For those familiar with Bubblegum Crisis, would it be possible to recreate their hard suits? I suppose the easy way to go about it would be to use heavy mil-spec armor, but I am not sure if there are enough modification slots to account for the capabilities effectively. I was thinking that rigging a worn drone/armor would be more faithful, but I am not even sure if that sort of thing is possible in the system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_Crisis

Sort of. Check out the Iron Will in Attitude. It's the closest thing to power armor I can think of in Shadowrun.

And if you're creating something from scratch, do remember that things can have certain mods integral to their design. With GM's permission there's also the option of overmodifying something, too, but usually with some kind of penalty assigned by the GM.

If I were to want to do some BGC Hardsuits, I'd start with Heavy Mil-Spec Armor and add as Integral Modifications those qualities which are common to all Hardsuits in BGC. That leaves 23-26-28 slots for the Modifications that represent the qualities that are Suit Specific.

You can't really recreate BGC hardsuits in Shadowrun with the existing rules, but you could certainly give them stats. They would be significantly better than any other mil-tech suits or drones out there, but that was kind of how they were in their own universe, too.

Don't forget they pay for their power by having a battery life span of two or so minutes, or something stupidly short like that.

~Umi

Only for the first generation BGC 204 suits. The 2033 suits from the original series didn't have that limitation, nor did the newer hardsuits in the 2040 remake.

Not surprising as they picked up the Energizer Endorsement.

And they just kept going and going.....

It was an intentional design limitation in the 2040 series (separate from the earlier OVA), and something I seriously doubt one has to worry about in Shadowrun, even with SR5's 'gray goo apocalypse' metaplot. IIRC only the Heimdall drone has the worst endurance, with even the Papoose giving its rider about a three hour battery life.

I was attempting to describe the "method" I would use to give Hardsuits stats within SR using an existing framework which already exists within SR.

Please keep in mind that I have only a passing familiarity with the BGC Universe/Mythos so I'm unsure how close the SR mechanics can get to modeling BGC Hardsuits.

I would say they are a cross between milspec armor and a rigged drone. In game terms, I would make it a bit tougher than heavy mil-spec armor, then add limited flight along with improved reflexes and physical Attributes (in other words, an unaugmented pilot would be the equivalent of a heavily augmented one while wearing the suit). I would also add lots of sensors and electronic countermeasures, and perhaps a tacnet. It still wouldn't imitate the anime perfectly, but it would capture the flavor.

It's hard to fit the Knight Sabres, runner level-wise. On the one hand, they weren't pawns of the megacorporations, they kept them in line. The ADP was an elite HTR unit with helicopters, armored vehicles, and combat suits that they bailed out of trouble. On the other hand, being elite super-mercenaries didn't seem to pay too well. They all had second jobs, and with the exception of Sylia (their boss), they didn't seem that well-off. Nene drove a scooter, Linna drove an unreliable compact car, and Priss had a racing bike, but lived in a trailer.

The big problem is a balance/arms race problem.

If a hardsuit gives attributes and armor boosts, then nothing prevents a character who already has implanted attributes and armor boosts to stack them with hardsuit boost. And don't get me started on the posessed implanted character who enters a hardsuit with a machine sprite.

And then you've got a arms race where characters who manage to get all the bonuses are just better than other characters. That's why I'd have suit bonuses not stack with implant bonuses: the suit just replaces some of the character's stats with the suit's stats, including the armor. In that case, hardsuits would mostly be a way for characters (mostly security forces NPCs, but why not non-combat oriented characters as well) to be able to give decent opposition to implanted (or magic) combat monsters.

That's what I would do too (not let it stack), although I was thinking NPCs for this, since I have a hard time seeing PCs in cutting edge armor that first world nations would salivate to get their hands on.

Pulling from other sci-fi games that do have power armor, many of them have a fixed Strength attribute that is frequently used for the purpose of carrying capacity, melee combat damage, and other tests directly related to Strength with the exception of everything that would be like Strength + [Skill] where the wearer's base Strength is used instead.

1. PC face NPC with hardsuit, find a way to take him out without too much damage to the hardsuit.
2. PC get away with the hardsuit.
3. PC fix the hardsuit, or find someone to do it for them.
4. PC has a hardsuit.

If you introduce a cool piece of tech, you can be sure the players will do everything they can to get their hands on it.