Introducing a restriction to balance a removed restriction isn't wrong in the same direction.

I'm just saying they're not related. If your problem is not enough danger from drugs or wounds, add more danger from drugs or wounds! Don't break another component of the canon. Besides, those cybereyes cost them at least a point of Magic, which isn't nothing. Is it often a good deal for desperate men? Sure. So?

One solution I've seen proposed (if not actually used) is just doubling awakened characters' Essence loss from 'ware (or, sometimes just from cyber), like the Eagle followers (IIRC).

From where do you get that?
I do not arguee, that it is the most reasonable solution.
But it is nowhere written. As a matter of fact it works the other way around, anywhere you look.

From raising magic in game to latend awakening. It is a dirt cheap trick. Granted. But I can't find anything in the book telling it is illegal.

'If it doesn't say I can't, I can'. Oy. But yes, presumably they knew the GM would just slap people.

So basically you just make all awakened qualities 15 BP more expensive. Sensitive system does exactly that for cyberware. Not my cup of tea, but then I don't believe cyberware is underpowered, not unique enough etc.

It's not a rule I particularly advocate either. I just know I've heard it before. Applying it to bioware is the more novel aspect, though I personally don't find it very 'fair'. It's not really equivalent to a 15BP surcharge, because they can't get rid of it. If they take 'ware, they lose more Magic than currently, and they can't get as much 'ware. Again, not my personal solution, but undeniably a direct counter to the 'augmented mage problem' that Epicedion was focused on.

@Yerameyahu

I guess thats why the introduced essence rules for the infected, which let them do exactly that.

The rules for essence lost are just not quite thought through.

Well, you have to take a gander at the whole shebang. Your first method, buying attributes and skills, then qualities once the first group are in a chargen "airlock", for example, points and laughs at both Exceptional Attribute and Exceptional SKill. Your human character paid 25 BP to raise his Agility from 5 to 6, then you bought the Exceptional quality, and now you don't get a refund of 15 BP from your attribute not being the max. You also can't go back and boost it to a 7, since, you know ... Airlock.

Ditto for skills.

And then you get an interaction with cyberware that hurts! For instance, you bought all your cyberware, put it into the Chargen Airlock, then bought qualities ... like teh ones that allow you to implant cyberware at a lowered essence cost. D'oh! Sorry Augmentation! You just printed a ton of sucky rules!

So, yeah, CHargen is a bit loosegoosey in terms of when you do things. There's no real 'step' method... heck, if there was, it might well be that you have to get qualities *first*, since they can adjust changes of gear and statlines!

So, yeah, trying to stuff your cyberware into an airlock so that you can buy magic in the cheap? Not valid, unless you invalidate a *ton* of qualities. The proper way would be RAW, which says that your Magic is reduced the same level as your essence was.

Now, personally?

In order to encourage the Burned-Out Mage archtype (Which I adore!) and to bring up the notion that there's a consequence to hacking your body apart, I lower the maximum magic that you can have, rather than your current magic, in a way similar to one poster up above limits Initiating to your Essence. This involves a "Magic Attribute Cap", just like all the other attributes have.

...

But this is getting off topic, isn't it?

New post, about cyberware, NEXT!

2x essence costs for Awakened would probably work.

That way you'd still probably invest in some minimal upgrades (cybereyes, smart-link, possibly datajack) but for the most part you'd rely on spells or adept powers for the greater part of your schtick.

You could reduce the penalty for bioware options vis a vis the wired options but I think you'd have to increase the penalty for Bioware at least a little unless you want every awakened character to invest exclusively in bio options.

As for cyberware, once it starts getting outmoded, you need to give it the ol' one-two punch ... it gets easier to find (Lower availability) and drop the cost.

For example, have you gone back and looked at CYberlimbs in, say, second edition? HUGE cost, low benefits, but so essential to the genre that you wanted to see more of them? Thus, the cost dropped by 90% (!) and the utility went WAY up.

Start fiddling with other cyberware for similar effects.

For instance, who wants buclky ol' Vat-grown muscle replacement when bioware muscle augmentation/toners are sooo much sexier and softer on your essence? As everyone bails on your product, you need to slash prices to drive sales! 5000 per rating is just too high! How about 1000 Nuyen per rating, with an availability of X3, right out of the gate? Yeah, the essence cost is huge, but now the street grunts can muscle up on the cheap.

Nobody wants cyberweapons anymore aside from the scary old guy with a Wolverine fetish? Those availabilities have gotta go! Every backalley clinic in the sprawl has a pile of old cyber-implants, just lookin' for a new home! Retractable spurs? Availability 8! Retractable razors? How about a 4? NON-retractable razors? Availability - and only 500 Nuyen ... we're practically GIVING them away!

That's not even talking about new gear. I heard that Johnny Edge was testing the new Smartlin V system from Ares. Designed to link up to the Predator V (It's in alpha testing!), but it'll spread out from there. Turns out that it needs the neural connection that cybereyes grant, instead of the weaker link that goggles give. Maybe they'll clear it up in beta, maybe not, but ol' Johnny got the nod since he's got eyes that can handle it. They're rated as a +3, instead of the normal +2, but we don't know what the cost will be yet. Probably need to get some more field tests done, see what the feedback is, before they can start selling them for reals. Don't you wish you'd gone ahead and gotten chrome orbs now? Hey, I know a guy that's doing implants on the cheap right now...

Flat out double essence loss for anything that causes essence loss, if the loser is awakened.
Will take care of most of these problems and make adepts pretty much a fluff choice too . .

I think the best options were already stated, and I'll just reiterate them:

Deduct essence loss from casting rolls (beneficial and hostile), AND from summoning rolls. That both makes mundanes stronger and makes taking anything above 1 essence loss quite unattractive for a mage, because now when casting on yourself you are losing 4 dice. Doesn't affect adepts so much, which is also good, because they are hampered without a bit of ware. REALLY nerfs mysads, because they already have so few casting dice, and mostly use them for buffing.

Give cyber (and bio) a flat +1 to DPs over gear options, and for each element involved in a roll. For example, implanted vision magnification and smartlink grant +2, total, to rolls involving both. You are also giving that option to essence 5 or 4 mages, but then it doesn't boost their primary skills. It does, however, make adepts better.

I agree, Wakshaani: cyberware already exhibits that feature. It's vastly cheaper than bio equivalents, with the tradeoff being Essence. That's what cyber is, and what it should be, in 2070. Are you saying 'go further'?

I’m a late comer, but I’ll start off with more useful ware. One problem is you can cap out on useful ware in character creation, and have to go with B list ware after that.

That might be a point: is there simply not enough cool cyber for it to be a long-term advancement path?

For certain aspects, yes, but only if you have the same view as the original poster... cyberware is 'dead' and so on. Giving cyber-eye'd smartlinks an extra +1 beyond what goggles can give falls under the 'improving cyberware' approach.

As for current stuff, 5000 for vatmuscles vs 15,000 for biomuscles isn't a huge difference, but the 1.0 essence vs 0.2 essence is massive. Alphamuscles won't close that gap ... heck, even delta muscles won't come close, but cost *way* more. The price difference sn't enough to seduce people very often ... when's the last PC you had with vat specials instead of bio? So, a little improvement, or at least cost reduction, would seem to be in order.

From the book:
Step 1: Metatype
Step 2: Qualities
Step 3: Attributes
Step 4: Skills
Step 5: Karma to Nuyen conversion
Step 6: Gear
Step 7: Contacts
Step 8: Make sure all your karma has been spent
Step 9: Apply modifiers to stats from implants and other sources, calculate derived stats such as init
Step 10: Roll for starting cash

So you can't do an essence drop/magic raise trick during chargen because your essence doesn't get lowered till step 9, which means your magic doesn't get changed till step 9.

Thank you for playing "Munchkin Tactics" but I'm afraid your method doesn't work.

I think there are cool options it's just that they aren't really available without pulling out really optional rules.

For instance I think there is a demand for full body conversions, both obvious and life-like like a Major Motoko from GitS but once you start doing 4 cyberlimbs, a cyber torso, a cyber skull and the required IP boosters (wired 2+) you are way way into needing bleeding edge cyberware + qualities and even then you aren't really that awesome.

Cyberzombies have significant playability issues that make them unworkable in most groups and borgs are pretty much clearly children trapped in a brain in the jar scenario. Plus rigging a body just seems like such a kludged solution.

Increasing essence cost helps tone down the cyber-mage and let's be honest the mages don't need the help and thus you really only have issues with the relative power level of adepts (pure adepts are pretty gimped in 4a and cybered adepts are maybe too good). However I think that could be solved by reducing the cost of various adept powers. Another solution would be to allow the adept to swap out adept powers like a skillwired person can change out active skills. That way if the adept centers himself for 15 minutes he can become a ninja type character and if he centers again he could be a gun bunny or a face or whatever. You'd want to limit the number of adept power known but he could choose freely among that pool to a certain value.

Hmm, that sounds like a cool solution. Let the adept take maybe 2x as many powers as normal, but can only have half the total PP worth active at any one time and be able to switch your powers with some extended thing. Maybe an extended willpower test with 1 minute intervals. That makes it possible to change stuff out in the middle of a run if you have prep time, but doesn't let you go from stealth build to combat build if the dreck hits the air circulator without warning.

This tends to be my feeling. They are some things that steel should just do better then flesh even vat grown flesh. One of the other changes I was looking at making was making cyberlimbs better out of the box, up to and including starting one stat at racial max. Otherwise I just don't see a lot of folks taking cyberlimbs.

I hardly ever see a PC take anything other than Muscle Augmentation/Toner. It has better essence efficiency than replacement and many characters want to augment either strength or agility at different rates. Finally because it comes out of the bioware pool (even though it does impact essence) you can further reduce the actual essence cost because you bioware pool will likely be smaller than your cyberware pool.

Other than cheapo vatjob thugs as extras muscle replacement just doesn't really enter into common usage anymore.

The question is, just how cheap would you need to make it for people to seriously consider getting it? I think you could make it free and people still wouldn't bother with it (grades aside). Now, if you halved the essence to 0.5 and kept the cost the same it would look tempting to some people, but I still think you'd see people leaning towards bioware because not too many are going to be as worried about str as agi, and so will still want the toner.

Still, at least it makes it into a serious consideration instead purely an NPC thing.

The problem with cyberlimbs isn't the stats of one limb but the fact that realistically you should nearly always have to use the average across all limbs. Moreover you should also include the head and the torso, whose cyber equivalents neither are intended to have augmented attributes nor come with the capacity to carry them.
So besides spending lots of ¥ and essence on the limbs you also need more Karma and ¥ to raise the attributes of the rest of your body to the value of your cyberlimbs.

To be remotely viable the character either just has only tow options either take a partial limb with goodies or go full "borg". The middle ground is very inefficient.

I don't like crippling mages with losing double the Essence of an implant. I mean if you have that big of a bat to the head then WHY would any mage get 'ware? My method makes it so that a mage can get ware, but it limits his future growth... you know the old "You can have power now, but you will be weaker in the future" trope.

One option that has occured to me is just giving non magical folks bonus essence which would make some of those high essence options more attractive especially at character creation. Say we raised essence to 8 for example but made adept, mage and resonant all have a essence rating hit.

More essence would help, but you're still balancing cyber with magic which isn't the point here, it is balancing cyber with devices.

That has never worked. Seriously, in D&D it might, but not SR, where POWER, NOW is pretty much it, because it usually means more power, later. Look at it this way: The character will play for the first 100 karma as an ubermensch, and then some other ubermensch might overtake him, but... firstly, if that's an NPC, then you are either de-protagonising, or likely provoking a TPK, or if it's another PC, then that's only fair, but that player was still overshadowed for a LONG time.

So any fix that sacrifices on the long has to really really think about the middle-run, too, because that's the only motivation. I don't even know whether my character will live to 100 karma, why worry? I'll be having good fun with my POWER, NOW character, and in the end, there's ALWAYS someone better, that's simply probabilities at work.

On Topic:

Seriously a perfect option to make cyber more attractive is give even less starting cash. I guess that's what the designers wanted, really, but they didn't go far enough. If you only have 150K to spend, then you simply won't have the money for too much bio, and suddenly that cheap cyber is looking good again.

It's actually pretty amazing what you can do with just 60-70k nuyen (without lifestyles and vehicles). Sure you won't have any essence left worth mentioning, but...

Well, I'm not really advocating this route. But short of writing up simply different, new cyber that does interesting things that bioware can't do, you're not going to change any of the basic premises.

What about splitting muscle replacement up?

Muscle Replacement (Str mod
4000 and .5 essence per point
Muscle Enhancement (agil mod
6000 and .5 essence per point

Honestly, I love Muscle Replacement. I get it on almost any character I make. You can always take it out later and swap in higher-grade stuff, after all. I assume a bioware-style cyber mod would be just like the bioware in play: everyone gets just the Toner, saves Essence and money, and is therefore more powerful. I guess that's mission accomplished, but it doesn't really feel like it's making cyber 'better'.

Indeed, why would I get the cyber here for 6k and .5 essence when the bio is 8k and .2 essence? Now if you made it... 2k and .4 essence or somewhere in there, you might have something.

The real problem is that bio is suppose to be significantly more expensive, but significantly more essence friendly, almost like adding another 4 grades to cyber. You go: Basic Cyber, Alpha Cyber, Beta Cyber, Delta Cyber, Basic Bio, Alpha Bio, Beta Bio, Delta Bio. There is usually actually a bit of overlap in there in that delta cyber tends to be above bio, and even beta is usually right around there. Now, on to the actual problem: Muscle toner and Muscle enhancement are already really cheap, like almost as cheap as the alpha cyber, but better in essence than the delta cyber. This is a huge gap from what we see in things like synaptic boosters vs wired reflexes. In that case you can nearly get delta cyber for the cost of basic bio (Which ultimately makes delta wired reflexes useless, but that's a very minor problem). Same goes for the skin and bone mods, both of which feature somewhere between a beta and delta cost difference.

So yeah, if you only want agi, then the cost is less than the alpha difference, and if you want both, it is barely above alpha difference, but still more effective than delta.

Yeram does have a point about you can always replace them, but if you're planning on replacing them, why blow the 5k nuyen? And then the problem crops up of 'if your going to blow the 5k anyway, why not make it 8k?'.

The other solution to fixing the problem is to make toner/enhancement more expensive, instead of cyber cheaper.

Ok, I'm going to try to tack on some quick homebrew to make Cyber actually more INTERESTING:

Get rid of realism where Cyber-weapons are concerned, and most certainly don't make them worse than detached guns. Give them a fat bonus to concealment. Make it cool to suddenly break a sub-gun out of a cyberlimb and blaze away.

Let Cyber, but NOT bio, surpass the racial augmented limit. Yes, that actually makes sense, because you are changing so much of the body that it shouldn't really matter what the biological limitations are - the huge essence cost says so. Or at least make cyber suites that do, for instance, a combination of Titanium Bone Lacing and Muscle Replacement 4.

Make the MBW a real viable option compared to wired reflexes or the adept power. Let it surpass racial limits, too. Basically reduce availability for MBW3 to within reach of Restricted Gear. Give it Rating 6 skillwires just like the Stirrup.

Make some interesting options for cyberlimbs - implanted toolkits, etc. These might partly exist already. Arguably cyberlimbs aren't the issue, here, because they are reasonably attractive in 4th edition.

Make moddable Borg kits that are available at chargen, let's say for around 100K nuyen, as a viable alternative to a meat body, with stats that can compete.

Make cyber cool in the world: Essentially, put the Punk back in cyberpunk. Make it the rage to have crome sticking out of your body, rather than the icky-factor it has right now.

Make cyber armour better. Seriously, make (potentially hardened) armour available in ranges that can compete with gear - at least 10 points should be possible without sacrificing too much else. Of course, it has to be exclusive, then, and not stack with worn armour, i.e. it has to be included in encumbrance calculations.

For instance:

Exo-skin
This suit of obvious interlocking plates of armour covers the entire body. It has capacity like an armour suit with a helmet, and encumbers as one. It provides one point of ballistic and impact armour per rating, and has a minimum rating of 4, and a maximum rating of 2x the user's body attribute. Exo-skin grants 2 bonus dice for social skill tests, because it looks totally cool. It also has cyberlimb capacity of 1 per rating, and can accept most mods with the exceptions of attribute enhancements and cyberlimb armour.
Exo-skin can be upgraded.

Essence cost: 0.1 per rating
Nuyen cost: 3000 per rating
Avail: 2+1/rating R

Militiary Exo-skin
This suit of high-grade implanded armour works like Exo Skin, but is additionally hardened to withstand even the most devastating impacts. It provides hardened armour of 1 point per rating, with a minimum rating of 6, and a maximum rating of 3x the user's body attribute. It has cyberlimb capacity equal to 2x its rating, and can accept most mods with the exception of attribute enhancements and cyberlimb armour.

Essence cost: 0.1 per rating
Nuyen: 5000/rating
Avail: 10+1/rating R

---
These would enable you to make Robocop, at least, and should be versatile enough to be actually interesting. Both are available at chargen up to to 10 points for normal (without restricted gear), or 10 points of milspec (with restricted gear).

I really don't think you need to raise Essence costs on implants for the Awakened; I think it's good that even for them, it seems more efficient to give up some "purity".

"Awakened would just get implants like the rest, and be better!" you say? I don't think so - I doubt any serious Awakened character would sacrifice that third point of Essence, because Magic 3 just doesn't cut it.

So you just need to have enough desirable implants that you can easily fill up 5 points of Essence with "I WANT IT" stuff at CharGen. That way, the mages go all hand-wringing because they can't take everything they want, and other people come a lot closer to that.

I do agree that the continuum from cyberlimbs to cyborgs needs to be developed more. It was cool in Ghost in the Shell; it would be feasible in SR.
=> the CCU needs to be redefined a bit: it's a brain in a jar, but the "directly to 0.1 Essence" is troubling, because that prevents you from taking stuff like Cerebral Boosters or a Math SPU, which make sense for a brain in a jar.
=> Do you put your brain in a cyberbody, or do you rig your cyberbody remotely? It's a big choice, because keeping your brain in a vault somewhere is safer, but you become vulnerable to people screwing with your connection. Inside the body is better if you need radio silence, but you're also "in the field".

I like the idea of a "cyberlimb shell" that still uses the normal rules for people with bodies, rather than being piloted like a rigger rigging a drone.

---

Another idea for Cyberware:

Null Bones (Rating 1-4)
Availability: (Rating * 6)R, Cost: Rating * 20.000 Essence: Rating * 0.5
Null Bones are a recent manatech discovery by S-K. Oricalchum rods are treated in a secret procedure to really muddle the mana flow of any body they're implanted in. They grant their host an (involuntary) Object Resistance equal to their Rating. (The host still gets normal resistance to magic.) These things are absolute horror to spellcasters however, because they subtract their Rating from their host's effective Magic rating.

Other ideas: an implant that converts CO2 back into oxygen, allowing indefinite holding of breath. Or perhaps altogether removing the lungs, which actually increases capacity to put in other implants because it rees up a lot of space.

Full cyber bodies aren't really Shadowrunny. Shadowrun has always sided on the man side of the man-machine line, with things going too far becoming twisted abominations. They are very Ghost in the Shell, but I don't think those two need to get any closer than they already are.

I agree. I'm tired of hearing how it's a problem that people can't replace their whole body.

Well, you can. It is just very costly, hard to rationalize why you are now on the street without a support network, and not very Shadowrun.

It is when that Corporate Sammi you cut down a dozen games ago comes back as one.

Sure, Sure... I can see that... Heh

There's a reason GiTS isn't a story about freelancers. Still... I think full borgs should be more possible. Maybe don't think GiTS, think Gunnmu (Battle Angel Alita). More punk.

Second hand cyberware opens up a world of cyberware for very very cheap. Sure it makes it even more essence intensive. But it's well worth it.

If you want Bioware to be less common, double or triple all the prices for bioware. If you really want to be mean, get rid of the 1/2 essence for which ever is lower thing.

Yeah, but you also have second hand bio, which is more attractive than second hand cyber because it gives you a smaller essence penalty and a larger nuyen reduction.

I don't think you'd need to increase the price of all bioware. Some things seem quite nicely balanced like synaptic boosters and orthoskin. It is just a few specific examples such as muscle toner that cause problems, though that could really have more to do with agi being the most useful stat and str being the least than problems with the options themselves.

My problem with Muscle TOner is that if you're an ADEPT,you're an idiot if you don't take them, vs taking agility boosting adept powers.

Muscle Toners should probably cost much more, like maybe as much as 5x more.

Shadowrun isn't anime. It follows more Western sci-fi and fantasy literature conventions. Making it more like GitS, etc, is contrary to its theme.

Cyborgs and Cyberzombies should be what you /fight/ when you accidentally break into the wrong zero-zone lab.

Not who you are.

Cyberlimbs are actually quite good for some concepts. In fact most street samurai builds I see rely on a “cyberarm of awesome” where you use restricted gear to get availability 20 Obvious Full Cyberarm. Max the arm’s body and agility with customization and enhancements, and then use an SMG. SMGs are one handed, so you use the cyberarm’s agility (I expect this to be 9), and wearing armor is a “full body” activity, so you average the cyberarm’s body (I expect this also to be 9) with your own to wear more armor. Add in a comlink, shock hands, etc to taste. Also the cyber limb gyromount is very good, as it is +3 RC that stacks with stocks, gas-vents, & personalized grip (amongst other things). This allows you to get to the magic 11RC quite easily.



The problem is not enough good cyber ware. Most cyberware is +number to a one or two rolls. You need broad, role-oriented cyberware. Think Tailored Pheremones. When did you see a face without Tailored Pheremones (or Kinesics, or both)? You want more stuff like that, less stuff like Math SPU, or Grapple Gun.

It may not be anime, itself, but it does borrow a lot from Japanese culture, especially where Japanese economics is assumed to have taken the overhead (with the global nuyen, and three of the megacorps being japanese (Renraku, Shiawase, and MCT)

Japanese culture of the 80s and early 90s. Back when anime was called "Japanimation" and only available by mail order on late-night TV.

GitS (etc) were based on stuff like Blade Runner and Neuromancer. We don't need to do some Babelfish English to Japanese to English retranslation.

Of course it's not, but actually many of the tech aspects ARE very anime-like, while the magic stuff is western fantasy. And we're talking about the tech, here.

Also, theme is very much a consequence of play-style, and I would say that SR doesn't actually have a common theme outside of "Freelancers do dirty work". Everything else is rather up to interpretation, and ranges from extreme stealth+mirror-shades to good old 80s pink mohawk, where full borgs easily have a place.

Robocop and Terminator are western Trademarks of Cyberpunk.
Well, ED-209 may have been a step too far but otherwise my point still stands . .

Robocop is a solo character.
Terminator is also a solo character.

Solo characters tend to break the molds, because you can be arbitrarily more powerful, because who cares if you're balanced with the other pcs.

Look at Robocop, and tell me who the other 3 people in his gaming group are playing.

The tech aspects are anime-like now, but that's probably due to the rise of anime slightly predating the SR4 design period. I think it throws the theme off, since body-replacement tech pre-anime plunged into the inhuman, whereas now tech tends to be spiffy and clean. Fancy cultured bioware, etc. It's far removed from its origins.