As far as I can tell, RAW for customised cyberlimbs is you can customise them to natural limits with no attention paid to what your actual physical stats are. I.E with a Agility of 3, you can customise to 6.

Now, the 2 examples I've just looked at in 4A have them matching current physical stats - The street sam sample and the example in the customisation section for the limbs. I'm pretty sure this is RAI.

Thoughts?

Presumably, yes. Anything too good to be true, isn't.

Well, from all the description about customized cyberlimbs the RAI is that it is fitted to match your actual stats, but the RAW very very clearly doesn't have a limitation like that. With such a large discrepancy I think what happened is that the fluff reason that customized cyberlimbs were invented was to accommodate trolls/orks, but at some point runners (and others) figured out that you could slap that troll grade limb onto a human even if the human wasn't super buff, within limits of course.

So, I don't know if RAI is really that it matches stats, or that RAI intended for people to take advantage of cyberlimbs in this way.

Honestly from as much as I hear people gripe about how useless cyberlimbs are, I don't see any reason not to allow this.

Except for the people that bolt on 4 of them to build body 9 armoured tanks on a meat body of 1, no complaining there

I generally customise to current augmented or natural max, whichever is lower, but that's personal preference. RAW is, as you said, pretty clear. I was just curious on what people thought RAI might have been.

I think those are mostly experiments in 'see, cyberlimbs can be useful' than real character concepts.

As I said, RAI is hard to tell, because the fluff states fairly clearly what they were intended for, but RAW quite clearly says it can be used for other things. Due to the number of errors and such in the game in general, it is hard to say if they did this intentionally or not.

My personal guess though is that RAI is RAW in this case. But I could easily be wrong.

Where does the cyberlimbs are useless thing come from? Two characters I'm building right now both have them, one full, one partial.

Oh yeah thats a real smart plan, just make sure you nver get anywhere near a toxin of anykind or your finished

I see customized cyberlimbs as an option to save capacity, with the tradeoff of a significantly higher price. So customizing a limb over natural stats is fine for me.

To be effective you have two options with cyberlimbs:
1.)Take one partial limb to get essence reduction for certain pieces of ware.
2.) Go full replacement.
Everything in between will seriously hurt your attributes. Average or minimum in most situations is pretty bad unless you pay additional BP/Karma to get the meat attributes up as well.

It's necessary in or to accomidate metatypes with high augmented values. If every cyberlimb started at 3 and you had to use capacity to up strength/agility/body a maximum of 7 points, then you would be unable to ever achieve an attribute higher than 10 with a cyberlimb.

Now, the only reason to use a custom cyberlimb to increase an attribute is if your augmented max for that attribute is higher than 10, or the limb doesn't have enough capacity to support all the tricks you want plus the cyberlimb enhancement. Customization is vastly more expensive than using the enhancement. It's already pretty trivial to get strength and agility above the natural max via augments and those augments are ignored for the purpose of strength and agility on the limb.

I see no problem with cyberlimb enhancements with strength and agility. I have only minor issue with cyberlimb customization for body due to the lack of ways to directly increase body.

I don't know, my Sasha has one full arm and it has better stats overalll then rest of her, so not hurting stats at all and actually she has 2 more agility when shooting with that arm.
Ofcource from min/max perspective it's still un optimal, as i could have used the money spend on the arm to raise her agility by that 2 points by upping her muscle toner to rating 4 :cyber

Edit: changed hand to arm

Then you have a very generous/lenient GM. Stats of partial limbs should only be used if only that partial limb is doing an action. To me shooting involves mre than just the hand. With rifles or other two-handed weapons you could easily argue "careful coordination of several limbs" and thus force the player to take the minimum.

My point exactly.

That part is debatable. Does shooting only require your hand (fingers/wrist), or does it need your full arm?

I bet shooting a pistol uses your full arm, thus no bonus agility.

Also, he said "partial limb." A cyberhand is a "partial limb." Because what he said was "partial limb" or "full body."

"I do not aim with my eye. One who aims with his eye has forgotten the face of his Father.

I do not shoot with my hand. One who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his Father.

I do not kill with my gun. One who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his Father. I kill with my heart."

Where is that quote from?

The Gunslinger, by Stephen King.

Right, but its actually entitled The Dark Tower.

Well if you want to be pedantic, the series is named The Dark Tower, the first book is titled The Gunslinger.

Fair enough.

Hehe, and it's *entitled*, apparently.

Apparently it's *entitled,* hehe.

Hey, you stole my comma!

I did. I tied it all up with rope and a pretty bow on top, and left it on the train tracks.

I await its rescue, while I wring my hands and cackle all the while.

You may have left it on the train tracks, but this thread has gone off the rails!

...That was completely unintentional and I tip my hat to you for highlighting it.

Dammit, where it should say full arm instead of full hand, which by the rules makes no sense as a term.
In my defence i'm going to say that in finnish, both hand and arm mean same think.

Don't worry. Anatomy is an irritating subject. If I asked everyone to point to their wrist most would probably get it wrong.

Am I missing something here? The wrist should be the bones of the hand connected to ulna and radius. Aren't there non-latin words for those bones? They sound so medical.

Most people. I expect the population of these forums to be abnormal in the response.

If I said wrist, a lot of people will point to their arm where they would wear a wristwatch.

It's also featured as a plot point in the Dr. McNinja story arc Spooky Stuff!

OK I forgot about that.

I looked it up and thought you meant the distinction between the wrist (bones) and the wrist joint (cartilage and other stuff between the bones). where you wear the watch (unless it's loose and slides down) is clearly on the forearm. Weird, what some people think.

So enough derailing back on topic, or are we done with the original subject?

So now a question at least relating to the topic, how lenient are you guys with the usage of the torso and head? According to the book they are just shells and as such not supposed to have their own motors i.e. STR AGI BOD, and lack the capacity for major upgrades. Still they are essential for many actions, or have you never tried to escape from a pinning move? Immobilizing head and shoulders is essential for a good hold. Those sections however would only be encased by the cybertorso and skull. Woe to anyone with natural attributes of 1.

All very confusing because I do wear my watch on my wrist , unless the wrist is somewhere besides the bendy part between my hand and my forearm.

While the torso might not have their own motors, I believe the shell is built considering a certain amount of force being used. If you have a cyberarm with STR 10, you could lift a 100kg object soley with the arm, but your torso (and legs) might not have the structure to help you lift the object, in this case, I think that STR of the torso should be used only as a threshold for the highest STR you can put on a limb.

And thus making cyberlimbs even less competitive. the enhancement rule (no more than +3 enhancement without torso) is enough IMHO.

They need to be useful (at least conditionally) without being all-or-nothing. The rules can be structured for that, so it's not the best argument in favor of 'loopholes'.

With starting attributes of 3/3/3 cyberlimbs can already start higher than the character. I think to keep it simple all base cyberlimbs should have been 'custom' and started with the characters attributes. Then again abusing cyberlimbs if one of the few things that can keep human street sams up to par with the orc or troll, once they've both maxxed the availability and capacity of a limb they pretty much end up with the same attributes.

I forgot about that rule (never been a cyberlimber kind of player).

That only limits you to 9 if you're customizing to 6, so it's not exactly a stopper.

It is for everyone who isn't a standard human.

Well, given that the best you can get otherwise tends to be 4 over your natural stat anyway, and most people don't have maxed natural stats in the first place it isn't really that much of a stopper. I mean, sure, you can't hit augmented max with the limb, but they can't hit augmented max anyway.

I don't know what you're talking about, Mäx. Other races can customize even higher, obviously. My point is that max+3 is plenty, not that it's literally the augmented max for everyone.

Best you can get is 5 over natural stat for Str/Agi and 1 over natural stat for Body. Suprathyroid (+1 Str/Agi/Rea/Bod) and Muscle Toner/Augmentation (+4 Agi/Str), or Muscle Replacement (+4 Str/Agi).

A troll with exceptional attribute (Strength) and genetic optimization for strength would fall 1 short of his augmented max. Having one or the other would have a 11/16 value for strength and still be have an obtainable augmented max.

However, it is impossible for any non-magician* to hit the augmented max on body without cyberlimbs.

* I don't know spells well enough to know if this is a certainty.

Well... The Increase Body Spell can allow a Mage to reach Augmented Maximums...

Well it can allow anyone to reach their augmented max at body, the caster isn't limited on casting it on himself and sometimes it might be a better idea to cast it on the Troll tank

Indeed... of course, casting the spell on the Troll Tank is going to induce a lot more drain than casting it on the mage will...