Astral Projection as a Metapower, A houserule for you to hate and deride Options

[Mercer]

As a GM (and as a player), I like mysteries. One of the things that made SR tough in that respect was that most starting mages could get tons of successes on a regular TN4 Assensing Test, and project pretty much anywhere to do it. Its not unbalancing because its the way the system is designed, but it became a pain in the ass to always have a background count or a ward or something in the way (lead sheet) to keep the mystery going past the first encounter. There are lots of tricks one can use, having the Johnson telecommute to the meet, have initiates with masking, but essentially what I was looking for was a modification to the system that allowed regular schmoes to get away with stuff from time to time.

What I settled on, after discussing it with my players and fellow GMs (at that point, we had a 3 regular GMs and a couple of back-up one-shotters, truly it was a golden age of gaming) was to split up Astral Perception and Astral Projection. Projection became a Metapower, and Astral Perception was renamed Astral Awareness, which had a base TN of 6 rather than 4. Once you got Projection, assensing dropped to TN4, the same as it was for spirits and dual-natured creatures. Astral Awareness wasn't sight based, but rather a sense of auras (although you could still cast into the astral with it; it counted as LOS for magic it just wasn't eye-based).

I ran my last two years of SR3 using this rule mod, and I was pretty happy with it. I never had a initiate take projection as a metapower (but then I can't think of a character who took anything other than Masking, Shielding or Anchoring, and we didn't have enough high level initiates to matter). Once Projection was gone, nobody really missed it that much. I think we may have made Ritual Sorcery work a little differently, but I can't remember. This was a few years ago and Ritual Sorcery wasn't a huge part of our games. (I think you only needed the astral spotter if you wanted to track the target, otherwise if you forged a link you could ritual cast as normal. Been awhile.)

With a TN6 for assessing, most characters who were good at it could get 1 or 2 successes rather than the usual 4+, and if it was important to them (i.e. they wanted to spend a karma point on it) they could push it to 3 or 4. This was also the same rule I used in my WWIISR game, which was a lower magic and tech level overall.

[FrankTrollman]

[Mercer]

So, basically you can either make it so that its more difficult to get useful information, or you can make it so its very easy to get basically useless information?

Player 1: 5 successes, I have laid his soul bare. He's not a vampire and he dyes his hair.
Player 2: Anything else?
Player 1: Nope.
Player 2: Why the fuck do you have this power again?
Player 1: Get off my ass, its free.

Personally, as player, I'd rather roll against a TN6 and have a chance of getting useful information, than roll against a TN4 and having the results be largely meaningless. Because letting the pcs max out their roll and then telling them, "Mr. Johnson may be lying about his name. Suckers!" is in no way fucking them around. (If the top result of assensing is in your words, "Whoopty-frickin-do", why would the players waste points on the skill, or bother with the roll? At least with my version, they get something out of it.)

[FrankTrollman]

But Assensing does give you useful information. It gives you useful information about magical effects, and about cyberware and diseases. That's what it does. It doesn't give you fucking telepathy. It doesn't tell you who is an enemy and who is a friend. It doesn't solve mysteries unless that mystery is "what manner of sorcery is this?" or "what has befallen our king?" In short, if it's a mystery that would interest Conan then Astral Perception is pretty cool.

For the mystery "Who shot the Senior Vice President" or the mystery "Why isn't this code compiling properly?" Astral Perception really isn't the right tool for the job. And if you're a Johnson and you intend to hire a bunch of shady mercenaries to do dubious work for substantially less money than the covert ops are worth to your employers - then the mystery of "What is the Johnson holding back?" or the mystery "How much would the Johnson actually be willing to spend on this mission?" isn't something that Astral Perception will help you with.

Basically it seems you're latching onto a complete non-problem. Imagine for a moment that people were taking their vision enhancement and wanting to "see" the Johnson so hard that they invalidated the adventure. Would your response be to hide the Johnson on the other end of a phone line? Would your response be to crank up the TN on visual perception tests until normal people couldn't make them anymore? Or would your response to be to give the player some actual visual clues as foreshadowing to the adventure and move on with your life?

Astral Perception is great. You can use it to locate enemies in buildings that aren't warded. You can use it to pick cyberassassins out of a crowd. You can use it to play "spot the Insect Merge". It's very versatile. But it doesn't fucking tell you what people are thinking, it never has, and there's no reason why it ever would. It's simply not in the job description.

-Frank

[CircuitBoyBlue]

The game I'm playing in now is, I think, the first game I've been a part of that hasn't drastically overpowered astral perception. Before, it seemed like thugs could never really hide, because the mage was always out there astrally projecting through the whole building. We'd get sentences coming out of the mouth of whoever was playing the mage like "I astrally project and scout out the building; is there anyone inside, and if so, where?"

Now that I'm playing the shaman (isn't that the way it always works?) we've been paying a lot more respect to physical barriers on the astral plane. Yes, it's a wall. Yes, you can walk straight through it astrally. But you have to. You can't just see through the walls and automatically get an idea of everything in the building. Sucks that we were playing wrong for so long (and yes, we actually found a way to be playing wrong, because we all felt astral projection was way overpowered), but it's nice now that as a shaman, I still have to creep around through the astral and cautiously poke my head through walls. Granted, it's not as dangerous as if I were crawling around on the physical poking my head through doors, but I am usually alone when I do it, and anything I encounter is likely to be capable of messing me up magically.

[mfb]

Mercer, it'd help if you explained what information assensing can easily provide that is problematic. the only situation i can see assensing being a real problem in is if the Johnson (or whatever) is a magical threat of some sort, and you don't want your players to find that out yet. in which case, i'd just give the guy Masking and enough force/magic to make it stick.

[Mercer]

[FrankTrollman]

I think we need to have a discussion about expected dice pools. You have an 80% chance of getting at least 5 successes on twelve dice. Where are all these dice coming from?

-Frank

[Karaden]

He's talking about SR3 with a Target number of four, meaning that roughly half the dice will get a hit, thus netting you five hits with 10 dice fairly regularly.

[FrankTrollman]

[Karaden]

Well, exact percentages and odds arn't my strong suit, I just tend to know what is and isn't likely to happen.

Unfortently I was never very well versed in SR3, so I don't know how hard 10 dice was, but from what I do know, a six in an important stat wasn't unheard of, and fairly high skills where resonably common. Sure 6 and 6 is the max you could get, but from my experince it wasn't all that uncommon if it was something your character was good at.

Eh, go ahead and ignore most of that, likely don't know what I'm talking about and am kind of tired. I'm sure OP will explain the 10-12 dice pools.

P.S. I was used to decking, so I was used to bonuses from math SPU and the deck and all kinds of other stuff, so higher pools where easier for me I guess.

[Mercer]

Dice Pools worked a little differently in SR3. INT 6 and Assensing 6 didn't add up to 12 dice. You rolled the Assensing skill and every two successes counted as a single success on the Astral Perception check. (Granted, that makes it harder to max out the roll and I'm arguing the other position, but there's no harm in being accurate.) So against a TN 4, a character with Assensing 6 might be adding 1 or 2 successes into the Perception check (he still has to generate at least one success on the attribute roll for them to count), and then if he has a INT 6, another three or four successes. So, a starting character built for Assensing would be getting 4-6 successes on the Assensing Test, which maxes out at 5.

Being "built" for Assensing really just means putting points into the Skill, everybody already had maxed or nearly maxed INTs, because it was part of Reaction and the perception mechanic. My group-- of which I spent roughly equal time playing and GMing-- tended to concentrate on magical character types, so having more than one magician per group was not unusual, and having magicians who had been played for any length of time with INTs above 6 was pretty much industry standard. Now, whether or not that was the "norm" is moot; not every group might have focused their characters in that way but mine did and systems don't just have to be balanced in theory, they have to be balanced for the group that plays them. (I mean, that's what house rules are.)

So, where a starting character who wanted to be good at assensing could max it out with an average roll, my group tended to take it to the next level where characters that had never even looked at the Assensing Table could max it out. (And this is not counting Karma, back when spending a point or two at the meet was a pretty normal thing to do, since it was likely to refresh at the end of the scene.) Now, the characters I'm talking about aren't the 400-point karma monsters occasionally mentioned; I'm talking about characters with 20-40 karma points, with the long-time characters maxing out at around 100. (Since most players had multiple characters, our games didn't have a lot of concentrated advancement. 4 was an average karma pool.) Characters that weren't "built" for Assensing (few points in the skill) were regularly maxing out the Assensing Test, which capped at 5 successes.

Raising the TN for an Assensing Test is not a hard thing to do, a Background Count of 1 makes it a TN5 and BG of 1 can be pretty easily justified anywhere. But I didn't want to raise the TN for everything magical just to make Assensing more balanced, and I didn't want to put BG's just where I knew Assensing was going on. (And by "balanced", I mean an average roll would produce an average result, say 2-3 successes, roughly the middle of the table.) My feeling was using Background Count was an inelegant patch; I preferred to keep Background Counts special and not have to inundate the party with Astral Static spells, initiates or free spirits with masking, and mundane people with less than honorable intentions who would never, ever meet in person with a magically-active character. All of that stuff was fine in small doses; the occasional paranoid Johnson who refused to be assensed, the rare initiate with masking, but I didn't want to use them all the time.

I went with a TN6, but if my group wasn't so strongly focused on magic I might have gone with a TN5. (TN4 seems too easy unless the group rarely has full magicians, has magicians with INT 4's, or the results of Assensing rarely matters on the outcome or course of the game.) TN6 meant that roughly 10% of the time the group hit the 5+ max, roughly 10% of the time got no useful information, and the rest of the time either got 1-2 or 3-4 successes. (Karma made it more likely they would succeed at the level they felt they needed to, but then, that's what karma was for.)

Again, my group had three or so regular GMs and others that ran one shots, so this wasn't just a case of a rogue GM nerfing the characters. We all had ideas for house rules, and as you can imagine, unpopular rules were hotly debated. This particular house rule was probably the most dramatic change I ever proposed, but it was also one of the smoothest. This had a lot to do with the types of runs we gravitated towards; gritty, noirish mysteries with strong mystical elements. I'd say one of my biggest influences in my games was Dashielle Hammet, another GM's was a mix of William Gibson and H.P. Lovecraft. Fogging up the Assensing mechanic just made sense in those types of games.

[mfb]

i think Frank has a different concept of 'reliable' than us. 5 successes, TN 4, 10 dice--that's not reliable, that's guaranteed. sure, i've only got a 62% chance, but that's 62% per roll. assensing someone takes one complex action; if i don't get 5 successes the first time, try try again. with 6 dice and 6 complimentary dice, i might be unlucky enough to have to spend as long as thirty seconds staring at someone to get 5 successes.

Mercer, it seems like your general goal is to make assensing more challenging, for no other purpose than to make it more challenging. i'm not saying that's a bad goal, i'm just trying to judge (assense, even!) your motivation. raising the TN to 6 is one way to do that. just to offer another possibility, though, have you considered adding repercussions to assensing? for instance, one thing i like about the Psychometry metamagic is that, while it can offer a lot of useful information, that information comes at a price. the more you learn, the more it hurts. i made a Psychometry specialist, once, and he nearly KO'd himself looking at a murder scene. pretty cool stuff. in a Cthuluesque world, it might not be a bad idea to add similar consequences for just regular assensing.

[Mercer]

Mainly, I just like playing around with rules, the way some people mod their Honda Civics into street racers. (For the record, I don't really get those people.) My group tended to concentrate on awakened characters, but we rarely played up to the high karma totals-- the highest level initiate I can think of was a Grade 4, and he was an import from another game. Certain metapowers (Quickening, Shielding, and Masking) tended to be so useful that they pushed the others into the background.

I'm not currently running SR3, everything's all about the Quatro these days, but I've been going over some of my old notebooks and turning up a lot of stuff I haven't thought about in awhile. I thought about posting a few NPCs, but then I thought I'd have to explain why an Initiate was running around with Astral Projection as a metapower, and it seemed easier to start this topic first.

[Kagetenshi]

[Zhan Shi]

In a sense, astral projection is already a metamgic technique. SoTA: 2064 had something called "Limited Astral Projection", only available to mystic adepts; you could project for (Magic) minutes instead of hours. Whether it's still considered kosher for SR4, I don't know; I never bothered to email Rob about it.

[Shockwave_IIc]

I think that it has been proven that if you are wanting a Character that can achieve 5+ success regularly then it can be done with little difficulty (Not to mention taking the Edge: Perceptive).

5 Success's does not give you enough to really do anything. Oh, he is feeling uneasy because he is not being completely honest!! (Cue shocking music)

It's what you do when they get 7-8 Successes. Do you give them more details? or just shrug and say that all you get for your exceptional dice rolling? (And whether getting 7-8 successes is truly exceptional for that Character, Which is not that too difficult to do as a side effect)

[Kagetenshi]

Assensing isn't actually a Perception Test (not even an Astral Perception Test)—depending on your interpretation of what a test "made with the skill" is, you might be able to get by with an Aptitude, though.

~J

[Fygg Nuuton]

Aura Reading is used as a complimentary skill in 3rd edition, you roll intelligence. You of all people should know this!

[Kagetenshi]

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Assensing isn't a Perception Test, it's an Assensing Test, regardless of the fact that it's made with Intelligence. You use Aura Reading (as a complementary skill), so a sufficiently generous (but not obviously absurd) interpretation could cause an Aptitude: Aura Reading to bleed over into an Assensing Test, or at least to the complementary dice.

Was what you were saying covered somewhere in there, or did I miss it?

~J

[Shockwave_IIc]

I think the confusion comes from me. Perceptive can not be used for Assensing tests, but it can be used with Empathic Sense adept power.

[Mercer]

[Stahlseele]

[Kagetenshi]

That's hardly true—it doesn't mention it as not working on Athletics tests, but that doesn't mean it does. No, the Edge is specifically defined as applying to Perception tests, with some exceptions. Anything not mentioned as an exception that is otherwise covered in the specified area of application is ok, but Assensing tests are not Perception tests and are thus no more covered than the aforementioned Athletics tests.

~J

[Mercer]

One could make the argument that Assensing is an Astral Perception test. That's how my group always treated it (you were looking at something, just in the Astral instead of the physical world), but we never used Edges and Flaws so the Perceptive bonus was a moot point for us.

Edit: The phys ad power Enhanced Perception seems to back this up, saying that each level "provides an additional die for all Perception Tests, including astral perception..."

On page 171, under the heading Astral Perception, "You can also see glowing auras surrounding living and magical things and gain information from them, using a psychic sixth sense known as assensing."