What do you suppose would happen to game balance is mages swapped Magic and their tradition's stat for conjuring and sorcery tests? What I mean is, for instance:

1) Mage rolls (Attribute)+Sorcery skill to cast a spell, like Logic+Spellcasting for a hermetic, or Charisma+Spellcasting for a shaman
2) Mage rolls Magic+Willpower for Drain.

I'm thinking this could be a good idea for limiting the power of mages in the long term. This way, instead of using the cap-less Magic attribute for actual spellcasting--thus as you gain in power easily overshadowing the Opposed character's dice pool--they "only" use their attribute cap-breaking Magic stat to help resist Drain. It also makes that primary stat for a mage's tradition even more integral to their actual spellcasting rather than Drain, which makes more sense to me flavor-wise.

So, what do you think? Am I missing something important?

Sounds cool to me...

So, the Magic attribute would still cap the force of a spell, but your spellcasting test would rely on a different stat?

First, this would turn casting into more of a skill than a talent, since you'd either have to be smart, intuitive, charismatic, etc. to cast, than simply have pure magical power to cast.

Second, this would mean casters would have two separate attributes they'd want to buy up even more than before. If you want your spells to work well, you'd need 2 high attributes instead of one. Of course, if most of your spells don't particularly need to be cast at high force (for whatever reason), then you could lower your magic, and raise your spellcasting-linked attribute.

If you try it in out, let us know.

Dread Polack

Well, without further modification to the rules, Power foci would not be usuable for your Spellcasting Test. They'd only work on Drain, which they don't work with right now. Well in RAW Power foci do kinda influence Drain if you rule that the Power foci increase the maximum Force you can cast at (wording is vague on this) like they did in SR3. Otherwise, hrmmm, it'd be kinda wierd since all those skills would have variable Linked skills. But *shrug*, doesn't seem horrible.

At first blush i don't really like how heavily it favours Elf shamans and hinders Troll magicians and most Ork magicians (outside of whatever Traditions will use Intuition). Right now those two can sort of tough out the drain because they have room for an extra couple of Physical boxes, and through Initiation (Centering metamagic) the difference is more buried.

But still an interesting idea.

I think this is an intriguing idea. Maybe it works that way in space, or on certain metaplanes. You rule the universe, so you can make it however you want.

But hyzmarca has it exactly right. Imagine this character:

Gets the Aptitude (Spellcasting) Quality for 10 BP. Pays to pump it up to 7 (only 32 total BP). Perhaps pays 10 BP to get Focused Quality (10 more BP) to max out Qualities (Being a magician cost 15 BP for a total of 35 BP.).

Here is where the fun begins. They initiate and choose Quicken as their first metamagic power. They Quicken Increased Logic to the max. Their spellcasting pool would be 9 + 7!! That is a starting point of 16 dice, not accounting for focuses, finding their mentor spirit, etc. That amount is very early on in character development. Just 23-30ish Karma so far. And what if the character does stuff to get even more dice?

Now Drain will always be on-par with Max force. This could be a gravy train. Getting Magic to some insanely high level, such as 8. To do that optimally would take 40 BP for a starting Magic of 5, 18 Karma for 6, 21 more Karma for 7 (the character has initiated once already. The next initiate level costs 16 and it takes 24 more to get Magic to 8. Total Karma spent to do this is 23-30ish + 79. Ouch, over 100.

But now tossing Force 16 spells with 16 base dice pool and resisting drain with 18 dice (remember Focused Quality). Base drain is 8, give or take +/- drain code modifier. With 18 dice, 6 hits are expected so it often reduces down nicely. But base damage of 16 plus 5 or more hits on average? 21 less hits made by opponent on Body or Willpower alone. Spells cast at level 8 will seldom cause significant drain, but will be very powerful.

Still, somebody could do the same thing with the rules as they are now. Just Quicken Increased Willpower as well and you have the same kind of powerhouse. In the truly sick instance of charcters getting Magic of 10 I am envisioning something like 16 dice to cast 20 level spells with base drain of 10+/- and 20 drain resistance dice. Those will actually hurt big time. The spells at force 10, however, will still be generally negated drainwise.

The final insult is when that character Quickens their reflexes so they are doing this four times a round. Also remember a magician can split her spellcasting dice pool among multiple targets in the same complex action. Her new nickname is Death Blossom. Casting four or more very powerful spells per round with hardly ever experiencing drain.

And then she asks, "Since when do dragons work as security guards?"

To be honest Shemhazai most of that isn't a flaw with *my* idea so much as a flaw in the magic system as a whole, in particular the Increase Attribute spells. All of those exploits are possible as before, and all would have a similar benefit. The only real difference is that you can't initiate a bunch of times and get even *higher* in in your spellcasting pool; now that you've hit a cap that's about as far as you go.

hyzmarca makes a good point. Unfortunately this kind of ballooning is already possible with Centering anyway.

I find myself liking the idea quite a bit. It does make the magical skills more skill-like (mechanically and thematically), while making the Magic attribute into a better measure of how much power you can safely channel.

True, there are some short-term gains for magicians with attribute boost spells. In fact, one might consider chainboosting their spellcasting attribute since the second casting could potentially get more hits than the first.

Longterm, however, it really caps the effectiveness of the magical skills. Your skill and your linked attribute can get only so high before capping, and under the proposed system it's your drain-handling capacity that has no hard limit.

Again, I like this because gunslingers run into the same "I can get only so many hits" situation as it stands. That is to say, it brings magicians and non-magicians more in line.

The shifted value of foci are the only bothersome complications I see. Yes, elven shamans basically get +2 to cast rather than +2 to drain. Yes, trolls make less effective tankmages. I don't see those as thematic problems as they mesh with the genre.

There may be one other side effect of this adaptation: Force of spells. Since the force of a spell limits the amount of hits you can get on the spell, it serves as a cap on magical power. No matter how awesome your dice pool, a force 5 spell will allow no more than 5 hits. Now since force is limited by magic, this rarely comes up under the current system. However, if the spellcasting test has a "cap", then there will be a practical limit to how high a force spell you will ever need to cast. If your spellcasting pool is logic + spellcasting, no matter how high your magic rating is, you will never want to cast a spell at a force higher than about 1/s your die pool. And since that pool never increases with initiation, High level casters will never have any reason to use the high force spells they are capable of casting, since they will not be any more effective than the low force spells they could cast as a newbie.

"Magic can theoretically do anything" has always been one of the philosophies of SR magic.

Magic has no limits. You do. That's why it's the way it is.

And further magic can do anything, but metahumanity certainly cannot.

It's interesting to note that the Great Ghost Dance is imporrible to perform under any actual SR rules. The number of members of a ritual team has always been limited by ritual spellcasting skill, which now has a cap and before would have required thousands of karma for each participating magician.

This has come up before; The GGD was actually more of a series of different ritual casting groups acting at roughly the same time, and with general common [political] purpose. It was not a single Ritual Spellcasting.

Well, to be honest look at the world around you.It is easier to destroy things than protect things. I mean How do you stop the damage of a nuke once the bomb goes off?

Unfortunately "direct damge spells" works out to be a pretty damn big exception.

This would be great for player characters. Even though it is theoretically possible for a magician to become a god, PCs are limited by the massive amounts of Karma it takes to achieve this. This tweak would limit NPCs in an even more restrictive way, while at the same time allowing PCs to max out magically in a very short time. Dragons, Harlequin and other NPCs with awesome magical abilities would be far less formidable.

Ironically it would give GD, in SR4 RAW, an extra die for the Spellcasting Test. But those stats are wierd since they don't have any Initiate Grades.

Note that dragons (and presumably IEs too) break the skill caps, as well they should given what they are. (This is entirely beside my opinion that they should all die slowly and painfully, along with whoever decided that LA could become an island, but I digress.)

Hm, an interesting point brought up about high-Force not meaning anything for most spells, but being really important for combat spells. Is there an easy fix for this, because it seems like this would be a problem in the canon SR4, what with Centering allowing a theoretically infinite number of Drain dice just as my proposal does.

The metahuman Skill cap isn't really broken by them per say. It simply does not nessasarily apply to them, nor to Spirits and such.

EDIT: It would of course cause many contortions if a player tried to play something that wasn't constrained by something near metahuman levels of Skill/Attribute cap.

Average hits from Centering is outpaced by Magic increases 3 to 1, and since maximum Force increases at double the rate of Magic, and Drain for most spells at 1/2 the rate of Force. Therefore average hits on the Drain test will increase at only 1/3 the rate of Magic increase. Since the cost of each point of Magic starts at 34 karma for Magic 7 and increase by 6 karma each point, the rise to that theoretical inifinite is fairly subdued.

EDIT: Also the risk of larger net Drain damage increases. Eventually you need to slow down your increase in Force cast even more so since even a moderately below average Drain Test roll could be extremely dangerous.

Lemme sum up what I'm thinking in an example:

* Hermetic casts a spell with Force X. If X > his Magic, he takes Physical Drain. He cannot cast a spell higher than double his Magic.
* To determine hits, he rolls Logic + Spellcasting (+ Spell Focus) (+ Initiate Grade if Centering).
* To soak drain, he uses Magic + Willpower (+ Power Focus).

So when someone initiates -- provided they take Centering -- they're getting an addition +1 "to hit" automatically. They still need to increase their Magic rating to get the +1 "to soak" as well as raising their Force cap.

This fulfills the design idea of making the magic mechanics more consistent with everything else as well as keeping the magic theme of potentially-infinite raw power.

And yeah, it's barely more than a cosmetic change from the existing system. So why change something if you're not really fixing anything? Broken and consistent is easier to absorb than broken and inconsistent.

I did say "more consistent."

Ah, so some of you *do* like the idea of reinvisioning magic, to have the mage's worldview actually affect the way he channels mana rather than merely the way channelling mana affects him? Well, then I'll put out my original idea, rather than pandering to the constituency who want magical power to always scale infinitely the wy nothing else can or does in SR4.

So, here's my beef with the way magic works in SR4. Essentially, I don't like how helpless mundanes are agianst magic under the current system. No matter what that hacker does, if he's within sight of a decent-level initiate without Counterspelling backup he's gonna get owned by the mage tossing 16+ dice in Spellcasting, with a resistance test capping out at 6 Willpower. Worse, unless the counterspelling backup has Shielding even the counterspeller's not going to be much help.

So, I want to change things. In particular my biggest aim is to force Spellcasting into compliance with the other opposed tests and give it the same sort of cap that those tests have. Linking the Spellcasting test to the Tradition-specific attribute is in fact only the beginning, though an important one because it changes the infintely-increasing Magic att out of the Spellcasting test; I also want to change a few other things as well in order to minimize their ability to circumvent this cap of Spellcasting+(Tradition Att).

For instance, Centering will be used to negate penalties from distraction, background count, etc, which was by far the best use it had in SR3. You roll your initiate grade (+Willpower?), and every success negates -1 dice worth of dice pool modifiers, from say injury modifiers, sustainning other spells while casting, leaning out of a fast-moving vehicle while casting, etc.

Power foci will definately only add to Magic rating to help with Drain, though I guess spell foci would still add their rating to the test itself. Spellcasting foci would definately count toward the augmented skill limit for spellcasting.

Hm, maybe Shielding should act the same as it already does though. Then you'd have the interesting effect that, in a battle between two mixed forces, the mages will usually end up cancelling each other out, punctuated by periods where one side does something clever or slips and the whole battlefield goes straight to hell.


(Edit): And I'd argue that the debate between blakkie and Azralon isn't so much about consistency as it is understandability and extensibility, as both are much more important to a usable and fun ruleset than consistency. Those were the issues, after all, that the SR3 system lived by, and to some died by.

In any case those goals are equally met by either this proposal or canon, so I contend that the debate between blakkie and Azralon is entirely vacuous.

I think I see your boggle, Blakkie. I'll explain my use of the word "consistency."

Normal skill pools are (Physical/Mental Attribute) + (Skill). The RAW has Spellcasting and Conjuring as (Special Attribute) + (Skill).

The original proposal makes magic tests (Mental Attribute) + (Skill). That's the consistency.

Specific example, if it's needed:

Shooting someone has a finite skill cap on dice pool hits -- barring circumstance modifiers, of course -- because Agility has a cap and Firearms has a cap. Per the RAW, manabolting someone has a theoretically infinite cap on dice pool hits.

Therefore, guns can be only so deadly while magic infinitely scales. Some people prefer the (however unattainable) idea of their mage eventually mananuking entire cities. Some people prefer the idea that mundane weapons and magic spells should have a more evenly-balanced scalability. That's the effect of the consistency.

For the record, I'm in the second group, which is why I don't object to the OP's idea. I won't be implementing it in my games, mind you, but it doesn't freak me out.

In the places your proposal makes sense, it also seems unneccessary to actually change anything. In the places where things nee dot change, your proposal doesn't quite make sense. Mostly, it seems like a lot of rewrite for a little gain, but to each their own. I feel that the "ownage" by magic users against undefended mundanes is intentional, requiring that a runner team have magical backup. It just makes sense. A runner team needs a hacker to deal with computer based problems, a Sammy to deal with violence based problems, and a mage to deal with Magic based problems. Compare what a mage can do against an undefended person to what a hacker can do against someone's undefended tech.

What alway limited mages was not the power of the magic, but the fear of the drain. Remember that no matter how many dice you are rolling in your spellcasting test, you cannot acheive more hits than the force of the spell. And also remember that the force of the spell is the base for the drain code, and that, in general, a mage will not be willing to knock themselves out. Magic may have unlimited potential, but for practical purposes it is limited by the drain a mage is willing to take. And that brings it back in line, because a mage who isn't careful with their drain management is a dead mage. Either by their own overcasting, or by the sec guards that find his unconcious ass, he is dead. I think you see a balance issue where there is none.

But it's your game too. I'd never be one to tell someone not to house rule. You should just always realize exactly what effect it has on your game, and in your case, you are gimping all but the most mundane of magics. If that's what you want in your game, then more (Or less) power to you.