OK, so I'm actually letting one into my game. I need to double check.

Raising Decking from 6 to 7 with an IQ of 7 would normally cost 10.5 karma, right? So with a rating 3 mnemonic enhancer, it costs 7.5.
So, even more fun. Just raising the decking specialization from 6 to 7 would normally cost 3.5 points, so it would cost .5?

Or if I were a mage, learning a rating 4 spell would cost 1?
That's pretty damned cool.

What am I missing?

The ME does not apply its benefits to learning spells.

Yeah, only to learning/improving new skills. Though I might well rule that the mnemonic enhancer reduces the time taken to learn spells, if I were that way inclined and a mage was foolish enough to have one implanted given the other impacts.

You aren't missing anything, aside from the lack of half-points and the fact that if it ever takes stress the character in question will be having headaches permanently unless they get it removed.

~J

Nope, you're pretty much on the money as far as it goes. Except that AFAIK, you round up the karma cost. This things can be great for players. An example, spending about three weeks with a trained language teacher plus some lucky rolls allowed my PC to get up to Russian 4 from scratch for four karma. He decided to impress the Johnson since we'd been taking a lot of Yamatetsu jobs recently.

And on the damage/stress points thing, go with the nanite repair thingies. One of the greatest products ever invented if your GM uses the bioware stress rules a lot.

no, you round karma costs down. SR3, 245.

And there is a minimum cost of 1 Karma to improve a skill.

I hear ya. Our game has been rounding up since the beginning. Or, that's what the GM said to do game 2. However, one player knew the rules, and missed that question - so he'd been buying cheaper skills since the beginning of the game. In the end, it didn't mean much, but there was a bit of grumbling ... (only a bit mind you, it IS just a game!)

I dunno -- I know a few munchkins with infamously selective hearing.

-Siege

Check out one of the characters in our group (one of the highest-karma characters at a huge 225+ karma). Cobra

He's spent the following karma (with woulda been cost with an ME):

You round DOWN for karma..? Dang. A ding dang d'oh! Oh well, time to announce I was wrong but its a house rule which we're sticking to then...

Its throwback to SR2 where absolutely everything rounded up except where it benefitted the characters, in which case it rounded down! Now I find out that in SR3 not only does Detection Factor round up, but karma costs round down? Oops.

Oh well. I'll mention it to the game group and see what they wanna do. They've not complained about rounding up in the past and enough of them read the rule book regularly, so perhaps they aren't bothered. Damn damn damn...

If I saw someone doing things like what you describe, Sphynx, I might have more of a problem with the ME. In my experience, though, it's more often been a tool to prompt the quick learning of a skill that the team in general lacks rather than the hyperspecialization of a few skills.

~J

Ins't that even worse Kage? Now, because you're going from 0 to 3 for 3 karma ( instead of 8 ) you're getting 3 times the skills you'd get otherwise as a generalist type character? Hell, that's a Rigger's wet dream, any driving or B/R skill to 3 w/ 3 karma? Decent Task Pool and he's got the equiv of a 6 right from the get-go.

Nah, it's just not a good piece of Ware (or rather, it's TOO good).

Sphynx

It would be worse, except it's skills that the team doesn't have that they need in some situations, and the rest of the team is busy concentrating on their specialities.

~J

I don't think its really a problem if a character (or many characters) piuck up a bunch of skills at rating 3-4. Its pretty easy to duplicate those levels with a skillsoft, so its not a new issue with the ME. Such skill levles are nominally competant, but Shadowruners generally face situations where mere competance won't cut it- working in bad conditions, under a time limit, with injuries, etc.

You could give your characters every skill in the book at rating 3 for free, and it would still be farily easy for GM's to challenge them. Its just your adventures wouldn;t run into the "dead end, no way we can figure out to even TRY to get around this" sort of thing. To my mind, that's a GOOD thing. If GM's are depending on that sort of obstacle to make thier game a challenge, then SR is a pretty weak game.

On the other hand, the really cheap specializations do seem potentially unbalancing, especially in the fields where a specilization is effectively as good as the whole skill (eg, Computer / Decking).

I dunno, to me having a 'Computer / Decking' specialization is kinda like having a 'Pistols / Shooting' specialization, or an 'Unarmed Combat / Making Things Hurt' specialization.

The computer/decking example only holds because most people don't see a use for "Computers" outside of decking and running the Matrix.

However, considering the degree of computerization portrayed in 2060, computer literacy seems at least as important as being able to read today.

-Siege

There are a LOT more things a decker can do with that computer skill. Programming, satellite hookups, a base for a background skill. And there are more specializations than decking. Specialising in Decking at character gen gives you an edge for a while, but you can easily start to regret it later, just like any other skill.

Scale back a bit -- why would a samurai spend points on a computer skill?

Mostly a rhetorical question because being unable to use a computer in SR 2060 would be like being illiterate in today's society --> really difficult.

But there isn't much call for computer skill rolls outside of decking, nevermind day-to-day life.

-Siege