10 bp Cybermancer- They are those that can recover essence loss by spending karma. They do so by making the cyber or bioware infused with there souls. Making it a an extention of themselves. You may not take Magician, Mystic adept, adet, or Technomancer with this quality.

10 BP to recover 1 lost essence in Character creation
20 Kara to recover 1 lost essence during game play

do you all think this is a good or bad thing? Why? What could I do to make it a better Quality? Is it to costly?

I'm not sure it's necessary. Given sufficient funds, you can cram in 8 essence points worth of implants by balancing the numbers. With grade improvements and positive qualities you can double that to 16.

In addition the Essence "hole" function that allows you to replace and upgrade pieces without losing additional Essence means you can continue to upgrade and swap out.

Maybe rather than have this quality, you can have a 35 pt quality version of Type O body that applies to cyberware. I mean some people have the ability to cram in a lot of bioware, this quality (with it's high cost) allows a sammie to have a LOT of cyberware, but still wouldn't break the system... much. If you find that a person with this quality is insanly powerful... make it so basic 'ware counts as Beta grade for Essence purposes.

Personally I don't think either is really necessary, Sams don't really need any extra help in the Sixth World.

Come on brother, everyone needs help sometimes.
Though I don't think they need this particular bit of help. With enough twinkery you can already get cyberware at an 80% reduction in essence cost. 50% if you can only spring for alphaware.
I don't want anymore essence reducing thingies of any sort that allow me to get new cyberware.

I want to see new cyberware!

I'm also not sure why sami's need even more cyber... especially with a type O body already in play.

Sorry dude, I totally stealth-edited on you.

This quality just smacks the basis of SR's cyber/magic dichotomy silly. It has been true for a very long time that if a character wants more than 6 points of essence, they need to become a cyberzombie. It is impossible to do otherwise. If you add this quality, you change the nature of the game in a fundamental way.

And also, sammies do not need this. They rock. Coming out of chargen, samurai are extremely scary if well built. Over time, as they add higher grade ware, they only increase. There might be a theoretical cap on them, but it would probably take years of playing the same character to come close to it.

Instead of coming up with things for Sams to not have to save up millions of nuyen, just throw out essence if you want them to have more goods. Its really that simple. Course, you have to come up with something for mages/adepts, and also, adepts will be pissed since now they suck even more in comparison.

or just change the gene-therapy so they don't have to kick out the cyberware or bioware to get the essence back they paid for it . .

That's not too bad an idea. After all, the price and time for the treatment is already quite high.

so the theoretical limit on samurai is lifted as it is on magic and it's still not game-breaking, good compromise i'd say . .
and some day, there WILL come the time when sammy samurai does not know what to do with his money any more AND he won't have enough essence left to do something meaningfull with it either . . and when you wanna retire, you want your humanity back WITHOUT having to give up everything that makes you YOU . . and that keeps you alive too *g*

This actually gives adepts and mages a whole lot to do with their money. Spend a few months downtime, get your ware and don't even loose your magic!

Which reminds me, since there are now rules to regain essence, once your essence returns to 6, does your magic go up as well? I get the feeling it doesn't, but I think it would be nice if it did.

and i think this is the whole of the problem. all of these qualities and special techniques and equipment to reduce the essence loss due to implants don't really give sams the edge, since it simply makes it easier for a mage or an adept to suppliment thier abilities. adepts and mages are now able to get the quick boosts that once were the domain of the samurai with thier cash, while poor sammy doesn't really get anything new other than an extra point of essence to work with.

In defense of this wacky house rule, I'll point out that mages can't use it. That's the only factor that really makes this do what it was intended to do: boost sammies, not mages.

But I think that we should stick with the cybermancy we already have, it's called cyberzombification. It kicks serious ass; sure it's rare, but it does exactly what this quality tries to do, except you can't just tack it on for a fairly trivial number of BP. This is an aboslute must-have, "duh" quality. Every samurai would take it. Instead of making this quality that sammies would be dumb not to take, you may as well just give them more essence.

Making it less stupidly expensive to advance skills relative to stats as well helps sammies if you feel they need it.

Making it 1 bp = 7k nuyen halving the cost of skills and skill groups and dropping starting BP to 350 might have the effect you want

You can make a ridiculously good cybermage under those rules though Cthulhu. Which, you know, isn't a horrible sin in and of itself, but I'm under the impression that this guy wants to primarily help out Samurai and leave more or less Awakened where they're at for whatever reason. I liked the mage I got out of those houserules though. It was fun having access to enchanting, arcana and astral combat without having to gimp my other skills first, for once.

That is the problem isn't it?

In terms of speed of advancement, Samurai need no help. They are already the fastest advancing characters in the game. I think the issue most sammys face is reaching the essence wall, at which point they have to front a large amount of nuyen. This has always been the reality of Sammys, so beg your GM for more money.

i'd say no, it get's lowered like allways(not the maximum, but the actual magic attribute, so mages don't have to pay for points they do not get[well, i TRY to be fair]) and they need to initiate to get the magic back even up to normal maximum and of course to get it above that . . so maybe they start out with metamagic earlier in the process, but the metamagic in itself will be weaker, because it depends on the subjects magic plus initiate grade, so initiating from magic 4 to magic 5 will mean you DO have the metamagic, but it will not do so much for you as it would for somebody who has his natural 6 in magic and initiates to 7 . .

We allowed mages (anything awakened) to bind cloned bioware at the same cost as a power focus to make it not cause essence loss. Course this was back when you had the body index thing to worry about also. It let people have a little leeway with their characters. Not much with the cost though.

That's.... a surprisingly innovative idea to allow a mage to bypass the essence loss from bioware. Wow.

Indeed it is. Wish I had thought of it back when I was playing SR2 regularly.