly on SR4 p61, 2nd column: "Lost Essence can never be regained (short of the Essence Drain critter power)". This may result in Magic Loss, this is true (and under the current rules, the critters with the Essence Loss weakness will effectively become burnouts very quickly... I suspect this will be fixed later on, because it makes no sense as it is).

Edit (me too slow):

Superbum:
Yeah, I'm not saying they're given as rewards or bought with karma. They arise spontaneously, or at least you're generally not born with it.

Either way, it still says the Magic attribute starts at 1. I guess you could read it as time pauses for that split second when you receive the quality through divine will, you spend your conveniently available karma to raise it above your essence loss threshold, all done a split second before essence loss deals its ugly blow.

hahnsoo:
I'm not saying installing cyberware is lost essence. My interpretation is that it's temporarily suppressed until you remove it, assuming it's not something irrevocably invasive (cyberarm?). I figure the more invasive, the longer it would take for the body to heal itself mentally and physically, possibly taking months or years. Yes, though the text on p61 says otherwise (even if cyber/bioware curiously only "reduces Essence" rather than the stronger terminology "lose Essence"), it still sounds like to me that having to pay the same amount of karma for raising a stat from 2 to 3 (after being reduced from 4 from essence) and from 2 to 3 (no essence loss) seems stupid. Shouldn't the cyberjunkie have to pay more karma?

It's been that way for 4 editions of Shadowrun. If you want to run things as a house rule in your own games, then feel free to do so, but also preface your forum posts that it is a house rule to avoid unnecessary confusion.

An SR GM I gamed with used a rule that was:

For every year spent with a hole in your essence, reduce the hole by .1 essence.

So this meant that if a sammie retired and wanted to live a normal life, he could get rid of his 'ware, and his essence would SLOWLY regenerate.

Of course, a sammie with .019 essence left will take SIXTY YEARS to be whole (metaphysically) again.

Ah, RL gives way....

Anyway now i remember, the relavent quotes are on page 62 and page 264. On page 264 it gives the cost for raising the natural attribute, on page 62 it mentions the penalty imposed by having essense below 6. So it is a penalty to Magic/Resonance applied against the natural attribute value.

This also provides the explaination for Vampires since their essense loss is temporary, unlike BTL/'ware loss, so when the essense loss goes away so does the penalty. Unfortunately this is not expressed explicitly as it should be, like a lot of other things in SR. Ah well, the sacrifice of having SR4 out by Gencon, and squeezing as much territory into the BBB as they did. *sigh*

However in the RAW the Vampire is still humped if Initiated and essense drops low enough that the penalty caused Initiate Grades to be lost, because the text there isn't talking about a penalty to them. But instead that the Grade is flat out gone. Of course such a Vampire either did not purchase Magic to the maximum allowed by the Initiate Grade(s), or they are at zero essense and have only days to live.

P.S. Regarding loss of [use of] Magic paid for during chargen.

Yup, and my question was if you applied the Essence lost rules after you have finished buying your Magic attribute or not.. And from what I read the discussion here, and with some RL buddies, we in RL agree that it is applied _after_ you have bought the Magic Attribute with BP..

What happens with essence lost during gaming the book is quite clear on.

Yes, the post script is the section talking about your original question because that is directly from in the Cyberware/Bioware portion of chargen.

The rest of the post is just talking about the tangent that the thread headed off on, explaining why if you bought Magic to 5, then had 1 point of essense worth of 'ware put in, reducing your effective Magic to 4, that once in play you'd have to pay 6*3=18 karma to raise the effective Magic to 5.

So many obvious holes in the rules... makes my head hurt... the errata might be as long as the book itself...

Veggiesama, as Mr. Unpronoucable has mentioned, the character to which you refer from the novel wasn't written with SR4 rules as a guideline. In fact, IIRC, that novel came out during the reign of SR2?

Anyway, prior to SR4, once you Awakened, you automatically received a Magic rating of 6, reduced by whatever hits you'd taken from Essence loss. If you had a character who started off as a sammie with a drekload of cyber/bioware and had a remaining Essence of, say, 0.65, you'd still end up a burned-out mundane before your magic career took off. In this way, there is but a small difference between those rules and SR4. I guess for SR4, the developers just wanted to enforce the life paths a character chooses, as someone else has mentioned.

If you wanted to play a character who Awakens late in life, that's still perfectly possible. You simply would have create a mage, buy up the Magic attribute and work out with the GM when your Awakening happens - you both agree on when it happens or you may leave it to the GM to "surprise" you. If you want to be "realistic", you'd take whatever cyber/bioware you feel your character would have up till the time the campaign begins - when you Awaken, you start off with the reduced Magic. Perhaps he's a hacker and a Man Of Science © all his life and now has to deal with his Manifest Destiny © on the Mystical Path ©. Or a bodyguard who now welcomes the chance to learn new abilities and adapt them to his work.

Whatever the case, I guess this game mechanic can also serve to explain why the population of magicians is so low in the world. There might be more magicians out there if not so many people had cyber/bioware installed beyond their Magic ratings.