Newbie Question about Spell Force Levels, How high of a force do I need? Options

[S7Michelle]

[Ol' Scratch]

A Spatial Recognizer would be more economical and provide better results than a Select Sound Filter. It lowers your target number for Perception Tests instead of just granting a few extra dice. I wouldn't really worry about either, though. Even though I usually take one or the other myself when I can, they rarely seem to come up on most runse ven though they seem like they should come up more often...

Actually, if you want a really nice suite, consider going with a Synthetic Cyberforearm. That gives you 2 ECU to use, which you can use to install a Direct Neural Interface (0.25 ECU), a Pocket Secretary (1.00 ECU), and 1,000 Mp of Storage Memory (0.50 ECU). That's a total of 0.75 Essence and 65,500 nuyen, or 0.6 Essence and 131,000 nuyen if you go with Alpha. The latter leaves you with enough room for a Datajack, a Knowsoft Link, and an Image Link if you take them all as Alpha as well (0.4 Essence and 11,200 nuyen). Your Datajack will not only function as a Datajack, but as a Router connecting everything together for a seamless integration, and all for 1.00 Essence exactly.

The Pocket Secretary is the real boon here, as it includes a recording device, a low-light camera, 100 MP of Active Memory, and a host of other advantages. As an Alpha implant, your hand is also difficult to detect due to its relatively high Concealability, not that it would matter since both it and everything inside it are all perfectly legal.

Also, if 1,000 Mp is way more memory than you'll need to store images or recordings, you can replace it instead of an External Transducer in the arm which will give you "telepathic" control over the Pocket Secretary. This, in term, lets you talk, listen, take notes, and otherwise have full communication abilities with absolutely no outside signs.

That said, having Treat as an Exclusive spell has never been an issue for me in all the years I've played, and I do typically play magician characters. If a situation is too dire for you to drop some other spell you may be sustaining (as opposed to having a Sustaining Focus sustaining), then healing whoever it is you want to heal is going to prove fruitless, too. Especially if they're in such dire sttraights that you need to heal them anyway.

Makeover and Healthy Glow never need to go over Force 1, really. They provide no real benefits at higher force as they're neither resisted nor have their effects determined by Force (only successes in the former's case). Fashion can benefit from being a higher Force as you can only affect Armor with a Rating equal to the Force of the Fashion spell +1 per two successes on the Spellcasting Test (if memory serves).

Just a few more things to consider.

[Eyeless Blond]

The Catalog spell, combined with your pocket secretary and a datajack for really fast data entry, can help you "scan" an area remarkably quickly. Say you're in a warehouse and can't find an inventory telling you where all the Farlight Excaliburs are kept; just cast this spell and make several "scans" of the area. Since you only pick up things inside the spell's radius, you can play a game of "hot and cold" to find anything in the area, much more quickly than it would take to physically open everything.

[Edward]

Catalog will be useful any time you walk into a room and what to know everything that is in it, right down to the number of strands in the bin under the shredder, it will also confirm or deny the presence of a hard to locate target item within its aria or tell you if the 6 disks you have found are actually all there is to find.

I likely wouldn’t take the cyber arm for the same reason you didn’t take the cyber eye, psychologically it is something very significant to give up, especially for a mage.

Another way to achieve unobtrusive mental access to your pocket secretary (and thus its data and phone capabilities) is to modify it to include a transducer and sub dermal data jack receiver, then implant into yourself a sub dermal data jack located on your waist, just where you will clip the pocket secretary.

Edward

[Angelone]

Sterilize is a very handy spell. It basically is a cleaning spell, if you and your friends get shot up and don't want anyone to track you ritually cast sterilize and presto no more ritual links.

[Ol' Scratch]

Or you could just pull a Boondock Saints and bring along a tiny squirt bottle (or splash grenade) of Ammonia.

[Angelone]

Yeah, but you'd have to bring more gear. Which could get damaged. Spells handier.

[Cain]

[Johnnycache]

My only advice is that over-limiting your initial spells is a little over-rated. The extra spell or two it will get you, you could make up in a single session, if it's a good haul.

I'd say you'd want one offensive, one defensive, and one 'utility' spell (like magic fingers or levitate) known without limits, simply so they will work if someone takes all your gear, you wake up suddenly with a ninja hopping your window sill, or you fall from a pier, or get caught in a blast that ruins some of your things, etc.

Our home rule is that you can only take the 0pts spells if they are fairly inconsequential things, like Healthy Glow or Trid Entertainment - my GM (and me when I gm) talked it out and decided it was a little dumb for an SR mage to be able to blow a heli out of the sky but not light a cigar, but it'd be lame to just take every spell at low levels. I wouldn't get crazy 0pting - if you do it too much, your GM will probably ban it :)) Good freebee ideas: Oxygenate, Light, Translate, Magic Fingers, Night Vision f1, Nutrition, fast, Intox and Detox (my hedonist Advesary Shaman has both of these so he can flip it on and off like a switch)

Three things I didn't see mentioned much: Improve Body, Combat Sense (or Deflect, the ranged only version), and Improve Aim (I think that's what it's called) are three spells that can be great at the right time. If your mage has a 2 or 3 body, a force 6 improve body will probably give you 5-6 points of body with no problems, leaving most or all of your spell pool to toss the drain off - that can be important as by the strict RAW, all the armor in the world won't save a character with a two body from a few SMG bursts. (2S resisted with two dice is still gonna leave a mark, and the dude can shoot twice a pass) Combat sense/deflect gives you more combat pool dice, which are obviously groovy, and Improve Aim gives you more dice for shooting other weapons. Deflect in particular, at about 4 force or with a drain limit, will give you a good number of extra dice (3-4 CP dice is a lot) with a good chance to take no drain. These spells are good for stealthy, alternate defense when sammi-speed and glowing force fields aren't kosher, and are also good spells to actually cast on other characters.

Also, the lowly "fling" and "magic fingers" spells can be the worst thing in the game - if used in concert with a 30 yen AP grenade.

[Cain]

[Ol' Scratch]

[Johnnycache]

I used stunball last night.

GM:"They're all running upstairs and barricading themselves in one room"
Me(smiling dopey grin):"What, really?"

I will attest to one thing-it's better to use stunball and not take any drain, because if you knock them out, they can be just as dead a few throat cuttings later.

[Edward]

The advantage of the ammonia over the sterilise spell is that if they get a mage to asense the aria within (force) hours they will be able to uniquely identify you.

[quote = Cain]
If you use Fashion and Makeover, it takes a base of 15 combat turns each, or 30 seconds. You can reduce this time with additional successes. It then takes one complex action per level of force to erase your astral signature. All told, you can make a complete switchover in less than two minutes. If you only use one spell, you can pull it off in less than 30 seconds.
[/quote]
If you have the time to do this then what is the other spell you can not afford to drop to do so. If you had any others running that would risk blowing your cover to an astral mage as much as physical mask would thus with no other spells to consider the same procedure can be undertaken using exclusive versions of the spell.

Improved body (and other improve stat spells) are in my opinion only good if you have a sustaining focus and have it active almost all of the time, you need to think carefully if you want to do this. As a force 6 focus for increase body would be half of your safe allotment, and exceeding that allotment is a very fast way to burn out.

Edward

[Ol' Scratch]

I have never, in all my years of playing (predominately magicians), ever taken an Improved [Attribute] spell. Ever. They're too much of a liability and pain for a runner, especially if you get it Quickened. It particularly messes with your ability to use Masking to its fullest advantage, and Masking is arguably one of the most important and useful metamagic techniques for a shadowrunner.

[Edward]

If you go the rout of quickening then improved attribute spells are worth getting, once you cross that line you may as well get all you can afford as you have given up on hiding that you are magically augmented and having something at a high force means you may be able to use it to break wards.

Edward

[Ol' Scratch]

Yeah, and then you just have to pray really, really hard that you never ever encounter an astral ward or other barrier because the only way to get through will be to break it, and that means you just tripped the magical alarm. So now not only are you a shining beacon, but you're a liability on any kind of stealth runs whatsoever.

Not exactly the thing a professional runner/detective/whatever wants to do, yanno.

[Cain]

[Johnnycache]

Fashion is a really under-rated spell til your GM decides to start enforcing all those silly "weapons and armor in public" rules...

[Johnnycache]

[noname_hero]

A few more ideas:

Manabolt
This one lets you attack about anything you might encounter in the astral with a ranged attack. Get it at force 5 or 6, it is a combat spell and as others have said you need those at high force.

Smoke Ball or Water Ball
Get one of these, or a similar area-effect elemental manipulation. Stuns your opponents, meaning you don't have to kill them, lets you attack targets you can't see, and the base TN is 4 regardless of the targets' Will or Bod.

Create Food
IMO better than Nutrition, especially if your GM lets you use extra successes to improve the taste. Most GMs do, at least if you have a Cooking skill.

Fix
*Very* useful spell. Most of the time you can have it Exclusive limited, and the time and money it can save you means that learning it is really worth the point cost. Just don't forget the spell's limitations.

[Aardvark892]

Doctor Funkenstein,

Great info for a newbie mage. Made me think that Dumpshock should add a whole new board called, you guessed it, Magiknet. Those of us that primarily play mages, such as myself, would really get a lot out of a magic-stuff only board.

Thanks!

Tim

[Ol' Scratch]

Oh, cool, glad you liked it. :)

[tisoz]

[Johnnycache]

Well, my dm doesn't want me to self initiate, so I don't get to learn metamagic until I find a guiding force of some kind in game - and the two effects stack, don't they?

But that brings up an interesting question: What is a "Spirit" for purposes of channeling? Elementals seem like a no brainer, but what about other spirits, and most importantly for my character's style factor, bound ghosts or spectres. . . also, can you repeatedly channel a spirt you've bound with it's true name or ghost chain?

[Cain]

It has to be a spirit that owes you services. So, a bound Free Spirit or an Ally cannot be channeled, since they don't owe you services in the traditional sense. That also leaves out ghosts and spectres.