Even Better when you add ritual magic to the list and can use that 35-40 seconds to take over someone, anyone.

oh yes and the average person knows this, they know ALL the ins and outs of magic and can make a logical unemotional decision when stressed...

(Emphasis mine) I was unaware that everyone had 40k (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) to toss on an animal (much less a Restricted one with Availability 14), and I didn't know that all shopkeepers only had Force 4 Wards.

The QFT probably wasn't strictly necessary.

Anyhow...alright, further checking shows that yes, it is highly noticeable. So, there is that going. at least the bad guys raping your mind will be something you can notice. Which still isn't going to help the public perception of them. Admittedly, gameplay wise, its does make the spell weaker.

As for the optimistic future of humanity: Despite the world's ability survive several drastic events, that has not naturally made humanity (or metahumanity) any less prone to fear mongering. I believe one of the recent articles of fluff was that technomancers created a mass population scare not so long ago, just on the concept that they were "different" and could do with their mind what a script kiddy could do with 50,000 worth of gear and agents/programs. Metahumans still remember the night of rage in Seattle, and the Brackhaven administration pretty much won on a "them trolls/elves/dwarves/orks is not like us normal folk, and they need a tight leash on them." In the entertainment industry, elves are portrayed as sinister, arrogant, scheming bastards using forces beyond the ken of humans or the ravishingly beautiful rebel-daughter of a similar parent, who will become the protagonists supporting female after he corrects her in human virtues. Orks play the roles of the faceless mooks, with the exception of the ones that break from the "bad' way of being orky to help the protagonists out. Lots of metas are still corralled by dint of economic and social policy into the ghettos. The cops hassle orks just because. Most Trolls have to work manual labor and low grade security. Elves are the classic public concept of "that rich arrogant guy" taken to extremes.

And all of that is from the core book.

So, while humanity may not be going apocalyptic over these events, there is still a definite trade in fear mongering and "different = bad until proven otherwise." And you can definitely expect that when you start passing into the realm of invasion of the sanctity of the mind, different is going to be seen as moving from bad to plain evil. People can understand 'guy shoots me, I die" even if its a fireball or a manabolt. They are inundated with that basic rule through media or life daily, and have 6000 years of playing by those rules. That's just a thug. But mind control? Wooah, hold on nelly...that's the stuff of horror films. Despite what the laws and punishments may be, if you want to show someone is real bastard in a movie, even circa 2010, you don't just have him kill someone. You have him mess with their head in a personal way that is disturbing un-normal. That's the difference between hannibal lecter and "some bad guy from die hard who shot the hostage."


Some of the most telling lines about public perception of magic in the core book (page 40, john q public) are present in the part where they say that people have hatred and and fear because of things like "astral snooping and mind control" and that there is increasing pressure to regulate and monitor spells especially those "related to combat or anything to do with the mind." There is also substantial writing in the same two paragraphs about superstition and paranoia, as well as religious opposition and qualification concerning magic that indicate that by and large there is still plenty of social fear of mages in general.

So, in summary, you have a world that is still definitively subject to fear and suspicion, especially of outsiders (despite, or possibly because of, the events so far), is canonically conerned with mages, and counts mind control as right up there with, if not worse than, attempted murder. You can bet your ass that if a mage leaves any trace of mental manipulation, he is in for a more serious response than a similar mundane approach.

I believe it is now. Very well said.

Actually I'd be more surprised they know that it was that animal that caused their wards to go down.

If you're willing to tolerate giving them several hours warning, and hope they don't go step into a decent background count or something.

double post.

I'd be shocked if they actually had force 4 wards to begin wtih. I'd be expecting force 2-3, as putting them up is actually kinda expensive. Unless you're running a very high end shop....

"these are not he droids you're looking for"

Spoken by the most evil character in the film... oh no wait, the most evil character just killed people, the good guys were the ones messing with people's minds.



It would be at best premeditated assault, and even that is questionable, as presently assault requires the application of some level of physical force. Also its no harder to track an uncleaned mannaball then it is an uncleaned mind probe, or control thoughts.

Ward trips, mage is alerted, mage sends bound spirit to investigate and report back. Bound spirit shows up, and sees background count of some sort off center around a given customer, and works out the customer isn't the one makeing it. Spirit reports back, mage calls store owner, store owner looks at tapes, at the time index indicated, and see's a lizard on the person in question, forwards a copy to the mage, or other paranormal expert, because the ward was insured, and the insurance company wants to know why they are paying. The creature is identified. The individual who brought it in is sued by the insurance company to recover losses, and that person's sin is also checked to see if proper permits for such an animal are in place. if they are not, that information is forwarded to Lonestar, and charges are laid.....

You'd better REALLY want that lizard.

The 'most evil' person in those films also lied, manipulated, and deceived his way into engineering a war that killed millions, simply so he could seize power. I'm fairly certain this involved more than a few Mind Tricks.

But you also make my point. In the Star Wars universe, the Jedi ability to influence minds is feared and hated by quite a large percentage of the non-Force using population.

There are huge swaths of the Star Wars historical timeline where Jedi are actively hunted or shunned, and not really because they swing lightsabers. It's the Mind Trick that people get all up in arms about.

Fear and suspicion are not rational or logical. The fact that a Manabolt is more effective and less costly drain-wise is irrelevant to this.



-k

A couple things to think about:

There should be a difference made between influence and control thoughts. If done right influence won't even be noticed.

You could even drug the guys you controlled thoughts on and good luck having them remember it (though with image links that becomes a bit harder if they do a play back).

From our perspective we are talking about things that are not possible and drives a horror into all of us. It could be different from their perspective as mental manipulations have been around for 40 years and if anything the human animal is adaptable (though playing on fears a time honored tradition of anyone wanting power over them).

With the invention of siemse/BTL the idea that your mind is a safe haven "may" not be as much as a big deal. Since if you slot a chip, there is a very real if unlikely chance that it does the same thing as the spells we are talking about.

Also people need to consider how much data is just floating around with AR. Pretty much your entire life could be put on display for anyone that is good at digging out information. How would this affect opinions of it?

400 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) is a R4 Ward that'll last for weeks - probably over a month. Not really that expensive at all unless you're a mom-and-pop store, which generally don't even exist in the Sixth World.

Do you bring up asinine problems like that for everyone who considers Astral Hazing? What about cyberzombies in your world? Do they get picked up by corporate radar the second they touch a street corner too?

EDIT: Heck, with the relatively low cost of Wards I'd think there'd be a savings reward from your insurance company for having one in place - like getting security cameras and other things of that nature these days.

Do you ask stupid counter questions each time someone says something you disagree with?

As for a cyberzombie anyone with any form of awakening is going to have a bad feeling with that kind of stuff anywhere near them due to background count, the psychic stink coming off one of them is almost palpable to a non awakened.


I would also point out that your drastically under pricing a ward considering a mage can and will charge a packet for that kind of always on quick response security

First off, don't immediately jump to personal attacks. It's unbecoming.

Secondly:

So, considering it takes one hour per point of force, a mage would charge 400 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) for a F4 Ward. That's straight from the book.

And lastly, it's not a good idea to close your argument with a sentence fragment that makes virtually no sense.

No, but I also don't argue for wards to be a ubiquitous as many people on dumpshock do. Anyone with astral hazing should crash the vast majority of the wards they walk through, as most will be force 3 or less, ie average magic score or less.

Suppose that's an option, if the meet isn't in a public place like 95% of meets are. But then again, a drone really isn't that hard of a thing to deal with.

Yeah, consider that a mundane would more or less need to guess at random the right place to take the picture, and even if the mundane did manage to get the picture (Okay, maybe not so hard, likely a good idea of the right room at least) you still need a mage to be able to identify the signature at all. So, back to "magic must defeat magic"

Okay, so, the fact that "Mage" automatically equals "Enemy's most dangerous weapon" doesn't raise some "Mages are overpowered" alarm bells? You're claiming that mages aren't overpowered because mages are targeted first because mages are automatically the most powerful opposition.

And for all the other arguments I've seen about 'oh, you can drop them easier with stunbolt' you're thinking far too limited. Control someone, and you haven't just gotten rid of an enemy, you've gained an ally. Suddenly the corp sec guy can be ordered to send the reinforcements to the opposite side of the building. Suddenly the firewatch guy that you controlled can open up full auto on his buddies that are taking cover with him. Get the corp sec guy to call the spider and open some doors without raising alarms. So, it has more combat options than a stunbolt, and far more out of combat options. Sure, you pay for it with a bit higher drain, but that's the way things go. You don't see sammies not buying good ammo because it costs more than regular ammo.

Re: OP Mages.

Yes, mages are OP. And they are meant to be. Pretty much every bit of canon references exactly how awesome mages are. And how uncommon they are. So, by the creators' definition, they are meant to be OP.

As a story-driven PnP game, shadowrun does not inherently have to deliver class balance, because the players and the GM balance their own game. Unless your playing a dps vs hp game where everything is specifically tailored to keeping the classes precisely even or precisely mutually supporting, the likelihood of everything being balanced is pretty low to begin with. And frankly, anyone who can conjure raw spitting death, draw out the very spirits of things, travel to different planes of existence, and a million other things leaps and bounds beyond the capabilities of technology through extension of their living will IS going to be overpowered in any game where the freedom to act beyond narrow mechanical confines is allowed.

Which is why it falls to the GM to make sure he has appropriate responses. Because you can damn sure bet the CEOs, heads of security, Mr. Js, law enforcement, fixers, and just about anybody who's anybody on a shadowrun is going to take specific precautions against these individuals who they KNOW are devastatingly OP. There's every reason to believe that the mundane world has spent copious amounts of time and nuyen to try and find a way to negate the Awakened. That can be as simple as "if any enemy magic is detected, all gloves are off...go ahead and toss the grenades in" or elaborate partnered over watch schemes with backups and failsafes.

So the argument has changed from 'Mages aren't overpowered' to 'of course they're overpowered, balance is impossible and mages should be awesome.'

*shrug* Don't really know how to respond. I suppose if you're okay with a lack of balance, then there really isn't much point talking about balance.

Nice to know that our ruleset released in 2005 has the same level of sophistication as a game released in 1979. Hooray!

That's what we like to call progress my friend. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Edit: As we all know, rules have to evolve to improve, and as we also know, evolution takes millions of years, and there is almost no detectable change between a few generations. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Sometimes I wonder if that what things like astral hazing are about. They know it is unbalanced so they try to patch it with crap like that, instead of fixing the core problems.



Sure maybe, but at the same time balance can be taken too far. Don't balance out all the uniqueness of a game while you try to make things balanced. Still there are a ton of areas SR4 could have worked on to better balance the game while keeping the unique flavor of the archtypes.

Its not so much "No one should care about balance" as an admission that there is no, and probably should not be according to the IP, mechanical way to bring mages back down into the realm of balanced.

So, turn the fluff aspects of the IP that make them mechanically imbalanced into their actual balancing act. Simply put, let that unique set of godlike powers bring the appropriate attention, wariness, and fear that it deserves. Of course, that requires flexible, intuitive, and creative adaptation, and cannot be defined by a threshold test or a specific skill. Fortunately, by being a PnP, SR is posied to allow this through virtue of there being a GM.

My favrite use so far was to clear out a R&D room we needed to jack something from by making all the researchers think they needed to go to the bathroom.