Here is what ive come up with for a low budget sammie,
-wired reflexes1, low cost but severely limited upgrade potential. 11,000
-muscle toner1-low cost,an extra bit of boost in a variety of skills.8,000
-attention coprocessor1-gotta notice when trouble is brewing3,000
-plastic bonelacing-extra soak to survive. being dead brings nothing to the fight.5,000
so basically 27,000

Thats the idea, but i feel a bit iffy on bone lacing,toner and attention coprocessor. each add something but do they add enough to justify their exsistance or drop one and bump up something else? Mainly the one im looking at is the bone lacing tbh, especially since its kinda the sams duty to take a hit or two.
Ideas, gaping holes in whats needed ect?

hmmm... depends somewhat on your goals.

but one thing i'm curious about, why are you looking at a low-budget street samurai anyways? is this a street level campaign or something like that?

we had a tpk last session so we are starting a new campaign with fresh off the street characters. my character concept is former ganger that did some legitimate security for a body shop and the doc payed in hardware. so i figured low end/budget ware fits into the concept but still enough to be useful.

If budget is your concern, muscle replacement is a lot cheaper than toner, and boosts your STR for free.

sweet, ty. for some reason i thought that raised str only. i usually play awakened characters with a light amount of cyber/bio to help survival.

Heresy.

nah, if it's SR4 and he's an adept that's just par for the course.

Yeah, pre 4a the smart thing for an adept to do was to get an alpha-grade or better Move By Wire system, because the MBW would actually cost you less essence than the points you'd spend on the Improved Reflexes power.

As for cheap, if your character worked for a street doc try grabbing a bunch of second-hand cyberware. You'll take a little bit of an essence hit, but your nuyen costs will be halved and you can always get better stuff put in later when you've made some cash.

If you want a good value-for-nuyen ratio at character creation, and don't care for essence cost, I would go for used ware.

Imho used wired reflexes 2 for 16,000 nuyen and used muscle toner 2 for 8,000 nuyen are almost unbeatable from this point of view (for a specialized fighter).
The other stuff is optional and depends on what you can affort.

Of course it depends if your character sees his essence as a valuable piece of his soul or as a second appendix

I was dabbling with a Troll Street Sam earlier and while I had a tad more money (140K), that was enough for Wired Reflexes 1, Aluminum Bone Lacing, and Muscle Replacement (2).

Body 9(12), A 4(6), R 3(4), S 10(12) -- That's one scary package! Deals leathal with his bare hands (13P!), but can use a combat axe to cut cars in half. Tossed Throwing Weapons 4 on there as well, so he can throw shuriken through walls.

No idea if I'd ever get a chance to use him, but... yikes.

@Wakshaani
That's actually a mid to low tier street sam, but on a budget, it has promise.
In a low power game, Trolls usually break the game as well as the opposition.

@Wakshaani
Good build, but I think you're doing a 5th edition build for an SR4 thread.

@Stahlseele
Yeah, the trouble with low-powered games is that de-powering one thing makes another thing more attractive. Limit starting availability and resources? Players can still power up by playing metatypes that give Attribute bonuses, or by playing awakened characters. There are good rulesets for low-powered games, but they involve limiting more than just starting money or gear.

... D'oh! You are correct sir.

Is the 'low rent Street Samurai' thing your idea, or the GM's? IE, is the GM declaring that the next go-round shall be a low-powered street game, or is it all you?

That's important, because if it's the GM, we need to know what exactly he's done to modify the chargen rules. If not, then...

Well, you need to take a reality check and cash it: Going "low-budget" in a normal game is just asking for your character to be outshone in melee by any troll (unless you are a troll, then you might just barely manage to break even with a human secondary-meele fighter,) and outshone in a gunfight by a hacker with gunbunny secondary traits.


Possible ways to offset this, however, would be to dig into alternative sources of power: Adepts aren't the only ones who can benefit from martial arts training, after all, and external equipment may be useful, even if your character has had limited opportunity to buy augs/worries/freaks out about installing augmentations.

No, you're not utilizing your resources properly if you need to get bio/cyber.

EDIT: Never mind.

you don't *need* to.

it's just more efficient to get bio/cyber for some things in SR4.

for example, supposing you want to have 3 initiative passes. the PP cost is what, 3 points? 3.5? can't remember for sure, maybe it was even 4?

instead, you could buy a synaptic booster 2, which cost you 1 essence, and therefore effectively 1 power point. it cost you a bunch of resources, but those resources didn't come out of your magic budget, which was awesome (I'm pretty sure I recall it actually being less total BP as well).

but the really obvious ones are if you wanted to boost your attributes. with magic, you were looking at something crazy like 1 PP per attribute, doubled if you go above your racial maximum. that's just crazy talk. you could easily fit in muscle augmentation and toner for far less cost.

there are a handful of other areas too, like augmented senses; generally speaking, massively cheaper with cyberware (though of course, they were also massively cheaper with goggles and headphones, and they didn't cost *any* essence at all).

SR4 certainly didn't *require* you to pick up a few pieces of cyberware or bioware for your adept. but it certainly rewarded you for doing so.

@Topic:
Also, you forgot the Smartlink.
SHAME ON YOU! ò,Ó;,

you don't need to implant that, any more than you need to implant the enhanced senses, but yes.

Right. Eye-Stuff. I forgot about that too <.<

Yes, but you can put two points into Mage (becoming a Mystic Adept [Mystic Adept > Adept anyways]), and with those two points you can cast Increase Reflexes and a host of other spells, greatly increasing your versatility without having to resort to vulgar implants.

sustained spells have their own drawbacks, primarily the fact that if you ever have to go through a ward they're going to cause you problems (and wards are not even remotely uncommon in the setting).

While that is true, the same can be said about a chromed up street sam or adept (anybody, really) and a cyberware scanner. At least spells can be turned off and be recasted.

Back on topic: I think muscle replacement carries just the right vibe for a just-off-the-streets kind of guy. Of course, there are more essence-friendly options out there, but those are also more expensive. I almost installed some in a hacker/secondary grunt character just because I was running out of nuyen during creation
I'd opt for cybereyes as well. Cheap boni and they cannot be stolen (which is a viable concern in the streets). If you add in skinlink, they'll be able to communicate with likewise modified guns - or those guns just get a data cable with an skinlink adapter taped to the character's wrist. Cheap protection from those hacker gangs.
If you're going for more cost-effectiveness a ganger might like, pack a bunch of molotov cocktails for the character while you're at it. A heavily armored motorbike can also be an asset in a firefight (I'm experimenting with using one as portable cover...).

Body 8 Bike with 16 armor, 6 Personal Protection, and Rigger Cocoon is 52 armor in addition to whatever you're wearing.

Vague example from my archive:


EDIT: Math.

I made a medic mage with 2 points of cyber/bio. Did it kill his magic somewhat? Yes. Was he useless without his magic? No!

mage with cyber/bio is viable in SR4, but not particularly more impressive than a mage without any cyber or bio.

adept with cyber/bio in SR4 is amazing, noticeably more so than either a street sam without adept powers or an adept with no cyber or bio.

which is why a mage with cyber or bio is not "par for the course", but for adepts it's pretty much exactly what we expect to see an adept have. it's so good that it's hard to say no.

Isn't that 42 addtional armor dice for the occupant of the cocoon? 16 armor, 6 protection, 20 on the cocoon itself?

That was along the line of my suggestion, yes
Actually, I already knew about the murdercycle. It's a good design. There I got the idea of using a bike as some kind of protective drone for my squishy support-mage/tech specialist.
I tweaked it with an idea presented in the book "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez. There they had heavy motorcycles with two robotic arms and blades attached (also, there was a blinding laser). I kinda went from there and am going to use this thing as portable cover. Maybe even the rigger cocoon, though that'll cost me one arm in the current setup. I always run out of slots before I run out of ideas
Hm, an enhanced rigger cocoon will also double as MedEvac...

Are we now derailing this thread into a different direction other than cybered adepts rock?

Then again, the only other input I can offer for low-cost street sam capabilities is this:
Consider amping up Reaction. There's a reaction-enhancer-something that's compatible with wired reflexes and fairly cheap. Between that and bone-lacing, I'd always choose reaction - it is used for dodging bullets, which is sure better than being able to eat more of those before falling over.
As we're on that, I've seen some ideas of using only one heavily buffed up cyberarm. Sure, that doesn't grant you much flexility in terms of skills other than shooting one-handed. But it is very cost-effective, and while you're at it, you can add in cyber armor. Having some of that on the side still helps survival. I also like the style associated with it

Example? I really can't think of much that's so good you can't not have it when it comes to cyber/bio.


IIRC, cocoon was 20 armor and 10 barrier, which you also add to your armor.

Okay. My bad, I like your version better, carry on then

cyber/bio methods of attribute enhancement were vastly superior than either spell or adept power options. even if you could use a spell, you either used an extremely high rating focus (force had to be equal to the base attribute) and have to recast every time you come to a ward, or use quickening and cause problems every time you came to a ward. you could somewhat mitigate that with masking and extended masking, but at that point you're burning 3 metamagics just to get something that would only have cost you an essence or two (while the power point cost would have been absolutely awful had you tried to do it as a pure adept), not to mention you're spending magic points and skill points on being a mage which further detracts from being an adept.

likewise with extra initiative passes. generally speaking, the best way to get more IPs was by using tech. again, there were magic options, but they were generally inferior.

there were a few other things that tech was good at as well, but they generally didn't interact with an adept's specialty... for example, if you wanted to hack, tech was better, but hacking adepts don't really benefit much from being an adept. or skillwires were awesome for the cost, but for your area of specialty you were pretty much guaranteed to have the skill itself (not that it was a bad idea to have skillwires on an adept, purely for versatility).

The biggest example I can think of off the top of my head is synaptic booster. The lost magic was less than the equivalent power point cost for adepts. For 1 lost point of magic you'd get SB2. For the PP cost, iirc it was 2.5 PP. Yes, it was expensive, but there is no reason not to aside from the roleplaying aspect. Toss in cybereyes and cyberears, 'cause why not, and that nets you a decent amount of mods for less than the .25 PP each for enhanced sense power. Balance your purchases right, and the pure adept falls behind the augmented adept, and it stays that way assuming same karma rewards.

[tangent]
It was one of my big complaints about adepts in SR4. (Much the same with drakes, really.) The cost of going unaugmented (or simply being one in the drake's case) isn't worth it, unless you have a cool concept. Then your character suffers because you paid a tax for being cool, when the min/maxer makes you their bitch because your cool thing caused the group problems once too many times.
[/tangent]

-Temperance

Muscle augmentation/toner and synaptic boosters are good for bang for the buck. Other augmentations are good because they stack with adept powers. If you're making a face, why not get tailored pheromones: 3, a vocal range enhancer, clean metabolism, and genetic optimization: Charisma, in addition to all of your adept powers? Similarly, bone density augmentation stacks with critical strike.

Basically, you make a good mundane whatever you want to be with as little essence impact as possible and then stack an adept on top of that.

Eh, maybe it's that I've always been good at optimizing that I've never felt the need to dip into cyber/bio. Also, I tend to go Adept to Mystic Adept who can cast a little for versatility to Mystic Adept who's basically a mage who can't project.