Hello! I'm trying to wrap my head around augmentations and augmentation surgery. If someone can help me out with a simple explanation, I'll be really glad... Let's take something really "simple", for example Neural Hacking Socket, a really useful implant for any hacker. Let's assume that accusation test was a success, and my character was able to buy it. Now he needs to find a competent medical team...no big deal, let's increase the cost of augmentation and make target number 15. Next is procedure...and that's where I'm completely lost. Who make the rolls? How many dices medical team have...what 1-3 failure means?
I would assume this is done between missions, so there is little reason to roll at all unless the medical team is a seedy one with no license (thus no insurance) or the like, in which case the roll would be using standard values (the "normal" values that a professional in the field would have), and a failure would involve extra cash spent in medical care from a problematic surgery (infection, bad quality, etc...). Losing a character (or a character's body, requiring a resurrection) between games due to a bad roll tend to not be good for the overall health of the campaign.
That's actually what my GM told me, he was confused by the rules and offered me simply to pay a little bit more. But I'm still interested how the rules supposed to work.
Ok, so starting on pg 344: "The cost of an augmentation includes the procedure necessary to install it. The listed base cost assumes the services of a competent medical team, who will make Medicine tests with a target number of 10. Superior augmentation specialists can be sought out at higher costs, increasing the cost of an augmentation by +2N per +1 target number." So you can buy a better medical team to do your implant (or hire a facility and get your team Medic to do it). Then on pg 345: "Installing an augmentation is a form of Serious Treatment. Once per day, in place of the normal Serious Treatment action, the surgeon can make one roll contributing to a complex Medicine test. The type of augmentation being installed determines the difficulty of the test and also determines how much damage the character suffers during each procedure (i.e., per Medicine test). Silk-based augmentations offer 1 bonus Momentum to each test. • 1+2N for an implant (D1, 2 Momentum, 1 failure) • 2+4N for a large implant or replacement (D2, 6 Momentum, 2 failures) • 3+6N for a full-body augmentation (D2, 10 Momentum, 3 failures)" So here we have the difficulty of the test, the number of successes needed to accomplish it, and how many failures will cause the procedure to be aborted (likely requiring a new payment, and possibly a new implant if there was a complication). But that first bit is important. For your Implant you are going to take 1+2N damage (that's very unlikely to end up being a Wound, but might). "Surgeons can choose to spend Momentum from their Medicine test to reduce the damage inflicted by the procedure by 2 points per Momentum spent. (This Momentum does not count towards the Momentum necessary for the procedure to succeed: surgeons can choose to either rush the procedure, dealing more damage, or apply the augmentation gradually while minimizing trauma to their patient’s body.)" Does that make sense?
Yeah, thanks! We decided to leave the number of dice rolled by medical team for GM (as well as bonuses for assist etc.)
