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> PC are too strong, what to do ?
IKerensky
post May 5 2011, 11:35 AM
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Hi,

I am planning to start again my SR campaign but I feel the character were to strong the last time... Even since the start using basic rules. They were very seldom indangered by opposition.

Magic user in peculiar were gamebreaker (adepts less than caster but even them), overcasting and spirit summoning make them far too strong, especially as spirit aren't enough limitated in the rules and are so damn fast to summon even on the flight. Mind control, healing or invisibility spell rules, the same than social adept talent they can ruin a scenario very fast by controlling NPC.

I fail to really hurt them in battle because of the amount of concealable armor avaliable, I had to resolve for all opposition to use narrow burst of APCR wich make a lot of the gear in the book totally useless. And even when I hurt them the mage wave his hand and cure it all.

Drain was a great disappointement, especially Overcasting drain who was a plain joke. Magician just doesnt really care about it as it was very easy to cancel/heal.

The only way I feel out of it would have been to resort to true Munchkinism but that is a way I dont want to follow.

Anyone with a set of rules/house rules to produce less strong characters and more lethal background ?
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Hagga
post May 5 2011, 12:03 PM
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Use the background count rules. Add in magical opposition - my favorite are insanely devout catholics who know healing magic, counterspelling and banishing and nothing else. If your mages are walking all over you, you simply aren't using the rules correctly. Huge amounts of concealable armour? Are you applying stacking penalties correctly? Spirits are quite limited - they're also quite strong. They're also very draining to summon at a useful force. Remember to use object resistance rules. Add a few points to that NPC's willpower and feel free to fudge rolls to prevent him being mind controlled, and keep in mind that he's got a damn good idea of what is happening to him (eventually, when he thinks about it) and if he isn't dead he's going to do something horrible to the PC's if it is within his power.

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Blade
post May 5 2011, 12:53 PM
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Drain doesn't magically heal and if you apply all modifiers mundane healing is often not enough to heal all damages.

But before changing rules, I think you'd have to think about what it is you exactly want.
For example, for damages do you want:
- The troll tanks/heavily armored guards or cyborgs to be still difficult to hurt?
- The characters to spend a month in the hospital after each run?
- A punk with a light pistol to be able to kill a streetsamurai?
- A heavily armed opposition to be able to completely wipe out your PCs in a single round?
There are a lot of possibles fixes, but each one of them will have side-effects and the choice you'll make will have an impact on the tone of your game.
In my games, I wanted all characters to get hurt easily (even troll tanks), but tough character to be able to survive longer. That's why I decided to boost condition monitor (8+Body instead of 8+Body/2) and remove the soak roll (armor automatically absorb (rating/2-AP) damages, and non military grade armor degrades quickly after a few hits).

So rather than say "Drain was a great disappointement", tell us what you want drain to be and we'll be able to help you better.
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sabs
post May 5 2011, 12:55 PM
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huge amounts of armor means that you're taking LOTS of stun damage.

You need 27 dice of body+armor to reliably not take stun damage from your standard short burst from an ak-97 (When you absolutely have to kill every mother in the house)

remember bodyx2 is the armor limit, before encumbrance. I prefer body+strength but thats' a different story. So with a 4 body, I can wear roughly 12 points of armor before encumbrance. (That's with abusing the formfitting body armor) 16 soak dice, reliably gets you 5 hits. Sometimes more, occassionally less. Throw in short bursts and people start falling unconcious pretty quick, even without APDS or ex-ex rounds.
Again, Overcasting. You need 18 dice to resist casting force 6 spells consistantly all the time. Use counter magic, use background counts. Adepts are not any more dangerous than a well built Cyber-Sam.

Getting super-crazy high drain resist dicepools is hard.
Willpower(7)+Logic(9) only gets you to 16, and those numbers are hard to get. If you blow a ton of cash and bp you can get willpower(8)+Logic(10) but that's really the top end.
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Loch
post May 5 2011, 12:58 PM
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Background Count (Street Magic p. 117) is your friend for dealing with powergaming magicians. Although really, the less the GM knows about magic, the more powerful it is in-game (the reverse is true with the Matrix).

Armor doesn't really matter when you use things like elemental damage, be it fire spirits, a haywire security system, or just the corpsec grunts toting stick-n-shock rounds to make sure they catch those felons ALIVE for questioning and sentencing. I'm not saying you bust out the laser cannons immediately, but if they're walking everywhere in full combat armor, that becomes a more appropriate response rather quickly.

Or you could do what I did and sic a bunch of hulked-out paracritters on them if they just keep shooting first and asking questions never. I've never seen a gunbunny lose his taste for fighting so fast (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)
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Brazilian_Shinob...
post May 5 2011, 12:58 PM
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While throwing a lot of magicians to attack your PC's is cheesy, since they are rare, you could always use spirits against them too, with the Magician summoning spirits and sending them over to attack the group, never showing him/herself.
Also, summoning spirits on the fly, is quite difficult and draining, unless your magician have both drain stats maximized and a summoning focus.
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Sengir
post May 5 2011, 01:18 PM
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Killer security vs. mages: The building lights switch to strobe once an intruder alarm is triggered. Issuing guards cheap flare compensation glasses is no biggie, but a mage without cybereyes gets a -4 modifier for all spells and can safely be considered distracted for other tasks (like summoning).

If the action is not in a building, flash-paks do the same trick.
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Warlordtheft
post May 5 2011, 01:19 PM
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For increased lethality things to kkep in mind regarding NPC's:

Group edge for low level mooks:set at 2, 3 for mid level mooks. High level NPC's get their own edge (all mages are high level NPC's). Use it to go first, shoot straighter or other wise frag with the PCs.

Overcasting:Yeah, they do realize this physical damage from overcasting can't be healed magically?

Armor:After each attack that hits reduce the armor by 1 impact & ballistic (an optional rule I use).

Spirits have edge, use it. Also be aware of all the spirits powers and have a general plan for how the spirit will use them.

Security plan: How will security react to an intrusion. How long till back-up arrives?

Rember-well equipped guards have ultra-sound sights--unlless it is a cake walk standard guards could have cheap 2nd hand cyberware (older editions this was hard to justify--but lvl 1 wired reflexes can cost as little as 10K nuyen.

Remember that each attack reduces a defense roll by 1.

Layered armor does not have the same concealibility as armor by itself.

Stick and Shock works both ways. Also, nonconductivity is a really cheap.

Magical support is the only reliable counter to magic. Use it, cause if the target is important the guards will have magical support.

NPC's should remember to use cover and spread out (why I prefer to use maps in combat).










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Tymeaus Jalynsfe...
post May 5 2011, 01:23 PM
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QUOTE (Sengir @ May 5 2011, 06:18 AM) *
Killer security vs. mages: The building lights switch to strobe once an intruder alarm is triggered. Issuing guards cheap flare compensation glasses is no biggie, but a mage without cybereyes gets a -4 modifier for all spells and can safely be considered distracted for other tasks (like summoning).

If the action is not in a building, flash-paks do the same trick.


And yet, the Mage could have those same cheap Flare Compensation Glasses. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)
After all, they are not using the glasses to target anything. So no worries there.
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Tymeaus Jalynsfe...
post May 5 2011, 01:27 PM
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[quote name='Warlordtheft' date='May 5 2011, 06:19 AM' post='1066523']
Rember-well equipped guards have ultra-sound sights--unlless it is a cake walk standard guards could have cheap 2nd hand cyberware (older editions this was hard to justify--but lvl 1 wired reflexes can cost as little as 10K nuyen.[quote]

Since Brand New Wired Reflexes 1 only costs 11,000 Nuyen, the used stuff is downright cheap at 5,500 Nuyen. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

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CeeJay
post May 5 2011, 01:33 PM
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Just two more things regarding magic:

- Casting of high force spells is very obvious (Perception test with threshold 6 minus force of spell). This makes 'controlling NPCs' in the public quite difficult...

- Make liberal use of wards! Wards are quite cheap and are a good way restrict the the mobility of spirits.

-CJ
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Wesley Street
post May 5 2011, 01:34 PM
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@OP. Limit your PCs to 300BP in charagen. It doesn't stop min-maxing but it definitely makes "standard" obstacles more formidable. Also, if the only challenges you're throwing at your players are ones that can be overcome via combat, you're not offering up enough diversity in-game. Mix it up a bit. Perhaps an adventure can only be overcome with investigation or some sort of diplomacy or negotiation. Your players may be sensing that you're only offering up one kind of obstacle and are modifying their characters to compensate.
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nezumi
post May 5 2011, 01:39 PM
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I don't know how new you are to the game. SR has layers of mechanics, so it's hard to master everything at once. If you are new, I would recommend you pull in one area (probably physical combat), master that, then move on to magic. The rules are complex enough that grabbing everything at once will result in a GM missing details, and that results in unexpected power shifts. If it's too late for that, just review the rules and maybe give some examples of play so we can critique your rules understanding.

Next to that ... armor is cheap. It comes with penalties though. Make sure those are enforced. If they are, well, why aren't your guards wearing armor too?

Defenses should always have layers covering each other. So have several perimeters, passive and active detection, magical and matrix overwatch and drones. If your defense is missing one of these, the PCs will exploit it and stomp all over everything. Also remember targeting; hit the mage first (at a distance and concealment, if possible), then the rigger, adept, street sammie and decker, in that order. Try to match your attacker to its target. Rigger or sniper vs. mage, sniper vs. adept, mage, magical critter or decker vs. street sammie, decker or rigger vs. rigger.

If the PCs are still busting everything, check out drones. They're much more immune to magic, they can carry heavier hardware and armor, they can be networked together to always use the optimum tactics (and provide indirect firing data, so you can have a tiny drone spotting and a big gun much further behind).

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Blade
post May 5 2011, 01:44 PM
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Since we've drifted towards a "non house-rule fixes" discussion, you can solve all your problems with a single thing:
Drones!

Drones don't care that you're wearing a heavy armor, you won't stay up very long against fully compensated long bursts.
Drones don't fear your stupid stun spells and your useless mana spells.
Drones don't find your pornomancer attractive.
Drones see through your magic invisibility.
Drones can't be mind-controlled by magic.
Drones do have a tendancy to listen to the hacker rather than their own orders but I guess you can't have everything...

And seriously, when you compare the price and maintenance cost of a security drone to the salary and equipement cost of a metahuman guard, you figure out that drones should be much more common than most GM think they are. Sure they can be hacked, but it's not THAT easy, especially when you have many of them or a spider/rigger to keep an eye on them.
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Ascalaphus
post May 5 2011, 01:57 PM
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What kind of opposition are you using? If it's just gangers from the Barrens, then 400bp characters are certainly going to destroy them. They might get in a few lucky shots, but mostly the PCs will win easily, because 400bp is just a lot more than the gangers are built out of.

CorpSec gets a lot of force multiplication from having a well-thought out plan to deal with intruders. Instead of just posting some guards in a couple of rooms, sit back for a couple of hours and really think out: if I were security director, how would I make sure no intruder lives longer than a few seconds once detected?

How well do you know the game system? It could be that you're overlooking important rules, particularly magic rules, which makes it too easy for the players.

If you're stuck without ideas on effective tactics, recruit the players. Run an adventure where they're hired to defend a base against NPCs who happen to have the same kind of powers and use the same kind of tactics that the PCs use. Watch how the players deal with it, and learn.

On to some of your specific comments:
Overcasting:
* It's extremely visible. All spellcasting leaves magical signatures that take a number of Complex Actions equal to the spell's Force to clean up, and last for Force hours. Overcasting is easy on the forensics guys.
* Physical Drain

Drain
* Can't be healed with Magic, and First Aid will not always heal the whole thing.

Easy Healing
* Generally healing, with First Aid or spell, takes a number of Complex Actions or even Turns equal to the damage to be healed, to complete. This means that healing will delay the PCs, giving security time to prepare a response, close down escape ways etcetera.

Armor
* A Body 5 character can wear up to 13 points of armor (of which 6 concealed) without Encumbrance penalties. (Enforce those penalties!) That means at most 18 dice to resist damage, for an average of 6 hits. Guns do at least [4+Net Hits] damage; so with a bad gun a security guard needs to get in 3 hits post-Reaction to do damage; not great. But if he has a Ruger Super Warhawk with Ex-Ex, he does [7+Net Hits] and -3 AP; then the average damage at 1 net hit is already 3.
* Tasers and Stick-'n'-Shock have AP -half. Against the well-armored dude above, SnS on a DV4 gun does an average of [Net Hits] damage, instead of [Net Hits -2]. On a Ruger, it does [Net Hits +4] average.
* You can also use bursts and auto fire instead.

Professional guards use
* Tacnet
* Smartlink
* Specialization on their main gun
* Good ammo
* Good gun

Also, try concentrated fire: one guard uses Suppressive Fire to distract most of the PCs, while all the other guards shoot at the magician. That's -1 die to dodge per shot; soon enough he's not dodging but dying instead.

Drone turrets with guns have no recoil and can't be mind-controlled. Wired, not wireless; likely too much work to hack. Not even all that expensive really.

It's not munchkinism for a security director to use technology optimally. That's just being a competent security director.
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Sengir
post May 5 2011, 01:58 PM
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QUOTE (Tymeaus Jalynsfein @ May 5 2011, 02:23 PM) *
After all, they are not using the glasses to target anything. So no worries there.

If he's casting spells he does...
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Blade
post May 5 2011, 02:02 PM
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QUOTE (Ascalaphus @ May 5 2011, 03:57 PM) *
Professional guards use
* Tacnet
* Smartlink
* Specialization on their main gun
* Good ammo
* Good gun

* Home Ground (the place they're defending)
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sabs
post May 5 2011, 02:02 PM
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Mages wearing contacs/glasses will have problems with spells fizzling in their face. Indirect Combat spells will often explode at their glasses. Which means eating a firebolt to the face. Enforce the LOS and window/mirror issues.
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Tymeaus Jalynsfe...
post May 5 2011, 02:08 PM
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QUOTE (Sengir @ May 5 2011, 06:58 AM) *
If he's casting spells he does...


No He Doesn't... he is not using the "Sense" of FLare Compensation to cast Spells (Flare Comp cannot be used to target). A Pair of Sunglasses does not impede Spellcasting.
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Tymeaus Jalynsfe...
post May 5 2011, 02:09 PM
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QUOTE (sabs @ May 5 2011, 07:02 AM) *
Mages wearing contacs/glasses will have problems with spells fizzling in their face. Indirect Combat spells will often explode at their glasses. Which means eating a firebolt to the face. Enforce the LOS and window/mirror issues.

Spells do not originate at the Eyes. Where do you get that?
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sabs
post May 5 2011, 02:15 PM
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Indirect Combat spells generate a spell construct at the point of origin (the caster) which travels down the mystic link to the chosen target.
As they travel down the link to the chosen target such effects may be impeded by physical obstacles or mana barriers. They may impact transparent obstacles (such as glass) and do not “bounce” off reflective surfaces used for line of sight.

It's an interpretation, but given that /sight/ is a key component of the mystic link, it's valid. You run into issues with the ManaSight Goggles, but really that shit is broken anyways, so I don't particularly feel bad about that.

Direct spells though, those work great through glasses.
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Irion
post May 5 2011, 02:18 PM
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@Tymeaus Jalynsfein
You need a free LOS.

QUOTE
A Pair of Sunglasses does not impede Spellcasting.

No, it does not. As long as it is optical.
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Tymeaus Jalynsfe...
post May 5 2011, 02:26 PM
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QUOTE (Irion @ May 5 2011, 07:18 AM) *
@Tymeaus Jalynsfein
You need a free LOS.


Your LOS IS FREE. Your magic does not shoot from your eyes (Your not Cyclops afterall). I agree that Indirect Spells will likely impact any intervening barriers, as they should. But GM Dickery of having Indirect Spells impact Sunglasses is Stupid.

QUOTE
No, it does not. As long as it is optical.


And Flare Compensation is Optical... ALA Sunglasses... Sheesh...
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UmaroVI
post May 5 2011, 02:26 PM
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You seem to be describing two problems. Figure out which of them is actually the problem, or if it is both, make sure of that!

1) "Mages are better than the other PCs and outshine everyone else."

2) "My PCs are too powerful compared to NPCs."

One fix for #1 is to be a passive-aggressive jerk and "interpret" rules like "it's totally valid to say that sunglasses will make a fireball explode in your face, lol," or the people who think that having literally an entire city in background count 1-2 is sensible, but not tell your players upfront and surprise them with your not-a-houserule-its-a-completely-valid-interpretation-of-RAW houserules. Or you could be direct and impose some houserules to weaken mages and then tell your players before they make their characters. By the way, if you are finding that non-cybered physical adepts outshine street samurai then someone is doing something wrong.

The fix for #2 is to either give your PCs less BPs, or beef up the opposition.
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Tymeaus Jalynsfe...
post May 5 2011, 02:28 PM
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QUOTE (sabs @ May 5 2011, 07:15 AM) *
Indirect Combat spells generate a spell construct at the point of origin (the caster) which travels down the mystic link to the chosen target.
As they travel down the link to the chosen target such effects may be impeded by physical obstacles or mana barriers. They may impact transparent obstacles (such as glass) and do not “bounce” off reflective surfaces used for line of sight.

It's an interpretation, but given that /sight/ is a key component of the mystic link, it's valid. You run into issues with the ManaSight Goggles, but really that shit is broken anyways, so I don't particularly feel bad about that.

Direct spells though, those work great through glasses.


Your Interpretation is wonky, though, BECAUSE of the Mage Sight Goggles. They Work, becuase they Work. Which is why I said that it is just Dickery to have Indirect Spells Impact upon worn glasses. I agree that you should impose the physical objects that actually impose, but that is going way to far, in my opinion. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)
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