Greets,

I play in a game with ToreadorVampire on Sundays and I succeed in destroying my PC effectively every game. I wanted to make a full body cyborg. Any recommendations on how to do it? How much does it cost and how can a character make that kind of money?

My character is the solo of the group.

Essence is like meh.

Well if you mean cyborg then essence is no problem. The problems are the cost 250000 for just the brain box then add on the cost of the body. But your GM might let you take a cyborg and only pay for the body.

On how to do it pick a nice drone probably an otomo (they look meata human) then if money allows pick up a heavy combat body as well.

If I recall, the brainjar alone costs 250.000y and is delta-ware. So with the born rich, 35k in dept and GM allowing you to buy the jar, you are lucky to be able to afford a toaster with the normal 50bp (rich 60bp) limits along with the jar. Ask if you can spend 100BP for money without any extra qualities and then you might be able to pull it off. Otomo is 150k and the assassin model 250k...

Short answer: Houserules.

If your GM allows you to play one, the ressource and availability limits for the CCU and an Otomo body need to become a non-issue. Just convert their cost into BP, add maybe up to 50 additional BP on top, and voila, you got the cost for a cyborg PC, more or less.

I personally did it by assigning 100BP to being a Cyborg, which gives you a CCU and the ability to buy an Otomo with your ressources. Easy enough, most likely not even remotely balanced, especially if the GM has no idea how to deal with the unique weaknesses Cyborgs have.

btw, The CCU is not Deltaware, you just need a Deltagrade facility to install a brain in it, because it's just so friggin' SotA.

Well it strongly depends on the campaign you're in, if you can make that amount of money. My tip (going along with the others) is, talk this through with your storyteller, tell hmi/her what it's all about, what it means to you and your character-development etc. Should your ST agree (and you would need the aprooval either way), you two will find a way to make it possible. One possibility might be to allow some kind of temporary "money for karma" rule, for your character, but there are other more interesting ways that a ST can come up with.

alternate version of a cyborg:

to start, you'll want to be a gnome. get yourself a control rig, the gear you need for hotsim with 4 passes (5 if you have unwired), and you've basically got all the advantages of a cyborg without the drawbacks (primarily cost). remember to cyborg adaptation your vehicle (i haven't noticed anything restricting that option to cyborgs only, and it's essence-free skillwires too ) just never leave your vehicle, and you're pretty much good to go

oh, and technically you can give drones an extra entry/exit point, which would allow you to sit inside it... don't forget that

(essentially, it's a heck of a lot cheaper to just buy all the gear that cyborgs effectively get separately. even better if you can convince your GM to make an 'ultimate rigger' cyberware suite, actually, and you'll have essence to burn for whatever else you want )

Plastic Warriors did conversions of CP2020 stuff to SR3 rules, which included the CP2020 full body conversions. So if you were willing, you could always work off that for some different body styles, but it's kind of a non-issue with the cyborg rules in SR4.

If you meant just replace arms/legs/torso/skull with cyber replacements.... Then its pretty easy to do. Max your cash, and spend restricted gear on them so you can max out pretty much any stats you want. From there, throw in some wired, and pick up the biocompatibility cyber quality, and you're pretty much set.

I had hoped to do something like Motoko in GitS too but SR rules are not up to it yet. Even if you replace most of your body body and become a CZ you are big and heavy, not the full cyborg's capable of leaping a building in a single bound of GitS.

Send in the clones!

That has more to do with physics than tech.

The biggest problem is to find someone you can trust with that kind of money to remove said brain and put it in the otomo instead of, say, the dumpster.

And you definitely could produce a humanoid body that is not made of steel and lead, but Shadowrun has slightly archaic views about that.

If you go the jar-head route, your GM might also let you buy a used Otomo body. It's one way to cut costs down. You just have to deal with effectively having the Gremlins quality at a high level until you can afford a new rig. On the brightside, you can load up your Otomo body with vehicle grade concealed armor and wear additional armor on top. Then feel free to play in traffic, shrug off rpgs and juggle live grenades for shits and giggles

Buy a modified GMC Sandal drone for your jarhead- instant Dalek!

Well we are currently already playing. The previous game session my PC gets shot five time from close range. Luckily she was wearing armor to be able to turn it from dangerous physical damage to stun. This of course meant that most of last week was played being unconcious most of the time.

Basically the rules as written in Arsenal make it not only stupid expensive but also make you not even Robocop but ED-209. So basically my options is going the dalek way, which I can only hope my GM does not place any stairs in front of me.

How about just beefing up the body instead? Replace all limbs with cybernetics ones?

Well, as you know that is perfectly doable and with enough money you'll even get along essencewise... you could however still express your wish to go full cyborg to your storyteller. If he does allow Vs he might aswell be allowing more technical solutions (and it opens up doors plotwise).

There are hower better options than cyberlimbs if you want to upgrade via wares. Depending on what you have and what you want ofcause.

I was thinking of when they land. GitS full cyborgs like Motoko and Batou can land after jumping amazing distances and NOT got through the roof with the force of their impact. Heavily cyberized people in SR tend to have much more mass and come accross as more cumbersome, like Robo-cop or the Terminator.

Realisticly, a battle-worthy humanoid robot body is going to be heavier than a human body. Sure, you can use lightweight materials for a great deal of things, but many points on the frame are going to be subjected to extreme stresses. For those, very-high-strength materials are necessary. That usually means steel. And since you're going to be shot at you'll also want layers of Kevlar everywhere and ceramic plates over the vital areas.

Its cyberpunk ffs. Titanium at least.

There will always be chassis that are willing to take advantage of heavy materials. The current direction of research for coping with material stress are metal foams, a common material being Aluminium IIRC. This has even better potential for cyberlimbs, where you can switch to an exoskeleton.

Concerning the undamaging jump, you don´t have to use the ideal lift-off angle if you are not going for your maxium distance. The largest damage would be done to your point of liftoff, where the maximum force is applied to a small area.



@Ch-R-ysalis-1: What does your character currently look like? Would a metahuman 2.0 be a viable alternative? (Muscle Aug/Toner 4, Suprathyroid Gland, Dermal Sheath 3 (ruthenium add-on), Synthacardium 3, Trauma Damper, Platellet factory, React, Bone Density Enhancement... not that it is cheaper.)

My character in terms of cyberware looks like this:

Cyberware
Headware
Commlink
Hermes Ikon
Satellite link
Control rig


Cybereyes
Cybereyes Basic System
Rating 2
Image Link
Low-Light Vision
Smartlink
Thermographic vision
Flare Compensation
Eye recording unit


Earware
Cyberears
Rating 2
Balance Augmenter
Damper
Ear Recording Unit
Select Sound Filter 3


Bodyware
Bone Lacing
Aluminium
Muscle Replacement
Rating 2 (alphaware)
Reaction Enhancers
Rating 2
Internal Air tank


She was my first SR4 character. So I need help to make her better.

Any worthy Dalek needs a friendly mage with a Levitate spell.



Certainly doable.
You get an insane damage track, can get tons of armor, dump STR and AGI (and probably even BOD), buy them up cheap with cyberlimb optimization...it's damn expensive, though.
Will not be easy to get decent INI when you go that way.



It's SR, so that would be titanoplast.
Or ferroplast
Or soyplast.

Those have to go. You have way too much cyberware anyway, and these are not even good. Sweet-talk your GM into allowing the deinstallation of the muscle replacement. Get a suprathyroid gland, muscle aug/toner 1, and a trauma damper. Have an enhanced rigger cocoon in your vehicle of choice to reduce the time at risk.

The most important question: How much money does your character have right now?

i recall doing some numbers around the time augmentation came out, in relation to recreating the major...

what i found was that hydraulic jacks and agility customized cyberlegs can make for some interesting jumping tests

troublesome thing is that im not 100% sure if those jacks are pr leg or total. and the way thats read can have something of a impact on the whole setup.

trouble is that none of it could pass as human (syntetic limbs) by a long shot...

oh, and she must be redlining that body more often then not...

but then its anime, so i write it up there with superhero comics. in other words, the body is as good, or bad, as needed to tell a good story. realism be damned

Flying Daleks are new. for many years they just rolled along-leading to the Tom Baker line "If you're the superior race in the universe, why don't you just climb up here after us?"

The AR system in 4th Ed is pretty clearly the head ware from GitS/ Stand Alone Complex, which is one of the very few things in 4th ed I like, but yeah the full body cyborg of SR is odable but is not the GitS full cyborg, unless you want to be the idiot CEO in the old Jamison body.

err, are you not forgetting about the otomo now, snow_fox?

still, full cyberlimbs, especially with the red-line rules, provide more impressive results iirc...

ok, i revisited my all cyberlimb design, aimed at jumping and agility.

using customzied synthetic limbs i came up with a agility of 8.5 (i guess it rounds up to 9), giving a jumping distance of 13,5 meter (lets say 14).

this still left room for rating 6 hydraulic jacks tho

each rating point adds 1 die to the jumping test, increases the distance by 20 percent (so at rating 6 your looking at 120 percent increase), and allows the user to drop 2 meter pr rating (12 meters) without having to roll dice on the landing.

give the above base distance distance, the max jumping distance would be some 30 meters!

and thats before one start to apply any kind of redlining.

ok, so the treshold for the jump would be 15

With Agility 9, Gymnastics 4 (Jumping +2), Synthacardium 3, Reflex Recorder (Athletics), Hydraulic Jacks 6 you are looking at some 25 dice.

Combine that with a bit of edge, and at least 20m are a realistic expectation.

While already in an active game, conversion to a full cyborg (with shiny drone body) can be a full on story arc, one rife with possibilities for RP, but it'll take time. You need to develop contacts in high places, save all your spare nuyen, and then most likely sell-out in some manner. At least that's my spin on it. For conversion of the body, you're facing some similar concerns if you want to go extensive. You're looking for Deltaware, then, and that entails similar concerns.

and if your gm allows, redline for 9 extra dice of agility

The GM (as in "I") allows, but usually does not manage not to smile long enough.

What would a sample drone body look like?

-Chrysalis

Shiny!

Depends on the type of drone.
An Otomo is visually indistinguishable from a metahuman, an Akiyama is vaguely anthropomorphic, child-sized, faceles, visibly mechanic and has all its limbs attached in an utterly wrong, completely inhuman-looking way.
A Tomino may look like a larger-than-troll-sized mecha (the Ares knockoff is called Madcat...go figure).

Other possible bodies are normal vehicles or drones, of course.
These would most likely just look like the run-off-the-mill version of the same vehicle, unless they get externally visible modifications.

Decepticon type of conversion then?

Go from helicopter to robot?

Think that one SAC episode with the full borg guy rigging himself up into that MBT and running amok. Actually, you could wire up a bunch of Jarheads to an aircraft carrier's systems, if you wanted to. It's not like the jarheads can really do anything about that anyway.

However, usually, it seems jarheads take more or less vaguely humanoid bodies; think chromebook 2 (I think it was 2) Cyberforms.

Reminds me of Scream a character I made. It had about 20 different bodies and an autoloader wardrobe. Scream used to change bodies like other people change socks.

Unless you happen to be the dictator of a small OECD country I can't see how you can afford it in SR4.

He was not full cyborg, he was bitter that his parents would not let him change a failing body for a cyborg so when he died his buddy made him into a Jar head by putting him into the MBT he designed. That or the Tachikoma are I think a really good idea of the SR full cyborgs.