If a Nartaki character, or any character with the Shiva arms quality, gets a limb replaced with a cyberlimb, is the essence cost the same?

A normal person could have all of their limbs replaced with cyberlimbs and have 2 essence left over. Would a shiva-armed character not be able to mimic this?

Since the rules are not specified, I would assume that the full essence cost would be paid per arm. I would just like to hear the communities opinion on this.

As an aside, could a normal person without shiva arms have additional cyber arms attached to a cyber torso in a Shiva style? Would the additional arms take up an entire point of essence each?

No, you can NOT get more than your usual ammount of arms through cyber(even if it would be cool, maybe just building them as drones with agent/pilot in there)
Yes, each Arm on the Nartaki costs the usual ammount of essence. Yes, that means if you replace 4 arms and legs, you are dead on creation.

yeah,but they would make one hell of a cyberzombie.

Meh, still nothing near close to my creation named Binky ^^

the shadowrun supplemental which should still be on ds has rules for such things. they are pre sr4 but im sure it would be easy to convert.

Naaahhhhh.... with Biocompatibility, that 6 Essence loss is reduced to 5.4 Essence Loss... More than enough essence to play the character...

Yeah, and with todays prices, Alpha is cheap enough too.

No Doubt...

Someone wants to make a Goro impersonator troll. A noble endeavor.

Noble Indeed... Good Luck...

Keep the Faith

Just surge him.
You don't need Cyber-Arms if you are a Troll.
Your natural Arms are usually strong enough for most anything.
Also, remember, that 4 or more Arms does not give much advantage.
At least, not as per the rules.
Bonus Points for Style though.

But they give you more Versatility
and in Close Combat they give an advantage (small though it is)

with a versatile Dance
Medicineman

Agreed, cyber arms are unnecessary. I was just considering setting something up in SR4CG_DK for cybered Shiva arms.


As far as advantage, I must disagree. Image this... You have 4 arms, 4 pistols. Your first simple action you shoot all four, using 1/4 your dice on each. If you can pull of at least one success with each shot, the target eats up 4 of their reaction dodging your shots.

Second simple action you shoot just one gun. You can use your full dice, and they cannot dodge.

Another consideration is melee. If you have the two weapon style manuever, you can use a melee in your offhand for full parry defense, while attacking with all other hands. I.E. Have a sword in your 4th arm, have two guns in your first 2 arms, then use arm three to hold clips and help reload the guns, or draw grenades or weapons for swapping. Now if someone attacks you, since you did not already attack with your sword, you can use reaction + 2 x blades as defense.

If you do not have the Two Weapon Style, you still get a +1 defense bonus when weilding two weapons. The rules do not specify, but if you had 4 melee weapons, I would suggest you would get a +3 defense bonus.

When attacking with multiple melee weapons (ar.163) opponents suffer a -1 defense penalty, in addition to the reduction to reaction for each subsequent attack. So when being attacked by two weapons, the first attack they have -1 die, the second -2.

If you were attacking with 4 swords, there are two ways to interpret that rule.

1. The penalty is still -1 base, so they defend against -1, -2, -3, and -4 on the fourth attack.

2. The penalty is incremented for each additional attack, so the -1 is for two weapons, would be -2 or -3 for four weapons. Final attack would be -2,-3,-4,-5 or possibly -3,-4,-5,-6.

Certainly shiva arms are useless to someone with a small pool of dice, but with sufficient skill and agility, and the correct situational modifiers, it could be devastating.

If you have a big enough dice-pool to do something like that, you also have a big enough dice-pool to reliably hit with one single weapon doing devastating damage, right? O.o

more to the point, it's cheaper to just whittle down defense pools with drones. 1 shiva arm will definitely cost you more than 6k nuyen, and for 6k nuyen you can get a doberman with an AK-47 that will have a dicepool of 6 (or even 8 if you get a smartgun going, might cost 7k though), which should be enough to get 1 hit fairly easily... and you don't need a dicepool of 24 to pull it off, either.

Ok, we will compare:

with 12 dice to shoot with, you can shoot twice. The second shot they get -1 die to dodge. If they are a cybered metahuman, they may have up to 9 reaction, so have a decent chance of dodging you with both shots. With combat sense, they could have 15 dice to dodge you, and are likely to dodge both shots.

Now if you are a Nartaki with 4 arms, your first four attacks are all dodged, but his reaction is dropped by 4 for defense. On the second action, when you take a single shot, it is 3 die more likely to hit than if you just used 1 gun. A significant difference, but not game breaking.