weavermount wrote:

It sounds like what you really want is niche protection. You want a Furry more to play differently than a ghost morph. If that is what focus on that directly. Talk to your players and work that out. If someone took a furry morph because they want to play frontal assaults rig the game so it makes sense for them to be doing that a lot and give the ghost something to sneak past. If a player starts wants to build there PC in a direction that would creep into another player's role talk to the 2 of them and figure out what works for your table. Maybe invent a new combat to temp them away from the stealth mods. Everyone goes home happy. My plan be very generous with whatever people want on there morphs and ego cast a lot. Say yes to everything, let people play with all kinds of morphs and just bounce around the system. I think of a tricked out morph somewhere more like a weapons cache than something a player is entitled to.

You know, I assume the PCs are bouncing around the system on a regular basis and that, unless they're located close to something critical (Mars, Earth, another focus of your campaign), they may not even be using their "own morph" at the climax of the mission. That won't always happen, but it makes playing a heavily modified form a lot trickier. I like the idea that PCs can get most morphs (aside from Futuras) relatively easily, but getting custom implants means you either get a morph that already had them, or you get them installed at the far end, recovery times and all. For certain minor advantages, this may be no problem. Perhaps your Menton gets medichines added after every egocast. But the more potent the tech, the more likely it is that you'll have to get it in an existing model, which means pulling a *lot* of strings, especially in a smaller habitat. And while really potent, high-level implants may be available in powerful morphs, odds are good that somebody had to actually leave that morph -- their normal home -- in order to let you have it. Probably someone with a lot of pull themselves. The more powerful and connected the former user, and/or the bigger your request, the more likely that someone is putting together this series of outlandish requests and is using them to track your team. Which is one reason Firewall may frown at some requisitions, even if they can be fulfilled. Remember, it's not just mere humans who are watching. A solution my "broken posthuman" NPC uses is to have burned a phenomenal number of Rez points on normally useless Traits that give him access to almost his full range of intellectual abilities even if wandering around in an unmodified flat. Then again, his backstory is that he rose from unaugmented human status beginning roughly a century ago, so burning a ludicrous number of points on resources that don't normally *do* anything makes a lot of sense. Another option is to have just enough money to have some suitably modified morphs (securely) tucked away here and there in various major population centers, ready to be activated as needed. But even if you hold immense amounts of wealth and rep, the more of these you have, the greater the cost. Then again, this guy mostly serves as an expert and observer. So long as he can meet his scientific and/or surveillance responsibilities, the rest is irrelevant. (*His* preferred implant? Emergency farcaster.) Finally, if your character is really, really good at some form of tech, and extremely original, another trick is to have tactics and designs for simple equipment mods in your head that you can employ whenever you settle into a new morph with relatively standard equipment, thereby enhancing its range of abilities without an excessive expenditure of wealth/rep or risking too many critical tech secrets.