I'm playing an Orc stealth adept, new character (6 karma). Specialising in hand to hand combat, sneaking, and disabling security systems.
I've been thinking that the best thing for him to get next is a ruthenium body suit, but my gm says it'll cost like, 81k.
Then he said something about using Anchoring Foci, or getting cyberware and Geasing so that I've still got the magic point, that kind of thing.

I have no idea what he's talking about, can anyone give me a rundown? And some advice on what to get?

O.o

Your GM sounds like he's on crack. You can't use an anchoring focus, cyberware wouldn't give you what you want, and I don't recall a ruthenium poncho costing 81 large.

Well, it's a body suit.
We're playing set in Melbourne, so +25% cost for ruth
20k for the ruth, 20k for the cameras
Street index means 40k for the ruth, 50k with the Melbourne cost
25k for the cameras after Melbourne cost

So 75K for matirials, 6k assembly fee.

The cyberware was more advised for things like extra vision enhancements and stuff, not the invisiblity.

Can't comment on the anchoring focus, since I dont know anythign about them, except that Melbourne prices are -10% for all magical equipment.

I...are these price mods official? Or is it just house rules up the wazoo?

The price mods (assuming you mean the price difference for Melbourne) are I believe in Target: Awakened Lands.

There's no reason whatsoever for an adept to get any sense improvements as cyberware. Any cyber sense can be duplicated by an adept for the low low cost of 0.25 magic points.

Cyberware-wise, he's probably talking about Dermal Sheathing with the Ruthenium Polymer add-on. This is very expensive, but the expense doesn't really cover the other disturbing aspect - you need to be substantially naked for it to work. I'm all for creative character approaches to standard situations, but I draw the line as a GM at a character saying "so, my ork character strips down to his jet-black speedos and sneaks into the facility". Hot elven female face character, fine. Male orc with all the build points gone into stealth and hand-to-hand and not charisma, hell no.

Anchored spell-wise, you could go for the anchored Stealth and Improved Invisibility spells. These would be pretty pricey anyway. Very effective where you get to use them, but you run into severe practical difficulties with wards, and until you can mask the d*mn things you're going to be detected all the time. Note also (whether or not this matters in your game is another question) that running around with active foci makes it easier to be detected by spirits using the search power and astral patrols. Since I often play stealthy characters, I personally get freaked out by doing anything that makes it easier to be detected. This is a reason why I never take a Suprathyroid Gland in such characters.

Personally, I don't like playing characters wearing a ruthenium suit. It's a little over-powered and pisses of GMs. I prefer getting one of those activewear jump suits, stuffing it full of thermal dampening and chosing an appropriate twelve changeable camo patterns. Still stealthy, but not as over powered. Also, Shadowrun is a game that is especially cool (at least until SR4 comes out) in combat, so if you assume that for the sake of the story you are going to get into combat, then the idea of running around in a 100K suit that must by definition take some hits some time becomes somewhat uneconomical.

Yes, but you can pack in a lot of cool cybersenses into 1.00 Essence worth of eyeware, or you can Initiate and get exactly four.

The real problem is that adept geasea are horribly horribly broken; there's essentially no reason *not* to get a Geas as an adept, as you lose nothing over someone who just sucks up the Magic loss.

Thats true, though getting the extra magic points takes a *lot* of karma.

There's a great reason not to geas. What geas do you take? Do you have to chant to make your senses work? Real sneaky. Do your senses work only at night? That's kind of lame if the sense in question is low light vision. Geas are only broken if GMs allow players to choose geas that do not truly limit their character. Like: "My improved ability [projectile weapons] only works if I have a bow in my hands." Great geas. Get back to the drawing board.

Never buy cyberears or eyes for an Adept. Use Group Initiation With Ordeal when initiating. Saves Karma.

Use money on stuff that can't be replicated with magic. Ruthenium suit is very nice.

And getting hit, doesn't mean you lose your armor. Some GM's will demand a repair upkeep, but generally armor takes no damage that a "Fix it" spell can't solve.

Is it just me, or do magical groups seem ungodly common?

I mean.. my game has been running for over a year, and we've only encountered one group. It's invitation only.

Now... as for the specifics..

Why does every geas have to be such a limitation that it makes it more almost as appealing short term to take the magic loss and initiate again? Long term, makes perfect sense -- not getting the metamagic when you initiate again hurts. It's a quite a price for the 'priviledge' of being able to use magic after magic loss.

Quite frankly, the way shedding involuntary geasa works, geasa should not be particularly limitting. There should be some element of it, but it should not be that bad. Not in the least. You've already shafted the person if they want to get rid of the limitation -- because, for instance, they tend to get punched a lot by someone with metal fists, and when they spit out all their teeth, they don't want to lose their magic point as well. (Str 7, 2 cyberarms, titanium bones..)

Likewise, a good GM won't cripple a character because he had a really lousy run that left him losing magic when he was already the weakest in the party. But hey, a geas should be a limit, so he has to become even weaker, to the point the other PCs have to break their characters to take him along, because he's a liability, not a help.




And what is wrong with low-light only working at night? That's not the only time it's important. They're in the dark, that does not mean it's night. It means they're in a building with no (or few) windows and someone has cut power.

Ignore the low-light at night thing, as you can't geas 0.25 point powers. It was just a "solar flashlight" example.

Sorry, typo. But I think you knew that. No good GM should allow such nonsense.

A geas is, by definition, a limit. If a GM wants to allow a more powerful campaign, they can ramp up the build points or go BeCKs and allow initiation in CharGen.

But to me it just ain't "fun" to make up a b.s. geas simply to squeeze an extra 0.25 points of power out of a character.

To me, "fun" is seeing how folks play through real limits, not how well they can justify a non-limit.

And as for this "canon" geas business, as EB notes, the rules put control of geas firmly in the hands of the GM.

This really isn't the thread to revive the whole "Geasa should suck taking" versus "Geasa should be fun to take" argument. It's never been resolved, yet, and likely never will be.

Let me ask you this: How do you know we are not at "the point where we cannot psychologically upgrade a meaningful geas to a meaningless one?" How do you know that someone in the game world does not have "Knowledge Skill: Geas Design: Gazillion"?

Yes, we should just agree to disagree.

You'll notice that the example I gave was "when I have a bow in my hands" not "when I have a specific bow in my hands." While I personally find your saber example to be a pretty twinky non-geas-geas, it has precedent with talisman rules as the saber is a specific item and one that could quite easily taken away, not to mention off limits in certain situations, as there are a lot of locations where the dress code is "jacket, tie, and no sharp metal." If someone asked about that geas in one of my games, I'd allow it before a tooth-talisman.

That said, "not limiting enough" is a perfectly acceptable reason for a GM to disallow a geas. I mean, christ on a crutch, a geas is intended to be a limiting factor and MitS says outright that players have to get geas cleared and that GMs can make them off limits if they aren't specific enough. For example, a "vegan" geas makes sense because it forces players to be thoughtful about what they do and it gives a GM room to sneak some kryptonite into an adventure, whereas a "no sturgeon caviar" geas is a useless hunk of crap.

'Not limiting enough' is not a good reason. In fact, it's a stupid reason -- a geas is a limitation on your character. That doesn't mean it's a way to make your GM chuckle while he plots ways to do things.

'It doesn't make sense in the least for your character' IS a good reason. A geas that doesn't make sense is singing hymns for improved ability (anything active). A geas that does make sense is a specific style of tools, or a specific set of tools.

And I happen to like the tooth geas. I'd fire a GM that disallowed it because it's not 'limitting enough', when the character had been shot in the side of the face and lost 4 teeth, along with taking deadly damage.. and found that his social abilities came back when he had new teeth put in. Or his 'improved ability(bite)'.

Likewise, reread.. my sabers. He doesn't just have one. He's got a set. 3 of them in fact -- two are mundane, dikoted sabers, one is a weapon focus, dikoted. Wouldn't be able to apply it to the vibrosword or daggers. The Geas makes sense and is valid by the rules of geasa -- it's an exclusive geas, perfectly justified. It's a limitation, although not a bad one. It also makes more sense then most of the 'good' geasa. Why on earth would someone develop a geas that has nothing to do with their power or the magic loss? That's just bad roleplay.

A vegan geas? Maybe if the character was already a vegetarian, that would work. Otherwise, that's so much of an extra limitation that it's a bad joke. Geasa are nasty enough as SLIGHT limitations -- they're either permanent or cost a metamagic. Making them equivalent to wearing handcuffs is adding insult and an extra injury to the first injury.

Geasa can be fun and exciting and offer something to the campaign. Take for example the combat mage who gets disrupted, while taking a D wound in astral space, and fails both magic loss checks.

Welcome to the gesture and chant geasa--Upraised middle finger projected clearly from his body and "F*CK YOU!". Now true, in the barrens or outside of any form of social pressure, this wouldn't be a limiting factor. But when you get known for cursing at people and having them erupt in a ball of juicy bits (Powerbolt) people start talking...

As a GM, I'm fairly flexible with players when they take a geas. This I think is mainly because without much planning on my part every single geas has come up at one point or another.

Killing hands that only work with a specific form of martial arts, some might call it munchkinesque. But if a character takes 2 forms of martial arts, one that is strongly offensive and one that they fall into for defense, it would make perfect sense for the intense focus of chi and spiritual energy to be lacking when they are protecting themselves. This is still a limitation because if the character earns more successes on the melee test, they cannot apply their killing hands when calculating damage.

Back to the original idea in this thread--as a starting character, the easiest thing to do would be to pickup an RTL Heavy jumpsuit with helmet. Program it with racing logos or somesuch for when you are on the street riding your bike. Have as a backup, the various camo patterns for any environment you would find yourself in and tack on the night camo which helps against sensors. Add 4 pts of Thermal dampening to the Armor, 2 pts in the helmet and a little chemseal because it always helps.

Now you have a sig of 12 to 14 against sensors and a +4 to stealth tests in any terrain. And it only costs a tenth of the Ruthenium price.

If you do go for the ruthenium approach, remember to apply it to your gear...there is nothing worse than a floating SMG or Katana to give away your position.

except that if the geas isn't limiting, why would you ever bother getting rid of it? the difficulty in removing a geas does not make a geas limiting. my head's pretty hard to get rid of, but i don't view it as a limitation.

Because If you don't, you're more than likely to reach a point where you can't take any more geasa?

It's most apparent when you have magician's way adepts, because their magic power dies first, they don't have all 6-8-10-whatever magic rating. They have 1,2, 5, whatever points of effective, spellcasting magic. Guess what? It's not that hard to lose much magic when you're making magic tests against TN 10 and can only fail 4-5 before you've lost all your spellcasting.

It might take a little longer for adepts and mages, but it does happen. Cost to initiate becomes higher, ease of losing magic just goes up.

So I've got magic 10.. all 10 points are geased because I keep getting shot, knifed, slashed, firebombed, blown up, or run over. Next time I take a hit, I lose magic. I can't avoid it.

Bear in mind, I'm playing in a game where my magician's way adept is really dangerous, devestating really, and he's still wound up unable to geasa away magic loss from deadly damage on his magic power.. and he's gotten really lucky with some of his magic tests. In fact, he's still at the point of 'magic loss -- can't geasa another point', so I know just how limitting geasa are by existing. 25 karma to get rid of an involuntary geasa. 2 karma for every initiation following.

If your using ruthenium dermal sheathing you should invest in some form of ruthenium clothing, now it becomes strip to the form fit body armour and you don’t need to worry about face masks.

It realy wouldn’t solve the cost issue as it is in all ways more expensive than a sute.

On bit of advice however, don’t just get ruthenium, also get the thermal dampening mod although it doesn’t last as long at a stretch, it is invaluable against the many targets with thermographic vision, I find the rapid transit jumpsuits a good choice for the base armour, you can include various non invisibility disguises eg currier, mechanic, jogger. The biggest disadvantage of using a ruth sute in invisibility mode is dirt, if you get dirty, (blood, dust, grease) that dirt will be visible,

As an adept you can’t use an anchoring focus yourself (unless you’re a physical mage) you could pay a spell caster to give you anchoring foci but that should attract an extra fee for the magician to bond the focus and an ongoing availability fee, it will quickly become exceedingly expensive.

Magical groups should be quite common, ones that take shadow runners les so. Every corp with a significant magical staff has group with the special goal for advancing the magical talent of that corporations magically active employees (possibly several such groups for varying traditions or sections of the corp). MIT&T should have several magical groups as will any other tertiary education facility with a large thaumaturgic department these are created buy students and faculty for research and personal advancement. Shadow runners would not likely interact with these groups directly and with the problems they bring would likely not be welcome as members. Shadow initiatory groups would also exist but they must be very careful of security and have group goal beyond the personal advancement of members so they will be hard to find and you wont interact with them on a run, all these groups would also have high fees.

As to geasa as long as the FAQ states that an item of cyber wear is a suitable talisman your just going to have to admit that it sucks or declare a house rule from the beginning. Personally I say that a talisman must be losable (but it may be easily replaced) and any other geasa must have a real chance of being difficult to fill occasionally. Low light vision only at night is fine, runners are always getting into dark places at odd times, geasa IA unarmed combat to only when using unarmed combat is not but only when using a given mauver would be. The tooth I would not normally allow but for IA bite I would. As to the sabres I would allow them as a talisman that you have several copies of provided you specify 3 traits they all share and any replicants will share, EG sabre, dicoat, real leather grip. My requirement that there be a limit is that you cant always carry sabres around.

The problem I have with the fuck you geasa is that it makes healing and other beneficial spells look strange,

Edward

jeez. dawnshadow, if you're having to stack on so many geasa that you're running out of room, my hat's off to you. most characters i've ever heard of don't run into that problem. i'd like to submit that, since that's the case, it's not really equitable to hold other characters to that standard. your character is trading limiting geasa for freakishly frequent magic loss checks, therefore it's fair to say your character's geasa are limiting. other characters don't have to check for magic loss nearly as often, so similar geasa would not be limiting.

Actually, MFB, it's the TN 9 magic test. Karma Pool spent trying to avoid said magic test. Only 4 points of magic power. Doesn't take much to inflict deadly damage, when you have body less than 9 (the other adept. The Sam's is higher).

Might be just that our game is a little more PC-bloody. It still strikes me that geasa don't need to be particularly limiting to be bad on the order of 'month spent with Bubba the Troll in a small cell'. Even a small limit is painful enough.

No one ever listens to me.

Hey, let's start arguing whether adepts or street sams are better, too, while we're all here.

that's only one geas, then, dawnshadow. find me a character who's taken magic loss so often that they can't geas it anymore. it just doesn't happen.

Thank you to everyone who replied on-topic.

To those of you who are discussing Geas merits/cons/limitations etc

PLEASE GET OFF MY BOARD

I think with all this confusion and having no idea what most of you are on about, I'm going to completely ignore cyberware/geasing, at least for now.


So, can anyone suggest any other ways I can improve my stealth? Or easy between-run money making schemes I could use? Because by the looks of things any increase for me is going to take craploads of (or karma in the case of magic points), and considering I started with resources minimum, will take a *long* time for me to save up.

Well, if you're looking for something cheaper than Ruthenium, the rapid transit heavy jumper with thermal dampening 4 mentioned above is a good place to start. Total price is 6,500 Y, Availability 8/4 days, SI 3. Get some camo patterns on chip (pricing not mentioned in the books, but shouldn't be all that expensive) to bump both your Sig and your perception TN by 4. You can get chemseals on it too, but that'll bump up the price and SI even more.

What book is this mentioned in?
Or if it's a custom item can you give me a breakdown, evidently I missed it in the mess of the middle of this board.

It's in Cannon Companion, in the armor section.

Might be a silly question (but I'm too lazy to switch back to page 1 and check) -- have you got the standard Stealth Adept Package, for powers, here? Traceless Walk? Athletics/Stealth out the wazoo? Wall Running? Centering (Athletics/Stealth)? Masking?

Most of the stuff you can do -- short of camo clothing, be it ruthenium or otherwise -- is all karma-based, not necessarily nuyen alone. Them's the breaks, when you make a Talented.

My adept powers are:

Imp Sense: Enhanced Hearing
Imp Sense: Thermo Vision
Imp Reflexes Lvl 1
Motion Sense
Magic Sense
Traceless Walk
Imp Physical Attribute Quickness (2)
Imp Physical Skill Stealth(4)

This was my first try at making an adept, and my first try at a sneaky character.

*nods* Not a bad bunch, so far. You might want to start stocking up on Karma for some Initiation -- more power points and Centering are good things. Improved Athletics (esp. with Wall Running from SotA 64) can get you into places you might not otherwise be able to. And for just .25 a level, Athletics is tough to go wrong with.

Keep in mind though that this is a potentially dangerous way to turn a profit. First off, every single unit of orichalcum you make has your astral signature all over it, so it can always be tracked back to you. This mostly applies to people who are trying to hide, or are selling illegally or something. Second keep in mind that this a very labor0intensive process, one that requires your near constant attention for a month, so it's not a good idea unless you can be absolutely sure of more than a month's downtime. Finally the radicals involved are expensive themselves, especially the gold.

Also keep in mind, this has nothing at all to do with your character (from what you've told us so far). How within his personality is it to suddenly sink karma into enchanting/alchemy, settle down with a nice shop somewhere, and work like a busybody D&D gnome merchant in between jobs as an Adept infiltration expert?