[SDTroll]

Do you still die if you get to essence 0?  I know this is reaching back in editions, but I can't find anything that says you do in 6th Ed.  It says if any physical or mental attribute becomes a zero you collapse, but nothing about special attributes.
Do you still lose all magic if your magic becomes a 0?  If not, can you buy it up?  What about if it goes negative?

If the answer is no to both of those, adept burnouts become even more terrifying than they already are.

[Noble Drake]

I haven't searched every iteration of the phrasing or words involved, so I'm not sure this is all the relevant info in the book, but here's what I've found:

page 17 mentions "If you're one of the Awakened, then technology joined to your body disrupts the flow of mana. The more 'ware you have, the weaker your connection to magic"

page 38 says "not all characters have this attribute; it is only for magic-using characters..." but that doesn't exactly mean that having Magic 0 is the same as not having the Magic attribute.

page 228 covers critters that lose essence and how they die at 0 essence

page 224 covers that a character drained to 0 essence by an essence draining critter dies

and the only instances of "burn out" in the book are both on the (hilariously terrible) glitch suggestions table

That said, my experience with this game has lead me to believe that pretty much no player ever is going to play a magical character and deliberately reduce their magic rating to 0 - so the most likely cause of a character hitting 0 magic is by hitting 0 essence because of essence drain, and that still specifies death so there aren't any unanswered questions in practical scenarios.

[Xenon]

There are a lot of scenarios where you might end up with 0 magic but still have essence left...

For example with magic and resonance priority D you will only start with an unadjusted magic of 1. If you then get any augmentations on top of that then your current adjusted magic rating will end up being zero.


In previous edition it was explicit that you could no longer cast spells while your current adjusted magic rating was zero, but once your current adjusted magic rating was increased to 1 you could start casting spells again.

RAW this is excluded in this edition. With a strict reading this mean that you may still continue to cast spells even if your magic rating reach zero. Either the intention (RAI) is that it should work the same as it did in previous edition but the rule is simply missing and it will be added in the upcoming errata
...or the intention is that it was changed deliberately in which case it make sense to not mention it in the rules and RAW and RAI is one and the same and no changes are to be expected in the errata.
...or the intention is something completely different - perhaps that you become burned out if your current adjusted magic rating reach zero ;-)

It was also explicit that the only time you would be considered totally burned out and become mundane was if your maximum magic rating ever reached zero (which in practice could never really happen once you initiated at least once - which pretty much made this a useless rule and would be a prime candidate for being cut to save word count in the new edition).

[SDTroll]

I haven't searched every iteration of the phrasing or words involved, so I'm not sure this is all the relevant info in the book, but here's what I've found:

page 17 mentions "If you're one of the Awakened, then technology joined to your body disrupts the flow of mana. The more 'ware you have, the weaker your connection to magic"

page 38 says "not all characters have this attribute; it is only for magic-using characters..." but that doesn't exactly mean that having Magic 0 is the same as not having the Magic attribute.

page 228 covers critters that lose essence and how they die at 0 essence

page 224 covers that a character drained to 0 essence by an essence draining critter dies

and the only instances of "burn out" in the book are both on the (hilariously terrible) glitch suggestions table

That said, my experience with this game has lead me to believe that pretty much no player ever is going to play a magical character and deliberately reduce their magic rating to 0 - so the most likely cause of a character hitting 0 magic is by hitting 0 essence because of essence drain, and that still specifies death so there aren't any unanswered questions in practical scenarios.

I'm looking more at an adept.  Since they don't lose powers for losing magic, start with a 4 magic and 4 PP, then get 4 essence of cyberware.  Eventually raise magic back to one with karma, thus getting more PP, get more cyberware.  Continue until you are out of essence completely. Totally abusive, but legal, right?  Now if you don't die at zero essence it is even worse, because you can just keep doing it forever, theoretically. 

Or, more likely to be allowed by me, can a street sam go to zero essence or even negative to get better cyberware.

[Noble Drake]

There are a lot of scenarios where you might end up with 0 magic but still have essence left...

For example with magic and resonance priority D you will only start with an unadjusted magic of 1. If you then get any augmentations on top of that then your current adjusted magic rating will end up being zero.

I wasn't saying that there weren't scenarios that could result in Magic 0 with some essence left. I was saying that they aren't scenarios that ever come up in my experience - i.e. players don't choose to have a magic rating and then also choose to lower it to 0. It's rare that a player of a character with magic even elects to get any augmentations, and when they do choose to play an awakened character with some ware they choose to do it in a way that leaves them with a non-zero magic attribute.

Much like how, in my experience, players don't choose to have their character be a "face" and then take bad reputation, or have their character be a chromed-out street samurai and take Combat Paralysis - it can happen, and it might even be interesting role-play and story opportunities, but players tend not to deliberately counteract their own benefits.

[Noble Drake]

I'm looking more at an adept.  Since they don't lose powers for losing magic, start with a 4 magic and 4 PP, then get 4 essence of cyberware.  Eventually raise magic back to one with karma, thus getting more PP, get more cyberware.  Continue until you are out of essence completely. Totally abusive, but legal, right?  Now if you don't die at zero essence it is even worse, because you can just keep doing it forever, theoretically. 

Or, more likely to be allowed by me, can a street sam go to zero essence or even negative to get better cyberware.

That adept scenario is tricky to respond to because I'm not sure what a character built that way would even look like (I'll go play around with it to see how it shakes out in practice rather than theory), but it definitely puts a damper on it if you treat magic reduction because of essence loss as the last step in the "what's my magic attribute right now?" math - so instead of buying Magic back to 1 being 5 karma it would be 25 karma because you are technically raising your magic from 4 to 5 and then reducing it to 1 because of essence loss. Plus then you run into needing to pay the extra cost for initiation in order to get your 7th and further power points (and I think this is how things worked in prior editions as well... not positive because my memory of SR rules is basically 90% 3rd edition, and magic was handle very differently as an attribute back then).

As for street sam going wild with augmentations: the SR6 book says essence is the limit of how much augmentation you can have, so while I can't say it's RAW that you can't go to 0, I can say that you certainly can't go into negatives.

[Xenon]

I'm looking more at an adept.  Since they don't lose powers for losing magic, start with a 4 magic and 4 PP, then get 4 essence of cyberware.  Eventually raise magic back to one with karma, thus getting more PP, get more cyberware.

Not sure you want to dip all the way to zero magic, because without magic you are unable to bind your Qi foci and your weapon focus - but yes, an 'advantage' playing a physical adept in this edition seem to be that you will not be punished if you decide to have a mix of power points and augmentations.

But with the vast utility spells seem to offer and the extreme power spirits seem to have in this edition (and also the resources you need to prioritize in order to afford them augmentations you are talking about) I am not so sure.

Do you think it will be worth the trade off...?

I was saying that they aren't scenarios that ever come up in my experience - i.e. players don't choose to have a magic rating and then also choose to lower it to 0. It's rare that a player of a character with magic even elects to get any augmentations, and when they do choose to play an awakened character with some ware they choose to do it in a way that leaves them with a non-zero magic attribute.

Since physical adept powers are not really depending on magic and also because you don't seem to forget physical adept powers (just like you don't seem to forget spells or rituals) if your magic goes down it seem as if there is a good opportunity here for physical adepts to compensate the lack of spell casting and spirit summoning with some augmentations....

[SDTroll]

That adept scenario is tricky to respond to because I'm not sure what a character built that way would even look like (I'll go play around with it to see how it shakes out in practice rather than theory), but it definitely puts a damper on it if you treat magic reduction because of essence loss as the last step in the "what's my magic attribute right now?" math - so instead of buying Magic back to 1 being 5 karma it would be 25 karma because you are technically raising your magic from 4 to 5 and then reducing it to 1 because of essence loss. Plus then you run into needing to pay the extra cost for initiation in order to get your 7th and further power points (and I think this is how things worked in prior editions as well... not positive because my memory of SR rules is basically 90% 3rd edition, and magic was handle very differently as an attribute back then).


[/quote]
I was just considering, for abusive purposes, that you could build an adept with 6 essence of cyberware and 6 power points before ever initiating.  Scary.  All the previous editions I remember the adept lost points when he lost magic, so this wasn't possible.  This is the first edition that isn't true, as far as I can tell.

[Banshee]

That adept scenario is tricky to respond to because I'm not sure what a character built that way would even look like (I'll go play around with it to see how it shakes out in practice rather than theory), but it definitely puts a damper on it if you treat magic reduction because of essence loss as the last step in the "what's my magic attribute right now?" math - so instead of buying Magic back to 1 being 5 karma it would be 25 karma because you are technically raising your magic from 4 to 5 and then reducing it to 1 because of essence loss. Plus then you run into needing to pay the extra cost for initiation in order to get your 7th and further power points (and I think this is how things worked in prior editions as well... not positive because my memory of SR rules is basically 90% 3rd edition, and magic was handle very differently as an attribute back then).

I was just considering, for abusive purposes, that you could build an adept with 6 essence of cyberware and 6 power points before ever initiating.  Scary.  All the previous editions I remember the adept lost points when he lost magic, so this wasn't possible.  This is the first edition that isn't true, as far as I can tell.
[/quote]

It's already been targeted for errata so expect to change and be at least closer to previous editions if not exactly

[CigarSmoker]

The relation between Essence 0 and dying and Essense loss equal Magic/Resonance loss is mentioned in the description of the "Essence Drain" power on page 224 CRB SR6

So until Errata you can use this as hint it was just forgotten to mention elsewhere ...

[SDTroll]

The relation between Essence 0 and dying and Essense loss equal Magic/Resonance loss is mentioned in the description of the "Essence Drain" power on page 224 CRB SR6

So until Errata you can use this as hint it was just forgotten to mention elsewhere ...

You lose magic, but adepts don’t lose power points when they lose magic

[Banshee]

The relation between Essence 0 and dying and Essense loss equal Magic/Resonance loss is mentioned in the description of the "Essence Drain" power on page 224 CRB SR6

So until Errata you can use this as hint it was just forgotten to mention elsewhere ...

You lose magic, but adepts don’t lose power points when they lose magic

They will

[Noble Drake]

I was just considering, for abusive purposes, that you could build an adept with 6 essence of cyberware and 6 power points before ever initiating.  Scary.

When I went to start looking at what kind of "oomph" I could squeeze out of a character if it could have adept powers and also bunches of cyberware, I started to notice that I really wasn't even sure which traits I wanted to gain via powers and which via ware because of the overlap in what each can do and the hard limit on bonuses - and putting Priority A in Magic and B in Resources to facilitate the build left me feeling like I was going to be hurting for dice pools if I wasn't very careful in arranging the right boosters.

After comparing back and forth for a bit, I felt like there wasn't enough "juice" to the squeeze - there might be an extra +1 or +2 here or there to squeeze out of that build, but the task of actually reaching that didn't feel like it was going to be worth it.

[Michael Chandra]

I should note the explicit statement on death by Essence 0 also was missing in SR5. =/ But yeah, from my change blindness gathering topic, my point of view: "Essence: Starts at 6 implied by max Magic and essence reduction rules, death at 0 as implied by Essence Loss"

As for PP, I would bet on that getting errata'd.