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Calirae
June 25th, 2023, 12:37
Hey chooms!

I'm getting into Cyberpunk RED for the first time and I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the humanity loss I'm seeing on character sheets in FG. I'm not sure if it's me not fully grasping the rules, or if the ruleset is doing something gonk.
On pg.117 of the CRB there's a table that shows Humanity Loss per Role at character creation. Regardless of what Role I roll up, the HL in Fantasy Grounds is always less than what it shows on the table on that page. In fact, it seems to only subtract 2 Humanity, regardless of implant. So I'm trying to figure out if this is a ruleset quirk, or if I'm misreading the rules?

Here's an example:
I rolled up a Tech using the wizard with the Edgerunner creation style. He has a starting Humanity of 70 and gets to start the game with a cybereye (HL 7), a Tool Hand (HL 3) and MicroOptics (HL 2). If I'm reading the rules correctly, the character's total humanity loss at character creation would be 12 - so his Humanity should be 58/70. However, the ruleset has set his Humanity to 64/70, which is only a total Humanity Loss of 6. I even removed all cyberware, which put him back to 70 and then tried to install them all one-by-one and noticed that, regardless of the actual HL value listed for each cyberware, his humanity would only go down by 2 per installed cyberware.

Could someone enlighten me on what's going on here and if I'm missing something?

(Didn't want to post this in the bugs thread because I'm not sure if it's just me being a gonk or an actual bug!)

Nightstride
June 25th, 2023, 21:33
The number you see going down is the max humanity loss. Per the tables on page 230, every piece of cyberware (unless it has 0 HL) reduces the max humanity of a character by 2 (borgware does 4). This number can only be recovered by removing the affecting cyberware.

The humanity loss provided on the tables on 117 corresponds with the left number of the humanity. In our ruleset, you can reduce the humanity by going to the cyberware tab, then for each piece of humanity right click the active toggles (foundational cyberware has an active toggle as well), and click "Apply Base Humanity Loss". This only needs to be done immediately after character creation. For any cyberware added later, players will need to follow the same process for the new cyberware, but click "Roll Humanity Loss" instead.

Reducing it manually is an option as well. It is not against the rules to have a humanity greater than the max humanity, however once it goes below that, it can't go above. (We actually confirmed this with RTG)

seansps
June 25th, 2023, 22:07
Nightstride’s explanation of the mechanic is spot on.

The part of character creation that I also find somewhat confusing is exactly that: the act of equipping the Cyberware lowers your max humanity. But you don’t actually deduct your current humanity until you apply the Base Humanity Loss. That of course is done manually in our system once you’ve equipped them all.

That confused me a bunch at first, too, when reading the rules, because the character creation rules only state how much Humanity each starting package should lose by default, but it doesn’t explain the mechanic of reducing max humanity at all until you get to the Trauma Team chapter where it talks about Therapy, and even then, it only mentions it a couple times in those tables.

Calirae
June 25th, 2023, 22:28
Oh, I have completely missed the part talking about max humanity loss and current humanity loss in the book! Now it all makes sense; thanks Nightstride and seansps!

I'm gonna blame 70% of this on me being an absolute gonk, and the other 30% on the layout of the physical book! :D

Thanks about mentioning how to do the base/roll humanity loss within the Ruleset, too! It sounded strange in theory, but now in practice it's pretty neat and makes sense!
(Also on a side note I just wanted to mention how much I love this ruleset -- from the look, the theming, the way you slot your stuff and on top of all, the automation. This has got to be one of my favourite rulesets I own on FG!)

seansps
June 25th, 2023, 22:30
Awesome, thanks so much, glad you’re enjoying it!

And if you’re a gonk, then so am I, because I only got it after re-reading that section 3 times and talking to Nightstride about it after he did the initial coding there. I’d definitely blame the book ;)