Ok, something I've been wondering about for a while. If you've got, say, a cyberarm, and it somehow gets severely damaged (now how could that ever happen?) so badly that you have to get a new one, do you have to pay the Essence cost a second time? And if, say, you decided to go alphaware instead of standard on the replacement, would you actually get Essence back, or are you just tossing nuyen out for no reason?

You don't pay the essence again, when ware is removed (damaged or otherwise) it leaves an essence hole that new where "drops" into, so replacing a normal grade arm with a new one, changes your essence not one bit. If the new ware doesn't fill the essence hole the space is left for the character to fill, if the arm was replaced with an alpha arm the character would have 0.2 essence hole left. Conversely if an alpha arm was replaced with a basic arm, the hole would be filled up and then the extra bit would be taken off the characters essence.
Hope that made sense.

Well, in SR3 (and I doubt the rules have changed), you can replace it without additional essense cost, you're simply installing it in the "essense hole" left by the removal of the previous cyber arm.

However, upgrading to alpha was a bit trickier, by rules as written. When you remove cyberware, you don't actually get any essense back (this seems to be impossible), but it does leave a hole, that you can fill with whatever other cyberware you want. So you only have a cyber arm costing 1 essense, and then you *cough* have it removed (probably with a lead saw...). Your essence is still 5, you lost that 1 point when you had the fake arm put in, but you have 1 point of essence to fill with other cyber. You put in that spiffy new alpha arm for .8 essence, leaving a .2 essence difference, which you could fill with a smartlink, or some eye mods, or whatever you want.

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SR4 seems to be more forgiving to what you do to your body (based on what has been said on these boards), so you might actually get the essence back when you take off the old arm.

I'm told a fairly common house rule allows for you to regain lost essence if you remove the ware and go to therapy (or something).

Ok, I get it now. Thanks for the help. I was more concerned about having that Essence hole than actually getting it back. Being able to upgrade and get more is nice, considering all the nifty dletaware you can't get at character creation...

so was magic and cyber don't mix
whoopscybermancy

core concepts have changed in the past

Cybermancy isn't actually a mixture of cyberware and magic. Magic is used for the clearly defined purpose of keeping the "soul" from leaving a body which should die because of excessive modification. The body is enchanted. Not the cyber.

Actually, you can get cyber enchanted as foci. It's just that the machinery doesn't detect or interact with the magic.

Yes you can...the question is: who wants that?

Umm, not to sound totally clueless but...what is 'cybermancy'? I can't seem to find that anywhere in the book...

Cybermancy is a powerful (strictly NSC) application of dark (supposedly blood-) magic, which allows an individual to have an essence of 0 and lower. Such people (if you can still call them people) are very rare and are called Cyberzombies. I never understood what use cybermancy has, because subjects tend to die after a few month and the procedures plus the used cyberware are vastly expensive. That makes it really unpracticable from an economic point of view.

The rules can be found in the 2nd edition sourcebook "Cybertechnologies" and in the 3rd edition sourcebook "Man and Machine".

Well, if you replace all of the meat with cyber, to minimize the cancer possibilities, they'll probably last longer before they die of cancer. Alternately, you might be able to get nanites that attack tumors (I dunno how SR handles nanites, never read that part of M&M), or failing that, a really good biomonitor system to detect cancer really early, a cyber IV drip loaded with chemo, and frequent trips to the surgeon's office to get cancer removed.

But is that worth the enormous cost compared to the relatively cheap 'above-0-essence' Deltaware Samurai?

Oh my G**, I just called Deltaware cheap...

Move by wire 4, and some other moderate cyber break the 6 barrier even when delta grade.

You still have 2.5 points of essence left after installing the move by wire 4. That means still enough space for 5 points of regular cyber...

And that MbW 4 in Delta costs 16.000.000 Nuyen without implantation. That means 16.000.000 down the toilet when the Zombie dies from cancer...

I think the easiest is to track actual Essence and the total Essence cost from installed cyber-/bioware seperately (at least once you start replacing stuff).

Whenever you install a new piece, you add its Essence cost to the total.

If then 6 minus this total cost is lower than your actual Essence, you replace your Essence with that number.

Bye
Thanee

The big problem with cybermancy wasn't cancer. It was never cancer. A cyberzombie was lucky to live long enough to die of cancer. The big problem with the cyberzombie is that they are so disassociated from life that they can literally "forget to live" and just keel over for absolutly no reason whatsoever. Cyberzombies have implants that flood their brains with old memories to help prevent this but they are a stopgap measure at best.

Remember the begining of the movie Robocop 2 where they were showing all of the failed robocops? That's sort of what its like to be a cyberzombie.

The real goal of cybermanchy is practical human immortality, it always has been. Cyberzombies are simply testbeds for magics and technologies that can extend human life beyond what is natural. Evnetually, this research should lead to Earthdawn level "unnatural life" style magics.

So what happens if I lose an arm, get a cyberarm for a while, then, when my cloned arm is done growing, have the cyberarm removed and the cloned arm implanted?

You still have a essence hole which you can fill up with any other 'ware you may want.

the really confusing part, happens when we remove a peice of ware, and replace it with bioware. If you started with 3 essence of cyber, and 2.9 essence of bio (4.45 essence lost total), and drop cyber by removing 2, so it becomes 3.4 lost essence, if we add that 2 as bioware, we now just lost more essence