ah, sweet validation! bask, my tiny ego, bask!

i am going to post a few things as far as the new counterarguments:

visibility of summoning: i had thought the rules you mentioned only really applied to sorcery, and i admit my mistake. however, i am fairly certain that you need to be actively looking for magical activity to see this sort of thing, which is not always possible. i imagine expert facial recognition systems might be programmed for such a task, but even then the reaction time is very, very short. there are a number of scenarios where you wouldn't be able to see the summoner at all very easily.

available mages: lacking distributional information on the power of magic, let us assume that it is roughly normally distributed among the awakened population. we can assume a magic of 7 is "extraordinary", belonging to no more than 2.5% of the awakened, and we'll figure 1 takes up the other end of the tail. so that leaves us divvying four standard deviations, we'll give one to magics 2, 3 and 4 and divide the high deviation between 5 and 6, giving us just about 10% of the awakened population able to pull a force 12. of the (shall we say, accounting for slight depopulation re: vitas and such) six billion people on the planet, this leaves us just about six million mages able to do this. if it's one in a thousand crazy enough to do so? still 6000 potential time bombs out there.

worthiness of targets: imma stop you right there. you saying that there's nobody who'd train and brainwash a mage for a few years to get a shot at the president of what is effectively a country like damon knight? i'm sorry, we are playing shadowrun, right? who was the old motherfucker from shadowland, neon samurai or whatever? think he wouldn't go super saiyan and blow himself up to take a shot at the president of fucking ares?

edge: i think this is a circular argument. you say the assassin is a nobody, i say he's a pivotal character, we can agree to disagree. here's the thing: security has no idea which he is! there are no named npcs for them. so security kind of has to assume that just maybe he can pull shit of this nature and plan accordingly. or do you imagine the post-mortem on dead Ares CEO to be "well, we thought he was just a mook! his name and lifebar didn't pop in my AR feed or nothin!"

alternate methods: sure, might work. good old suicide bombing is actually kind of hard to stop. but there are a lot more tells for a bomb (chemsniffers, scanners, traffic surveillance) and basically none for a spirit that hasn't yet been summoned other than "hey, that guy is a burly-ass mage, make sure the snipers have him locked down." and even then masking can get you around that. so there's a better chance your summoner gets past all the other security issues long before your bomber does. i'm not discounting other methods of assassination. i'm saying this one is really hard to see coming and really hard to stop once it gets going.

any time a VIP is not behind a high-power ward he has, has, has to have astral overwatch, and he has to have ridiculously powerful astral overwatch. anytime an HTR team engages a magical threat they have to bring the heavy artillery. this wasn't a problem in-universe before the ruleset made it way too easy to have death tanks on demand from astral space.

i pose to those who see no problem with the summoning rules then: how, exactly, does easy access to high-force spirits serve either the spirit (tee hee) or mechanical balance of 5th edition? how is it a better game for making summoning comparatively easy?

In the real world there is a policy in explosive storage magazines that nothing explosive goes on the floor. It all goes on pallets or dunnage and that few inches apparently enormously reduces the damage to the floor in case of an accidental detonation. So apparently the difference between having it in contact vs close is pretty huge.

1) Actively looking provides a bonus to Perception checks - it isn't required. So people would be entitled to that Perception roll (especially since things with a threshold of one are kind of obvious as hell).

2) I'm saying if you've got a mage with that kind of power, it is always, and I do mean ALWAYS, more useful to get them to do a lot of things for you than to kill themselves doing one thing for you - and they're too rare to waste.

3) I'm saying that as far as the argument regarding in-world implications goes, Edge isn't a factor; it's an out of game construct, a purely metagame element. If we're arguing the metagame, that's one thing. But metagame elements are not relevant to a discussion of in-world implications.

4) A sniper can still get a high-value target if he needs to. Counter-snipers and such are a risk, but there are a number of ways around that. There's also the sniper blimp drones that come up on here from time to time. It's quite possible that there have been, at this point, many Damien Knight decoys assassinated through various means.

And I dispute your definition of easy, frankly.

Knight may very well have a fucking astral army backing him up 24/7. But minor execs? Hell no. It /is/ that easy. Magic, after all, is fucking terrifying.

And on the note of normally distributed magic I seriously question this assumption - it seems like it should be a descending order of commonality.

couldn't an even semi-well placed executive pay a LOT of money to have an initiated magician anchor a super-high level protection spell, triggered when the detection spell linked to it detects the presence of magic within a certain range? And also, another bonded spell that detects magic and automatically fires a force 98 manabolt at the caster? I don't think this stuff is easily achievable for an average shadowrunner, but for those with access to near-unlimited resources (or are handed down certain protections from those that do and want to protect their assets) and nearly unlimited time and prefect conditions to get the spells just right, this stuff wouldn't even be that hard to accomplish.

Yeah, but you need magic in the Sixth World. Mind Probe, Detect Truth, Mob Mind - a corp exec will want to be able to order /his own/ mages to use those spells (like say on a recently extracted scientist that he's not completely assured the loyalty of.)

Point..but the trigger could be more specific than ANY magic...

Security is always an over-reaction. A too-specific trigger will never go off, and a too-vague one will torch his own men. He's better off staying behind wards or having magical security of his own at all times. In fact, that's the only half-assured way he won't get ganked willy-nilly.

An F12 spirit with concealment can to a metaplanar shortcut past the wards and likely get away with it. Particularity if it has countermagic to deal with the defensive mage for a moment.

Yeah, even having spirits protecting the VIP in the astral just as a defense against such an attack is only a half-arsed solution. But then, that's the point.

A high force (12 or above?), triggered mana barrier would work, especially given that regarding mana barriers, RAW say "the gamemaster has the option to have certain ranged and sustained critter powers (such as Concealment or Movement) suffer the same fate as spells." (p. 316)

An effectively played F12 spirit is a monstrosity. It's almost impossible to see, it moves at impossible speeds, you virtually can't hit it if you do see it and when you finally do hit it the spirit mostly ignores the damage. It, on the other hand, notices everything, essentially never misses and can pretty much drop anyone with a single action.

If the game really allows a starting character to have a decent chance of summoning one and still being able to direct it then I'd suggest there is an problem. Either with the rules for the capability of the spirit or the rules for summoning one.

And, having run the numbers, I do not think such a thing happening is a realistic possibility. The odds of outright killing the summoner are really quite high if the spirit is using Edge.

Can we see the numbers? I was just thinking about kzt's post, and wondering if there was a "decent chance" of a character summoning F12 and living to tell about it.

The use of Edge to resist the summoning is a critical point that needs to be addressed/clarified in some errata *sigh*

This is without accounting for exploding dice, because I haven't found a way to get this site to do that and be counting hits properly: http://anydice.com/program/2802

Without exploding sixes, you've got about a 40% or 29% (depending on Body score) chance of straight up dying, and only about a 17% chance of coming out with 1 service. Once the spirit's Edge is in play, the numbers would be getting a lot worse for the summoner.

So, what is the big deal?
People die to spirits from time to time, they also die to suicide drones or snipershots or toxins or alot of other nearly unstoppable attacks. Who cares? This is supposed to be a dystopian future, people are expendable and there are 20 others who want to take over that job you just opened up.
Of course there will be some security, but there is no reason to waste so many resources on something as replaceable as a CEO of a megacorp.
The gameworld does simply not care if some people die or a building explodes for <insert reason here>. The running costs of highed security are simply measured against the replacement and insurance costs. And you can guess twice what is cheaper.

There is no reason to be a douche about things and make spirits roll edge. High Force Spirits are broken for many other reasons and if you start to draw the line only at this point I question your sanity.

i'm kind of surprised no one hit me on the "not all awakened can conjure thing," thought about that after i posted. still, would only reduce the numbers to a couple thousand nutball mages instead of 6000.

rhat,
i'm pretty sure we just aren't going to see eye to eye on this. you think a mage is always more valuable alive, yet armies send them to war with some expectation of attrition. i would just say that i'd think it was insane twenty people spent years learning to fly planes into buildings if i didn't know it happened, i guess. the very idea of suicide terrorism on that scale is utterly repugnant, and yet people did it. worse yet, some of these people were well educated, well off... exactly what a mage should be, no? ideology and insanity can trump everything, even self-preservation. if we don't have similar ideas about that, there's not a lot of common ground on the setting issue.

edge doesn't have nearly, nearly enough of an effect at force 12 to make the odds as bad as they need to be, in my opinion. granted, just an opinion, but i would say that in previous editions i never, ever worried about this coming up. if edge were equal to force like back in 4th, absolutely would make a huge difference. 24 exploding dice is a rough expect of nine or ten successes, and soaking 20P enough to live is a bitch. at half force, though, it just doesn't cut it nearly enough; on 18 dice, you're talking about an expect of 7 and 14P, which is just low enough to be survivable by a mage with a slightly better than average drain resistance using edge. the way force for spirits has been handled is a big dumb step back for the game. if that gets errated back to edge = force, i'm on your side then.

normal distribution is just a best guess without solid information. good old central limit theorem and all. you could model it as a poisson-ish distribution, i suppose, but that means there are a lot of basically useless force 1 mages running around doing, uh, birthday parties? you can skew the normal too, but it's all just conjecture unless the writers give some solid stats somewhere. (incidentally, are you in fact an estimated variance?)


kzt:

i think the touching explosives thing making a big difference argues for the interpretation that "attached" means contacting, yes. it's a bit more complex with shaped charges, but close enough. you could interpret it to mean the planting of the explosive, but i note that the demolitions role seems to cover the construction of the device rather than the planting of it. i meant the "makes sense" sarcastically since it totally makes no sense that taping the bomb down makes the difference as long as it's oriented correctly. tone of voice, internet, dammit.

the whole "magic screws you dead" thing is bad enough without summoners having a decent chance to conjure up a flying tank. at least you have some defenses against sorcery or ritual sorcery. even if a force 6 spirit is a terrifying thing, enough security can shoot it dead and a decent conjurer can defend you against it. in every previous edition, i think you really only ever had to worry about force 6 or so spirits with the old edge rules or the old conjuring rules. it is literally two or three orders of magnitude easier to summon a force 12 now and get away with it. so, yeah, obviously i concur the rules for summoning them are... poor.

quentra:

you grasp the salient point precisely. damon knight, maybe he's got his own force 9 pet and quickened mana barrier spells and god knows what protecting him, but not everybody gets secret service level magical protection like that. and the idea of force 12 uber-spirits would have everybody shitting their pants in fear. your magic guy could protect you when force 6 was the tops, but now if he's not willing to take deadly drain to throw himself in front of the flaming god-monster then you're boned. i submit this sort of world looks different from the shadowrun we know and love, and has a much more brutal "shoot it or recruit it" attitude towards mages. the best option for mundanes starts to look like not only "geek the mage," but "geek the mage in his teen years, as soon as he manifests anything that looks like conjuring." it's the only way to be safe for everybody not CEO of an AAA, so basically everybody. even adepts, sorcerers and alchemists would probably want to off the conjurers, because they're nearly as vulnerable as anyone else to this shit. so it doesn't really serve the game to have it around.

Neat site! Didn't know about this...

Looking at your link, X is summoning pool, Y is drain resist, and Z is spirit resist, right? Why graph Z-X? Wouldn't it be X-Z (summoner net hits?) And why (X+X)-Y? Wouldn't it be (Z+Z)-Y (resulting drain) ?

Unless I have X and Z reversed, but then your numbers seem off, as X (spirit resist) is using Edge, which you seem to indicate in your post that you didn't do ("Once the spirit's Edge is in play, the numbers would be getting a lot worse..."), and a summoner pool of 12 is pretty low for a character that is expected to summon F12.

1) I'd assume the population is something like Adept>Aspected>Magician+Mystic Adept in order of commonality (yes, I mean to say that Magicians and Mystic Adepts combined are a lesser proportion of Awakened than Aspected mages are).

2) We might not, but I'll try to be a little bit clearer as to what I mean. If you train a guy specifically to kill himself for you in a specific way, then that is in fact all he's good for to you strategically speaking. You do not suffer a reduction in capability. This isn't the case with a mage or conjurer, who can do far, far, far more for you than that. On the individual scale, someone who has power like that, without going down a pretty specific road in terms of mental illness, will at least care about surviving long enough to do whatever it is that their insanity directs them to do. Its possible, but the probability of it happening (especially since the agency involved in having that kind of power might be negatively correlated to the incidence of many disorders) is low enough that I can easily believe that it hasn't occurred yet. And, for that matter, we haven't exactly gone and put anti-air weapons on skyscrapers, have we? We've taken security precautions both reasonable and unreasonable, but we haven't gone to the utter extreme that you seem to be suggesting that spirits would create.

3) Spirits and Sprites going back to having Edge equal to their Force/Level is something I can absolutely get behind.

4) Okay, I've got to admit something: I have a reasonable grasp of statistics, but I have no idea what you mean by asking if I'm an estimated variance. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

X is an edged summoning resist. I'll admit, I could push the summoning pool higher with a power focus, but that does already represent skill 6 and Magic 6. As to the Edge, what I meant (and damn did i ever manage to type something completely different from what I meant) is that with 6's actually exploding like they should it gets worse. The sites explode command, unfortunately, doesn't mesh quite right with their count command (if you roll a 6 and a 1, it sees that as a 7, or at least that's what I expect is happening). Exploding dice would have a strictly unfavourable impact on the spread.

yes, these results look a lot like the spirit is using edge and the summoner isn't, so i calleth shennanigans upon thine simulation. to be fair, the spirit is always going to have more dice than the summoner unless the summoner has ridiculous edge, so it's not like the odds are good for the summoner, exactly. it's just that they're not nearly bad enough.even going by these numbers, the summoner gets a service 16% of the time and survives 75% of the time (cumulative probability of success about 12%), whereas in third ed you got a service about 14% of the time and exploded 99% of the time (cumulative probability of success of about .014%). re-rolled sixes only really bump the curve about a point over, though that makes the cumulative probability closer to 6% or so off the top of my head. it's that survival probability that makes this a viable tactic in 5th, not the actual odds of getting a service, which are remarkably similar between 5th and 3rd. of course, there's edge, specialization, totem modifiers, foci, teamwork, and other things that can tip it towards the summoner's favor as well.

rhat:
i think i may have confused my symbols, i'm thinking r squared proportion of variance, not r hat. dammit. too late for smarts... red hat?

The simulation is meant to get at the setting point. All spirits have Edge, but only 0.000000000000000000000000001% of people do. As such, summoner Edge is excluded as being irrelevant.

I'll admit, though, that I just kinda threw the summoning test in there after having previously written it just for odds of survival.

Ok got it. Thanks for the help (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I think summoner edge is relevant, since the number of summoners who have Edge is a MUCH larger group than just "people who have Edge". Also, summoner dice pool will hit 18 pretty "easily", without the need for extreme heavy optimization. 6 MAG/Skill, +2 spec, +2 totem, +2 summoning focus...I think this is way more likely in SR5 than SR4, btw, because it's easier to get MAG 6 in the Priority system as there's no penalty for getting that "last" point of magic. Similarly with 6 skill.

Using Summoner pool of 18, resist pool of 13, F12 spirit resisting with no Edge.
Results: at least 1 service ~78% of the time (avg 2 services), drain > 9P about 2% of the time.
Seems very survivable.

Using Summoner pool of 21 (3 edge), resist pool of 16(inc att), F12 spirit resisting with Edge (18 total dice). The exploding dice don't work for either dice pool, so I call it even
Results: at least 1 service ~57% of the time (avg 1 service), drain > 9P about 20% of the time.
Not nearly as good, spirits using Edge to resist summoning really puts a hurting on this kind of thing.

still, joe summoner without edge has a 6% chance of calling godzilla, whereas under 4th or 3rd ed rules any summoner was almost guaranteed to die. it's a significant bump in probability, and i think security worries a lot more about a one in ten or a one in twenty kind of risk than they do a one in one thousand. it also means that a teamwork summoning becomes a lot more worrisome; maybe a bunch of mages aren't willing to kill themselves, but they might be willing to take one for the team long enough to get your spiritual cruise missile online. i assume you can be stabilized after your condition monitor overflows from drain as long as you don't die. against 14P: calculated risk. against 18P; um, see you next monday, boss. you do lose the element of surprise by doing this, but it's still a threat.