Summoner terrorism, the "single spirit theory": oswald summoned alone! Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Switch to: Outline Standard Switch to: Linear+

[shinryu]

i posted this in somewhat more fragmented form on the official boards, wherein i encountered great resistance from the infalliable rules hivemind*. since the saner players and freelancers seem to hang around here, i thought i'd throw it out and see if this bothers you guys as much as it does me.

disclaimer: this is not to do with anything but security and military implications of overpowered summoners. no actual endorsement of mass genocide is intended.

so, in 3e, your odds of summoning a force 12 spirit successfully and surviving are about 1 in 1000. other people have run the numbers on this board, but i think you can safely say they're between 25 and 50% depending on exact circumstances. while the sr3 force 12 spirit was definitely a worse deal since immunity was way powerful, there's a good argument that a force 12 spirit in 5e is basically the equivalent of a teleporting light armored vehicle you can undetectably smuggle with you almost anywhere you want.

oswald's really not the right assassin for this, as this tactic is most likely suicidal, so let's go with osama bin summinin. our plucky awakened terrorist reads from his own version of the koran where suicide tactics are totally permitted and dealing with the djinn is a valid method of jihad, and for whatever reason he decides he's going to kill a VIP giving a speech regardless of the cost. were he to attempt to suicide bomb the vip with actual bombs, he has to deal with chemsniffers and other excitement. drone and car attacks can be stopped with firepower and smart planning. i submit, however, that osama bin summinin's best bet for wiping the VIP if he doesn't care too much about survival is to summon the biggest spirit he can and tell it to sic balls on said VIP. assuming he can get close enough to get a look at the guy, he can do it, and there's not a single way to spot that he can do this for a mundane. if he's learned masking metamagics, even the awakened might have a problem.

again, i won't run the numbers on summoning this beast, but suffice to say the odds are indisputably better than 1 in 1000. if he successfully gets his murder-djinn, the summoner merely has to have one service to say "kill that guy" and security is in some deep, deep shit. they have about 3 IPs to do something about this: IP1, summon, IP2: command and manifest, IP3: kill. if security isn't right on the ball, they may not even react before their VIP is butchered like a hog.

physical security is a bit fucked anyway. with a 24+ defense dice pool, 24 hardened armor and between 6 and 12 automatic successes for damage resistance, they need to be able to hit this thing with massed grenades, assault cannon fire, or missiles to even annoy i. i submit this is not an optimal tactic under many circumstances. you could suicide bomb the thing with drones carrying explosives, and this is probably your best bet, but again may not always be viable. you can also shoot the summoner, if you know who he is. is that guy gritting his teeth in pain summoning something, or experiencing last night's delicious meal from stuffer shack? you want to guess and shoot him?

magical security ain't much better off. mages are going to have a bitch of a time banishing this nasty if they aren't themselves willing to take a big hit of drain, and they better get it right the first time before the spirit lets loose. he's fairly resistant to direct combat spells and can dodge indirect spells easily with a 24+ dice defense pool. any astral mana barrier that doesn't basically incapacitate the mage casting it is going to get disrupted simply by the spirit flying up to it, though it may provide visual cover. about the only viable tactic i can think of for defense is to have several other spirits there to try to gangbang this thing into submission from the astral, but that's iffy as well. it is going to be twice as powerful as most of them.

the killer spirit? well, it just needs to land one 24P engulf or elemental attack to pretty much put the VIP down in one. with 24 dice to attack, hard for it to miss and not do assloads of damage.

result: VIPs need massive, massive amounts of dedicated magical security to feel safe from these types of attacks. viable for actual presidents of countries and vice presidents in megacorps, probably less viable for other people with good reasons to be paranoid. i wouldn't leave my warded arcology without a magical bodyguard if this sort of thing could happen.

now, a not-normally suicidal summoner might try to pull this shit if, say, emotionally distraught, pushed too far, or in an otherwise no-win situation like the Red Samurai bearing down on his ass with a vengeance. since a force 12 isn't a virtual guarantee of explosive death by drain, he may find the win or die button his best choice, or he may not give a shit anymore.

result: law enforcement always, always has to assume a magical perp might summon a tank on a moment's notice. assault cannons and grenade launchers are standard issue weapons, since you have to assume you must go loaded for worst-case scenarios. beat cops probably regularly straight-up shoot street people dead if they blink at them funny. it's not "i thought he had a gun", it's "i thought he was casting" that gets knight errant off from the huge number of officer-involved murders of harmless homeless orks gone off their meds in the wrong part of town.

oh, hey, what if your terrorist or temporarily crazy summoner lets this thing loose in a mall, or in an airplane... oh shit. roll 1D6 x HTR response time and figure out how many people it can kill before people that can even start to hurt it show up, if they can (ok, astral response is faster, sure, but that's still on the order of minutes). i think that's a lot of people, yes.

result: pretty much everybody is kind of worried about this sort of thing if it happens, oh, ever.

historically, the shadowrun universe actually owes a great deal of its political order to an act of what would politely be called magical asymmetric warfare (less politely, magic 9/11) where a couple dozen shamans broke the back of the biggest military machine on the planet, killing themselves in the process of doing so. i cannot imagine that the threat of awakened fanatics unleashing tanks from the ether is not something that is taken very seriously by security experts, if not least for the ability to stoke the paranoia of the masses.

i leave the results to your imagination; suffice it to say that i'm a little surprised summoners aren't burned out with ware as soon as their abilities manifest in many places, let alone that there haven't been magical holocausts and constant shoot-on-sight pogroms against unregistered mages. it does, however, make a lot more sense why really important people live in mana voids like orbit,

am i missing something here? an easy security strategy that makes this less viable? i don't think "shortage of suicidal mages" works as a way out; hell, if you're a poor teenage conjurer in a magic-repressive culture like the middle east is described as, being raised by kindly strangers to go blow your brains out for god against infidels is probably one of the few viable career paths you have. plus the losing their goddamn mind or having nothing left to lose types of incidents. i think this is one of the reasons the easier high-force summoning rules cause serious setting problems for 5th edition on top of the game balance issues.

*not unique to the shadowrun boards. it seems like any official forum for anything is filled with prolific posters that defend their product to the death even if it's obviously flawed. doesn't seem to matter if it's a small issue or a giant problem, must defend product with forum lives. defense force assemble!

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Which is why you put in place controls to manage that sort of thing. Simple and easiest is the expenditure of Edge to resist the summoning, followed by an expenditure of Edge to resist Binding (the sweet spot for that expenditure will vary, depending upon who you talk to, I prefer Spirits of Force 4+ to do so). Simple, effective, and well within the rules, until someone decided that Mages were just not powerful enough. *sigh* I still weep for the future.

[Raiden]

If you MUST use the "spirit uses edge" shtick, (no offense to those who do, I personally do not like it, as a GM and as a player) make it if the force of said spirit is greater than summoners magic use it.
ways to deal with spirits in 5.
banishing a force 12 spirit is as follows in SR5 -mage rolls banishing, spritit rolls its force, say 12. 3-4 hits, mages banishing, 6 (yes if I make a mage they will have banishing 6 now as it is actually worth something finally)+magic 6+ lets say a power focus two. 14,4-5 hits, if he spends edge (which in SR5 where it refreshes with a good rest is easy) get about another 2 hits. or, instead of that, have a NPC mage summon a F15 spirit and kick the 12s ass. or just ask your players not to abuse the spirits to much.

[shinryu]

Which is why you put in place controls to manage that sort of thing. Simple and easiest is the expenditure of Edge to resist the summoning, followed by an expenditure of Edge to resist Binding (the sweet spot for that expenditure will vary, depending upon who you talk to, I prefer Spirits of Force 4+ to do so). Simple, effective, and well within the rules, until someone decided that Mages were just not powerful enough. *sigh* I still weep for the future.

yup. but even edge isn't really enough if the summoner spends his edge to keep this from being viable. with edge, i think a summoner with a drain pool of nine dice can expect* to survive (barely) summoning a force 12 using edge as well. hardly a 1 in 1000 chance like in the old days.

*force 12 using edge expects seven successes using rerolls for 14P damage. summoner rolls and rerolls nine dice with a point of edge and can expect five successes, taking 9P damage. he's in bad shape, sure, but in good enough shape to sic that force 12 spirit on his foes. he does need to be a good-ass summoner to get services, but specializaiton+foci+edge can give him enough dice to expect to win. by contrast, you had about 2% odds of a service and 1% chance of survival in 3rd ed with a conjuring of six and charisma of six. gets worse from there of course.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

If you MUST use the "spirit uses edge" shtick, (no offense to those who do, I personally do not like it, as a GM and as a player) make it if the force of said spirit is greater than summoners magic use it. banishing a force 12 spirit is as follows in SR5 -mage rolls banishing, spritit rolls its force, say 12. 3-4 hits, mages banishing, 6 (yes if I make a mage they will have banishing 6 now as it is actually worth something finally)+magic 6+ lets say a power focus two. 14,4-5 hits, if he spends edge (which in SR5 where it refreshes with a good rest is easy) get about another 2 hits. or, instead of that, have a NPC mage summon a F15 spirit and kick the 12s ass. or just ask your players not to abuse the spirits to much.

Never said a Spirit uses Edge to resist Banishing... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Sendaz]

The truth is anyone can be gotten anytime if one is dedicated enough to the task at hand.

The scenario you described no doubt has security is SR sweating in their sleep and you wouldn't even need to go crazy levels of Force to do it.

And that is just one lone summoner. Get a cabal going sending in a strike team of moderate force spirits and one is bound to get through.

How do you explain it not happening 24/7? It is a bit of hand wavism, sort of like being in a MMORPG where PVP is allowed in some zones but not others. Otherwise you get shot in the head the moment your character first spawns because some sick **** would be camping the spawn points if they could. A certain level of suspension of disbelief has to be taken to make the game work.

It is not a perfect answer or even a good one, but end of the day you have to think of what sort of campaign you want it to be.

[Raiden]

no no, I did not mean to imply that either. shoulda spaced those two separate thoughts apart.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

yup. but even edge isn't really enough if the summoner spends his edge to keep this from being viable. with edge, i think a summoner with a drain pool of nine dice can expect* to survive (barely) summoning a force 12 using edge as well. hardly a 1 in 1000 chance like in the old days.

*force 12 using edge expects seven successes using rerolls for 14P damage. summoner rolls and rerolls nine dice with a point of edge and can expect five successes, taking 9P damage. he's in bad shape, sure, but in good enough shape to sic that force 12 spirit on his foes. he does need to be a good-ass summoner to get services, but specializaiton+foci+edge can give him enough dice to expect to win. by contrast, you had about 2% odds of a service and 1% chance of survival in 3rd ed with a conjuring of six and charisma of six. gets worse from there of course.

Having seen a Force 5 Spirit inflict 20 points of Damage on a Summoner, I think you vastly underestimate the results (besides, having recently confronted a task using a 9dp, with +3 additional for Edge 3 because I really wanted to succeed; the result of 15 successes was freaking amazing; so you can imagine that having 24 Dice (force 12, with Edge 12, remember) rerolling 6's, well, you can kiss that mage goodbye), whether actual damage, or the psychological effect it would have just knowing you can indeed die, and die horribly. Besides, the sheer fact that the Spirit GETS TO RESIST WITH EDGE keeps that stupidity down to a very dull roar. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

[RHat]

... So, noone's allowed to honestly disagree with you, shinryu?

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

no no, I did not mean to imply that either. shoulda spaced those two separate thoughts apart.

Hey, no worries, assuming that was directed at me. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Erik Baird]

The biggest flaw I see with the scenario is that a shaman summoning a F12 spirit should have a very noticeable shamanic mask (unless that got nixed in 5th?) Identifying the caster would be very easy for security. It seems to me that the scenario would work better with a hermetic mage that had a F12 elemental on call.

Either way, it would be a nightmare scenario for any personal security detail.

[shinryu]

... So, noone's allowed to honestly disagree with you, shinryu?

well, i am right, so that is a problem for your argument. you have been polite in disagreeing, however, and i appreciate that.

politely, i did not see a counterargument that i have yet found convincing for this scenario. less politely, i got accused of advocating genocide by people who seem to reflexively defend RAW like a holy text without doing the math. if you honestly disagree, that's fine, but it doesn't invalidate my argument. if you can break my argument on the rules or some valid tactical or social consideration i have missed, so be it. if you have to say "the setting doesn't say this happens!" then i retort that the writers of the setting haven't thought through the implications of their own rules very well. you may consider this the magical analog of the 5th ed writers having to clean up the nanotech mess from the fourth edition.

while edge does add some unpredictability to rolls, you have to understand a force 5 spirit doing 20 damage on summon is a freak event. it's not possible to easily calculate odds on that, but you're talking about rolling something like every die rolling a success, or rolling multiple sixes and getting successes off of those. can happen? yeah? does happen? not often.

[Raiden]

, 1-2% of the population is awakened so there is one limiting factor, two. if the summoner goes unconscious the spirit goes away. 3. Magic is SUPPOSED to be scary, "geek the game" is a rule for a reason, imbalanceing? sure? but thats what magic does. 4. whats to stop a runner team from flying a copter, or running a hummer into said mall dropping ridiculous amounts of bombs, then blowing it sky high? It is a rare thing for someone to give there life completely to something. (if summoner dies, the spirit just leaves and doesn't do the task). I am sure there are plenty (use this term loosely) higher powered mages out there to protect from spirits. APDS assualt rifles -can- hurt said spirit. ( though the force/2 auto hits to resist damage IS a bit silly) and remember, some spirits have severe allergies to there opposites

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

While edge does add some unpredictability to rolls, you have to understand a force 5 spirit doing 20 damage on summon is a freak event. it's not possible to easily calculate odds on that, but you're talking about rolling something like every die rolling a success, or rolling multiple sixes and getting successes off of those. can happen? yeah? does happen? not often.

May not happen often (you are very right), but it happens often enough at our table (3-4 times per session, we end up with rolls that are beyond exceptional, in one way or another) that the Mages ARE NOT WILLING to throw their lives away on random attempts to summon a Force 7 Spirit, let alone something as horrific as a Force 12 Spirit. Only in the most carefully controlled circumstances, with everything going our way, have we ever had a Mage even attempt to do so (Force 7 Spirit for the Zero Zone we hit), and he STILL had to soak 14 Physical Drain (1/2 the dice pool in successes). That being the case, we never really worry about spirits much above force 4-5 unless we are hitting a Zero Zone, because most mages cannot successfully summon one reliably enough to just spam them (after all, the average magic attribute across the world is probably somewhere between 3 and 4, with maybe a couple of Initiations thrown into the mix).

[RHat]

well, i am right, so that is a problem for your argument. you have been polite in disagreeing, however, and i appreciate that.

politely, i did not see a counterargument that i have yet found convincing for this scenario. less politely, i got accused of advocating genocide by people who seem to reflexively defend RAW like a holy text without doing the math. if you honestly disagree, that's fine, but it doesn't invalidate my argument. if you can break my argument on the rules or some valid tactical or social consideration i have missed, so be it. if you have to say "the setting doesn't say this happens!" then i retort that the writers of the setting haven't thought through the implications of their own rules very well. you may consider this the magical analog of the 5th ed writers having to clean up the nanotech mess from the fourth edition.

while edge does add some unpredictability to rolls, you have to understand a force 5 spirit doing 20 damage on summon is a freak event. it's not possible to easily calculate odds on that, but you're talking about rolling something like every die rolling a success, or rolling multiple sixes and getting successes off of those. can happen? yeah? does happen? not often.

Erm... You may not have intended it, but it certainly came across like you were suggesting that, in setting, such a thing should/would occur. In particular, you do seem to ignore that things like the Great Ghost Dance are truly exceptional events, things that only come up as serious desperation plays because the consequences for their use go well beyond just killing some of the participants.

In any case, you do seem to have a few serious errors. For example, you equate summoning a Force 12 spirit to be like a suicide bombing - done by a fanatic willing to die for the cause. What you miss, however, is that suicide bombers are (at least so far as I've read) generally recruited for that purpose specifically, rather than being otherwise valuable assets. Someone that has 6 Magic is gonna be too powerful and too useful to waste on such an action - instead, if they're Aspected, they'd be used to summon and bind spirits for a wide variety of tasks, many of which would actually be defensive in tactical significance. If they're not aspected, the list of things that they'd be used for gets a lot longer. It's tactically moronic to have someone kill themselves summoning a Force 12 spirit.

I'm not sure why you think Force 5 spirits should be hitting with 20 Drain with any great frequency, though - that SHOULD be a reasonably accessible Force. Even a Spirit of Air only has about 13 attack dice at that Force and a DV of 10 -5, compared to a potential 18 and 12 -7 for a chargen Street Sam. It's true that spirits are a FOO (First Order Optimal) strategy, but that's not a bad thing; games need to have such strategies for those times that you've got new players mixed with experienced players.

[shinryu]

as a brief tangent, i myself have seen enough of these "shouldn't happen but does" rolls that i wonder if the imperfections of game-grade dice really do make that big of a difference. anyway...

so, i fully concede we're talking about a rare event, here, although i would note that even a force 8 spirit is kind of a bitch to deal with for all but the most elite forces. still, one 9/11 is enough in some cases, and the problem with the anti-awakened propaganda is that, unlike many other forms of ethnic stereotyping, a great deal of it is really true. so i don't think i'm understating the social implications.

in fairness, i have a couple of decent defensive solutions that may be employed; it's the explosiveness (of one) and lack of reaction time that are problematic.

1) lots of big explosions is one solution. a kilo of rating 25 explosive gives you a shaped charge that when touching* an object halves its armor and does 25P or more damage. mount these little bastards on long sticks (spar torpedos, thanks sane poster on official forums!) crossbow bolts, on suicide drones, or in shaped-charge grenades (interesting note; modern launched HE grenades are almost universally HEDP grenades, so should have much better armor piercing than they do). our spirit is now reduced to soaking with ~24 dice + 6 automatic hits, which is still a lot but so is 25P damage, not quite enough to waste it on average but close. i'd be willing to house-rule any in-contact explosive device gets this effect. of course, you have to hit the fucker, so massed fire, lots of explosions, not so good. the demo charge solution at least lets you use wireless detonation to minimize the problem.

2) alchemy. it's basically trivial for a decent alchemist to turn out contact-activated punch preparations at force 7. With only 2 drain, these should go off for around 10S magical damage on contact with the spirit. again, hitting him isn't easy, but attaching these to crossbow bolts, long sticks or drones gives a security team at least some chance of hitting it enough times to hurt it, and a soak pool of 12 against 10 damage is still a hell of a lot better than most other options.

i'm not convinced either of these do enough to totally mitigate the problem, and as has been noted, you try hard enough you can probably get anybody. it certainly doesn't mitigate the paranoia issue. and, of course, now bodyguards are all but required to carry high explosives around or have an alchemist whip up some preps before they head out.

*so the text of explosives says "attached", and that's great, but attached is kind of a bad way to put it. i put a bomb on top of something, and it doesn't halve its armor. i tape it down and it does. yeah, makes sense. so i'm willing to interpret attached as touching in the correct manner instead of literally affixed to something. i think that's reasonable.

[RHat]

so, i fully concede we're talking about a rare event, here, although i would note that even a force 8 spirit is kind of a bitch to deal with for all but the most elite forces.

And if it uses Edge, it's out of reach for all but the most elite summoners. 12 dice to resist means you've got to have Magic 6 and Summoning 6 plus either a focus or specialization just to have much of a chance (and it takes very high stats to be able to survive). Remember also that only PC's, spirits, and Prime Runners have personal Edge, and that people don't know about it - just that high Force spirits can resist the summoning far more powerfully than they're supposed to be able to.

Of course, things like a Mana Static spell on a contact preparation that is protected by a leather holder would be very interesting. Getting attacked by a spirit? Open the holder, hit the preparation.

[Chrome Head]

you can also shoot the summoner, if you know who he is. is that guy gritting his teeth in pain summoning something, or experiencing last night's delicious meal from stuffer shack? you want to guess and shoot him?

For someone directly accusing the setting writers of misunderstanding the implications of the rules, you make a gross misreading of the RAW yourself.

Remember reading "Magic is rarely subtle" (p. 280)? The rules state that any use of magic can be perceived (extremely easily). In this case, any force 12 magic is guaranteed to require AT MOST a threshold of 1 on a simple perception check. So over half the people present are sure to know precisely who summoned the spirit. Not to mention any reasonable GM would consider such a major (force 12 for god's sake!) magical action automatically obvious to everyone in the vicinity with clear line of sight.

Back to the setting discussion, I can't agree more with arguments about the rarity of awakened metahumans, and even greater rarity of magic 6 ones, not to mention ones with very high skill levels as well. That the rules state these guys can exist doesn't imply at all that it would be a common occurrence.

Now, this being said, I find spirits too impervious to damage. Immune to Physical damage should be toned down to half the armor it currently provides. Or summoning spirits of force greater than magic rating should be made even more dangerous, such as the often suggested idea of making edge use automatic for those spirits. I'll argue that properly role-playing an entity with willpower in the double-digits should mean that you have a strong sense of self-determination and that getting summoned by an extremely weak (in comparison) metahuman will piss you off enough that you will use edge every time.

[DireRadiant]

Consider the following

Given Summoning + A + B + C we should get outcome SHINRYU
However we are not getting outcome SHINRYU
Why aren't we getting outcome SHINRYU?
There must be something other than Summoning + A + B + C that makes "outcome"
What is it?

Compare to

Summoning + A + B + C can only give us outcome SHINRYU
outcome SHINRYU is silly
Here are the silly things we must do when outcome SHINRYU occurs
Silliness ensues

And to finish

Gamist versus Simulation
Are SR5 rules gamist or simulations?
Using SR5 ruleset for simulations results in lots of silliness.
Using SR5 ruleset for gamist results in fun roleplaying table top pen and paper social fun.

Silliness can be fun and entertaining, but if you rely on simulationist precision for your happiness then I am afraid that SR5 is not going to satisfy you in nay way whatsoever. Trust me, none of the SR rules sets have gotten any of the magic dragon elf stuff right yet.

[shinryu]

this isn't so much simulationist as it's about how this change in the rules causes inconsistency in the setting, and i note that people seem to continue to literally misread my posts; as an example, i think that 20 drain out of a force 5 spirit is actually exceptionally rare, not the other way around.

to address the points made :

0) 1% of several billion is still a fucking big number.

1) you have to compare payoff of the intended target versus sacrifice of the munition. it's not worth pulling this on dumbshit dan the security man, but damon knight? there's somebody that needs to go (according to some).

2) this is likely a much higher-success option than many other similar attacks on hard targets, making it much more appealing. you'll never snipe that son of a bitch, and you probably can't car bomb him. but one good spirit at the right time might be just fast enough to work.

3) i do include summoners losing their shit as another case where this is problematic, either due to actual insanity or due to in extremis situations like red samurai up their assholes. in these cases, it may be a desperation tactic, but that doesn't matter much to the people on the receiving end.

3b) have i mentioned conjurers talk to powerful extraplanar entities with unknown agendas? universal brotherhood ring a bell? toxic spirits? lots of reasons these guys might talk someone into a real bad idea like this, especially since it's not necessarily suicide.

4) I see a force 8 spirit and a magic 4, conjuring 4 summoner about even on dice, not exactly the realm of "only elite summoners." plus it's actually LESS likely to kill the person involved! i don't really buy that npcs don't get edge, either; all the contacts have them, for example. plus he gets edge cause he's a named npc and i said so, so there.

5) define obvious, cause the book don't. can you tell prayer from stomach cramps? why should summoning be physically obvious when all the action is happening astrally, not from fire shooting out your hands or something similar? shamanic masks might be a giveaway if they still happen, but even that assumes that in a crowd of people that security recognizes the exact guy pulling shit right off the bat and shoots him immediately without hesitation. like i said, lot of dead street people if that's the standard for cops to shoot people. i think that's actually one of my less radical ideas though, since real cops do that already if you twitch wrong at them.

why was this never a problem in earlier editions? because it was two orders of magnitude less likely to happen. if 1 in 1000 mages is willing to do this and they succeed 1 in 1000 times, it's a one in a million nightmare scenario. if they succeed even 1 out of 10, then it's scarily plausible. i think it's more like 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 now. so, yeah. even odds on getting a tank. yep, game balance, everyone!

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Define obvious, cause the book don't. can you tell prayer from stomach cramps? why should summoning be physically obvious when all the action is happening astrally, not from fire shooting out your hands or something similar? shamanic masks might be a giveaway if they still happen, but even that assumes that in a crowd of people that security recognizes the exact guy pulling shit right off the bat and shoots him immediately without hesitation. like i said, lot of dead street people if that's the standard for cops to shoot people. i think that's actually one of my less radical ideas though, since real cops do that already if you twitch wrong at them.

The book actually does. Obvious is exactly that, Obvious. The difficulty to notice magic use is 6-Force of the magical Effect. It may take many forms, but that is irrelevant. If they are summoning as stupid powerful as Force 12 Spirits, there would never need be a roll. Hell, there would never need be a roll for Force 6+, if you asked me, because it has moved from Threshold X to Threshold Zero. And the first rule of counter magic is to geek the mage. A mage casting/summoning at that level is prime fodder for being targeted, especially since he is involved in doing something that has his attention.

[thorya]

I don't know why you are casting this as a surprising scenario, since the same topic has come up at least twice in the past week or two.

I don't have the SR5 rules yet, so they might have changed this, but there's still my go to for dealing with all sorts of threats, Dodge Ninjas, Tank Trolls, etc. Combat chemicals. At least in SR4 it seemed like it was up to GM whether or not toxins worked on spirits and if they could us ItNW against it. But if SnS works on them, why not chemicals? At least contact chemicals, since the other vectors might require biological descriptions of a spirits manifested form. So I don't see why security wouldn't incorporate chemicals, especially from dual-natured sources for fighting spirits.

The area effect neutralizes the dodge bonus and spirits have high body scores, but until you get to the uber level, they can't shake off chemicals easily. If you let ItNW apply to toxin resistance, the damage won't be high enough to get through for most of the 5+ spirits, but secondary effects will work. -2 to everything is a start towards dealing with the spirit and paralysis will take it out of the fight.

[RHat]

this isn't so much simulationist as it's about how this change in the rules causes inconsistency in the setting, and i note that people seem to continue to literally misread my posts; as an example, i think that 20 drain out of a force 5 spirit is actually exceptionally rare, not the other way around.

to address the points made :

0) 1% of several billion is still a fucking big number.

1) you have to compare payoff of the intended target versus sacrifice of the munition. it's not worth pulling this on dumbshit dan the security man, but damon knight? there's somebody that needs to go (according to some).

2) this is likely a much higher-success option than many other similar attacks on hard targets, making it much more appealing. you'll never snipe that son of a bitch, and you probably can't car bomb him. but one good spirit at the right time might be just fast enough to work.

3) i do include summoners losing their shit as another case where this is problematic, either due to actual insanity or due to in extremis situations like red samurai up their assholes. in these cases, it may be a desperation tactic, but that doesn't matter much to the people on the receiving end.

3b) have i mentioned conjurers talk to powerful extraplanar entities with unknown agendas? universal brotherhood ring a bell? toxic spirits? lots of reasons these guys might talk someone into a real bad idea like this, especially since it's not necessarily suicide.

4) I see a force 8 spirit and a magic 4, conjuring 4 summoner about even on dice, not exactly the realm of "only elite summoners." plus it's actually LESS likely to kill the person involved! i don't really buy that npcs don't get edge, either; all the contacts have them, for example. plus he gets edge cause he's a named npc and i said so, so there.

5) define obvious, cause the book don't. can you tell prayer from stomach cramps? why should summoning be physically obvious when all the action is happening astrally, not from fire shooting out your hands or something similar? shamanic masks might be a giveaway if they still happen, but even that assumes that in a crowd of people that security recognizes the exact guy pulling shit right off the bat and shoots him immediately without hesitation. like i said, lot of dead street people if that's the standard for cops to shoot people. i think that's actually one of my less radical ideas though, since real cops do that already if you twitch wrong at them.

why was this never a problem in earlier editions? because it was two orders of magnitude less likely to happen. if 1 in 1000 mages is willing to do this and they succeed 1 in 1000 times, it's a one in a million nightmare scenario. if they succeed even 1 out of 10, then it's scarily plausible. i think it's more like 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 now. so, yeah. even odds on getting a tank. yep, game balance, everyone!

-1) Then there was an implication in what you said that was contrary to your intent.

0) 1% is all Awakened. A portion of that has 6 Magic, and a different portion can Conjure. The intersection between the two is already quite small. Then drill down to the portion with high drain stats and high skills and the resources to acquire the right foci... It's going to be an incredibly tiny number.

1) Not worth it for Damien Knight when the guy you'd be sacrificing could instead be used to hit a wide array of high-value targets. It's not worth it to anyone.

2) Actually most of those could, potentially, work. Without killing the one doing it.

3) Toxics and such are more likely to grow in power until they can do something without needing to kill themselves to do it - they have agendas that are better served by their continuing to be around. This is actually more true of bug shamans, for that matter.

4) Force 8 with Edge. And if you're giving someone Edge, it's because they're plot-significant. Other then entities that ALWAYS have Edge, Edge is not a part of discussions of in-setting implications.

5) Noticing magic is a Perception + Intuition [Mental] (Skill-Force); the rules are on page 280. So, with high Force spirits, usually very easy.

As far as the game balance goes, you're choosing to ignore quite a bit.

[quentra]

I think Shinryu has a point, actually. There are people that crazy - this is really the sort of crazy shit that Toxics would in fact pull. Hell, this is dystopia - the man pushed to the edge (to the point of martyrism) is one of the most common archetypes in the genre. And yeah, 1 in 1000 was both believable and terrifying. Having Force 12 spirits be far more common in a world where highly skilled and valuable people regularly engage in possibly lethal scenarios AS THEIR JOB looks like another sign of not checking setting implications for mechanical changes.

[Vicar]

I think Shinryu has a point, actually. There are people that crazy

Yeah, gotta go with this one here. The discussion puts me in mind of a situation I remember seeing on the news, years ago, where this guy out in California stole a tank and drove it down Main Street and wrecked shit (he didn't use any of the guns, either. He simply drove over things). Just because.

Did the cops eventually take him out? Oh yeah, you know they did. With many extreme killy-death-bullets. But not before he did a hell of a lot of damage.

And it does beg the question, how the hell did the guy steal a tank to begin with? Why?

I don't think it matters, actually. Maybe the stars aligned in the sky just right on that particular day, for that particular person, and all that magicky jazz. What matters is that it happened. Shinryu's scenario isn't terribly implausible, given the nature of the rules and the setting.