I built a character like this just last week. However it occurred to me that I've made a permanent sacrifice of essence/magic in order to get that implant gain (I took a liking to Mystic Adept). Meanwhile my ability to cast spells, counterspell, banish, etc. is all effected by a lower Magic score.

I decided to just drop the implants because in the long run, the character will be more effective IMO without them. Am I wrong?


What I ended up with is a Face character that is also a Magician, and skipped the Adept builds entirely. I just use spells to augment physical attributes as needed rather than cyberware or Adept abilities. If my Adept had been pysically focused it would of worked alot better to add the cyberwear with Adept.

About the hidden arm slide... it would only be hidden with his normal clothes.

As for the one-trick pony-ness... well, the idea is to kill all your enemies before they get a chance to react, and this was mostly an excercise in "How many dice can I legally get to roll with my Assault Rifle?".

As for the encumbrence issues: Did they change that from 3rd edition? I thought it still worked off of Agility (formerly known as Quickness).

As for the Adept Powers: Whoops. Here they are.
Improved Ability (Automatics): 5 (2.5pp)
Improved Attribute (Agility) 1 (2pp)
Combat Sense 1 (.5pp)

Doh. I'm just making mistakes left and right. I remember reading it and seeing "Increase the recipient's Body by the bone density rating"

You could default to Agility, couldn't you?

No, you can't default. Dodge allows you add your dodge to your reaction when on full offense. Personally if that's a character you actually intend to play I'd highly recommend getting a couple points in perception. Defaulting to an intuition of two will only give you one dice to roll. Anything outside the obvious will require more than one success also. If this was just an attempt to see how many dice you can get on an automatics roll, congratulations you have a fist full of dice. But if that's all you wanted I'd consider the reflex recorder for automatics with that 0.1 essence left.

The problem is, Ability boost doesn't stack with cyber enhancements to ability scores. So if you got muscle toner to increse your agility, you can't use ability boost to increase it further.

And Ability boost is SOOO much better.

Why? Well, for a measly .25 points, you have it at rating 1. When using the power, you roll Rating + Magic rating, and every hit increases the stat by 1.

This means that if you have a magic rating of 5, you are rolling 6 dice to boost the stat. An average of 2. Once you start increasing your magic stat (As you certainly will), It keeps getting better, without you ever having to take it past rating 1. In fact, you don't ever want it past rating 1, for resons I'll get into below.

Now it will only last for twice your hits in rounds, but who cares? By that time you will have kicked all ass, and then you take drain. The DV of the drain is the rating of the power. IE, 1. If you had it at rating 2, you have doubled the drain you must resist for a measly additional die, and spent .25 pp to do it. So don't. You resist the drain with Body + will. You are an adept. You can get 1 hit on that test.

Now, there appears to be no reset time. So you can just use the power again once it runs out. I don't have my book with me, but I don't even think it takes an action.

Summing up, assuming you have a Magic rating of 5, you can, on average, get an additional 2 points to an attribute for 4 rounds with no drain, usable at will, for thebargain price of .25 Power Points. Why would you ever give soemthing like that up to use any other method of boosting your physical attributes?

But what about the randomness, you say. It's a check? so can't you fail or botch it? Sure you can, but that same randomness is also your friend. You can, after all, roll all six successes, boosting your attribute by 6 (Up to your cap, of course.) And since you get it for twice the successes, those good rolls will last much longer than the bad ones. If you fail, you can just take the drain and try again. After all, you can get 1 hit on the resistance test, right?

Plus, it's a roll. You can spend edge on it.

And that is my dissertaion on why attribute boost is the best adept power in the game, for physical adepts.


Oh, on a side note, Yes, Yes you can.

Well, that's what the Rating 3 vision enhancement and hearing enhancements are for.

Why? How about because the action it takes to do this is undefined. Most likely, it is a free action -- which you get one of a turn. Some days you might want more than one attribute boosted at a time...

But in general, I agree with you. Spend one power point to get the ability to boost all four physical attributes, it's a real bargain!

-translation by me.