One of my players is making an adept combat medic. I was thinking about offering him the option to use Improved Ability for Biotech, representing a magical attunement to the human body that allows him to treat victims better, but I wanted some opinions.

Anyone tried it before? How bad is it to have someone rolling 10-12 dice for biotech, especially compared to magical healing?

I said "no because it's not canon", but that dosen't quite fit with my objection. Adepts are good at enhancing their physical abilities but Biotech is a technical skill therefore it's not the physad's domain.

I have no problem with Centering with Technical Skills, as long as their use is fully mundane (ie, non-cybernetic). Computers, Biotech, and Electronics all fall in that domain, and I've had a spy-oriented adept in our game that used the latter.

It may not fall under the domain of a physad but it is a cool enough idea that you hsould let him try. Oh and if it terribly unbalances your game let us all know!

By all means, allow it. Every .5 put into the skill gives him one higher skill on the Biotech roll. Limit on levels is his Magic rating.

Make it every .25 gets him a level if you want, as the skill doesn't unbalance the game, mostly helps teammates, and will let him have a good set of other physad skills.

A magician does major healing with a fraction of their Spell allocation. Having a super-medic who does it with an almost magical sense of where the damage is would be a cool character and would in no-way unbalance the game.

It's almost impossible for him to change the outcome of a combat this way, he just helps get the team back on its feet for the next time.

Let him center for penalties later, after he initiates and takes it, so he can bypass terrible conditions with a good roll.

If you're an adept and you'd like to burn your magic points on it, go for it. I'd have to be part of a very large party with absolutely all of their bases covered before I built a dedicated adept-medic.

I think it clashes with the feel of Improved Ability; there's too much mental discipline involved in Biotech. That said, I think the idea of Biotech-enhancing powers like the aforementioned "magical damage sense" is a good one. It might even have game mechanics that are identical to those of Improved Ability

It's a very cool idea to have a medic adept, but I wouldn't make it an Improved Ability. Not sure exactly how else to do it, but I can think of a few ideas off the top of my head:

- Power where the adept doesn't get penalties for lacking a medkit, and maybe gets an additional -1 TN if he has a medkit, because of a magical understanding of the metahuman body and it's functions, as well as faith healing style magic to treat said damage. Cost: 0.5? 1.0?

- 'Healing hands' as opposed to killing hands - bought at levels and you make Biotech rolls to stage the existing damage down. Use a TN equal to 10-E + (BI/2) as per normal magical healing, and every two successes lower the wounds one damage level. You cannot treat anyone who has a wound level higher than what your power is. Cost: Light 0.5, Moderate 1.0, Serious 2.0, Deadly 4.0 ? Must be used within an hour for game balance?

- 'Medical sense' - each level gives you an additional die for treating wounded or sick patients. Cost: 0.5 per level. Basically the same thing as Improved Ability as far as game mechanics go, but in the way it works it is more similar to, say, Sixth Sense. This would also apply to rolls made with other skills, if it is relevant for the treatment (Medicine, for instance).

Hmm, this gives me an idea for a spell... 'Analyze Wounds' as Detection spell, where successes give extra dice for first aid.

Check out the "Knack" idea -- let the adept buy the spell like a power and use it as such.

Otherwise, I have to agree with all the "no" votes -- adepts are limited to motion-intensive actions when buying IA dice and Biotech doesn't (shouldn't, anyway) fall under that category.

-Siege

Side-note... did anyone else realize that most of the answers for the poll don't fit the question?

Surgery...mastery.

Dude, if my medic reaches for my wound with a credstick in one hand and a key ring in the other...

-Siege

I'd allow it, at 0.25 points a level too. Sure it's a technical skill, but for an Adept who is naturally in tune with his own body, it seems very reasonable - especially with powers like Distance Stike, Killing Hands, improved healing and Missile Mastery available to him, which essentially allow him to use his powers beyond the confines of his body and/or show a tuning to living things - that he should be able to use that tuning not just for harm, but for healing too.

For that reason, I like the healing hands power idea too, but I'm not sure quite how you'd balance it, which is why I'd go for the improved biotech route - for now.

How about Healing Punch?

Sock 'em in the face, and roll your magic attribute against 10 - Essence. Keep the same costs for L through D.

Okay. So it's stupid. I just woke up.

My real objection to that power is the following idea:

Adept ... little cyberware (i.e. microscopic view), Apitude (Biotech) and Improved Ability (Biotech) ... Say "Hi" to the team's new surgeon, who does anything from trauma surgery to implant surgery with ease ...

Just as a bit of a note, adepts haven't been called "physads" let alone "physical adepts" for several years now. There's a reason that stereotype-inducing name was removed in 3rd Edition, even if some of the powers still clutch on to it. For those that don't, see Astral Perception, Empathic Sense, Sixth Sense, etc.

Sure, adepts tend to focus on somantic abilities. But how anyone can say that Biotech isn't a somantic ability is beyond me. If anyone in the modern world were to be said to have "magic hands," it would be a surgeon. It's not like surgeons, doctors, or field medics just wave a wand and wounds magically heal up with no physical actions on their part, yanno.

In any case, the ease at which some of you can rationalize allowing an adept to cut-up, bruise, and otherwise disect opponents with their abilities while turning around and saying that the can't do the exact same thing in reverse just seems odd to me.

Using a knife to gut someone with style and grace falls within their domain, but using a scapel to remove an appendix isn't? I'm missing something in that reasoning process.

Hey, I'd love to see "physical adepts" move away from those roots and branch out into the "social" category that has been advocated here.

Improved pheremones, improved ability: social skills, the "VOICE" and so on.

I'd nix the "magician's way" adept before allowing adepts to increase mental stats, of course...

-Siege

Edited for typos

Call it a failing in my character.

-Siege

Do can he use distance strike and a weapon focus scaple? Get a little Blackjack action going on?

"I'll do it! For my normal fee of ten million dollars!"

-Slapstick

Interesting philosophy.

So you're also saying that since adepts can perform these functions in combat situations, they're the only types of characters combat-oriented characters will ever play? Afterall, they can offset all the penalties in a combat situation, and gain bonus dice while doing so. Given how an adept with a Smartlink-2, Centering (Ranged Weapons), and Improved Ability (Pistols) is the defacto marksman with pistols, obviously that must mean that no one would ever play anything else and that adepts are clearly unbalanced and the only pistol-using character a Runner would want next to them.

A very interesting philosophy, indeed. I guess all those other combat-oriented characters running around are an anomoly or something.

First, try avoiding sarcasm please.
Secondly, instead of putting words in my mouth, please re-read what I wrote.

I didn't say anything about being the only thing played, I said the only "surgeons a Runner would want". After all, if you knew one of these, would YOU want to go to a mundane surgeon who can't offer half of what this guy can?

I know it would unbalance because you can offset negatives in this manner. Skillz, a character in the game I run, made his character completely around the Biotech idea, he is the perfect cyber-doc, able to pump (at one point before they Errata's it to a 3 for CED) as many as 15 dice for a Surgery, the only thing that keeps it sane is the negatives he incurs. Already none of the team would consider going to an outside source for implantation.

Sphynx

That may be the only surgeon a runner would want, but would it be the only surgeon a runner would get?

Sure, an Adept could dedicate his abilities entirely into surgery whereupon he could implant 14 essence worth of gear into a person using a rusty toolkit on the slopes of Everest in blizzard conditions, but would the runner whos getting all that ware installed really want that same person alongside him as fire support when breaking into a triple A research compound?

Balance issues can be resolved more easily by taking a character out of his usual environment far more easily than with more firepower/more opponents/tougher opposition/worse conditions.

I mean honestly, it's not like his ub3r l337 surgery skills are going to help his first aid bring his pal down more than one damage code.

You can think that if you like, but my experience tells me that players do want the best biotech'er you can get on a run. Specially when dealing with an Awakened in the middle of a gun fight after someone's put a hole in the medkit with a shotgun blast. After all, the TN starts at 8 I believe for a Serious wound, and anyone else is going to need to accept all those modifiers, everyone cept the one that can center to offset the penalties that is.

Sphynx

8 is a base target number, it can't be lowered below that, plus you need to make the centering test against all those modifiers, your grade isn't going to be a big help for a fair while, so the centering isn't going to make such a huge difference as you make out. It never does unless you have a high centering skill, nth grade, and perhaps a centering focus - remember, it takes 2 successes to bring the targets down by 1, even with a centering skill of 6, and a force 6 centering focus, those 12 dice aren't going to bring your targets down much below 1 if you're lucky - and that's a hell of a lot of karma to invest given you need 2 skills to enact it, not to mention the focus, initiation and so on - all for a -1 to penalties?!

It's hardly unreasonable to expect an adept, with such a massive karma expenditure, to be able to bring a serious wound down with first aid so much easier than a mundane. Isn't that what an adept is supposed to do?

Compared with a skill of 6 with a Saviour kit on hand it's not exactly broken to spend 1/4 of his starting powers on improved biotech.

It's true that it takes a fair bit of karma, but consider that with all of those other initiations he has been getting to reduce the target number, he has been learning to apply centering to other areas like melee combat, ranged combat, and so-on. With centering 6 and a force 6 focus: He's getting some huge bonuses across the board.

[edit] And adept's aren't really supposed to be that much better at first-aid than mundanes, any more than they're supposed to be better at advanced calculous than mundanes [/edit]

And so he bloody well should be with 4 or 5 initiations under his belt! Christ, isn't the whole point of initiating x number of times to become a bit good at what you do? I can think of much more unbalancing power combinations used with centering, not least Blind Fighting for a sniper adept - even that can easily be controlled by controlling where he'll come in handy.

With an equal amount of karma under his belt, a mundane can have his own similar bonuses, particularly in terms of versatility. As I say, where the adept may (and is meant to, which is why they're called Adepts) excel in one field, a mundane will be damn good at virtually everything.

Doesn't change the most basic fact. It's out of theme for Adepts. Their theme is not "excel in one field", it's " focus their magic on the improvement of body and mind".

And no, it won't cost that much Karma since anyone who intends to make Centering a central part of their character will have the skill they center via already at 6. And that skill could be "Medicine" even, something they'd want anyhows. So, less than 50 karma total, that's not going to do nearly as much for a "mundane", no matter how generalized they are.

Sphynx

Yep, because we all know surgeons and medics use neither their body nor their mind. It's all, uhm, social. Yeah.

To repeat myself from earlier, using a knife with style and grace to slash open someone's stomach and spill their guts out easily qualifies as an adept ability. But using a scapel to cut someone's stomach open to remove an appendix is completely unrelated and a bastardization of adepts?

You sure didn't seem opposed to the concept when Mike Mulhvill (I hope I didn't misspell that too tragically) suggested Awakened surgeons with weapon foci scapels when you wanted to implant a shift with bioware. Or wait, it's okay for a mage to use magic in a holistic, physical fashion (even though it seems contrary to their nature since they could just use a Heal spell and be done with it when it comes to healing patients), but not non-combat-oriented adepts who are naturally inclined to be a surgeon?

I'd presume that Sphynx's comment addressed Darkest Angel's comment about adepts excelling in one field:

Well adepts enhance their physical stamina in a number of ways, I have no problem with that and it gives them a bonus which is fitting with the abilities of a physad.

Now, consider that a med-kit's small computer can have a biotech skill of 12+. Does that really imply that expert precision with a knife is the key to biotech or even just first-aid?

Add to this the fact that Biotech covers things like extended care and organ culture and it looks like the fact that an adept can have supreme skills with a scalpel dosen't mean drek.

I'd point out that nearly any skill requires a certain amount of physical activity.

Is it "motion intensive?" If you're a really aggressive typer, maybe.

The bottom line -- if you like the idea, run with it. Personally, I don't care for it but I think we can all agree that my tastes don't dictate the flavor of your game.

-Siege

Five quick points.

Read the Biotech skill entry some time. "A character with this skill understands basic medicine in a hands-on sense, as a paramedic rather than a physician." Knowledge Skills are what differential a character with just Biotech from a Doctor, Surgeon, and etc.

"Looking after your grandmother at home" would be use of a Homecare Knowledge Skill not Biotech, just like designing a surgical plan is a use of Medicine instead of Biotech. Many of the specializations for Biotech make little sense for the way the skill is treated in the game (including Organ Culture & Growth and others).

As you pointed out, Enhanced Articulation gives the exact same bonus to Biotech checks as it does Edged Weapons checks. So cannonically, they both benefit equally from the exact same purely physical enhancement.

Adepts already have several powers that do nothing but enhance their mental and cognitive abilities. Astral Perception, Combat Sense, Empathic Sense, Enhanced Perception, Magic Sense, Sixth Sense, Spell Shroud, and True Sight. Most of those do nothing to enhance their physical abilities, only increasing their mental abilities and honing their ability to comprehend what they are perceiving.

And as previously stated, the active practice of surgery (as opposed to planning one) is often considered an artform, and practicing surgeons are said to have "magic hands." Adepts excel at art, have magic hands, and even have an Artistic Way that proves that they don't have to be combat-oriented. Sculpting is a Knowledge Skill (see the Adept archetype in SR3) in the game, but would you deny such a character the use of Improved Ability with that, too? It's far less "active" than a Technical Skill like Biotech, and both are linked to Intelligence.

1: I use my computer in a hands-on sense, do you advocate the use of improved ability for computer skills?

2: Extended care is a specialization of Biotech. If you don't like the looking after your grandmother example then how-about looking after a character who is recovering from a deadly wound? (IE: after the initial trauma surgery)

3: Yes, although that does not mean that the physical enhancement is the same form of physical enhancement as an adept is capible of. Note that adepts don't get improved ability for physical Vehicle, B/R, or other Technical Skills either, implying that enhanced articulation goes beyond what the adept improved ability power is capible of.

4: The list of powers you gave are all sensory abilities (with the exception of spell shroud which is just a magical ability) which is not nessecarily the same as "mental and cognitive" abilities. Enhanced perception is the only thing there which really counts as cognitive, but it is still hardly mental.

5: Actually I woud deny an artist's way adept improved ability on sculpture & similar skills. It says that their art is so great as they can see the world how it truly is, not because they have 1337 chisel skills. A bonus for enhanced perception, however, would fit the description perfectly. As for surgery being an artform: I doubt either of us have much experience with that. I have had first-aid lessons, however, and I didn't really consider that to be much of an artform, nor did it imbue me with magical hands.

I actually think a more believable case can be made for Improved Skill Dice for Social skills than technical skills.

Everything that goes into the adept can be used to augment his or her ability to read and respond to people with enhanced senses, altered voice to achieve desired maximum effect, improved pheremones (which isn't a canon power, but c'mon -- if the adept can augment strength, quickness and body, I would imagine body odor wouldn't be too far behind. ) and so on.

I've advocated expanding the adept's repetoire into the Social realm as it seems a logical expansion of existing physical ability.

Biotech as Hands On
Yes, Biotech is hands-on...so are B/R skills, Computer, Electronics, Demolitions and Typing.

Any skill will, at some point, involve physical activity. That doesn't mean every possible twitch of an adept's fingers is automatically augmented -- and if so, it wouldn't be limited to just one skill. Happy dancing fingers would improve any ability.

However, none of afore-mentioned skills involve the motion-intensive actions that characterize the existing augmentable skills.

Unless, of course, the adept raises "hunt and peck" to a whole new level.

-Siege

Edited for Typo

Combat Skills require just as much mental and cognitive skill as they do physical skill. Those are very weak arguments. To shoot a gun you have to take aim, know where to hit to gain the maximum effect, wait for the right moment, adjust for environmental conditions, steady yourself, and pull a trigger. That's a hell of a lot less (or at the very least on the same level), both physically and mentally, than what a surgeon has to do.

While planning the surgery is a use of a Knowledge Skill, performing it is certainly qualifies.

Hell, adepts can apply Improved Ability to Gunnery which includes the use of Remote Turrets. That's little more than using a computer.

1&2: My post was a response to A clockwork lime's post.

3: No, The powers listed there are Physical and Combat skills. Those are the skills that physads have an affinity for (especially the highly physical ones like athletics and stealth). On another point: the rules for enhanced articulation are screwed-up as it is. They provide an extra die for small unit tactics tests for a start.

4: But enhanced perception is described as sharpening the senses, indicative that it is not really a mental bonus.

5.1: Art is somewhat more perception-based than first-aid, and if the GM called for a perception test to diagnose what was wrong then it would help.

5.2: That was a response to ACL's statement that as surgery was an artform, it should get bonuses. My point was that even if one aspect was sometimes considered magical and artistic by some people, then the same logic hardly applies to other aspects of the skill.

@ACL: What do you know about surgery? As for the mental aspects of shooting: I suspect that the reason people spend so long in shooting ranges ETC is so that those actions become reflex and they don't need to think about it each time.

Doesn't matter. An adept gains the same bonus whether he's shooting from the hip or spending five minutes aiming. Just like he would patching up a wound in the middle of a firefight versus prolonged surgery in a hospital environment.

Lilt, what list of skills are you using for allowable Improved Skill candidates?

EDIT: 5.1: Art is somewhat more perception-based than first-aid, and if the GM called for a perception test to diagnose what was wrong then it would help.

Er, you completely missed the point that perception is intergral to the skill. So what did you learn in that First Aid course that failed to turn you into a magically awakened wiz paramedic?

I allow improved ability to be used on the skills listed in the table on P169.

I meant "No, it is not ridiculous to only allow those skills. The skills that Adepts get a bonus to are reasonably well classified "

My last post was a bit hasty, I would allow any skills under the categories listed (combat and physical) rather than the exact skill list. Thus I would allow parachuting (at 0.25/rank), and other combat skills (such-as offhand weapons skills ad martial arts) that were introduced in other books.

The skills listed and attributes boostable can still "affect a rigger's actions" as quickness affects a rigger's reaction and improved gunnery (or other relevant ranged combat skills) affect ranged combat actions they take.