Okay, I know that there are supposed to be Borg rules in Augmentation but the equipment is not so much the point of this post. People who have read my posts might have seen my Alternate Magical Traditions thread a while back. (If you want to check it out it is also on my website in my sig)

I was thinking (I know this is dangerous) that it would be interesting to do the same with heavier cyberware characters. I have several ideas and I wanted to see if anyone could help me with it.

First off I was thinking that it should be done in BP, not money. There could be a money cost listed but the BP cost would reflect balencing more with the rest of the BP system and character types. Now you can do this now by just going back from the nuyen cost to the BP cost. Something that costs 15,000 nuyen would cost 3 BP. If it was rarer then it could cost more. Part of my magical traditions system worked on the idea that the individual items cost more then normal but there was a list of disadvantages that bring the cost back down.

Now have these borgs as package deals based on how corps and military groups would normally group them together. It would have a list of abilities along with a list of contacts needed to maintain them, upkeep, and training. Qualities based on no magic, lack of tactile sense, high signature, social disassociation, odious personal habits, etc. Maybe some sort of hunted based on how valuable you are. You could buy some of these off with other cyber specifc qualities. These packages would basically work like racial packages and have a combined cost.

Another of my strange ideas is once you have paid for the cyberware as cyberware (you have the ability to ignore pain and put more devices in yourelf) then I think that it shouldn't replace your stats. It should give you a +1 to a few things but not make your stats have to start over. Basically if you have an ork with cyberarms then it should be +2 str for the ork and +1 str for the cyberarms for a base str of 4 and then you buy it just as you normally would for any character with BPs. After character creation you would go back to the money system but until then it should just be another modifier. It would add a bonus to the max stat. This would replace all that stats at 3 silliness and be a lot quicker.

Any ideas?

Hmm. I'm not sure. Though personally I'd do it the SR3 way at least where stats are concenred and at least make the limbs have the 'average' strength of the apporpriate race in the first place. Full conversion borgs on the other hand are a whole other story in some ways. I mean technically with SR3 a full con borg only really needs the brain and major intenral organs (Many of which can still yet be replaced with bioware enhanced versions) to still be viable. Though very much on the edge of cybermancy.

I think that might be partially why in SR4 they just said all limbs have base stats X. I mean if by Cannon going with a full conversion (Cybertorso, cyberlimbs, cyberskull) means that every last one of your bones has been replaced, not to mention your skin with hard metal. Then whyt he heck couldnt you just build a bigger better frame around the remaining flesh and thus have what was once a human in a troll sized borg frame with a trolls physical stats?

I mean you could rule some wierd mystical stuff to do with essence I suppose. But it still doesnt make any actual sense then. Afteral what? Is a troll's soul also twice as big as a humans or something?

Onto the idea of starter packages though, I think that sounds like a great idea. I mean every corp has a certain.. standard method of operation. Some are to one degree slightly caring (Draco Foundation maybe?), while others are cold heartless and ruthless (Aztechnology). Many are on some degree in between. So maybe that borg body from Ares is designed for frontline combat on the modern battlefield while Aztechnologies is designed more for clambering through jungle terrain (Real or urban) and attacking the target unawares. While say some matrix companies borg is abit of a mix in between and instead focuses on all sorts of nifty hacking gizmoes.

Well we have a full borg in my game right now according to the base rules. It was more about the alternate build systems.

Well yeah wasnt saying it couldnt be done or anything. I'm just pointing out some stuff that might get covered with the new expansion books which would have to be taken into account later on anyway.

And for build systems it's not too hard to come up with 'basic packages' really. And working out the cost is equally easy. Finding an 'appropriate' counter beyind brining back the hunted flaw or something is a little harder to do though.

I mean even SR3 doestn -really- get into too much detail about exactly how 'dehumanizing' selling your soul to the machine really is. And there's no real way to 'grade' various levels of sociopathic tendencies in game terms. Its not all that easy to really grade IRL either for that matter.

Also the thing to take into consideration is if a corp is going to go build a high end ware, or probably even any full borg. They'd very likely toss in an all too cheap kinkbomb of one flavour or another. It's the ultimate insurance of loyalty. Afterall if they turn on you, you just hit a button and the problem goes away. It's also not too hard to just say OK the guy had it removed one way or another.

Also I think would be needed is a system to figgure out when the corp would just write it off as a total loss. I mean beyond a certain point, even with Deltaware the corp would just say 'To heck with it, were spending more in resoruces trying to get the guy back/take him down than we spent building him in the first place'.

Obviously they'd keep such peole on a 'list to watch out for' especially if it was a Beta or Delta level borg. And dont forget the bioware side of things either. So a standard soldier would probably be all obvious cyberware, where as one geared for assassination would more than likelly be either all synthetic, or use a heavy degree of bioware instead.

In SR3 I had a character who was a full borg, to reflect the ease of building a larger, stronger body, I payed the points to be a troll since he was troll sized, but used to be a human.

In fact, I bet you could do full borg pretty easily as a race selection, since you wouldn't be identifiable as any other race with out being cracked open and DNA sampled.

Well I think that I would need to have Hunted with some sort of rating on how focused they were in try to find you. Sort of a replacement for loyalty.

I was going to use a version of derangement from nWoD as a series of qualities you could get.

I thought about the kink bomb and your right - it would require someone to take it out. That could be part of the reason they got into the shadows was that either they owe someone for taking it out or someone else rekeyed it to their own code.