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 Outline Switch to: 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!