Question about Cyberpunk implants
Hello again helpful GURPS people!
I've been doing more reading and working to get the foundation of my first GURPS Cyberpunk campaign put together, and I ran into a bit of a conundrum. When players are putting together their characters, are there any rules about how implanted weapons differ from weapons used normally? Like if a player wanted to use a mono-wire whip that costs $5,000, would there be a different cost for having it implanted in their hand? Or if there's a chip they could get that allows them to use a power like the sandevistan, I don't know how to handle that since powers are point buy but it would also cost money...? I've tried looking in the books for any rules or recommendations, but if they exist then I think I've missed them.
The true cost of implants in cyberpunk is empathy. Its what keeps you from just loading up with everytjing because you'll just lose your pc to the referee
Thank you for reminding me of this. That is another thing I wanted to ask about, because I don't know how I'd handle something like that in terms of game mechanics. Empathy loss is hard to quantify
With GURPs you can just rip the empathy stat from cyberpunk and tape it on. It'll work. That way you can just do what the book says and you don't have to convert their numbers to your scale.
I think creating a new stat is very reasonably as Sanctus mentioned (Power Ups 9 also gives great guidance on how to do this btw), but I've also had success in forcing Disadvantages or Lost Points on players to represent this cost; its very GURPS-y to start and gives lots of room for expression by the player on how they decline. If you charge points for cyberware I recommend using this as a discount too (i.e. Your Altered Time Rate 1 [100] Sandevistan also causes Low Empathy [-20] for a total of 80 points.)
There's a couple places you should look for help:
To go further beyond just recommending sources: the answer is kind of hard. Gurps doesn't make a great distinction between cash and points, least of all because you can buy the Wealth advantage that gives exponentially more cash for a linear cost of points.
This is also confounded by equipment getting better by TL: a 5d pi Innate Attack is amazing in Rome, but it's an Assault Rifle in contemporary America. Some people recommend the Accessory perk if such equipment is readily available at a given TL, but also there's the Extra Arm and Payload advantages as mentioned. These are only useful if the equipment already exists, esp as a weapon though. Sandevistans are basically Altered Time Rate.. and AFAIK there's no equipment readily giving that, at least at TL9 (which I guess you are). You can totally just create it and price it with cash (Meta-Tech helps with that); if it's too rare, unique, or powerful you might want to charge points for it though.
There's a lot more subtly to the ideas here, but hopefully it's enough to at least help with any issues you had (sorry for the 17d necro, but I figure I could weight in at least for anyone reading this in the future, if not for any problems you've had since then).
Wow, this is a very thorough reply, ty! Unfortunately my GURPS plans have been put on hold for a couple weeks due to life stuff getting very busy, but I will definitely be looking through your recommendations and the books you mentioned. I have definitely looked at Ultra-Tech and Bio-Tech, but was unaware of the Meta-Tech book, so I'll check that one out soon.