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2.5 is nearly half of that! C'mon Racter, you can shave off another point or two! Think of the possibilities! E: Update on previous page.
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Oct 21, 2023 14:42
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I think the point is in part that the amount of cyber he has should amount to far more than 6, even if he could technically get a little more. I think in game, the notion of essence is only fuzzily understood. As in, we know this is roughly the amount of cyber before a person usually to develop major personality disorders and if we add this much more then they will spontaneously die.
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Oct 21, 2023 17:19
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Yeah I imagine having your drone permanently hooked into your subconscious and having the ability to effectively rewrite your brain on demand should be fairly essence-heavy.
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Oct 21, 2023 18:51
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Yeah, my original Shadowrun 3rd Ed pen and paper Street Sam character my friend wrote up for me had like 0.25 Essence left? I had no idea how to roleplay that at all, but that character was stuffed to the gills with cyber (dermal armor, bone lacing, wired reflexes, hand razors, cybereyes, smartlink, and a datajack for good measure if I remember most of the gear correctly). Racter losing half his body below the hips would def result in like half his essence being gone, and then he’s gotta have some brainware and a decent Mind Impulse Unit and Control Rig and a datajack in order to be a successful Rigger, on top of what’s letting him offload his emotions to Koschei built into his MIU and Control Rig. That should drop him below what he’s got statted out there, but he did mention some kind of rare adaptability. And yeah, 6 Essence is a purely mechanical stat so people can’t cyber up too much, but it’s fluffed out as the Rule of 6 or something like that in some of the older editions, where scientists and corp researchers doing the initial cyberware installations found that you could only really make less than 6 major alterations to the body with ware before the soul straight up died as it didn’t recognize the body anymore, or something to that effect.
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Oct 22, 2023 00:56
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Glory from the last game is a pretty good example of what getting to 2 or lower Essence can do to a person. Robocop is generally how people perceive less than 1 essence. 0 is literal cyberzombie territory. Racter is acting like he speedran the essence entropy process by starting with the mental dysphoria and disorders instead of getting them through chroming up. Who knows, maybe he did. That's the theory he's working with and nothing has actively disproven it yet.
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Oct 22, 2023 02:15
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Having low Essence is dehumanizing, but that's because low Essence is a sign that you have packed yourself full of dehumanizing things to make yourself into a better person-shaped gun. When you look at everyone and see a targeting reticle superimposed on them in your cybereyes, and your nerves have been rewired to run on pure murderous twitch reflex, and you can barely feel your skin because of the subdermal armor plating, that's low essence.
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Oct 22, 2023 02:28
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It might just be later editions, but is there not incredibly sleek cyberware that consumes little essence and is hardly visible, but costs the gross national product of the entire Milky Way to install? In other words, only really for evil CEOs (which is all of them) who want to be end-boss Mecha-Hitler?
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Oct 22, 2023 02:37
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I always just accepted this as a divorce between gameplay and story. The intention seems pretty clear cut that Racter is meant to have maybe 1 or less essence remaining, and thus why it's meant to be a big shock moment to discover it, as, at that level of Essence, he should have significantly more side effects then he's presenting. It's meant to be a "wait, how are you not affected by that? EVERYONE is affected by it!"wiegieman posted:Having low Essence is dehumanizing, but that's because low Essence is a sign that you have packed yourself full of dehumanizing things to make yourself into a better person-shaped gun. I forget if I already mentioned it in this thread (and if I did, too bad, you get to read it again), but the gold star on writing that is in the 2e book simply titled Cyberwear, which gives a first person account of what it means to be ware'd up to the gills. Rather then being presented as "well he lost Humanity Points so he's just weird now," it's very much written in the light of "what would it mean for your day to day life, to try and live with this 'ware?" and how dehumanizing it is not because you're made of metal, but because you've removed your ability to interact with other people. He can't wrestle or play with his old buddies anymore because his cyber-arms are too strong and he unthinkingly hurts them. He always keeps his back to the wall, not because he's paranoid of someone attacking him, but out of fear of losing control of his own wired reflexes when someone accidentally triggers them. He talks about how most cyber samurai, so alienated from other people, end up getting headware not to call in for jobs or do super secret plans, but to call Matrix girlfriends or even just regularly visited sexlines, because that's the only meaningful human interaction they really have left. When he first gets his cybereyes, they're not configured right...and he doesn't get them fixed immediately, because the artificiality of them is so everpresent that they cause him to disassociate, making him feel like his whole life is now just a video he's watching, and he wants that disassociation between himself and his actions. It's also the book that introduced cyberzombies - with him undergoing the procedure in question - presented in the same way you would a horror movie. It's meant to be horrifying that he's turned himself wholely into a weapon, to the point where he's now remote controlled, his soul desperately trying to die and not being allowed to do so. Which makes cyberzombies one of the exceptionally rare things in media that calls back to the actual horror of the zombie myth. The horror was not that zombies are scary and eat brains. The horror is that not even death can save you from slavery.
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Oct 22, 2023 05:39
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ProfessorCirno posted:I always just accepted this as a divorce between gameplay and story. The intention seems pretty clear cut that Racter is meant to have maybe 1 or less essence remaining, and thus why it's meant to be a big shock moment to discover it, as, at that level of Essence, he should have significantly more side effects then he's presenting. It's meant to be a "wait, how are you not affected by that? EVERYONE is affected by it!" Good post
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Oct 22, 2023 05:44
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ProfessorCirno posted:I always just accepted this as a divorce between gameplay and story. The intention seems pretty clear cut that Racter is meant to have maybe 1 or less essence remaining, and thus why it's meant to be a big shock moment to discover it, as, at that level of Essence, he should have significantly more side effects then he's presenting. It's meant to be a "wait, how are you not affected by that? EVERYONE is affected by it!" I've never read a shadowrun text/book, but I'm sure as hell reading that one. You got me interested with that first person descritpion of the process, thanks!
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Oct 22, 2023 06:47
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Oh, slight note, got the name wrong. It's Cybertechnology, not Cyberware. Funny enough, the book was at the time...somewhat poorly recieved. People complained it spent too much time with narrative writing, not enough time...alas, getting to the "cool ware." Nerds. What can you do.
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Oct 22, 2023 07:10
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perhaps a lot of nerds simply don't have all that much essence to start off with and thus cybering themselves to the gills would yield no discernible changes
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Oct 22, 2023 07:28
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mortons stork posted:perhaps a lot of nerds simply don't have all that much essence to start off with and thus cybering themselves to the gills would yield no discernible changes To be fair to Racter, there are lots of people in the sixth world who feel more comfortable with 'ware in them than before they got it. Some people are just into it.
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Oct 22, 2023 07:37
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JustJeff88 posted:It might just be later editions, but is there not incredibly sleek cyberware that consumes little essence and is hardly visible, but costs the gross national product of the entire Milky Way to install? In other words, only really for evil CEOs (which is all of them) who want to be end-boss Mecha-Hitler? Yes, on top of the basic cyberware you've got higher grades, which are increasingly expensive, cutting-edge, and less impactful to essence: alphaware (the Viking range of cyberware, the top end of the mass market), betaware (the custom car of cyberware, custom-built for its purchasers), and deltaware (the custom private jet of cyberware, as much a work of art as a piece of technology). And then there's bioware, where instead of chrome and metal you use purpose-grown organs to do things like see better, exert conscious control over your adrenaline system, and the like, which tends to erode your sense of self much less but is also very expensive. Turns out that augmentation is basically: transcend the limits of your frail mortal shell, spend the GDP of a small country, become a dissociated shell of yourself, pick (at most) two.
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Oct 22, 2023 16:09
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ProfessorCirno posted:I forget if I already mentioned it in this thread (and if I did, too bad, you get to read it again) ProfessorCirno posted:Shadowrun has always been shaky on how much or how you should roleplay having very low Essence. Until I think SR5 they never even made it a mechanical thing, and even then it was connected to one of the most hated mechanics in SR5: limits. which, i might add, is an extremely good post and one i have referenced twice so far in discussing narratives surrounding this sort of thing. your rundowns have been extremely appreciated.
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Oct 22, 2023 16:41
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Essence is kind of a mess. It was originally invented as a mechanical game balance thing so that players couldn't have magic and cyberware at the same time. Then it got put into the setting as a narrative thing, even though it isn't really in any of the cyberpunk stories Shadowrun's coming from and is also kind of against theme. Molly Millions is ruthless and cold for mundane human crapsack world reasons, then turns herself into a weapon in response. Shadowrun essence has the causality backwards, with bonus problematic implications ("You, the player playing this game, are less human if you have a prosthetic arm"). Some of the later changes in emphasis towards how augments would change everyday life are better, but it still doesn't make that much sense for "I have a cell phone built into my hand (and so do 99% of the people you interact with)" to be inherently alienating from human society, but "I am part of the 0.1% magical elite. With a twitch of thought, I can explode anyone in this room" isn't. I think most people just completely ignore all the intrusive narrative parts unless you specifically want that character (Glory). Game balance expects that a street samurai character is going to use most of their essence budget, but nobody wants to have every cyberware character be the same dispassionate beep-boop meat robot. This game does that too; if we had made cyberware Taz running around with 0.5 essence left, it wouldn't be trying to enforce (and doesn't even really offer the options for) the personality the narrative says 0.5 essence implies.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:36
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Do note that the essence costs early on included pretty much everything, fake tits eat you soul. Getting a bone stapled back together does not however despite the fact that the same logic implies it should. It's embarrassing and genuinely bad in that new age way. As it turns out, in real life, human brains love extending their body plan to incorporate tools, cars, swords, fretwork saws, planes, they just love it, that's not really relevant, what I do find relevant is that approach to game balance zooms right past the action economy which rules the balance of all things in a turn based game. I do understand why they made it so people would stick to the archetype, that is more defensible, every spellcaster having dermal armor and cyber-eyes was not part of the vision but I say it should be included instead as money just enables you to be better, the pain of the downtrodden is knowing that the CEO up there has bulletproof skin that looks, acts, and feels like real skin and they have a coat of brittle shingles because of the corrosive gas leaks.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:34
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SIGSEGV posted:Do note that the essence costs early on included pretty much everything, fake tits eat you soul. Getting a bone stapled back together does not however despite the fact that the same logic implies it should. It's embarrassing and genuinely bad in that new age way. I’ve mentioned it in this thread before, but even in the 4th or 5th cyberware/Bioware Augmentation splatbook, they’ve statted out Essence costs for both Breast and Penile implants. I believe they cost 0.25 Essence each.
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Oct 23, 2023 13:46
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I can't believe I missed that and I'm just gonna quietly lmao at it in a corner.
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Oct 23, 2023 14:13
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Wanna play the age of sail shadowrun game where my character's peg leg, hook and eyepatch start leeching his humanity away
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Oct 23, 2023 16:13
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I don't think prosthesis eat your soul in Earthdawn, so I guess if you throw your cell phone away and poo poo in the wood you'll be fine.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:28
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Foxfire_ posted:It was originally invented as a mechanical game balance thing so that players couldn't have magic and cyberware at the same time. Why, tho? I mean: "it's cyberpunk plus fantasy! dragons as CEOs, wizards and hackers work side by side!" "Can I play a cyborg mage?" "no" Doesn't fit with the jive. How is the game balance upset by that? Isn't needing to invest resources twice enough?
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Oct 23, 2023 16:37
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Whybird posted:Wanna play the age of sail shadowrun game where my character's peg leg, hook and eyepatch start leeching his humanity away LEG: You know you really shouldn't be standing around so much, practice your running whenever you can and nothing could gain on you! HOOK: Is that landlubber looking at us like he got plans?! a quick swing to his face followed by a powerful jerk will show everyone. everyone. EYEPATCH: There is much hidden in the light of day, go skulking around after nightfall and all sorts of secrets come out of hiding...
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Oct 23, 2023 16:42
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starting to sound like disco elysium tbh
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Oct 23, 2023 16:49
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Adjacent to a lot of this, one of the problems with the Essence system (and Cyberpunk's humanity system, and...etc, etc, etc) is that research increasingly shows that the human brain is actually fantastic at handling prosthetics and similar. As it turns out, the brain has two things it needs to accept body parts: the ability to see it as a tool, and your ability to have psychological "ownership" of it. And we're really, really good at both! We don't yet know what the actual limit of our ability to rebuild ourselves is, but most current science points to alienation being caused by prosthetics or similar simply not providing the brain with enough information. I mean, we don't have CYBERARMS or CYBERLEGS or whatever, but all current science and studies lean hard into "actually, after a brief period of therapy to ensure psychological ownership (which would be substantially easier if the limb in question already looked like the previous one), our body would have no problems at loving all in adapting to it." Now, the far more "exotic" stuff like Wired Reflexes, we have no clue how the body would handle that - that kind of thing is purely the subject of fantasy. But replacing body parts? The science says there's no reason to expect human beings to undergo LOSS OF HUMANITY over a new arm.
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Oct 23, 2023 16:51
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Strictly speaking you can get cyberware as a mage or adept and if you want to optimize it is the better choice to make. You can get the bioware equivalent of wired reflexes, which is quite expensive, at a good rating for 1 essence which makes you lose 1 magic. Which isn't bad. Especially when you consider that taking the equivalent in adept powers costs 2-3 magic.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:43
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Kith posted:starting to sound like disco elysium tbh Got the same vibe and I feel like there's some potential in a setting where augmentations come with AI personalities that like to contribute to their user's stream of conciousness.
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Oct 23, 2023 18:43
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ProfessorCirno posted:Now, the far more "exotic" stuff like Wired Reflexes, we have no clue how the body would handle that - that kind of thing is purely the subject of fantasy. But replacing body parts? The science says there's no reason to expect human beings to undergo LOSS OF HUMANITY over a new arm. If anything, the success of mirror therapy etc. shows that restoring a body part to something which more closely resembles its correct form, even superficially, actually makes you more human, not less; but then SR's Essence is more about magical woo bullshit than it is about psychological trauma
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Oct 23, 2023 19:22
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CheeseThief posted:Got the same vibe and I feel like there's some potential in a setting where augmentations come with AI personalities that like to contribute to their user's stream of conciousness. LEG: You could really use a cool, refreshing Nuka-Cola right about now.
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Oct 23, 2023 19:40
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Man, this thread sure is filled with a bunch of apologists looking for a shot to turn themselves into Chrome Pinocchio 
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Oct 23, 2023 20:36
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Gun Jam posted:Why, tho? For :shadowrun: reasons, cyberware and magic use mostly different resources. Cyberware costs money & essence (either during a campaign, or at character creation by putting the 'Resources' category at a high priority to get a bigger 'you may start with equipment that costs up to X' limit). Magic wants high priority spent on your magic rating at character creation, and costs karma/xp during a campaign. After character creation, they don't compete with each other that directly; without essence, there's no mechanic stopping you from spending all your money on cyberware and all your karma on magic. It would probably end up with most mildly optimized characters kind of homogonous. Everybody would want at least a little bit of magic and at least a little bit of cyberware. Forcing you to pick a niche leads towards everyone in the group having a specialty, the same way that D&D says "By default, a wizard can't cast a fireball while wearing plate mail and a hits-people-with-big-axes guy doesn't know how to backstab someone"
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Oct 23, 2023 21:27
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RabidWeasel posted:If anything, the success of mirror therapy etc. shows that restoring a body part to something which more closely resembles its correct form, even superficially, actually makes you more human, not less; but then SR's Essence is more about magical woo bullshit than it is about psychological trauma A recently developed nerve controlled prosthetic arm with some feedback elements alleviated a great deal of phantom pain in the recipient, for example.
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Oct 23, 2023 21:48
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Something people don’t get about games such as Shadowrun- tabletop and computer- sometimes it’s about helping the player live out their fantasy. Speaking from personal experiences as a player and GameMaster of D&D, I love that aspect of gaming and if a player at my table wanted to roll a cyber-mage, a handicapped superhero like Daredevil or Oracle, or anything with crazy essence issues, and they had a worthy concept and a clear need to play it out, I would house rule it in if necessary. I wouldn’t necessarily be their enabler sympathy guy- I got needs too and I’m not a panderer, same for other players- but I would like them to have fun with the game too. Racter would definitely have a space at my table, same for Glory. And hopefully we’d have fun.
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Oct 23, 2023 23:39
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It's worth noting if we think back to Glory that her good ending pushes really strongly towards it not even being specifically her cyberware that made her like she was, it was the immense and horrific trauma she went through - and that she can, and is, healing from that, by helping others who might also feel as used and broken as she can. And, of course, the LP isn't finishedyet. Harebrained isn't done thinking and talking about how Essence actually works and how cyberware might effect someone.
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Oct 24, 2023 03:57
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If people want to have a chrome arm that can punch through someone's ribcage they should pay the price for that, no matter whatever their sob story their background consists of.
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Oct 24, 2023 21:18
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Foxfire_ posted:For :shadowrun: reasons, cyberware and magic use mostly different resources. Cyberware costs money & essence (either during a campaign, or at character creation by putting the 'Resources' category at a high priority to get a bigger 'you may start with equipment that costs up to X' limit). Magic wants high priority spent on your magic rating at character creation, and costs karma/xp during a campaign. After character creation, they don't compete with each other that directly; without essence, there's no mechanic stopping you from spending all your money on cyberware and all your karma on magic. I was about to post this. It's basically a mechanic for balance. Cyberware (big armour) is powerful, magic (also magic) is powerful, the two combined break the game.
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Oct 24, 2023 22:23
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Sylphosaurus posted:If people want to have a chrome arm that can punch through someone's ribcage they should pay the price for that, no matter whatever their sob story their background consists of. Nobody told me it was going to collect the hearts though!  Have you tried to convince a metal arm to let go of a human organ?! It takes some doing.
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Oct 25, 2023 03:43
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Sylphosaurus posted:Man, this thread sure is filled with a bunch of apologists looking for a shot to turn themselves into Chrome Pinocchio From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you.
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Oct 25, 2023 06:37
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I think there's three htings going on here basically. First, Essence as a balance mechanic between magic and cyberware. Sure! Essence as purely a balance mechanic is fine. "More tech = less magic the end" is a position that hypothetically most people would likely be fine with. The problem is... ...Second, Essence as an in-universe indicator of things. This is where it starts to get bad, and a lot of cyberpunk makes the same mistake, because it sorta boils down to "pacemakers and prosthetics make you less human." That's a really lovely thing to say, and also boy, you certainly are, uh, treading real close to real life arguements of eugenics! It's essentially a declaration that having prosthetics is something inherently dehumanizing. On top of being just a frankly lovely as hell thing to believe, it's scientifically bullshit - the human brain is in fact incredible at adapting to a whole lot of things, prosthetics included, which honestly makes sense because the whole drat point of our big wrinkly brains is that they can adapt to unexpected stimuli and/or organize and sort that into categories that allow it to become expected and normalized stimuli. Which finally leads us to the Third thing, which is that this is a bullshit and terrible way to represent a theme of tech being dehumanizing. We know tech can be dehumanizing. We had a whole-rear end industrial revolution to teach us real fast just how dehumanizing technological advancements could be. The Luddite movement didn't hate technology because they thought progress was bad, they were smashing the machines that were destroying their industry and leaving them to starve in the gutters while their children lost their hands to those same machines. Cyberpunk as a genre has long suffered from largely being popularized just before the "end of history," which means this punk genre has somehow never read a single word of actual revolutionary theory. As a result you get frankly stupid ideas such as "what if COMPUTER...made you LESS PERSON" like the world's most insipid boomer meme spread across Facebook. It also leads to real dumb ideas like "the real trend setters are going to be ancap murderers who take the tech to UPGRADE THEIR DEATH SKILLS" when we all know the actual front runners of that kind of tech are going to be trans folk and furries. There are solutions! You can focus on how tech is dehumanizing by specifically looking at how it removes you from the human experience not because COMPUTER BAD but because you're intentionally dehumanizing yourself so you can get a slightly better paycheck at your job where you murder people. You can focus on how this tech really is not obtainable purely on your own, sorry bizarro libertarians who make up a more sizable number of tabletop gaming nerds then you'd think, and so every bit of 'ware comes with either either a leash to a sponsor of some sort, or comes with a connection to the community that chipped in and helped you buy it. You can focus on how this tech is both company owned and largely pushed onto people per terms of employment, and thus you had no choice but to "upgrade" yourself, except now your new ears needs constant updates, and if the company that made it so decides they can start charging you regular fees for "updates and upgrades" and, should you not pay, they can just turn it off and utterly remove your hearing, a thing that has in fact happened in the real world that we live in. And as for magic, well, again, you don't have to make Essence any sort of connection to your base humanity. And also, make magic way more weird and stop presenting it as a matter of holistic wholeness and soul connectivity, so that 'ware cutting you off from magic stops having such grotesque connotations. Dragonfall actually did this fairly well with Dietrich - his connection to his mentor spirit is going to loving kill him and pushes him into increasingly more dangerous stunts. You get the idea.
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Oct 25, 2023 08:22
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