Astral Projection as a Metapower, A houserule for you to hate and deride Options

[Mercer]

As a GM (and as a player), I like mysteries. One of the things that made SR tough in that respect was that most starting mages could get tons of successes on a regular TN4 Assensing Test, and project pretty much anywhere to do it. Its not unbalancing because its the way the system is designed, but it became a pain in the ass to always have a background count or a ward or something in the way (lead sheet) to keep the mystery going past the first encounter. There are lots of tricks one can use, having the Johnson telecommute to the meet, have initiates with masking, but essentially what I was looking for was a modification to the system that allowed regular schmoes to get away with stuff from time to time.

What I settled on, after discussing it with my players and fellow GMs (at that point, we had a 3 regular GMs and a couple of back-up one-shotters, truly it was a golden age of gaming) was to split up Astral Perception and Astral Projection. Projection became a Metapower, and Astral Perception was renamed Astral Awareness, which had a base TN of 6 rather than 4. Once you got Projection, assensing dropped to TN4, the same as it was for spirits and dual-natured creatures. Astral Awareness wasn't sight based, but rather a sense of auras (although you could still cast into the astral with it; it counted as LOS for magic it just wasn't eye-based).

I ran my last two years of SR3 using this rule mod, and I was pretty happy with it. I never had a initiate take projection as a metapower (but then I can't think of a character who took anything other than Masking, Shielding or Anchoring, and we didn't have enough high level initiates to matter). Once Projection was gone, nobody really missed it that much. I think we may have made Ritual Sorcery work a little differently, but I can't remember. This was a few years ago and Ritual Sorcery wasn't a huge part of our games. (I think you only needed the astral spotter if you wanted to track the target, otherwise if you forged a link you could ritual cast as normal. Been awhile.)

With a TN6 for assessing, most characters who were good at it could get 1 or 2 successes rather than the usual 4+, and if it was important to them (i.e. they wanted to spend a karma point on it) they could push it to 3 or 4. This was also the same rule I used in my WWIISR game, which was a lower magic and tech level overall.