A few rules questions, and possibly some advice for a novice GM Options

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Now if the UK pants are worn under the trousers, if you try casting Wreck Pants you don't have true LOS for the undergarments, unless they are wearing their pants low in which case they deserve whatever they get running 'waistless enabled'.

Otherwise are we going to need a couple of detection spells like Locate Pants to allow us to detect and target?

Nope, just use an indirect LOS/LOS (A) version of the spell. No need to see the Pants at that point, though the spell can then be dodged, of course.

[SpellBinder]

Hmmm, and how would you get in LOS to said pants? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

And Wreck Armor sounds good to me (Manipulation)... just, why don't you just kill them instead? Even with Counterspelling, most people have less than 5 hits for defense most of the time.

Actually, it's a Combat spell. See the Ram/Wreck/Demolish spells on page 165 of Street Magic.

[m-logik]

Most of your questions have been answered so I'll just add on this last point as this is a similar situation to what I was in. I'll say this; For players, learning a new ruleset and a new setting (especially if it's vastly different from anything you've played before) is a tough ask. What I did was, to start with, eliminate the Magic and Matrix rules from the equation. Have everyone play a sammie, even if it's a sample character, and give them a simple run in the barrens or something to get familiar with the rules. Then add the other stuff in later as people get more comfortable. Even if you don't do this, don't let anyone play a Technomancer as their first character. We had a new player do this, and it was a disaster.

That's good advice, but unfortunately it's a bit late for that. Both of the new players are playing awakened; one is a pyromaniac black magician, the other is the previously mentioned animal handler druid mystic adept. We've run through some sample scenarios to get them acclimated to the basic concepts of play, but I still foresee a lot of time spent counting up dicepools. No one is playing a matrix based character at all (luckily!), so I rolled up a super-optimized hack-from-home TM for myself to play whenever I can convince someone else to GM, and then gave him to one of the players as a free contact. Other than that, I just made everyone buy a browse program, an analyze program, and talked one player into buying a pocket hacker. Hopefully I'll be able to handwave the matrix aspects this way, at least until someone gets tired of spending their hard-earned cash on hacker services and invests in some matrix skills.

I did drop another question that appears to have been buried in the theorycrafting for stripper spells, regarding sprites and nodes' processor limits, if anyone wants to field it.

[RHat]

I've got a new one. The entry on sprites in sr4a (p. 240) says that their stats aren't limited by the attributes of the nodes they're in. The entry on nexi in Unwired (p. 50) exempts "agents, IC, AIs, sprites, and e-ghosts, which are limited by Response per standard rules" from the increased processor limit of a nexus. The inclusion of sprites on that list suggests that either their attributes ARE limited by the node, or that despite the fact that a sprite "runs on other, inexplicable resources" it will still count against a node's processor limit. Neither option seems to square with my conception of sprites. Is this an error, or is there a rule about this that I've missed?

It seems to just be a typo - or, alternatively, you can consider the fact that the standard rule for sprites is that they are not in any way dependent on response.

It may be that chapter was written by someone not familiar with technomancers. Also, all that said, consider this: Processor limit and response don't matter to technomancers at all. If sprites DID count against processor limit, you'd basically be giving sprites a significant, if situational, buff. Technoshaman needs to take down an AI on it's home node? Brings in 9 sprites (8 Charisma, 8 Registered, 1 Compilied), rapidly degrading the node's response.