Overcasting, reigning in the cheese Options

[2bit]

Force 9 shattershield: drain DV 1

I'm not against a limited-target touch-range mana spell having a drain DV of 1, but I am against overcasting it so high without additional risk, especially when Force equates directly to damage.

Were there any published suggestions for making overcasting more risky that I missed? I was thinking +1DV per Force point over Magic rating.

[Samaels Ghost]

It usually is a problem to overcast. I think this is more a problem for this spell and spells like Knockout and Death touch rather than a problem with the Drain system as a whole

[Thanee]

I'm with you there... overcasting is clearly too easy with the low drain spells.

Your proposal doesn't sound too bad, it's surely worth a thought.

Also, there is still the weird effect, that physical drain is often actually less damaging than stun drain, because of the easier ways to heal it.

In older editions, I had usually given drain twice for overcasting (or other sources of physical drain), once physical and once stun, but that obviously doesn't really help much with 1 DV drain. ;)

Bye
Thanee

[Metasigil]

If you're so annoyed about Shattershield that you're considering making all casting more deadly, just disallow Shatterspell in games you run. There's no need to make everything worse. If you're actually concerned about overcasting in general being too powerful, that's something else. Something to keep in mind is that apparently, Physical Drain cannot be healed with magic. This is not stated in the BBB, but Street Magic assumes it to be the case and it has been confirmed that it will be in the FAQ when it finally does come out. I know when I first saw that I immediately started to pray that my GM wouldn't. He did. There goes my First-aid and Heal fueled rampage of Overcast Manaballs.

[James McMurray]

If it has a DV of 1 at force 9 it can't do a heck of a lot. What exactly does Shattershield do?

[Moon-Hawk]

It obliterates wards, in such a way as to immediately alert their creator and thus an appropriate security response.
It owns wards in the same way that plastic explosives own walls, and with approximately equal degrees of subtlety.

[Kremlin KOA]

Note to self, Hire wiz kid mage gangs with shattershield to provide distractions for BIG runs where security is provided by knight errant

[James McMurray]

Ah, then I don't see a problem with the spell. If the campaign is more mercenary in nature, meaning subtlety is not necessary, then the spell may be too much.

[Samaels Ghost]

You're still leaving a thick astral signature behind right by where a mage or his spirit is gonna be checking in a few moments. Plus, if YOU get Assensed then there's going to be Symbolic links made. That enough reason to be subtle, even if your mission doesn't require it.

[James McMurray]

That's why I said "campaign" not "mission." :)

[Cold-Dragon]

on a side note, the SM section says drain, which in general refers to stun drain when mentioned. If it were referring to physical drain, both books have always (or else almost always) specifically stated 'physical drain' when it applies to physical damage.

the variant rule was to soften up on the no healing stun drain.

And also a good point about shatter shield: Force 9 will last quite awhile, you don't go leaving those around, even if you break the barrier (and I think it is actually mana barrier spell specific, so it's no good on wards???).

[2bit]

Right. Ridiculous combat spells like fireball are ridiculous to resist drain on whether overcast or not. I definitely liked it better though when you cast a Deadly mana bolt, you had to resist Deadly drain. Just this one aspect of combat spells seems broken to me. Stun Touch (metatype) (Indirect) is ungodly effective imo at (F/2) -3; For 1 DV drain, you've got a Force 9 spell with a base of 9 boxes of stun damage the target has to resist. You grant them half impact armor, but deny them the chance to resist completely. Extremeley good chance of KO even against targets with protection. With a bit of Karma under your belt, at Magic rating 7 you can bump that up to thirteen boxes for a paltry 3DV drain.


Another option: what if you apply the modifier before diving by 2? That would keep drain values from getting extreme in either direction.

it would turn a Force 1 Fireball (F/2)+5 into drain DV 3 instead of 6. Force 9 Fireball would be DV 7 instead of 9.

turn Force 9 Shattershield (F/2)-3 into drain DV3 instead of 1. Force 13 would be DV 5 instead of 3.

[Slithery D]

[Slithery D]

[Cold-Dragon]

Okay then, the signature will tell a person off hand where you were when you blast it to bits *shrugs* and if they have a half decent assenser, they'll hunt you down and eat you.

If you do it too many times to someone, they will eventually hire a person who can do it so as to collect the insurance from your body.

[James McMurray]

[Cold-Dragon]

*wishes the authors had more blatant ID so he can see when they make such corrections then* :P So any drain cause by magic is meant to be resistant to healing if it's not natural 'wait for it to stop bleeding then?

[Slithery D]

[Lagomorph]

[Slithery D]

Having raised the Shattershield "panic," let me admit that it's hardly a problem in security setups that involve wards as simple warning devices that tell the roving astral response team where to go. It's a very big problem for areas that need ultra high astral security that are extremely valuable to destroy, but that can't afford to hire enough active mages/spirits to defend them.

Let's take, for example, a Japanese or UCAS supercarrier. Think an astrally projecting mage with a fire spirit in tow could do some damage if he got into the weapons magazine or the reactor spaces? Do you think it's worth it for an enemy terrorist organization to round up half a dozen or more mages to hit it at once? Do you think Japan or the UCAS can afford to have round the clock projecting mages/spirits that can not only defeat such a force but do so instantly, before a single fire spirit can manifest and blow most of the ship up or leave it dead in the water and a radiation hazard?

Of course not. You need high force wards that are too dangerous to be assaulted - reflecting wards. Take it as given that every government has a couple of Magic 10+ guys with Reflecting metamagic on retainer who do nothing but put up Force 10+ reflecting wards up around nuclear reactors, the Oval Office, the Pentagon, etc. If you've got one of those up, anyone attacking it is facing a very high risk of disruption (or death, if you switch them to physical damage, which I recommend to dissuade kamikaze terrorists who want to punch through and then use a metaplanar shortcut for their bound fire spirit and are willing to risk being knocked out and sent back to their body). See also Offensive Mana Barrier (SM pg. 174), which if quickened is actually superior on a damage and drain basis than Reflecting Wards, but is vulnerable to dispelling. [Edit - Ooooooo! Masking wards with an invisible Offensive Mana Barrier inside... Technically "contact," not an actual effort to penetrate it, is all that's required for the zap, but that's pretty cheap and probably not what they really meant. But darn...]

Good enough, now I don't have to assume the Huk's magical assets have already sunk every single Imperial Japanese supercarrier as part of their revolution, nor caused accidents in every nuclear power plant on the home islands. But Shattershield, alas, lets one destroy these uber pasive defenses with essentially no risk, the investment of 5 karma to learn the spell, and at most the time to recast it two or three times if the barrier gets some luck resistance rolls. Now we're back to every important target destroyed by motivated magical terrorist groups or something like 50% of the magician population employed as astral security to provide enough active defense that an astral hit and run is risky enough that a sustained campaign even by motivated people can't destroy society.

[rangda]

There is a very simple solution to this problem. Don't worry/care about other people's games, disallow the spell in yours (or if you want it for a npc or a pc wants it, make a castrated version).

This isn't a miniatures game played in a competitive environment where rules need to create a level playing field, it's a ruleset for a bunch of friends to hang out together and play. If something doesn't work don't use it.

This is not to say the discussion of the various effects, logic, game balance, and minutea aren't fun, it's to say don't get so caught up in it that you can't see the forest for the trees. :)

[Slithery D]

Or analogize the kind of astral assaults I'm talking about to air warfare. Astrally projecting mages are fighter/bombers, and the spirit they "drop" into the physical world to do an assault are big bombs.

Standards wards are nothing more than radar telling you an attack is incoming so you can scramble your interceptors (more mages and spirits) to come and get them. That's fine if you've got enough interceptors to beat off an attack once they respond. But that's not always feasible. It's much cheaper to get together ten mages for a "raid" than it is to permanently have ten mages on a particular site to fight them off at parity.

Enter reflecting wards, which function as automated SAM systems with unlimited ammo. Now there's real risk to punching through to "bomb" with your elementals, even if you have "air superiority" in numbers. But the Shattershield spell easily does away with this, once again making astral offense the winner.

The real problem is that basic wards are shit in SR4. They don't damage you if you fail, and you can keep trying to press through until you finally succeed. A simple warning just isn't enough.

All of which has zero to do with overcasting, but...

[Demerzel]

A warding anchor can not move. If it moves the ward ends, so how is a supercarrier warded? Quickened Manabarrier type spells? Again I thought that these were not mobile...

[Slithery D]

We talked about that in another thread a couple of weeks back. The guy who wrote the SM wards section finally came around to the idea that you can make the frame of reference of your ward a car/plane/ship, so long as the physical anchor of the ward doesn't move in relation to the ward itself. A world without warded airplanes is a world with unlimited terrorist deathtraps. And a world without Reflection warded airplanes is a world with delayed unlimited terrorist deathtraps. You have to have mobile wards or you can't have public transportation.

I do agree that Mana Barrier spells should be less mobile that that; I certainly wouldn't let you make the caster the point of reference and let it move with him, so its hard to see how you could attach it to a car or ship, either.

[hobgoblin]