[Chalkarts]

I'm working on a Cyber mage of sorts, Heavily cybered (3-4 Essence worth) leaving a magic rating of 2.

The priorities I've set are

A: 450k
B; 20 Attributes
C: Human(5)
D: Magic(Aspected Mage)
E: 18 Skills

Thematically,

He wage a wage mage once.  Kept himself fit, knew his spells, was pretty good in combat.
He did what the bosses required, made and honest wage and kept his head down.
But then he discovered gambling.  He placed a small wager with his last buck on his way home from the bar one night and boom! 10k overnight.  Unfortunately fate and luck rarely get along.  He got the bug, bad.  He started betting on all manner of sporting events, mostly the MMA type events.  Bare knuckle combat was his sport of choice....to bet on, not to participate in.

He had his ups and downs but then desperation and greed got the better of him and he tried to fix a fight.  He tried to bribe a fighter to throw the fight without doing his research.  He was attempting to manipulate them mind of a fighter to get him to lose but was caught and brought before the Yakuza.  He had attempted to magically cheat one of the Yakuzas prized fighters.  This did not sit well with the yakuza.

After finding out what he had done, he was black bagged and taken to a Yakuza safe house outside of the city.
There they hurt him. For treachery, dishonorable conduct, and attempted theft of a large sum the Yakuza decided that the fate of this man should be lingering and humbling.  A man so arrogant as to try to get one past the Yakuza needed to be brought down a notch.  So first they took his magic.  They knocked him out and proceeded to Remove his arms and eyes.  Before the procedure he was a strong man, but after he was just average.  They attached low end possibly second hand cyberware.  He had 20/20 vision but after the procedure he was at 20/15, his cybereyes needed glasses.  They then played around in his mind for a while.  They took his spells and removed most of his magical ability.  He remembers a time when he could throw fireballs but doesn't remember how he did it.
They then took his ravaged mind and gave it a mundane purpose.  They installed skillwires and a skilljack, basic models, off the shelf kind of work.  This allowed him to be plugged in with countless menial jobs as they rotated him around one of their Wharehouse/Chop Shop/Drug Cookery/Factories/Restaurants for 18 hour shifts for 5 years as repayment for the sum they might have lost.

He retains his knowledge of counterspelling since its more skill than magic.  He was always good at defensive magics.
And since earning his freedom he began working menial jobs for his own income.  Over the past few years pulling job after job He's decided to embrace his horror.  His arms and eyes have been upgraded several times and he has a small collection of skillsofts for a wide variety of situations.  He uses melee, his hand razors are his favorite weapon for bringing down targets.  But he still retains a decent pool of countering dice once you factor in Foci and mentor.  So he's a street sam with an uncanny knack for spell avoidance and the ability too perceive and fight astral targets..


Questions:
I know I'm putting a high priority in money, if I made money my B, I could probably afford everything but with little wiggle room, But I;d get to bump something else to A,.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Hehe, 18 skill points is going to hurt, especially with regards to spending 6 or 7 of them on Counterspelling.

I would honestly swap skills for metatype since you're going human anyway; you still get to be human, and you get 1 point of Special Attributes for a total of 1 Magic or 1 Edge, and you can always buy up Magic later. Might mean you have to give up some positive qualities to get to that Magic 2, but even with Magic 1 you can still counterspell.

I'd leave nuyen at A; you can get a ton of high-class ware for that kind of cash since you're going for 3-4 essence worth. Alpha grade or better for all of it, though that does clash with your character concept. Hmm, yeah, maybe go Attributes A and load up across the board, as standard grade arms are 1 Essence each or 1.25 if you get them used, so that's 2 to 2.5 right there. High-end counterspelling foci could eat up some cash, of course.

Fighting astral targets... That's a tough sell, because the rules are not in your favour, especially if you're going Aspected Magician. I can't remember if they can even astrally project.

Anyway, solid concept! Look forward to seeing how it turns out.

[Chalkarts]

Fighting astral targets... That's a tough sell, because the rules are not in your favour, especially if you're going Aspected Magician. I can't remember if they can even astrally project.

Anyway, solid concept! Look forward to seeing how it turns out.

They cant project but can observe.

[Bewilderbeast]

Fighting astral targets... That's a tough sell, because the rules are not in your favour, especially if you're going Aspected Magician. I can't remember if they can even astrally project.

They cannot. They can astrally perceive just fine, though. Still, astral combat is usually a poor life choices. Full mages or aspected casters will usually prefer to just blast the spirit in question with spells. Everyone else that perceive astrally (other aspected mages and adepts with the requisite power) have a tough time engaging spirits in melee because spirits aren't beholden to gravity while the would-be astral warrior very much is.

If considering astral combat, reach for some combat Grenades instead.

An important thing to clear up ahead of time is how buying up Magic with Karma works. Some think that tanking your Essence and Magic score, then buying it back up to 2 for 25 Karma is cheese. I'm personally inclined to agree. Alternately rulings your GM may consider:

1) When upgrading Magic, you have to consider how high your character's Karma costs would be if they had no Essence damage. A GM could rule, for example, that if you started with. Magic 2 and bought two Essence worth of 'ware, then the cost of raising your Magic back up to 1 would be 15 Karma, not 5. This GM is considering your Magic score to be 2, with a 2 point penalty for Essence loss. So you'd need to pay to raise your Magic to 3, not raise it back it up to 1 for 10 Karma.

2) A GM might rule that if your Magic hits 0, you're burnt out forever. No spending Karma to buy it back. I don't believe this is RAW, but with character creation ordered the way it is (remember, you spend Karma last! ) then your character would effectively be limited to a single Essence point of 'ware at character creation to avoid permanently "breaking" his magic.

Anyway, just be aware that there are multiple interpretations once you start that "buying Magic/Edge back up" game.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Aye, good call on Astral Combat; that was my point as well, that you're better off blasting astral entities with spell than trying to engage in close combat.

And spot on with regards to buying Magic back up; different GMs will have different views on this. I personally allow reducing magic to 0 during character creation as long as you do it in sequence, then buy it back up using the Character Advancement rules.

I.e. by the time you're spending nuyen it's already too late to spend special attributes, so it'll cost you Karma to buy back your Magic attribute. I do treat it like you would during character progression though, so current attribute to desired rating, in this case from 0 to 2 would cost you 5+10 for a total of 15 Karma. Just my personal take on it, of course, but I'm partial/biased towards burnout magicians trying to blend magic and tech.

[Bewilderbeast]

Herr Brackhaus, do you have a rules reference for the whole "buying an Attribute up from 0 to 1 costs 5 Karma" thing? It's not on the character advancement table in the core book, so I'm wondering where you're getting the figure of 5 in particular.

[Herr Brackhaus]

Bewilderbeast
Sure, no problem.

The cost to improve an attribute is new Rating x 5 Karma.

Logically, if your starting attribute is 0 because you had your magic reduced through essence loss, it'd cost 1x5 Karma to go from 0 to 1.

ETA:
I will concede that the next sentence states that the "calculations for these improvements have already been made in the Karma Advancement Table", but they forgot to include 0 to 1 as this is clearly possible as per the Magic rules.

If your Magic is reduced to zero, you can no longer use any skill requiring the Magic attribute, even if your maximum Rating is still greater than zero (but you can still raise the attribute with Karma and then get back to the spellslinging).

So, even though the table doesn't list 0 to 1 this is clearly a possibility, and the only rules reference we have is "new rating x 5 Karma".

[Reaver]

Bewilderbeast
Sure, no problem.

The cost to improve an attribute is new Rating x 5 Karma.

Logically, if your starting attribute is 0 because you had your magic reduced through essence loss, it'd cost 1x5 Karma to go from 0 to 1.

As long as essence supports the magic, then yes. If essence is too low, congrats you burn out.

Also note, some GMs don't follow that logic. Arguing instead that since your original magic was (X), you spend karma equal to that level. Thus if you started with magic 6, then reduced magic to 3 through loss (essence, burn out, foci addiction, so on), when you go to increase magic again you pay 35 karma it raise it back to 4, 40 karma for 5, and 45 karma to go back to 6....

[Herr Brackhaus]

Oh, absolutely, Reaver. I myself pointed that out in the post above that that was my interpretation and not one that's shared by everyone.

[Reaver]

Oh, absolutely, Reaver. I myself pointed that out in the post above that that was my interpretation and not one that's shared by everyone.

Must have missed that. My bad.

[Rift_0f_Bladz]

You may want to build him via Sum to Ten rules, which will allows for some more wiggle room for skills and stuff. I, personally, would avoid cyberarms. I would use either the use cyber or bio mussel augments to get the same effect for strength and agility, plus it saves on essence for other ware to be shoved in. Skill based ware is horrid, both for effect and essence cost (but makes sense character story wise). Also, have them shove in initiative based ware along with a persona chip and make him a cage fighter he used to bet on (this justifies the bone and mussel augments).

[Chalkarts]

Also, have them shove in initiative based ware along with a persona chip and make him a cage fighter he used to bet on (this justifies the bone and mussel augments).

I like this, idea.  I was tempted to make the cyber arms into just big gun arms.

[Rift_0f_Bladz]

Eh, again cyberlimbs suck monkey wang in this edition, clunky rules, doesn't effect limits (some ways to make this true), expensive essesncs wise. Just use bioware/cyberware mussel augments and bio/cyberweapons. Who cares if they are seamlessly integrated into the poor shumck, he tried to weasle out of his debt with the Yakuza! Make him bleed, be patch together with some bio/cyber chop shop hack, and then made to do it again!!!

[FST_Gemstar]

I like going full cyberlimb for a character like this... it lets you

1. Dump Agility/Strength... so attribute priority doesn't have to be super high
2. Perhaps take a Metatype that has high natural agility max (so that you can boost cyberlimbs very high) and high natural willpower (see below)
3a. Take the Cybersingularity Seeker Quality, for +2 Willpower
3b. Use increased Willpower to better take advantage of Drugs and Spell Resistance.


A Willpower 8-10 + 6 in Counterspelling is a tough cookie to hit. Going Skills E is going to be tough tough.

[Glyph]

Cybersingularity Seeker doesn't really fit someone who had forcibly implanted 'ware.  Plus, he would need four full limb replacements to get that +2 bonus.