Mundanes able to detect being assensed? Options

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

i didn't forget watchers. they're spirits, aren't they?

Sort of, Kind of... In a way...

[Sengir]

Brings up an interesting question though: Does assesning cover a full 360 degrees or can you only process the information if it's laid out like normal sight? (Meaning you can "see" from any part of your aura, but you have to pick a certain point to look out from and are limited to viewing a conical area roughly the size of your normal line of sight.)

I'd say your brain is still wired to a limited field of view, no matter the potential capacities.

[psychophipps]

It's pretty easy to describe as "spotlighting". We take in a Hugh Jass amount of visual data at any given time, especially while moving, but your mind naturally "spotlights" on what it deems as most important at the moment (and all too often it's the wrong stuff). It's not an intrinsic "You can't do this because...reasons" but a "You need to really focus on this one area/person at a time if you want it to count as an Assensing check".

[Cain]

i didn't forget watchers. they're spirits, aren't they?

Yeah, but they deserve special mention. Because watchers are free to summon, and you can have a lot of them, they make great checkpoint guards. Regular spirits are a bit expensive and hard to bind for this sort of deal, but watchers are perfect for this sort of thing.

[Rad]

Yeah, but they deserve special mention. Because watchers are free to summon, and you can have a lot of them, they make great checkpoint guards. Regular spirits are a bit expensive and hard to bind for this sort of deal, but watchers are perfect for this sort of thing.

I thought you were still limited to one watcher at a time?

[SpellBinder]

SR4: A magician of any tradition can have up to Charisma watchers at one time, and this doesn't count towards bound or unbound spirits. They last a number of hours based on your Magic + Summoning test.

SR5: If I'm understanding correctly, creating a watcher counts as a minion (and you're limited to Charisma in minions, including ally spirits, homunculi, and great form spirits), is a ritual that you must learn (like any other spell), and the ritual to create one takes Force minutes to complete. They seem like spirits, but you actually cannot use Banishing against them, and as I understand it you use Ritual Spellcasting to conjure one.

[Rad]

SR4: A magician of any tradition can have up to Charisma watchers at one time, and this doesn't count towards bound or unbound spirits. They last a number of hours based on your Magic + Summoning test.

Well that's nifty, I'll have to remind my group about that...

[SpellBinder]

Well that's nifty, I'll have to remind my group about that...

Oh, but there is more. SR4a, pages 189 to 190 gives you pretty much all you need for watcher spirits.

[Cain]

Oh, but there is more. SR4a, pages 189 to 190 gives you pretty much all you need for watcher spirits.

People have always underestimated Watchers. They're dumb, but they make great astral detection systems.

I'm not sure if this works in SR5, but in SR3, the Watcher Attack Pack was fearsome. Watchers couldn't do much damage in astral combat, but they counted as Friends In Melee. So, if you had six watchers plus one big spirit, you were scary in astral space. In a one-off, we were all playing magicians, and we encountered an astral great dragon. Every single one of us sent a horde of watchers after it, plus every spirit we had. That dragon went down rather quickly. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

[Rad]

Yeah, numbers really seem to make the difference in Shadowrun.

[Jaid]

SR5 watchers are no longer free of charge, and are likewise not something you can just conjure up on a whim.

you must expend reagents equal to the force of the ritual while in a magical lodge of at least the ritual's force (you can expend more reagents if you want, to reduce drain, as well, but that is not required). furthermore, it takes force minutes to cast the ritual, and if you don't have a lodge handy you need to spend more reagents and time (time being the biggest problem here) to set up a temporary lodge.

you are limited to a maximum number of minions at a time, but i'm not aware of any language specifying that other types of spirits count as minions.

in any event, you can probably still use watchers to help out in astral combat (and can also do the same using homunculus in regular combat as well as astral combat, provided the target is on the ground), but it's unclear whether the friends in melee bonus applies (which is only a flat +1 dice pool bonus, regardless of number) and you use the regular combat teamwork rules (which suck for no apparent reason), or if you can just use the more general teamwork test rules for astral combat (there's a line at the start of the astral combat section, which is about 1/4 of a page long, which says you resolve it like regular combat, but no mention of whether it just means that it's similar in terms of how the die rolls are set up, or whether all regular combat modifiers and rules also apply to astral combat).

so... you can still use the trick. but it got nerfed so hard, i don't think it's worthwhile any more. it costs money (not much) and time (quite a bit) to set up, and doesn't give you very much benefit.

on a side note, SR5 watchers also violate one of the fundamental laws of magic that have been around for at least as long as i can recall in shadowrun; they are summoned with ritual spellcasting, a sorcery skill, and i'm pretty sure there are multiple explicit statements that you cannot under any circumstances conjure a spirit of any sort using sorcery in at least two previous editions, not sure if it goes back to 1st or 2nd as well.

[SpellBinder]

...

you are limited to a maximum number of minions at a time, but i'm not aware of any language specifying that other types of spirits count as minions.

...

on a side note, SR5 watchers also violate one of the fundamental laws of magic that have been around for at least as long as i can recall in shadowrun; they are summoned with ritual spellcasting, a sorcery skill, and i'm pretty sure there are multiple explicit statements that you cannot under any circumstances conjure a spirit of any sort using sorcery in at least two previous editions, not sure if it goes back to 1st or 2nd as well.

Ally spirits are also minions (pages 122, 127, the rituals are classed as [Minion]), so having one will impact how many watchers you might want to have.

And check out the Summon Great Form Spirit [Minion] on page 136. Since the ritual doesn't specify otherwise it also uses Ritual Spellcasting to create (to me that's also a break in the same fundamental laws of magic that have been around for a long while now), you don't get as much bang for your buck as you used to (no increase to a spirit's materialized Physical attributes), and apparently now can't perform it again to try and improve the great form spirit further. On the plus side it does appear that binding great form spirits doesn't cause that extra 50% drain they used to. But with great form spirits being minions it begs the question, is a bound great form spirit a bound spirit, a minion, or both?

But regarding the old laws of magic, I currently couldn't find any reference to them in the SR5 books. So I guess when it comes to spirits now, if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it isn't really a duck. Makes me wonder what other old laws of magic are gonna be broken next. (gold from mana?)

[Cain]

Yeah, numbers really seem to make the difference in Shadowrun.

Oh gods, yes. Early in SR4, a summoner mage tried to resurrect the Watcher Attack Pack. He had 6 Watchers, 6 bound spirits, an unbound spirit, and his own astral form. That was a mess of a combat to deal with.

Before the nerf came in, self-replicating agents were all the rage in SR4. I gave up on Matrix combat when one guy brought in 1000 agent copies; the only logical response was 1000 IC programs defending things. I just handwaved that one, there was no way I'd play that out.

Even in SR4,5, things could get out of control quickly. One mage with six bound spirits and one unbound could take over a combat. The Technomancer did the same thing with seven sprites, taking over whatever machinery was in the area. And the drone rigger brought in his six drones. There were twenty-three combatants on one side, and that doesn't include the street sam, who was largely useless in this fight.

Normal opposition didn't stand a chance, but whatever the players do, the enemy can do as well, right? So they fielded enough drones and spirits to match their numbers. Which meant that now, I had a battlefield with about fifty different combatants running around. Shadowrun is not a mass combat system, so things were just unmanageable. I basically gave up and declared a PC win.

[toturi]

I'm not sure if this works in SR5, but in SR3, the Watcher Attack Pack was fearsome. Watchers couldn't do much damage in astral combat, but they counted as Friends In Melee. So, if you had six watchers plus one big spirit, you were scary in astral space. In a one-off, we were all playing magicians, and we encountered an astral great dragon. Every single one of us sent a horde of watchers after it, plus every spirit we had. That dragon went down rather quickly. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

It was cool until you hit a patch of BC.

[Rad]

Before the nerf came in, self-replicating agents were all the rage in SR4. I gave up on Matrix combat when one guy brought in 1000 agent copies; the only logical response was 1000 IC programs defending things. I just handwaved that one, there was no way I'd play that out.

Oh believe me, I'm aware. Back then I was still playing, rather than GM-ing, and our hacker had a dedicated agent swarm specifically tasked with maintaining every type of software in the game at rating 6, as well as spoofing lifestyle for the whole group. Called them his "Code Monkeys."

Of course, this was before the nerf came down that prevented agents from writing or upkeeping software. Once that hit he had to find new uses for all the fricking agent programs he had. Once during a job that involved blackmailing a government clerk, he cracked into the guy's headware commlink and basically took full control of it. Left a few code monkeys in there to watch the guy and make sure he followed orders. The whole table cracked up as he described how periodically one of the code monkeys would walk into his field of vision via AR and stare at him ominously while eating popcorn. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Cain]

Agent swarms were still deadly, even after the nerf. You couldn't have two copies of the same agent in the same node, but you could have copies in multiple nodes working on the same thing. I had to put a stop to that one, because otherwise one decker with one cracked Agent could take down Zurich Orbital.

[pbangarth]

So, do denial of service attacks not exist in Shadowrun, then?

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

So, do denial of service attacks not exist in Shadowrun, then?

They do... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And the hell with Standard Agents (though they are really nice), The favorite tool in my Cyberlogician's toolbox were his Worms (kind of an Agent, but not really).

[Cain]

So, do denial of service attacks not exist in Shadowrun, then?

They do, but the rules are complicated. They needed to stop the Agent Smith army somehow, but they left in rules for DDoS. They had to make a compromise.