Why not simply label the Specific Essence Hole Rules as Optional Rule?
That wouldn't take too much space... and allows everyone that want's to use it with more 'security' as implementing it as a Tweak.

The fact that you can fill holes is already stated in the first chapter, leaving the Generic Essence Hole in place.

This change was not implemented at the last minute and was added to drafts made available more than a month before Augmentation went to print. The authors and playtesters had plenty of time to provide feedback and many did.

You are mistaken and have misunderstood the rule or how the calculation is performed. The "Essence hole" is not factored directly into the total Essence loss at all. In fact, no subtotals are modified at all when anything is removed. If 1 Essence point worth of cyberware is removed the character's cyberware (sub)total remains at 3.5 (he just has 1.0 of that total available to reuse).

In your example:

One character has 4 Essence worth of Cyberware and 3.5 Essence worth of Bio-ware. He actually pays 4 Essence for his Cyberware, and 1.75 Essence for his Bioware - leaving him with only .25 Essence.

He gets a cyberlimb removed.

His cyberware essence loss total remains at 4 since the 1.0 lost to the cyberlimb hasn't regrown and continues to count towards the cyberware total (the 1.0 cyberlimb has just been replaced with a 1.0 "Essence hole" which can be used for something else) and his Bio-cost is still 3.5.

Again, I repeat, the rule says nothing about altering totals or subtotals when anything is removed. Calculations are only necessary when something is added.

Peter, if it actually said that, this would just be an unnecessarily complicated and silly rule that improves the game in no way and serves only to irritate. But what it actually says is this:

OK, what it actually says is that the Essence hole is a cost added in at the end of the calculation ("A disparity between the total Essence Cost of her implants and her current Essence."), and that when you fill it again it fills in at the beginning of the calculation ("deduct the Essence hole from the new implant's Essence cost before applying it to your total.")

Technically as you have it in right now, Essence Holes never go away because they are being used as currency to purchase further implants instead of losing Essence. So if you have a .25 Essence hole and a 1.2 Essence hole you actually still have to keep track of that - forever, and further implants will be paid for out of those holes first and then out of your Essence in a dynamic fashion based on whether Cyber or Bio has a larger cost (after reductions from Essence holes).

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This is serious Man and Machine bullshit. It's really complicated and it fucks the game right in the ass. Partly, this is obviously my fault because when I saw it going through revisions I skimmed to the example and saw that in the example everything appeared to be working properly, not noticing that in fact you had cocked it all up for no reason.

Aaargh!

-Frank

You are correct in that the wording is unclear. The final sentence of this quote should end "to your cyberware or bioware (sub)total." In fact, it did in previous drafts. My bad for not rechecking the version.

P.84 of the BBB explains how to calculate the total Essence loss from the two separate tallies so there is no contradiction there.

You are also correct in that Essence holes factor into the subtotals until they are filled. The fact that they factor in at this stage is the only significant difference from the single Essence total and it's most obvious result is to make cyber-intensive and bio-intensive characters hard to inverse.

As usual your opinion will be taken into consideration when errata comes up.

There only three values.

Under the core rules you keep a continuous tally of your Essence loss to cyberware and another for bioware. The lowest of the two (sub)totals is halved and then both are added together. The resulting Essence loss is subtracted from 6 to yield your Essence rating - this means keeping track of 2 values, adding the highest to half of the lowest and deducting that from your 6 Essence - so 3 values at best though the final one is derived.

This basic mechanic has been in place since the beginning and one often overlooked aspect of it is that strangenesses can occur when one (sub)total is increased over the original "dominant" one. Note this has nothing to do with Essence holes in Augmentation, but occurs every time the lower subtotal increases above the value of the higher subtotal.

In Augmentation, once a piece of cyber or bio is removed the 2 subtotals values are unchanged (though one now has an unused Essence hole to be filled). Consequently no stats need to be changed or recalculated until that hole is filled and exceeded by new implants. This is as complicated as jotting down your Essence hole beside the subtotals. The derived Essence attribute/value does not need to be recalculated until the existing Essence hole is exceeded.

Frank has correctly pointed out that the writeup is unclear and even misleading on this point (citing the "Essence total" rather than the "subtotals" in one critical line). I will be taking his opinion and others under advisement and passing them on to Rob when we go for errata.

Meanwhile Frank has posted an edit of the writeup in the Augmentation errata thread, those of you unsatisfied with the current rules are free to use that.

Not exactly. In my version your Lifetime non-payment Essence losses come straight out of Orange line #5, which in turn is capped by line #4 subtracted from line #1 but not otherwise linked.

So if line #4 goes up, line #5 may go down. But Line #5 doesn't go up if line #4 goes down; and if line #5 is presently lower than line #4 and #1 would generate (for example: Blood Spirit attack), then nothing happens.

Having a special number of lifetime Essence losses and then creating a 1:1 correspondance between the output of the subtotals and the final Essence is, I think, a bad move. For one thing it implies that Essence can be restored once lost, which it very specifically shouldn't be.

-Frank

Actually no, that's not what Synner said. I was clarifying the intent of the rules on p.182 before we botched the editing.

What Synner actually said was that the #1 and #2 subtotals from Yellow are simply noted besides the #2 and #3 Orange subtotals. These remain unchanged (in fact, none of your Orange values are affected in any way by removal of implants, so no calculations are necessary at this point).

When something new is implanted you compare the essence cost of the new implant with the existing Essence hole (Yellow #1 or #2). If the Essence loss of the new implant being installed is inferior to the Essence hole then you simply adjust the Essence hole - no changes are made to your Orange values at all.

If, and only if, the essence loss of the new implant exceeds the existing Essence hole (Yellow #1 or #2), do you have to recalculate Orange #2 and #3 subtotals, cascading into changes to your Orange #4 and #5 (identical to the resolution of any new implant that calls for further Essence loss).

As Frank has dutifully pointed out this is not clear even in the current writeup (after comparing to previous drafts its clear some remnants were left in in final editing) and there will undoubtedly be errata.

I believe that the fact that playtest groups found this mechanic "easier" has simply to do with the fact that you don't need to recalculate the Orange values every time you implant something. You just keep track of the Yellow #1 and #2 values and when those are "refilled" or exceeded do you recalculate the Orange values.

The problem is... you are changing the Orange values. Indeed, the only way to know if your Essence drops or not is to change the Orange values, which are themselves always the combined total of the Essence cost of your implants.

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All you've done by creating the new specific Essence hole is to produce an extra step whereby if the new Orange value is less than or equal to the old orange value plus the "Essence hole" value your Essence doesn't change. But you're still adding and subtracting the same amount of numbers at that point when you don't change the Essence value.

And then of course if you do change the Essence value it's actually a lot more math because the only information you've gained by doing the required "Essence hole" subtraction is the difference in that Orange subtotal - which you then have to add back into that subtotal exactly as if you'd just added it in from the beginning.

Of course, that additional net change subtotal isn't even something convenient like "the amount your Essence changes" - as you still have to compare the new subtotals of cyber- and bio- to determine which is halved before deciding how much your Essence changes.

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Or to make a concrete example:

Let's say that you've got a cyberlimb (Essence cost 1) and a Synaptic Booster (Essence Cost .5). Now, you have an Essence of 4.75 - because the Bioware costs half Essence.

Now we remove the Cyberlimb (freeing up an Essence "hole" of 1). Our Essence is still 4.75 of course because Essence doesn't recuperate on its own.

So now we put in some more cyberware, let's say Muscle Replacement 2. This has a cost of 2, and according to the p. 128 version we're looking at subtracting 1 from 2 and then adding the result back to 1(!) See, the hole is subtracted from the cost, but the total cost includes the hole, so the subtraction cancels out in the end. You end up having a Cyberware Essence cost of 2 regardless of whether you were keeping track of the "Cyberware Essence hole" - it's just that this way you subtract the hole value from the cost of your new implants before adding the remainder to the hole value.

That's why people are so incredulous. Putting aside the weird implications or the botched prepositions, the entire process as intended is a waste of time. It factors out at the end of the day and yet involves a couple of extra math steps for nothing.

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So when you say that people found this "easier" - other people with math backgrounds are actually offended. It literally can't be any easier to do it this way, because it's in all ways less work to not do it.

You're asking people to subtract C and then add the same C immediately afterwards in the middle of their equation. It's puzzling. People think you aren't being straight with them.

-Frank

One final time, cause I really do have better things to do.

No. Reread my post. I did not say the Orange values do not change. In fact I said they do change. What I said was that they only change when something new is added and then only when that something new exceeds the existing bioware or cyberware-specific Essence hole(s).

So if you had a 1.0 Essence hole noted next to your cyberware subtotal you only need to worry about changing your Orange values (ie. the stats on your sheet) if your new implant exceeded 1.0 Essence. If it was only 0.8 Essence you'd just adjust the Essence hole value to notation "0.2 Essence hole" and leave all the Orange values where they stood.

Before you jump at that read this post through.

This is incorrect because of the point I made above and the one I'm going to reiterate next. The math you do (only when a new implant exceeds the existing Essence hole) is exactly the same as you would to recalculate your Orange values normally (ie. recalculate your Orange #2 and #3 to yield a new Orange #4 and derive from that an Orange #6).

The idea was that you save yourself from recalculating anything until the cyber or bio Essence hole was filled.

This is only true if you ignore what my reply to the first time you made this point on page 3 of this thread. As I told you in my earlier response: the edited version that saw print is misleading and that for clarity the end of the third sentence of the first paragraph should have read

(I also noted it did state so in earlier drafts)

What this does is make your Yellow #1 and #2 "credits" towards Orange #2 and #3 and there is no Yellow #3 at all.

If you're not willing to accept that there's no point in continuing this discussion.

I hope that last post clarifies, once again, what I meant, because I really don't have the inclination to repeat it.

I'll repeat what I said above and which Doc Funk obviously missed.

I believe the reason this calculation was preferred is because you don't even touch your "Orange values" until the cyberware and bioware specific Essence holes are filled and exceeded. It makes filling the Essence holes a "sideboard" mechanic rather than forcing the recalculation every time.

So to use your example above:
Let's say that you've got a cyberlimb (Essence cost 1) and a Synaptic Booster (Essence Cost .5). Now, you have an Essence of 4.75 - because the Bioware costs half Essence.

Now we remove the Cyberlimb (freeing up an Essence "hole" of 1 to your cyberware subtotal). You still have a cyberware subtotal of 1 (including an Essence hole of 1) and a Bioware subtotal of 0.5 which would be halved to give you 0.25 if you actually needed to recalculate Essence, which you don't (you already now it doesn't grow back).

So now we put in some more cyberware, let's say Muscle Replacement 2. This has a cost of 2, and according to what I've now told you twice, this exceeds the Essence hole of the cyberware subtotal by a full 1 point and calls for recalculation of your subtotals (and hence your Essence). So you simply do the standard calculation: new cyberware subtotal of 2 + 2/bioware subtotal of 0.5/2 = 2.25 deducted from your Essence lowering it from 4.75 to 3.75. (This part of the process works as described in the core rules and every other variation posted here. The thing that would make the intended rule is that you save yourself from having to do this until the specific Essence hole is plugged. Note that for convenience we're skipping the part where you have to add together 8-9 implants to calculate your cyberware/bioware subtotals. Having a credit on the side saves you from calculating that: you know how much you can plug in for "free" without having to recalculate things until you exceed that credit (at which point you use the normal/BBB rule to calculate your subtotals and essence loss again).

Just to bear this out: If instead of Muscle Replacement 2, you had installed an higher-grade cyberlimb with a 0.9 Essence cost, no recalculations would be necessary at all. You would just subtract 0.9 from 1.0 Essence hole "credit" listed beside your cyberware subtotal and change the notation to a 0.1 Essence hole - meaning you don't touch your "Orange values" (ie. the Essence stats on the sheet) at all and you don't have to add together all your cyber implants and all your bio implants and then perform the subtotal recalculations, and the total essence loss calculation.

I acknowledge (again) that at some point we botched it in editing by dropping the "cyberware and bioware sub" before the "total" (see my point on the intended writeup above). But this "sideboard" is how the rule was intended to work and why some people thought it was easier (I reiterate that I have not expressed a personal opinion either way).

To reiterate: Instead of recalculating your "Orange values" for every single implant you add, you "run a sideboard" with your Yellow values (#1 and #2 only) and save yourself the hassle of calculating the cyberware and bioware subtotals, recalculating total essence loss, and then comparing with your standing value to see if you have actually lost Essence.

With this mechanic you only had to do that once the cyberware or bioware Essence hole/"credit" ("sideboard" if you will) was exhausted/filled.

I hope this last post clarifies things because I really have no interest in revisiting it. Your opinions and any we get via email will be taken into consideration when we go to errata.

That's it from me. I've got other work to do.

Nasty someone.

So that would be a 'yes' to my question... thanks.

To clarify, most people here are used to Bioindex and the fact that you have to make the choice of Bioware or Cyberware before you reduce your Essence.
The actual cause of the outcry would be that such rule was snuck in through the back-door, when the main rules seemed to imply otherwise.