Spirits and Dart Pistols Options

[phlapjack77]

Again, suppose I know I'm facing down plant spirits, and bring in a powerful herbicide, like maybe the 2070 equivalent of Agent Orange. The new stuff is designed to not affect metahumans so much, but it should do a number on a plant spirit. These "toxins" wouldn't have much of an effect on metahumans and animals, but you break the suspension of disbelief when you say it can't work on a walking shrubbery.

I think there are 2 things about this.

First, it's not actually a plant, right? It's a plant spirit, sure, but not really a plant. Materialized, it's just a blob of protoplasm mimicing a plant.

Second, in the excellent find by Seth above, the text says, "Substantial evidence exists that arcane properties and archetypical elemental oppositions also translate as properties of corporeal materialized forms. Spirits associated with water, such as water elementals, sylphs, and river spirits, exhibit hostile reactions to fire, and spirits tied to fire react similarly to water."

To me, this says that using herbicide against a plant spirit is entirely justified as working. Other "toxins" that wouldn't traditionally affect a plant, well...

*edit*
3rd point, your herbicide wouldn't count as a traditional toxin, since you said it doesn't affect metahumans. So in this totally weird, not very likely to happen edge-case, not very much suspension of disbelief is being broken.

4th point, reading about toxins, "...a resistance test is made to see if the substance actually infiltrates the victim’s biosystem and impacts her health." So since spirits don't have "biosystems" at all, toxins don't affect them (and don't affect vehicles / drones / etc)

[Kliko]

This way is madness. Don't go there!

[Seth]

Again, suppose I know I'm facing down plant spirits, and bring in a powerful herbicide, like maybe the 2070 equivalent of Agent Orange. The new stuff is designed to not affect metahumans so much, but it should do a number on a plant spirit. These "toxins" wouldn't have much of an effect on metahumans and animals, but you break the suspension of disbelief when you say it can't work on a walking shrubbery.

I must admit I would let herbicides work on plant spirits. I let water work on fire spirits...etc. Sometimes this is in the rules as "allergy" or "vulnerability". I don't know if its RAW, but things like that feel right. Its not about suspension of disbelief for me, its about the internal consistency of the game.

[phlapjack77]

I must admit I would let herbicides work on plant spirits. I let water work on fire spirits...etc. Sometimes this is in the rules as "allergy" or "vulnerability". I don't know if its RAW, but things like that feel right. Its not about suspension of disbelief for me, its about the internal consistency of the game.

The water / fire thing is "RAW", as the spirits are listed with Weaknesses respectively. Other things are the realm of "common sense" I think, something else entirely (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Yerameyahu]

AFAIK, there are no herbicides in the game anyway, but that's not the point. A plant spirit is not a plant. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[pbangarth]

The common sense view that spirits are made of different materials from animals is confused by the fact that Insect spirits are given an allergy to insecticides, which are poisons made to work on natural insects. But no such allergy to herbicides is allocated to Plant spirits.

[Raven the Tricks...]

Yes, but insect spirits are inhabitation spirits, not materialization spirits, which makes all the difference in the world.

[Adarael]

Look at it this way: If I spilled radioactive waste on a car, you would imagine that the car would get pretty well damaged by it. If you do the same thing to a non-Toxic spirit, no one here would have a problem with it. If I immersed a regular spirit in acid or poison, why wouldn't the spirit be affected? Come on, doesn't anyone remember Captain Planet? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I wouldn't imagine the car would be damaged by it at all, because it wouldn't be, unless the waste was also a corrosive. Uranium Hexaflouride would fuck up a car, because it's a corrosive. But piling crumbled concrete, spent fuel rods and irradiated graphite from the heart of Chernobyl's reactor core on my car wouldn't do anything other than scratch the paint and poison whoever was inside it. Over a long enough period of time, it would corrode the wiring covers and other non-hardened matierals (seat covers, foam, etc), but at about the same rate as being parked next to a beach.

Corrosives are a physical destructant, and so should eat away a car. Radiation is a biological destructant, but is a very slow physical destructant, and so won't do crap to a car except in extremely long term senses.

Just as a clarification.

[Stahlseele]

How about injecting spirits with FAB?

[Ascalaphus]

Rules, like potatoes and chicken, aren't any good when eaten RAW. Cook over a gentle fire and season to taste with common sense.

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So, insect spirits suffer from insecticides. Okay, they're Inhabitation spirits; perhaps they wouldn't be affected if for some bizarre reason they Materialized. It makes sense that the Inhabited metabolism is somewhat insectoid.*

Water and Fire spirits have an allergy to the opposing element.. that's a bit more hairy. It's a Function Follows Form kind of argument, and you could extend that to plant spirits and herbicides, beast/man spirits and toxins, but...

Injecting neurotoxin into a fire spirit --- that's ridiculous.

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Even supposing you could inject a spirit with a nonmagical toxin - couldn't it just deMaterialize in order to remove it from its ectoplasm?




*Actually, the whole idea of extraplanar insect spirits sharing metabolism with earth insects is kind of fishy, but we'll overlook that.

[Yerameyahu]

I think it's Weakness, not Allergy, although who knows. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) These specific terms are sometimes used messily in SR4.

[Method]

Cain is right in that a lot of toxins are weak acids, but its kind of a semantic distinction that has to do with their electrical charge. They are not necessarily corrosive. In fact aspirin (aka salicylic acid) is an acid and we give that to people all the time. Will it kill you in high enough doses? Sure, but not fast enough to matter in SR. And you don't melt, you hypeventilate to asphyxiation.

Adareal hit the nail on the head. You have to consider the mechanism by which a toxin/drug/chemical works. Physical corrosion of matter is one thing but by definition a drug/toxin interacts with a biological system. Since spirits don't have biological systems they should not work. If they assume physical form, be it ectoplasm or whatever, corrosives or fire should work.

And as for the whole fire vs water, insecticide vs bug spirit, herbicide vs plant spirit thing: I think the answer lies more in the realm of "belief dictactes magic". By this logic, you might argue that a spirit of beasts that materializes should be susceptible to toxins, maybe.

[Adarael]

Something I thought of while I was in the shower this morning: aren't elementals NOT immune to elemental spell effects of their nature? I.E. you can kill fire spirits with Flamethrower, yeah?

[Stahlseele]

yeah, you can. and since it's an elemental attack, half armor too.

[James McMurray]

There is a critter power for Immunity to Pathogens and Toxins. Spirits do not have it. I don't see how the lack of text granting them immunity still results in them being immune.

[Ascalaphus]

What kind of answer are you looking for?

Do you want us to admit that RAW doesn't explicitly make spirits immune to toxins? Sure, it doesn't explicitly say that. It's heavily implied by all manner of descriptions of what spirits are, but it's not explicitly written out. You're not the first to point that out on this forum.

So what? What are you going to do with that?

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You can't force a GM to let you stun spirits with that, because presumably the GM has free will and can point out that the very first section of the Game Concepts in SR4A (p. 60) explicitly encourages you to change rules if they don't make sense.

You could apply this in a game you GM. (But you don't have to if you think it'd be silly, see above). However, if you tried to convince your players that spirits (and cars) are vulnerable to neurostun based purely on this rules-lawyering, then I'm not sure they'd take it too seriously.

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Realistically, not everything in the game is spelled out completely and explicitly. Because word count is a limited commodity, and because it'd be dull reading. It isn't even necessary - people have common sense and they're allowed to use it.
And if they did try to make a completely rules-lawyer proof, complete and unambiguous book, it'd be so horrible to read that no-one would want to buy it.

[James McMurray]

I'm just stating my opinion like everyone else. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

The answers I was looking for were explicit in the questions I asked in the OP:

1) Do darts affect spirits? No, by RAW they're 0DV attack so can't pierce ItNW, thpugh the rule is in an unexpected place.
2) Do toxins affect spirits? Nothing says they don't but a lot of people infer it (or house rule, whichever you prefer).

[jaellot]

Pg. 91 of Runner's Companion states that "A free spirit, in its materialized form, is made of energy in the form of a set of coherent forces." First sentence of the segment entitled Free Spirit Nature. That entire first paragraph should make it obvious that an injection dart won't deliver its playload to the likes of a spirit.

And even if it didn't, saying that you can shoot a spirit with a dart because they don't have a power of immunity makes as little sense to say you can shoot a machine sprite occupying a drone, because it doesn't have the power either.

Then again, it has been stated vehicles lack immunity to toxins, too... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

[Cain]

Pg. 91 of Runner's Companion states that "A free spirit, in its materialized form, is made of energy in the form of a set of coherent forces." First sentence of the segment entitled Free Spirit Nature. That entire first paragraph should make it obvious that an injection dart won't deliver its playload to the likes of a spirit.

And even if it didn't, saying that you can shoot a spirit with a dart because they don't have a power of immunity makes as little sense to say you can shoot a machine sprite occupying a drone, because it doesn't have the power either.

Then again, it has been stated vehicles lack immunity to toxins, too... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Sorry, but no.

If I dip a free spirit in corrosive acid, it'll be hurt just like everything else. If I expose it to radiation, that'll do the same. If you start arguing anything else, then you start getting into thoughts like: "Bullets shouldn't hurt spirits, there's no internal organs for them to injure!" and things go rapidly downhill from there.

The problem here is The Abstract Nature of Rules: SR4.5 doesn't even try to categorize or make specifics out of every possible form of attack there is. That means there will always be corner cases. As far as I'm concerned, ItNW is just that: anytime the players can come up with a sufficiently off-the-wall justification for the attack, I let it bypass the immunity. That's where you get spraying a nature spirit with toxic waste, or packing cans of defoliant in the last run of Ghost Cartels.

[Bodak]

Does a materialized spirit have a circulatory system, or indeed anything we would recognize as the biochemical basis for life? I would tend to say no, and on that basis that they are immune to attacks which rely on the target being organic and alive. Whether spirits qualify as "life" is up for debate, but they are almost certainly not organic as we understand the term.

As masses of fluff states, researchers have philosophised about what spirits are for decades. Spirits do not show up on a "Detect Life" spell recipient's sense although (meta)humans and (para)critters do. This would suggest to me that although they're animate and sentient, they are not alive. Even if you want to say plant and beast spirits are life-like, as far as Magic is concerned, they are not alive. And if anything is qualified as an authority on spirits, Magic is.

[Yerameyahu]

You keep mentioning herbicides and 'toxic waste', but we're talking about Toxins. They're known quantities in SR4, poisons that hurt metahumans and animals; I don't think there are any rules for plants, because no one cares. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Acids and bullets are physically damaging, and materialized spirits are certainly physical. What they're not is biological, so narcoject doesn't affect them. In the same way, spirits are not affected by pathogens; can you imagine a spirit catching HMHVV?

If you think for a second, you'll realize that it would as stupid for spirits to have the Immunity to Toxins/Pathogen power as it would for cars to have it. Despite the (egregious) misnomer, remember that it's *not* immunity; it's just extra (Hardened) resistance. You would never give something that's inherently and truly immune to something the Immunity to (X) power, because it'd be redundant. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Cain]

You keep mentioning herbicides and 'toxic waste', but we're talking about Toxins. They're known quantities in SR4, poisons that hurt metahumans and animals; I don't think there are any rules for plants, because no one cares. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Acids and bullets are physically damaging, and materialized spirits are certainly physical. What they're not is biological, so narcoject doesn't affect them. In the same way, spirits are not affected by pathogens; can you imagine a spirit catching HMHVV?

If you think for a second, you'll realize that it would as stupid for spirits to have the Immunity to Toxins/Pathogen power as it would for cars to have it. Despite the (egregious) misnomer, remember that it's *not* immunity; it's just extra (Hardened) resistance. You would never give something that's inherently and truly immune to something the Immunity to (X) power, because it'd be redundant. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

An acid, by your standards, is not a Toxin but hurts metahumans easily enough. Certain pathogens will hurt humans, but not other animals. FAB won't touch a mundane, but it will make a mess out of a spirit. It's not hard to imagine that you can hurt a spirit by irradiating it, burying it in toxic waste, or by exposing it to a seriously nasty acid. If you start saying that chemicals and toxins don't hurt spirits, then you suddenly start saying that acids and radiation don't affect spirits either, and then you're onto bullets, and then you're sunk. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif) Ok, I exaggerate, but I think you see my point. From a fluff standpoint, there's nothing saying that spirits are immune to one toxin but not another. Mechanically speaking, it would make spirits too powerful to make their Immunity to Normal Weapons be so broad as all that.

[Yerameyahu]

Again, no. There is a clear difference between radiation, toxic waste, acid… and Toxins. By 'my' (the rules') standards, acid is *not* a Toxin—absolutely. I've been saying that over and over all thread. 'Can hurt a metahuman' is not the definition of a Toxin. I clearly said that Toxins are "poisons that hurt metahumans and animals"; that certainly doesn't mean 'toxins are *things* that hurt metahumans'.

Further, I never said that "chemicals and toxins don't hurt spirits". On the contrary, I specifically said that chemicals (==Acid damage, which is either acid or alkali in SR4) can hurt spirits. You're 100% right that "there's nothing saying that spirits are immune to one toxin but not another"—they're immune to *all* of them.

This is basic logic. To recap:
• Toxins are chemicals, but not all chemicals are toxins. (Acid damage.)
• Toxins hurt metahumans, but not everything that hurts metahumans is a toxin. (Radiation, Acid, Fire, Cold, Electricity,… bullets. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) )
• Toxins work only on living biological subjects. Spirits are not living biological subjects, so toxins do not work on spirits.

For completeness, I'll re-reiterate that this is materialized spirits, not inhabitation spirits (which includes insect spirits and the KE-IV issue).

[CanRay]

You know, Alcohol is a Toxin (Or a drug, I can't remember right now where it's classified as in Shadowrun), I wonder what Spirits are affected by it.

Or would it empower the Spirits by becoming one with the spirits?

[Bodak]

Spirits are not living subjects at all.

Would spirits have "Immunity" to vacuum? That's not radioactive, a chemical, a drug or a toxin. It won't damage cars (though the air-pressure in pneumatic components might damage the cars) but it will have adverse effects on living beings such as (meta)humans and (para)critters (except moss piglets). But would it have any effect on Spirits (which are not alive)?