[All4BigGuns]

In fact, given 5th Edition's tagline of "Everything has a price", it's interesting to note that picking Resources E in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition represented a FAR worse off character in terms of money.

Actually, in SR3, the Priority E for Resources was only 1,000 less than SR5, but there wasn't any of this drek of having to broadcast a SIN in certain areas (wireless was pretty rare thing back then even IRL) so unless you were always going around trying to make nice with high society as a SINless slob, the fake ID wasn't as important. The Unarmed Troll Adept could just buy an Armored Jacket and call it good.

These days, however, you really need a Rating 4 Fake SIN to really do much outside the Barrens, so that's a 10,000 tax before the associated licenses (which for just one identically rated Fake License is 1,600) on just about every character. So Resources Priority E hurts a LOT more in SR5 than SR3.

I was more comparing the difference between maximum and minimum resources with that statement. I.e. a character in 1st through 3 with Priority A in resources had a cool mill to work with, while Resources E meant you had pocket change. My 3rd Edition book lists priority E for resources as 5,000¥, 2nd Edition is 500¥, and 1st Edition is 100¥. All three editions capped out at 1,000,000¥ for Priority A.

Comparatively, it'd be like a 5th Edition character with Resources E being given 45¥ (1st Edition) or 2250¥ (3rd Edition).

I was going by raw number comparison just because that's fair since it's the higher levels (that most characters that get implants are going to be using) that saw massive reductions).

Getting 5,000 still hurt less in SR3 than getting 6,000 does in SR5. In SR5, if you're Resources is at E, you're guaranteed to have to have less in the way of the starting karma for customizing other aspects just to get that necessary SIN and its Licenses, not to mention lifestyle since you'll need all or at least most of the base amount just to have the other stuff you need. Whereas in SR3, if you were a Mage, Shaman or Adept you really didn't need more than that 5,000.

[Glyph]

Personally, I don't think augmentations should be at all fair.  They should give a disproportionately cheap boost to the recipient's abilities, just like adept powers do.  One of the themes of the game is transhumanism, with the notion that augmentations and magic can turn an average person into a badass, and a badass into a superhuman.  Muscle augmentation/toner/replacement costs should not be determined by the "fair" cost to get a boost to an attribute.

So how should their costs be determined?  By comparing them to what an adept can do, by comparing them to the opportunity cost of other augmentations such as cyberlimbs, and by taking a broader look at what kind of overall loadout you can get with a given Priority of resources (A and B especially).  Overall, I think SR5 has been hit or miss in this regard.

I like the addition of used 'ware as an additional grade, the increased viability of reaction enhancers compared to wired reflexes or synaptic boosters, and the rules for cyberlimbs.

I don't like how all of the dice pool boosters are much more expensive, and I think that for an option with much higher Essence costs, cyberware is too expensive.  Wired reflexes: 2 costs 3 Essence and 149,000 Nuyen.  Synaptic booster: 2 costs 1 Essence and 190,000 Nuyen.  So for 41,000 Nuyen, you can save 2 points of Essence - that's huge!  Dermal plating versus orthoskin is closer to how it should be, in that the cyberware version is double the Essence, and half the cost.  Unfortunately, the costs are so low that the bioware version is still a no-brainer.  Getting orthoskin: 3 instead of dermal plating: 3 means spending 9,000 Nuyen more to save 0.75 Essence.

[Herr Brackhaus]

I like the addition of used 'ware as an additional grade, the increased viability of reaction enhancers compared to wired reflexes or synaptic boosters, and the rules for cyberlimbs.

Wait, really? Core book only, with Chrome Flesh, or with Chrome Flesh German Edition (aka Errata)? Because the rules for cyberlimbs are generally exceptionally poorly regarded on these boards, at least in my experience.

The German edition helped by allowing limbs to affect limits if all four limbs have been replaced, and qualities like Redliner and Cyber Singularity Seeker certainly made full limb replacements much more attractive. And there's no doubt that the single cyberarm decker is a great, if somewhat cheesy, way to gain some decent combat ability for a pistol wielding less-than-frontline combatant.

[Wakshaani]

Sorry I had to dash off earlier ... I wound up being late for work due to yammering away on here! D'oh!

Tomorrow, I'll go in and drop some more datapoints, but, some *very* good info bipping around in here already. Good work!

[Critias]

No matter what edition you're using or how many editions removed you are from when it was first built, you should still be able to exactly replicate a character's capabilities unless you choose to change them.

That's...a really weird "rule" to claim, and I think you'll find there are a great many more RPGs and edition changes where that is an untrue statement, than where that is a true one.

[Sterling]

I like the addition of used 'ware as an additional grade, the increased viability of reaction enhancers compared to wired reflexes or synaptic boosters, and the rules for cyberlimbs.

Wait, really? Core book only, with Chrome Flesh, or with Chrome Flesh German Edition (aka Errata)? Because the rules for cyberlimbs are generally exceptionally poorly regarded on these boards, at least in my experience.

The German edition helped by allowing limbs to affect limits if all four limbs have been replaced, and qualities like Redliner and Cyber Singularity Seeker certainly made full limb replacements much more attractive. And there's no doubt that the single cyberarm decker is a great, if somewhat cheesy, way to gain some decent combat ability for a pistol wielding less-than-frontline combatant.

I don't know about the other forum members but I am sick and tired of reading about how the German edition has done this, or corrected that.  This is the Catalyst Games board for Shadowrun, not the Pegasus board.

I have absolutely zero interest in the Pegasus German Language version of the rulebooks.

Perhaps a separate thread for the Pegasus books can be introduced? 

[Sterling]

Now, to address Wakshaani's actual thread:

I am against the idea of flat increases to stats where different races have such disparate starting points.  I would like to see money costs reflect the value the stat is being increased to, but for Essence costs to remain the same across the races.

As for balancing Bioware against Cyberware, I can appreciate the game balance approach of making them in some way equivalent, but I prefer to go with the idea of "everything has a cost".  You want to reduce Essence Loss then pay through the nose for Bioware.  I'd like an approach of Bioware costing 4 times the nuyen for half the Essence cost.

This is probably because I'm a grumpy old man who feels that Shadowrun is where man meets magic and machine, not chemistry.

[Wakshaani]

Right! So, some detailed bits.

The simplest mechanic for this particular bit of boosting would be to simply take teh Karma cost of raising an attribute from the primary chart, convert it to nuyen, and call it a day. Thus, raising a Strength from 1 to 2, which costs 10 Karma, would cost 20,000 Nuyen, while raising a 4 to a 5, normally 25 Karma, would cost 50,000 Nuyen.

This leaves out the secondary cost of Essence, of course, and leaves out the assorted minor penalties that come with cyber (social stuff, harder to sneak past sensors, and so on) ... so, you need some kind of cost break as a trade-off. But how much? How much is that loss of Essence worth, and furthermore, when you have something like Muscle Replacement that bumps *two* attributes at once, how do you determine the cost of that? SHould you split them into two separate bits of Cyber like you have for the Bioware versions? How does this hold up against legacy cyber?

So, a tricky question.

You also start to eyeball the concept of "What is teh cost of Essence loss?" ... in 1st edition, if you hit 0.0, you died. Beyond that, if you weren't magical, there was no difference between the Street Sam with 0.1 Essence, the Decker with 5.0, and the normal dude with 6.0 ... there were roleplaying hooks about emotional detatchment and cyber-psychosis, but mechanical apects for that didn't come around for a while. If you wanted to really crank it up, you could require every reduction in Essence to be offset with negative qualities ... mental, but also social or physical (Like immune system issues) , really showcase the inhuman aspects of cybernetics. Here we get to another bit of design theory ... woudl you keep the value flat, such as 10 Karma for each point of Essence lost, or would you use a sliding scale? You could reverse the main Karma chart, so that losing 1 Essence was worth 5 Karma, 2 was 15, 3 was 30, and so on, creating a very definitive side-effect for Essence loss.

If you went that route, you could ultimately make cybernetics *free*, since the cost was being paid in another way (required flaws!) ... but you also would have to look at the tradeoffs. If Muscle Replacement 2 was free in terms of cash, required you to take 15 points of flaws, but gave you let's say Agility form 4 to 6 (55 Karma) and Strength from 6 to 8 (75 Karma), then you'd be looking at a net gain of 105 Karma ... that's a no-brainer for most people.

So, we don't go there.

We also have to take into account Bioware... if we decide that, combined, Muslce Augmentation and Muscle Toner 1 should be 0.5 Essence, vs 1.0 for Muscle Replacement, but cost twice as much, then we have to look at things like Alpha quality ... if it doubles the price of cyber but does NOT give half off in Essence, then Bioware is flat-out better. If Bioware reaches levels of low-Essence cost that cyber can't (Even Delta grade doesn't get Muscle Replacement to the level of Aug + Tone) then Bio needs to cost more than a Delta-level of Replacement or, again, there's no real reason for the cyber. This is further complicated by the ultimate cap of "How much Karma would getting the same benefit cost?" ... if it's 40 Karma to buy +1 to each naturally, but 60 Karma (120,000 Nuyen) to buy it, and that comes with more negatives, then you've eliminated the need for the cyber entirely!

Lastly, there's an encouragement factor. (You'll see this later with Trolls) ... do you want Replacement to be priced at a level that eeryone will take Agility and STrength of 1, then boost it with bio/cyber due to how cheap it is, or do you want to encourage only those who already focus on those attributes to be investing in it while making it cheaper for low attributes to Karma it? (This is more of a lasso for powergaming, but it covers design as a whole... remember, one of the design goals is to make choice more difficult. Anything that's an obvious no-brainer is bad.)

So, let's say that you want to encourage focus. You further want to establish a 'break even' point, a place where cyber's shortcut starts to really look appealing. Since we're dealing with a core book, we also decide on simplicity... instead of using the Karma chart, we'll just use the traditional (Rating * Nuyen) rate for the cost, instead of an ever-increasing cost based on teh sliding scale.

Sitting down and testing some numbers, you can put that cutoff about anywhere, but for this discussion, we're going to use the move from 4 to 5, where you go from 'Well-trained human' to "Really dang impressive" ... this is where the "shortcut" of cyber belongs in the snapshot of this thread. Lower than that, you get better results the old fashioned way, while those who truly focus on, say, Strength, are already paying an execptional cost, so saving them a little more for concept is a nice lil' backpat. Since we know Bioware will be more expensive but cost more Nuyen, we use it for a base, then work the cost for Cyber for there.

So, moving from an attribute of 4 to 5 costs 25 Karma, or 50,000 Nuyen. Bioware is minimally invasive, and we decide on .25 Essence as a good starting point, and note that Bio is vastly more difficult to detect than cyber, so it doesn't need a big discount. We go with 10% off for now, making it cost 40K per Rating.

For Muscle Replacement, we know that we'llhave Alpha and Beta around, even if we don't know the cost multiplier yet. If it doubles the cost, and we set +1 Strength to 20K, we can see that it won't be low enough ... Cyber will have roughly twice the Essence cost, and if Alpha doubles the price but doesn't half teh Essence, it's no good. What if we quarter the price, to 10K? 10K is a mere 5 Karma, so you get a substantial boost at a discount, but the Essence cost is a bear. We see no need to change it from the traditional 0.5 level, which means Musle Replacement (1) will set you back 20,000 Nuyen and 1.0 Essence, vs the 80,000 Nuyen and 0.5 Essence of Bioware. This gives you some wiggle room for what you expect Alpha to be (double the cost, 80% of teh Essence) and Beta (Four times the cost, 70% of teh Essence) with the latter starting to give way to Bioware.

In the real world, Grade costs came way down. Teh final cost of Muscle Replacement and Augmentation/Toner isn't what I'm showing above, so, clearly there were more factors.

But, you start to see teh mechanical design and you get a starting point to go further with. You can make Bioware more appealing by lowering the Essence cost some, from 0.25 to 0.2, for instance. You can give CYberare a bit more of a price reduction, since it comes 'bundled' in a +1 AND +1 format, rather than just letting you buy "the good bonus" of Agility without Strength. You can fiddle with Aug/Toner prices to make it easier to get the less-valuable resource (Strength) and more expensive to get the 'good' one (Agility) ... Maybe you go with 40,000 for Toner, but only 30,000 for Augmentation. Maybe you make Strength more valuable as an attribute, to keep some better game balance, or make Agility somewhat worse for the same effect.

If you adjust the cut-off point up, from 4-5 to 5-6, you make Cyber more rare. If you move it down from 4-5 to 3-4, you make it more common. You can lower the cyber price more to make it even more appealing, or make the cost break for bio smaller to make it a harder choice... lots of fine-tuning can follow, once you settle on a basic philosophy and a core price point.

If we start with the idea that +1 Attribute is worth 25 Karma/50,000 Nuyen all by itself, just how much of a price break do you want to get for Bioware or CYberware? That's where the factors get interesting. That's also where you'll start to see a lot of arguements.

So, now it goes back to y'all ... how big of a reduction starts to feel fair, with this in mind? Would you have explored an alterante method (For example, the negative quality kickback based on Essence lost formula) instead, or would that be too big of a change and a simple Essence mechanic retained be superior? What sort of cost and benefit would you want to associate with STandard, Used, Alpha, Beta, and Deltaware? Would you need the 'Cap at Alpha' requirement, or would cost, and availability, modifiers be enough to keep things balanced?

It's a complicated dance, and we're still ultimately focused on just three Augmentations ... there are just all those echos to watch out for that are bouncing around from each decision.

[Malevolence]

Ooh! They've opened the door to community input for SR6!


I kid, I kid.


But my main input here is that the stat bonuses from augmentation are Augment (with a capital A) bonuses and thus are limited to the +4 augmented max, and so on, so they are fundamentally less valuable than a base stat boost. Since most (all?) other means of Augment bonuses are straight value x rating, there is no reason to consider making these any different. Cyberlimbs are an entirely different animal, but are not the topic here, so I'm fine with ignoring them for now.


Point being, basing them strongly on a karma cost tied to the normal progression is likely to lead to unnecessary mental gymnastics. Quite frankly, the best option for stating these out is to look at the other methods of obtaining Augment bonuses - the most similar being Adept powers. Of course, since we're discussing creating a value curve from scratch, we can't assume that the Adept costs had been implemented yet, so they might have been unavailable to use as a basis, and even if they were, they would have had to have been considered previously, so at some point the costs of an Augmented stat boost had to be decided.


Now, having a 1 karma = 2000¥ exchange rate is handy for creating an equivalency between things like Adept powers and Tech based augments. It allows a universal cost basis by which to measure these things, and karma makes a great basis as it is the tool for advancement. So, we can ignore nuyen cost and focus on a karma cost, then break that karma cost out into other things like nuyen and Essence and Power Points and so on. So, we have to start with a karma cost for Essence. Essence is similar to any other attribute except that instead of starting at "1" (I also agree with others that racial attributes should be a permanent bonus applied on top of the base 1-6 progression, so that the cost to raise an attribute X points from the racial minimum is always the same) and going to 6, it starts at 6 and goes to 0. Additionally, once lost, you can't just buy it back with karma like you can an attribute. So it's more precious, but it also has no other purpose than to act as a limiter on techno augments (or getting drained by the Essence Drain power). There's a hit to Social Limit, but there are so many ways to raise that limit with gear and drugs and so on, that it is hardly a limit. And really, that limit is rarely useful to anyone but Faces and Charisma based traditions (where it becomes your astral limit) that even if limited it is likely to have little effect. Making loss of Essence incur NQs is an interesting idea, but really tech struggles so much to be competitive with magic as it is that this would be debilitatingly unbalanced.


Quite frankly, I would have made Essence a stat just like the others except that starts (and caps) at 6, and can be bought up with karma when it falls below that. This means that there is effectively no upper bound to the amount of cyber you can get, but you have no such limit with magical boosts, so I don't see the problem. Mages could exploit it, sure, but they can anyway. They'd still lose magic from Essence loss just like currently, so taking a point of cyber/bio would require them to buy back the 6th point of Ess AND the lost 6th point of Mag. Magicians would want their Ess maxed, so they would always be paying for the most expensive point of Essence to keep it topped off, where as a Sam could drop to 1 and just keep buying the 2nd point of Essence for 10 karma whenever he gets new cyber added. Not sure how this would work with fractional values of Essence, so this is very much a half baked idea.


But, I've strayed off topic.


So, getting back to the karma cost of a stat boost, lets look at what the devs decided on. We have four different options, largely, from cheapest to most expensive:
Gear: Drugs usually provide boosts to multiple stats for under 2k¥ (1 karma) per dose, but the tradeoff is that it is very temporary
Quickening: 1.5 karma per point (5 for the spell, 1 for the quickening which can provide all 4 allowed points of bonus; not allowed at chargen so only provided for reference)
Mystic Adept: 5 karma per point (at chargen - much more after, but we're going to focus on chargen for now)
Augmentation: 10s of karma per point. Usually 12.5k¥+ as well as a hit to Essence which we don't have a karma cost for, but I'd rate it in the ballpark of other attributes, so at least 5 karma per point, but most often much more


Let's eliminate drugs/spells and Quickening since they are either temporary or not available at chargen. That leaves the costs chosen by the designers at anywhere from 5 to 21 or so karma (20% to 50% of the 30 karma for the drop from Ess 6 to Ess 5 and the 6+ karma equivalence of the 12.5k¥+ the cyber costs). There are some more esoteric ways of getting these bonuses, including becoming Infected, but these are not available in the Core book, so again, we'll ignore them.


Cyber has a number of downsides in addition to Essence loss - it is hackable and easily detectible, which might cause problems. Bioware is probably has the least downsides, since Adept powers are also easy to spot with Assensing. Adept powers have no hit to essence like bio and cyber, so Bio and Adept powers are probably reasonably balanced in tradeoffs, depending on how the world in general feels about magical or technological augmentation. If most places don't care, then the Essence hit to Bio is a negative that Adept powers don't have, and I think that most places are fine with boosted attributes so long as you have the appropriate license. So Cyber and bio have their karma cost split between Essence loss and nuyen cost, where Adpet powers are a straight karma cost. Downside wise, only cyber has any significant downside besides cost. As it stands, because Essence is limited and cyber/bioware has no upgrade path (you have to rip them out for a fraction of their value and then pay full boat including dealing with Availability for the replacement where adept powers including focuses can be upgraded for the cost difference), Adept powers should be more expensive karma wise since the cost of ware should be reduced to account for the negatives.


Now, being fond of round numbers, I'm rather happy with a cost of 10 karma flat per bonus attribute point, so if I were there at that meeting, that's what I would have tossed out. That's just a starting number - we could do some playtesting and adjust it up or down as needed, but it is a pretty good starting point. Considering the above, your Adept powers would be the karmic baseline at 10 or so, and the ware would cost some smaller amount to account for the lesser desirability. Further, the karma cost of cyber would be reduced from the karma cost of bio for the same reason. So, lets say after playtesting we decide that 12 karma is good for attribute boosts via Adept powers, we could set the cost of one attribute point for bioware at 11 points and cyber at 10.


Now, how to split the cost between nuyen and Essence for Bio and Cyber? The general consensus seems fine - roughly half the Essence cost for bioware over equivalent grade cyber. Then the remainder goes into nuyen cost. Since each has a different karma cost, it takes a little more math to determine cost, but if we start with 50/50 for the cyber, we have 5 karma lost to Essence based on the most expensive step - 6 to 5, or 5/30 of a point of Ess. That's 1/6, or .16666. We'll adjust to make a more even value, so we'll bump it up to .2 Ess, or 1/5 of a point of Ess (cyber is supposed to be more Ess costly, so we round up). That means that the Ess cost is now 6, meaning that the nuyen cost would be ¥2000x4=¥8,000.


Shooting for half the Ess cost for bioware means that we are splitting the karma up 25/75. 25% of 11 karma is 2.75, which we'll round to nearest, for 3 karma. That's 1/10 of a point of Essence, so .1 Ess cost, and the remaining 8 karma goes into nuyen cost, for ¥16,000.


So, we end up with:
Muscle Replacement: .4 Ess and ¥16,000 for Standard grade
Muscle Toner/Augmentation: .1 Ess and ¥16,000 for Standard grade


I'd set the value of each attribute roughly equivalent for this since even though some are obviously more valuable, they each can be valuable for the right character. Call it economics - everybody wants Agility, so even though it gets the markup, the creation cost is lower due to volume, and vice versa - less demand for Strength means that the per unit cost is higher, but the margin is lower. For flavor, the designers can adjust the nuyen cost up or down by up to 1000¥, so Muscle Toner could cost 17k¥ whole Muscle Aug is 15k¥ without really significantly changing the dynamics (it's half a karma).


For the differences between grades, I'd say that if we keep the limitation of only allowing up to Alpha grade at chargen, then the crossover where cyber and bioware meet should happen at Beta or Delta, and I personally prefer Delta, which oddly enough is where the devs seem to have set the point where Ess cost is halved, tying cyber and bio in my scenario.


ETA: I started at 10 karma, but I could easily see playtesting deciding that the values should be closer to 15, 16, and 17 for cyber, bio, adept respectively. That gives us:
Muscle Replacement: .5 Ess and ¥30,000 for Standard gradeMuscle Toner/Augmentation: .15 Ess and ¥23,000 for Standard grade


There is also the option of making the split 75/25 for Cyber and 25/75 for Bio, which would put things closer Essence wise to what the Muscle Replacement costs in the book.

[SmilinIrish]

A simple way to boost Mundane (normally cybered) characters is to change some aspect of Magic Priority E.  Give Magic Priority E characters bonus starting cash.  I don't see a need to give a fluff reason for it, its just for game balance.  Give them a bonus equal to Money priority C.  This provides a way to boost cybered characters, and there is no way for Awakened characters to abuse it. 

[celondon]

Using the parameters laid out, I don't see a way to make Muscle Replacement balanced vs. Toner/Augmentation. As Wakshaani points out, there are a lot of variables that go into it that aren't listed in the parameters that are necessary to balance them out. The best approximation I can make is setting the Cost Multiple for Cyberware to 0.15, the Essence multiple for same to 2.0, while using Cost 2.0 and Essence 0.5 for Bioware. If we then use 50,000 nuyen per rank and 0.4 Essence per rank as a basis (the nuyen is calculated  by taking the average of the sum of 2000*Karma cost to raise the attribute) it gets use the following results:

Toner & Augmentation are both 100000 nuyen and 0.2 essence per rank
Muscle Replacement is 30000 nuyen and .08 essence per rank

And, while that is a reasonable mathematical outcome, the resources available a starting character means that they are too expensive in terms of nuyen, though pretty close in terms of essence. Since they are straight up stat enhancements, they are already deeply discounted, since it is unlikely a character using them only had a 1 strength to begin with, so reducing costs further really eats into the 2000 nuyen = 1 Karma paradigm, nearly game breakingly so.

Of course, that's not a new observation -- the immense popularity of Agility enhancement attests to the fact that if you are a physical based character at all, these augmentations are the single best optimization you can make for your character. The return on investment is huge, compared to other options.

[Grizzly]

Interesting challenge - thank you!

While Wakshaani gave us a few fixed points to work with in his original posts, I think there are a few more that bear examination:

Attributes appear to be linear in scale: an increase in Strength only increases carrying capacity by 10kg per point, regardless of what your strength was before the increase. An increase in Agility increases your walking rate by an additional 2m.

There are going to be limitations: we know that there will be a limit system (even if we don't know the full details), and that there will probably be a hard cap on attribute increases.

Extra dice are awesome - up to a point: adding a single die to a pool can significantly reduce the chances of rolling a glitch or critical glitch.  That said, once dice pools get above a certain size, the 'safety' effect of adding an extra die is so small that if that's all you're adding it for it's not really worth it.  Also, Limits can cap you even if you have moar dice! to roll, so again past a point adding an extra die is not worth it unless you can also raise your Limit.

That said...

Essence is an important resource and tool - as it helps to manage the power creep available within a game (at least for the mundanes). You only have 6 points and you always need a value greater than 0.  As a designer, I want to determine how many attributes a character is able to have at the max augmentation at character creation - as I and other designers will need to keep this in mind for creating runs and opponents.  We have a legacy piece of cyberware that increases two attributes, so with a mind to having 3 attributes at max augmentation for a starting character (and bearing in mind that higher grades exist to reduce essence cost even if we don't know what the adjustment rates are yet, and that we haven't determined availability yet) then I would place the basic Muscle Replacement essence value right where it is a 1 point per ranking.

The next decision from my point of view is actually to examine where the tech curve is...how does cyberware compare against bioware in terms of capability, cost and availability. Muscle Replacement was available back in 1st Ed (2050's and probably earlier). After an additional 25 years of R&D the Deltware version is probably maxed out in terms of product development on the core properties of increasing Strength and Agility. This should tend to push the essence cost down significantly, which is what the Core Book gives with a 50% essence cost reduction for a 2.5 price increase.  Now if we say that basic bioware is still "cheaper, though more expensive" then Muscle Toner and Augmentation are at about the right spot at 0.2 per point and costing 32k and 31k respectively per rank.

Nuyen-wise, I don't have all the older books to examine and compare starting resources, etc...plus, we're not just looking at character creation but a whole game of possible upgrades (and my math-Fu is weak right now due to a migraine and hacking chest infection). Overall, I'm not unhappy with the base prices listed in the Core Book...except that I have no reason to ever take Muscle Replacement past Alphaware at Rating 2, which costs 1.6 essence. If I need more Strength and Agility, it would be far better to find Standard Muscle Toner and Augmentation at Rating 4 than increase my cyberware rating, even if I had access to Delta-tech.

Delta-tech MR at rating 4: 250,000 Nuyen and 2 Essence
Standard MT and MA both at rating 4: 252,000 and 1.6 Essence

In addition to the essence savings, there is a hidden cost to the Delta MR - it's availability 28, compared to the MT and MA availability 20. Therefore the Deltaware will need extra time and money to find, completely negating the trivial 2000 Nuyen savings, and still have a higher essence cost.  Why would I bother? Why would anyone bother? Even within the game world, why would a Mega continue to fund a super-high-tech lab to create and install Deltaware MR, when they can support a much cheaper lab to produce standard MT and MA for the same material benefit and still have more room for Cortex Bombs??

This leads me to a conundrum - should MR be a lot cheaper so that it is worth the extra effort of finding it at the higher grades, even though that will increase its use in starting characters (which may not be such a good thing).  Should MT and MA have a higher availability rating? It would have to be rating 7 to be an equivalent to Deltaware MR which would mean a starting character can only get one rank of it unless it's used. Or is there another option?

One thing about companies and the products they make, they do tend to follow a pattern. Back when MR was a new thing I'm sure the Mega's were scrambling to find new ways to make it better, faster, strong (and more profitable)...but now the tech is mature and no matter the rank you want there are a dozen brands available to choose from.  The only way to justify higher prices and keep those shiny Deltaware clinics open is to add useful features to the core product that differentiate it from the main competitor (Bioware).

Why do we have a limit on the number of ranks for MR? Yes, yes, because we want to keep the math in check, but also because from a fluff reason the superior muscles are using a flesh and bone frame to exert its power on, meaning that there is only so much force that can be applied without breaking the body of the person using the gear.  But wait...we have another legacy piece of cyberware to consider after the pizza break: Bone Lacing.

Bone Lacing "improves the integrity and tensile strength" of your bones, which means not only that you can take a hit better than the other guy, but that your body can exert more force than normal if only it had the muscles to do it with...

My solution to keep the cost of MR where it is while still keeping it desirable (for some builds) at the Deltaware level? Allow two cybernetic systems to do what no bio-implant can, talk to each other and work together though a Wireless bonus:

If a character has both Bone Lacing and Muscle Replacement (at the same grade) and enable Wireless on both systems, then the two pieces of Cyberware work together for added benefits based on the type of Bone Lacing (the following is just a rough idea and will almost certainly need tweaking):
Plastic gives +1 Physical Limit and increases Carrying Capacity to Strength x11
Aluminium gives +1 Physical Limit and 1 bonus die to your dice pool when using either Strength or Agility (yes, including weapon skills and melee damage) and increases Carrying Capacity to Strength x13
Titanium gives +2 Physical Limit, +2 bonus dice and Carrying Capacity is Strength x15

Bone Lacing is also kind of pricey, Essence-wise, which would encourage seeking higher grades of both Bone Lacing (and then of course, Muscle Replacement) in order to keep the above benefits.

Anyways, that's my Nuyen.

[Glyph]

I think one big assumption being made is that the cheaper/more invasive 'ware and the upscale version have to be "balanced" with each other.  They need to be balanced in the sense that they should not be blatantly superior (or inferior) to every other option out there, but cyberware and bioware, I have always seen as more of an apples and oranges kind of thing.  So I don't have a problem with muscle replacement being cheaper than augmentation or toner, much less both of them; or used augmentation and toner having the same Essence cost as deltaware muscle replacement.

The way things stand now (or at least, the overall impression I get) - muscle replacement is what you give a Resources: C troll, muscle toner is what you give a Resources: C adept, and the augmented characters who have Resources A or B will almost always opt for augmentation/toner over replacement.

[Wakshaani]

Teh dice emchanic is an interesting ... as noted, tehre are some linear aspects (like lifting and movement), but a flat rate was decided against due to one big aspect:

More dice allow you to do things that are literally impossible with fewer. It's increasingly uncommon, true, but when you roll three dice, you simply *cannot* score four hits; with three dice, you can, if rarely(1 in 81, for those playing at home) and scoring three will be more common. So, that fourth die is more valuable than the third, the fifth more valuable than the forth, and so on.

This is why there's the ever-increasing cost.

On... Sunday?  Probably SUnday, I'll break out some TrollTalk.

[RiggerBob]

my main input here is that the stat bonuses from augmentation are Augment (with a capital A) bonuses and thus are limited to the +4 augmented max, and so on, so they are fundamentally less valuable than a base stat boost.

Wait...

If i raise an attribute from 1 to 1(2) through aufmentations instead of boosting the base stat with karma, i can still raise the base rating for it's lower karma cost later.
Raising an attribute of 6 (racial cap) to 6 (7) is not even possible without augmentation.

Claiming augmentation bonuses to be less valuable than base stat boosts because of an internal +4 cap when they can break the racial limit AND reduce the effective karma cost of raising the attribute further just feels completely wrong.