I like the idea of a streetsammie having some cyberlimbs, but really, is there any point? Even if you take a obvious cyberarm the attribute ratings of three take up 9 capacity! This leaves you with 6 points to spend - and not even that if you want to have better attributes, 3 is average, which is too low for my taste. So the question is, has anyone found cyberlimbs useful?

As far as I understood it, you get the initial 3 points in attributes for free. It only takes up capacity if you boost your attributes beyond 3. So you could have 6 in BOD, STR and AGI and still have some capacity to spare for a cybergun or something.

The basic rating 3 for attributes don't use any space.

And yes, my mage has an obvious cyberhand .

Like they said, the basic ratings of 3 takes no space. For a starting character, you can boost the agility to 7 for just 4 capacity. Add in a gyro mount and you have a heck of a good gun hand.

And Cyberlimbs are fairly cheap, too, so you don't really have to sell your soul to have one. I have a character who has an arm and a leg on the same side (car accident). Leg has a holster for the gun he likes to fire with that arm.

Pretty sweet, no?

-Nate

I have a hacker with a concealed Cyberarm, makes a handy place to store a comlink and the gyromount is nice

Love the idea of them, but for some reason I always hated the idea that you could have different limbs with different stats. Tried to houserule that (where cost scaled according to the stats you had before any cyberlimbs, and general stat boosts could be bought on top) but not sure I found the best way.

I don't think the cyberlimbs in the book are very useful as it stands.

Here's what I have written down currently to make them more reasonably useable:

The way I run cyberlimbs differs significantly from baseline SR4.

Your cyberlimb, when you buy it, has the same stats as the rest of your meatbod. Your limb's strength is set to racial maximum. You can buy strength upgrades for the limb if you want (no other stat, and at the moment, until I can work out a decent rule, no armor). If one of your physical stats changes over time, you've got to do maintenance on the limb (a few hours in a clinic, or a few days with your toolkit of tinkering with the settings on the limb) to get it to work properly with the rest of your body. Strength boosts are figured in as a bonus on top of your unaugmented stat.

The high cost of strength boosts involves setting the limb to work in such a way that you can't tear it free of it's socket accidentally trying to do something that you can't support with the rest of your body, and tuning it so that you can do things like pass an egg from your cyberhand to your meat hand, back and forth, without crushing it because one is noticeably stronger, by adjusting the "effort feedback" (that is, how hard it FEELS like you're using the limb to do something with it) so that it's more sensitive in the lower ranges.

Sadly Shadowrun cyberlimbs are sorta useless but at least look cool. Fortunately for me Cyberpunk cyberlimbs are cheap and damned handy. I'd want all my characters to have at least two.

For several editions now I've houseruled that the cyberlimb stats match your original stats at purchase. Upgrades cost extra as in canon. Otherwise you just end up with a totally unnecessary headache of mismatched stats.

I've always felt that cyberlimbs were more useful to hackers and covert ops characters than to street samurai. Although since they got cheaper in 4th things might be different now...

My Merc uses one....left leg at the knee.
Good place to stash a Leatherman, some hard currency, and a holdout piece.

Shrike30, thats a nice houserule. I like it a lot

Thanks for the response, I greatly appreciate it. It seems I didn't fully understand that the basic attribute ratings of 3 didn't cost capacity. Shrike's houserule also seems pretty good.

Still, as an old CP2020 player, the SR-cyberlimbs are a bit disappointing, though they're clearly not totally useless pieces of crap.

Thanks. Yeah, CP2020 here, as well, and my houserule largely stems from that game. I want players to be able to get a cyberlimb *just for the limb*, and have it do cool stuff. None of this "glorified utility belt" crap for me... it's a fragging metal arm. You *should* be able to crush bricks in your hand and punch holes in car doors if you want to.

I've been considering borrowing from the Bone Lacing rules for cyberlimbs doing physical damage/getting DV bonuses. I'll probably slap that on at some point.

the problem with cyberlimbs right now, is that they are mechanicaly inferior to a bioware-enhanced natural limb. here are some very hard caps on how much you can upgrade a single limb, and they will lower your average stat if you have high attributes to begin with.

if you want people to use them, then change how they work. easiest way, is to have attribute upgrades not take up capacity. and to have different base stats for metahuman cyberlimbs. do that, and they start to look like a reasonable thing.

right now, if i have muscle toner/augmentation and bone desity, and have my physical stats at 5(7), then i need a cybertorso just to break even. never mind the 8(10) a metahuman could start with.

Aaron, thats how we play the armor in my circle.

If you are looking at the numbers then cyber-limbs are only really worth it if you get a torso, then you should probably get all four limbs done up too. That opens a whole other conversation though.

A Sammy could do one arm the "Punchy" arm and the the other a the gun arm, they would get past the capacity issue.

Otherwise, cyber hands/feet and lower extremitys are your best choice for usefulness. You can fit spurs in a hand that takes less essence than spurs would, or fit a gyro in there, or 2 points armor that stack. And still gain the agility/strength benefits from the meat part of the limb, which will probably be better with bioware.

...My Toll Face Adept Babydoll has a tacky lamp made from a cyberleg.

...won't say where she got it from.

I've found cyberlimbs are very useful for a decker-type character, where the mental stats are taking up so much BP. Then getting a cyberarm with +3 agil +3 str makes for a much better combat situation.