So my players have started to buy eye'ware but its now got to a point of insanity.

My question is this:

If you have
- Cybereyes with Thermographic, Eye Recording unit Image Link, Smartlink.
- Contact Lenses with Enhanced Perception:3, Flare compensation.
- Glasses with Optical Magnification, Lowlight
- Helmet with Ultrasound sight.

- Or any other mixture of modifications above (or not listed that would be applicable) presuming no duplications.

Could you have all of these on at the same time?

None of my characters have tried this but they are starting to mix Contacts with Glasses... so it has raised its head as a question I don't know how to answer.

Your advice is appreciated.

short answer Yes

Hough!
Medicineman

Nice... a little OP but expensive (ish) too...

A bit longer answer. While there is nothing in the rules against turning all this stuff on at once, it could be a bit confusing to look at. Ultrasound, for example just renders what it detects in a way your eyes can interpret, without colour or other details sound couldn't parse. It creates an overlay of the detected area over your regular vision. Little hard to see what your lowlight or thermo is picking up through an overlay. The others don't really interfere with each other as much and in many cases compliment each other. Smartlink tied to camera to record shots and able to see in the dark while not being dazzled by bright lights? All good.
Just be thankful they haven't found the Ultrawideband Radar sensor or the Radar Sensor cyberware. See through walls? Yup. See through invisibility? Yup.

Yes. And also in combination with Mantis' comment about Ultrawideband Radar sensor or the Radar Sensor cyberware.

Don't forget Magesight Eyedrops.

"Legolas, what does your adept eyes see?"
"Everything."

Technically it's all legal. If you have a problem with it, about all you can do is restrict some of the enhancements from being used to target spells with.

One thing to note, with all of that going on in your vision either as overlays or picture-in-picture it would be distracting and should probably impose a -2 to all tests relating to vision. At least in my opinion.

Logically, contact lenses and cybereyes sound problematic because contact lenses somewhat rely on your eyes being moist, which cybereyes aren't I think. Otherwise, by RAW you can layer as much as you want and you should. Being able to perceive threats is a prerequisite to being able to defend against them.

Regarding modifiers for distraction and such, don't forget that all this stuff can be turned on and off. Having all kind of different sights available doesn't mean they are active all the time. Plus, we are talking about people who are used to a world in which their senses are constantly assaulted by advetisments, ranging from that hot chicks underware to that midlife crisis solving car to your left, while casually checking their social network and negotiating the sidewalk. I don't think our standarts of distracting apply.

Nowhere near OP on the SR5 scale. Look into long-term binding and fettering. Cry.

Long term binding was always a thing. Did it change in SR5?

Year and a day as always, with a return if disrupted. Consider it, though. Summon force 6 spirit, pay 6 karma, have it use Assist Sorcery. Boom, +6 dice to your sorcery pool, and if someone happens to disrupt the spirit, it comes back in 22 days. Since it allows 'sets of services', you could have it use a power on you as well, say Endowment so it could hand you one of it's own powers to use at will. Say Fear, or one of the Energy Auras, since they're on most spirits. Make sure the spirit has Aura Masking as a power, and it can hide itself from assensing as well.

For comparison, from Street Magic:So yeah, mechanically identical.

Common sense says that they can be layered...to a point. You can't use thermal imaging through natural eyes, cybereyes, or contacts with goggles on your face because the heat signature of the goggles blocks the receptors in your eyes from picking up the IR emissions in front of the goggles, as an example.

Not really. Assuming you skinlink or PAN them together, then if the contacts have an Image Link (which they all should start with), the other devices can feel directly to them. The contacts sort the information and layer it appropriately.

I don't know. Having the rainbow of infrared layered on top of the matte grey of ultrasound (or UW Radar) along with real-color video plus the highlighting from vision enhancement plus AROs and any other items loaded in your field of view (assuming all of it on at once) would be at least noisy in your vision if not fully distracting.

If all of that isn't distracting, what would qualify for the "distracted" penalty? Because I have no idea if that isn't distracting. If you have all of those as picture-in-picture display, noticing anything in a window other than your "main" view would qualify for distracted IMO.

Nah, it just gives you headaches--but you can totally deal.

You ever seen Star Trek TNG? There was an episode where we got to see through Geordi's VISOR. It was a cacophony of visual details. He said he just focused on what he wanted to see, and ignored the rest. I'm sure people could get used to that sort of thing.

Also, even though you have all of them, that doesn't mean they're all active or present at once. You could use built in software to construct a composite image, or just toggle between modes as you needed them.

In my games I've strictly forbidden layering of vision devices. The simple reason is that it completely ruins the point of tiered stuff. Why use goggles when three layers of contact lenses have total capacity of 9?

You can't layer 5 pairs of contact lenses you say? The same rule that say you can't use lenses behind glasses behind goggles.

The common mistake GMs do with players that do this kind of stupid optimization and munchkin-ing their characters.

Just because there isn't a rule explicitly FORBIDDING something does not automatically mean it is allowed to do it. I can't find a rule that say you can stack vision devices.

There is no reason (From game design view) allow five pairs of contact lenses. The whole point of capacity and availability is moot once you allow stacking. The capacity is there for a reason.

Once again, it all comes down to what you want at your table. Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with, say, two layers. Anything more than that -- and even that, depending on the items -- gets tricky and awkward. Cyberyes plus some glasses or goggles? Absolutely, and I don't think anyone contests that. Contacts plus one other thing? Sure. Glasses inside a helmet? Yeah. Contacts under glasses under goggles inside a helmet? It's starting to turn into a headache to keep track of how much shit you've got strapped to your face, and maybe it's time to suck it up and just get something with higher capacity, or to start requiring some (or all) of it be wireless-enabled all the time to keep conflicting data from happening, or something else to suggest the player tone it down a little.

If folks are wanting to stack layer after layer of eyeware, maybe it's time to ask them why. Are they paranoid about just plain old darkness and other vision mods, are they planning some shenanigans with flash grenades, do they think it looks cool, are they just experimenting to see how much shit you'll let 'em get away with? Often the "why" behind something can help you figure out how best to handle it in your campaign.

There is a vast difference between layering glasses over contacts and claiming the rules "allow" multiple layers of contacts. Layering glasses over contacts is done in real life. I know plenty of lab workers, construction guys etc who wear contacts for their eyesight and protective goggles/ glasses for work. Not to mention people wearing contacts and sunglasses.

There are no rules for plenty of things. Their absence doesn't mean they're impossible.

None of them have any functional upgrades in them, they are just glass or plastic. To use them all at the same time does not make sense to see an image in an image in an image. Adding layers of HUDs on top of each other. It is just like listening to your phone, your mp3 player and a portable radio at the same time. While it is physically possible to wire their outputs together it won't give any good benefit for the user.

From a physical standpoint, your Thermographic upgraded contact lenses will just see the temperature on the inside of your glasses and will render you blind, not allow low light stacked with thermographic. Your cybereyes then only see the same filtered light and the vision enhancement no longer has the "raw" data to process (And refine for the limit bonus you wanted). It is not just stupid from a game-design point of view, it also mess with how things should work.

I'd go as far as to let people swap between devices and turn them "off" and require extra change device mode actions to swap vision modes between glasses and lenses but that still suffers from the issues I mentioned above so even that is a stretch in my opinion.

I think Critias is on a very good track asking the players why they want to stack stuff.

Two words:

Awakened Grue

Will also accept Cyberzombie Grue and Grue Adepts.

We do not talk about Emerged Grue.

But can I get peril-sensitive mirrorshades?

Close enough, load up an ARE Negator program into your sunglasses.

If you don't think glasses or contacts have any functional upgrades in them, you're sorely mistaken. As for stacking them, that happens sometimes. My mother, before LASIK, had nearsightedness so bad (-23 diopters, for those who understand the term) that she couldn't wear contacts powerful enough. She wore contacts for everyday use, glasses on top of those for driving or reading; and if she needed sun protection, she wore granny shades on top of that.

Then put the thermo on the outer layer, and have it feed back to the contact's image link.

As Cain said, modern day contact are functional upgrades by definition. As for real world examples of layering, I know a guy who wears contacts and plays around with night vision goggles at the same time. Two functional upgrades, layered in real life. Contacts and something like google glass are another example.

You really gave your own answer. Those arguing against layer also seem to argue that layering automatically leads to having all vision modes available at the same time. That is a faulty assumption. The rules may not be explicit about it, but they aren't about a lot of things. If you are stupid enough to layer your thermo vision into something that will be negatively affected by an outer layer that's your own damn fault and your DM should penalize you for it. Not because the rules say so, but because logic and the fact that you failed at planning ahead says so.

Plain and simple, there is no reason why the guy with cybereyes, which for him feel natural in his everyday life, should not be able to make use of thermographic vision glasses just like a guy with normal eyes would. His eyes are build to work like normal eyes after all. However, activating his build in low light won't do squat for him unless he turns the thermo vision feature off (if possible) because it would only brighten up the thermo image and actually make it harder to make things out. The flare compensation works fine however, regardless of were it is build into, because its function is to take pictures and overlay your actual vision with image before the flash. The vision magnification on the other hand magnifies the image. In the cybereyes, it excells at magnifying the glasses' inside screens. In the glasses however, it magnifies the actual image, but the low light vision in the cybereyes is really just a fancy way to adjust the images contrast because the software in the glasses doesn't understand how to illuminate darker points to be compatible. There is neither a rule prohibiting this, nor is there a reason why it should be.

Outright banning layering not only robs the player of utility he/she is supposed to have, it also robs the table as a whole of an instrument to bring the world to life. The authors went out of their way to make wireless a thing and failed, but layering devices, in the absence of skinlink actually gives it an interesting dimension. Contacts are wireless by default. Unless you plug your glasses in, they are wireless too. You have to turn stuff off and on, which makes you vulnerable. Effectively, layering is a tradeoff between utility to have sense modes and the risk of having those senses hacked.

Edit:
My GF asked what I had been writing. When I told her she informed me that she had worn two layers of contacts on several occasions and while it wasn't comfortable at first, it was definately doable. She wore plain contacts for her eyesight, along with tinted ones for looks. So yeah, it doesn't even need a rule. Doable in real life.

Also, it's not always appropriate or even possible to wear all layers at every location. (That's why the ultra-paranoid Johnsons meet in a public sauna!)
I don't think there is a need for house rules, just apply some common sense (see above) and be done with it.

As Cain already pointed out, this isn't true. My welding instructor needed corrective lenses. Sometimes he'd wear his custom eyeglasses that combined his prescription with ANSI Z81+ safety glass, but other times he'd just wear his contacts and a normal pair of safety goggles. Once we started welding, he'd put on his auto-dark welding helmet over top of this--because you always wear safety glasses under your helmet.

For those not keeping score, that's vision mag contacts stacked with armored shades stacked with a helmet that has electronic flare comp. Stacking functional upgrades, and it isn't even the 6th world yet.



A lot of times when I build a shadowrunner and I've got some extra cash to spend I'll pick up redundant layers of eyeware simply so that if someone wants to take my gear I can simply go "Here chummer," hand them my shades, never letting on that I've still got contacts or cybereyes that do the same thing.

SR already suffers from the "one build to rule them all" scenario, so the last thing a good GM should be doing is limiting options because these limit a player's ability to make their characters stand out. Maybe one guy has slick, high-capacity cybereyes that carry all the mods he needs. Another guy is a little more slapdash and has to cobble together his enhancements by stacking some cheap contacts, glasses, and goggles he picked up on sale. Each route gives you a different flavor.

Just keep in mind that this progression also makes sense. Nothing that requires continuous, unimpeded input is being placed behind another type of sensor array that keeps the first sensor layer from working.

To be honest, you can pretty well fit all of the "important" ones into a package that's not really that expensive. As long as you have Image Intensification (Night Vision), Thermographic, and Flare Comp you're pretty much good to go unless things get really crazy. Yes, you can fit more into more expensive versions of optical sensors, but the any others are just extra icing on the cake.

Oh I definitely agree that certain combos--particularly sticking thermographic behind another layer of eyeware--don't make sense and should probably be disallowed. It's the knee-jerk attitude of "This is all munchkinism! No stacking at all!" that I have a problem with, because even things like having multiple layers of vision mag lenses make sense IRL.

(Though I'm not sure that particular combination is rules-legal.)

Of course, there is the truism of "Two is one, so one is none" in regards to carrying a backup. Having a spare pair of shades with the basics mentioned above in case your goggles take a shit on you somehow wouldn't be a bad idea.

Yeah, I mean critical glitches are a thing. Also called shots and the accident power.

Have I mentioned lately that I love you, Crit?

Because I totally do.

On the heels of you asking me about dreamy elven prettyboys, earlier today, Wak, this post takes on a whole new angle that I'm not sure my wife is entirely comfortable with.

For stuff like UWB radar, there's no reason not to have it on a sensor on your belt or whatever and have it linked through to your image link. There are probably other sensors that this would work with as well.

This is very true. My typical combination involves flare comp, vision enhancement, and smartlink in contacts; everything else in glasses that can be worn over them. This way, I keep some essential vision mods no matter what, but can stack on more powerful ones if need be.

Where does the requisite Image Link for the SmartLink fit in these contacts?

A lot of nitpicking about my choice of the word "functional" over electronics. I meant image processing, not simple or even advanced refraction or polarization.




The reason I vote against exactly what you do is because it can not be the intended use. Why is there even a capacity limit, why is there availability concerns for certain combinations? Why are there grades of cybereyes if it is cheaper, easier to get and more effective to just layer stuff? It completely ruins the entire purpose of tiered solutions. Where contacts are small, cheap and near invisible BUT have lower capacity.

Goggles are big and cumbersome, but fit way more stuff and cybereyes cost a portion of your soul but can fit everything in them. There is a choice in upgrades here that is completely obliterated by simple stacking the cheap stuff to get _everything_ for a fraction of the true cost.

It is to me breaking the game and fun meaningful choices in gear in the same way that taping 3 grenades together and deliver instant win attacks that overshadow everything else for a tiny fraction of the cost in skills, nuyen, tactics, thought and whatnot.

It is like buying ammo that is APDS-exex-capsule rounds with -10 AP +6 damage and deliver any drug of choice and take the lowest availability of the combined ammo types and then load it in your gun. This sounds familiar.. yes, it is exactly what SnS was in SR4.

A fun game has meaningful choices where you can build more than one type of character, pick more than one type of gun and have fun interesting tactics that you play depending on your choice. A straight up no-brainer alternative that is super effective in every field removes that choice and takes away from the game.


From a realistic point of view: Vision devices want the raw data to do vision enhancement (or vision modes such as low light or thermographic) If you take a photo without flash in a very dark room and then look at the printed photo with a pair of low-light goggles you still wont see much. YOu can argue that certain combinations in certain layering strategies (thermo-graphic on outer most layer only and so on) is just a mess. Just do not allow it, period.

From a game design point of view: availability, ratings, capacity, essence cost and everything strongly suggests there is an intended trade off between cybereyes, contacts, glasses and adept powers where you have to choose upgrades, not just pick them all.

Vision enhancements might not be such a big deal, but the things add up and why break a part that has some game design behind it? There are plenty of poor design choices in SR5 rules as is. There is no need to cheat on vision mods.

It's not nitpicking, you were factually wrong, and we pointed this out. Your exact words were:



As people have pointed out, this is not necessarily true. Even if you meant to exclude purely optical (ie: non-electronic) upgrades, welding helmets, which I used in my example, can have electronic flare compensation. Many cameras now have digital zoom features. Hell, you could be one of the dudes test-driving google glass. On top of that, the rules clearly state that vision magnification can be either electronic or purely optical, so this "optical properties = not a functional mod" distinction doesn't even exist in the game.



Again, I think you're wrong here. The point of adding capacity rules to eyeware is to aid the suspension of disbelief. Cramming image link and wireless into a pair of fragging contacts already stretches credulity, even with SR tech. Add to that the fact that in 4.0 cybereyes had capacity and normal eyeware did not, and I really think it's just a matter of verisimilitude and believability. Remember that even if you didn't allow eyeware to stack, a runner could still pick up a full suite of vision mods by getting the ones they can't fit as sensors and using image link to display the outputs. So adding capacity limits to eyeware doesn't do anything to limit what type of vision enhancements your players are running around with.

Nor is it unrealistic for stacked eyeware to be capable of working together. All of your goggle/glasses/contacts/ect are linked together via your PAN. One can reasonably assume there is a configuration menu of sorts enabling you to let multiple devices work together, including configuring how you view multiple overlays and HUD elements by toggling transparency, positioning, ect.

Say you're wearing thermographic shades with image mag contacts on underneath. Rather than try to magnify the display and getting a bunch of pixelation, the glasses' display shuts off and feeds it's information to the contacts--after scaling the image using the contacts' digital zoom software. This of course is assuming the display uses pixels at all, when many SR displays are described as being holographic or drawn by laser beams directly on the wearer's retina.

Now say our runner dons a set of ultrasound goggles over that? Perhaps the display renders the thermographic data as the typical false-color overlay, then shows the ultrasound info as a wireframe layer in contrasting hues over that. Menus and HUD elements are configured so that they don't overlap with one another, and various sensory types are displayed as overlays using different colors and transparencies. It might seem confusing to us, but if you've played enough video games I think you can get a sense for how this might work.

And I have a perfect counter example. I have a pair of classes that react to sunlight and dim them. Guess what happens when I use them in my car? They don't "#¤"#% work. Chromatic (flare comp light) does not work behind most glass.







I won't go into details about resolution but the short version is that 20Mpixels in a cellphone camera is useless. The resolution of optics is limited by other factors.

Vision magnification won't work on a digital image (no matter if it is lasers and whatnots, you effectively have pixels no matter what. You have effective pixels on analog film ffs) Processed image is "destroyed" for further processing. Using binoculars on a cell phone screen won't help.

The same goes with trying to read thermographic data from a false-colour image from an ultrasound sensor. Even if you are looking at the ultrasound sensor's passthrough when it is offline.

The things that DO WORK TOGETHER with these features just like you say are the things with high enough capacity to fit those upgrades together. Magnified thermographic image with ultrasound option? Yep, that is a pair of nice goggles, not a stack of cheap plastic toys in a stack.


You suggest that we stack items in a particular order to get things to work when I suggest we just don't do it at all. There are way to get all upgrades anyway so no need to write 10 page long essay on how it should be theoritcally possible to have a pair of binoculars that are cheap but somehow still made from IR-grade lensing (that is very different from VIS or UV lenses). For infrared optics you often use _SALT_ instead of glass since glass is not transparent to infrared light.

I work, professionally with spectroscopy in my day job. We have to select fiber optics, lenses, jitter and every single aspect of our devices based on the very specific wavelength of light we work with for the individual applications. I can't just take the cheap VISual light stuff and use it for my IR applications. I have to get separate parts, our shelves at work have optics marked "UV, VIS and IR".
Refraction index changes with wavelength. Magic materials of superfuture sure have made things easier, but that is what high capacity expensive stuff does - not three lyers of 50 nuyen contacts.

But hey, that is just my opinion. Realism isn't really important in shadowrun, but to invoke "realism" as a reason to cheat out on game design choice doesn't appeal to me. I'm sorry I even brought up "doesn't make sense for realism" as an argument. I realize now that it is a pretty bad one in a world with dragons and elves.

Maybe the book doesn't say anything about not wearing more than 1 layer. I will still frown at the character with 3 pairs of contacts and think of it as pure munchkinism.

Three pairs of Contacts worn simultaneously IS pure Munchkinism... However, Glasses over Contacts is not. The latter is what has been argued, not the former. *shrug*

My combat medic mage has an ultrasound sensor in his cyberhand and UWB radar in his leg. It helps that he has a indirect attack spell to help deal with the invisible hoop holes trying to ruin his day

I have a pair of correction glasses that react to sunlight and dim them. When I am in a car behind glass that cuts down the glare, naturally the dimming effect does not appear to work. The correction effect works perfectly.

It's the UV light that the glasses react to. No UV light, it's blocked by the windshield glass, so no change in the tint when you're out driving. Flare Comp reacts to unsafe light levels, not just UV light, via software so it would work fine through glass.

First of all, as pointed out earlier, polarized lenses is not the same as flare comp.

Second of all, yes they do; it's just that the wavelengths of light polarized lenses react to are already blocked by tinted glass. Your glasses won't get any darker, but there's no need for them to. If you look out a window, your lenses will still react to the light. Basically, polarized lenses are just glasses that get darker in direct light; but since tinted windows already block light, they're just redundant.

Third, that has absolutely nothing to do with Shadowrun vision mods, most of which are electronic in nature. They're basically vision overlays on a display, and there's no reason why you can't have multiple devices share an Image link.

Well there's your problem. You're making the mistake of trying to apply real-world knowledge to a game that doesn't operate on the same rules.

You're also kind of hung up on this whole: "zooming in on a screen" thing that (to my understanding) nobody but you has been talking about.

In the example I gave before, the image mag contacts weren't zooming in on the display of the glasses in front of them, they were being fed the raw image data collected by the glasses' IR sensors, and then scaling that to match the level of visual zoom being applied. In Shadowrun, even contacts are wireless-enabled. There's no reason layered eyeware can't switch off it's display and transmit it's image data to another image-linked device.

Secondly, digital zoom works. It works today. In a Shadowrun future where tiny cameras with ridiculous image resolution are possible, it works even better. You claim "there will always be pixels", but so what? The human eye has "pixels," it's image resolution is limited by the size of the individual light-detecting cells in the retina. If you have a technological sensor with better resolution, you can "zoom in" by scaling the image and still have a resolution equal to or higher than what the human eye can detect.

Ever worked with a really high-resolution image in photoshop? A photograph set to "fit on screen" might look perfectly normal, but zoom in to 100% and just a portion of that image fills the screen with no discernible drop in quality.

And that's assuming that digital cameras work the same way in Shadowrun as ours do. It's possible SR cameras use advanced edge detection software to save every image as a vector map, which could be blown up almost indefinitely.

Nope,

Even gigapixel sensors will fail. Even perfect lenses with perfectly uniform refractive index will fail

The law of diffraction forbids any optical system to have a higher resolution than the law of diffraction allows. It is a basic physical law and can not be worked around with "more pixels" or "better lenses".

It can be fixed with superresolution tech but that is inherently NOT STACKABLE.

To get around diffraction limit you need a bigger sensor/optics. Something a contact lens can't do outside anime/manga characters.

From Camera Lens News:



But, sure maybe they can make "Magic lenses" that just use clairvoyance to see what you intended to see and not use light at all. I actually don't care if you can get image zoom on contact lenses (even if that itself makes little sense without amazing image stabilization).


But none of that matter;

I object to the use of stacking devices from a gaming/game design point of view. That it adds nothing good in terms of balance, gear tier levels, player and character choice etc. It just makes cybereyes an obsolete waste of money and essence and I rather like cybereyes as a meaningful concept. The cheat out way to get everything good a cybereye system offers by slapping contacts together (or using contacts and glasses or whatever) is just stupid in my opinion.

And, I use "three layers of contact lenses" as the clear example. The same rule you all use to stack lenses with glasses and goggles (the one that doesn't exist) also allows three layers of contact lenses. Nothing in the book forbids or even mentions either.
At the very least, the change vision mode action needs to be taken multiple times to swap between stacked vision gear. One action to turn contacts lowlight off, another action to turn glasses IR on.

Better don't go there. I know it's difficult to suspend disbelief if you're working in a specific field and see rules representing it poorly in a game; most computer people I know have the same reaction towards the SR matrix (no matter the edition).
Fact is, it usually isn't very helpful to extrapolate from RL to the game.


Cybereyes are a meaningful concept. You can't take them away from someone easily, for one thing. They're also not necessarily obvious, like glasses or goggles are. That's two things you can't ever do with accessorized gadgets, right off the top of my hat, and I'm sure if people here thought about it a bit there'd be a lot more advantages to cyberware. Of course, this is a matter of edition in respect to price differences.


You have a logical fallacy here. Just because you can stack glasses in front of contacts, followed by big goggles doesn't in any way necessitate the ability to stack three pairs of contacts on each other. There also doesn't exist a rule forbidding it, because, let's be honest here, it isn't necessary if you go at it with an open mind and a clear idea of what you like in your games to work or not to work. The rules cannot cover every nook and cranny, and I think we're all aware of that.
You don't like it? That's cool. You stated your reasons (cyberware becoming obsolete in your opinion) clearly, and I can get behind that. Other people prefer the other approach, for various reasons mentioned in these two last pages, and they're all equally valid.


Of course, if you want to go at it with that kind of micromanagement.
Personally, I just ask people about their vision mods and act on the assumption that the characters cycle their vision modes to the best available according to environmental factors, except for a few specialized accessories such as UWBR or US and the like.

Concatcs R3 with Flarcomp, Imagelink and Lowlight 1375 nuyen
Glasses R4 with Magnification and Enhancementx3, 2150 nuyen
Second pair glasses (I have two pair of glasses regularily, one corrective and a sunglasses that are made to fit over regular glasses). R2 with Smartlink and Thermographic: 2700 nuyen.

Total cost: 6225 nuyen.


Availability 11, 8 and 10. Trivial to get and cheap.


Goggles R6 with juyst Magnification, Enhancement 3, thermographic vision and Smartlink: 4550 nuyen (same prices as the stack, plusminus a few hundred). Still lacking image link and flarecomp mind you, Availability 18R. You can't get these from start because they are cooler than you should get on your regular runner budget.
A pair of goggles with capacity 13 (to get everything) would be availability 23+base item. Availability 23 worth of upgrades, split to simple triplet of 10. Yeah.


Cybereyes with Imagelink, flarecomp, lowlight, smartlink, thermographic vision, vision enhancement 3 and vision magnification actually only has availability 12 (+all the mods that are at most 9 for one) but costs 36000 nuyen and 0.5 essence.


Do you really think that is fair? You can buy 10 stacks of the "all in one go" glasses+contacts shenanigans to have as backup in case you eat ball lightnings for a living.

I really don't see the counter argument to allow this. I already say I can ignore the "real world technology" limitations. Don't care about refraction and diffusion limits. Just care for game mechanics. That is enough. Game mechanics matter.

You pay 0.5 essence and 10 times the price to get _everything_ in your cybereyes. Or you have to pick and choose a few of the options for your big obvious goggles and only get to choose a few select things when you go stealthy with contacts but never ever ever do you get everything and more with the contacts+glasses combo.

Is it worth 30 000 nuyen to have a useless protection against random aoe damage cracking your glasses? When was last time your GM even remembered to ruin all your gear with grenades? Wasn't he/she evil enough to deliver 18P blasts as is? I pity the decker in a group where all carried equipment breaks every other adventure in an attempt and artificially make cybereyes pay off.

Physical adepts have superior initiative, acting faster and more times than anyone else, mages are, well mages. Can't we just let sams and deckers have vision modes as a good strength? Why do we need to let the mystical adepts get all vision modes in addition to their other areas without even breaking their 6000 nuyen starting money?

I personally don't think mages deserve perfect vision modes. They have enough thunder as is.

Just my two coppers.

All I can say to that is that it comes up often enough that runners without cybereyes don't have all their sensory gear available or actually lose them. Sure, you can afford to flush 3000-6000¥ (depending on edition) down the drain a few times before cybereyes amortize themselves. How often is, again, highly dependant on which edition you're playing.
SR5 cyberware prices are at times insanely inflated. I myself play 4th and one character's vision gear costs 3000¥ while another's cybereyes are worth 11,500¥. That's a price difference I can get very well behind, considering the advantages.

All this being said:
It has nothing at all to do with fairness or balance between archetypes. Your convictions are your own, and other people remain unconvinced. You might as well complain about full matrix accessibility with trode nets for everyone.