Sorry Critias, my comment about buying magic after chargen was pointed at mfb's logic shotgun. If you read earlier posts, I think I said your idea was ok (or I meant to), but that treating more like how you buy magic at chargen might be another way to implement it. Probably was driven nuts by someone's arguments.

Build Skills are covered in the main book and for drugs and chemical compounds in M&M.108. The base time to make a melee weapon is based on its base cost from the equipment table divided by 10. Unfortunately they don't differentiate between build and repair. Perhaps use days for build and minutes or hours for repair?

There are edges for reducing essence loss in M&M. There are also guidelines for creating edges, and the example here resembles the way they say to do it (take a similar flaw and double the cost.)

Well,I always liked the idea that when or if you removed the thing causing the lose of Essence one would slowly regain it. So if you have cyberware, then after sometime you you become more "live" again.

I'd say more "normal" than "live."

Remember, most people have no 'ware whatsoever. If you're a wageslave, though, you've probably got a datajack. That's it.

Well, less dead to magic, but the woring is not really the main point.

Well a mundane with 6 Essence is just as dead to magic as a mundane with 0.01 Essence.

Bitbasher, call it how you like. The point is, there should be balance and people picking sams more often, not "another adept". What is fun seeing 4 almost the same adepts and 2 mages in a group? Granted, in my group never more than half are magically active due to my policies.

if people are playing adepts because they think they're more powerful, they're in for a big surprise the first time they run into a competently-built sam. if you want to perform amazing feats that other mortals can't hope to match, play an adept. if you want to kill the hell out of everything that moves, play a sam.

indeed. but when you start talking about "balance", it generally comes down to who can kill the most people in the least amount of time. sams already take the gold medal in that category, so i don't see where the game needs to be "balanced" even more in their favor.

Meh. Different game styles for different people, I suppose.

Personally, I'd find it a matter of not having anywhere to burn all that cash -- except into new vehicles, 'ware repair, doc bills, ammo... Hey, wait!

I like the idea of buying back a point of essence with 20 karma. I think I'm going to institute it, but I won't allow a magic point to return. That's what Initiation is for.

Maybe it is the munchkin in me talking, but as for cyberware I've always wanted to see, I'd like to see independently focusable cybereyes. This would not only include the eyes, but some patchwork in the brain so that each eye can work without the other, maybe by including some kind of rangefinder in the eye to solve that depth perception problem with single eyes. That way you could use two smartlinked guns at the same time and could increase the field of your perception. I kind of messed with it once in a villain, but I didn't get the chance to use it much.

One of my players came up with a cool cyberskull enhancement that would allow him to change the shape of his face. I allowed him to run with it and throw in some cybereyes that can change color, some cyber skin that can change hue, and add in some artificial hair follicle cyberware that allows for a change in hair color with electric currents an all of the sudden you've got an amazing cyber-chameleon. He wanted a character that didn't have any magic used to change his looks because an awakened character with some good aura reading skills can crack the magic disguise. It worked well for him while he played it. He was a prototype for a corp and escaped to run the shadows (of course) and eventually the upgraded models came for him (they could change the length of the hair as well as the color, added vocal cyberware to change the voice, and had advanced skin to incorporate wrinkles). This was all before the adept facial sculpt power.

Now you mention it, the old Palladium game "Ninjas and Superspies" had some pretty good cyberware of that ilk. Think I might dig that out and have a quick scan to see if anything else useful was in there (apart from god knows how many martial arts) as the cyber was deliberately low powered... disguise stuff sounds promising though.

And it sounds a lot less painful than my nanite biosculptor idea.