Questions on staging and spirits (long), Need rules clarifications Options Track this topic Email this topic Print this topic Download this topic Subscribe to this forum Display Modes Outline Switch to: Standard Switch to: Linear+

[Dippy]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to SR. I have been gaming (mostly as GM) for about 20 years and have been wanting to run a 'cyberpunk' style game for half of that! I bought SRII but never got around to putting the effort into preparing to run it. Then I bought SRIII but the same happened. I suppose initially I found the system a little complicated (as do my players now), and also I hated the idea of metahumans. Well I've bitten the bullet by learning the system and have solve the metahuman problem (there are none in my game, I just have mutants instead).

I have now put my players thru their (and my) first run. Based on my experience I decided this should be something I wrote myself rather than a published module so that I could improvise when I needed to rather than stop the game so that I could plough through the rules.

The game was very successful and we all enjoyed it, however I did find that in the firefights, the PCs were often close to being killed, and on one or two occasions I needed to fudge the dice rolls to ensure they didn't. So now I have revamped the PCs to make them a bit tougher (and taking advantage of some of the newer features in the Fanpro rule expansions). At least now it will be easier to make the opposition a bit tougher if I have gone too far the other way.

Anyway, there are two aspects to the rules which are still bugging me, and I have not been able to find any help in any of the books:

1) STAGING
In parts of SRIII I have found two slightly confilicting descriptions. It states that D is the maximum level, but also that the stage up/down is based on the differences between the dice roll successes of the two parties.

I have assumed that the maximum of D should be calculated AFTER comparing the differences in successes. I.e. when my PCs fire on an opponent and score many successes, I get them to tell me the damage level plus any stages above D. Obviously it is often possible for some of them to say "D plus 2 stagings". I then make the damage resistance test and in this case need at least 3 stagings for the NPCs to survive.

Am I correct? I can't believe that the maximum damage level should be D before the damage resistance test...

2) SPIRITS
a) Conjuring
During my first run, the PCs were fighting ghouls in an abandoned subway. The player of their shaman decided to conjure a spirit to help in the fight. So he asked me if he could conjure the spirit of a subway train. Now since in SRIII it specifically mentions a city spirit taking the form of a subway train, I thought this was OK.

So now that player assumes that there must be spirits of objects as well as living beings. This is fair, and the SR concept follows that idea with native american spiritualism as the basis of shamanic magic, and the openess to all other forms of spiritualism described in the Magic rules supplement.

So later in the run when I am trying out the rigger rules, I have the PCs in a car chase. The player of the shaman says "can I conjure the spirit of the car chasing us and command it to stop?". This took me by surprise and I was unable to get help from the rules. In the end I accepted, but gave the shaman a target modifier using the object resistance rules, 'cos I couldn't think of anything else at the time.

Since then I have checked all my sources and can't find an answer. So I told the player that his shaman can summon spirits only from the planes, and the rules don't allow for what he tried. Unfortunately both of use are left unsatisfied with this. I am still unhappy that since city spirits often appear as objects (garbage is described in SRIII), it implies that objects can have spirits.

I think the idea of a shaman actually summoning the spirit of an animate object to control it is reasonable, although clearly it should be much harder than conjuring a regular spirit. So any ideas on how I should rule this?

b) Spirit combat
The rules say that spirits use the regular combat rules. The book stats never mention combat skills for nature spirits, so presumably they must physically fight by defaulting to their strength attribute. Doesn't this make them fairly weak? This leads on to the question below.

c) Low force nature spirits
I'm just preparing the next adventure in which my shaman PC gets the chance to be initiated. On his astral quest ordeal he will encounter a nature spirit. According to the rules this will be force 2. So the spirit in question would do 0M damage in physical combat. I have taken this to mean it does NO physical damage - am I right? Admittedly it should fight astrally anyway, but the astral quest rules are fairly clear that physical combat is possible in the metaplane places.

TIA,
Dave