One of my players, playing a Spider shaman, wants to be able to lift the whole team at once, with an area-effect Levitate spell. Levitate's TN rises by 1 for every 100kg of affected mass - for each individual, basically - but SR3's spell design rules in Magic in the Shadows don't include any such mechanic. With a total of 5 PCs, he's looking at a TN of 9 on his Sorcery test. What would be a reasonable Drain increase to increase the spell's weight limit?

"Players be like" sounds kinda archaic.

Players often do something with the Physical Barrier spell too. Make a plate for everyone to stand on then move the area of effect. Make a ramp for a car to drive up to get to somewhere difficult. Flip a pursuer car over with a ramp under one tyre. That kind of thing.

The MitS spell design rules often do not cover nuances of canon spells. Treat takes half as long to become Permanent as Heal does, but nothing in Spell Design rules provides such an option. Try to design Slow Death (TAL.107) with the MitS rules. Spell Design explicitly says spells can only affect an entire organism including cyberware (Paid For With Essence) and Shapechange does so but Petrify does not, yet there is no option in Spell Design that makes that possible.

Back to mass-Levitate. The spellcasting rules allow the caster to cast the same spell on multiple targets simultaneously with one Complex Action at a small penalty. For low-Drain spells such as Stunbolt, this makes Stunbolting three enemies in one action quite viable. For higher Drain spells, less so (without Power foci or Ally spirits to help). One could reason with the player that instead of Designing Levitate Area they could multicast Levitate and take the higher TN to Drain rather than to the cast. It may be that an Initiate with Centring can Centre against penalties to offset these higher TN mods anyway.

Whichever way you engineer it, one can only move the Target of Levitate while maintaining LoS on them so the more targets the caster is tracking (whether using Area Levitate or multicasting Levitate) the more likely it is for one of them to just stop moving and get left behind. The Target has no control over their own movement and the caster must manage everyone's trajectories. Watch out for mana barriers and Dispellers.

If you can't envisage how magical Power Rangers could disrupt your game moreso than everyone having a MCT Nissan Rotodrone with Winch fitted which they use to airlift the team in and out of hot zones, then it's probably fine to support.

I think I would say without raising the TN by 1, the spell can lift (up to Force) items each of which can weigh (up to) 100kg mass. By choosing a +1 TN penalty, it can lift (up to Force) items each of which can weigh (up to) 200kg mass. Etc. Pick your TN penalty when you pick your Force prior to casting. But that's just what seems reasonable to me, given the risks.

A small penalty of having to divide your spellcasting dice by the number of targets and having +2 by additional targets. In the case at hand, that's a nice 11M drain to resist and between 2 or 3 dice on the casting test by targets at most… Not very efficient.

And centering against drain doesn't lower drain. It just gives you one success every successes on the centering test…

@Tanegar: There's in MitS (spell design) a rule to transform single target spells into area spells. Applying it here would mean that the caster lifts all 100 kg objects in a Magic radius area. The penalty is +1 drain level. So in the case here, would make it +2S. You could probably house rule that the caster can have a bit more agency in selecting the targets of the spell. In any case, increasing the drain by one dalage level is probably what you're looking for.

In my smuggler game, back in session 250, I used a modified levitate spell. They were visiting Aden, and entered his mountain lair - to find a shaft that went WAY down into the depths, about a kilometre straight down. I wanted to show them a bit of dragon magic and something a little unusual.

Here's what I wrote, for flavour (skip to below the line if you just want to see the out of game thoughts)

"They reached the end of the access tunnel and came across an oddly-shaped room – an octagonal shaft dropped down vertically below them, disappearing into the darkness, with no handrail or safety barrier between them and the indeterminate drop. The room at their level, though, had three other tunnels branching off, each of which had an octagonal profile too, extruded from the complex geometry of the room they were in, with equilateral triangles formed to make a perfect mesh in-between each of the octahedral tunnels. Several of the triangles glowed softly with a pearl light, the source of the faint glow they had seen from the entrance, casting an even glow around the room and perfectly lighting it from all sides.

“Well, whenever you be ready, down ye go!” The drake gestured into the pit with a claw, and Aswon inched closer to the edge, glancing down. The light from the illuminated panels faded after perhaps ten metres, but the shaft gave the appearance of going way deeper than that. He thought he could see another faint pin-prick of light far below them – but it might have been a trick of the eyes.

“Um – sorry? Are we supposed to go down there?” Kai asked.

“Aye, aye. To see the laird.”

“I’m not sure how we’d do that. It looks…deep?” The drake nodded in agreement, then turned towards Tads.

“Are ye not good with the floating spells, then?”

“Not really, and I can only do one at a time. It might take a while, depending on how deep it is.”

“Ach, we don’t want to keep him waiting. Mighty testy, he gets. Excuse me for a moment then.” The drake moved to the side of the tunnel, and they saw there was a small recess in the tunnel, an alcove of sorts which contained a few items. The drake reached for a bundle of cloth, and then transformed before them, shedding his draconic visage and morphing into a broad-shouldered man who stood naked before them. A mass of unruly red hair flowed down into an equally hairy body, upon which several tattoos or woad markings were intricately carved into his flesh. The bundle of cloth was shaken out, and with the ease of years of practice the Tartan was quickly fashioned into a kilt that covered his body. “Right, sorry about that. Now, let me concentrate for a moment.” There was a shimmer of magic, and a disk of force appeared over the tunnel, covering the twenty-metre shaft with blue pearlescent energy. Kai, Shimazu and Aswon could see the power radiating from the disk, and the link to the drake – Aswon in particular guessed that one of those woads or tattoos now concealed by the kilt would be glowing brightly while the spell was powered up.

Tads squinted at the spell – it looked like her levitate spell in some regards but was subtly different. The magic was just…different. At first her brain had thought to use the word ‘twisted’, but that implied some sort of taint or malaise to it, and it certainly didn’t feel like that. It was more like if all of her spells were a two-dimensional picture, and this was the first thing she’d ever seen in three dimensions. There were layers or concepts here she’d never really experienced before, and she was struggling to find a right way to even think about them, let alone work out what was going on.

Hunter and Marius, of course, stared at the blue glowing disk with a mixture of distrust and horror. They both leaned over the edge and stared down at the potentially bottomless pit through the translucent energy and then at each other, before turning towards the rest of the team, waiting for one of them to be the first to test just how solid it was. They relaxed slightly as Tads strode confidently onto the energy, not sinking a millimetre into the surface and held in place effortlessly, and she was quickly joined by the others. They noticed that Aswon stayed right by the edge, but he waved them on to the disk confidently, and they both edged on – finding the surface just as solid as walking onto a rock or a concrete floor. There wasn’t even that slight dip you felt as people moved onto a lift and the mechanism absorbed the weight…

The drake strode on as well, his kilt rising slightly as he crossed the edge of the disk and the slight updraft from the tunnel was funnelled through the thin edge between disk and wall, and then with no warning they started to descend, picking up speed quickly with each passing moment. Aswon brushed his hands against the exterior wall and as he activated his gecko tattoo he stuck there for a moment, before turning off the powers and dropping back onto the disk. They’d descended a good five metres in the time he’d taken to run his experiment, and he bent his knees deeply as he landed, absorbing the impact.

“I was just curious…” he said, when the man gave him a look. The disk accelerated, and the light above them receded into the distance, the smooth walls blurring past them. Hunter tried to keep a track on how far they’d dropped, but his GPS wasn’t picking up any signal – in fact all electronic signals had long since faded away, blocked by the mega-tons of rock surrounding them. Even his cybernetic spatial recognisers were glitching out, confused and disoriented by the perfect geometric shapes and lack of identifying features to latch on to. Far below them the speck of light started to grow as they quickly drop towards it, revealing the bottom of the shaft.

“A thousand metres, maybe more.” He muttered under his breath, while his systems reset themselves as they had solid reference points to lock onto once more. The disk slowed, still descending but dropping in speed, and each felt themselves pressed down into the translucent energy as their apparent weight doubled under the force of deceleration. The force eased off as they entered the top of the chamber, and the topmost part of the rock began to glow, casting the same even light they had seen in the room far above them, down into the space. Tads did a quick check in the astral plane of the glowing panels.

“Looks like a fairly simple light spell anchored to a detection spell of some kind, both fairly low in force.”

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In terms of game effects, I tweaked the levitate spell, and changed it from a single target of 100kg and a +1TN per extra 100kg or part thereoff, to a disk that would support 1000kg - but it was designed only to go between point A and point B, making it a very restricted spell. I figured that no so much in terms of balancing drain, it balanced effectiveness and the potential for abuse / being OP in game, but limiting it this way. If it only goes between point A and B, then it's a perfect spell to be really cool and function as a passenger / goods lift in a secret mountain base, but no good for random battlefield levitation of APCs or bits of scenery, and thus even if my team got hold of the formula, it wouldn't be something I needed to worry about in-game.
Although this effect isn't listed or hinted at in MITS at all, I figure that there's a certain amount of logical approach or cause-effect going on here, like turning a powerbolt into a slay-human, or even a slay Jeff Smith of Apartment 2B, Main Road, London spell - where each restriction makes the spell much less hard to drain, but much more tightly controlled... and that instead I was just moving the restriction in a different axis. And besides... dragons. Dragons are cool, and the players should be reminded that they solve problems with magic rather than technology in a way that's natural to them because they're thousands of years old and massively more powerful than they are.

So, that's my 2p worth on a mass levitate. I do think having a mass levitate, especially with a big weight limit could lead to some really big problems in game, as it can make combat encounters wildly unbalanced - when you can just lift up the chasing police can and smash it into another police car, you take away a lot of threat from the riggers/sammies, or other more clever spell usage, and it turns that one spell into a massive hammer to weild at anything even vaguely nail-shaped. That's why I wanted to restrict it so tightly, and hopefully in a way that makes sense, and still makes a cool thing that *could* be really useful still - but not unbalancing.