Actually, Fortune, he wanted info that the latest revision has been shipped from the printers.

I didn't say "fails," I said light stress. As in, equivalent to minor upset in the organ's functioning. "Deadly" stress is organ failure, but even light stress can kill and, worse, it's completely irreparable. When I asked Fanpro about it, I was told light stress was not supposed to be so dangerous.

An the danger of light stress on bioware is funny, because you can be blasted down to a stump with no arms and legs, with massive attribute stress on all attribute stress, and SR's medical technology can heal you back to full health with no essence loss. Limbs and organs can be replaced, attribute stress undone...

But once bioware is stressed, it is permanently stressed, irreparably stressed, and that one point of stress can kill you. Light stress on a platelet factory can give a stroke a day, while light stress on toxin extractors will leave you an osteoporotic cripple.

It would've taken a 3-word errata to fix that problem, too.

What the hell? In my book lightly stressed platelet factories makes your fingers and feet cold sometimes. A lightly stressed toxin extractor means you have to take a vitamin once in a while.

Are you reading the correct sections?

Yeah, let's think about this:

Such an innocent little statement, neh? The "only" problem from light stress on platelet factories is that your hands get cold and tingle?

First, do you know how bad is your circulation if you have body part temperature drops and anoxia to the extent your nerves tingle? I mean, this is so bad that it's equivalent to sleeping on your limb and shutting off blood flow, like a tourniquet.

Second, if you're having clogged-up capillaries in your hands and feet, not to mention reduction in flows to those areas, do you really think your brain will be spared?

Imagine your brain suffering blood flow reductions adequate to cause "cold extremities and tingling sensations."

And do you really think those effects will happen without clots forming? How long do you think it'll be for someone suffering from "cold extremities and tingling sensations" in their limbs due to over active platelet production to suffer a stroke?

Re: Vitamins.

Sure, vitamins will fix the problem of toxin extractors right quick.

The problem is, you have to know about it first. Vitamin deficiencies are horribly insidious effects. You don't know you have vitamin-C deficiencies until casual collisions in crowded places cause nose bleeds; you don't know you have calcium deficiencies until your arm bones crack in a simple practice session of karate; etc. This is how healthy young women end up with osteoporosis when they're in their 20s - they don't realize their low-calorie, high-exercise regimes are crippling them. (See: Female Athlete Triad.) There's no pain, no deprivation, no urge to suddenly start taking corrective actions.

The few runners that might get regular blood work checks or have biomonitors with diagnostic subprocessors might realize what their toxin extractors are malfunctioning, but most vitamin deficiencies are so damn insidious you never know they're happening until they've had their effects.

You've never had tingly sensations due to platelet-thickened blood, have you? That's an entirely different cause behind numbness and tingling than sitting on a limb and locally cutting off circulation. Platelet overproduction is a system-wide, clog-your-hands, clog-your-brains problem. Logically, you cannot limit tingling and numbness due to platelet overproduction to just your hands and feet - there's no "extreme" in that extrapolation, just basic knowledge of the circulatory system.

The errata that would eliminate the concerns had nothing to do with touching on the effects of bioware stress, but rather would enable the last point of bioware stress to be removed. It was so simple, just 3 bloody words:

Easy fix. Simple fix. No need to alter existing stress rules at all, no need to touch all those stress effects, just add 3 little words, and the long-term effects of light bioware stress are no longer cause for concern.

Yes, they do. The game rules very clearly establish that a platelet factory with light stress sludges up the blood so badly that tingling and reduced temperatures occur in the extremities. The brain is thus directly endangered.

Not directly, no, but the inability to fix bioware's last stress point when SR's medical technology can work miracles is ludicrous. It's just a 3-word patch to get rid of the issue - allow bioware to be fixed completely, problem goes away.

The rules established how dangerous light stress is in some items of bioware; you can ignore all those entries if you want, but I'm not. Instead, if I'm going to alter rules, I'm not going to alter a dozen different bioware stress entries, I'm going to tack on 3 simple words to one sentence and allow bioware stress to be completely repaired.

Wrong. If you are able to heal the last stress point on bioware, you don't have to suffer its ill effects long enough for it to be a problem. In the case of the platelet factory, you wouldn't be pumping sludge for blood long enough (before it's fixed) for there to be a significant risk of strokes.

Once with platelet factory: the PC had blackouts and saw stars due to poor blood flow in the brain (no strokes). The platelet factory was repaired, removing the last stress point.

Once with nephritic screen, causing vitamin-C deficiencies (scurvy). Again, the nephritic screen was simply repaired of its last stress point.

Since then, no one's taken platelet factory again (no bioware-heavy types for any of the SR GMs IMG) and bioware stress is checked for whenever any PC takes deadly damage, so no further bioware stress side effect incidents have cropped up.

But that all depends on bending the rules one way or the other: either ignore stress effects or ignore the inability to repair the last point of bioware stress.

This isn't quite like the danger in retractable spurs (beware spontaneous ejection while scratching your groin or chin). In a game where you can completely heal mangled limbs and organs, the only way to fix bioware costing tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands of nuyen) is to just replace it with a new piece, and for problems that are supposed to be minor ("light" stress, fer chrissakes) but turn out to be very dangerous.

And the fix is to add 3 words to one sentence, cross-referencing existing trauma surgery rules.

Already done in my book. Actually, I added 5 words; "...without Trauma surgery or Magic."

In that case I'd wager that no character has ever had an actual stroke from a lightly-stressed platelet factory implant in the history of Shadowrun. As such, it's not really a problem for anyone


On repairing that last point, it's really unnecessary in my games; light stress never has a tangible game-mechanics penalty in the books and I don't make any up. It's just RP fodder as the character limbers up before a run or takes an advil or hurls in the toilet or whatever, reminiscing about that time he took a hit to the stomach and had to stop eating live rats for a few days. It's plenty fun.

I jsut have to say, thank you for that incredible image -- it's something I'd never really explicitly thought of, but I find it so very morbidly amusing.

on another note, reading about the severity of stress now makes me seriously reconsider the getting of bioware for characters. =/ No longer that magic cure-all, lol.