Shadowrun 3rd Revised, our backs turned, looking down the path Options

[nezumi]

As a head's up, I'm keeping very busy at work and in my personal time, so I am more liable to make silly mistakes in my note taking. Please do be sure to double check me as I work.

[Kagetenshi]

Looking for proposals on how to best integrate the idea of Awakening during life into the rules, as well as the idea of young Awakened spontaneously using magical abilities despite not being able to default. In particular, the tension between the existence of the Assensing test and the flavourtext implication that testing for magical ability is more than a matter of sending someone with high Aura Reading into a classroom for at most (number of students)*3 seconds needs to be resolved.

Note that I am emphatically not looking for a way to allow a mundane adult to Awaken. As noted above, however, the flavour strongly suggests that it's much harder to determine if a child has magical ability than the rules suggest.

Also looking for opinions as to whether the current 1% Awakened population number should be reduced, and if so by how much.

~J

[Kagetenshi]

Spell Defense. Should it exist? I'm really not keen on the idea of the people least vulnerable to magic being the people who can use it, but I'm willing to listen to arguments to the contrary, especially since it would muck with several metamagics.

~J

[Critias]

Why not have it as just a metamagic, then? In a visually appealing "mage duel" sort of way, I like the idea of folks blocking spells cast at them, locking in a contest of magical might with another spellcaster, yadda yadda yadda (so I don't think it needs to be removed completely). It's also great when a team mage can help a group work like a team, by exerting himself to protect them from incoming mojo. But I can agree that it feels weird sometimes, so I wouldn't mind if it were harder to get ahold of, rarer to run into, and that sort of thing.

It seems like making "spell defense" a choice upon Initiation (and having those other metamagics require it as a prereq) might be a decent compromise.

[Kagetenshi]

I like that idea. Anyone else?

~J

[Lindt]

Seconded.
I play mages and I keep forgetting about it. I think making it a metamagic (or beefing it up a tad and THEN making it a metamagic) would be a great idea.

[Link]

[nezumi]

I also would like to see spell defense tied in as a metamagic. That would be interesting to see. However, on the flip side, we either need to up the drain on magic or up the natural ability to resist magic. Either one would be fine to my thinking.

For the manifestation of magic, are you just looking for flavor text? You said specifically excluding the awakening of magic in an adult, which seems to me would be a critical part of the rules for the awakening of magic in a child. Regardless, this is a spot where I like how SR4 does it. Magic should start at 0 and be bought up like an attribute. I'm tired of every mage already being full powered straight out of the gate. Just reduce the cost for being a mage to compensate, or use the system Sphynx was working on which really worked well at mixing and matching stuff.


The 1% is fine. Remember that most of them are probably adepts and aspected. The only reason we assume everyone is full mage is because that's the sort of characters we make. We need to see a lot more aspected mages in the opposition. They're still super useful, after all. They can still make wards (or did we open that up to mundanes too?)

[Link]

[Kagetenshi]

[nezumi]

[Kagetenshi]

[nezumi]

[Kagetenshi]

Well, there's also the fact that the Sam has a Willpower of, IIRC, 9.

~J

[nezumi]

That... would make a difference. I don't have mages in my group with 9 willpower.

Yes, I'm starting to think your group may not be the best test bed for some of these rules : P

[Kagetenshi]

Yeah, we're a good test group for highly-optimized characters, but feedback from more normal groups is highly appreciated. Unfortunately my experience is that most of the groups mathematically inclined enough to give high-quality feedback are optimizers themselves...

~J

[Wounded Ronin]

In my experience spell defense is a very key part of your basic necessities and I would err on the side of making it too strong and available rather than too weak and not available.

This is because I have seen mages using Control Thoughts consistiently devastate groups of characters who didn't have the juice to defend. I would never consider sending a group of non-trivial NPCs up against the PCs now without them having at least one magician who, if nothing else, just sits there focusing on spell defense.

[Kagetenshi]

See, here I think of Control Thoughts as too difficult to use to be threatening most of the time—the drain code is moderately nasty, it needs to be cast at high Force (6 is pretty much a minimum, IMO) so that gets compounded, the TN is probably high (where "high" is anything above 4, since it's resisted), and they get to resist a second time if you tell them to do anything interesting (and only need one success to resist if you haven't stayed with them the whole time). At least with Control Actions you can make them shoot themselves in the head without giving them another chance to break free.

That said, if magic is going to be made more resistible, I'd like to make it more resistible across the board—not just when Yet Another Spell-Slinger is nearby protecting you.

~J

[Herald of Verjig...]

The only way I can think of to deal with the issues many people have with overpowered magic is to find a way to furthur discourage mages from dropping all their dice on offense. I have only seen this done as an act of desparation, so I have not had it as an issue and similarly have not had mages who were horribly game-abusive (despite one built on misunderstandings of bioware and layered armor).

I suppose you could discourage this by having a few battles where after the PC mage blasts everyone, the NPC mage uses a held action to get into range and drop a massive powerball right on the PC mage. But I'm sure players who choose to be problematic in this regard will see that as another challenge and will immediately invest in lots of sheilding foci.

[Wounded Ronin]

[Eyeless Blond]

[Kagetenshi]

[Link]

[nezumi]

I agree with EB on everything EXCEPT the Magic starting at 6 point.

Currently a standard group (as in, not the type Kage plays in) cannot run without a mage in the canon setting. One mage can basically rape them up down and backwards. The only effective defense against mages is another mage. Now I don't think we need mundanes and magicians to be balanced, but one cannot be completely and utterly defenseless against the other. And like EB said, the way to fix this isn't to make it more difficult for mages to protect mundanes, but to make it either more difficult for mages to do their stuff, or easier for mundanes to fight back. Hence, making spell pool a metamagic is a poor idea, however increasing drain codes, allowing mundanes to build wards, etc. would directly address the problem at hand.

re: magic rating at 6, what other attribute do we have that starts at its maximum and goes down? Why is it that a mage with 40 years experience casts his fireball with the same radius as someone who just awakened yesterday? Magic, like strength and everything else, should be something that increases with practice. Now granted, we COULD make everyone start out with 6 Strength as well, and have flaws to lower that Strength, but why would we want to do that either?

EB argued that this shouldn't be a focus because it's such an unusual case. The reason it's an unusual case is because the rules don't allow for any other case. In SR4 it certainly isn't unusual, nor should it be. I think the paradigm used in SR3 is fundamentally flawed. This is one of the few changes made in SR4 that I really agreed with.

[Kagetenshi]