I took priority A on resources and bought my charater obvious alphaware arms, legs and torso. Head and 0.03 essence is all flesh that remains. Still above zero! And it grants him a body rating of 16! Give him an LMG and he can take on fully grown cyberzombie!

Now the question is: will installing more cyberware into his cyberbody drain essence? Dermal armor or sheath, for example. Or strength enchancements for cyberlimbs that normally drain essence. What ya think?

edit: and what about healing? There's nothing to heal!

The way it was presented, an essence of 6 = 60% of the human body, I think.

More cyberware will require more essence. Basically, if you add in any cyberware, it will always cost essence. Same goes for strength and quickness enhancements. This cannot be mitigated, so your character looks like all he has is a body, but no essence left (which doesn't make sense, 4 limbs@1 per= 2.4 + (guessing) 2 for the skull and torso = 4.4. What else is in this guy?) Can't really get around the essence for cyberware hurdle.

Healing will occur, but the big thing with this character is cyberware stress and damage, as stated in M&M. Good luck.

Don

Many of your questions can be answered by referring to Man and Machine pages 32-36.

i don't recall if it actually works this way, but one would think that mounting cyberlimbs on a cybertorso would greatly reduce the essence cost of Str and Qui enhancements, as there's much less wear and tear on the living tissue.

then again, one would think that cyberlimbs would be easily stronger/quicker than what can be accomplished in the meat. maybe i'm just crazy, though.

Most of it you will only see on bad days though.

Sure, your Body may be 16, but your Quickness is only 4 and your Strength is only slightly above your racial average (4 for Humans, but I'm guessing you went with Troll, so make that an .

Likewise, if you went with complete Alphagrade implants, you should have a full 1.00 Essence left. Four limbs, a torso, and a head only comes out to be 6.25 Essence and 400,000 nuyen which, when purchased as alphagrade implants, is "only" 5.00 Essence and 800,000 nuyen. So no clue what you did to get it down to 0.03 without more input.

Most of the implants you'd want, like Dermal Sheathes, are unusuable to you now and even if they were usable, they'd still cost Essence. In fact everything still costs Essence unless you have them installed directly into the cyberlimbs. Though on the plus side, they'd only cost 40% of the original costs in both Essence and nuyen due to all those limbs. But anything that grants an Armor or Body bonus is null and void since you have more than three limbs.

What you can do, however, is cram yourself full of Body Plating; that's armor made specifically for cyberlimbs. Unfortunately, with only a Quickness of 4 (and a max of 7 without suffering some hefty Essence loss for each additional point), you can't wear very much of it without suffering severe Quickness and Combat Pool penalties.

All in all, you now suck royally. Well, unless you want to be a tech wiz-type who carries all kinds of cool gadgets in your limbs. But that obvious skull and limbs kinda negates the point in that anyway... so yeah... you pretty much suck.

But at least you look scary.

yes. Shadowrun, the only cyberpunk game ever made in which cyber sucks.

It doesn't suck as a whole. It only sucks when you try to replace every ounce of flesh with it. After a certain point, you hit diminishing returns.

Though on the whole, I agree. The rules for cyberlimbs are absolutely abyssmal.

If you go the Body Plating route take Heavy Weapons and buy an LMG, that way the Penalty to quickness-related skills doesn't hurt your firearms. If you don't want to go that way, since you're already captain freakmetal try mounting some SMGs in fixed or tracking mounts on all your limbs so you can shoot two dozen people each complex action.

Also for some inane reason all cyber-weapons, including cyberguns, use the Cyber-Implant Combat Skill according to Man and Machine, although my group house-ruled that cyberguns use the appropriate firearm skill. But if you keep that blissninny rule in place, you have have one bloody combat skill for your shotgun, your SMG, your Tazer, and your melee skill and use all your other skill points for other stuff, like Intimidation and Cyberware B/R (You'll need it). Best of all you can add all those weapons to your limbs with no essence cost if you just get a DNI or even skip the DNI and get skin-twitch activation.

Cyberlimbs suck, but they can almost be worthwhile with enough modifications to them.

you've got a point, but it seems silly and wrong that you have to sit down and think pretty hard in order to figure out the advantages of getting a limb replaced with metal. the advantages should jump out and grab you--especially considering the cost of getting them.

cyberware and cyberlimbs kicked ass in CP2020, the main book even had rules for meat limbs being destroyed by massive damage and in time that created a lot more cyberlimbs in the players. problem with shadowrun is they can't do something like that, because most magic users would just go around amputee style and then shadowrun would have even more rules to cover all the amputee wackiness.

In shadpowrun a cloned limb cost half as much as a cyberlimb anyway, so less cyberlimbs was obviously what they were shooting for.

Cymberlimbs are useful because of the stuff you can put in them. But as the above posters have said trying to become a terminator isnt really a good thing. It can be powerful, cyberzombie style, but for a runner that has to worry about cover and stealth and such its pretty gimp.

Also, not sure your body would be 16. Check pp32-33 M&M under compatability and read the example. That many limbs drops the bonuses from each. Maybe it is you didnt post full stats, but from what you did say I doubt it.

Until M&M was released I'd never considered a character with a cyberarm, now I can see advantages for everyone - even a mage has a good use for a partial replacement if he's getting some other cyber anyway.

Comparing the ethics and social effects of cyber between CP and SR is pointless. In CP cyber is part of the style - replacement eyes are cool, a cyberhand is cool - EVERYONE (nearly) has some sort of mod - they're also cheap and easy to get.

SR is very anti-cyber, not least because of the magic aspect, but there's an overriding trend for the general populace to dislike and distrust cyber (this has started to change though IMO). It's also expensive - Starting PCs have massive amounts of cash to play with (a million nuyen will buy a permanent high lifestyle for comparision) - a datajack costs the equivalent of a month's living expenses for a low lifestyle - not something that you could just buy on a whim, it would take either credit (with it's own problems in 2060) or a lot of saving (or course a lot of corpers would have one as part of the package).

there is allso the fact that a cloned limb (unless you have docwagon platinum or something, and then there is still a 2 month into the contract period timeframe before they have the arm ready) takes time to grow. a cyberlimb is there now! but yes the cost in cash for the base limb should maybe have been lowerd a bit (essence cost is fine tho as we are talking a major part of the body. and personaly im more for the old metaphysical explanation for essence then the metascience one in m&m).

oh and there are no need for a dermal sheath or similar with a full body conversion as the bonus in body you get from it is compareable. and you can now stuff your body with a whole lot of cyber (and other gear) and still not take further essence loss. (ok the grade and obvious vs cyntetic have an effect here)...

i think most cyberlimbs shows up in the military realy as if you end up with a lost arm in a messed up engagement then the dock can patch you up and fit you with a cyberamr and your back fighting in notime. same goes for people the corps need to have active stat. for the rest then they just wait for the cloned limb...

One of the biggest benefits of cyber limbs has always been the fact that No 1 they are legal as long as you don't go overboard and No 2 you can hide so many cool toys inside! 5 fingertip compartments? Hand razors or a cyber spur that shows up as part of the structure on scanners? Gas canister? Whatever small electronics doohikey you can talk me into thinking is small enough (think Ork/troll characters).