[Novocrane]

Ok. Your entire point looks to boil down to "I interpreted your written idea differently to you". To clear things up on my end, I meant the 3 str / 3 agi, not the separation between natural stats and cyber stats. The part on customisation may have clued you in, but I get that you may have missed it while in a bad mood. Or may simply think the whole thing is bad.

I also find it a bit ridiculous that you think your reply being focused on amounts to a "slap fight", or that this is the kind of thing that deserves to be taken private. I wouldn't have posted here if I didn't want anyone to reply to it, and my base assumption is that you would do the same. (if not, I'd suggest breathing into a paper bag or some other activity when a bad mood takes you)

[samoth]

I agree with the "Limbs should initially be equal to whatever your characters' Agi and Str stats are" when you buy them.  You raise a stat through karma?  You now have to pay X nuyen to increase the limb stat to match.  It's just common sense.  Make the limbs cost X x Attribute Level so Trolls have to pay more, etc.  Increase the limit to +4 like every other enhancement and suddenly Limbs really are balanced.  It's not rocket science and I have no clue why they refuse to either make cyberlimbs rules simple or give us more in-depth rules for how to use them.  I suppose they are more simple now actually: go back and check out the SR3 cyber book and read the tome of limb rules there that contradict themselves and make things even more difficult than necessary for no reason.

My real complaint about limbs is there's really no official word on exactly what they affect.  Yes, a full arm will use the stats of that arm for all actions.  However, rules for partial arms or hands are vague.  Does a hand or partial arm use it's stats for shooting a gun, for example?  I don't know and the devs won't clarify, which causes needless house ruling.  I could see it ruled either way, so it has potential for serious cheese if your GM says you use your natural attributes so you don't have to pay for stat raises on your hand to shoot your gun at full rating.

The attributes of partial limbs
(including cyberhands and –feet) may be enhanced, but
their attributes only apply for tests directly involving
those limbs (such as a Strength Test when gripping something
with an enhanced cyberhand)..

[Reaver]

I think the ruling for partial limbs is about as clear as they can make it really.


they use their stats in a test that JUST uses that part of the body.


If more parts of the body are needed, the cyber becomes less and less effective.

That cyber hand is great for opening that jar of pickles. But less effective when shooting a pistol. And even less effective when firing a rifle.

[samoth]

I don't think it's clear at all.

Firing a gun, for example, isn't JUST pulling the trigger.  It requires at very least full arm coordination.

You say "it gets less effective" but by the rules as written it does not.  Either the hand fully controls shooting a gun, or it does not control it at all (but then what does the base Agi of 3 do for the action)?

Like most things, it would be trivial to put a table into the core rules that explained this type of stuff but they didn't bother and we're still arguing about it 9 months after release.

[Reaver]

I don't think it's clear at all.

Firing a gun, for example, isn't JUST pulling the trigger.  It requires at very least full arm coordination.

You say "it gets less effective" but by the rules as written it does not.  Either the hand fully controls shooting a gun, or it does not control it at all (but then what does the base Agi of 3 do for the action)?

Like most things, it would be trivial to put a table into the core rules that explained this type of stuff but they didn't bother and we're still arguing about it 9 months after release.

So? Is shooting a gun just done with the forearm down?

If so, then use the cyber limb stats.

If not, then use the base attribute stat.


Now, as a gun owner and shooter, there is no way you can convince me that the forearm, wrist and hand do all the work in shooting a pistol. So, use base agility please.
Crushing a bottle (with someone else hand wrapped around the bottle) or holding a doorknob closed so a door won't open are feats of forearm strength. Please use your partial cyber limb.


See?

Was that hard?

[samoth]

I'm a gun owner and avid shooter as well and I guarantee shooting isn't just done with the wrist down like in a cyberhand.  However, others may disagree for in-game purposes.

Take guns out of the equation, what about throwing punches, slashing with a knife, throwing a grenade, operating a lockpick, and on and on?  It requires GM fiat when it should be a flat RAW explanation.

The question becomes "Why increase the Agi stat at all when you don't even know what it's used for".  This leads easily to the guy with two cyber hands and two cyber feet with jacked up armor with no penalty aside from direct use of the those partial limbs for tests (which are mostly undefined). 

Your Cyber Lower arm with the flat 3 agility and 3 strength doesn't seem like it has much drawback for keeping those stats dumped since they don't average with your other stats like a full limb would.  On the other hand, if your lower limb/hand's stats DO influence the skills directly then you're paying a lot of nuyen for increased attributes that do not average with the rest of your body which seems like a rip off to me.

[Reaver]

ok, lets look at it this way.


There was a certain level of intelligence, reason and inituition made by the writers and editors of Shadowrun. They wrote the rules in such a way as to give you a generalist view of how or what a limb (or the matrix, or magic, or purple-people-eaters) can do. From there, it is up to the group of players/GM to decide what task  is reliant what part of a limb or given limbs. In effect, the Writers and editors said "we are going to assume our readers are *this* smart" <wave hand in air>. The book ended up being 500 freaking pages long! How much larger, or how many volumes would it be if they assumed their customers were morons?


AS with any game that is powered by imagination, sometimes you have to use it to come to an appropriate ruling on a given device, ritual, spell, code, or ware. Come up with that ruling, remember it, and apply it evenly across the board and move on. Rules are there to guide the game, they are not the game in and of itself.

[samoth]

The main book has pages and pages of useless and/or redundant information so I don't think it's asking too much to have one sidebar for a simple rules clarification.  A major problem with Shadowrun is it is a very technical rules and numbers-based system, but is randomly written in a conversational tone that doesn't mesh well with the statistics.

[Reaver]

almost all rule books are peppered with color and fluff stories. It helps to draw the reader into the world. True, SR takes it a couple steps farther with it's "forum thread" styled books, and sometimes the editing could definitely be better, But I have seen plenty worse books.

As for side bars, yea they sure would be helpful for a wide range of topics, but then the question becomes:

what do you include?
What topics require their own sidebar?
what should be covered in that sidebar?


Hindsight is always 20/20, and we can grumble all we want. But you can bet these questions where asked and thought about all during the book. To me it looked like they assumed (maybe incorrectly) that most of their players could figure out the small stuff, if given an overview of how the large stuff works.

Who knows, maybe cyberarms will be revisited in the new cybertech book and they will answer these questions.

Until then, Good judgement and real life experience will have help form your rulings on matters they didn't micro-rule.... And Spirits help you if you lack both.

[samoth]

I don't appreciate that you're basically calling me stupid for not being able to decipher their rules as intended when there is no official word beyond

The attributes of partial limbs
(including cyberhands and –feet) may be enhanced, but
their attributes only apply for tests directly involving
those limbs (such as a Strength Test when gripping something
with an enhanced cyberhand).

for what a partial limb or hand controls.  It is entirely up to GM rule and could be wildly different from table to table, and you don't see that as a serious oversight?  Come on.

Full limbs as written mostly make sense, but partial and hands/feet absolutely do not and require house ruling no matter which side of the debate you fall on.  That's bad writing/design.

[WellsIDidIt]

All the rules work together. They aren't individual rules meant to be thrown in separate boxes and used on at a time.

For limbs, you use that stat when you make use of only the limb, you average if it uses more unless it's "careful coordination," in which case you use the weakest rating.

Partial Limbs add that they only apply for tests they are directly involved in.

That doesn't make the other rules disappear. If you're shooting with a cyber hand, it involves your arm and your partial limb. It's careful coordination. It directly involves your hand. You use the weakest.

If you're hula hooping, your cyberfoot doesn't matter. It isn't involved. Even though your legs are. So you don't get to average it into your agility.

The limb rules make perfect sense if you use all of them together and think each case through.

[samoth]

In your reasoning, if I had a cyber hand with 3 agility and a natural agility of 7, would you roll 5 die as the average?  That doesn't make much sense either.

If using careful coordination between a cyber hand or lower arm and the rest of the meat arm means you end up using the lower rated piece, why would you ever bother increasing a hand/lower arms stats above your normal stats?  That makes them worthless compared to a full arm replacement.

[WellsIDidIt]

In the case of something your character does that only uses the hand. For everyone else, the necessity is to raise the stats up to their other stats so they don't have to take the lower rating.

[samoth]

That brings us right back to my original point: what do you use only the hand for??!?!?

You've just submitted your own house rules to fix the issue.

[ZeConster]

I also find it a bit ridiculous that you think your reply being focused on amounts to a "slap fight", or that this is the kind of thing that deserves to be taken private.

Because clearly I'm using the words "slap fight" because you dared disagree with me, and not because you decided to use the words "knee jerk" and "no productive response" to describe a post that's simply to-the-point.