Trying to figure out how magic attacks work, and am wondering if I'm missing a step. SR4a pp. 183-184 stat that the attack is an opposed roll between the casters Spellcasting+Magic vs. the defender's Body or Will (as appropriate). Net successes are then added to the base damage. The question, though, is: does the defender then get to roll body or will again to "soak" the damage, like the victim of a gun shot gets to roll armor+body after the to-hit roll, or is the damage just applied directly.

So if I had a spell with base damage 5S, and the caster got one net success, the DV would be 6S. Does the defender just take six boxes of stun damage, or does he now get to roll Will to resist some of it?

Thanks.

Nope. One roll.

And, at least as I understand it, its rolled as an opposed check instead of just a casting and then a soak check because if the defender reduces the caster to zero net hits then there is no affect.

For example:

A force 5 Stunbolt is cast with 2 hits and the target gets 2 hits on their Willpower roll leaving zero net hits. This results in no affect on the target (the caster must still deal with drain). If it was a casting roll then a soak roll, the above example would have still resulted in 5S damage to the target.

Did I get that right, or have I been doing something wrong?

Basically because the caster has to deal with drain, it has less ways to deal with the damage.

Plus, there is also counterspelling, and the target can spend Edge to resist the spell.

Yup, no damage resistance test. Use stun spells and cast at force 9 you probably wont suffer much drain if any and 1 net success equals an unconscious foe. And in most cases you will be rolling more dice than your target so you will usually get 1 success.

Yep, stunbolts are fairly broken like that.

By the same token, so a focused burst from an compensated SMG using stick n shock.

At least then the person gets dodge skill, cover, and armor.

And don't say "Well, the person against the mage could get counterspelling." because it isn't universally available like dodge, cover, and armor are.

But how many shadowrunner teams do you see without counterspelling?

How many targets of shadowrunner teams do you see without counterspelling?

Which is more my point. Yes, every runner team includes a mage with a 4 in counterspelling, but not everything that team attacks has a mage backing them up, but most everything they attack (That is worth the bother of picking up any dice) will have a dodge skill and amor. And there will almost always be cover to get behind.

My other point is that it is like playing a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors where you can pick Rock which beats Scissors, Scissors which beats Paper, Paper which beats Rock, or Volcano which beats all three of them. Which do you pick?

If you don't mind my replacing "volcano" with "nuke" then...

Nuke incinerates rock, yes.
Nuke incinerates scissors, yes.
but Paper defines Nuke.

Wink, wink.

What about Lizard and Spoc?

Well, snake is a lizard, so it beats paper and loses to the others mentioned so far.
Spoc is an alien, so he beats nuke, rock, scissors, and snake.

Awesome...

Keep the Faith

It's all here.

Awesome Draco18s.... I needed a good laugh...

Keep the Faith

Anytime.

RPS-25 isn't the only "extended rock-paper-scissors" but its the only one I can find now. The same guy did a 15, a 17, and I thought he was working on a 99.

Oh wait. Here it is, RPS-101.

Totally Crazy... Thanks

Keep the Faith

The big difference to me is a vanilla mage is doing the one shot drop action with stun bolt, where as you have to really build towards it to get the same level of guaranteed success with a Sam. The Sams targets get just a lot more defensive rolling so you have to overkill it more than you do as a mage. Take the focused burst with stick and shock. Base damage 6 up 6 shot burst kick it up to 11 damage with what 3 net successes=14 damage. Even with 1/2 armor and body I have a decent chance to be standing on a lot of targets. Not a great chance or an average chance but decent. And with cover and dodge, 3 net successes isn't easy. All the mage was dealing with is cover, and he only needed 1 net success. Sure I can build a Sam so 3 net successes or more is easy, but I can also build a mage who can 2 shot citymasters with powerbolts, and they don't get counterspelling vs that.

I think at each level of rules manipulation from vanilla to breaking the system the mage is just more of an unstoppable force. He may be easier to kill in some cases or harder to kill in others, it is probably harder to be the full package of both destruction and hard to kill as a mage, but I guess as Karoline put it as a mage you are more frequently choosing volcano.

Now sure when attacking super secure facilities they can have defenses that make it hard on the mage, harder than the sam will face. And there are outside complications that effect a mage more than a sam, there aren't dead kick ass zones, but there are effectively dead magic zones. To me it seems like the blunt hammer approach though to fixing a rules mistake. Hey we made the mage too powerful so hit him with these rules so he gets nerfed, like totally all facilities are aspected against the mage so he drops X dice and magic power etc. Things like magic which are a fairly core thing to the game should balance out on there own and you use aspected areas, background count etc to add an extra challenge not to nerf the mage and bring him back in line with the rest of the team. It just seems to me it requires a much higher level of rules mastery to keep magic balanced with the rest of the team, and that seems off to me.

I don't know, both can be created right out of Character Creation... and both really need to build to do so... The mage will not be doing it with just a Magic of 3 and Spellcasting of 3, and the Street Sam won't probably be doing so with Agility 3 and Firearms 3... they need to build for that level of capability... and a Mage Capable of constantly One-Shotting opposition is not a Vanilla Mage in my opinion... and lets not forget witholding dice for the extra damage (now 18 DV). All soaked with 1/2 Impact + Body and a secondary effect that has to be adjudicated against living targets (and that WILL have a definite effect regardless of whether the victim avoids the worst of it...

As for the 2-Shotting Vehicles, you still have the OR to consider... and besides, a comparable Sam can do the same with HIgh end weaponry that costs no actual Karma to obtain...

Keeps the Faith

Personally, I think standard spellcasting is fairly balanced. The biggest culprit, game balance-wise (at least to me) seems to be overcasting. It adds some flavor for a desperate mage to be able to channel an extra-awesome blast of magical energy at the cost of injuring himself. Unfortunately, for some spell/mage build combos, the mage can overcast all day and soak the Drain.

I would house rule overcasting Drain to go up by one per point of Force over the mage's Magic, rather than the normal half Force calculation. That would make it still doable, but riskier, as it should be. On the other hand, I would also tend to use things like background counts far less.

You also forgot that casting is a complex action. Where the caster would have to overcast or double-cast to reach 12 damage. Mr Street Sam can just double-tap with his two simple actions to shoot those stick and shocks, or worse: burst fire.

Shadowrun is a game of glass cannons, and in that sense mages are on par with other characters. What some people are objecting to (and there is some merit to the argument) is that magic can generally only be countered by magic. Unless you have a SURGED gnome with astral hazing, that is. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

While I don't disagree, I think magic is not as overpowered as it was in SR3, where mundanes didn't have Edge to defend themselves with, counterspelling was less common (since mages had to apportion it out of their overall dice pool), and mages could one-shot kill with relative impunity.