and also did so *again* after i told you i had provided references earlier, and even added in a link to said post (which was only a couple of posts above anyways) in case you were too lazy to scroll up.

you not noticing the proof i provided does not count as me not providing proof.

"If the critter has the Allergy weakness, then the Immunity does not apply to non-magical attacks using the allergen." p.295, SR4A

also, fire also halves armor. so it does quite a bit even if that were not true.

Back when he was still Line Developer, Rob Boyle answered an e-mail asking if Stick'n'Shock was effective against spirit's ItNW. He said that it wasn't since the spirit's armor isn't exactly an armor to start with. Since it didn't make it in SR4A or the FAQ, it isn't exactly canon, but that's the closest I've ever seen to an official statement on that topic. If you're interested, you might be able to find the thread with the search function.

P. 288 of the BBB states (SR not SR4A - I don't own that):
Emphasis mine.

Don't forget AP, we have to consider AP:


I don't know how some people think that Stick-n-shock bypasses all armor or doesn't work at all. To assume S-n-S doesn't apply means you have to be selectively ignore all the rules on how AP and Electricity damage are applied.

The rules seems quite clear.

1) You apply the half AP effect of Stick-n-Shock to the spirit's armor, meaning that it is at the Force rating instead of Force x2.
2) If the Force of the spirit is greater than 6, then no Damage Resistance.
3) If they did take damage, the struck target must make a Body + Willpower (3) Test. Either way, facing -2 dice pool modifier.
I interpret that S-n-S doesn't work if they are above Force 6 due to the wording on Hardened armor.

Sure that doesn't mean Stick-n-shock is uber against spirits but anything that halves HARDENED armor is still pretty damn awesome. At least if its force 6 or less. Oh well there is the AZ-150 Stun baton for anything up to force 8...

- J.

Oops, sorry (IMG:style_emoticons/default/embarrassed.gif) I fail.

first off, rob boyle said he didn't like electricity working that way, not that it doesn't work that way.

secondly, nothing indicates that net hits do not stage up SnS damage. therefore, it works just like everything else.

I agree, if Rob wants spirits to be next to invincible against mundanes, that's how he can play it in HIS game. But per RAW, spirits get messed up by electricity, fire, and everything like that which halves armor. And that's what I'm sticking with.

Quite frankly... that's my biggest issue in this whole thing. Spirits and relative power. (NOTE: I'm normally the party mage by default... we need one and I tend to pick last to fill in the 'we need this' role).

It's not too hard to pull a big one out of your hat... especially if you take a metamagic like centering to help w/ the drain (you can get drain up into the 20's if you really think about it w/ a focus, metamagic, and augmented stats). And I don't like seeing them be some kind of an 'i win' button once the force numbers start racking up.

What I don't like about SnS is it's straight damage and doesn't care if it's a machine pistol or a heavy machine gun (you'd think you could fit a bigger cap in bigger rounds like say a shotgun firing a 'stun bunny' round). Why I don't mind it is it's one of the FEW legit ammo types... game doesn't have many good ones and some of the balanced interesting ones like gel just got reamed for no good reason.

What I do like about SnS is it's one of the few good ways for mundanes to handle spirits, or ludicrous armor ratings. I think the bigger problem is the electricity secondary effect can get outright silly. Defiance EX shocker... never leave home w/o it!


Overall, AP half seems a little overpowered, until I stop and think how easy it is to work up an armor rating of 20 or even 30 dice. And that's just impressions mind you. I kind of wonder if the game would be better if it was a little less granular and even 1 point of armor was a big deal only scaling up to say 10 or so (reflecting that most metas only have 9 to 11 boxes). There's not a lot of room at the low end for high level fixed AP mods, but at the high end... ap half can easily be 10+. Maybe they need more rounds w/ varying percentage of AP's... like replace each point of AP with 10%... EG: APDS -40%, Exex, -10%. A little bit more math, but it might work better given how often armor ratings can swing from close to nothing to so much, that pretty much nothing won't stage down to stun (and you stand a good chance of soaking most of the damage even from a direct 'nade' or rocket hit).

Increased granularity is a problem in a system with only d6's. You're always limited to addition and subtraction more or less, when you start doing percentages it starts to slow down the game for very little benefit. A percentage AP mod wouldn't make sense, either. Say your ammo can penetrate 3" of steel. Now you're trying to shoot through 6" of steel, and 9" of steel. It can still only penetrate 3", it's not some dedicated percentage of the steel. Your system would have ammo pierce more the more armor was there, and that just doesn't make sense. At least, it doesn't make sense for conventional ammo. For elemental damage it makes more sense, we're not saying that the more armor you wear the more effective it is, we're simply saying that all armor is half as effective as normal. That might actually be consistent with how electricity and fire work IRL. But bullets pierce a certain amount of armor, then they're done, it doesn't scale based on what they hit.

You know, there's a whole separate question here: is mundane electrical damage a "normal weapon"? If the electricity is a magically spawned elemental effect, it's still mana duplicating electricity. But if it's "normal" wouldn't the electrical value ALSO have to exceed the spirit's force (since the round halves impact)? Just me throwing out an idea that's been bothering me for a while about the whole bloody SnS vs. Spirits debate.
Same thing applies to fire and so on: can a spirit walk through a curtain of flame if the fire's base DV < Spirit's Force?

There might be a quick and dirty solution to the combination of Hardened and non Hardened armors.

Apart from exceptions, you may only wear 1 piece of armor, so you will always wear only 1 piece that does not say it can stack with others. Just call this your main armor. Your armor is hardened iff your main armor is.

I haven't really thought about the balance of it, though.

Yes. Sadly

Sadly? I'm delighted! In all these discussions, only once (above) have I seen mention that the DV of the SnS has to exceed the Spirit's force or it's wasted! I think the whole idea is nonsense. You only need to get up to DV 11 to hurt a Force 5 spirit (lowest level at which SnS will work now). A Heavy Pistol is DV 5, Pen -1. So as few as 5 net hits (yes, I said few) would theoretically do the trick without special ammo. I have always believed spirits should be exotic, special and relatively tough - not magical drones. If a force 6+ spirit materializes, it shouldn't he a hum-drum occurance. And a clip full of taser rounds shouldn't make it puff into mana-bunnies.

You lost me.

SnS only works on up to about Force 7, maybe 8, depending on your dice pools.

Anything 5 and under you can take care of with regular ammo.

it's an assumed fact if you're discussing the spirit's hardened armor being halved, and this being a useful thing, that the spirit is indeed assumed to have hardened armor in the first place. since the only source of hardened armor the spirit even has is from immunity to normal weapons, it would be a moot point to discuss how the spirit's hardened armor interacts with stick-n-shock rounds if the electrical damage did not count as normal damage.

that being said, magically created fire/electricity/etc is apparently different, btw, as it bypasses immunity to normal weapons. as do critter powers (just throw an angry cat at them... in a pinch, a cat that wasn't angry until you threw it at a spirit will do, since officially natural weapon bypasses ItNW)

also, stick-n-shock can deal with higher force, it just requires more net hits. if you want to go up to force 9 with ease, the defiance ex-shocker is the best (readily available and non-forbidden) choice. if you can go completely nuts, of course, then you want to get yourself a gauss rifle. which has the handy added feature of being able to damage just about everything.

My latest character is not summoning focused and I can reliably summon a force 8 spirit. Its not even hard. Without stick and shock 1/2ing the armor I'd walk over anything that didn't have magical support or really heavy weapons. In a game a player summoning exotic is cool, summoning indestructible juggernauts of destruction is not.

People who aren't mages occasioanlly want to play too.

That was what I meant by mana duplicating an element but still being mana.


Wasn't there an earlier thread (that didn't reach a consensus) about whether taser-type rounds damage could actually be staged up or not? One side said "limited peak discharge" while the other said "Taser to the pills FTW!" IIRC. I personally fall into the first set and so does my current group.

And your comment about the cat (excellent point, incidentally) brings me back to the question of if Fire/Electricity in their primal forms are "natural". If so, then the SnS really WOULD be a spirit killer, because it WOULDN'T get the ItNW at all, and only have HALF it's force for armor.

Summoning Force 8 spirits is "easy"? And you can do it "reliably" on the fly? How many hits does the spirit get on the summoning test? How much drain do you usually wind up taking? Force 8 for a starting runner should be HUGE. If you're pulling them off routinely without drain and they aren't your focus, you've GOT to be higher level, and by a good margin.
A force 8 spirit will usually on average force you to resist Drain 6, and with maxed stats and a +2 Power focus, you could expect to take 1-2S damage. If summoning isn't your focus, you probably would have skill 4 or less, and 6+2 magic, 12 dice. That's an average of 4 hits vs the spirit's average of just under 3, so you usually are trading 1 service off a Force 8 spirit for 2 stun damage? And that's "not even hard"? Sorry, I guess my definition of "hard" is different. If I am taking ANY drain damage, it means my character is working for it. That's the point. As a player, we can determine that's no big deal, it's just stun. To the CHARACTER it's a blistering migraine headache. And if you're overcasting to get the spirit, it's even worse, because now those points are actual damage - as bad as being shot with a light pistol while wearing light body armor.
"Easy" for a non-focused starting mage is drain stats both at 5, and a magic of 6 power focus not above a 2. That means to "guarantee" no drain on average my best spirit is going to be force 5. Normal weapons can take them down. And my summoning test will give me (probably, if my CHA is at 5 as well) 2 services.
I understand what you're trying to say, but spirits just aren't as easy as some people make them out to be, or I just take the whole thing a lot more seriously from an in-character perspective. To really summon force 8 spirits "easily" you would need to be able to get your drain resistance up to 24 so you could afford to "buy" the hits, or at least 18. How you do THAT without huge mojo fetishes and high level initation is beyond me. By that point, your stats are high enough that the summoning test is a breeze anyhow.
Again: if I can't do it without normally taking drain, it's not "easy".

The biggest problem with summoning force 8 spirits is that eventually the GM roll 6 or more hits and you'll have to resist 12P damage without armor and probably just explode. Your maximum realistic drainpool is 5 + 5 + 3 (stat, stat + summoning focus) so you could literally die right there with a poor soak roll.

It's a 9% chance of taking 10P damage, so how good exactly is your soak pool?

I wouldn't really call that maximum realistic drainpool, not for logic traditions anyway, considering the relative cheapness of Cerepral Booster.

Obviously there's no reason to mention that you can't stage up electricity damage, since it's not explicitly stated in the books. Not that anyone would listen even if it was. It only has a specific amount (rating of say... 6) of electricity stored in it. By rolling your dice, you can't make there be more electricity.

"Immunity to Normal Weapons: This immunity applies to all weapons that are not magical" If you really think your SnS ammo is magical, i think we have bigger issues.

Even if you think that you can shoot your SnS round 'better' to do more damage (you can't), your sammy doesn't know where the 'waek spots' on a spirit are anyway (it doesn't have any as the form it takes is meaningless and they all look different depending on how they were summoned).

And sure, it'll take out force 1 or 2 spirits easily. I mean, not in 1 shot or anything, but easily enough. But then again, so would a troll with a flyswatter.

Also: *agrees that Force 8 spirits are not easy to summon*
Also Also: Does everyone who plays a 4th mage take a power focus? They're mentioned alot, so I was just curious.

Someone's never peed on an electric fence.

Or licked a 9V battery.

Electric fences have much more electric potential than one SnS round. Licking a 9volt battery shows a good example of non-conductive armor rules. Hell, if you even wanted to say they do a bit extra damage to water elementals, or anyone covered in water, I'd be fine with that.

Funny story though, I did once sit on an (unlabeled) electric fence. But no, i haven't peed on one as I'm not an idiot. Either way, that is simply saying that piss is a conductor, not that SnS rounds do more damage because you rolled more successes.

Since I am his GM, I can answer this from my side.

0. Charisma 7 folks. Elves, over powered and abusive from this GMs point of view.
1. I kick his hoop 2 out of three attempts. His mage takes 1-4 boxes of damage, after Resisting Drain. The Medic then patches up the damage (/me shakes an angry fist in the air).
2. They rarely summon on the fly, why would anyone want to? They summon before they go somewhere. Often the medic is standing next to a medic drone just outside the circle. Just in case things get nasty. They bind during any downtime and the usually only bind Force 5. On the fly, they would just (ab)use Edge
3. Last sessions I got 4 successes out of 8 dice, three times in a row? or was it four Killfist? I got 5 on the poor human shark shaman, dude folded like Origami.
4. Due to his elven nature and charisma based school, he has 12 dice against drain. He may also have one of those foci but I thought in SR4A they no longer applied to drain. I could be wrong. However on 12 dice, he routinely gets 4 successes. That should not shock anyone. All he needs to do is lower damage to 4 boxes, the skill rating of First Aid possessed by the medic.

For Sprites its worse. Not only can the medic wipe off Level boxes but the mages can then heal whatever is left. The only limit on Sprite Summoning is what will kill you. This makes our Troll TM a giant battery for Fading damage, but his Rating 9 Crack sprites are something to behold.