I'm sure this keeps coming up... but I keep running into a wall to counter magic in a way for a mundane.

i.e. One mystical Adept casts Improved Invisibility then runs around with a monofilament sword slitting throats... Other than having either a mage running counterspell or a spirit doing the same, or giving everybody ultrasonic vision, if he manages to nail 3-4 hits, I don't see most security guards ever having a way to counter it that doesn't make logical sense (i.e. they aren't going to pour flour on the entrances or hallways every night for a building that people actually use).

Another mage tells his spirit to materialize in the Ares City Master over there and kill the guards inside. Yes I can play the spirit direct to the letter and call that two services, but I find it very odd that the only real way to stop that would be to ward all the Ares Citymasters out there. And the guards inside aren't exactly going to get past the Immunity to Normal weapons that materialization provides.

Spellcasters aren't required to have a geasa (sp?) so they kinda look at you and blow you up.

etc... etc... ad naseum.

I could see fixing invisibility by instead of just making them disappear, making it that the invisibility hits add to the normal stealth/sneak hits, but that doesn't really stop the materializing spirit.

arsenal have a few tricks there (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

glomoss on a stick is one example.

The Dowdian adage from editions past still holds true... Magic Is Power.

magic is mostly over-powered, because it IS open end . . in the high karma values magic will do everything better than anything mundane can do it . . aside from that, magic usually starts out weaker because fresh from the start there are things magic just can't frigging do and that tech does better than BEGINNERS Magic . .

...burst/auto fire capable weapon with S&S, followed by Mage Mask and Mage Cuffs and a Containment Coffin. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

burst/auto with s&s and a closing(or opening) head shot with Ex/Ex or APDS to follow takes care of most magicians a little more permanently ^^

I'd say, high infiltration.. hide and wait until the mage drained himself dry.. THEN KICK HIS LILY ASS!
or you just wait until he projects (IMG:style_emoticons/default/devil.gif)

High Intuition, maxxed Reaction, Edge on the initiative test, and Edge on the Heavy Weapons(LMG) test, Shiawase Arms Nemesis LMG on wide burst.

The first answer is- talk to your players. It seems like there is a disconnect between how you want magic to work in the game and how they want magic to work in the game. See if you can come to a concensus about how magic would work in the game world your group is collectively creating. If they insist on being a death-on-wheels magical killing party then...

The second answer is - retribution. Your mystic adept might think that trick is great, but eventually some corp or syndicate is going to figure it out and send people specifically equipped to deal with that character (so yes, counterspelling magi, spirits and ultrasound vision). Also reread the section on spell signatures. Lone Star and most corps have the magical security resources to followup on a criminal spell signature.

Third- if your NPCs are used to living in a world where a mage can "look at you and blow you up" they will start adapting their behaviors. They will start using cover more effectively (see modifiers below). They will shot anyone that appears to be magical first. The minute a spell goes off they will take cover and call for magical back up. Corps will start using glow moss, and FAB and whatever. Magical security will become more common place. Etc etc etc...

Forth- make magical threats more common in your game. If the awakened are running rampant start throwing in wild (and angry) spirits that are drawn to their use of magic and don't like it. A shadow, a toxic spirit, a few shedim here and there. Remember that any dual natured critter can see an invisible character on the astral. Ghouls, shapeshifters, etc etc...

Fifth- dry up their contacts. After a Lone Star detective comes around to their talismonger with a picture of the character that talismonger is going to think twice about supplying the materials the mage needs to counger another "murderous" spirit or learn another "muderous" spell.

Sixth- enforce some modifiers. Remember that spellcasters usually need to see their targets. Vision mods apply to many spells. You can also give the mage mods for being distracted.

Seventh- use the surprise and perception rules. If your mage needs to spend a simple action to observe in detail he can't immediately cast a spell at the guard he sees, much less the guard he doesn't immediately detect. He also can't fry anyone who surprises him.

Just a few tips. Good luck.

okay I agree that beginning magicians are weaker than advanced magicians,
but I need an understanding of what can't beginning magic do that technology can?


that's the combat problems... you can't wait for him to drain himself stupid because he won't.

This might just be my group, and we might be wrong, but we've always ruled a mage needs LOS to direct his spirit. You could order to attack the Citymaster because you can see the Citymaster, but you can't order the spirit inside to kill the people you can't see. (Although if they're all mundane, its pretty easy to project along with your spirit into the Citymaster and tell it to kill everyone.)

Mundanes do have it pretty hard against magic, but I think its pretty comparable to how bad they'd have it if in a highly technological area they had no defense against hackers or if going against sams they had no armor or weapons. Which is not to say there's nothing they can do, they're just starting way behind the line.

Most of the time, anything worth paying shadowrunners to do (particularly magically-active shadowrunners) is going to be worth it to someone else to pay similar people to stop. While magic is rare, its something that the characters are going to be dealing with a lot, because they're going to be dealing with the other 1% of people who do that. It’s like baseball. The number of people that can accurately throw a baseball 100mph is fairly low, but those that can are playing at the level where the people they're throwing the ball by are pretty good at hitting things going 100mph. Any given major league pitcher can clean up in any given church league, its just generally not worth his time.

i say again, glomoss. or other stuff from manatech in arsenal, or street magic (much of the manatech chapter seems to point back to street magic).

have the prettied with potted plants and similar, with a nice colony of glomoss and a optical sensor in there somewhere.

when the invisible mage walks by, it will most likely light up, the sensor will pick that up, and a alarm go of in the control room.

next thing you could have mundane guards with glomoss wands show up, doing a sweep of the area, maybe a security mage is doing perception via fiber optics to try and spot the source of magic, or a spirit or projecting mage arrives to have a look around.

in more high sec areas with little to no magical activity, have haven lilies planted instead. if i got it right one should be able to take down anything of force 3 or lower if one have enough of them.

hell, it may even be that if one is breaking into a magic lab, the path into the place is lined with these to keep some of the low level effects contained.

and thats before one start to talk both mundane and awakened guard critters, or maybe just a pheromone scanner or the lowly movement detector using ultrasound. even pressure plates in front of doors work. dont need to be loud, just need to have a light or a slight beep when someone walk past. so if it goes of and the guard cant see anything there...

basically its the same kind of setup that a automatic door have, or a shops bell.

if it goes of, and noone can see anything, call magic security asap.

Heal Stun damage. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Even if you rule that way, there is always Remote Service.

I've had a similar problem going on in my head. How do you infiltrate a place with magical security if you're not awakened? If you need to defend one, FAB-III can do the trick. But getting in is the problem.

So say a character, let's call him mr. Sneaky, wants to leap into some high security facility property and grab a doohickey. This guy is a master of gymnastic-fu, and he's got all the complimentary ware, say, kid stealth legs with hydraulic jacks and quickness enhancements, Move-by-wire 3, synthacardium, muscle toner, oxy rush nanites. And he's not called Mr. Sneaky for nothing. He's practically sam fisher combined with casper the friendly ghost for all anyone can spot him, say a stealth rating of 6 (SR4) and 8 (SR3, and let's not forget that +3 dice for stealth and athletics from his Move-by-wire). And let's he's donned his favourite ruthenium sneaksuit. He's got maglock passkeys, keycodes, memory strings stored in his headware memory, retinal and fingerprint tailor nanites, and he's got a sweet lockpick and electronics kit to bypass any maglock he doesn't have a code for.

He easily sails over the monowire laced perimeter, and the pressure pads to boot. His sneak-suit has a couple of levels of thermal dampening on it, so no cameras or IR sensors are going to pick him up, especially at the speed Mr. Sneaky is going. He rolls his 11 (SR3) Stealth dice. Whaddaya know? two sixes. Re-roll them? Another six! and a two. A target number to spot Mr. Sneaky is 14, and add ten to that for his ruthenium suit, so that's a TN of 24 to see him, and that's before applying vision modifiers. He hits the open field leading to the facility running, he can see the claymores by their heat signature, and the gun turrets are blissfully ignorant of mr. sneaky, thanks to the fooled sensors.

Unfortunately for mr. Sneaky, the facility has magical security. There is a watcher spirit patrolling the field. According to MITS Page 88 the base target number for the astral patrol is 2, not the stealth roll of 14, and certainly not 24. Uh-oh Mr. Sneaky, The field is less than 2,000 square meters, so we've got a -4 TN mod, not that it matters, because TN 2 is the lowest of the low. So let's say this watcher is force 4. He rolls 4 dice. My God! He rolled all ones! The watcher suddenly reaches the impossible conclusion of the tree falling in the woods paradox and spontaneously combusts, without even alerting his daddy shaman that he just ceased to exist. Lucky mr. Sneaky!

So our sneaky gentleman powers his way up the facility wall with his grappling hook and insane athletics skill and finds an inviting skylight. With his electronics kit and lockpicks, he silently disables the security circuit on the skylight and rappels in, closing the window behind him, and the security rigger is none the wiser. So he's dancing about through the facility, opening maglocks and leaping through laser trip-wire mazes and generally having a great stealthy time. But uh-oh mr. Sneaky! Looks like you passed through a ward! Because you're not an Initiate with masking metamagic, or even awakened at all, you can't spoof your way past it, and like with the watcher spirit, your base stealth skill did drek all!

So to cut this unnecessarily long story short the corp shaman feels something pass through his ward summons a hearth spirit he quickly uses it's search power to locate the intruder and surprisingly doesn't get all 1's. Now either the Shaman says to his pal Mr. Mage "We've got some-one in sector 4" and soon Mr. Sneaky is engulfed by a fire elemental, or if Mr. Shaman is the only Mr. Magic user in this corp facility, he gets Mr. Security Rigger on the line and says "We've got some-one in sector 4" and the dogs with the genetically engineered Gamma-Scopolamine carrying bees in their mouths are released, or the rigger fills sector 4 with Green Ring-8, Halon gas, Gamma-S, Fugu-56 Million or whatnot, possibly all at the same time. So any way you slice it, Mr. Sneaky is incapacitated, beaten, tortured, experimented on, and has jumper lead clamps attatched to his genitals. If he's lucky.

And that's not even very impressive magical security. It's one shaman, probably not even a full magic 6 shaman, let alone an initiate. And a ward.

Um, but things not astrally active don't show up to wards....

A meta game answer is that SR has decreed that mages are really, really rare. As in 1% are magically active and more like 0.2% is a mage or adept. For PCs I find it tends to run more like >50% are mages or adepts. That's because it isn't that expensive a choice for a starting character to do. And even a magic 4 mage given time to summon a spirit can really kick mundane butt. So if you try to follow the way the rules say you tend to get magic being dominating because the typical opposition has none. It's like only PCs can carry guns and all the NPCs only have knives, what would you expect from that?

So either you convince your players to tone it down (in any of several ways), provide magical defense to the NPC/facilites or you have to assume that at least 20% of security guys are fully magically active and ignore the book to keep the game fun.

And in SR4 at least, infiltration tests do count against astral perception, and watchers only have 2 dice to spot with (since they're max force 1.)

yes, I know your example was pre-SR4



edit: kzt: a force 4 spirit is a lot easier to take down than a troll in most circumstances - if you can get past the 8 hardened armor, it's usually toast since it has about half the soak dice.

still it was a good story, you gotta praise him for the effort
We looooove you Sir Psycho (IMG:style_emoticons/default/love.gif)

Welcome to the shadows, chummer (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Mages are very powerful [some of the example in various rulebooks have great examples]..
..But very rare.

And, hey, if it was easy the Mr Smith wouldn't have needed to hire professionals.

about spirits attacking a transport of some sort, paracritters trained as guard animals perhaps...

barghests, hellhounds or even nagas may be deployed alongside mundane troops if they expect any kind of magical attack from spirits.

also, a group of mundane soldiers hitting a spirit with force of will attacks should make for a interesting sight. sadly, banishing isnt declared a skill one can learn without magic rating. if it was i would expect most security having a course in it alongside unarmed combat and similar.

Sure is. And after it hits you with fear you won't, as 8 vs 3 usually wins, and it can do this from LOS. When it engulfs your friend next to you it tends to limit the use of heavy weapons. And when they do blow it up you summon another. Spirits are very powerful, even at low force. At high force they are insane. If the magic 4 mage summoned a force 8 spirit and didn't have really bad day it's hard to stop until it runs out of services or a mage.

I generally am more conservative with what I have my Spirits do. A Magician that spends as much time as mine does in the Astral and on various MetaPlanes(Too Damn Cool not to when you have access lol, and it's encouraged) needs all the friends he can get. I also don't tend to bind many spirits, except my Familiar/s I just added a second more minor one.

As for the question of Why Does Magic Seem So Broke, Is this a game where there are Elves, Dragons, and the Big Nasties of the Darkest Deep Meta-Planes or not? Do you realize how much Karma You throw down the bottomless pitt that is "Mage Character Developement" to get the ability to levitate around surrounded by a powerful shield and blast things with the Lightnings and Fiery Dooms??!!! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/devil.gif)

The problem... is once it isn't easy... Mr. Smith hires pros... they bring a mage... and it is easy.
With magic being so rare (per the BBB) I feel like I'm getting silly by laying out magical defenses... not to mention which, the non-magical characters get sick of mage on mage and spirit on spirit action... but without them, the mundanes feel useless...

i.e. I throw in some spirits to keep the magic ones busy so the mundanes can deal with mundane guards... The mundanes on either side have to deal with immunity to normal weapons, so they're going to be stuck if they have to hurt a spirit.. and whichever side wins the magic duel will then win the fight.

Ummm I'm dealing with a mage with 6 magic (7 with his power focus) and a mage with 5 magic (2 for spells and 3 points of adept powers)... Most of the time they overcast and handle the drain (because most of their spells are F/2 + x and a force 8 or 10 spell is only 6ish points of physical drain. Usually blown down to 2 points or less. One of them just sustains improved invis... that's all he casts as a mage. The other throws spells left and right and laughs at drain. These aren't characters with high karma... they've earned about 12-14 by now. These are basically new characters.