Are Mages Broken? Options

[SuperSpy]

I voted for somewhat overpowered, but only because they can take geasa for magic loss from cyberware/bioware. Take that away and I think the balance is just fine.

[Kagetenshi]

Good call: kill geasa outside of Initiation ordeals and that'll go a long way.

~J

[Commiekeebler]

[Commiekeebler]

Geasa isn't the problem, tho.

The problem is in the flexibility of spellcasting, and also in the 'open-ended' power-gaming that magicians and adepts are prone to.

A samurai is limited by essence. His magical evil twin can keep gaining more and more power into demi-godhood, with no upper limit of how much of this juice he can cram into his bod.

An experienced magician (200+ career karma) can go toe-to-toe with a samurai of equal resources and experience and smear him, without even resorting to cyberware. Quickenings, foci, elementals... the list goes on. Magicians make better samurai than samurai.

[DrJest]

[DrJest]

[DrJest]

EDIT: Nothing to see here. This is not the double post you're looking for.

[Commiekeebler]

Sorry if I sound inflammatory. I mean no offense, and I, myself, enjoy playing the magicians the most. As I've said in other threads, though, currently, they are unbalanced. I won't go over my arguments here again, they can be found in that other thread (2nd and 3rd page of discussion):
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...opic=7872&st=25

Now let me try and explain how democracy works. You've got your majority, who everyone tries to keep happy, and who doesn't care much. Then you've got your minorities, who get oppressed systematically to keep the majority happy. Because, so long as the majority chooses YOU, you don't need to care about everybody. Cynical, yes, but also true.

Now about this particular vote. I see three categories here:
Mages are Overpowered
Mages are Fine
Mages are Underpowered

The majority thinks that mages are fine, and that indicates that the balance is pretty good. That is, there are no glaring problems. Now, if you look under the curtain, you'll see how the two minorities compare:
28 to 2 and going up.

The way the question itself is raised is symptomatic of the problem. It's like saying "if you ask yourself, should you marry this girl, then you shouldn't".

The question, as raised in the forums isn't "are mages overpowered or underpowered?". The question is "are mages overpowered or fine?" and the form of that question, as raised by this fine community, tells you the answer is somewhere between overpowered and fine, not between overpowered and underpowered.

So, to sum it up, the mages are "a little overpowered". Does this explain my position?

I have circumstantial evidence of extensive playtesting that suggests that the mages are way, way overpowered, but since the majority of this community wasn't exposed to it, I can't blame them for being less active than expected about the problem.

[The_Eyes]

He's just making a simple Appeal to Popularity argument. He seems to also be arguing that his appeal is correct because governments are successful, despite the fact that, except in the most extreme cases, no government on earth is actually a democracy, but rather a republic, which is an entirely different animal, but now we're getting off-topic.

I still contend that the main reason people are arguing that mages are unbalanced are arguing on principle rather than any specific evidence. Sure, mages have lots of potential, in fact infinite potential, for power, but in practice at chargen this makes them either very solid in a couple very specific areas or really spread out and in the end ineffectual in a lot, much like mundanes under the current system. Later on the mage has potentially infinitely more power potential than a mundane, simply because they have more areas that they can infinitely expand in, but in practise this doesn't become a real problem until you pass the 300-500+ karma mark, which few games do.

[Commiekeebler]

Actually, what is this poll, if not an appeal to popularity? :)

I'm just playing by the rules here.

The Eyes, I can't tell you about everyone else, but I can tell you why I claim the magicians are unbalanced, and it has nothing to do with spite or principles. Please follow the link I posted above to the other discussion for details.

The biggest piece of evidence I can present is my experience on various Shadowrun MUSHes (multi user shared hallucinations), i.e. first persistent text-based morpgs, before morpgs were born. :) I've played on those on and off since 1994.

A MUSH can have up to 1500 players, and anywhere from 10 to 70 of them online at the same time, with 1d6 GMs offering them runs. There's a continuous shortage of GMs, because a lot of people like playing, instead of running things. Because of this, there's also a lot of downtime, when people go about socializing, clubbing, hanging out in the Matrix, roleplaying out soap operas and petty rivalries, and when they're terminally bored, discreetly (or blatantly out in the open) killing each other on vendettas or just for fun. Because of this latter statistic, on most MUSHes there's policies that restrict killing players to 'good IC reasons' or even with 'GM-approval' that needs to be gotten in writing beforehand by internal mail. But I get off the topic.

Because of the persistent nature of the world (there's always people logged on, moving about the city grid), population demographics need to properly represent it. Say, if almost everyone played an elf, it wouldn't make it fun for the 1-2 humans in a city that's supposed to have 60 percent human population. Fortunately, priority chargen and karma rules helps with this, because metas have to give up a lot of points for the pointy ears. The site statistics verify that metahuman population roughly maintains at what it's supposed to be, with the exception of orks. They aren't as glamorous as elves and aren't as strong and hardy as trolls, so they aren't picked by players as often as they should be. The 3rd edition makes them (and dwarves) more viable by reducing the priority needed to make them.

Unfortunately, the magic is where the problem with demographics is. Almost every other player wants to play a magician, and there is a rule about 1 character per player (to stop the abuse of multi-character single-player assassination teams), so, if left unchecked, the city is swarmed with magicians. It does damage the athmosphere. On most MUSHes the magicians are restricted: you have to wait in line (sometimes months) to get a chance to play a magician. Sometimes they restrict it so you can't play a magician as your first char on the MUSH (and a few other things), sometimes they expect you to write a novel for your character background, just to play a magician in the game. They weed them out hard! Red tape over red tape, to keep the population in check. On one site, where they made an alternative point-based chargen, they made no restriction on magic apps, but they hiked up the cost of magic to the point of making every magician weak in the attributes/skills department, and house-ruled magic heavily (no watchers, no double armor on spirits' immunity to natural weapons, magic is outlawed, modified some spell descriptions, etc). That did it, too.

Of course, some people like to play magicians for the fun of it. But, being competitive worlds, Shadowrun MUSHes, like many MMORPGs now, have their share of PKers. And magicians, as my experience and player interest shows, are the most dangerous opponents, even when they do 'fight fair'.

[Jérémie]

[toturi]

Magicians are powerful only if they get to prepare/get enough Karma/get an edge somehow. To get any of those, they need to survive. Of course they can be very powerful, they start out weaker than their mundane counterparts (even if you did min-max by using Sustaining Foci). But the problem with MUSH is that magicians are never killed off fast enough to demonstrate their vulnerability, since GMs will inevitably go soft on their beginning PCs and avoid killing them. Also GMs will inevitably reward good roleplaying, so if you are weak, you sneak around, you get Karma.

This is never balanced by the heroics karma, GMs view cybered monsters jumping into battle as overpowered/poor roleplaying(nevermind their main purpose is to kill). Imagine this: Cybermonster jumps into an unprovoked battle with sec guards(somehow GMs do not see this as heroic or good roleplaying), he wins, the GM throws more and more opposition at cybermonster(what if the cybermonster gets Karma for jumping into battle? every single sec guard he kills is Karma and he get more and more powerful, but this never happens).

GMs are simply not killing off their mages enough. They think it is a bad roleplaying experience, it is not. They are simply demonstrating that mages have it bad at first, but no, GMs let their mages have their cake and eat it. And those GMs are the ones complaining that mages are too powerful.

[kevyn668]

[Eyeless Blond]

Btw, that post by "The_Eyes" was me. Sorry about that.

The argument I'm trying to make here is that it's not necessarily a good idea to equate a popular opinion to a correct one. And yes, that does mean the poll is essentially flawed in its existence, but so what? Polls are fine if you're looking for the poular answer, and occasionally they are good indicators that something is wrong (make a poll on whether you think enhanced articularion or the pre-errata Mnemonic Enhancer is broken, for instance, and you'll see a good indication that something's wrong), but don't make the assumption that just because more people think mages are slightly overpowered instead of slightly underpowered means that there is necessarily something wrong.

I have read your arguments about why you think the power of mages is too high in general, and I've read the counterarguments as well. I don't happen to think that any of them prove your case; as I said, mages to have more potential than mundanes, but the trade-offs are such that at reasonable karma levels you don't end up with a problem.

The thing about the MUSH argument, first off, is it's another popularity argument. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's unbalanced; it could just be fun. MUSHs I think are particularly bad for balancing the tabletop game because, from what I've seen (which is admitedly not much) the karma level quickly goes off the scale. When you get to the thousands and thousands of karma range, sure mages are more powerful, mostly because mundanes simply run out of things to spend it on. This isn't a problem with mage advancement so much as it is a problem with mundane advancement, or lack thereof.

As for most MUSHs limiting mages to enforce population statistics, I'm not really sure why this is an issue at all. Are you saying that mages should be powered down to the point that people should only want to play an Awakened character 1% of the time? The reason the statistic is so low in the SR universe *is* an artificial one: it's because only 1% of the population is born Awakened, not because everyone got to choose whether or not they wanted to Awaken and only 1% chose to. Everyone who wasn't born to magic just has to deal with being mundane, like it or not. Again, just because the aerchtype is more popular for PCs than canon population statistics suggest has nothing to do with the power level of the aerchtype.

I have lots of other problems with MUSHs and the popularity of mages as a character type being indicators of magic's overpoweredness, ranging from my previous arguments that GMs just aren't including many of the drawbacks to being Awakened (background count, strictly enforcing Geasea, etc) while allowing all the Awakened advantages, to the fact that people just like playing mages because magic is cooler than technology. Suffice to say I don't think that magic's popularity in the MUSH world is an indication of magic's brokenness, but rather a host of other factors that have nothing to do with game balance.

[kevyn668]

[Eyeless Blond]

I'm using it as an IC name in a game on the other forum. It helps me organize my IC posts from the ones not related to the game.

I'm just being stupid and forgetting to switch back.

[kevyn668]

Gotcha. :)

[apple]

[Ol' Scratch]

[Eyeless Blond]

Right, right. I'll probably just forget the alt nick and keep this one since it comes to that. After all, I put money on this one. :)

[toturi]

[apple]

[toturi]

[Kagetenshi]

[Vuron]

The fact that for realitive little investment in spell points and karma a Street Mage can have +3d6 to init and be able to move 30+ meters per combat turn goes a long way towards making mages exceedingly deadly and mobile attack platforms (as evidenced by the stories of the mage armed with the autoshotgun of death)

As mobility can make a huge difference in game play (30 meters means that the average mage can move in and out of cover most phases and that only when the opposition has held actions can they reliably plug the beast) while the mage is "slower" than the high end samurai in terms of reaction speed he's mobility makes up a good deal of the difference. This doesn't even address the fact that that combo of spells with a sustaining focus in place requires a much smaller percentage of the mage's development than the same investment by a street samurai. The hyperspeed samurai is deadly but he is much more of a one trick pony. Basically all the mage is sacrificing is skill points and attributes in comparison to the average mundane. However judicious usage of spell points goes a long way towards reducing the mages weakeness in regards to crappy stats and skills.

Of course with some changes to some spells Mages remain extremely powerful but not as extremely powerful and flexible as they are now.

Changing the spells that allow a mage to buy 1 force and still have full effect would go a long way as would requiring sustaining foci spells to be renewed on a shorter time frame (maybe once every 24 hours or 12 hours etc). That would allow them to be flexible instead of having high levels of buffs.