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

[nezumi]

And what does essence do? It serves as a cap, that's really about it. It doesn't make stuff more powerful. However, funny thing, essence is really just essence index on its head. In other words, essence is a measure of how much you have NOT changed.

So I still ask, should an awakened infant have the same magic rating of a mage with 20 years experience?

[Kagetenshi]

Well, your question ignores both initiation and Magic Loss. Putting that aside, though, my opinion is yes—I like the idea of the raw magical power of a person being, barring damage to that ability or specific, directed attempts to increase it through deep ritual, identical to that of others.

~J

[Stumps]

Couldn't you make Magic, as a cap rating, Essence?
Magic Loss, etc, could be done with Essence. How natural you are.

Then that frees up Magic to be able to start from 0, while Essence can function for the pool, loss, etc.. that Magic presently does.

Magic, of course, would not be able to exceed Essence rating, but would default on 0 except where anyone feels like starting a race off with a natural + or - for Magic.

*shrug* just a passing-by thought.

[Kagetenshi]

You probably could, but the "why" part is the sticking point. Convince me it's a good idea, and I'll be spending all kinds of time figuring out how to make it work :)

~J

[Stumps]

Well, from what I can tell, you guys have a concern with the power of a Mage against mundanes.

One proposal seems to be to take magic and lower it's rating to 0 and make mages work that up to 6 instead of starting at 6.

The idea seems to be that this will make mages work harder at having great and powerful spells that will rip mundane's to shreds.

The problem posed back to this idea was that Magic does more than this and also acts as a buffer rating in the opposite direction than using it as an attribute would allow.

If this is the case, then shifting the buffer rating responsibilities over to essence (which is tied into magic rating right now anyways) and making magic an attribute would solve that concepts issue.

[Lindt]

I think it was Sphinx who posted alternative magic char. gen rules a while ago that I found to be so good I used them during the last go round of new players. It allowed you to still spend the same number of build to make a mage, but allowed you to tweak it a little, so starting with 6 magic wasn't a requirement.

[Lazarus]

[Lazarus]

[Eyeless Blond]

[nezumi]

I was working with Sphynx on clarifying them before he went on baby leave. I shot him a message. I do have an updated version of the doc, I *BELIEVE* it is THE most updated version (barring formatting issues) that I can send to whoever has an e-mail address.

He wrote the rules up so basically you can mix and match everything, your magic rating, your tradition, etc., while it still comes out with the same end costs as if you used the traditional methods. There are a few things I suspect Kage won't like (where it's a bit too universal), and also some interesting odds and ends (like an adept can buy astral perception with BPs instead of Power Points), but overall I think it would nicely solve our problem, it would only need to be pruned back to avoid overstepping the scope of the issue.

And again, while I know Kage doesn't run low powered games, most people run 120BP games or slightly lower. I regularly run ganger campaigns. I can assure you, the SR3 rules are pretty lousy for low level characters on a number of points. Magic rating is one of them. So most certainly, it is an issue for anyone playing that sort of a campaign. But like I said, for me it's also a huge paradigm issue. Your essence is a measure of how in line your spirit is with your body. Your magic is a measure of how well you can channel the natural forces of the universe to do stuff. The first should start at its max, but it does not make sense to me that the second should. Generally, when we're talking about our abilities to manipulate the world around us, it starts at 0 and goes up, it doesn't start at the human maximum and go down (unless you're counting things like the ability to drool or poop). Perhaps if Kage could explain why he thinks that does make sense, it would get me to stop complaining :P

[Link]

[nezumi]

I would see Magic vs. sorcery the same as strength vs. unarmed combat. In both cases, the first is the physical ability, the attribute, the second is the skill to apply it towards a specific ends.

[mmu1]

[Kagetenshi]

Do we have anyone with LaTeX, ConTeXt, or other TeX variant proficiency for book typesetting here? My experience is pretty much purely mathematical typesetting.

~J

[Sphynx]

[Sphynx]

The following is in reaction to the 'magic is too powerful' vibe some are putting on this thread; and the desire to 'balance' it.

Why? What is unbalanced about it? Control Thoughts? Mana Blasts? All the spells? Some? I -hear- that it's unbalanced, but I'm not seeing it. If it's just certain areas, it'll be alot easier to fix those areas than to revamp magic overall. I've played 3rd edition so much over the past decade, and not once seen the abuse/over-power of magic that is being implied in this thread.

[Stumps]

I haven't ever experienced this myself, but I do know that pretty much any aspect of Shadowrun can be taken to such an extreme by any player or GM can create a habitual over-powered version of nearly any component in SR.

So, I suppose it's possible, though an example for reference for us folks that haven't seen it in action would probably be helpful.

[nezumi]

To answer Sphynx...

1) Astral perception. You touched on this in the other thread.
2) An imbalance between character types. A mage is close to invulnerable to a sam. He can shoot him from kilometers away, he has spells the sam can't dodge and will have trouble soaking (no spell pool), while the mage can still dodge, still wear armor and soak shots. The only real defense against a mage is another mage or a drone.

Those are definitely the big ones.

[Sphynx]

2) Ok, but how is that unbalanced? The Sam has no chance of knocking himself out when he shoots at you, his high willpower and body are compensation enough for most offensive spells, and for the ones that it's not, his impact armour comes in handy.

A defense can be made for any class of characters, to show how 'more powerful' they are, but they're still all balanced. I know personally, I quit even having offensive spells (and I -always- play a mage) because a gun was so much more effective. Mages are more for 'tools' than offense in most games I've been in.

The only other possible flaw I see is in the ease of having cyberware (like a smartlink) for a mage. And I'm honestly all for greater cyber limitations to magi, but that's a problem in geasa and initiation, not magic in general.

[nezumi]

Most mages have the willpower to stage the drain to basically nothing. Sams generally can't afford that willpower. Even for those that don't, spell pool/defense makes all the difference. A mage has a pool to defend against any kind of attack. Sams depend solely on a single attribute, no armor, no chance to dodge. Again, maybe I spend too much time playing with 'fresh' characters or lower powered characters, but generally Sams pawn average Joes, mages pawn sams, riggers pawn all. However, there are more defenses against a rigger than against a mage.

If your sams know of some serious mage defenses that are available at chargen and don't involve another mage, I'd love to hear them.

[Sphynx]

Every sam in our game has a WP of 5+ That's just a necessity, like having armour is for a mage. When's the last time a Sam had any trouble at all killing a mage with a gun though. Anything from a 2+ (despite any stats the mage has) to 5+ under really bad conditions. Rolling as many dice as the mage would cast with (12 to 14), with ammo and guns that do S+ damage. The only real defense is Dodging for alot of these guns, and I assume since we're talking best-case scenarios for mages, we're doing the same for Sammies.

My character could never stand up to a burst-fire 6M shot from a Sammie under a condition where he would at least still be standing if I mana bolted him. And he'll probably shoot me first anyhows, and as I take that Deadly wound, I risk magic loss, whereas he risks a headache and if I didn't die, that mana bolt will surely knock me out if I cast it. There -is- a balance in magic vs guns.

However, it seems that the suggestion is that Combat Spells are the problem, not magic in general. No? If so, and everyone disagrees with me, then we should work on that area.

Seems to me, one solution would be to simply limit the casting dice for combat spells to the force of the spell.

[Taran]

I wouldn't agree that Combat spells are the only problem. A whole bunch of spells are annoying without necessarily being problematic because their usefulness degrades rapidly above Force 1. Improved Invisibiliy and IR are the classic examples (and they have extraordinarily powerful effects, to boot!), but most of the indirect illusions have that problem: rather than bothering to up the TN to resist the spell, you can just roll a double fistful of dice and get more successes than your target has points of Intelligence. This would be a bigger deal if II wasn't so much better than most of the other indirect illusions: Camouflage, Double Image, etc.

The elemental manipulations are also dangerous: their code is lower than you'd see for a gun, but since they affect half impact armor and aren't affected by range mods, they're more dangerous than guns.

Armor's problematic too, as by the spell description it stacks with all other forms of armor. It's showy enough that mages can't have it up all the time, but doesn't it strike you as odd that the Q4 mage can have much better armor ratings than the Q10 street sam?

I've heard bad things about Use (Skill) where Skill = Launch Weapons or Throwing or something nasty like that. The key is that since the spell has range, you can throw grenades or shoot missiles or whatever from as far away as you can see, without exposing yourself.

Mind Probe has a number of known issues, I'll not rehash them here.

Other spells are depressingly weak: the resisted detection spells (which is almost all of them, and what a trap that is for new players!), Decrease Foo, Decrease Cybered Foo, Gecko Crawl. Agony in particular sucks like Paris Hilton: read it, then do a quick compare/contrast with, say, Stunbolt. In fact, if you use Stunbolt as the measuring stick quite a large number of spells come up short. You can blind your enemies, impairing them for as long as you can sustain the spell...or you can knock them out. You could Confuse them...or knock them out. You could turn them to stone...or knock them out. Combat spells are part of the problem.

Some other spells are just weird: Gecko Crawl, for instance, can increase a character's movement rate when walking on the ground!

I have a plane to catch, or I'd go into yet more detail, but I feel that the issues with SR3 magic, and specifically SR3 spells, are many and pervasive.

[Sphynx]

I've never seen a problem with Improved Invis. Even the most simple of security systems overcomes all but Force 5 or greater versions of that spell. Could you clarify?

Elemental Manipulations have never been a problem in our games. They're so damn drain intensive that few people will ever take anything other than maybe a simple firebolt. Guns are tons better.

Armour isn't problematic for me either. Why shouldn't a mage end up with a better armour save than a Sammie? And in our groups, it's often the Sammies which are the recipients of the Armour spells...

Use/Magic Fingers: Never heard of a problem. Things still only move a certain number of meters per success based on magic. You can't throw something to the moon with any of the spells in a single round or anything.

Mind Probe: Again, what problem?

Yes, some spells need some working on (like your Gecko Crawl example which should never go above half your ground movement rate). And detection spells are in discussion still for just that reason. But I'm not seeing the items you're stating as being problems

[Kagetenshi]

[Sphynx]

So Invis is unbalanced because it works against everyone? It's not Camouflage, it's invisibility. However, you can't walk through a ward of any kind with one, trying to with a focus less than Force 5 is more likely to destroy the focus than not, you can't have a sustained spell on you without the astrally aware around you being aware of it. It's a tool spell. Where's the unbalanced? Should half the people around you see you when you're invis? o.O