Message no. 1

From:	Quentin Campbell quentin@*******************.com
Subject:	Magic Loss (was Essence Ques)
Date:	Tue, 25 Jul 2000 10:34:16 -0400

I've been slowly pulling this together since yesterday ('cause work keeps
interrupting my need to be a geek), so bear with me.

> From: Sebastian Wiers
>
> If you want a game where every character strives to maintain
> an essence
> of 1 or more, that's fine, but it deosn't seem that the canon rules and
> fiction make low essence a signifigant contributing factor in
> trauma related
> death. M&M implies some effects it has on treatment, recovery, and long
> term health, but not on immediate wound survival.

I agree - this isn't canon, but I think that this is an area that the
established Shadowrun material glosses over a great deal (too much for my
sensibilities, anyway).
This all really goes back to the never-ending debate about what Essence
actually is. The way I go with it (recent M&M foolishness aside), Essence is
lifeforce - pure and simple. It's the energy field generated by the natural
harmonious cohesion of mind, body and consciousness. If this harmony is
disrupted through physical trauma that cannot naturally heal, that being's
Essence diminishes commensurately. Implant surgery, by its very nature,
disrupts a being's Essential harmony in this way. The being in question is
being deeply internally damaged and is not being allowed to naturally heal,
since natural healing would result in the rejection of the artificial
implant.
As it is in SR3, severe physical trauma like a Deadly Wound can cause
permanent body damage that never really heals (as is represented by possible
Attribute & Body part Loss tables). My house rule takes that one step
further and applies this logic to Essence After a certain level of body
damage, the lifeforce of a person just disrupts because the physical form
isn't cohesive enough to house the Essence any longer.

> Besides, in my experience, its almost always people who take deadly
> wounds who suffer any implant damage using the M&M rules. It seems a bit
> much to add essence loss to the one time when a character suffers implant
> damge.

Remember, characters still have to roll less than or equal to their current
Essence on 2d6. That means that someone at Essence 1 or below who takes a
Deadly Wound has less than a 2.8% chance of suffering Essence loss from said
Wound. In the nearly three years I've been running with this house rule, it
has yet to actually happen.

> Also, what would you do for a cyberzombie? Would they loose
> essence and be even more "zombie"?

I've never actually used a cyberzombie in any of my games so this issue has
never arisen. If it did, I'd have the cyberzombie make an immediate
'disassociation' check or whatever the hell it's called. You can't very well
lose any more lifeforce if you're already dead, but I imagine that a
cyberzombie watching most of its remaining meat get blown off its metal
frame would have a hard time pretending its still alive.

Q.