Spell Design drain modifier. Options

[emo samurai]

What does it mean in the bottom of the spell design chart when it gives a dice pool bonus or penalty for drain modification? Does that mean you can design hyper-efficient spells? If so, awesome.

[Aaron]

I think it means that spells that are harder to cast are easier to design. Thus, if I was designing a Lightning Bolt, I would add three dice to my pool.

Hm ... that's weird.

[emo samurai]

I'd rule that you can make hyper-effecient spells. The flavor's always talking about corps refining their designs, but nothing ever comes of it in the actual mechanics.

[lorechaser]

It actually makes sense to me.

It's fairly easy to design a spell that's obvious, and has a big effect on the user. To get something really useful and streamlined, you have to work a lot harder.

Think of it like writing code, if you know that. You can write a bloated inefficient program that does a job a *lot* faster than a svelte piece of 100 line beauty that does the same thing, but also makes toast, and uses .0001% of your resources.

[Dashifen]

Alternatively, they could have intended for your to remove positive drain modifiers and add negative ones and poorly represented that fact. Thus a +3 drain spell would actually remove three dice from your design pool, thus making hard spells harder to design. The table simply states +/- Drain modifier, not which modifiers you add and which you subtract.

Also, a quick glance at p. 162 under Step 6: Calculate Drain Value doesn't yield anything considering no mention of the design test is made there.

[Moon-Hawk]

I agree that inefficient spells and efficient spells should exist, but allowing all of the stock spells to be redesigned to have less drain screams of brokenness.
Perhaps the spells listed in the book are already quite optimized, and custom designed spells will likely have higher-than-average drain codes to represent their inefficiency.

Of course, for emo's game, the book spells will be horribly inefficient and his characters will redesign them all to have -3DV and +3 awesome.

[Dissonance]

http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational...l/synninbar.jpg

Yeah. It's kind of like that.

[FanGirl]

The link is broken.

[Dissonance]

Say what? It works for me. I'll Imageshack it.

http://img238.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...ynninbarnw9.jpg

[Metasigil]

Bwahahahahaha! That is Synninbar all right. The only game where no matter how screwed you are, there's still a minimum 5% chance that your god will wander over and make it all better, just 'cause he/she/it/they really do(es) like you.

[FanGirl]

OMG! Stephen Colbert was right!

(Oh yeah - thanks, Dis. ;) )

[Aaron]

[lorechaser]

My last d20 future game included cybernetic bears with laser beam eyes. Just so I could show that image.

[Dissonance]

Re: Aaron

Sure, while the majority of us think this is a bad idea? That's why I posted the Synnibarr image. Because, really, that's what Emo's games look like to the outsider. Or, at least, how they originally were presented.

I believe his characters started with 600 build points and, well. Let's just say that this would just be another drop in the bucket.

A bucket full of bears with laser eyes and hellhound puppies with cybernetically enhanced teeth that are also weapon foci.

[Dissonance]

Also, holy crap. While using the facilities, I had the single best idea for the worst campaign ever.

Ninjas have kidnapped the president of the CAS. There's a two billion nuyen reward for his live retrieval. All shadowrunners in the CAS and bordering countries are now on a no-holds-barred manhunt to save the head of state, and killing any other team in their way to claim the reward for themselves.

It's Bad Dudes meets Wacky Racers.