Example: 2 cyberarms, each with 3 points of armor. Armored jacket (8/6) = (14/12) armor overall? Makes no sense to me but acc. tp RAW i see no mistake in it.

thats correct.
just add Cyberarmor (encumberless) to worn Armor

hough!
Medicineman

/me waits for:"OMG! CYBER OP!"

Add Orthoskin or Dermal Plating to the mix, titanium bone lacing, and a troll changeling with dermal deposits, and it's possible to shoot your armor through the roof.

Of course, you'll likely be taking more Stun damage than Physical when attacks get cut down below your Stun track.

Which is why it's mostly useless and impossible to propperly tank in SR4 in my opinion.

Just tell your GM to always hit you APDS in full auto. Then you should always take physical. Problem solved.

Seems a little bit overpowered. Shouldn´t it be like it is with attributes? Direct attack on armored limb = armor stacks. General attack = average of worn armor? Makes no sense to me, that 2 armor on one arm and 2 armor on the other arm = 4 armor. If i put on an armored overall the armor on the different parts of the suit are also not counted seperately.

Its the same with PPP Forearmguards, or Legguards
You get them Both for (IIRC ) +0/+2 that add too (but With encumberance ,as its worn Armor) Hip Protection ads another +1/+1
Shadowrun intends to have generic Armor rules. You get one Armor, and lots of bits and Pieces just add up to that Armor
No need for direct hit tables, no need for additional rules that slow down a fight (which already takes quite a while )

with a generic, but faster Dance
Medicineman

So yes, if you have some high armor value bracelets you too can play Wonder Woman in your game.

No it's not.
If you did it any other way, it would be useless. It's at the limit of being useless AS IT STANDS.
The Limbs and Armor in SR4 are, for the first and only time in the history of SR not a useless waste of money and essence.
And of course the magocracy could not have that and promptly nerfed it again from what it was at the beginning of SR4.

Full armor on four partial cyberlimbs & torso, titanium bone lacing, and Rating 3 dermal sheath = B/I 24/25 armor, and that's before you include whatever armor you want to wear (like full on PPP gear, full FFBA, and armored jacket for another 16/14 for a B/I of 40/39).

But if you don't have magic support then one stunbolt spell will likely lay you out on the street.

As will all chem-tech basically.
And the fact that your armor is likely to be bigger than anything hitting you, it just means that all damage goes directly to your stun track, which is shorter and harder to defend generally.
So yes, you may not get holes poked into you, even with people shooting assault rifles in full auto at you . . but you will simply fall over after the third or so attack because your stun track is full.
And if you don't keel over, even without them actually puncturing you, if they simply keep shooting you, you will still die because the damage stages up from the stun track to the physical track.

No, the Armor is NOT OP.
It's barely above usefull.

Oh, and just for the record:


like a broken record.
I TOLD YOU SO! -.-

If you are LUCKY they just keep shooting you until stun spills over into physical.

Once they got you unconscious, the devious GM can do all sorts of things to the player and their gear....

which is why anybody with half a brain does not care about wether or not he will simply go unconscious, because if you are smrt, you will see unconscious as dead or worse already.

Unconscious is neither dead nor worse.
It is an opportunity to move your character in a direction not contemplated previously.

Yeah, usually with bits aquired during chargen missing and hard to replace if you are anything but a streetsam that has built everything more expensive than his guns into his body.
i have yet to play in a game where a brief unconsciousness on the battlefield does not equate to:"no, you can not even make a new character, you are going to keep playing this character and now i get to do what i want with it for a change."
doesn't even have to be the GM, have seen antagonistic behaviour like that from both GM and other players as well.

When he's dead you can at least say:"well, that could have gone better, now how to improve on this concept to make failure such as that more unlikely to happen in the future?" if you liked it enough to want to play it again immediately.
Or:"well, that could have gone better . . anyway, back to the studio, where we have our next guest making an appearance. he is going to be an interesting one because reasons that are different from these of those who just left us!"


But that is neither here nor there and has actually nothing to do with the topic at hand.

No, cyberlimb armor is not and was not OP in SR4 ever. And still it was nerfed already.

In SR3, Limbs and ESPECIALLY their Armor were all but useless, but the Armor/Damage-System meant that you could actually successfully tank damage.
That changed with SR4.

actually, cyberlimbs are very useful in SR5... with the right character. it's very easy to get a high attribute with a cyberlimb, and it's usable (albeit expensive) even for a street sam or similar. most will opt for just augmenting their attributes, so long as they can afford to put a good score in the relevant attributes.

where they really shine, though, is for people who have crap attributes. especially if you use the interpretation that the cyberlimb does not have to obey your own augmented caps by virtue of having its own attribute, at which point you can leave agility as something very low and yet start off with agility as good as a street samurai - at least, for the purposes of shooting people or otherwise using your one arm.

Costs too much.
Both Money and especially Essence-Wise.
It was the same Problem in SR3.
An Arm cost you more than an Arm.
And even if you have one superhuman Arm . .
As soon as you need to to anything that needs to be done with not only just that one arm, you are functionally useless again.
Augmenting your Attrbutes in your body might be capped, but the cap is usually not the problem and it means you can do more than just really really well pick your nose . .

Did it cost you an arm and a leg?

Ding Ding Ding!

sure, it's not as good as the real thing. but it is as good as the real thing for some purposes, and you've only got so many attribute points and karma to go around.

I'd rather have real agility 6 with rating 3 enhancement on a decker. but the difference is, I can have a cyberlimb with 6 agility and rating 3 enhancement without needing to invest much more than it would cost just for the rating 3 enhancement on a regular person (and have room for another couple of toys), which means I can often afford 4-5 points more into the attributes that boost my actual specialty.

for someone who focuses on agility, like many street samurai, physical adepts, infiltration experts, etc, having agility 6 in your whole body is investing a lot of resources into your area of focus, which is fine. if you just want to hold your own in a firefight, though, a cyberlimb is a much lower investment which will get the job done most of the time.

And you get to pay both money and essence FOR THAT!
THAT is the main Problem.. Fluffwise, yes, they are seen as little better than a hook hand and a peg leg are nowadays. . .
But mechanically that makes them terrible. Close enough to a trap option. Frank did his best to make them viable in SR4..
Appearantly too viable.

I've got a character I designed to take a lot of damage and be able to shrug most off. It's a gnome with four cyberlimbs and a cybertorso. Without his pain editor he'd keel over very fast, though.

Sadly, all that left little room for initiative passes as his hackerware had to get in somewhere, too. But that's not his role anyway, that's his partner's game (who is quite heavily armored as well, but without a pain editor, and has been sputing colorful curses because of that.)

Yes, it may not be terribly realistic, but armor in SR is mostly an abstraction and (luckily) lacks hit zones. That makes for some uneasyness, of course.

Now that I come to think of it, another character is about to get a full cyberarm and I thought about some variation in switching the lower parts of that modular cyberarm... might as well patch in a "armor up" version for heavy duty.

i'm not sure i see your point.

you can either spend money and essence for it, or you can spend money, essence *and* attribute points for it.

it is not as good, but it is also not remotely as expensive in terms of character creation.

4-5 attribute points is not a small thing. attribute points in SR5 are extremely expensive.

furthermore, 3 points of used muscle toner is 72k nuyen + 0.75 essence, for +3 attributes only and you need to have your attribute at a high rating. for a cyberlimb, if you accept the interpretation that it has it's own attributes and is not bound by your augmented limits (which i've heard people say is the case, but still haven't seen a direct clarification or errata from a developer to confirm), it will cost 30,000 for an agi 6, str 3 cyberlimb (you can boost the strength to 6 for another 15k if you care about melee), and slap in 3 points of agility enhancement to get 6(9) with the limb, for an additional cost of 19,500 nuyen (so about 60k nuyen vs 72k nuyen and 1 essence vs 0.75 essence). and you've still got capacity available for further increasing your strength, or your armour, or adding a cyberarm gyromount, or whatever other things you want in the arm, plus you get to add to your condition monitor, plus you didn't spend any attribute points in chargen to get there.

60k nuyen isn't exactly nothing, but it is by far the cheapest way to get a 6(9) attribute for combat.

Yes, but with only one extrem strong cyberlimb the old questions starts with "what attribute for which test?".

SYL

And as soon as you do something that needs more than the one arm, if you are really unlucky, it will be even worse due to averaged attributes . .

The point made earlier seems the most important to me: What do you need the Attribute for?

If you want to be the world's best retro-break-dancer, one agile arm is next to useless. If your primary reason for getting more agile is to shoot straighter, then it pays.

There is no overall best option.

Well, except for pistols you use both hands for weapons (rifles, machineguns, submachine guns etc) - and even pistols are often used with both hands for better accuracy and recoil handling.

SYL

one of the examples where you get to use one limb is when you lead a melee attack with your cyberlimb. not make the whole thing with it, mind you, but simply lead with it.

if leading an attack with your stronger/more agile arm counts, then firing a pistol (or machine pistol or even to some extent an SMG) should be possible - in fact, while i'm sure ideal conditions would have you using both hands, i also don't doubt that many times in actual combat, those smaller guns are in fact used one-handed simply because you have no time to get into a proper firing stance and such. as far as recoil, it's quite possible that your single cyberarm is stronger than both of your natural arms combined (especially if you actually did spring for customization or enhancement in that area), and for you to have a gyro built in to the arm to help in that regard as well. mechanically speaking, it's pretty easy to get an arm with enough strength to give one free point of recoil compensation, not so easy to get your natural strength there for most.

also, i don't know why you're so scared of getting screwed over by averaging. the cyberlimb has a higher attribute than your own base agility, and honestly probably strength too even if you don't spring for strength customization or enhancement if you're human or elf. the average will certainly be lower than the value in your one cyberlimb, but your cyberlimb should only be bringing your average up, not down (though in the case of strength, the amount of increase is probably too small of a fraction to have any effect in many cases). yes, your average won't be awesome. but again, i'm not advocating low agility with an awesome cyberlimb for B&E specialists or street samurai. i'm advocating it for a decker, or maybe even a face (though a face won't want an obvious limb, of course). someone who just wants to be able to do a decent job of shooting people without having to make the full investment of actually getting a high agility.

Made me wonder something pertaining to the Shadowrun system of cyberlimbs: how do you guys handle a really divergent mismatch of attributes between the biological and the cybernetic? Like, for example, you've got a real wimp of a human with full on arms and legs that are maxed on Strength and no other implants. Ever consider the chances of a cyberlimb breaking itself from the poor slot's bones when (s)he tries some incredible feat of strength?

SR3 had rules for that.

Honestly the rules for cyberlimbs just do not cut it.
It is like: Who the fuck will take them anyway...

So you have a lot of holes within (my armored cyberfoot with the nice nanohub) and the streetsam getting weaker by getting a cyberarm...

That would have been a great thing to fix in SR5. (But I guess there is also a lack of courage to really think of new mechanics because of "bähä I do not know that, I do not like that".

Actually, if i remember correctly, they nerfed it so you could not armor partial cyber limbs anymore either . .
And you can not use the full capacity of a limb for armor either anymore . . and i think they did something about the nanohub and the partial cyberlimbs too, to make it not work like that anymore, but i am not sure about that at the moment . .

I couldn't find anything in the SR5 book to say partial limbs impact cyber armor, but did find that partial limbs don't give a full box for the Physical Condition Modifier like they used to and count for half instead (two partial cyberlimbs = 1 Physical damage box).

@Stahlseele
Well, thats good in the way that they try to fix obvious problems. But I was thinking more of a new system which works all around.
Cyberlimbs are something you give your character with physically shitty attributes to cover them up, period.
Espacially interesting for the late game periode.
That they aligned hand and foot is also nice. But again the major elefant in the room, that your natural attributes are totally overwritten just stays...
(You have to go full cyber now to really get the benefit, but it stays...)

I think the problem isn't so much that cyberlimbs replace your attributes--that part makes sense to me--it's that cyberlimbs are touted as "better than meat" replacements when for many runners they actually aren't. I think the thing to keep in mind is:

A) That "better than meat" tagline is pure corp marketing, chummer, and you should know better than to buy whatever drek the corps try to sell ya'

and

B) For the average wageslave, cyberparts are better. It's when you compare their performance to hyper-trained street samurai that they start loosing their shine. A nifty chrome arm might make you as strong as Bruce Lee, but it doesn't necessarily make you stronger.

Cyberlimbs were pretty useless in SR4 - except maybe for a face wanting Agility: 6 in one arm - until the optional rules in Augmentation, which made them actually usable. This includes a sneaky power-up for cyberzombies, since customized limbs are based on your natural maximum, which goes up with their negative Essence for cyberzombies. So cyberzombies actually can be badass with cyberlimbs.

SR5 rules closely resemble the Augmentation rules, although they got rid of the needless complication of cyberlimbs having a separate Body Attribute (they only have Agility and Strength now), while getting rid of the rule that a cybertorso lets you get enhancements over rating: 3 (enhancements only go up to 3 now). So cyberlimbs can make you powerful right out of the gate (especially if your "natural" stats are much lower), but over the long term, they cap out a point below the normal augmented limit.

to be fair, the rating 4 (non-magical) strength and agility options are mostly theoretical, too. i mean, rating 4 muscle replacement is 4 essence and the availability is non-trivial (especially if you try to get a higher grade to reduce that nasty essence cost), and muscle toner and augmentation have the same nasty availability and cost a rather large chunk of money (the availability puts it well out of the price range you can expect to afford any time soon given official SR5 shadowrun payments, so you can mostly only count on what you buy in chargen).

so yes, arguably you're missing out on a tiny bit of your absolute maximum potential... but practically speaking, you have the same chargen cap, and for many groups that is functionally the real limitation.

and for the groups where you actually earn your way up that high, you should be augmented adepts anyways

Too Long/Only Skimmed: There's an interpretation of Cyber Limbs that would actually have you average the armor of all limbs and apply that, so that 4 cyber armor on one arm translates to 4 armor on attacks against that arm, but only 1 armor (fraction round up) against general attacks.