Good. Then you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Again, another pleasant surprise in store.

A goodly percentage of players prefer mundane augmented players. Both Arsenal and Augmentation will give them a lot more options while the magicians have enough to splurge their money and karma on in Street Magic.

Let's see...
- Done.
- Not the way you're thinking but done.
- Skillsofts and wires in 2070 should be in Unwired. Lot of ideas for that.
- Done.

Playtesting is ongoing during product development. Ideas can be submitted to FanPro at the address Adam gave. Given that Augmentation is in development you might want to send any such suggestion my way too and I'll make sure it reaches the specific authors involved (email is in my profile).

Well, it is the book introducing more options for mundane augmented characters.

Well the main point of the pilot program as I understand it is to simulate the 'mental stats' more so than the physical. It's ability to interpret commands, etc.

Just don't forget to add a millimeter wave scanner for cybereyes - 0.1E/2C works fine.

See? That's what really happens to suggestions.

I understand your happiness...

But why did I have to wake up to that mental image before breakfast?

No it is not. Pilot is not used for vehicle or gunnery tests. Response and Sensor is used instead.

This is because a drone has both Sensor and Response. Pilot is only then used, when a jumped in rigger would use mental (or physical, but thats nonsense) attributes. But mental attributes are not used in rigging any more.

Are you saying the GM has control over how much money he gives out but not karma?

?

OneTrikPony: Respectfully, why do you play SR if you dislike magic so much? There are a number of fine cyberpunk only systems out there. SR is magicy. I suspect as time goes on, it will become more magicy to keep a distinct identity.


On Ex-Ex: I remember a number of threads that bemoaned the fact that everyone used ExEx, ExEx was horribly nasty, and just unfair, and APDS rounds were inferior in every way to ExEx.

Not any more. ; )

You're assuming that the hacker is spending the resources to get Wired 3 or Synaptic 3, or has a mage willing to sustain Increased Reflexes. Or is a hacker adept who spent 5 of his 6 magic on 4 ips....

That's a *big* assumption.

Wired 3 is 5 essence, 100k nuyen and 20R. Even alpha, that's 200k and 4 essence.

Synaptic 3 is 1.5 essence and 240k nuyen.

Now, from the point of view that it's easier for a sam to become a pretty good hacker, I'll buy that to some degree.

From the PoV of a hacker, VR is still the way to go.

Yeah, Stick-n-Shock in an Ingram Smartgun seems the most efficient gun/ammo combination.

My point was that there is still kinetic energy from the impact of the bullet, it doesn't just stop gently and sticks - gunpowder charge is still used and a caliber fitting the gun is also used. The energy part is the armour mod and electrical secondary effects. Instead of using a fixed charge across the board it is a modification of the weapons usual stats.

Sorry, bad description.

I meant that depending on the caliber the electrical charge would also be smaller - thus one uses the weapons base damage instead and adds an armour modification and secondary effects.

Inconsistency. Why should a drone use Pilot, when a rigger uses the Response of the drone?
Thats like saying: A rigger jumped into a drone uses the drones Sensor, but the drone itself does note use its own Sensor, but Pilot.

This would be inconsistent and anti streamlined.

with a rigger in control, its just like doing VR hack jobs. your limited by the response time of the hardware rather then how fast the programming can understand and react to the environment.

but when the pilot code takes over, just trowing fast hardware at the job may not alway be the best solution as code could still get confused about something a rigger would just go "to hell with procedure, fire!" about.

My thoughts exactly, and even if a TM were able to get those extra IP in AR, they are still considered in Hot SIM status due to their brain being the commlink...

thats how i read it to. but that leads to one having to track two response levels for the agents. the internal one, going by their pilot rating and the comlink. and the external one, going by the comlinks response and system.

I think his point is that Money comes, and Money goes, but Karma keeps building. Karma is sneaky that way.

And he's right. A lot of GM's keep a closer grip on the cash flow than the karma flow. I'm guilty of it myself, and I love cyber.

Part of the problem is that to upgrade Cyber is very expensive, traditionally. Upgrading your basic cyber to alpha ware, or your alphaware to betaware, or god forbid bioware, just so you can squeeze in a fraction more capability, requires enough cash outlay to fully kit out several other members of your team with top of the line non-cyber gear of all types.

I've been playing around with the system, and looking at characters people have posted:

Who are you more likely to see at character generation with bioware initiative boosts (Adept or Sam)? Answer: Adept, as far as I can tell.

The Sam is more likely to go with wired for financial reasons in character generation - he wants more than 1 piece of cyber, if he considers himself a street samurai. The adept on the other hand has much fewer finanial obligations and the bioware is a signiicant power point discount over his own way of handling initiative boosts.

Now, how likely is it for the Sam to get that nice bioware upgrade to the tune of a quarter-million-plus nuyen in game? This is the worst case scenario... but this is what the samurai's equivalent of initiation is. Magical types continuously build up with karma, and eventually initiate - usually as soon as possible. Cyber types have a harder time upgrading.

Because if the team has gotten enough money that the cyber-folks can upgrade at all, what have the other members of the team done with that huge amount of money? We are talking about tens to hundreds of thousands of bucks here.

Anyway, enough ranting. to answer your question:

In theory, no. In practice, yes. For it to work in practice, he'd have to cut back karma awards severely over the long term, or increase cash awards past what might seem reasonable based on the finances of the other characters.

Possible the best idea is to implement a cash <-> karma system, with oversight, of course.

Worst. Rule. Ever. (well, ok, not worse ever, there has been worse, but this is bad.)

It wasnt like that in SR3....the stock Sam had them both. In SR4, I will not be touching this with a ten foot pole.

Im middle ground, i do love playing mages and magically active characters, but i also love sammies and mundanes, depending on my mood, and the nerfing they get is a bit extensive. I am, tho, very happy to see when Arsenal and Augmentations come out, that makes me a happy person.

That's the first observation that I put in my thread on the hacking portion of the FAQ. Aside from the interval for Probing the Target, VR just isn't faster anymore. I pointed out the line they'll want to delete from the book next version of the errata.

This is Shadowrun, it's not as big of an assumption as you think.

Still more money than I'd prefer to toss downrange at full auto on a regular basis.

SnS seems more like a SA type ammo, where you get more 'bang for your buck'.

Eh, your best bet is to use a wide burst with them.

Yeah, that's not a good ruling, I don't know where it came from.

---

In the broader spectrum however, I don't full agree with a lot of the cybernetics analysis that has been going on.

Sure, as a magician you can be a street sam by taking a bunch of buff spells and binding a bunch of spirits of Man to sustain them on you - but now you're talking about glowing like a nuclear lightbulb all the time, and it doesn't work in a heavy background count (your Force 4 Increased Reflexes spell ends as soon as you hit a rating 4 domain or mana ebb). But the sticking out magically is a big deal. Magical security doesn't normally trigger on non-magical entrants, so your street sam is actually able to walk through wards and watchers just fine.

Remember, Shadowrun isn't about bringing the MOST FORCE to the table, because you can't do that. The corps can hire deputies faster than you can kill them all. The goal is to bring enough force in quiet enough that you can beat anything already there and then escape before backup happs. Magical trails from spellcasting are a BIG DEAL, and really hurt the party in a lot of circumstances.

Remember, any mundane character can have a truck filled with hundreds of kilograms of plastic explosives drive into an enemy installation and detonate. That's more damage than a powerball hurled by a great dragon and you don't have to be anything special to do that. The problem is that while that is overwhelming force, it's also usually pointless.

That, and I've seen a lot of street samurai who can regularly blast through two or three Force 5 spirits in a turn.

However, it is definitely true that Street Samurai don't have enough things to slavor over right now. This is largely because Street Magic is out and Augmentation is not. While I personally am not super jazzed by the prospect of being a full-conversion cyborg, I've been doing some heavy statistical analysis and the Augmentation Hatchetman goes through a Force 10 spirit in an initiative pass.

-Frank

And of course you're jumping to conclusions before FanPro puts out the two core books fundamentally geared towards the augmented mundane... but nah, you're probably right.

I think you need to reread the limits of "that new metamagic technique" and also figure in that it's an advanced metamagic which means you need to initiate at least twice to get it.