Spirit immunity is hidden under the Materialization:


Materialization
Type: P • Action: Complex • Range: Self • Duration: Sustained
Certain astral critters are capable of projecting themselves
into the material world, thus allowing them to interact with
physical beings. When materialized, critters may aff ect physical
targets. Additionally, materialized critters gain Immunity
to Normal Weapons.

Which leads us too:

Immunity
Type: P • Action: Auto • Range: Self • Duration: Always
A critter with Immunity has an enhanced resistance to a
certain type of attack or affl iction. The critter gains an “Armor
rating” equal to twice its Magic against that damage. This
Immunity Armor is treated as “hardened” protection (see
Hardened Armor above), meaning that if the Damage Value
does not exceed the Armor, then the attack automatically
does no damage.
Immunity to Age: Some beings possess immunity to aging.
Th ese beings neither age nor suff er the eff ects of aging.
Immunity to Normal Weapons: Th is immunity applies
to all weapons that are not magical (weapon foci, spells, adept
or critter powers). If the critter has the Allergy weakness, then
the Immunity does not apply against non-magical attacks
made using the allergen.

And finally:

Hardened Armor
Type: P • Action: Auto • Range: Self • Duration: Always
Hardened Armor is even tougher than normal armor.
If the modified Damage Value of an attack does not exceed
the Armor rating (modified by Armor Penetration), then it
bounces harmlessly off the critter; don’t even bother to make
a Damage Resistance Test. Otherwise, Hardened Armor provides
both Ballistic and Impact armor equal to its rating.

The awakened ones aren't going to be much more helpful either if you play that toxic spirit full out.

A good mage has a fair shot at banishing it, but other than that F12 is just beyond the pale as a fair challenge.

Surviving the banishing attempt could be difficult.

Silly rabbit, rules are for kids. Apparently you missed his reference to a Force 10 Weapon Focus and 6 Improved Skill dice. Crazilicious!

You deal with an average, and that is only an average, drain of 8DV up until the spirit uses one of their twelve points of Edge. Then the mages head likely implodes.

But maybe not if the mage has 9 Edge, a Force 12 Power Focus, 5 Grades, and Centering. That could help tip the balance a bit.

I suspect that part is the actual issue. Even your 500 BP people that you've been talking about running for are going to have trouble with a "mere" Force 8.

And yes, while a 400 BP magician straight from chargen can theoretically toss out a Force 12 spirit, it's going to be really friggin' hard to pull off. This is why:

That spirit is rolling 12 dice against the magician's Magic + Conjuring to oppose the summoning. The magician needs to make at least one net hit over the spirit, or it won't even show up (drain still needs to be soaked even if it doesn't).

Since it's a Force 12 spirit, then the mage needs to have a Magic 6 (legal in chargen). To give them even odds against the spirit, they'll need to have Conjuring 6. To give them somewhat favorable odds, they'll want to Specialize in a particular spirit and/or maybe have mentor spirit bonuses.

At this point they'll be throwing 14 dice versus the spirit's 12 to summon. Doubtless you'll want them to use "bad guy Edge" to make sure the spirit shows up, maybe with an extra service or two.

Realize for a moment how many BPs you'll have had to spend on this summoner. Add in some relevant foci for extra expense. It's certainly possible to create this powerful one-trick pony, but you need to ask yourself if it's also desirable.

Note that the spirit will, on average, generate 4 hits on its roll to oppose its summoning. This means that on average it'll be offering 8P drain for the mage to soak on his/her Willpower + (Charisma if shaman, Logic if hermetic) soak roll. The summoner will almost certainly take a good chunk of that; probably about 5P, Edge notwithstanding.

So in order to summon up that bigass Force 12 toxic, your bad guy has effectively taken damage equivalent to a gunshot wound from a pistol. And that's after twinking him out and maybe spending some Edge too. He might want to reconsider his tactics if he's going to be doing that sort of thing often.

Something else to consider: What happens when that spirit rolls, say, 9 hits on its opposed roll during the summoning? It'll be tough for the summoner to match that with Magic + Conjuring, sure, so he might not even get a spirit to show up for his trouble.

But the nasty part is that he's going to have to soak 18P drain now. I'd hate to be a big bad archvillain trying to create a massive Weapon of Ultimate Doom just to have it blow up in my face before anyone else sees it.

Conjuring Materials have a cost of 500 x Rating, not 1500 times rating. The text is accurate, the original table in the equipment section has a typo.

But regardless, while you aren't going to see many bound spirits over Force 5, an unbound spirit is just as bad. You don't have to be very special to successfully summon an unbound Force 7 spirit.

-Frank

The Adept he describes is going to have over 30 dice before Edge. Skill + Improved Skill + Specialization + Weapon Focus = 6+6+2+10=24 dice. Add to that probably a 7th Skill point, and then his Agility. Oh, and Reach too for the sword.

Yeah that typo makes Force 7 sprits probably 67% more likely to occur

Sounds like a weather forecast doesn't it?

Forecast for tonight's Shadowrun:

Maglocks, giving way to monitored cameras further in to the facility. Security Guards will be active and there is a 67% chance of Force 7 Spirits. We recommend you stay home.

Silly rabbit. I'm pretty sure he ment Improved Ability 6, judging from the Force 10 focus.

From the errata v1.3 I read :

I thought it mean that conjuring didn't need any material (I don't find any trace of it in the conjuring rules, no trace of any price for it -given the errata) - and that binding only need material to be operated.

Am I wrong ?

That certainly changes the economics of magic a bit.

Not really. A Force: 12 spirit will usually have a Reaction of 14 or better, and also has the Dodge skill at a rating equal to Force (if you look at the spirits, you will see that they all have this skill). So that's 26 dice to roll versus the adept's 25 dice (assuming 7 skill + 2 specialization + 6 Improved Ability + 10 from the weapon Focus), just to see if the adept even hits it at all. After that, the spirit has a Body of 12 or so to roll to resist any remaining damage, and the spirit will also have an Edge of 12, which is enough that it can spend Edge points fairly indescriminately. Force 12 is bad news all around.

See my earlier post. You missed Agility from the adepts dice pool. Betting dice to donuts a combat specialized adept is going to have a better than average Agility.

It is still going to be horse race if the Spirit manages to get the first attack in on the adept, which will be situational dependant, and if the GM plays the spirit as highly agressive and uses Edge liberally.

Screwdrivers make lousy hammers. The right tool for the right job.

Lethality is part of it. As you ramp up the power level it becomes more and more so that the first attack is the last attack. This is good in SR usually because it discourages turtle characters that bring down the rain of destruction on the PCs around them. But if your whole game moves upscale? It comes down to who shoots first.

But it isn't just that.

I actually disagree that the game doesn't work at the level you're cranking it up to. But what it does do is work pretty differently from the way it normally does. That means a lot of advice you'd get about how things work won't be appropriate.

Shadowrun is a game that is trapped in a future/modern setting with an advanced (if crumbling) social infrastructure. That means that if someone gets up and takes on society head-on like an anime character, they will die. For all practical purposes, society as a whole has unlimited firepower. They can hire security guards faster than you can kill them. They have Thor Shots and nuclear bombs.

Traditionally characters in Shadowrun respond by putting force at a point, running away, and hiding a lot. It's like King Kong, as long as you keep to the jungle and the fringes you can fight the man all you want - you're an 8 meter ape for goodness sake. But if you take it to the empire state building, you'll get cut down. And that equation doesn't change much if you're a 4 meter ape or a 20 meter ape (though of course, the size of the dinosaurs you can beat up in the jungle will change).

So in Shadowrun, ramping up power past a certain point is actually kind of pointless. The characters still won't be able to fight Imperial Japan in open battle, but they'll be able to defeat just about anything in personal combat. To a very real degree adding more power makes the game feel more limited, as the number of meaningful threats goes down. Smaller things (like angry drunken gang bangers) lose meaning and the really big things (like corps and nations) remain out of reach.

You can do it. You can even make the game work (with careful tweaking). But ultimately there aren't any CR 14 monsters in Shadowrun to fight. This isn't D&D where there are monster books filled with stuff to populate the next dungeon level with. This is more like the real world, where the power of an average civillian is barely noticeable, but the power of India is a billion times that and defeating it is actually unthinkable for an individual.

-Frank

There is a Kombat Mage TNG (the next generation I guess) mentioned as popularising one of the SMGs.
Karl lives on, sort of.

What's Karl Kombatmage? Simply the best movie of '63 and one of the best trid series of the '50s (well, provided you understand German or can get ahold of a translated bootlet). Geeze, chummer, I thought everyone knew that.

It is/was a popular Trid Show referenced (usually in derisive fashion) to address what the average citizen knows about magic or combat or shadowrunners. In SR2 source books heavy on shadowtalk and where the writing style was usually presented in a more in character format references to 2050's pop culture were fairly frequent.

Possible. But his chances of having the game work are a lot higher if plays the game a bit closer to the power level that it was intended to be. But work is a subjective thing.

Maybe he just needs to get the munchkin phase out of his system. A lot of gamers go through that, and many even have a total blast doing it. A few even like to stay there. The former you can play in SR fine, but don't expect too much useful help from DSF. Because the help you'll get isn't what you are looking for. If you are the later I'd feel it would be a diservice for me to not recommend you check out something that better fits that power level.

I found Frank's lengthy post to be wonderfully insightful. The King Kong metaphor in particular was nice.

My one criticism/confusion comes from another thread, where it was stated:

For the record, I agree with the idea that the closer to "epic" SR gets, the more the standard dynamic breaks down. Why work for Johnsons when you would get rich quicker robbing banks? Why work at all when you could all be uber-Facemen and make millions buying & selling commodities?

Shadowrunners typically "need" that lean, hungry-wolf edge to give them motivation to operate on street level. The streets are a target-rich environment, but not a financially-rich one. Once you start weekly Lofwyr raids then you should probably retire the characters and chargen up a different batch of newbies.