Ok I hear a people talking about how cool and pure it is to play totally uncybered awakeneds. This sentiment is usually brought up as an aside so no one has really talked about it much. My specific question is can anyone actually articulate the appeal of this style? I've heard "I just don't like it", but is there more?

There is an aesthetic appeal to purist design.

It is straightforward, no-bullshit and streamlined.
Simplicity carries an inherent beauty for many.

Saying "i won't stuff any augmentation in my caster, instead i'll take sensitive system" is a form of purist design- and, in case of characters designed for short-term campaigns or oneshots, also mechanically absolutely viable.

I don't mind augmented awakeneds, but must admit that i currently don't have any in my portfolio.
Probably because i don't have any logic-based casters, or because abusing cram instead of getting synaptic accelerators fits my shaman's style, i'm not certain.

I think a lot of it also comes from earlier editions where it was much more difficult to play a mage with any cyber.

But easier to play an adept with a lot of bio.

I havn't played too many cybered Awakened, just a couple, but i'm not against it at all. I just havn't come up with too many situations where I felt it necessary to cyber the awakened, from a character standpoint. Again, i have no problems with it whatsoever and if folks prefer to play natural or cybered to the gills near burnouts, go for it.

Now, from a purely technical standpoint, i can see the appeal of it. Numerically, you can purchase your Logic 4, OR you can take Logic 3, 50,000 nuyen for 10 BPs, and pick up a Cerebral Booster, Muscle Toner 1, Muscle Augmentation 1, and bam, you just got 3 attribute points for(less than) the price of one(technically, that combo costs 25,000). For just a point of magic; instead of 5(if they didnt hard max) they cast with a very respectable 4. And they can always up this to 5(their natural max), and initiate, etc. In the old days, cybered casters were evil. Sure, they had to be careful of those exploding power foci(well, in 1-2e, 3e did away with it), but they could be scary indeed; not to mention Expendable Fetishes. These were a wonderful tool that let folks cast those force 2 spells at force 4, if you didnt mind carrying pockets full of marbles, feathers, beads, or whatever else you happened to use for it.

Looking at the other side, i can kinda see why folks like the 'purist' approach. They are indeed perfectly viable; ive played plenty of non cybered awakened and they preformed just fine. Some folks i guess just like the 'natural feel' of the characters. And yeah, in the end, they can reach some scary amounts of power. Adepts get more points, mages get more magic, mystic adepts can become very, very powerful(in quite a long time, but damn.)

It used to be that no Mage or Adept would willingly destroy that part of him that was magical, by encumbering himself with cyberware.

A Mage with more than the minimal amount of cyberware was someone on the downward path to the Burnt Out Mage - desperately clinging onto the glory and power he once had, using cyberware to bolster his effectiveness.


It depends on you, and how much you get into the spirit of SR - players can bolt and build their character with nary a thought of what makes the character tick, but Magic is meant to be wonderful and what makes you feel alive..
..Not just "oh, if I take 1 point of Magic, I can see into the Astral plane and see people in the dark before I shoot them".


I guess the nearest we get are athletes and physically very active people who suddenly can't be that way anymore, because of injury or circumstance..
..They spend hours/days/months enjoying their atheletism, and would never willingly give up those moments of zen-like spirituality.

Except for the archetypes (meaning : typical, suggested player characters) of the burned-out mage and his less desolate and depraved relative, the combat mage, who both happen to have been around since SR1 (the latter since Sprawl Sites).
The game's motto has always been "where man meats magic and machine", not "where machine and magic always band together to srew over man" or "where machine and magic stare briefly at each other, then hide in terror, shivering in disgust, while man tells us what true roleplayers do".

Both ways are completely within the spirit of the setting, both happen to have mechanic advantages, neither is "true" or whatever.

SR has, from it's very beginning, been about the clash of technology and magic.
Including both their fusion and their violent mutual rejection.

Thanks for pointing out the purist angle. I guess the blending of tech and magic just seemed like such to the point of SR that I didn't really see that. Also I'm really grateful for Rasumichin's post, as I couldn't have said it that well.



Yeah my cousin was a junior olympic foilist. Doing fencing and disaster relief destroyed his shins. That was one of the harderst thing I've help support someone though

Actually, I was referring to the repeated inferences and mentions in the rules and the novels of how dedicated a Mage must be to practice, learning and study of his craft..
..And thus would not want to throw away the thing he's dedicated his life to, for a bit of 'ware.


SR was much about the differing [and forced] paths of machine and man - there were those with cyberware, and those with magic..
..But they didn't really mix [except for those Mages who took a little 'ware].

Without those separate paths, there's nothing to stop anyone having high levels of each.

6 essence = 6 magic, 5.89 essence = 5 magic. thats how my group looks at it anyway

...while I tend to champion the concept of the unaugmented adept, the original KK was the burnout (bio). A lot of this stemmed from the old Magic loss rule for deadly wounds in previous editions. I found it much more advantageous to Initiate, then burn out that point with bio implants while maintaining a 6 MA (thus giving her a decent chance of not losing a magic point should the situation arise). In the end she was a grade 5 Adept with a 7 MA (the campaign ended before she was able to get the new bio she wanted).

I always dislike the assumption that people always value and cherish their gifts and work to maximize them to their fullest. A lot of people view their talents as merely a means to an end. Sure, most truly exceptional professionals combine talent with genuine passion for what they do (how else could they maintain the necessary focus to outpace everyone else?), but in that second tier you'll find a mix of people who either have natural talent but lack the drive or people who have the drive but lack the talent. Just look at athletes-- For each guy out there who maximises their potential and becomes an all-star there's literally dozens of young athletes who never reach their full potential and mostly continue to play because they have the physical tools and because it was the logical thing to do.

Remember also that for many Awakened their gifts are their tickets out of the gutter-- if told to submit to a Trauma Damper or SkillWire installation, you can bet your ass most wage mages will grin and bear it. Let's face it: Most wage mages are being paid to put up wards, do some research and to crap out modest Force spirits for their Movement and Guard powers. If installing SkillWires, Cybereyes, cerebral boosters and Trauma damper into an otherwise average wage mage results into a far more valuable employee, than you can bet the corps will make it worth his while to make the "adjustment".

Seems to me that a character's coolness comes from roleplaying. You could have an unaugmented mage who's awesome, or a cybered up mage who's awesome. It's all about your preference in both roleplaying and gameplay. I disagree with anyone who says that one or the other is inherently worse or better.

It's not the size of your magic attribute, it's how you use it

I think this is the best way to look at it. I had some fun playing a cyber-Buddhist Mystic adepts, just as I have had fun playing completely pure adepts. I see it more as dependent on the character.

I have recently been trying to resist the temptation to augment purely due to the ease of stat increases. A magic 3 is not unacceptable, and the augmentation taking up that 2 essence can really be worth it efficiency wise. Part of me sees this as the easy way out of karma hell, and so I have tried to make some characters that take the long, slow way to its end.

Also, I know we all love the sweet, sweet taste of cyber/bio, but sometimes I wonder what a human would really feel like with it. I mean I would probably be totally freaked out with skillwires moving my body on its own almost (though at my command), and what about the coldness of a cyberarm. At what point do you draw a line between what is human and not? Can you really call a Cyberzombie human?

There's lots of athletes who dig into things that are destructive to their abilities in the long term (steroids), take risks with their ability to play in the hopes of improving (Lasik surgery to try and enhance their vision beyond the basic 20/20), or even just slack off in the off-season, coming back to train after a few months of relaxation.

Certainly, some of the bioware mods are worth their essence cost, and some of the things you can get with cyberware aren't easily duplicated without it. Running up to 2 points of essence loss isn't unheard of, and running up to 1 point is pretty common (ESPECIALLY with 1 essence point buying you two levels of synaptic acceleration, rather than 3 magic points getting the adept equivalent... i've seen three different characters in the last few years of playing with this exact config).

If you plan carefully, work with the higher grades of 'ware, and use things like partial cyberlimbs for their capacity to tuck some kit into your body, it's not hard to fit an awful lot of scary stuff into a couple points of essence. You lose some Magic in the process... but the question becomes (like everything else), was it worth it?

Or, to put it another way: sure, that 24 karma just bumped you from Magic 7 to Magic 8... but there's an awful lot of things you could have done with 24 karma. Was all that time training, straining, and improving time that you would have enjoyed more learning to skydive? And in the meantime, your buddy spent 24 karma moving from 5 to 6 (at -2 from essence loss), but he can also do a bunch of cool stuff with his hands that you can't, and his skin is fragment-resistant... and did I mention he can bench press motorcycles?

Mages like cybercommlinks, too

And the ability to get the frak out of the way of those pesky bullets (Synaptic Booster 1 or 2)

Hate to break it to you, but he doesn't have to spend 24 to go from 5 to 6. He only has to spend 18 (after paying between 9 and 16 karma for Grade 2 Initiation). Course the other guy also has to spend 9-16 karma, but mister cyber still saves 6 karma. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

I have to agree on that post.

Also, remember that you can also have a late awakening and already HAVE cyber, and most wagemages keeps themselves legal by casting legal spells at low force.

Would you even notice if your magic dropped the imaginary number of 6 to 5 if you always had spells that you never need to cast over force 2? It’s not as if mages scream, “NO I’VE LOST 16,66% OF MY AWESOME MAGIC!� when it drops from 6 to 5.

Then there is the fact that a lot of ware is simply beneficial in their daily life and the “sacrifice� in magic isn’t really felt when you suddenly go superhuman or becomes TWICE AS FAST as your normal metahuman.

Think about the fact that with 1 point of bioware you can go three times as fast as a human behing.

A normal reaction time is between 0,2 to 0,25 seconds. Imagine having the reaction time of 0,08 seconds with synaptic accelerator 2…

Yes, a mage can do that with magic but would require a high magic, cast a high force spell and require several successes – and take the drain, sustaining or carrying an expensive foci.

Personally I’d love not to have the hassle of all that and see everyone else move in slo-mo as my reaction time is three times faster and cast spells with one less force…

Even with a magic of 1 you can levitate 200 kilograms without a problem.

That, I think, was part of what made Essence loss important and is often well covered in other games, as cyberphychosis..
..And the sense of dislocation, despair, differentness along with possible/likely mental problems is what's supposed to keep players from willingly losing their Essence.

Tho, since there are no effects from having a low Essence in SR4, it's understandable why people just ignore it [except as a limit on how much 'ware they can implant].


Personally, I go with something like a geas - pick 1 quirk for each -1 Essence, or like an ad/disad and get a worse quirk the more Essence you lose.

Making essence loss cause psychosis? Sure, if you get a quirk for every point of magic you have, for "tampering with forces man was not meant to wield". Other games have that too.

I think it's a good thing they got away from the "our mage is killing people daily, summoning spirits and wrecking minds and souls with spells, but he's mentally stable, but that evil samurai, who spent 5 essence on cyber, that's a psycho even though he tries not to kill people" view.

There are reasons for not augmenting, and reasons for augmenting, it depends on the characters (and gaming groups) in question, ultimately.

I think think that any magic user with an active mentor spirit might find himself on the outs if he starts cramming cyber into his body. If a mentor spirit can admonish you for not pursuing the totem you have chosen than you certainly could make an argument that it would admonish you for willingly weakening your relationship to magic.

Such mentor spirits would be the ones who make you lose double essence. Others won't mind, and most aren't magic-focused anyway. They rather concentrate on being helpful and friendly (dog), seducing (seductress), healing (bear), tinkering and so on. Magic is only a means to achieve this goals, not THE purpose.

Am I the only one that thinks they made it much harder to play a cybered awakened ?? It doesn't decrease your magic potential, it deacreases what you actually bought up in magic. In SR3 it was almost insane to not drop one point of essence to play any awakened characters just so you could have some Cyber. The difference between Force 5 to Force 6 mattered little at all.

As for cybered Awakened, do what the character would do...not necessarily what is optimal. Sometimes it's just better to play suboptimal, makes your success all the more sweeter.

Plus, power foci directly increased your magic attribute (yeah, it's been mentioned before).
Yes, augmenting the awakened has become more difficult in SR4 and i appreciate that.
I love minmaxing my characters, but having no-brainers like "i get magic 6 just for being an adept, so instead of buying increased reflexes (2) for 3 points of magic, i'll just get myself some synaptic accelerators (2) for 1, and then some of the other stuff that's cheaper as cyber or bio, and blow my power points on things i can only achieve with magic" takes the fun out of optimizing, as it elliminates counterweighting tactical advantages and disadvantages.
Such no-brainers only cater to the needs of people who simply want to be über.
I don't care about that, i care about playing with the rules, taking character design as a challenge.
There's no challenge in realizing that one option is always mechanically better and that you would only abstain from it for style reasons.


That aside, i'd like to comment on the notion of 'ware decreasing your connection to magic.
People in this thread always talk about combat ware, synaptic accelerators, trauma dampers and stuff.

But imagine you're a hermetic mage, or follow another logic-based tradition.
You know that channeling astral energies (read : soaking drain) is directly linked to your abillity for logical reasoning, for grasping complex formulae and making causal connections (read : your logic attribute).

In other words, the smarter you are, the easier you cast.

Now you hear of cerebral boosters (the implant about which a shadowtalker in Shadowtech said : "made him the fastest guy in astral space").
Of an implant that will directly increase your IQ (up to, i don't know, 185 or something).
Doesn't that sound promising?

I think the main aspect at work is the purity angle, in combination with a "leave the tech advantage to the mundanes" notion.

The purity angle I dislike because it should be a fringe opinion in 2070. You will temporarily have less power available, but that comes back and the ware stays (ingame realisation of the player buying back lost magic). The other aspect is almost laughable, because most players espousing that theory happily create magic 6 spellcasters that stomp on everyone, while calling the augmented impure.

Those who want to play a purist are still welcome, but in my game, everyone will ask them what they were smoking if they start to criticise the "impure".

You're completely right, as are the others who talk about Mages getting 'ware.

My point of view is that whole number reductions in Essence [-1, -2, etc] indicates big changes in a person, which a Mage feels as though a part of him is gone - like going blind and deaf and getting a limp and losing sensitivity in his hands, all at the same time...
..Like cutting your own arm off, just to replace it with something that isn't part of you, which by all accounts take a very determined and focussed mind to actually go through with [Armitage from the SR novel 2XS is held in awe and a little fear for willingly having his arms removed and replaced with matt black cyberarms] - whih does seem to indicate that people mainly get non-minor 'ware via injury.

Things like speedware or headware don't fall into that category because they are much more integrated and augment the natural body in small ways, but even they supposedly need time adjusting and learning before they are fully usable [ignoring accepted, for the minute].

Previous rules mention that Mages who Deck exhibit signs of aberration - limping icons, glitches in the system, twitches, etc which does seem to indicate their subconscious is fighting the 'ware.


Previous versions of SR were much more path focussed than current SR and had much clearer defined roles, but current SR has many more options for mixing and matching - so both are right for the way things are done using those rules [much easier to do paths when your character generation options are much more limited].

I prefer the path method, because I prefer defined characters - trying to be all things to all characters gives quite wishy-washy characters, who might [supposedly] be good at many things, but that's why you have teams [or in RPGs a group of people who work together to accomplish goals] - different people for different tasks, and good at them.


If people are good ate several things, imagine how much better you'd be at what you do if you focussed on only a few things ??

Yeah, hey, there's nothing wrong with awakened characters with some ware ...

My favourite character was an Adept melee-assassin type (SR3, not 4) who had carefully selected exactly one essence worth of high-grade ware. It's excellent for gaining access to things that magic can't provide, or for things that give you a quick edge that nobody would suspect.

Thus a replaced arm with a a grapple gun inside, handrazors in your fingertips with poison sacs built in (when a one-hit kill is a must), the obligatory monowhip stashed in your thumb, maybe a commlink in there if it was SR4. I think my old character had a shock hand in there too, since he didn't have killing hands (used the monowhip instead as his main weapon).

One thing I would advise against when doing that is taking modifications that can be duplicated by magic, thus vision/hearing modifications are now out, wired reflexes are out ... there are still a lot of unique/semiunique neat things you could have though.

I think that in my case, it's the purity thing. When I make an adept, I want to explore what he can do with Adept Powers. Yeah, taking some 'ware is more efficient... look at the build I posted recently. I spent 1 PP on sense enhancements that I could have gotten with .6 Ess of cyberware, and 2 PP on 1 level of Enhanced Reflexes, when 1 Essence of Bioware would get me the equivalent of twice that.

Still though, doing it "the hard way" is part of the fun for me. Even though it's completely illogical, using Augmentation with my Adept feels like "taking the easy way out." The only discouraging thing is the amount of karma that it's gonna take to seriously improve my guy. 34 for Magic 7, going up by 6 for each point after that. (Minus a bit if I join a group and/or use ordeals.) And right now, I can think of uses for Power Points up to around Magic 10... and that's not counting the 70-100 karma I'd love to throw into skills and attributes besides Magic.

There are roll players and there are role players.

'nuff said.

And sometimes in the same person...

Why would some awakened not have ware? Why not?
Why would a sammy sport only cyberware? Or Bioware? Why not?

I have played many characters who were 'gimped' because it fit the character...
I've also played many optimized characters because it fit the character...
If you don't have fun playing a pure mage, don't play a pure mage...

Actually no. please articulate your position. Some people on DS have this habit of spouting off how unpure/munchi/anti-thematic/lame it is to cyber an awakened character. Usually this sentiment is completely unsupported, and I assure you not manifest to everyone. I opened this threat so that they could say there they are coming from without jacking a thread. May have done beautifully and I hope you can as well

I play my mages and adepts fairly pure, trying to recall the last time I used cyberware etc in one. Why for me playing rpgs as long as I have, cyberware etc makes the play "seem" too easy for a mage or adept to me at least.

Yes I play alot of "gimped" characters by that I mean they are not the most "efficient" designs etc. I tend to make a idea/concept and then flesh out that concept as much as the SR4 rules allow.

That means at times the character may be lacking certain "Standard/Required" cyberware etc or skills. Yes if the concept/idea behind a character allows for efficient min-maxing, I have done it.

I tend to get into the minds of my characters, even though they may be "gimped" I try to play them as the character would, and being "gimped" attempt to make up for the less efficient design by being more efficient/innovative in tactics etc.

WMS

...then there's the character's background to take into account as well as retconning due to expanded rules. In rebuild of the Short One (after I took her out of the magic-heavy campaign she was in) I wanted to make her a little more versatile again. During this time, Augmented was released and now there was no way around her having 'ware.

In her original backstory I mentioned she received a full ethnic "makeover" to look Japanese as a means to protect her from her father. According to the rules for biosculpting this fell in the Moderate category (.1 essence) which had an impact on her Ki (magic). Well with .9 essence left to fill, it made sense to add a few more enhancements: Synaptic Booster 1, Synthcardium 2 and muscle Augmentation 1. In effect she is pretty much the same as she would have been going the all magic route with the exception she now has a 5 DP with her Athletics group Combat sense, Improved Perception and "natural" Low light vision (OK, so I did take a couple sense based powers).

Now before people bring up the über question, there is a catch here. Right now she is pretty much locked into having only 2 IPs and has a natural cap to her Ki of 5 (for purposes of initiating). She cannot raise her initiative further though adept powers, only by upgrading her Synaptic Booster. This means she needs to burn out another point of Ki which in turn reduces her unaugmented cap to 4. Furthermore all powers with ratings (such as Critical Strike) would be capped at her augmented Ki. So it really does not get as frightening as some may think, as in the long run the, character becomes a Karma sink earlier in her career.