As I said, it's one of the central theme of cyberpunk. Most of the time, the cyberpunk main character is less than human: he's poor, in bad physical or mental condition, at the bottom of the society. He also uses drugs or has implants which make him different both more and less than human.

Most of the time, the story goes on to show that despite all this, he's the most human thing in a world where (among other things) corps squeeze the rest of the population for profit, turning them into soulless workers and consumers.

This thread actually reawoke my interest and love for Shadowrun ^^
Thanks blade, i think i will quote your post often in the next few days.

My group has done this before. I think the player called it the "Archmage Derrangement" which he played pretty much like a budding Raistlin or Supervillain. This was before Augmentation gave us Derrangements and specifically Megalomaniac. He took it after surviving a few brushes with death and after his magic got fairly high (8-9 range I think) and realized he was "invincible!".

*snip* Just kill Essence. Every mundane can work in as much Cyberware as he wants, but for every two points of "Essence Cost" the character gains said quirk/derangment. Magically active and resonant Creatures still loose their "natural maximum" for magic.
Cyberware, after the 6th Essence point, cumulates a quirk/derangment after every point.

This would need a redefinition of the Cyberzombie, naturally. Maybe as in "a cyberzombie can cram in more cyberware by basically gaining all the derangments/quirks at once, but now the Essence cost is halved".

I think this touches on part of why I loved grounding. Cyberware makes you less human, but magic carries a very real possibility of your exploding violently for no apparent reason.

How is this better?
Magicians don't lose anything. They gain more.

The problem with grounding was hitting that mage with an AoE spell and killing his whole team. So it was less "your exploding violently for no apparent reason" and more "being a severe liability to your team's health."

In any case, Grounding doesn't make a mage "less of a person" for having high magic. It just makes their career choice deadlier (it's entirely possible to run a mage with no foci).

Thats the wrong question. And assumption.

Huh?
I thought if something is being house ruled, the house rule is supposed to make something better, because if you did not need to change it, to make it better, you would not need to house rule at all . .

Your thinking is right. Though you ignore what the whole discussion was about. This isn't the "Mages outpacing Mundanes" Thread.

Huh?
Oh, right x.x
Wrong tab x.x

On the topic of transhumanism, I'm not sure it's as prevalent in SR(4 or otherwise) as it might seem to be.

Transhumanists want to replace their human bits because they believe that doing so betters THEMSELVES on a fundamental level. Being augmented, being "upgraded" from your junky human meat is a GOOD thing on an almost moral level. It's expanding their horizons, opening their minds, allowing them to be "more" than human in a way that transcends pure performance specifications. Replacing bits of them is a goal in and of itself, it is as much the objective as whatever they may believe the augmentations will give them.

The vast majority of SR characters get 'ware because it lets them DO something they couldn't before. Why is that a good thing for them? It's because that something they can now DO that they couldn't without the 'ware is going to put food on their table, protect their loved ones, earn them promotions, or just let them survive a situation they wouldn't otherwise. They find no particular pleasure in having parts of their body removed or pushed aside to have something shoved inside them. In fact, it bothers most of them when they actually think about it, which most of them try not to, too much. It's all about what the 'ware can do for them, not about what getting the 'ware will help them "become".

The first example is vanishingly rare in SR. People with that mindset are ostracized by society as radicals with issues, and even the most gung-ho manager of cybernetics research Suit in a corp will feel distinctly uneasy when faced with the fanaticism that might light the eyes of a hardcore transhumanist when they extoll the virtues of "improving" humanity. The Corporations don't want transhumanists as customers, because if enough people became transhumanists, society would change enough that they might just find themselves obsolete. Likewise with governments and their citizenry. Of course, the average joe probably wouldn't be keen on their new neighbour being an augmentation addict, either.

The second has always been, and still is, the norm. Personally, I'm fine with keeping it that way. And geneware and nanotech can take a short walk off a long pier, then swim back to being found only in high-security R&D facilities. You can write entire games around those concepts, but trying to shoehorn them into SR's "theme" of cyberware (and later bioware, though I think that's gained too much ascendance, too) is just going to result in a sloppy mess of techno magic (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...) and poorly explored shallow ripoffs of gattaca.

That said, I'm not opposed to the idea that there are plenty (by plenty meaning a statistically tiny but still fairly large bunch of poeple) of folks out there that willfully seek out good cyberware to replace perfectly good limbs or body space. The closest examples we can find in our own world lacking in prosthetics or implants that actually improve the performance of whatever they replace or augment (no, the sprinter with prosthetic lower legs doesn't count, because the only thing they exceed is a straight line sprint under very controlled conditions) would involve drugs; steroids for athletes, speed for air force pilots, etc. People WILL do irrational things for the edge it will give them, even if they're doing harm to themselves in the end.

What I'm babbling on about here is that I don't think it's a black and white "people wouldn't cut off a perfectly good arm to get a cyberlimb, they have to be forced into it" or "any sane person would replace their weak flesh with highly superior artificial components that have all the functionality of the original" choice. There's a grey in-between where a million different perspectives, and most PCs in SR, reside. Which I find more interesting than being forced to choose one or the other. Which is part of why enforcing social or psychological penalties with augmentation is a bad idea. Yes, the lack thereof does mean that it comes down strictly to role-played reactions and behavior, and this means some players will never show the slightest hint of "getting it" as some might put it. But it seems better, to me, than the alternative.

It's a tough balance to maintain, and I thank the creative people involved in the game's development for walking it.

Argent didn't just have one perfectly good arm cut off off, he had both. Just so they could be hyper-effective weapons systems.

And he keeps them updated, too! Complete with fingerprints! (Luckily, with no oily residue from actual fingers, he doesn't leave any prints behind.).

Yes, except that other than that Argent was (at least in the novels I've read) Mr Nice Guy with better empathy than most people.

He's got issues as well. They just don't affect him in "I'm a damned asshole" way, more of a "Don't ask about my past and I won't rip your arms off so we match" way.

Except Evo, they're kind of banking on being early adopters of the cyborg revolution.

I REALLY like this idea, and may have to use it in the future.

eh? Is that a 4th ed thing or have I been oblivious to exploding mages?

No, that's an SR1 and 2 thing.
Been mostly impossible since SR3.

For good reason. Grounding opened up the door to a lot of weird questions.

*sigh* It did mean i had to retire my free spirit NPC who used to get a kick out of going around and grounding spells through any Spell Lock or Dual natured being he found (Spell Locks got out of control for a little while in our games, this was a way, in game, to put a lid on them ).

Bull

You poor little bully you! ^^

Grounding is one of those small things that change between editions, where the creators essentially say, "It's a small retcon. You know it used to exist, we know it use dto exist, but we're going to quietly ignore it. We're all better off for this."

There's a few things that crop up every so often like this and, in general, the playerbase is okay with it. The advantages of having an RPG base instead of a CCG base.

DId someone say bully?

Have I? Oh, good. I can use the free time.

I for one am so glad Grounding was eliminated. It just created more problems than it was worth.

- J.

The one thing I liked about grounding, it made going astral more dangerous, put a downside to having active foci, and made being dual natured more of a liability than a bonus. But yeah it could get complicated.

Double post.

Dual Natured is STILL a huge liability ..

More of a liability, i.e. now his non-magical friends can get fried along with him.

Ah, right ^^

Having sustaining foci also still causes trouble with wards and is the magical equivalent of walking around with full body armor and an assault rifle.

Not the same as being blasted from thought-space, but still not problem-free.

To my understanding it's not R3 Revised though.

Or like breaking into Fort Lewis to steal ADPS eh?

Aww, you're right. To make it worse, I can't find the conversion guide…

~J

I have that somewhere, I'll pm it or something when I get a chance to look.


EDIT: Well, your Inbox is full

Going to assume that the guide isn't protected or whatnot, so I found a copy here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4089972/Rigger-3...onversion-Guide

Well, to the extent that it's a creative work it would be under copyright, but somehow I don't feel too unsafe going out on a limb and assuming that errata like this was intended for distribution.

~J

After a failed search at Battleshop, I found Rigger 3 (unrevised) at RPGnow/DriveThruRPG.

Any idea why it is not for sale direct from CGL ?

Any idea why it is not the revised edition ?

Heh. I really didn't expect this topic to be so boring inside. And it looked so promising*...


* If you add "Catapocalypse" and the fact that "Kot" means "Cat" in my native language...

From what I found out a few months ago, somehow the PDF source of that book was corrupted or something, and nobody from CGL ever went back to see if any old FASA/FanPro folks had a copy. I also read that there may have been some confusion on the rights of the revised book, seeing how it came out after FASA died. I'm a little fuzzy I'll see if I can find my information later.

The last time I browsed through CGL's file server, I didn't see a copy of Rigger 3 Revised. There's a lot of other cool stuff in there, but not that.

Hm ... that probably doesn't help much.

Well, if one of their newest Freelancers is any indication, CGL seems desperate.

There are no rights issues relating to Rigger 3. Rigger 3 was released by FASA -- it was their last Shadowrun product. Rigger 3 Revised was released by FanPro when the book needed to be reprinted. A proper backup of the Revised files was never made, and the hard drive that the files were on died. It's just that simple.

*shrugs*
you are one of us . . you are our kind of crazy . . it's a fair cop . . which is seldom enough . .

Any chance a new PDF will be created and made available like some of the other old books?

Catalyst's current business is not my area of expertise.

Well use some cutter nanites and force someone to talk!

Ahem. We use duct tape and chairs and CanRay for that stuff here...

Getting books in PDF has been a side project I've been trying to get done for a while, so I can answer this, unoffiically.

Basically, any book that is not available in PDF right now is a book that we simply do not have a good OCR scan of to make available. To get the OCR scan done well, the book has to be stripped, effectively destroying it.

So right now, anything missing is something that none of us at CGL have extra copies of (or even have any copies of). It's something we're slowly trying to rectify.

Rigger 3 Revised seems to be one of the hardest books to find in hard copy. I don't know if, because it was both a reprint and one of the last SR3 books done it had a shorter print run, or what, but I never even saw a copy of it at my local game shop back when it was released, and I know a number of folks who've been looking for a copy over the years.

Bull

Yeah, I've never seen a copy of that book irl either. I'm guessing short print run.

Hmm... I have a friend down in Georgia who tries to buy two copies of all of his gaming books. I'll have to ping him and find out if he has a spare Rigger 3.