Ok, I'll lay it on you.

A Qi focus that gives an adept improved reflexes 3 costs 42,000 nuyen and requires 28 karma to bind. It's force 14. Oh, and you can get 5*magic points worth of foci bound across magic foci.

The cheapest street sam equivalent will set you back a mere 270,000 nuyen and 5.0 essence.

Availability? The 'ware does beat the focus out at 20R to 42R. Edge may be required to get your hands on this one.

That sound? Oh, that's just every cyber-sam crying inside. Just ignore it.

Edit: Made a minor mistake.

A Qi Foci that gives an adept Improved Reflexes 3 without any PP's spent on the ability is actually more than that.

1 PP=a Force 4 Focus.

3.5 PP=a Force 14 Focus. That's 28 Karma to bind and 42,000 nuyen, and at that point they don't have much in the way of allowed Foci left.

The Sam Equivalent of Synaptic Boosters 3 is 285,000 nuyen, but only 1.5 Essence. It's also 18R for Synaptic Boosters 3, so that technically edges out the Force 14 Foci(Availability 42.)

EDIT: Didn't noticed you fixed the mistake, but Synaptic Boosters 3 are still only 18R and 1.5 Essence.

Focus: addiction, karma costs, expensive, hard to get, vulnerability to astral/wards

'Ware: limited resource (essence), expensive, potentially vulnerable to hackers

One problem: Scratch the 'expensive' part of the focus. 3 grand per point of force is not expensive, especially when compared to its equivalent 'Ware.

I would add a "very" in front of the "expensive" as it costs 42 karma.

The guy with the F14 Focus will likely suffer from Focus Addiction. Also, Wards...

This assumes a character that survives long enought with out IP boost to acquirer a force 14 focus.
Well i quess if you build a face at start and then branch out once you get the focus.

Personally i would just use 2,5PP and force 4 qi focus at chargen to get the reflexes 3(or 1,5PP at start and 1PP later)

Not to mention the fact that he will have neutered himself in order to be able to get the availability 40+ item.

Why not just buy Increased Reflexes with your natural Power Points, and use Qi Foci to boost your other, less commonly needed powers?

~Umi

better idea:

adept starts off with decent resources, buys synaptic booster 2, completely ignores the existence of improved reflexes power. cost: 1 PP and 1 point of magic (on the plus side, buying up magic with karma will be cheaper in the future). then spends the 5 remaining power points on better stuff like combat reflexes and spell resistance that can't be gotten cheaper elsewhere.

or, start off with lots of adrenaline boost. 6 levels of adrenaline boost = +12 initiative for 6 points of (presumably stun) drain per turn, which is almost as much as improved reflexes 3 will give on average... plus it doesn't have stacking limitations. supplement with drugs or edge for crazy initiative. and that will only cost you 1.5 power points, leaving you 4.5 to spend elsewhere (like those aforementioned combat reflexes and spell resistance, both of which scale much better over all).

Starting with Synaptic Booster R2 requires Resources B or better, which will seriously gimp most adepts.

Yeah, trust me-the Bio-Adept option was(and IMO, thankfully, since it ended up better than either pure side be it mundane or magic) cut back a lot. Resources B as an adept means you're taking at best Magic C, which means you likely want to play a human at D to have enough magic to max it out, if you want Attributes A...which means your skills are going to be E and you'll be a one trick pony. Or you can grab Troll A and Attributes E and be seriously either overly one-trick with stats and utterly useless anywhere else, or just '5 body and strength, average everywhere else.' and have pretty crappy stats but you'll have a couple more skill points which will still leave you a one-trick pony. You CAN play a bio-adept but the price is incredibly high to do so and you're left with a one-trick pony in most of the circumstances. (The only way in my testing that I got a bio-adept that wasn't was using an Elf or a Human in a very very specific build and they were more 'two trick' at best. They didn't impress me, I'll say that, and I have an eye for a powerful character.)


Adrenaline boost is nice, but you'll be resisting Drain every round if you keep piling it on. It's a Body+Willpower test, so if you're, say, 5 body and 3 willpower, you are *probably* not going to erase 6 drain every single round. You'd need a combined total of 18 Body and Willpower, which is only doable by a troll who spends like 10 of their starting Attribute Points in Body and Willpower, so again, it would be a gimmick. Honestly, spending the 1.5 PPs on Reflexes 1 is the simplest, best, and easiest way.

also, isn't that near or better rating focus wise than the stuff that say...oh...Harlequin, runs around with?

Its equal.

you don't need to get rid of every point of drain for it to be valuable. 2 unsoaked drain to act with +12 initiative for 1 combat turn is likely to be enough to get through most combat situations. now, 2 points of drain damage (after soaking) is not exactly fun or anything, but it's not an insurmountable obstacle. particularly since you face it *after* the combat turn ends.

i mean, if you're expecting to routinely have fights that last 10 combat turns, or even 4-5, you'll definitely have problems. my experience is that if you're stopping to fight for that long, you're probably screwed regardless though. it means that you're no longer fighting the guys who's job it is to keep you busy, you're now fighting that HTR team that you really needed to get away from before they showed up, and not only are you stuck fighting the guys you didn't want to be, the fight is also not going well at all.

as to the bio-adept, it will be a slower start, but first off, remember you can get up to 50 points of karma to round out those weaknesses. 18 skill points will get you 3 core skills up to 6. assuming, say, mentor spirit and quick healer (very useful for anyone expecting to take drain or fading), that leaves you with potentially 42 karma. you can buy up to 7 skills at rating 2 for that, just as an example - not ideal, but if you've got A attributes you're probably able to make it work reasonably well until you can invest more karma (plus you've still got 5 points worth of adept abilities to fill out your weaker areas too, which can help considerably). or you can spend some more of that karma on a qi focus to make it stretch even farther.

yes, it is a bit of a one-trick pony (or at least, the pony only does one trick exceptionally well) when coming out of chargen. so were the SR4 bio-adepts. what's your point?

Go mystical ninjas!!!

Umm 10 combat turn is a mere 30 seconds, even onsite HTR teams dont have that good a response time

if you're stuck in combat for 10 turns, it most likely isn't against regular security guards with pistols.

the observation is not that after 10 turns, the big guns will show up. the observation is that fights with anything other than the big guns likely won't last very long.

My point was SR4 bio-adepts were not one-trick ponies. I made several that were far from being one-trick ponies, I have character sheets for them lying around and they were good at several things. That's the major difference. In my experience, one-trick ponies run out of steam after awhile, unless it's, say, for a one shot or a one weekend game, when at that point I usually find goofy gimmick builds are kinda fun. But yeah, SR4 they were far more powerful than they are now, and it's kinda good they are cut back a bit. I mean by reducing them to one-trick pony status they did make them less desirable when you realize you can make something better going pure either way. If you WANT a one-trick pony, then sure, you can throw something together.

so your argument is that a 4 dice (max, assuming all those skills would be at rating 6) difference somehow changes you from being functional to being completely unable to function?

because that's the difference. SR5 bio-sam can invest in a bunch of skills at slightly lower values via karma and otherwise keep the attributes the same. less than 4 dice if the adept uses the extra power points to invest in closing the gap in some areas.

Not unable to function, but much more 'flimsy' for a word.

I mean again, I built an Elven bio-adept under SR5 for a test that managed to have a lot of good linked Agility skills since I could drop 1's in the skills. But it was still a very flimsy build, and I worked with it for a long time. You can play it, and yes, what he IS good at he was very good at, but it wasn't all that great looking. Compared to a non-gimmick character, he was not nearly as good. I ended up with a much more solid and better build overall when I did a pure cyber and pure adept version. (The difference in skills with these builds were not 'a few points' it was Skills B vs. Skills E, the character had the same attributes, and the Skills B version can get Bonus Karma just as easily for even more.)

I mean sure, you can play one, and if you want a more hyperfocused type of character it'll work, and it IS, for all intents and purposes, playable, but I stand by my experiments that pure is numerically better, with a lot less weaknesses, where in SR4 it was the other way around, from some of the bio-adepts I built under that system. (It's playable. It's no longer the optimal choice.)

EDIT: Looking these over, dare I say bio-adepts are actually fairly...balanced in the sense that GMs probably don't have to worry about them breaking the game, since they're good at what they do and playable, but do give up quite a bit of other stuff, unlike before. Different races fare better though.

Trolls run into issues-you need to essentially score Resources C at least for this(and devote Karma for bonus nuyen regardless), but Troll B can't work since Magic will be D at that point. Troll A and Magic D can work, and you dump your SA points into that, but they will lack the free skill(Valuable to this build due to the low skill points), so they'd have to settle on Attributes B-still good but they'll definitely be lower.

Orks and Dwarves can get away with Attributes A, but they need to take Race B, use their 4 SA points toward Magic, and then again miss out on the free skill.

Elves above work well as they can take race D. Humans actually work out pretty nicely-they end up with a little less Attributes than elves but can afford to take Skills D giving them 4 more points, and can take Magic B, giving them the free skill on top of it.

If a Char of mine would ever lay hands on a Force 14 Focus, he would go all Gollum on that thing.
Severe focus Addiction .... my precious!

Worth giving it to you just for that...

Oh, a strongly focus addicted character has some great RP potential.

Hell, I'm pretty sure another focus-addicted adept wouldn't mind getting those tattoos for himself, and now I'm reminded of the old PS1 game Vagrant Story.

That's a pretty twisted 'horror game' villain idea right there-an adept serial killer that goes around collecting Qi Foci tattoos from other adepts and needs to be stopped.

Highlander?

Consider this stolen.

9-out-of-10 ghouls agree that Adepts are "Magically Delicious".

While I'm sure there should be a rule against this, what's stopping an adept from getting Increased Reflexes 1, then buying two rating 4 qi foci to get up to Increased Reflexes 3? That would do the trick, and would be legal for a starting character, if cheesy.

Well, the number of Foci that can be active is equal to your Magic attribute, so that's not too bad, but could come into play if you insist on doing the Force 1 Cheese method.(Total force you're pretty lucky since it's Magic x 5). However, you need to check for Focus Addiction if the total Force of Bonded Foci exceeds your Magic Attribute, so abusing Qi Foci for the more expensive things will have you rolling for Addiction pretty quickly.

For Foci, the Addiction Rating is the total Force of all active Foci(8 in this case-for a comparison, equal to Jazz, while Bliss has a 5 and BTLs range from 6 to 8 ). Every time you use the total Foci for 11-Focus Rating weeks, so in this case every 3 weeks...if you use anymore you'll be testing a lot)-and it's a *logic + Willpower* test for Foci since it's psychological(and we know how often Adepts stack Logic and Willpower.) So essentially, yes, Adepts can use Qi Foci cheese if they want to test for addiction all the time, and eventually they're going to run out of luck. It's Threshold wasn't 1 either-I believe it was a 2, which is considered a nastier addiction, with 3's being the stuff like Kamikaze and Tripchips.)

(However, it's almost the same-except for Availability, which is what the cheesy part is. 2 Force 4 Qi Foci cost the same as 1 Force 8, in terms of bonding and nuyen-but it's the Availability that can be worked around. That I'd rule against...even though I don't use the limit at Chargen anyway, if I was playing a game where I did enforce it, I'd make the call that sure, you can get Reflexes 1, but you'll have to be content with a Force 4 Reflexes 2 and get the rest in game, or you can get Reflexes 2 and get a force 4 to raise it to 3, but not two force 1's.)

EDIT: Hint: GMs, play up Focus Addiction hard.

Is the addiction Roll for all BONDED or ACTIVE Foci? Away from Books currently...
If that is for BONDED foci, that is very Harsh. If that is for ACTIVE Foci, then not all that bad, especially for those who only use Foci when Needed, rather than all the time.

Active foci, so you can just turn stuff off when you are not needing it to help lessen the risks.

I intended it to mean ACTIVE. It's a psychological addiction in the fluff (but as your mind limits your ability to work magic, it's worse than usual).

Focus Addiction.

That was what I was thinking. Thanks

Has this been confirmed as to be actual errata or where you just overruled?

I plead the Fifth.

"You can't, you are Canadian."

Shut up!

You plead Question Period? That doesn't even make sense...

So...

I recreated my Current Mystic Adept (312 Karma), and there were a few changes to the character. Maybe he comes out a bit more powerful, and in other ways he lost out.

Biggest Changes Are
He is now a 5s/5a Adept (Whereas he was a 3s/2a Adept originally - Could have stayed at 3/2, but I did not want a 5 Edge)
He has lost several spells to Rituals (had to pick up actual Rituals so he could use that Ritual Magic Skill) and He lost several Spells to Starting Limits (Priority lessened the available Spells from what he originally started with). So a loss of 12 Spells overall (if my count was right), because I also had to make up some skill deficiencies due to the reduction in Knowledge Skills, as well as Karma Changes in the Cost of a Sustaining Foci. Oh well.
And no Initiations. Original Character had just received his 4th Grade of initiation (Group and Ordeals used - 44 Karma).

Assuming that the Adept Abilities and Qualities remain the same as in 4th Edition Books, he is pretty well set, though lacking in some key areas (like Initiations).

Dice Pools are essentially the same (Spell Casting gained about 3 Dice or so, Ritual Casting gained a Die, Social Skills all lost a Die). The change to Counterspelling hurt a bit, but not that big of a deal.

Only real combat loss was the +2dp for Smartlink, which can be recovered should I really care about having something transmitting. But since the Skill is strictly for backup, I don't see me using a wireless bonus on anything (since I have no ware at all, and my base equipment has no need of it).

Had I converted, rather than rebuilt him, he would be much the beast, I think, with fairly high skills, but that seems like I am cheating. *shrug*

So he is a Professional in the same things he was specialized in previously (Skill 6), and Competent in most other skills (Skill 3), with an Exceptional in Counterspelling (Skill 9) which was his primary specialty focus in SR4A.

Still, I prefer my SR4A Version. BP/Karma Gen is so much more precise in character creation *shrug*

EDIT: The Conversion gave some interesting results, but the biggest benefit is that he does not lose any Spells (and his Sorcery/Adept Split stays at 3/2), so a bit behind the rebuild in Spellcasting power, but still 12 spells more versatile, and 4 grades of initiation.

You're comparing a chargen fresh rebuild to a 312 karma gained character, and you only have minor changes, and admit you possibly come out more powerful?

Do you have the original chargen stats of your prior edition character to compare to? Because that would be quite illuminating.

~Umi

No, it is a Chargen Build with additional 300+ Karma for his experience...
It is a Rebuild, using received Karma to compare Actual Karma Expenditures across the two editions for a Character with 300+ Karma.

Way too much typing involved.
Attributes were the same for both editions: 3/3/4(6)/2/4/4/4/4
Magic went from 3/2 to 5/5
Edge stayed the same

Almost all Karma was spent into Foci and Spells.
Sadly, the Rebuild did not get the Initiations, unless I was willing to carve out some more spells. Oh well. Forgot to add that to the list, will go back and edit.

whew! had us worried for a sec

Heh... I can see why. Sorry I was unclear.

Overall, in advancement for SR4A, I had spent 250 on Spells (an additional 50 Spells), 44 on Initiation (4 Initiate Grades), and 18 on Skills/Specialties. Totaling 312 Karma.
Does not go as far in SR5, unfortunately, but you can start out of chargen a bit stronger, overall... Especially as a Mystic Adept.

Now, here's the question... if someone doesn't leave it active all the time, just when they're on runs, how often do you have to test for Focus Addiction? If they only have > Magic in active foci one or two hours at a time, how long will it take before they need to make a test?

I'd certainly agree to that as a house rule, but the problem is that I don't see this as a core rule. I'm looking for ways to limit the cheese within the rules.

We invoke Section 13. Which to me, sounds much more badass anyway.

Only if Section 13 is tougher than Section 9 is.

Warehouse 13 on the other hand is just plain weird.

What, the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned?

Section 9 does not imprison people, it kills people.

Would you care to list which spells you bought? 50 seems an unusually high number, and I'd be interested in seeing which ones you wanted.

That said, while you can start 5/5 as opposed to 3/2, I believe I'd rather take 3/2 if I could have the spell rules of 4e.

Indeed, I will PM it to you.
I also agree that 3/2 is a better split, in my opinion. I prefer much of SR4A over SR5, to be sure. Some things in SR5 are very interesting (I don't mind the refocus on Drain, for instance), but some of it is just crazy.