Why does it cost so much to be a ghoul?

Advantages:
dual natured
improved sense of smell
improved hearing
+1P unarmed damage

Disadvantages:
dual natured
allergy to sunlight (mild)
must eat people
blind
ugly
distinctive style
everyone wants to kill you

That advantages list is pretty short, and none of them are really strong advantages.

For only 65 more points, you can be a vampire. That gets you regeneration and immunity to age, pathogens and toxins. Maybe it's harder to feed, though, with that essence loss/drain thing. Wendigos also get the magician quality.

So what's the deal? Do they just price it high, to keep it rare?

Sort of. My understanding is that costs are not mathematically "balanced". The costs do factor in things like rarity.

Yeah, what he said. Balance is often (read: always) ignored with racial cost. Not a big deal, most of the time, unless you really, really care about balance, but than SR will be not a game you can enjoy without heavy houseruling.

...who wants to be a vampire anyways...

Keep in mind that you get bonus BP for not being infectious.

Ghouls are actually significantly cheaper than they should be. Including the fact that Dual Natured is a negative, on the value of 20 Build Points, Ghouls are getting a random, unnamed 20-30-point discount. Doubt me? Go look at their Attribute modifiers.

Attribute bonus points? D'oh!

After adding... 10 attribute points to the above list... Complaint withdrawn.

I was just looking at the paragraphs for the description of the ghouls. Didn't see that chart. Damn pdf's... hard to page through... *grumbles at self*

Er... thank you!

Are you referring to the quality of Infertile Infected (RC p.82)? It's 5 BP, and means you can't infect anybody else. I probably shouldn't ask this, given certain recent showy displays of ignorance, but shouldn't that be a positive quality?

Yes, and dual-natured should be a negative quality.

But in addition to the infertile infected quality, here's another thing to consider. If an infected loses that 1 point of Magic that they start out with, they lose all of their powers except for enhanced senses and natural weapons. So if you are planning to play a mundane ghoul, then getting those cybereyes and that cosmetic surgery to "pass" as a non-ghoul will also get rid of that pesky dual-natured quality for you. It actually makes mundane ghouls viable again. True, you have one point less of Essense to play with, and also need to get a severe biomod if you want to look metahuman (the cybereyes aren't a big deal, because most cybered characters will have those anyways). But in exchange for that point of Essense, you get some hefty Attribute bonuses.

In fact, cybereyes are non-obvious by default.

SR3 ghouls used to be a bargain. Now they're a bit more balanced.

Overall ghouls are quite cheap.

- J.

*Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn*

Can a ghoul actually do something like gunsmithing or delicate stuff like that without cybereyes?
What about using the cameras and sensors of a drone?
Just how limiting is the dual nature of a ghoul?

Ruleswise, blindness means a -2 penalty when doing anything that astral sight would help with, like shooting a person, because people have auras. And -6 when doing anything that astral sight wouldn't, like fixing the trid - or watching it, for that matter.

As for dual-natured being a positive or negative, it's exactly the same as the adept power of Astral Perception, only it can't be turned off. So when your average mage sees a force 6 fire spirit about to attack him, he drops back to physical, thereby removing one enemy from the combat or bringing the spirit to the same place as the rest of the team. The ghoul has no such option. He also has a little more trouble getting through wards.

And that is exactly why it is such a bad fucking quality to have. You have no way to prevent astral attacks on you, & Wards are everywhere. Being dual-natured is extremely dangerous in the Shadowrun world, and significantly hampers your movement.

Okay, so the general opinion is, that you can't make out the details without physical vision.
What about working with it through sensors? I mean, the -2 doesn't count for dual natured Characters.

What book're all these ghouls an' vampires an' whatnot in, anyhow?

Runners Companion

Wind_in_the_stones, do you have a page reference for that -2 modifier for actions in the physical world for blind but dual-natured creatures?

I take this to mean that you're going by auras alone, and since you can't make out all the details, you get a penalty. You can't tell exactly where the guy's armor is, you didn't see the debris in the road, etc. It's like you're in partial light or light fog.

I assume that most dual-natured critters don't have the -2 penalty, because they have both normal and astral vision. Ghouls' eyes don't work, so they don't have physical vision to fall back on.

making them, by far, the best blind ki-adept martial artist O.o

Okay Brother. Good catch. When you said it in your comment up above, it didn't contradict my understanding of the rules because I assumed it was talking about dual-natured creatures in general (and not specified to ghouls). Most duals also have physical vision, so said penalty could still apply to ghouls, since they don't have eyes.

So creatures who are dual-natured by nature, don't have the penalty, but creatures who are only occasionally dual-natured (like astrally perceiving mages) do.

But I'm not sure I like the rule. It doesn't really make sense to me. It implies that duals can see better than others. Either you can see physical or you can't. And creatures who have always had only astral vision, would probably be worse at seeing on the physical, than anyone else, since they don't know what they're looking for.

Makes me want to try to trick an opponent into fighting me (my ghoul PC) into fighting blindfolded. X-)

Well, the thing makes sense for shapeshifters and other dual natured characters who always have both, astral and physical senses. I mean, they are born with it and the penalty probably is confusion as the metahuman isn't accustomed to it.
But a ghoul does get his -6 for visual perception, so he isn't better at "looking" for things. The fun starts now: If the -2 would applie to ghouls, is it cumulative with Reduced Sense?

Are you referring to the RAW you quoted? That rule absolutely makes sense for any dual-natured creature who has eyes. It reads like a clarification to any players who thought that astral sight made things difficult for people who were also using physical sight. The point is that if you're dual, and you have physical sight, you're assumed to be using is.



No, he doesn't get a -6, because he has astral vision. And no, it's not cumulative with reduced senses, because that doesn't apply penalties in the first place. It simply means (in the case of ghouls) that their eyes are broken. In fact, nowhere in the rules does it say that there are ever penalties for reduced senses, or bonuses for increased senses.

What I'm wondering now is, can a person "close his eyes" in astral space? Since he doesn't have eyes there, can he turn off his vision?

Further Down

A ghoul gets this Weakness, RC specifically states the -6 modifier.
And it is the "rule" for modifiers for reduced senses.

As you said, the eyes of a ghoul are broken. So he gets a negative dice pool modifier whenever he tries to perceive something visual.
But they can use astral perception to make up for it, like identifing people, recognizing objects, maybe even communication (more in the like of body language, but i wondered, if ghouls actually use the emotions they "read" from their family).
But it isn't a visual perception, astral sight is a psychological sense, more like "feeling" around. You don't have literally eyes in the astral space nor ears, yet you can see and hear in astral, even feel, propably even smelling and tasting.

Now, my Fun-Question was just fooling around, but your question could be answered easily (at least with my view of the whole astral perceiving thing): Yes he can. It's called Switching off Astral Perception

Happy new Year by the way

Oh, is it 2009 in the Resonance Realms already? Happy New Year!

Hm, can you do that while projecting?

Okay, but technically, the decreased senses doesn't grant a -6 penalty to tests, it grants blindness.

And I think the rules are clear, except that the one you quoted from p.77 contradicts everything else. Like I said, it sounds like it was meant to be a clarification meant to fix a general misconception about dual-natured critters using both astral and physical sight, but its author mistakenly wrote "ghoul," instead of "vampire" or "hellhound". And even though I'm the one playing a ghoul right now, I'm going to house rule that the -2 applies.

"Closing the eyes" while projecting would catapult you back in your body

Technically, it does. Yes, if i had written the rules, i would've written something like an automatic failure, but it is clear: When you are blind, you get a -6 on your visual perception tests.

And the p77 reference (which is in the Infected part) is just the same as used in 3rd edition. It just means, that a being born or living with permanent astral perception has no problems with interacting with the physical, since they aren't confused by their senses. The original -2 applies for that reason.
What you houserule is your own beer and that's okay for me.

That's about the best explanation for it that I can imagine. I almost buy it.