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Endocrine control/Emotional Dampers mutually exclusive?

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Mephil Mephil's picture
Endocrine control/Emotional Dampers mutually exclusive?
Hey guys, I thought I would seek the aid of the community for this one. I've always considered Endocrine control and Emotional Dampers mutually exclusive to each other, bearing that in my mind, Endocrine is an amped up Emotional Damper. However, a player of mine picked both for his character, and I cannot actually find a rule stating that they ARE mutually exclusive. Thus potentially yielding him a +50 bonus to deception. I am not actually particularly against the idea of him having this bonus. What I am against is how it works logically, since it feels like the two bonuses are kind of similar in nature and thus shouldn't stack. (I have ruled for now that they do not stack) after all, being a good liar isn't just about not showing the emotional signs of whether or not you just told a lie, but coming up with a believable story as well. I checked through every sample character to date, and I have no found a single instance of a character sporting both. What are your thoughts on these?
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Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
It makes total sense that
It makes total sense that they are mutually exclusive. I would not say they cannot be put into the same body, but rather that they do not give any additive bonuses. Endocrine control seems to be about controlling the brainstem/HPA-axis while emotional control seems to be more limbic in nature. Both calm you down, but in different ways - you cannot become arbitrarily calm. I would as a GM of course suggest that he gets a sociopathy imprint instead. His friendly neighborhood psychosurgeon has got some neat files from a friend in Nine Lives that allow you to temporarily turn on and off sociopathic glibness. What could possibly go wrong?
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Decivre Decivre's picture
I tend to make them non
I tend to make them non-stacking because they serve completely different purposes. Emotional dampers do exactly that, reducing or eliminating your bodies natural tendency to emotionally react to stimulus. On the other hand, endocrine control gives you the personal capability to fine-tune your emotions and hormonal responses. These act in direct conflict... suppressing your body's ability to emotionally react will, by design, reduce your ability to finely control them. Just as a numbing agent will reduce your ability to sense things by touch.
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DivineWrath DivineWrath's picture
I tend to favor the
I tend to favor the possibility that some augmentations may be incompatible with each other, or are likely to run into conflicts. Considering that this game is supposed to be a hard scifi game (or at least contain strong scifi elements), I think the theme mixes with this game quite well. For example, right now the current world record for a person holding their breath under water (doing nothing) is over 20 minutes. In studies done on such people, they've found that they have a much larger red blood cell count than normal people. It seems that their training has caused their bodies to grow much more red blood cells. They believe their bodies have done this in response to their training much like how the body will increase muscle mass in response to physical exercise. I think that the holding your breath ability of the "enhanced respiration" bioware augmentation works in a similar way. The augmentation provides more and better red blood cells. However, I think that the "respirocytes" nanoware augmentation (which also provides a hold your breath ability) also occupies space in your blood. At some point, I think that there is point where the only way to improve the ability to hold your breath by stuffing stuff in your blood, is to take something else out. In this case, respirocytes is the better augmentation to hold your breath, so that is the one that applies. I don't think that they should stack. You certainly can get the other benefits of the enhanced respiration augmentation since the other aspects don't compete for room in your blood. The "oxygen reserve" cyberware augmentation is a different augmentation that provides oxygen through a different means (it provides oxygen to the lungs instead of occupying volume in the blood). As such, I think that it stack with respirocytes and enhanced respiration.