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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • There’s a couple places you should look for help:

    • Basic Set has the Cybernetics spot in the advantage Advantage section, but the best spot is Transformations on page 294, specifically Body Modification. In short, this covers how to cost these things and the general idea is: if it’s available readily it should cost money, while anything special or unique should cost points.
    • Ultratech has a whole section dedicated to Cybernetics in the Medical part. I personally find them acceptable but a little… vague.
    • Biotech has lots of rules for Gene editing and such, especially describing what options might be available by tech level. I’ve always found it useful as a check when designing biological Cybernetics.
    • Meta-Tech is a new book about pricing special equipment that’s built of points so that it can be purchased with cash. They have rules for Cybernetics there and I’ve personally found it extremely useful and one of the best options.
    • Consider the Extra Arm limitation Weapon Mount, which can be used as a concealabke weapon mount for an innate weapon. Also consider the Payload advantage. Players can just buy the weapon and slot it in here.
    • Lastly, I’ve done a lot of work on a Shadowrun port that includes some rules for Augmentation of all kinds. The old version is here: https://ingeanus.github.io/GURPS_Shadowrun_LaTEX/ but I’m working on a new version and if you want me to send you that, feel free to ask.

    To go further beyond just recommending sources: the answer is kind of hard. Gurps doesn’t make a great distinction between cash and points, least of all because you can buy the Wealth advantage that gives exponentially more cash for a linear cost of points.

    This is also confounded by equipment getting better by TL: a 5d pi Innate Attack is amazing in Rome, but it’s an Assault Rifle in contemporary America. Some people recommend the Accessory perk if such equipment is readily available at a given TL, but also there’s the Extra Arm and Payload advantages as mentioned. These are only useful if the equipment already exists, esp as a weapon though. Sandevistans are basically Altered Time Rate… and AFAIK there’s no equipment readily giving that, at least at TL9 (which I guess you are). You can totally just create it and price it with cash (Meta-Tech helps with that); if it’s too rare, unique, or powerful you might want to charge points for it though.

    There’s a lot more subtly to the ideas here, but hopefully it’s enough to at least help with any issues you had (sorry for the 17d necro, but I figure I could weight in at least for anyone reading this in the future, if not for any problems you’ve had since then).



  • From a mechanical perspective, no, since they’re differing systems. If you wanted it to apply I’d consider accounting for it in the cost of Non Iconographic and Dyslexia since they respectively shifted in their impact in the game though.

    Realistically I’d argue that there’s some fundamental difference between language and symbols because one could argue the same for the English alphabet or entire words, as they are just abstract symbols.

    One might say that the iconographic nature of languages like Chinese might mean you can’t tell what the Kanji/etc meant (i.e. that certain words were created to visually represent those concepts), which might give penalties for using it broken/understanding difficult or new words as you can no longer intuit meaning by the symbols themselves, but not really impact the abstract language portions.