Still, nothing wrong with giving each floor its own rectangular ward is there? Since floors often correspond to security clearance and provide clear demarcations for warders I could see this being popular.

'Tis a good layout. Rasumichin's point however does emphasise that you can't have interior divisions inside a "shell-warded" structure, for example the 200-room hotel or other tower block.

I'm not sure how much value I'd place on a room that was shielded from Astral travellers that start *outside* the building... they only need to get into the public areas (rent a different room) to breach that security. I'm sure people pay extra for one of the rooms/suites that has its own Ward though.

Actually, it's spelled out on the writers blog and in subsequent postings on dumpshock. SM rules were kind of odd....

You can have multiple flat 1 meter thick wards that touch. They do not form a complete barrier to astral entities, but they will stop spells.

As much as any ward stops spells, as that is one area that RAW is terribly written.

Impair might be a better word.

Per RAW, wards and countermagic don't do anything to help inanimate objects. The writers cleverly have the ward providing a bonus for a test that inanimate objects DON'T GET TO MAKE! So any magic 1 character can destroy any building or vehicle in under a minute using powerball, no matter how much magical security it has.

My suggested solution is to change wards so what they do is remove hits of spells crossing the ward equal to the force of the ward. When have less than one net hit the spell fails. There are other approaches I've seen suggested that seemed reasonable.

Question: Umm...doesn't the material still resist the damage with it's Structure and/or Hardness ratings?

Answer: Not quite, but it's all in fairly easy to understand text in SR4 BB pg. 196.

So...no. Any Magic 1 mook can't blow up any building or vehicle in under a minute with Powerballs. At least not without probably taking some big-time (as in lethal) drain.

Ok I exaggerate a bit, a magic 1 can't blow up a jet (can't make the OR threshold) but they can get most buildings. Magic 4 can do it easily.

And, no. Nothing gets to resist direct spell damage. It just happens. As to whether it happens, that's just a success test for the mage. I don't write these crazy rules....

"Direct Combat spells cast against nonliving objects are treated as Success Tests; the caster much achieve enough hits to beat the item’s Object Resistance (see p. 174). Net hits increase damage as normal (the object does not get a resistance test)."

That's why I want wards to peel away successes.

Or at least peel away dice as a modifier. I'm not sure if it's worth a house rule. Though regardless I suggest increasing the OR based on object size. That's sort of RAWish.

Anyway something else on wards. They aren't all high end. Recently awakened Timmy next door can ward as one of the first things they can do (doesn't require any skill). I isn't spelled out in the text, but I wouldn't pay some much for rating 1 wards. But at the least the mage is still warned if something punches through.

And the spell still has to blow through the item's Structure (wound boxes) with Physical damage to destroy it as "causing damage normally" indicates.

Yes, I'm technically inferring here but it's not hard to understand without having to haul the devgrp front and center.

That said, I'm failing to see the issue here. You beat the threshold to reflect the difficulty of magically attacking a non-magical object, all successes past that threshold add damage normally to remove points from the objects Structure rating until it (or at least a section of it) is destroyed. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

I'm not quite sure how we got here either, but I think it's that by RAW warding your vehicle provides no protection against it getting it blowed up by magic.

No protection against being blown up by direct combat spells. Indirect objects get the damage resistance test, which counterspelling (and I'd argue wards too) add to. But, as was noted above, its pretty hard to blow chunks out of buildings with direct combat spells. Vehicles, its still hard, being that you get Force + Hits - OR Threshold. (5 hits on a Threshold 4 test, = 1 net hit).

Still it isn't very hard because body doens't scale anywhere remotely linarly with size. So the way they go a buildin might be 50 body. Not 50,000 So That's 33 boxes of damage. A single force 9 powerbolt will cause heavy damage and cause everybody to run for the exits.

Annoying.

Good luck trying to powerbolt that building down.

Interesting note, the barrier rules have their own special rules for barriers to resist damage, and it seems they would superceed the magic rules and grant barriers a damage resistance test (against even powerbolts) of armor x2.


Also, your force 9 powerbolt, with 1 net hit is 10 damage. Structural material has 12 armor, and 11 structure. 10 < 11, and as such, you don't do jack to the building.

Nope. When they say "Direct Combat spells channel damaging power directly into the target’s inner being, affecting them from within, and so bypass armor" they mean it bypasses armor. When they say "A spell cast on a non-living, non-magic target is not resisted, as the object has no life force and thus no connection to mana with which to oppose the casting of the spell" they mean non-living objects don't get a resistance roll.

The way the rules work is the caster rolls a success test, and if he overcomes the OR the target takes the force of the spell plus any net hits. (Yes, it says in about 4 places that you need at least one net success to succeed at a success roll, but everyone but me wants to assume that the magic rules don't work that way.)

The example in the book: This is in many ways a terrible example, but it servers the purpose here.

"If Raze had targeted the bike instead of the ganger, his 4 hits would have been enough to reach the threshold of 4, as a motorbike counts as a highly-processed object. Since nonliving objects cannot resist against Directed Combat spells, the bike would have taken 5 DV from the spell (Raze didn’t score any net hits over the threshold to raise the damage)."

You can change the rules in your game, but realize it's a change.

When you shoot a building with a spell or a gun you don't take into account the entire buildings body, and armor. You deal with the wall and the material it is made out of at that specific point. Every time you destroy a piece of a wall by knocking it's structural track to 0 you blow a 1 meter square hole in the building. If a mage was using AOE spells on a building made out of drywall it would probably blow a large chunk out of the side of the building. A powerbolt would open a small hole. Also the problem with using a high force AOE spell is that you will most likely kill every single person on the street within quite a large number of meters of where the epicenter of the impact of the spell. Assuming the spell is cast at ground level, or even a few stories up. A building high rise? Probably no problem, but no one likes a mage destroying a very large chunk of a very tall building.

Your example is dealing with vehicles, which use condition tracks. Mine is dealing with barriers, which use the barrier rules.

I'll conceed that barriers still don't get a damage resistance test, as direct combat spells still bypass that, and the barrier rules reference a damage resistance test.



You're right, except that its very hard to do that. Structural material, such as brick/plascrete, which I would assume most buildings outer walls are made of, has a structure rating of 11. Thats for breaking through it. Doing 10 damage to the wall doesn't blow a chunk out of it. And it doesn't matter if you consistently do 10 damage to it. Until you hit 11, you don't break a hole in it, and it doesn't have a condition track, so previous damage doesn't carry over.

Buildings aren't made out of drywall (not the outsides anyway). Lets take a normal example, a security door (8/9). The hacker can't get it open, and so the mage decides to powerbolt/ball it out of the way. He rolls his mighty force 6 powerbolt, and gets 6 hits even. Its highly processed (being electrically locked and all that) so, he has 2 net hets. 6+2=8. 8 < 9 and thus he can never get through the door like that.

Tarantula my post was saying if the side of a building was made out of something silly like drywall... although not entirely impossible with the way some buildings are made these days. I also thought direct combat spells went through armor though. Anyways it's kind of a foolish situation. Stuff let that gets tons of attention. It's just a dumb idea when a rocket would probably do it easy peazy and cause just as much attention at that point.

That's why I chose powerball. You need several attacks to peel away the non-structural elements so you can get line of sight to the structural elements. Then you collapse the entire building when you blow out a 12 meter section of structural steel with 30 stories above it. The advantage of powerball over rockets is that you can do it from several km away and your launch signature is a lot lower. Not to mention that rockets are pretty poor at blowing away 32 point armored blast bunkers, but three f6 powerballs will do it just fine.

Alright so there are differences between vehicles and barriers. So maybe very large vehicles would also switch over to barrier rules.

Though it sounds like magic slices through barriers pretty easily as well. And still get the annoying bit where it's hard to defend your carrier against magic.

Structural steel eh? You mean that nice 16/13 rating barrier material? And how no matter how many F6 powerballs you use, it'll never take chunks out of it?

And blast bunkers? 32/17. You say a rocket is no good at it. AV Rocket, 16P, -6AP. Its AV, so it jumps from 16P to 48P for the barrier. Barrier gets 32x2 = 64 armor to resist with (perfect time for trade in rules). 64/4=16. 32P left. 32 > 17, making a 1 square meter hole. If the guy shooting is any good, and can get at least 2 hits, then he'll make a 2 meter hole.

Now, your example against the F6 powerballs. Force 6 powerball, threshold 4. 6 hits (cap out against force), 2 net hits. 6+2 = 8. 8 < 17, you never make a hole.

So we're basically pointing out that the writers never thought that some shit-bird mage would try tossing Force 6 Manaballs at a Blast Barrier or use the same to take an entire building down. Yes, it's a waste of time to try to do so and that mage most likely will have some...mildly upset...company before they finish either deed in full, but it sure is fun to poke holes in the ruleset with examples that will never really come up in play, huh? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

No, they did think about it. The spell isn't strong enough to break structural steel. Get over it.

If you want a chance, you'd need minimum Force 11. (With 10 hits, 4 count to threshold, so the other 6 carry over as net hits) making your base DV 17.

I do so love the voice of Reason.

The quotes above is pretty much what I would tell my players if this situation ever came up. And you know what? They'd take this ruling like good little bitches and we would carry on without further argument with the rest of the session.

Such is the power of the GM to stop attempted rules exploitations...

That's actually a pretty clever interpretation. It's not totally logical for powerball, as the size of a structural member is a lot less than a meter in cross section, but clever. It also works for keeping them away from blowing up armored vehicles.