Should low Essence values lead to paranoia, phobia, and other things. Since SR3 this is not mentioned any more, except in cyberzombies.
What do you say?
Would you want guidelines for mental illnesses, phobia, anti-social behaviour, sociapathism, coldness and so on?

I think that it should. I ran a game once with a character w/ Move-by-wire, and ended up suffering from it's side effects. He was a Top Notch, cybered to the hilt cyber street same killing machinge type, and to have him start having mental issues... well it made for a great game.

If anything, low essence should affect stamina and fatigue. After all, it's powered by your own bio-energy. Presumably, a cyberarm uses more energy than your real arm, which is why there is an essence cost. Since it uses more energy, you should become fatigued more easily -- which can be compensated for by other cyber- and bio-ware.

I think a blanket rule for 'becomes colder and less human' for low essense is bunk, because it doesn't make any sense. What if someone just packed their body with stuff that's not even interfaced to their mind, like Toxin Filters?

I could see someone who gets alot more input from their body than normal people being affected by their cyber, but not much. No more than someone who always runs in AR, or a technomancer or mage who always sees/senses things that most people don't.

i suppose it all depends on how you look at it.

i mean, i don't see too much of a deal with, say, implanted sim module/datajack/whatever, since there are external versions. which is not to say that extensive use of these things won't have an effect, but rather i don't see the need to have an effect beyond what using the external versions would.

on the other hand, i would be comfortable with saying that certain modifications do mess you up in certain ways (wired reflexes being one of the more well known ones), particularly those that make fairly large changes to your brain (cerebral booster, sleep regulator... basically anything that you might see from using a drug, pretty much).

however, that being said... it's way too much bother to go through each individual piece of 'ware and decide what has what effect, and i'm not in favor of low essence in and of itself causing changes... so, generally speaking, no (flavorwise it would be fine, though)

Just a remark: This is not about realism. This is just a question of "Do you want it because of the dystopican setting to have that effect or not".

Besides: I think a compilation of how cyberware would affect day to day life of a runner would be nice. How does a man with intelligence 9 deal with the world, where verybody else must be extremely stupid. What does sleep regulator do to oyu? How is wired reflexes affecting your behaviour. And all such things.

There is really a lot of stuff out there, that really differentiates 2070 from 2007. And and cyberware is one of it (besides AR and information technology).

the Cybertechnology of cuorse has that nice piece w/ Hatchetman. But overall, that would be neat.

I personally think that a large amount of cyberware in person will have psychological outcomes on the person. I could see a person developing an addiction to getting new cyber, much the same way that people get addicted to getting plastic surgery now. Also some pieced of cyberware are going to completely change some people's view of the world, such as some hot-sim riding data junkie developing the psychosis of believing the virtual world of being more real then the real world. Also Wired Reflexes and the such will create a jumpiness and most likely a sense of paranoia in the character, a want to trigger the reflexes more often and for longer amounts of time. People with obviously fake cyberlimbs could develop a sense of disconnection to their limbs, since the just don't feel the same when touching the rest of their body, a feeling that separation between themselves and their limb. Simply, a number of psychosi can develop with the installation and use of cyberware.

If anything, using too much VR/BTL, especially rigging, should cause dehumanization. Anything that actually disassociates the mind from the body. The cyberware thing is just silly. It can screw with a good game by making it absurd.

At any rate, I'm all for letting the player dictate his character's psychology. If he wants to play a psychopath, that's fine. If he is strongly suggested to play a psychopath, that's fine too. Forcing a player or taking her character out of her control is just bad form.

Sure, this is not about forcing players, but to make suggestions. As is just about anything concerning character.

The first part of Catharz' post is valid as well. The stereotypical disassociation that is usually applied to cyberware could (and if this system is implemented, should) also be applicable to habitual AR/VR users.

Mechanically characters are already punished for having low essence.
First Aid and magical healing takes dice penalties.
Its not fair to apply any other mechanical penalty to the mundanes who must turn to cyberware to futher there power.


Forcing any kind of psychological problem on a player can only lead to you having one less player.
Players who like psychological problems on there characters don't need and excuse to give them one. The effects of cyberware on people, isn't meant to be obvious which is why they dropped the rules for them.

And Jaid if anything cyberware would increase stamina. Machines don't suffer from fatigue like living things do. Cyberware requires no oxygen, and that is a huge boost to avoiding fatigue.
Who do you think gets tried first John McClane or Robocop?

Players should decided for themselves how cyberware effects them mentally. After all not everyone is going to have the same reaction to wired reflexs as everyone else.

Well one guy always sounds aloof and arrognant thanks to his mental boosters giving him a logic of 9. While another actually sounds kinda slow and even mentally handicaped because his mind is always else where.

One guy with wired reflexs may be hyper and talks a mile a minnute because he leaves them on to long. While another appears perfectly normal.

One 0.1 essence guy may be somber and miss the lost of tactile sensation his heavily cybered body is missing. Another may be violent and cruel.


if your going to force any kind of psychological problem on characters who choose to get cyberware why don't you just take there character sheets and play the game with out them.

too many dice to roll that way.

What I would prefer would be an optional system. Maybe a certain amount of optional mental flaws. I've never played with a system that used it, like Cyberpunk did IIRC. NEver played that system, jsut seen it. But it seems interesting to me.

Perhaps abatter question would be: Has anyone used this as a rule? How did it work out?

Again: This is not about forcing things on players, this is about 2 tings.

1.) Giving ideas and suggestions to players to enrich their roleplaying
2.) To give an idea how cyberware works on the majority of people, to set baseline, to give background.

Since the "cyberware brings mental problems" fluff has vanished from fluff I have not seen a single character with this theme. Mostly because people think it has gone.
I like this "low essence - mental problems" thing because of the dystopian setting. It makes the world darker and gives it flavor.

This is definitely not about rules! Its about ideas, guidelines and suggestions.

(Edit - posted before Serbitar's last post)

Okay, ideas:

I think it is more the types of cyberware than the "Essense" rating that should be used for ideas.

Someone who gets mnemonic enhancer could find out that enhanced memory is not a good thing for someone who commits acts of violence or gets injured on a regular basis. Post-traumatic stress is bad enough without remembering it all in perfect detail.

Things like a pain editor could mess a character up. Maybe when it's on, it's almost like sensory deprivation, but when it's off, things are too intense.

Too much VR, smartlinking, data displays, and so on, and the character might begin to feel a curious disassociation, like he is a character in a video game rather than someone acting out in real life.


btw, one good way to inspire the players would be to have a sammie buddy of theirs telling them about the downsides of his new piece of 'ware, or having a villain who exhibits cyber-psychosis of some sort.

I would like to see specific pieces of cyberware having noteable effects. Very low Essence should be more subtle, but there's a number of bits of 'ware I'd like to see some more fluff written out for, even if it's just a paragraph or so of "this is what living with bone lacing is like."

Yes, at first this was all about essence. But I really like the idea of cyberware specific drawbacks (again, not as a must, but as fluff and roleplay enrichment).

What about compiling an essay about "The dark side of ware?", writing some stuff for most of the ware thats out there? Could even be written mostly in Shadowtalk.

Anybody interested?

hmmm... you know, it wasn't that long ago someone commented something to the effect of "i'd like to be able to just create shadowtalk for official books". now, this isn't exactly official, but maybe we can track them down... or possibly they'll show up before i can find it in a search. who knows?

[edit] got it. digital heroin, in this thread, not to far down

so maybe you should get in touch with him... given you've got a rather large amount of material you're usually working on, you might want to farm stuff out.

heck, you might even consider starting up a new version of TSS/whatever there was before that. [/edit]

Actually I have been wanting to write some more SR related stuff and I think that this may be a good topic to launch myself back in with...also the thread has caught my eye for awhile now and is a very interesting topic to discuss.

The smarter than normal guy would be like a Mentat from Dune.

Mostly I vote no on such things because too many people have been exposed to pop psychology. You add in a few paragraphs about how ware might effect people’s actions and influence social trends and you get hordes of imbeciles coming out of the woodwork talking about how getting your eyes replaced should make you want to eat human flesh.

But since it’s you, I’ll throw in my real .02Y.

One of the biggest social effects of the information age I’ve seen so far involve memorization vs. knowing how to find information.

As information becomes easier to look up, people no longer practice memorizing things. So, for example, you could find the average rainfall in Brazil for me in a few minutes. But you would not be able to remember it if I asked you again tomorrow. After all, you could just look it up again. But one thing you might not notice is how you go about searching for the avg. rainfall figures. You have some idea where to look, have a pretty good BS detector, know to avoid phishing sites, and so on. So while the mental tools of the previous generations might have involved much more memorization, the mental tools of members of the information ages and much more in information retrieval and sorting. So, one of the biggest impacts of cyberware will essentially be having ‘net access in your head, all the time. You can be sitting on the beach and by watching the satellite photos of the weather, you know when it is time to pack up and go because a thunderstorm is moving in. To persons from a previous age you will seem to be some sort of oracle. Imagine things such as everyone opening their umbrellas just as the first drops of rain begin to fall.

People will might call you an information junkie, but that is missing the whole point do people call each other vision junkies because they walk everywhere with their eyes open?

No, more like adepts that take 3-d memory and photoreading.

Everything that a player character does in Shadowrun has impacts on psychological health. From the very basics of answering to different names (fake SINs, for example) causes disociation, on up to the act of killing another metahuman that of course causes all kinds of life long trauma.

Persistently interacting with worlds other than your own (such as immersive cyberspace or the astral plane) would naturally alter peoples' expectations of the world around them, which is basically just a fancy way of saying that it directly causes you to be batshit insane.

In fact, having your body replaced bit by bit with ceramics and plasteel is probably the least crazy-making and sanity defying thing that Shadowrun characters do with their lives. Of the basic Shadowrun archetypes (Mage, Adept, Hacker, Rigger, Street Sam), really only the Street Sam isn't constantly switching back and forth between different sets of physical laws that govern the world(s) which surround him. In short, by any modern definition of mental stability, the street sam is the only standard PC type that isn't running on empty from the get-go.

Adding madness to the side effects of cyberware is fine if that's what you want to do. It really just means that you're fed up with this shit where any player character can ever be a reasonably sane and balanced human being under any circumstances.

-Frank

And of course, as loss of essence means loss of emotions and empathy, the street sam is even less likely to go nuts...

There are plenty of people who spend much more time playing WoW or F.E.A.R than the average mage spends in in astral space. Fortune (used) to spend tremendous amounts of time on Dumpshock... Going batshit insane is typically much harder than presented.

The vast majority of soldiers who fought in WWI came home sane.

I voted no, but what I mean is that I like it the way it is now.
Empathy loss is mentioned, but you can choose whether it will affect your character or not.

This way, if you want to play someone slowly becoming inhuman because of his cyberware, you can do it. If you want your 0.001 essence character to feel emotions you can.

Furthermore, if you state explicitely that cyberware leads to mental disorder (and add rules for it) that'll lead to "magic (adepts) good, tech (streetsam) bad".

And cyberware isn't the only thing in a shadowrunner's life to affect psychology. Killing people is something that you don't do without any trouble. So you'll have to take those into account too if you want to be fair.

I support that and I also support magic having a serious toll on users. I would support magic having a GREATER toll than cyber. Cyberpsychosis is a great tool for adding grit to the game, but the designers of SR seem to have forgotten that having a path of selling the human soul for power (cyber) and contrasting it with accessing the divine powers of nature and the universe which can be used for good with no negative consequences (magic) really kills a lot of the philosophical questions cyberpunk poses. Magic should work with the expense of making a person less human, bringing the horrors over, killing puppies and raping virgins. Cyberware should just make you not care.

There was a now defenct Cyberpunk game that had a set of rules for cyberware causing mental problems. I don't recall the specifics right off hand though. They had a specific name for the condition, though I don't recall the specifics here either. It would be in line to say that the person would become withdrawn, more edgy and antisocial. The mechanic used was if the amount of cyberware was greater than a certain attribute (empathy I think it was), then they would have problems, and the greater the difference, the greater the severity of those problems. If a person went too far, they would run amok killing unti lthey were killed.

I do think that something like that would apply in SR. If you read the materials. SR is full of Sammies that are on the edge or outright psychopathic. There is mention of others that feel like they are losing themselves or aren't as attached to their bodies anymore. The best description of all of this would be from SR2's Cybertechnology. In it, you follow the story of a man who goes from his first hand spur to becoming a cyberzombie, and the effects it has on him. Let's just say you can see him losing his humanity a little at a time.

So, I do see it as being an issue. Without a mechanic for it in SR, its up to the GMs now, but I don't expect to really see anything hard and fast. The reason for that is simple: SR is too cyber dependant and making a rule where everyone with a lot of cyber goes nuts wouldn't be much fun.

I did have a my own system I used, I might poke around and see if it can be found.

No, I thought the general tone was that technology was going to be what saved us this time from the horrors as we weren't anywhere near advanced enough in magic as we we back in previous ages. This is cyberpunk -- technology is cool.

Ah sure, sorry, I was talking SR4.

I have never quite understood why getting a datajack played with your mind and made you a worse person, but summoning a Fire Element, of completely unhuman intelligence doesn't.

Any form of power whether it cyber or magic will play with the mind of the user.

Well, the datajack playing with your mind makes some sense. After all, you're drilling a hole through your skull in order to directly interface with technology. That's not to say that conjuring up sentient beings from a pile of Spirit Snax shouldn't play hell with your world belief.

Of course, if anybody should have psychological problems, it should be the face. After all, he has to hang out with the guy with who willingly replaced his functional limbs with metal, the guy who talks to invisible creatures from beyond the pale, the girl who can carry on a conversation with the internet, and the kid who has firsthand experience with being a helicopter on a daily basis.

I don't know why Dissonance, but that really earned a chuckle from me.

So any rules on Magic psychosis? Or should this have its own thread?

More random stuff:

In general, part of the assumption of cyberware reducing your empathy is that the ware sets up further apart from the group, in a sort of 'now that I am a transhuman, I have put away all such childish things'. One of the main points they miss, however, is that there already exists a large community of similar transhumans. Being able to self identify with a group is a great corrective mechanism for mental health. When human society large consisted of <sad lonely bubbles> it was easy to be cast out of your social group for deviant behavior. However, with the advent of information networks (and a large population) it becomes easy to find a group to belong.

In general, the full blow psychopaths (erm, its anti-social personality disorder now, isn’t it?) are that was because they can’t read the social queues of a group, which means that they are unable to belong to a group, and thus unable to use the social dynamics of a group to moderate their behavior. Of course, it’s also possible for the behavior of groups to get out of control as well.

I think it is important to add the mental effects of losing essence. I don't just mean from cyberware alone. Losing essence is losing the soul and it would be foolish to think that it doesn't affect not only the mental, but the emotional and physical side of the character. Most of this can be played out in the game through good old fashion RPGing. If you ever get your hands on it there is a great story in Cybertechnology that shows the effects of cyberware and bioware on the system. If I can get a link for people I will, it is a must read for any player with a street sam style character.

One thing they described was that having cyber eyes was like always watching television. It didn't feel like normal vision. The user quickly started feeling that everything was distanced, disconnected. When someone's leg was broken, it's like watching an actor on TV 'breaking' his leg, it doesn't feel real, hence the decrease in empathy.

Somehow though, I feel like summoning up sentient creatures and compelling them to do your will would similarly decrease your empathy.