Strength and agility varying on limbs seem fairly straight forward. BBB says use the lowest stat in involved -logical and playable. Armor however is only on stat compiled from all the gear on your person. Is it unbalancing to have each spec of armor add up to that monstrous total? Or does this force us to use a hit location table, and all the complications that arise from that? How do you guys handle it?

I just do it the way the books says (and you describe), and just handwave away any minor inconsistencies.

I take the sum of the armor for all limb locations and divide by 5, rounding normaly. So someone with an Armor 4 cyberarm and cyberleg (total 8) gets 2 bonus points of armor to add to there total. This doesn't work with partial limbs, but I've never had someone try and armor one of those.

-- edit I hate that stupid 8) smiley guy, always shows up when I don't want him.

it might be worth considering allowing armored partial limbs to add their armor only in melee. they'd basically be built-in shinguards and forearm guards.

By RAW, you add the armor from cyberlimbs directly to the armor total, much like a helmet or a shield.

Because everyone knows it harder to shoot you in the head when you have artificial legs.

Yeah, I'd be a bit more comfortable with the heavily abstracted damage resistance rules if they didn't add in things like armor plated cyberhands, protective eye covers and a regeneration ability that can be bypassed by a called shot to the head.

actually, the protective eye covers do only protect your eyes.

That's kind of my point though; bypassing armor and hit locations are highly abstracted in this game yet they put in a few items (like eyeball armor and head shots to stop regeneration) that don't mean anything if you're not aiming for particular areas. It's hardly gamebreaking, but it's also not tidy design, even if eye covers really are just essentially a cosmod.

SR is full of things where hit location is important, but they simultaneously deny that it is. For example, taking a panther cannon hit in the shin of your cyber leg isn't going to send you to the hospital, but it's going to cost you serious money.