I'm curious what you all think about Awakened characters having ware. Personally, it's a peeve of mine and I think there should be more severe penalties for it than there currently are.

While it's easy enough to have a Shaman's totem get all snippy, which is never a good thing, how can Adepts and Hermetics get a likewise kick in the ass? I'm considering an increased difficulty in Initiating, as in more karma and more IC effort, or perhaps a cap on how high an Awakened can Initiate with ware, or increase the BI loss, or severely restricting access to the astral planes/making spirits more hostile until the ware is removed.

Initiation is supposed to reflect a greater dedication to magic. To me, that means ditching the 'quick fix' benefits of ware. You sacrifice some things because the magic is more important. Anyone who wishes to 'taint' their magic ability should suffer for it.

So, opinions?

(just anticipating )

SR3 rewrote just about every old glitch and loophole of combining 'ware and spells. No longer can spells stack on top of adept abilities stack on top of bio: now the choice must be made to 'ware or not to 'ware, and even the physical magician ends up no faster or stronger than their mundane counterparts. This leaves, what: encephalons, cerebral boosters, trauma dampers, the traditional cybereyes? Not imbalancing, I don't think ... although I'm all for shamans especially being required by their totems and their life's paths to minimise or abjure 'ware altogether. (shrug) Personal opinion, is all.

Regardless of initiation, the penalty to astral time for non physmages is permanent. Too much 'ware, and the magician is going to lose a significant part of their abilities.

To each their own I suppose. I always have some cyber in my Shamanic character. There aren't alot of Totems that mind cyberware, I believe only Eagle and Unicorn? Any GM-Interpretation of a Totem dis-like is, well...., purely GM-Interpretation. Seems kinda pointless to play in a cyber-genre with just magic though (I realize that's just a personal point of view).

Regardless, I'd sugegst making sure the players were aware of their Universe's sudden dislike for cyber-in-mages attitude.

Sphynx

I disallow gaesa

POW! THE CONSEQUENCES!

I dont see anything wrong with the way SR3 handles magic and "ware," it is pretty balanced IMHO. If you think about it, bioware reduced your effective magic rating by 1, and that point of magic can't be geased away either. Even if the said piece of bioware has a bio index of .1, you still effectively loss one point of magic. Now magic lost to cyber on the other hand can be geased off, but the GM must enforce the gease, that is the only real way to penalize the character that has magic and cyber. Some "ware" is broken when combined with magic, but there is always away the GM can get the player using that combination .