I'm sure this topic's come up in the past, but as newcomer to the board I was interested if anyone has come up with a better set of rules for cyberlimbs than the ones in M&M? My impression is that they're generally too expensive, too Essence-unfriendly and plain subpar compared to meat-and-bioware to mess with except for the cool factor (or a gyromount arm). $100,000+ just doesn't seem worth it, even when packing smartlinks, spurs and shock hands in to take advantage of the Essence freebies.

Our approach has been halve the Essence, quarter the Nuyen cost, IIRC. More in the morning.

~J

we basically allways more or less house-ruled limbs in 3rd as they are in 4th with augmentation . . you get limbs according to your meat body stats and you have a little bit more of capacity to put things in . . namely as much as you want, as long as you do not go overboard and add gyromounts into your legs or foot anchors into your arms or anything like that . . but you still pay the usual money and essence cost . .
so you can buy your arm, put in smartlink, spur, handblades, nail-razors, climbing claws, magnetic system, gyromount, basic pocket secretary, personal comm unit, and so on and so on and so on if you put in one DNI to route all of that into your brain.
you still pay at least 1 essence and one heck-load of money, but your arm actually gets usefull after a certain ammount of money was put in *g*

is the best way to do things in my eyes.
so you don't have a body that is too weak to actually support the limb and you don't have a limb that would be actually too weak to support the body.
the strength/lifting and holding thing is a real bitch with that, as a troll would never be able to hang onto something by gripping on to it, if i remember correctly.
because he weights 200 to 300 kilo and his maximum str of 15 or 16 says he can hold STR+x5(90 kilo) without suffering stun damage and a maximum of STR x 20 for body combat turns means he can get up to 300 kilo and gets a serious stun wound for that. so if he got cyber legs, they would have to be at least str of 15 to support him for longer time and he'd still get hit with a serious stun damage every other time, if one were to only use the rules as written.

Current house rules we run with are:
Halve the base cost for the limbs.
Halve all increase stat costs.
Need a cybertors for increase stats four up.
No matter grade same ECU as basic limb.
Limb acts like plastic bone lacing for unarmed combat in addition to any body increases.
We also have red lining rules inspired by SR4.

yes, i realilize that, i just like to point it out ^^

It should be noted that a metahuman's own body mass is exempted from the carrying rules, so you should probably stop pointing it out

~J

so a str3 cyber-arm on a 300 kilo troll could support the bodyweight just fine, but he could not lift something else that weights 300 kilos ? O.o

Correct. If you want to be the one to open the can of worms of accounting for body mass, especially considering there aren't any rules enforcing characters having particular masses, be my guest—I'm staying well away.

~J

i ain't opening no can <.< . . we're house-ruling limbs as we see fit ^^