[X] My Assistant

[Churl Beck]

[Lagomorph]

I think the primary difference between the adept powers = mage spells is that basically, you're treating your purchased magic rating for an adept like an essence cost for street sams, if you want to get an improvement out of your adept, maybe look at getting something like alpha beta or delta grade powers, multiply the cost of a power by .8 for some amount of karma and that would add room in for an extra power. maybe a karma cost of 8 or 4 times the power point cost to upgrade it a level (std->alpha) and then the same amount to upgrade all the way to "delta grade" powers.

[TinkerGnome]

Mage spells != adept power points in scalability. Adepts get the use of every single power point at all times that they apply much like street sams and their ware.

One thing that I've seen work fairly well in the past is allowing the purchase of karma for cash (1k :nuyen: per karma worked okay in SR3 and would probably work better with SR4).

Mages are balanced by drain (which looks like it'll be hitting a lot more in SR4 than 3) and the fact that they are relatively limited in how many dice they get to resist it.

[Kyoto Kid]

[Brahm]

[Space Ghost]

Or better yet, geasa could also allow a coexistence of cyber and adept powers. If geasa come back in Street Magic, you won't need to worry about an adepts power level.

[TinkerGnome]

Not having Geasa around makes me happy. Especially voluntary geasa. I've witnessed some feats of power gaming that make my skin crawl...

[Brahm]

[Shrike30]

The whole "20 points of karma for a power point" rule in SR3 existed only because the rules for initiation weren't in the main book, and the official Q&A stuff does, in fact, say that initiation is meant to supercede this rule. When SR4 came out, they put initiation in the main book, and therefore had no need to also include the dumbed-down version of initiating the 20-karma rule represented (namely, turning in some karma to gain more powers).

I don't see what the conflict between your old concept and the current ruleset is. For an adept, his Magic attribute isn't a measure of his ability to control and channel mana (that mumbo-jumbo stuff) in the same way as a mage... the slang equivalent is much closer to "his kung fu is stronger." Your understanding of your body grows through hard training and discipline, and your powers grow with it (as, OOC, you initiate and then buy another point of magic, gaining a power point in the process). The metamagic you pick up along the way is easy to roll into this concept... learning "centering" doesn't mean you have to suddenly develop this crazy magic ability along with your martial skills... you could just run through the first few moves of Crane form to calm yourself and prepare for what is about to come.

The only real problem I think you would encounter jumping from pre-Magic-In-The-Shadows SR3 to the current version of SR4 (and trying to duplicate the character) is that your Karma costs are going to be totally different, and you'll probably be at a different power level. Since this hit pretty much every type of character in odd ways (little things like some 'ware getting cheaper, lots of gear no longer having rules or being outdated, and the like) this is a pretty minor issue.

[Kyoto Kid]