Shifting Essence prices.

[Bluesmun]

I sat down to pull up my Shadowrun character for the first time in a bit (my game hasn't been meeting), and they went from having a little bit of essence left to going below 0 after I installed all of the updates. I poked around here and found out that one of the bugs was that some augment mods apparently weren't adding their essence costs, and I guess it was the electroshock mod to the orthoskin that did it. Easy enough of a fix, to be honest.

Except I can't really fix it. It might just be my copy of Hero Lab, but when I go to remove an augmentation, be it cyberware or bioware, my essence cost stays the same and doesn't change unless I add another piece of essence-draining gear for more or less than the previous cost.

Lemme put forth an example. Say I had a character with 3 essence, then bought a .4 essence item. I'd be at 2.6. No problem. But, deciding I don't want that, I remove it. The augmentation is gone, but I'm still at 2.6. Then I buy a .1 essence item, and my essence instantly increases to 2.9 essence. Or I buy a .6 essence item and my score drops to 2.4.

So, am I stuck having to redo my character from scratch? I can do it, but considering that it was a completed, legal character under another version and bugfixes have rendered it illegal, it'd be rather time consuming.

[Mathias]

Re-open the configure hero form (ctrl-k), and in the list of sources, turn off the "Use Essence Holes" optional rule.

[Mathias]

Alternatively, make these changes in creation mode, and not advancement mode, if you do want to use the essence holes rule when you're actually removing augmentations as opposed to right now, when you're correcting a mistake. You can switch back-and-forth between the modes on the Advances tab.

[Bluesmun]

Oh, okay. Thanks, that solved my problem pretty quickly.

[Canis]

Originally Posted by Bluesmun

Lemme put forth an example. Say I had a character with 3 essence, then bought a .4 essence item. I'd be at 2.6. No problem. But, deciding I don't want that, I remove it. The augmentation is gone, but I'm still at 2.6. Then I buy a .1 essence item, and my essence instantly increases to 2.9 essence. Or I buy a .6 essence item and my score drops to 2.4.

I could have sworn that was reported as a bug and was fixed. But yeah, HL seems to forget about your essence hole when you add new gear sometimes. I've stopped using the 'optional rule' (since it's not actually optional in SR4A rules) cos it's glitched. Nice to know there's a workaround, I'll have to give that a try.