Magic > Tech?, I don't want any trouble...just sayin'.. Options

[nezumi]

[Platinum]

It says that mages are 1% of the population ... not 1% of shadowrunners. Who cares if it favours them.

[JonathanC]

So aside from simply disallowing or limiting the number of magical characters, is there any way to balance out this problem?

[hyzmarca]

There are solutions that work against magic but not against most cybered characters.
Opposition with high willpower, wards, astral-only threats, biofiber, Background Count, Imps, Things man was not mean to know clawing at their feeble metahuman minds.


There is also the optional rule that drain is calcualted using Force instead of Force/2. That rule alone greatly reduces the effectivness of magicians.

[Dranem]

How to make an Awakened Character feel useless: Send the team consistantly into high-background count locations...

[ShadowDragon8685]

No, that's how you get your Awakened character to start spending karma for cash like a sucker, and start installing cyberware. :)

[James McMurray]

In SR4 Magic can be beefier than cyberware after a while, but it takes a heck of a lot of karma. You don't automatically gain magic rating when you initiate, so to get those bonus power points will cost you the fee for initiation and the fee for raising the attribute. For the non-adept that could be a new skill at 3 or 4 (not sure what the formulas are offhand, so I don't know exactly how much karma it would cost just to hit grade 1 and +1 magic.

During character creation magical characters are gigantic point wells. A nonawakened character can afford to get some gear he wants but won't use every day, and some skills he likes but aren't absolutely necessary. An awakened character, because he has to pay points to be awakened and pay more points to up his magic, doesn't have that ability.

There are a few things that a mage can do that technology can't, but the opposite is also true.

[toturi]

[hyzmarca]

There is a simple solution to that. Buy every copy of SOTA64 you can find and burn them all. If your players won't sell theirs then steal them.

Or just disallow Virtuoso. That'll work.

[James McMurray]

SR4 is sure to have background count as well, it just doesn't have rules yet. Most likely each point of background count will be -1 die to tests. Heck, just having violence commited raises the background count fo the area by 1. If your street sam shoots at someone before you go to cast you're taking a penalty.

For offense, tech > magic in some instances (grenades vs. ball spells for example). In others it's worse (trid phantasm and improved invisibility).

[hyzmarca]

Actually, Ruth is better than II if you have enough scanners. The spell is resisted. The tech isn't.

[James McMurray]

In SR4 ruthenium polymers (i.e. the camo suit) only give a 4 dice penalty, not +12 TN. And in either edition you're better off combinging them with the spell if you want to remain unseen.

[Kagetenshi]

Ruthenium limits your mobility, and worse yet it only provides TN penalties to the test for being seen—once you've been located, the locater can shoot you at no penalty.

~J

[Taran]

And a seven-success II is not, for all practical purposes, resisted.

[Wounded Ronin]

[hyzmarca]

Really, I don't think instakilling a character by ripping his mind apart with the visage of a big astral bad is really worth it. As has been mentioned here that kind of arbitrariness allows the player to dissasociate the the character, reducing the overall emotional impact and transforming what should be terror into simple annoyance or frustration.

There are ways to take a character out of the action that still force the player to control and empathize with the character and leave hope of future recovery and high karma reward.

Taking the opening premise from the other thread, a magician sees something that man was not meant to know and suffers the consequences a better solution may look something like this.

Roll Willpower - TN 30
0 Sucesses

"You scream as loud as you possibly can. You don't know why you're screaming. You don't know anything. What ever you say has pulversied your mind. Thoughts and images roll through your head like a jet-powered locomotive but you can't even begin to put two of them together. "

Roll Willpower - TN 26
0 Successes
"You continue screaming at the top of your lungs and reach up towards your face. You can feel your eyeballs under your fingertips although you don't know what they are. You plunge your fingernails into the soft squishy globes, digging them out and popping them into your mouth. You chew them slowly while still screaming."

Roll Willpower -TN 22
0 Successes
"You reach up again, this time clawing and scratching at your scalp."

Roll STR - TN 3
1 Success
"Eventually, your fingernails find footing beneeth your scalp ad you drive your fingers down, into your face. With a burst unnatrual strength you easily tear your own face from your skull. "

Roll Willpower - TN 18
0 Successes
In a desperate attempt to make the screaming stop you plunge a hand into your own mouth, past your half-chewed eyeballs and grab your tongue.

Roll STR - TN 4
1 Success
"With herculean effort you pull and feel your tongue tear loose from its moorings deep inside your throat. Eventually you yank the entire apendage outt. It is surprisingly long."

Continue along these lines, reducing the Willpower TNs and increasing the STR TNs untill the PC gets 1 willpower success.

By the time that happens the PC should have already torn his vocal cords from screaming so loudly.

This leaves him barely playable but an interesting roleplaying experience as well as a liability for the rest of the team.
If the other team members drag him out then you can start making the really bad consequences happen after his recovery. If they choose to leave him to die or kill him outright you can have him contine to haunt the other PCs, still under his player's control but completely insane and quasi-immortal.

In this situation, the player will have no reason to complain and therefore there will be no need for a Hitler speech.

And really, what is more frightening for the mundane players, the mage dying without a save or the made tearing his own face off with his bare hands?

[Wounded Ronin]

Wow, that's a great way to go about it. Better than instakilling the PC by a long shot. I mean, you're only giving the mage a M or S wound with all that horror and yet it's a real good description of horror.

It's also really in character for That Which Must Not Be Known. Like, as a GM, if I did that, I wouldn't really feel like I was breaking any rules.

Everyone likes to do astral this, astral that, tee hee let's know what's inside the building. But perhaps there's really room for peeking in the astral to be something that you don't generally want to do because of t3h horrors. It's kind of like that game, Clive Barker's Undying, which is one of my all time favorites. From time to time you hear a voice whisper, 'Look around...', but when you use the scrying magic sometimes the things you see are so shocking that you'd rather close your eyes to the astral than take a look.

Wow, I like that. A nice way to balance the power of t3h mages.

(I still recommend Clive Barker's Undying as a kickass game: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...ce&s=videogames )

[ShadowDragon8685]

Ahem...

The first time a DM did all of that to me, once I got over the disgustedness factor of it, he would be resisting 3 + (1/2 my STR)P as I picked up my chair and swung it at his face.

[hyzmarca]

I'm pretty sure that chairs cause stun damage. That's what professional Wrestling has taught me.

[Grinder]

And Western movies :D

[toturi]

[James McMurray]

I was on a run once where my mage was doped beyond belief the entire time we were captured. Trying to cast or even astrally perceive hurt me and hurt me bad. I had a blast.

[Voran]

Just checking, the mage was doped up, or you were? :)

[James McMurray]

I, being the mage, was doped up. Didn't cast a single spell for almost the entire time, but really enjoyed the game. It was one of the more memorable ones I've played.

[Wounded Ronin]