Spirit Power: Immunity, Errata please Options

[j2klbs]

Brief Overview: Spirits can be summoned on the fly by starting characters that can mop entire squads of well equipped prime runner street sams. Higher level spirits (also summonable by starting characters) can be harder to kill than dragons due to unbeatable hardened armor values. The current rule that Immunity (more specifically Immunity to Normal Weapons) grants Hardened Armor equal to twice essence does not scale well and introduces a significant imbalance in the game design. This power has even been improved over 4th edition as it now also grants bonus damage resistance hits equal to half its rating (round up).

Recommendation: Errata the Immunity power to only grant Hardened Armor equal to essense (not double essence).

Detailed Overview: A starting magician can easily have 7 Magic, 11 Drain dice, and 15 dice on Conjuration tests. Depending on how many wounds the magician is willing to take, he could summon up to a force 14 spirit. The following numbers do not take into account any expenditure of Edge which the mage could use to reduce wounds or increase services.

Force Expected Wounds
------- --------------------
7 1 (stun)
9 2.3 (phys)
11 3.6 (phys)
13 5 (phys)
14 6 (phys)

To illustrate my point, suppose the magician conjures a force 13 Fire Spirit. This spirit will destroy anything it attacks. But, to make matters worse (and to make a game system not fun), there is nothing mundane opponents can do against this creature. Per the rules, it has 26 Hardened Armor to bullets, melee weapons, etc. Even the deadliest weapon in the game, an Anti-vehicle rocket (24P, -4AP) due to availability costing the mundane character roughly 5K nuyen per rocket will do just 1 point of damage (14 Body + 22 Armor = 12 hits + 11 auto hits = 23 damage reduction). Any other weapon including firing fully automatic HMG's just bounce off this creature (remember that it is dodging shots with 30 dice!).

As a point of comparison, western dragons which are supposed to be the most powerful entities in the game only have 18 hardened armor and dodge of 16 dice (compared to a force 14 spirit's 28 hardened armor and 30 dodge dice). Is it really the intent of the game design that a starting character can summon a creature that is twice as hard to kill as a western dragon?

The problem exists with lesser force spirits as well. A force 7 spirit is mostly immune to damage. A force 9 spirit cannot be touched by most street sam's. And all of these spirits are summonable by a starting magician.

If the designers errata Immunity to only grant Hardened Armor equal to Essence (not double Essence), this change will at least make mundane characters able to do something! Even with this suggested errata, if you crunch the numbers, a starting street sam will only be able to damage spirits a little. For example, his best tactic will likely be to toss a frag grenade at it (this avoid having to go against spirit's high dodge dice). Even with the proposed errata rule, the frag grenade (16P, -2AP) has the following expected values against a fire spirit:

Force No Errata Dmg Errata Dmg
------- ------------------ ----------
7 3.3 8.6
9 0 6.3
11 0 4.0
13 0 0.6

As you can see, with the proposed errata, at least a mundane can do something while the spirit tears his comrades' limbs off. But being completely ineffective against an unstoppable killing machine does not make for a fun game system. Designers, please consider this simple change to restore some balance to the game system that I love.

~Jason