New to Shadowrun

[Imperialus]

Regarding cyberware and mages:

As I recall, lowering Essence lowers your Magic (Or Resonance). Period. And it rounds down. So yes, cyberware on a mage is a hilariously bad idea. The second you install a single bit of cyber or even bioware on yourself, even if it's just .1 points of Essence lost...BAM. Your Magic/Resonance goes down a full point. You're right regarding the maximum though - hilariously enough, every lost point of essence also lowers your maximum Magic/Resonance. So yeah, you get smacked TWICE for it.

I'd agree that it's a sacrifice, but at the end of the day dropping your softmaxed magic from 5 to 4 due to essence loss costs you 10 BP's.

On the other hand 1 point of essence to play with will get you a pair of rating 3 cybereyes, and a set of rating 3 skillwires. That can ramp up your mages versatility considerably more than throwing one more die in a sorcery test can.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'd agree that it's a sacrifice, but at the end of the day dropping your softmaxed magic from 5 to 4 due to essence loss costs you 10 BP's.

On the other hand 1 point of essence to play with will get you a pair of rating 3 cybereyes, and a set of rating 3 skillwires. That can ramp up your mages versatility considerably more than throwing one more die in a sorcery test can.

Trauma Dampeners is what you need, IIRC. Maybe that's not longer true in 4E, it certainly was great in 3E.

 

[tylermalan]

I wonder how it went?

It went alright! Surprised me with the NECROOOOOO!

We played a few sessions of an intro adventure taken from... somewhere. I think the core book? Our team was big - 8 people I think. I played a stealthy guy.

It was fun and we definitely liked it, so much so that I think we all kept wanting to play it consistently, but the group broke up as it was a military group and lots of people (including myself) were moving away.

We had issues with the complexity. I, personally, tried reading the entire book before we started, and I got totally lost in the hacking and magic sections. I ended up skipping them. In-game, the hardest part was knowing (and remembering) which skill and which stat combined to give a dice pool to any given task, and, especially with hacking, we found that there were a LOT of specific tasks that each skill could cover. We just barely started to get into the swing of things after 4-ish sessions, but hacking was still hard.