[OOC] Character Creation

While denizens of the Sixth World are accustomed to seeing a variety of augmentations and alterations to the metahuman form, the "uncanny valley" still exists. The uncanny valley is the disconcerting effect that happens when people see something that is almost, but not quite, metahuman. An animated cartoon with exaggerated features looks fine to metahuman eyes, but a computer program that closely, but not exactly, replicates human appearance is a troubling and unpleasant sight to most viewers. This is what happens when people see others with augmentations—on some level, people notice there is something less (or more) human about that, and they respond to it negatively. The change may not be exactly visible, but it is in some way noticeable—in one way or another, a person has become less human, and on some level other people notice this. This is why a character’s Essence is included in the calculation of their Social limit.

Crunch-wise, however, it has very little impact:
* A character with Charisma 3, Willpower 3 and Essence 6.0 has a Social Limit of 5
* A character with Charisma 3, Willpower 3 and Essence 0.1 has a Social Limit of 4

Now while the Crunch seems minor the in-game aesthetics are not. Still the GM (and players) need to figure out what Essence is in their games (even if a just a loose idea) and then, if the GM really wants to put together a psychosis chart do it based on that or completely divorce Essence from the psychosis chart except as a rough guide. Now while most people just ignore Essence because of the ill defined nature of it and go no further than the logical consequences of its definition in regards to cyberware and bioware enhancements, this really is not what it was meant for. Players should be encouraged to think about how differently their characters view the world from a normal person and act upon that, but except in extreme cases this is not required. Again it helps if the GM outlines the social ramifications for Essence as well as outline ideas for players to reflect how losing Essence ought to affect their characters. In early editions, your character could become a cyber-zombie but this is no longer the case even though it is still sort of implied that the more Essence you lose the less "socially human" you become -- so many reflect this in dialing down the characters emotions and taking Negative Qualities to reflect this. One should though, keep in mind that a loss of 3 Essence is a 50% reduction in ones humanity.

Magic Healing : Low-Essence characters are more difficult to affect with some health spells. It is hard to put the body back into its natural state when that state has been unnaturally altered. In game terms, this means you take a dice pool modifier equal to the Essence Reduction (rounded up). So if the person has Bioware Cat's Eyes and their Essence is 5.9 they have a -1 Modifier to the Healing Dice Pool used on them.

Normal Healing: Low-Essence characters are more difficult to heal using normal means. Basically there is a -1 penalty for each 2 full points of lost Essence. So -1 penalty at 4 to 2.1 and a -2 penalty at 2 or less

Personally I preferred the earlier versions Shadowrun in that they treated this Essence Loss mechanically more in-tune with how they described it aesthetically but I guess it was not as much fun for those extremely wired folk

This means (modified page 95) that if an Adept that starts with a Magic Attribute 4 decides to buy and install some Bioware Cat's Eyes (Essence -0.1) during or after character creation, their Essence will go from 6 to 5.9 due to the Essence cost of the Bioware , and the Adept will also lose a full point of Magic, leaving them with a Magic attribute rating of 3. The character can then lose another 0.9 points of Essence, taking him down to 5.0, without any penalty to their Magic Attribute, but if they drop below a 5.0 Essence, their Magic Attribute is going to lose another point. Of course they can use Karma to raise their Magic Attribute back up after the loss but they can never raise it above their Essence (rounded down). This is why so few magic users or technomancers make use of either cyberware or bioware. Those who do can find their talents burned out if too many augmentations reduce their Magic or Resonance rating to 0. For more information, see Magic Loss (page 278) or Resonance Loss (page 249).