Essence cost

[artemisent420]

It has been a long time since I have played SR. I am wondering when you replace an eye or an arm or anything like that does that cover the whole essence cost or does the essence cost still go up with each purchase? Also is there a rules book that comes with these purchases or do you have to buy the actual books as well. I own the core book.

[RavenX]

Essence costs sum together as you add augmentations to your character. Your essence is basically how much of your personal spirit and anatomy you possess. The more augmentations you possess the lower your essence goes, which is a direct factor into whether or not you can cast spells.

As for Augments, if you want to see those, check out Augmentation, that is the core rulebook for Augmentation and medicine in the game.

Arsenal covers all the weapons and armor and vehicles for the most part.
Street Magic is the magic sourcebook.
Runner's Companion covers metatype variants, new qualities, and extra methods of creating characters.
Unwired would be the hacking handbook.

These are the 5 main supplements you want for playing the game. My group uses all of the books, but is restricted to the ones released in Hero Lab for the time being as they are required to have their characters in Hero Lab. It makes my life for running the game easier to have them all use hero lab, and if someone forgets a sheet, I just print out a new one for them. They are required to send me their characters so that I can make use of the tactical console feature of Hero Lab.

[CeaDawg]

Originally Posted by artemisent420

It has been a long time since I have played SR. I am wondering when you replace an eye or an arm or anything like that does that cover the whole essence cost or does the essence cost still go up with each purchase?

It depends upon the grade of the augment that you replace the lost organ or limb with.

EXAMPLE 1: Virgin Meat Bod (VMB) has Essence 6. VMB loses an eye during combat. We'll just say it's the left one. If VMB does not replace the eye, then there is no essence loss under the rules in Shadowrun 4 Anniversary Edition. That's Option A. Option B is to replace it, and the undamaged right eye with a shiny new standard grade set of cyber eyes, with no mods. The essence cost for that is 0.2 essence, for a rating 1 set, while a set of rating 3 cyber eyes will cost VMB twice that much, or 0.4 essence. That seems a bit harsh so VMB opts to spring for the Alpha grade set of rating 3 cyber eyes from the Walmart Vision Center. Those only cost 0.32 essence instead of the 0.4 essence. So, the higher the grade of wares, the lower the cost. However, the higher the rating, the higher the cost. It becomes a juggling act to balance out what you can afford to lose in essence with how well the equipment will function.

EXAMPLE 2: VMB is not so virgin in the augmentation department anymore. They had that terrific set of rating 3 "Great Value" alpha grade cyber eyes. I say had, because they examined a plasma cutter up close and personal like, and fried them. The street doc removed the sparky pieces of junk, now VMB has an essence hole of 0.32 essence. VMB has a decision to make; stay blind and have some revitalization treatments done to fill that essence hole, which is a very expensive and time consuming process, or hit up the slot jobs at New You for some smokin' SOTA peepers. Hey, VMB's got scratch, why not pop for some Beta grade stuff? New Beta grade, rating 3, cyber eyes cost 0.28 essence....uh, hey doc we got a 0.04 essence hole left, if we do that. Let's put a rating 4 Beta grade in there in stead, their 0.35 essence cost will use up that 0.32 essence hole nicely and uhmm... another 0.03 essence as well.....

EXAMPLE (How many do you want?): There are many more examples that can be done, look at the ones in the rule books, work your way through some of the sample characters to see how they came up with those stats & stuff. I've been learning how to use Hero Lab doing just that, as well as plugging in as many old player characters as I can.

And as RavenX said, additional augmentations do stack up the total essence cost. Be sure to pay attention to the subtotal essence cost for the augmentation catagories (Cyberware and Bioware), there's a special rule in there for mixing and matching those types of wares.

Also is there a rules book that comes with these purchases or do you have to buy the actual books as well. I own the core book.

Mathias and company have done a very nice job of anotating just about everything in the Shadowrun data sets, but I strongly recommend getting some of the other books as well. My players have been generous with our gaming group and pitch in to buy hard copies of the rules in addition to the PDF files that I buy from either of the online stores that Catalyst recommends. By the way, which version of the Core Book do you have? HL/SR is based upon the Anniversary set of Shadowrun 4 rules. If you're using an earlier version of SR4, the page references will be off in a lot of cases. Arsenal and Augmentations are your two best to start off with, unless you want a technomancer (Otaku for us old folks), then you need to get Unwired as well. After that I'd recommend Street Magic and the Digital Grimoire (this one is PDF only), followed by Runner's Companion and 6th World Almanac. Those will have you pretty well fixed up for the majority of the missions and adventures available in print.