This is counter to the whole concept of transhumanism. 'Cyber eats your soul' is an issue in a game without souls. :) Personally, I don't care, but that's how I understand the setting to be intended.

I don't see Detachment as implausible if you handle it well. The brain is in fairly tight feedback with the body, so a brain emulation needs a pretty good body emulation (including virtual chemistry). Now if synthmorphs are bad at providing that, then detachment-like problems make complete sense. However, I would not make it an unavoidable problem inherent in synthmorphs. It is not "cybernetics eats your soul" but simply low quality. If you pay extra, you can get a body that feels nice - this also adds to the grittiness, since most PCs will no doubt not be able to afford the top-of-the-line bodies with full personalized virtual metabolome... Similarly lowering the WT or TT if there are too many enhancements of the body or brain can make sense. There are simply so much that can break in there. I would use my own interaction mechanics - the number of possible bugs and interactions increase with the square of the number of implants (10 implants means 45 possible interactions; with 1% risk per combination you get about 40% chance of at least one troubling interaction). Sure, you can avoid it if you pay extra or use a high quality clinic - that you cannot afford. Grittiness and transhumanism can work fine together - just because your mind is software doesn't mean it is free of bugs or crashes. Your body is a shell, but bears the scars of past changes. You might be unageing, but you suffer from planned obsolescence.

I don't really see how you'd 'lose yourself' from bioimplants. Half of them aren't even cybernetic. Is this 'detachment' distinct from the Alienation and Continuity mechanic?

The Integration mechanic could be applied to this problem, if you like. There'd be hard & soft approaches. Soft: Lots of augmentations impose a penalty on the Integration test when resleeving, but after any penalty period due to a bad Integration test elapses, the ego acclimates and may function normally. Hard: Regular integration tests and cascading failures. You could do either or both of these. Requiring the PC to make new Integration tests at regular intervals -- even long after resleeving -- would be the more brutal of the two. If they fail, the penalty would be like failing a Integration test at time of resleeving (which can sometimes be brutal). I'd suggest short intervals -- weekly or even every other day -- because what you're modeling is the strain associated with mastering a foreign or overly complex body's capabilities. Characters with great SOM stats will sail through this -- which is exactly what the SOM stat is for. Cascading failures would mean requiring a character who failed an Integration test to keep testing until they throw a success, suffering the penalties of failed Integration in the meantime. For most of the stock morphs, though, I don't recommend penalizing them for augmentations at all. I'd save the sort of treatment described above for characters who truly go apeshit with their augmentations (as some are bound to do). You want to keep game balance, right? ...not punish people for being crazy posthumans. :) It occurred to me that you could use Alienation tests similarly & have the effects be more psychological. I wouldn't do this in my campaign, because it's just a little too much like the good ol' cyberpsychosis rules of R. Tal's Cyberpunk or SR's essence stat. Your mileage might vary.

That is a way you can go, but I really think it's akin to dialing back the year. In 2010, guns are cheap, accurate, reliable; in 1865, not so much. In EP, those implants let the skin do its normal job, because they were painstakingly designed to do so; in EP-minus-30, maybe not. And that changes many other things at the same time.

Crossposting from the copy of this thread in the Homebrew section (we should really pick one and stick with it!): I've been playing around with a similar concept for our campaign, since I'd like to try and keep my players a little more grounded - at least for now - without discouraging them from being creative with modifications; I'm very much on the Call of Cthulhu end of EP than the players-are-walking-tanks action end of EP. We've yet to start but just going over the list with my players has me angsting about how, or even if, I should deal with souped-up morphs. One idea I've been thinking about, based on Arenamontanus's article on the subject, is essentially similar to the bad luck trait; every time the amount of extra implants (above the amount that morph gets by default) exceeds the morph's Wound Threshold, the GM gets a moxie point every session to use only with fritzing that player's enhancements in a creative way; their enhanced vision gets interference from their eelware, or their cyberware limb has problems interfacing with the character when they're using their Multi-Tasking implant. This has the nice added effect of only cropping up when players are actually using their implants in an active way, too.

Xagroth wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

And I really don't like the everyone-has-all-the-cheap-implants thing. Much more fun if only one of the team has that crucial implant.

But precisely they are cheap because they are easy to make, install and use, not because they are gamebreaking implants. It's like not liking a D&D game because the mage is full of utiility spells (safe rest, alarms for the night, traps, open locks, locate hidden doors, turn the floor into mud, turn a wall into mud and then after making the hole, turning it again into stone, freezing a water elemental, making a tree grow, breaking the ceiling and providing a escape, giving the thief an improved invisibility spell...) instead of limiting himself to fireball-throwing.

You completely missed the point. Having the right utility spell for a situation is fun. But when the fighter, thief and cleric also has the spell, it just becomes boring. Do you really think it is that interesting when everyone has enhanced hearing, enhanced smell, eidetic memory, chameleon skin, eelware, emotional dampers, enhanced pheromones, enhanced respiration, temperature tolerance, t-ray emitter, oxygen reserve, and medichines?

Well, if all the playes have the same implant "menu", then I don't have to worry about the playes spreading and who can see what, find what, or fall in which trap. Also, my current player group is formed by a 19 years old scumborn con artist in a baseline morph with less than 2000 creds in equipment &implants, an AGI in a masked steel morph (he still has to spend the money), and a soldier-nerd girl with 28.000 creds in implants & gear (of which about 20.000 went to the reflex booster & neurachem 1...) in an olympian morph. And none asked for improved senses, only Oracles for the girl.

It kinda sounds like you have a problem with a transhuman future. After all, 'if everyone is super…'. :) I mean, yes, a transhuman future completely destroys a lot of our classic narratives. Disease and death are not an issue. Seeing in the dark is not an issue. Etc. You have to have *new* conflicts.

:) I said there were new conflicts. Some are analogous to the old ones. But I think you see the point? The objection was that casting 'Light' is lame if all the classes can do it; I disagree, especially in the transhuman future.

Yerameyahu wrote:

:) I said there were new conflicts. Some are analogous to the old ones. But I think you see the point? The objection was that casting 'Light' is lame if all the classes can do it; I disagree, especially in the transhuman future.

Totally agree. I was providing that as an example to the original poster of how 'all that gear' doesn't really make players superhuman, as it is accompanied by expectations of how things will work. I have mulled once or twice over the idea of a trait only available to pre-Fall characters, the idea that they're used to acting and using initiative WITHOUT massive AR information. I'm just not entirely sure how to simulate it. A few ideas but none seem good...

Smokeskin wrote:

I feel there are important options for "PC distinction" and interesting stories in the low/moderate cost implants that are lost with the vanilla ruleset.

Some of my favorite characters have very few modifications and are distinguished by their weaknesses (Consider Clint from the EP MUSH log in the Homebrew section: he has typical 'I live on Mars' implants for respiration, et al., wrist mounted tools, medichines, muscle augmentation and electrical sense...He also has 'Planned Obsolescence' and 'Unfit' on his morph. Premature aging, thank you very much, oh mighty uplifters...And he wears bifocals because his vision is going and he's terrified of further surgery/meddling with his already somewhat screwed up bod.).

Yerameyahu wrote:

And for my part, I fully understand the feeling you get when you realize that you should *always* get every last implant that costs less than Expensive (they're so cost-effective!). That feels wrong, from a gamer POV.

I'm not entirely sure I agree. At first, yes, the kid-in-a-candy-store impulse sets in, but my (admittedly limited) experience with EP games has resulted in very few situations where more than a couple of those implants came into use even once. Perhaps it's the type of campaign I'm attracted to (much more socializing/investigation/mystery/horror than shooty), but it's hard to call things cost-effective if they don't ever get used. What you've really got is a whole lot of 'That might be useful, someday!' stuff, and it's hard to weigh the cost-effectiveness of a handful of 'potentially useful' mods against putting the same number of points into a skill and turning 'borderline failure' rolls into high MoS successes. It might just be me, but I think that after a few games, and after losing a few morphs (sometimes at the beginning of games, "Hi! You're all resleeving on Titan now!") most players will becomes less focused on 'gear' and more on 'skills'. Of course, in the meantime you've got massive gearheadedness.

LostProxy wrote:

...and your GM is not the kind of jerk who will kill all the players for the sake of story.

Uhmmmm. If they're doing it [i]for the sake of the story[/i] and it's a fun story, how does that make them a jerk? If they're doing it to be cruel and petty or as some sort of bizarre power trip, sure, that's being a jerk. But if they're doing it as part of a story involving resleeving (perhaps trying to solve the mystery of your own prior murder or some other such thing that clearly requires your character to have died) how is that being a jerk?

Re-Laborat wrote:

LostProxy wrote:

...and your GM is not the kind of jerk who will kill all the players for the sake of story.

Uhmmmm. If they're doing it [i]for the sake of the story[/i] and it's a fun story, how does that make them a jerk? If they're doing it to be cruel and petty or as some sort of bizarre power trip, sure, that's being a jerk. But if they're doing it as part of a story involving resleeving (perhaps trying to solve the mystery of your own prior murder or some other such thing that clearly requires your character to have died) how is that being a jerk?

I was talking about games where it is smart to invest in your body because you will not be leaving it a lot. The downside was what you stated. If you invest a lot in something and then your GM takes away for the sake of story yes that is being a jerk. Because if investing a lot in that body was part of what made you effective it is possible your character was heavily gimped and you are in for a session of constant failure. I do not know about you or your players but for myself and the ones I play with constantly failing at your role in the group and forcing the other players to make up for your uselessness is not fun.

There are rules for that, yes. Depending on the implants, your destination might well have them, though. And… they're hella useful. And how often do you egocast, exactly? :) More often if you're a star-hopping secret agent of Firewall, sure.