So, something I've thought about a bit, just throwing out for a consensus.

I know it seems like power gaming to play an Ork or Troll who has undergone cosmetic surgery to look more human like. You get all the bonuses without the flavor.

But, I look at trolls and think that those horns they have would be a total bitch. Sleeping would suck, among other things. Not to mention tusks on either race. Their mouth is never really quite closed. That's gotta cause issues.

Now, take one of these Meta-types that have the ability to install crazy expensive cyber, some of which changes their appearance dramatically already. Wouldn't some of these guys have a little nip-tuck done? For merely convenience sake? I kinda think there would be a few "pretty" Trolls being bouncers in high end type places.

I could see social and racial prejudice being thrown there way because of this, but really, Orks and trolls get that already.

Any thoughts?

Sounds a bit like mouth breathers I see at my gas station.

This was discussed in another thread on cosmetic surgery on orks, trolls, & etc...

For an Ork... it makes sense. Get enough work done, & you could pass for human. Troll don't have that luck... few humans are over 9 feet tall, have long arms, & are sized like walking Hummers.

There's also the human looking quality... but that seems a waste as with enough nuyen, you can buy your looks.

The tusks probably aren't that much of an issue, comfort-wise. The problem is that the artists tend to go amok when drawing orks or trolls. For every one with functional-looking tusks, there are ten freaks who wouldn't be able to close their mouths without cutting themselves. It's orks and trolls, dammit, not radioactive mutants!

Also, keep in mind that orks and trolls who get certain kinds of cosmetic surgery could be seen as "wannabe breeders", and treated with a fair amount of contempt, by other orks and trolls (and even other metatypes, the progressive or nonconformist ones at least). Some cosmetic surgery is probably acceptable - straightening out teeth, capping horns like most minotaurs do, and such. But when you start actually looking like a human, or some freakish uncanny valley version of one, you will probably start losing street cred.

Uncanny Valley Trolls as Humans. Interesting...

There's heavy social mods if your Human-Looking Ork is found out... From both Humancentric and Orkcentric peoples. You're a traitor to both peoples! It's twice the social negative modifiers!

And you're probably treated like an Elf/Ork Poser, too.

It hardly seems like powergaming to me if you actually make an RP issue of your "ethic" looks. I think it's laudable.

In the real world, some Asians have their eyelids surgically reshaped to look more Caucasian; why shouldn't orks have their tusks reworked?

Didn't I hear about some Trolls have scrimshaw work done on their horns, like a tattoo?

My question to this is how far has plastic surgery truly come because the level of change is substantial. It would not simply be facial reconstruction but full body reconstruction. I'd imagine down to chests and pelvis's being cracked and narrowed. Muscles contoured and perhaps even limb shortening.

I've done this to an ork, but wondered just how close to human she really could come. I pictured her looking just a smidge off, perhaps how a F to M transgendered person might look but ork to human. High cheekbones and harsh angles in her face. But then again with medical advances I wonder if there'd be any signs or scars left at all.

Depends on how much you can pay for, with vat-grown skin as an option... The scars, if any, would be quite small and in places not normally seen.

tehana does make a good point but take it a step forward, the jaw structure of a sabertooth tiger is different from it's modern relatives and in any species that uses vocalizations the shape of the mouth is a big deal, it does after all affect how you form sounds. A troll or ork who had their tusks done would have to learn how to make some sounds all over again. Then the issue of chewing, they would find themselves shifting food around in their mouth to accommodate tusks that aren't there any more. And if they had their jaw rebuilt to take care of how it would protrude? Congrats, you look a little closer to human, but good luck being understood, mush mouth. This is before we get in to how muscles in the neck and jaw interact with each other, how the tongue fits in the mouth how scarring from surgery could affect the secretion of saliva....

Basically? too many reasons to discuss why making an ork or troll "human looking" is an expensive proposition and at my table we have always house ruled it you can get close, but you end up basically being treated like a "human poser", though an ork with human looking as a quality can pretty much get it spot on.

Anyhow, why would you want to look human now with Ork Pride going about! There's even an Ork CEO of a AAA-Corp now!

Ork Pride... Now there is an Oxy-Moron...

You try telling that to Gary Cline. Check to see if there's plastic on his office floor first.

Heheheh... It is only there for some redecorating.

Yeah... Keep telling yourself that.

I'm not seeing dental work as being that big of a deal. People have painful procedures done on their teeth as we speak, some only for pure cosmetics.

I could see tusks being corrected in minor ways as common, for the more privileged tuskers. Something started young.

Same for horns. Both of them would be simple issues of comfort.

As far as making them look like humans, I'm sure there as surgeries that could. Even ghouls can get cosmetic surgery for that.

I mean, trolls are still going to be a crazy tall, oddly proportioned looking people.

I see a couple reasons folks might want to do this:

Comfort
To look less fearsome, perhaps these tuskers like human and elf women, and want to be more appealing to them?
A person who goblinized later in life would definately consider it.

I remember (but I could definetly be wrong) reading that bigger tusks were equated with manliness.

I don't exactly disagree with you Squinky, I just think your view is relevant for the more human looking orks and metavariants, in some of the illustrations in official books if you pay attention to the scale there is really no way the tusks of some of the individuals presented to fit in a normal metahuman mouth without restructuring them. Look at Contacts And Adventures for a prime example right on the cover, those tuskers have the sort of underbite that makes me think of a particular Venture Bros villain.

BAH! There's humans and elves that love the big, burly types! Why should they have to change...

Oh who am I kidding? Society gives a view on beauty and the sheeple follow it. Starve themselves sick, get painful and unnecessary surgeries (That take valuable trained doctors away from life saving, but less paying, surgery suites), make-up (Animal and Paraanimal testing), perfume/cologne (Same), improper gym exercises that injure them and will cripple them later in life, take drugs and herbal treatments (And who knows what the hell they are really!), unsafe diets from charismatic and undocumented "Experts" (At least they aren't televangelists)...

I'm ranting again, aren't I?

Only a bit...

But you look so *beautiful* when you rant...

I look like text on a screen.

And your Avatar... Don't forget your Avatar...

Yes, because things look great in 16-Bit.

It's so appropriate though. A man slumped down in the corner.

Not much different from your own...

Considering the explosion of Ork Pride and Or'Zet's rise-and the fact that nerds today dress like Klingon's and Storm Troopers well I guess I'd see a significant number (Not necessarily a majority mind you) being proud of their "fearsome" heritage.

And aren't there Ork Posers?

I imagine there would be posers of all sorts in the sixth world.

*Looks waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay up at the troll with a huge beard* "I'm a Dwarf." "Whatever you say, man. I ain't arguing with you."

The things they can do with Bioware these days. Or is it like Heffer from Rocko's Modern Life? A troll raised by dwarves and no one had the heart to tell him he was adopted?

Or like Captain Carrot from Discworld where he *IS* a dwarf, but just happens to be human too.

Also, he could have been born human to dwarven parents, and goblinized into a troll at puberty.

I don't *think* that can happen.

Not positive, mind you, but I was under the impression that Goblinization only happened to humans (One of the things that terrifies Humanis people.... at any moment, you could turn into ONE OF THEM!!!!oneone!Eleven) ... once your genes had expressed into Metahumanity, they were done expressing.

I can't say with 100% authority, mind. (And COmet SURGE throws it all out a window, natch.)

It's rare, but it still happens.

I think indeed some may want to go get a lot of stuff done. If someone wanted to in one of my games, I wouldn't mind one bit. It's physical appearance. It really doesn't do anything for gameplay, and really, racism I imagine either if people found out(int he case of an ork.) I mean, if someone walked up to me and said ''I have an elf character, but he is completely uggggly in every stretch of the imagination'', I'd let them play it. I don't see a problem with letting people play physical appearances how they want.

I mean, okay. Take a troll. Bob the troll, early 20s or so, decides he wants to look like the hot, buff dudes he sees on TV. Maybe he goblinized at a rather sensitive age and he never got over it. He's buff, and really he's not even all that unattractive lets say(IMO, I always thought trolls and orks could run the range, just like there are some humans who look like they fell out of the proverbial ugly tree.) So Bob the Troll gets a whole lotta surgery done and he now looks like a big buff and damn handsome dude. Thing is, people racist against trolls are *still* going to know Bob as a troll. If anything, I can imagine some hardcore racists being even more disgusted with him, since 'he's trying to be like them, the bastard.'' And as pointed out, some trolls may well think of him as a traitor-with others actually perhaps being jealous that he could afford it.

Hell, if anything, it may end up with a bit more social disadvantages than if he had just stayed ''Bob the Regular Troll''. But, well, if he's happy, he's happy.

He seems happy, but is Bob really happy on the inside? Or does he fill the whole in the centre of his being with violence to keep the pain away?

As good a reason to 'Run as any.

Sure, some racists may frown on getting de-tusked, and some orks or trolls may think of you as a race traitor. But how do average people in the street react? Does it improve your chances of landing a decent job as say, a receptionist? Because that would be one of the main reasons to do it.

I think that's quite possible; compare to college kids cutting their long hair and putting away their metal-bandshirts by the time they start looking for serious jobs.

On the other hand, due to people getting used to the presence of tuskers, maybe piercings and tattooes have become more acceptable too in "polite society".

There's also Or'zet, which requires tusks to be spoken properly...

It's never come up, but I've ruled that if you speak Or'zet without tusks, it sounds like you're speaking with a stereotypically gay lisp.

I could see getting something like spacers in/on the gums to help out without too much change. A bit like some Asian people get their tongue frenulum cut to speak English better.

Nah, see, the troll at the door is supposed to look intimidating. Being ugly is part of the job.

There are also orks with pierced (!) tusks in the books, if I remember.

That's a little extreme for a blinged-out grill, if you ask me.

I have to say, I looked through some of the books and there are trolls whom I'd consider handsome, but they're still troll-y.

The one that sticks out in my head is the guy on the back cover of the SR3 Shadowrun Companion. But I have a soft spot for ''Metal Guys'', and I think he looks metal enough that I thought to myself ''damn, he ain't bad.''


Here's the guy:

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b13/TheC...nter/pic001.jpg

He's definitely a big trolly dude with his horns and tusks, but he has no weird dermal deposits, he's pretty symmetrical(I notice that the goblinized folks seem to suffer a bit more from asymmetrical features more often), and has a generally badass longhair heavy metal look. I've always liked this random dude.

Solution: REMOVEABLE HORNS!
You can get Cyber-Ware-Horns.
So why not make your natural ones removeable?
Small Smuggeling Compartment to boot, if you hollow them out.
Makes wearing helmets easier too.
As for the skin-issues/dermal deposits:
Well, yes, warts and the such will have to go, but who says that you have to sand down the dermal deposits untill they are completely gone?
I'd rather make them smooth like marble, polished bone in the skin . . maybe carve some nice patterns/lines into them too . .
Make them the centerpiece of a nice tattoo/nanotatt maybe . . in all essence, keep what's making you you. what's making you a troll.
But that does not mean what's making you the troll has to make you look like an UGLY troll, if you have the money to get something like that done.

Also handy for Mead Night at The Big Rhino!

I think that some cool designs with the deposits could indeed be neat. Kinda like how people IRL get skin implants. That would actually look really cool, designs carved or maybe burned into them.

I have a troll fella who is fairly symmetrical in his looks. He's a young hacker-just about nineteen. Punky looking dude-long mohawk worn down, and he has some pretty extensive piercing in his ears and a few scattered around(eyebrows, lip). His dermal deposits are fairly even, they don't get in the way of his clothing or anything, though he seems to wear the same ripped up jeans and ripped-sleeve shirts all the time. xD His tusks aren't exceptionally large though he does have them, and he keeps his horns, since he actually has metal rings on them for design. If you actually cleaned him up, tied his hair back in a ponytail and stuff he'd look damn respectable, though you'd probably have to tie him down if you wanted to actually get him in something other than jeans and a t-shirt.

And indeed-imagine, your own beer helmet, never to leave your head!

I've made a couple of characters that drew heavily on these aspects for their background/characterization.

The first was made, oh, 7, 8 years ago, and was a Troll Face. Which is outlandish enough, I know. But she'd goblinized her first year in college, and had some serious emotional and psychological reactions to the experience (not uncommon), which she attempted to deal with by getting a LOT of biosculpting done (more uncommon). She wound up quite attractive, in a human sort of way...though she still had rather troll-ish physical dimensions, so she had the build of the shit brickhouse to end all shit brickhouses in human terms. Had her horns polished and symmetrified and twisted into attractive ram's horn styles, had her tusks more or less removed, her teeth re-straightened (and a few removed to bring the number closer to human standard), her jaws rebuilt, nose, lips, brow, ears, pretty much the whole lot, on top of full-body dermal deposit removal/sandings, softened-up skin, and whatnot.

Naturally, while this did make her somewhat more "presentable" in places where the average troll is ranked as "not presentable", she still looked rather odd for a troll (closer to a Fomorian, actually), and she suffered a lot of blowback from the troll and (to a lesser degree) ork communities, being (not uncorrectly) identified as a wannabe breeder, as someone else put it further up the thread. Made for some very interesting encounters.

The second, more recent, was a teenager when she goblinized as a troll, the daughter of a couple of up and coming Japanacorps executives, who had previously been a highly successful status symbol for her young parents, being the very model of the intelligent, hard-working, respectful, and graceful young Japanese woman as fixated upon by the traditionalist bent. Unfortunately, that all went to hell when she started changing in the middle of the night during a recent local rash of SURGEing. To her parents' partial credit, they didn't do what would've been the most expedient of all options, but rather, they spirited her away, sneaking her out of the compound and to some doctors with a strict confidentiality policy and a not so strict set of ethics.

She got a more rigorous full-body set of treatments, all of them aimed at cutting her back to looking as human as possible. Naturally, these were some very invasive and dangerous procedures, which took quite a bit of time, as she needed to heal up from some of the steps involved just to survive the next set. Over a year later, they were more or less finished, and having broken out a cover story of sending her to live with family on a distinctly out of communication small island somewhere, they brought her back. And to those quacks' credit, they had been successful! More or less. She looked almost entirely human...except for the fact that she was nearly ten feet tall, of course. And in near-constant pain. With reduced body and strength attributes to account for her structurally reduced musculature and skeletal systems, shortened arms, lengthened legs...

It all turned out to almost be for nothing, anyway, as her parents' attempts to come up with a slightly more acceptable cover story for her changes were poorly received, and they got the strong impression the sort of people who would produce such an abomination would not be welcome in the upper echelons of a respectable Japanese corporation such as the one of which they'd lived their entire lives as citizens. So she had to run, again, in the middle of another night, when the "extraction" team her parents hired were making a beeline into her bedroom. She got away, but where would she be welcome if her own family, who were responsible for half of why she was the way she was, wouldn't have her?

Good times, good RP fodder.

I've been toying around with the idea of a troll face with a realistic cyberskull with a magnetic system and removable horns.
He'd also have Artisan (Resin Sculpting) to produce a nice variety of different horn and dermal deposit shapes.
I think it would make for very efficient disguises, as these features are pretty memorable.

More on topic, my personal take on the subject :
The Human Looking quality is not available to trolls, so there's no way to ever pass your troll off as human unless you undergo Metatype Adjustment gene therapy and actually become human on the genetic level.
Simply removing horns/tusks wouldn't be sufficient in itself, although it could grant a slight CHA bonus along the rules for biosculpting.
I'd also count it as a prerequisite for gaining the Human Looking quality ingame.
Without that quality, people would still view you as an ork, just one without tusks.
This is based on the precedent of ghouls having to buy off the Blindness quality when they get cybereyes.
To gain or lose a quality, the usual way is to spend BP/karma. Surgery may just allow you to do so in the first place.

Well . . . The North European Troll Meta-Variant GIANT is, basically, just a 3 to 4m tall Human . .
No Tusks, no Horns, no Dermal Plating, no ugly Skin. Only infra-red-capable eyes, big and strong.

Your Troll sounds kinda like a Troll-Variant of Karl Ruprecht Kroenen with his mask, only made more life-like.
Under SR4 with the nano disguise kit or the false front ware you should be able to do something like that pretty easy.
And an Adept with Kinesics or whatever that was could produce similar results i guess.

Also:
I have one such prettied up Troll.
Van. Squinky drew him for me once.
Charisma 4, smooth smaller natural plates and some artificial plates made to look like his natural ones.
Horns and Tusks look very pretty, very symmetrical too. Because they are actually the non retractable cyber-implant-weapons made to look like natural ones.
Muscled out to nowhere, as you'd expect from a Troll, but Bioware helps with a nice +5 to STR.
Ah, here we go:
http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs31/i/2008/223...productions.jpg

And skin like a tree ^^