The way I read it, you can ward, say, a vehicle, but you must have a physical anchor that'd remain immobile in relation to that vehicle. If you consider that possible, given the kind of stress and shocks anything near shadowrunners receives, you can have the ward moving along with the warded vehicle.

Not even close. First of all, for a mage to be an awesome mage at the start, he needs to have his magic, willpower, Charisma/Logic, and Spellcasting at max (not to mention investing BP on conjuring and sorcery skill groups. After that, he needs to purchase a foci for his spells, and then dedicate BP points to spells. This leaves little to nothing for anything else other than mediocre attributes and a few skills. The mage will then need a levitate spell to coincide with the sammie's climbing, a physical combat spell to be able to damage physical enemies (like drones), an area effect spell to be able to do what the sammie's grenades do, a sustained armour spell to do what the sammie's higher body rating (and bone lacing/orthoskin) can do, etc. And of course, the mage needs to resist damage every time he does something like that.

That being said, and going back to the discussion about the sammie vs. mage debate, unless the mage gets Improved Reflexes spell sustained by a foci. The Sammie will get first crack at the start of the fight, and plug the mage faster than he can say Abra Kada-BANG!.

Going back to the early part of the discussion where you brought up overcasting. That is something I wasn't considering. My players and I tend to stay away from it, so I didn't think of it. We used to use it, and the players loved it, but I'm a firm believer of reminding the players now and again that if they use an advantage a lot in the game, eventually the enemy will use it too. They didn't like it when one of the players died from an enemy mage overcasting.

Everything else said and done, I will concede to you and agree that starting mages are equal in power to starting cybergoons when cybergoons have to start resisting damage every time they attack (or do something cool).

Yeah, that's what it finally came down to.

Still doesn't sit well with me, though. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

I take it sammies need no attributes, no skills, and no gear, then?

Maybe the levitate spell, if the GM considers spirits taking the mage whenever to be too cheesy. Even without it, climbing will just take the mage a little bit longer with a low skill. Stunball is already an area spell, and there is no need for an armour spell at all for the reasons previously discussed.
A competent mage (much less one with his foci intact) resists drain on most of his spells easily.

Eh, let me rephrase the initial point again: mages do more damage per turn, and that damage is resisted with a weaker attribute (without skills or armour). They are better at hiding thanks to spells like invisibility or spirit powers like concealment. They're better at getting into secured areas, because they can switch their sustained spells off at will and then renew them in a few seconds, while sammies are riddled with cyberware forever (plus the only way to detect a mage is a mage, and those are one in a hundred metahumans, while scanners are dirt-cheap). Plus mages have abilities that sammies have no way whatsoever to emulate, from assensing and spirit summoning to mind probe, mob control, or trid phantasm. Sure, yeah, they have to resist drain, big deal.


I offer my players to pay a couple thousand extra for a vehicle upgrade that'd keep the anchor still.

If there's not much difference between a 01. Ess and 6 Ess character in terms of social effects, is it really necessary to have this rule at all? I think it would make more sense to either simplify the rules by not having to worry about this kind of thing, or make the rule such that there is a noticeable difference between 6 and ~0 Essence.


How about Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things?

At a guess, perhaps the fully cybered version has some ware that deals with that? Perhaps as a part of the effect of Tailored Pheromones?

As well, don't forget that a mage becomes much less effective as soon as another mage providing spell defense is on the other team.

I was always a big fan of grounding. It made mages less powerful because they needed to be far more careful.

Another reason we stayed away from over casting is that we, as a group, decided to crank up the healing time. So, if you were a mage and took a wallopin' from overcasting, it would take a much longer time to heal.

Of course, a sufficiently high rating Machine or Tutor sprite can do a lot to help with healing...

???

There's a difference, but not so much that a cybered up face is infeasible. Like I said somewhere, the team spent a lot of energy making sure all of the traditional Shadowrun concepts would work, including cybered up faces, troll faces, adept faces, mystic adept faces, technomancer faces, and unaugmented faces. And non-face concepts, too, but were talking about the Social limit, I think.

Machine Sprites can be given any Autosoft as an optional Complex Form, including Professional (meaning that they can have any technical skill, such as Medicine). Tutor Sprites can straight up have any Technical skill. Combine that with the right drone, and they're rolling Rating*2 with hits added to the healing roll.

The confusion over the mobility of wards comes from the fact that Street Magic says that you can't move a ward and the first FAQ says that you can. Over time, a compromise evolved.

I think you (and I hope many others) would agree when I say I'd personally prefer purely stationary wards. It removes the need for all the weirdness of wards-in-wards by making it impossible for that to happen.

I definitely do.

Man, I really hate the healing system in SR4.

An alternative, for that specific problem, is to declare that when wards collide, the ward with the lower force (or both if the forces are equal) collapses.

A genius doctor with an applicable specialty rolls something like 11-14 dice for the same test, if he's not augmented or Awakened. What's wrong with assisted healing via medical care?

It's not so much assisted healing I have a problem with, but how assisted healing along with bodyx2 dice that allows a character with a full condition monitor to heal in a day or two.

The problem with that is that you can create a ward-smashing cardboard box that only needs upkeep every few weeks.

Which, I assume, is why you expanded the timeframe. However, it might help to think of full condition monitor as being at more or less full function, rather than truly being fully healed - your ribs still hurt when you laugh, the gunshot wound still hurts, etc. It's at that timeline for the sake of getting back to gameplay in short order, so really it's just the point of "healed enough to work".

So factor in some sort of physical backlash against the anchor - perhaps even a Force*2 roll with net hits as damage and treating the anchor as a barrier.

That could work, but it's leaning pretty hard on the KISS principle. I can see a system two (or more) layers deep like that if wards were a regular part of the game, but for basic Shadowrun? Especially when the problem can be elegantly solved with what was (to be fair) originally printed.

How much value is added to the game by allowing moving wards, when you can get the same effect by other means (like the Mana Barrier spell) that don't carry the same weird edge cases?

Guards carrying ward anchors on their person, making infiltration by spirits or mages with active foci more difficult (even if the mage's own ward breaks the carried one, the backlash would alert the guard)? A means for mundane runners to be protected from magic even if the team's mage isn't on hand? It creates a number of new possibilities.

There is, however, a reason I tied it directly back to an existing system.

If you take a shotgun blast to the chest that nearly kills you, you are not back on your feet "healed enough to work" in a day or two. You are in the hospital on life support.

If a character is back into game play in a couple of days after that, he no longer fears getting hurt.

My entire playing group saw how unrealistic this is and we developed the longer healing period, and some of them absolutely hate changing rules. That's how bad it really is.

What we did, if anyone is interested, is decide that the time interval for a healing test was equal to the number of boxes of damage currently suffered in days.

If that delivers what your group wants, great - but being down for that long doesn't make for a good game, generally, unless everyone just stops for the interim.

On the other hand, it made mages brokenly overpowered if the opposition had one.

"Just let me zip over in the astral, hey a mage" *nukes*