I have some questions:

What kind of cost reductions could one expect to receive on Bioware and Cyberware if I had the appropriate facilities to produce their my own ware?

What kind of expenses would I have to expend to acquire the appropriate facilities and resources to produce my own ware?

There aren't any rules about this that I'm aware of. SR is about running the shadows, not business, and as a result, rules for the business side of things tend to be scarce and not always well-made.


In this case, I think that the investments to set up 'ware production are huge. We're talking double-triple digit millions just to start. Then to run at a profit, you need to achieve economies of scale which mean you need a large customer base. Deal with the competition, stay abreast of technological and economic trends, and so forth.

If you've got that kind of money, why go shadowrunning?

If you're dealing with all those business issues, do you even have time to go shadowrunning?

This is quite outside the range of the rulls for good reasons.
Dicepools in SR are cheap.
So to get some realism in the mix, you would need insane requirements to create your own ware.
This would be beyond any SC so you could screw it.
Every time the rules tried to make something in the reach of PCs it screwed the game balance.
Spoofing the lifestyle rules? Right.
Writing your own programs? Military here I come.
And of course creating radical materials etc.

People always ask this. No cost reductions at all. Instead, massive cost increases as you try to replicate the work of megacorps. It's the same reason people don't make their own computer chips at home, instead of buying Intel or AMD, whoever.

1) There is no mention of cost, although I could see only having to pay 1/2 up to 3/4 cost. I can not base that in any rule or regulation, simply on personal advice.

2) Procuring Cyberware and Procuring Bioware, page 127, Augmentation.

Everyone else assumes you're building your own from scratch or trying to make brand-new stuff, not ordering parts and assembling yourself. It's like Orange County Chopper, or buying your PC parts on Newegg or Ebay and then assembling your PC instead of buying a premade.

He said 'produce my own ware'. There aren't rules for assembly from parts *either*, but I'll admit that's not what were were talking about.

"Produce my own ware" does not neccessarily mean "fabricate my own ware without schematics from base parts" - it can simply mean "buy parts from X, Y, and Z factories and put them together from schematics I bought from Q company."

There aren't exactly rules to do that either, but between B/R rules and the ones I listed from Augmentation we can get close enough for a GM to call the rest.

Question: Are the rules for assembling a vehicle or firearm from scratch (using a desktop forge/facility to turn raw materials into parts that you assemble)? If so, you should be able to do the same sort of thing with cyberware at least, since it's just chrome. Bioware I'd say no to, because there you're looking at needing access to cloning facilities and the like which Id imagine are harder to find/more expensive than something that makes bits of metal into other bits of metal.


However if there's no rules for creating anything from scratch then yeah, no.

There really aren't rules for making things from scratch *nor* assembling from parts. There are a couple specific bits about upgrading device hardware, and about fabrication industrial chemicals (and even those are heavily disclaimer'd).

Neraph, 'produce my own' does easily mean 'create my own'. It might also mean 'assemble', but I'd bet that's a secondary interpretation for the majority of people. In any case, it wasn't mine.

There are some rules for Bioware, on cyberware there is even less.

And you got the growing time. Well, I guess you need the genetic informations.

I tend to use the technical skills as an alternate method of buying gear. As you have to buy parts your costs are the same but you are rolling a technical roll rather than an availability roll to see how long it takes.

Sort of. The availability of the components is generally about the same as the finished product, IIRC.

Generally a bad idea, I would say.

If you have craft skills in a game that allow you to make stuff from scratch, you either find:

You get no benefit, and so it is pointless, may as well spend the points elsewhere

or

Its such a good source of income you would be crazy to keep shadowrunning/adventuring.

I've never seen the craft rules in a game system manage to walk the line of being worth having but not being a lucrative career in their own right.

The same goes for game balance, yeah. Either it's too weak, or too strong. *Repair* and modify are okay in SR, but Building is always a mess.

Ars Magica has an elaborate crafting system that might be interesting. But it is elaborate.

Ah, good times.

As a matter of fact, there are no rules for crafting stuff, anyway.
The only rules, which are without GM fiat in working condition are the rules for writing your own progs. (And even here it is not obvious if it is only from 1-6 or 1-12, or evem 1-4)

The rules for creating foci a very long, but say nothing. Get something, craft a foki out of it, the rest is up to the GM.
(And Ochtalium gives not enough of a boni so it does not matter)
So the price for creating a foci is nowhere near the price buying one. On the other hand it cost one Karmapoint. So it is only a great Idea if you may exchange money for karma...

And the line from Raw to radical, well theprices are fucked up.
Raw copper to radical copper: 300 profit per unit.
Raw gold to radical gold: 30.000 profit per unit.
For the same work.

There are some short, pretty bad rules for Chemicals as well, in Arsenal.

Not really...
It may be the same Work, but it is not the Same Material.
Gold is worth a LOT more than Copper is.

On the other hand, even if you manage to break even, this gives the enterprising shadowrunner access to a powerful degree of security. Provided you have access to an adequately trained and reliable cyberdoc, you can now potentially access alpha-grade cyberware, or at least one of the lesser grades (custom tailored to each runner's body) with a security the Megas would be generally displeased about if done on a large scale, and might be minorly tiffed about if and when they realize you're doing it. If you added attached medical facilities, then you could potentially reach delta-grade, tailored cyberware. Even at cost or slightly above, this is a strong advantage. When you check the price of some of the most powerful delta-grade ware, you've already reached the "why are you still running?" phase.

85,000 spent on move-by-wire that you'll eventually replace for better? 10k-40k on cyberlimbs with all the bells and whistles that you're still going to upgrade when you have the chance? That's a few years decent living, why the hell are you running to begin with?

Point was, it takes "roughly" the same effort to acquire* 1 unit of gold as it does to acquire 1 unit of copper.

The question is, is it as easy to acquire 10 units of gold as it is to acquire 1000 units of copper? Probably. That's a LOT of copper.

*Why does this word look funny, now?

Regarding the original topic, here are the house rules I use for players who want to design their own cyberware packages:



So to answer your questions, "10% nuyen and essence cost reduction for cyberware, as per the Augmentation rules for packages." But that's my personal ruling and not necessarily official, since the package rules seem to assume that they're being made by the Big Boys.

Also note this doesn't address bioware at all, which is reasonable - it's a LOT harder to make a grow-your-own-mutant-organ kit than to just build a robot arm in 2070.

for growing Bioware, all you need is a Medicine Facility or a Cloning Shop, the Medicine Skill and a tissue sample of the piece you want to grow/clone.
That's what Augmentation says. Of course inventing new stuff is totally GM fiat and much harder, obviously.

by RAW it's so easy, everybody should learn Medicine and buy a shop. The only thing you need to do is steal some tissue samples.

Which is why we know it can't be true. Even if that were just the basic Type-O stuff, it clearly doesn't make sense for the setting.

@Makki
Yes, that is true. And as a side not to Yerameyahu it is also that easy for cultured ware, if I am not mistaken.
(What grades you get is not listed, anyway)
Yes it is RAW and there is not even a point in saying there would be another RAI.
But it is a stupid and incomplete ruling. (There are no costs or test mentioned. Actually there is nothing mentioned on how to handle it.)

Because, as we've already said, you (player) can't do it. And thank god you can't.

Meh, I actually really dislike that you can't. Why shouldn't a runner who has the relevant skills be able to over time piece together a lab that lets him make his own stuff? In game, there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to. In game, as long as the long term investment is steep enough it doesn't pay for itself right out the gate at character generation, I don't really see the problem with it.

I do agree with you. But for every reasonable, balanced, long-term application, there are a thousand versions of 'LOL i got Essence 0.01 for free!' builds. I'd rather have nothing than bad rules, and I don't think I'm being unfair when I assume that's what we'd have. In that last post, though, I was specifically referring to what they described as 'so easy, everyone should do it'.

@Seerow
Because the results are mostly horrible. It ends up having standard and deltagrade only 4 to 5 hits appart from each other.
Like: Make a logic+medicine roll[2]
For each net hit increase the grade or something like that.
(Well, I guess I just use edge for two additional hits and if the mage is sustaining "increase logic" I go delta easy.

It should be a huge extended Threshold, with each grade applying an exponent.

Well, to bad there is not a single exponent in the hole rules...

And looking at the rest of the rules I guess you are right: Better there are no rules.

I'm not saying current rules are good. Hell, current rules are more or less nonexistent. I was just commenting the lack of rules is something that's always really bugged me, because I think crafting is a viable option for something PCs should be able to do during down time. Of course, it should be a relatively long term deal, not something for instant payback. In fact I wouldn't even mind if it wasn't strictly profitable unless you were planning to go into business selling the stuff



Personally if I were going to ad lib crafting rules I'd do something like:
-To craft an item you need a facility
-For Cyber/Bio facilities can be bought in Alpha/Beta/Delta grade, these have cost multipliers just like cyber of that grade. (So a delta facility would be 1,000,000 nuyen)
-To create the item, you must first have the formula/schematic to do so. You can generally get these off the Matrix for 25% the price of the item. You can alternatively take time to research this yourself, but it is a test with an interval in weeks. In the case of Bio/Cyber, Beta and Delta grade formulas must be researched individually for each person. This, in conjunction with the higher facility costs, is why deltaware is so goddamn expensive, because the scientists working on it have to go out of their way to make a new piece for every single new customer.
-Once you have the formula, you can create the item, this requires materials worth about 50% the cost of the item. In the case of Cyber/Bio, this is 50% of the standard value. (The majority of the cost of delta comes from the facility and needing to research the schematic for every individual piece. The materials themselves are actually more or less the same)

The actual time intervals and thresholds would need to be hashed out in more detail than I could do in something off the cuff like this, but the idea would be to have it so only someone particularly skilled with everything in their favor could do deltaware, and anyone with some training can do normal, then set the scale in between for the rest.

See, look, you're *already* cheating. *Base* cost for delta? Delta is made of totally different, high-quality materials. Hehe.

And this is why "building rules" are so hard to pull off.
You are "cheating" very, very fast.
But it is the same in other games two.

Forging a sword in some fantasy games goes sometimes also like that:
So, finished. Now I have used a bar of metall I bought from half the reward of the last adventure and after one day offtime work I have a sword worth twice as much as we made during the last 10 adventures. (Or maybe even worse)

Right. Crafting rules always suck, it's like a law of the universe. It's hard to write good rules (useful, appealing, balanced).

Which is why a lot of games just don't bother.

Honestly, after paying 25% and wasting a month researching a unique formula, paying another 50% of actual cost, plus facility cost, plus more time actually making the thing, would end up just being a waste of time.

Yeah, there's a reason people don't make their own microprocessors and artificial hearts and things. :/

That last rule wasn't half bad for explaining why cyber gets so expensive at higher grades. And when you factor in all of the costs so far, you're treading a big deficit out of the gate, and that's BEFORE factoring in the cost of surgery (Delta Grade is likely too delicate to leave for machines alone to install, and even a technomancer would be unable to self-install such ware).

It also depends what your time is worth, and so on. If you're paying 25% of the *real* delta cost, and *then* doing the research for the customizing, and then you're paying *real delta* surgery costs, then maybe it's okay. Gotta run the numbers. Still, delta really is made out of better materials than standard.

It's just my estimate that doing all of this yourself would cost more, in terms of not just money but time as well, than just paying the standard cost. The pay out would be in the security (as long as you can trust the surgeon).