OK. Thanks. I wasn't sure if that was the case with Cypher, because, as you point out, you usually can't buy those things. Damn exception to the rule was throwing me off. Also, I thought I recognized Red Masque from somewhere. I really enjoyed the NAN adventures back in the day. So new rules and trip down memory lane.

So I bought this one and was somewhat impressed. My biggest complaint is actually that I wish this was a bigger book with more material in it. That said I feel like I got my money's worth for $5

The martial arts alone was worth it I think for a lot of players.

People love to tweak their characters with things like that.

i thought those were in run & gun...

You are right, was thinking wrong thread.

Sorry to disappoint. I had some other brilliant ideas for this book but they ended up being a little too ambitious for a short pdf supplement. Maybe someday...

Now we have the negative quality and rules for the player character being pregnant.
Just what we lacked at our table. Finally that glaring hole in the ruleset is plugged.

UPD: Cypher is an interesting idea, a virus that lets you store info in your cells' genetic coding.
Feign Illness adept power allows you to mimic illnesses, including physiological changes. Needless to say, I'm going to use it to feign HMHVV.
Transmit Damage looks like a ridiculously powerful ability that not only damages the target with an unarmed attack, but also heals you by the damage dealt.

There's also a viable cyborg body, Caduceus 7, for only 17k!

One could extend your argument to any number of qualities; look at some of the SURGE qualities for example- do we really need rules for Catgirls? But one function of qualities in my mind is to give a mechanical framework to roleplaying elements- to provide players and GMs who start with an idea some guidance for how their idea would interact with the game world. And one of my goals was to give some mechanical framework to more mundane medical conditions because A.) not everyone needs to be dying of superAIDSebolacephalitis, B.) I don't think the existing SR4 rules had done a great job of it and C.) the purpose of the book is to give Medic characters more interesting stuff to do. I would also point out that Qualities aren't just for PCs. And if none of that works for you, then you're in luck because these (like all Qualities really) are completely optional.

Should make your next courier snatching run more interesting, yes?

Interesting idea I suppose, but I would point out the power allows you to mimic signs and symptoms, not things like Mist Form or Essence Drain, etc.

At first glance yes, but when you consider the cost and the fact that the adept has to engage in a potentially dangerous activity (like combat) to heal a few boxes, I don't think its all that powerful. There are lots of cheeper, easier and more effective ways of healing a few boxes- this is really an RP/fluff thing. Also, I would point out that it does nothing to actually increase the damage the adept causes so it relies entirely on the character's ability to effectively cause melee damage (i.e.- costs the adept has to pay for separately).

So it would seem. Personally, I don't think you can have anthroform drones be a commercially available thing and then price them so high that players can't afford them just because they might make cyborgs. If anthroform drones are a thing, then they would be priced to sell in markets for which they are designed. Besides, if a player decides he is going to make a cyborg, the price of the body isn't necessarily the cost determinant factor- medical facilites capable of transplanting a human brain aren't cheep.

Blasphemer! Of course we need rules for catgirls!

There are many areas of game world which normally happen off-screen. In my opinion, it is not in any way necessary to supply Capacity numbers for a penile implant, nor point out the precise bonus on olfactory tracking a menstruating female, nor provide rules for pregnancies.

Well, about as interesting as for one with a data lock; but still it's a fine idea.

Okay, I'll have to make do with... what was it, +3 Str and +5 Bod?

You know, when the power of my spells depends on the number of creatures dying this turn around me, I bring a sack of hamsters in 0 HP with me.
Same thing here: after magical and mundane healing, an adept can heal himself simply by punching his snake pet.

There's plenty of adepts who are optimized to deal melee damage as it is, so that's a non-issue.
But what appears to be an issue, as for me, is how closely that power resembles the Blood Magic techniques.

Arsenal offers an elegant solution with people being afraid of humanoid bots after the Lockdown.

Minding that the CCU alone costs 250k?

There a 3-4 page thread on that other SR forum about the idea of a Rat Puncher Adept. I am of the mind that you don't need rules to deal with such behavior. Or more to the point that you can't make rules that are 100% immune to abuses like Rat Punching Adepts or using Feign Illness to try to gain vampiric powers*. But for what its worth, I have suggested to Jason that if B&B is ever updated to a corrected version the rule should be restricted to metahuman targets. Of coarse, then players who are bent on abusing the rules will run about punching helpless little old ladies, but I'll leave that to their GMs to deal with.

*Regarding Feign Illness: I think its implicit that the power does not actually reproduce the pathologic effects of the disease (feign = to represent fictitiously; put on an appearance). Otherwise faking a heart attack or a stroke would be pretty stupid. Along the same lines, I would argue that feigning HMHVV infection would not suddenly make you stronger or tougher or capable of mist form or whatever.

that adept ability to drain health also opens up a few interesting points.

don't have the book, but if it can heal stun damage, it's awesome. if it can heal from doing stun damage, that is also awesome in terms of healing as a team (the adept can take a bunch of physical, which takes days to heal, and instead cause an ally stun damage, which takes only hours to heal... so instead of being out of commission for a week, this could reduce you to being out of commission for a day, with some help).

then, you've got other things to consider; for example, the interaction with first aid. the adept can take, say, 2 boxes from someone. then you use first aid on that someone to heal those 2 boxes. then you do another 2 boxes, then heal them, since it's a separate set of wounds, and so on.

vampiric health drain is actually pretty crazy. does it at least follow the standard rules for being unable to heal drain damage?

oh, and being afraid of humanoid bots is pretty danged irrational. i don't think the manservant was given reduced functionality because it was humanoid... i think it was given reduced functionality because it was marketed as a drone to spend time around the most vulnerable segment of the population, and was being marketed by a company that recently had a massive PR problem with robots going berserk and killing people (most or perhaps even all of which robots were not, in fact, humanoid in shape at all - in fact, several were rather alien in design, as i recall).

other corporations don't have the same negative publicity to deal with, and robots designed for other purposes don't have the same design concerns anyways (on account of not typically being around dozens of unarmed, typically untrained, and frequently infirm people).

The power allows an adept who has taken physical damage to heal it by dealing physical damage to an opponent (requires killing hands). I'm not sure I understand your second scenario (healing your friends by dealing damage to them?) but I don't think this power supports that.

As far as healing drain is concerned, there is a blanket rule in SR5 that drain cannot be healed with anything except rest. In SR4 there is a similar rule that precludes the use of any form of magical healing to remove drain.

Can it at least make them sparkly like a Twilight Vamp?

Just kidding

That's not "100% immune to abuses", that's "considering the most obvious way to deal damage without taking damage yourself".

While it's pretty obvious that the power should not give you the paranatural abilities, I fail to understand how it is you are planning to feign the changes to the cardiovascular system that the HMHVV wrecks so that it's both believable and not producing similar effects.

Why metahuman and not metasapient, like the rest of the Blood Magic?

Could you please explain how that is an abuse? When in Threats we learn that the Blood Magic Gestalt sacrifices Awakened teens to fuel their rituals, are we to take that the AZT is abusing the rules of the system?

Heal yourself for any amount of damage by punching your friends and then healing them back up. Each time you attack them, you deal some moderate damage that can be healed right back with First Aid and Healing (it's a new set of wounds each time), and each time you heal yourself for your power Rating boxes.

So if I use it to mimic HMHVV(vampire strain...not sure how to diferentiate) are the allergies signs or symptoms?

HMHVV is a virus that causes vampirism and the power allows you to mimic a virus, not a racial condition. So in my opinion would be that if you can fake being a corpse, then you can fake being a corpse which has no essence due to HMHVV.

Trying to use the power to be a Vampire just seems like a horrible cause of Munchkinism, which I as a GM would punish someone for badly.

It just shouldn't work, imo. I mean, you can pretend to be a vampire by altering your physiology, that's not giving you vampiric powers.

Actually, an obvious solution would be saying that only mundane diseases can be feigned.

I would use Feign Illness with the Day Job negative quality.

Also handy for getting out of a bad date with

>impaling SR employers give paid sick days

Impaling? Kind of a Harsh reaction wouldn't you say?

Sounds like the NHS

I agree on both counts. But I think adding a laundry list of limitation to every rule is tiresome and usually takes away from the game more than it adds. I'd have to review the various diseases (including magical diseases) to be sure that such a limitation doesn't preclude other fun, interesting and non-munchkiny uses of the power.


Awesome! You win SR.

I'm sorry if I'm mistaken, but isn't researching how a given rule interacts with others part of designing rules for something?

This attitude, combined with your perception of how 'tiresome' it is to make a rule work properly seems a bit off. Either you design rules that work or just write up some stuff that's rattling around in your head. One of the two can make a great product, the other one a ... not so great one, usually.

Personally, I can't judge on whether it's a good product or not. I haven't read B&B, and the price seems pretty reasonable, but comments like that, from its author no less, make me really really wary.

Edit:
As an addendum: I'm also one of the proponents for going rules-light if possible, so I'd agree. But there are a lot of people who treat RPGs in general as conflict simulators like D&D, and it usually makes for a better experience for everyone to nip potential issues in the bud by putting down well-researched information.

First, I'll apologize in advance for following diatribe on game design.

bannockburn: Based on your addendum, I sense that we probably don't disagree as much as you might think.

My comments were not intended to be a defense of sloppy game design or even my own writing. I will be the first to admit that my writing and my rules aren't perfect. I don't think of myself as a brilliant game designer. But I can assure you that I spent a great deal of time cross referencing things. In fact, the reason most of the rules in B&B cross reference SR4A material (a common complaint I've seen from newer SR5 players) is because I put all those pages and reference in my draft personally.

However, despite all that it is difficult to write rules in a system as complicated as Shadowrun without generating some kind of wonkyness. And things like using this power to gain the advantages of being a vampire aren't immediately obvious to those of us who don't see the game as a "conflict simulator" as you put it (a great term I might add). There is a camp of roleplayers that thinks that if a rulebook doesn't state you can't do something than you can. But should the rulebook state that SR characters can't fly (for example) perhaps with a handy sidebar listing exceptions for when characters can? More to the point, should there be a passage explaining how gravity works, just to be sure all involved parties are on the same page?

Obviously the answer is "no". My point is that a game is built on assumptions that allow it to remain playable. Problems arise when (in cases such as this) different assumptions are made by the author and the players, and no amount of rules text can solve all those problems. Personally I think that's where the GM comes in. One of his key roles (perhaps the most important) is navigating different assumptions about how the game world works.

Now, that's not to say that I don't have lots to learn about game design, or that Catalyst doesn't have endemic problems related to editing, proofreading and play testing (all of which are supposed to help catch problems like these, that's a discussion for another time and place). But a detailed section elaborating how this one optional rule (a single paragraph in a 23 page supplement to which it is only peripherally relevant) interacts with every other rule in 2 different editions of the game is beyond the scope of the book.

Alright. Thanks for clearing that up, I seem to have misunderstood you

If you intend a rule to do X, it would be prudent to look how X interacts with other rules. Magical illusions granting the properties of the object you're impersonating (say, Physical Mask as a granite statue of yourself) is not intended and requires some serious twisting of the rules.

Which doesn't mean that you don't see it on a regular basis in certain groups

By the way, here is a (probably) unintended use I'd approve: Feigning an illness certainly involves body temperature, so why not give yourself the symptoms of Malaria to cure Syphilis?

Except the power has nothing to do with magical illusions.