I've noticed this as an attitude among a lot of players, and I was discussing it with someone who was planning to run a play-by-post Shadowrun game (4th edition in this case, but I've had similar experiences in 3rd). Basically, all of the characters (or most) submitted to the GM were mages, adepts, and one technomancer. No cyberware badasses, not even a decker. And really, who can blame them? I sent the GM a traditional "decker" (I guess they're called hackers now), but honestly...I'm reconsidering. I almost sent in an Adept myself.

Cyberware characters have to worry about all sorts of cyber detectors, legalities of their 'ware, essence loss and its effect on healing, and the huge cost of upgrades.

If I'm an adept with the equivalent of wired reflexes, I can walk through any checkpoint in the world, provided my fake ID works. I can't be arrested for being Awakened, at least not in most countries. And I can initiate until the cows come home to get more power points to upgrade with...and I have no penalties when it comes time to get healed. With the exception of Rigging, any job you can do with a cybered-out character can be done better with magic. And now that you've got technomancers, you don't even need cybered characters for that.

I think of cyberware as being a bit part of the setting of Shadowrun, but using it as a player seems almost like punishing yourself now. Am I missing something?

Improved reflexes will always cost an adept the same amount of magic unless he takes a volluntary geas and in that event it will be unavailable part of the time. With higher grades of cyberware a sammie can reduce the essence cost of his Wired Reflexes by up to half with no downside oter than extreme cost.

There is also the bioware issue. A .1 essence character can still stuff 3 points worth of bioware into himself which helps improve the expansivility of a cybered mundane.

The second problem is the karma/nuyen dichotomy. In a low cash high karma game the magicians/adepts come out ahead. In a high nuyen low karma game the cybered characters come out ahead. In a low karma low nuyen game the cybered characters come out ahead, in a high karma high nuyen game the cybered characters can hold their own with the magicians for some time but are soon clobered by weapon focus wielding adepts in melee and smartlinked gun adepts at range and they eventually fall behind the magicians.

A cybered character will have more mundane skills than a magician and at high ratings, usually. The awakened character is a karma sink in both long and short terms which the cybered character is simply a moneysink. The cybered character can better afford to improve skills (although he'll run into diminishing returns on any single skill before the adept does due to Improved Ability).

Also, cyberware is far more versitle than magic in some ways (less so than others) in the places where magic and cyberware don't overlap it is best to have both.

Of course, the versiltility of a well rounded rigger cannot be overstated. That magician may be able to levitate you but can he fly an airplane?

in 4th the magic > tech thing is a little worse but adepts trump both

Coming from someone who loves to play magical characters I'd like to lay out some Pros and Cons for magic versus mundane...
1) Awakened People are suppose to be rare, I've known many GM's to take x amount of magically active and then close the magic slot.
2) Technomancers don't use programs, the amounts of Complex Forms they use is limmited depending on their resonance. A Hacker can buy as many programs as he likes with only regard as to cost. Though the Technomancers ability to load as many forms as they like not to mention threading easily overcompensates
A Technomancer's Persona damage track is the same as their physical track, there is no buffer to protect their meat from IC.
3) As there are cyberware detectors, there are magic detectors (watcher), wards, and barriers. Some locations to restrict magic use, forcing mages to wear dampeners. (which are extremely uncomfortable)
4) Hackers are extremely versatile: They are leet computer experts, pro vehicle and drone controllers and can hack into most electronic/magnetic lock systems.
When the heat gets high, they can log off and kill their commlink. Technomancers are always connected, the only way for them to go completely offline is unconciousness.
5) In SR4, when a mage/technomancer gets Ware, it not only lowers their total magic/resonance cap, but also lowers their current attribute! Meaning more Karma/BP to keep yourself at the same level.
6) Awakened character have a -2 penalty against them when being treated by mundane healing checks. Magical healing cannot heal spell drain, only First Aid.
7) Last of all, creating an awakened character is expensive. As you need to devote BP to your Magic or Resonance, to the qualities to be what you are, to the spells or complex forms you can have, and so - like many other RPGs, Awakened characters start out physically weaker (except maybe adepts) than your average Joe. You shoot a cybered samurai and he'll keep coming after you. You shoot a mage and he's down for the count.
I may have missed something, but that's all that comes to mind right now.

Yes and no.

On the one hand, I think magic tends to dominate the setting - excessively so, in my opinion. I dread the day when someone comes up with the magical rigger, to go with the technomancer, and there'll literally be no specialty that a mage won't be able to handle.

On the other hand (in SR3 at least) there's still a lot of things that cybered individuals do better than the awakened. The aforementioned riggers are one example. Another is the character with a lot of skills at extremely high level, courtesy of skillwires and ECD (which you can stack on top of many other archetypes, skillwires are cheap - relatively, anyway) Finally, there's the fact that while (for example) a street sam might not have as many dice in one gun skill as a gun adept, he'll likely be faster, stronger, have a higher reaction, a better body, a much higher armor rating, a lot more vision and hearing enhancements, etc., because those things are a lot cheaper to improve with cyber and bioware than using magic.

Just had a thought, as Magic users are rare in the game which they are supposed to be, dont most GMs forget that? Not being funny but in the games Ive been in the GM I use was very good in that Magic was not on every street corner and thereby was a spectacular ooo aaah thing when seen. When coming up against a Mage it struck fear in my heart for what they could do. But with other GMs the Mages sorta are like the Orcs Many many many of them the runners have seen it now its boaring. Shouldnt it be up to the GM`s to keep a healthy balance????

If I were running a game of say for argument sake 6 people I wouldnt allow all of them to be awakened as the odds of that many people magically active coming together that arent part of a group are frightfully rare. I would have some sort of dice roll or something.

Just a thought.

Be well.

In my game, mages are much more common (because the best defense against a mage is another mage). Wards are a dime a dozen. There are penalties watching the physical plane from the astral. I'm also thinking up a weapon that mundanes can use against magic or at least a reliable astral camera. I will certainly say that magic IS better than non-magic four times out of five. Giving the non-mages something they can use against mages will be great in balancing that. I also strongly enforce OR rules and the like. Magic is pretty useless against drones. I decrease the TN to spot a spell being cast. I do enforce the rule that astral travel through the earth is difficult or impossible, and I allow for grounding. I've considered (but haven't implemented) not dividing force by two when calculating drain.

And of course, mages are shot first.

I think you missed my point, namely that mages are not by any reasonable definition of the word rare.

~J

1% of the population of the global population is awakened, and only a fraction are serious mages/shamans/adepts and all. With local and factor variations, like Oni, the Tir and Tibet, but not much.

It's rare in my book.

I wonder... With the years passing in the upcycle, would the slow rise in mana level would make that % grow?

They should probably start upping the numbers with the next releases. With how much show time magic and adepts get, especially after the comet wizzed past.

In my game, magic is going to have a reverse spike for a few months. People are going to be confused because their mojo goes south for a littel while.

On rarity, I don't think it matters. Runners aren't supposed to be the average people on the street. A normal average human in Shadowrun is what, 3 in every attribute? A million nuyen is a decent amount of money (what is it about 83 years of a low lifestyle?), how many people have that installed as cyberware enhancements in Shadowrun?

I would actually assume that mages and magical people would stick together. They have more in common. People who play Shadowrun are a small part of the population, but we always seem to clump together, don't we? I don't like putting such restrictions on my players by saying "quota: 1 full mage, 2 adepts, 3 characters who took the million, and the rest, good luck."

Magic is very powerful, but I also think lots of antimage stuff was provided in the multitude of books without making every enemy a mage. My group tends to abuse invisiblity, physical mask, and masking, but a few wards can play havok with that. I also think that reasonably, some enemies have to be mages. The corporations are going to spend the money to put a few mages in a security force. Probably not that 3rd-level initiate with the power focus (save them for corporate magical research), but some scrawny guy with a detect magic spell and some experience banishing would probably be worth hiring to protect the building in the evenings the 3rd-level initiate works in.

If you took the mean as the main criteria for making characters, then you wouldn't make shadowrunners. You'd make a corporate toadie intern, or a corporate toadie executive, or a junkie passed out in the gutter.

I can understand limiting Awakened characters; but my question was more specifically about the power level difference between Awakened characters and Cybered characters. Comparing Apples to Apples (Adepts vs. Cyber Sams insteada of Mages vs. Cyber Sams), the Adept is going to take a bullet as well or better than the Cyber character, since they wear the same armor, plus Mystic Armor. The cost of increasing reflexes via Power points doesn't matter in the long run, since you can always get more power points, whereas ripping out your Alphaware Wires and getting Beta or Delta put in is medically risky, highly expensive, and time-consuming in the extreme.

And again...if you're caught with Wired Reflexes, you're a criminal. They toss you in jail. If you're caught with Adept Powers...you're just an Adept. You get a dampener, but you go free. Aside from a few things like Skill Wires, internal air tanks, and the like, there isn't much of anything you can get with cyber that you can't match or surpass with magic or powers.

And technically, can't a Technomancer do rigging? And there's nothing stopping a mage or anyone else from dropping cash on one of those maglock picking machines. Think of all the cash they're saving from not buying cyberware.

Am I wrong in thinking that using Mages, Adepts, and Technomancers, you could have a very effective (possibly more effective) team with absolutely no cyber or bioware involved?

Mystic Armor only applies to Impact armor, not Ballistic. Otaku cannot rig without a VCR, which is difficult to get on ¥5,000 starting resources.

~J

In 4th ed, Technomancers aren't under any limits on resources, and I believe Mystic Armor applies to ballistic as well (in 4th ed, that is). I don't have the book in front of me at the moment though, so I could be wrong. They also did away with VCRs, if I recall correctly.

Still, that puts an Adept on about equal footing with a cybered guy vs. guns, and on superior footing in melee or against elemental manipulation attacks (flamethrower, powerball, etc.)

Kage: 4th Edition. Technomancers can control the Matrix and wireless devices without any technical assistance. They 'feel' the technical world around them and manipulate electronics much the same way that mages manipulate mana.

Jonathan: With the proper legal or fake licenses, you can get away with most cyber without ending up in jail. In fact SR4 plays out that cyber and body mods are so common that cyberware scanners are only placed in restricted zones. You'll get accosted by security in restricted areas regardless of whether you're cybered, magic of not.

Sure, but I was talking about a worst-case scenario. It just seems to me like magic is simpler to deal with from a legal standpoint, equally/more effective, and more convenient (assuming you're Awakened) than cyberware is. Perhaps they'll address this in the coming year with 4th ed books.

I think the legality of Magic changes from GM to GM. I have Lonestar very fearful of magic, they tend to treat the awakened from a perspective of Guilty until proven Innocent rather than the other way around (cyberware is treated as innocent until proven guilty, but we already have a lot of evidence)

All the time when I read this thread I was planning my response: "but.. mages are not rare". Then I saw Kagetenshi had beat me to it. But really, 1% of the population? Even if only a fraction there of go into serious magical use, that's a lot. You should see one on every street corner, more or less, even though you might not know it. You should ocationally see a mage metamorphosed into an owl eying the room suspiciously in your favorite bar. You should see spirits and awakened creatures, ocationally, not just when they attack you.

In my mind the problem is that magic is treated like super-powers in most games, which does nothing to keep the setting gritty, if that's what you're after. It just takes away the flavor of magic and mystery in the world and makes it into something that's just there for the characters to use.

There are ways to counter magic, there are ways to detect it, and people that matter will use them. So the GM has every reason to limit magicans just as much as cybered characters.

Thanks for the responses. It seems like more or less the consensus is that Magic, in general, is better than cyber. But this can be circumvented by limiting magicians. The thing is...why bother limiting them? I mean, why favor some of your players (those lucky enough to get the "Awakened" slots before you stop taking magic characters) over the unlucky schlubs who have to make do with a pistol when they could have had a flamethrower spell?

1% of the world population is Awakened. What is the percentage of the world's population who are shadowrunners? Does the GM need to keep in mind that runners are rare? There are about a couple of billion people in the SR3 Earth. Therefore there are about 10-20 million Awakened. You call that rare?

It says that mages are 1% of the population ... not 1% of shadowrunners. Who cares if it favours them.

So aside from simply disallowing or limiting the number of magical characters, is there any way to balance out this problem?

There are solutions that work against magic but not against most cybered characters.
Opposition with high willpower, wards, astral-only threats, biofiber, Background Count, Imps, Things man was not mean to know clawing at their feeble metahuman minds.


There is also the optional rule that drain is calcualted using Force instead of Force/2. That rule alone greatly reduces the effectivness of magicians.

How to make an Awakened Character feel useless: Send the team consistantly into high-background count locations...

No, that's how you get your Awakened character to start spending karma for cash like a sucker, and start installing cyberware.

In SR4 Magic can be beefier than cyberware after a while, but it takes a heck of a lot of karma. You don't automatically gain magic rating when you initiate, so to get those bonus power points will cost you the fee for initiation and the fee for raising the attribute. For the non-adept that could be a new skill at 3 or 4 (not sure what the formulas are offhand, so I don't know exactly how much karma it would cost just to hit grade 1 and +1 magic.

During character creation magical characters are gigantic point wells. A nonawakened character can afford to get some gear he wants but won't use every day, and some skills he likes but aren't absolutely necessary. An awakened character, because he has to pay points to be awakened and pay more points to up his magic, doesn't have that ability.

There are a few things that a mage can do that technology can't, but the opposite is also true.

There is a simple solution to that. Buy every copy of SOTA64 you can find and burn them all. If your players won't sell theirs then steal them.

Or just disallow Virtuoso. That'll work.

SR4 is sure to have background count as well, it just doesn't have rules yet. Most likely each point of background count will be -1 die to tests. Heck, just having violence commited raises the background count fo the area by 1. If your street sam shoots at someone before you go to cast you're taking a penalty.

For offense, tech > magic in some instances (grenades vs. ball spells for example). In others it's worse (trid phantasm and improved invisibility).

Actually, Ruth is better than II if you have enough scanners. The spell is resisted. The tech isn't.

In SR4 ruthenium polymers (i.e. the camo suit) only give a 4 dice penalty, not +12 TN. And in either edition you're better off combinging them with the spell if you want to remain unseen.

Ruthenium limits your mobility, and worse yet it only provides TN penalties to the test for being seen—once you've been located, the locater can shoot you at no penalty.

~J

And a seven-success II is not, for all practical purposes, resisted.

Really, I don't think instakilling a character by ripping his mind apart with the visage of a big astral bad is really worth it. As has been mentioned here that kind of arbitrariness allows the player to dissasociate the the character, reducing the overall emotional impact and transforming what should be terror into simple annoyance or frustration.

There are ways to take a character out of the action that still force the player to control and empathize with the character and leave hope of future recovery and high karma reward.

Taking the opening premise from the other thread, a magician sees something that man was not meant to know and suffers the consequences a better solution may look something like this.

Roll Willpower - TN 30
0 Sucesses

"You scream as loud as you possibly can. You don't know why you're screaming. You don't know anything. What ever you say has pulversied your mind. Thoughts and images roll through your head like a jet-powered locomotive but you can't even begin to put two of them together. "

Roll Willpower - TN 26
0 Successes
"You continue screaming at the top of your lungs and reach up towards your face. You can feel your eyeballs under your fingertips although you don't know what they are. You plunge your fingernails into the soft squishy globes, digging them out and popping them into your mouth. You chew them slowly while still screaming."

Roll Willpower -TN 22
0 Successes
"You reach up again, this time clawing and scratching at your scalp."

Roll STR - TN 3
1 Success
"Eventually, your fingernails find footing beneeth your scalp ad you drive your fingers down, into your face. With a burst unnatrual strength you easily tear your own face from your skull. "

Roll Willpower - TN 18
0 Successes
In a desperate attempt to make the screaming stop you plunge a hand into your own mouth, past your half-chewed eyeballs and grab your tongue.

Roll STR - TN 4
1 Success
"With herculean effort you pull and feel your tongue tear loose from its moorings deep inside your throat. Eventually you yank the entire apendage outt. It is surprisingly long."

Continue along these lines, reducing the Willpower TNs and increasing the STR TNs untill the PC gets 1 willpower success.

By the time that happens the PC should have already torn his vocal cords from screaming so loudly.

This leaves him barely playable but an interesting roleplaying experience as well as a liability for the rest of the team.
If the other team members drag him out then you can start making the really bad consequences happen after his recovery. If they choose to leave him to die or kill him outright you can have him contine to haunt the other PCs, still under his player's control but completely insane and quasi-immortal.

In this situation, the player will have no reason to complain and therefore there will be no need for a Hitler speech.

And really, what is more frightening for the mundane players, the mage dying without a save or the made tearing his own face off with his bare hands?

Wow, that's a great way to go about it. Better than instakilling the PC by a long shot. I mean, you're only giving the mage a M or S wound with all that horror and yet it's a real good description of horror.

It's also really in character for That Which Must Not Be Known. Like, as a GM, if I did that, I wouldn't really feel like I was breaking any rules.

Everyone likes to do astral this, astral that, tee hee let's know what's inside the building. But perhaps there's really room for peeking in the astral to be something that you don't generally want to do because of t3h horrors. It's kind of like that game, Clive Barker's Undying, which is one of my all time favorites. From time to time you hear a voice whisper, 'Look around...', but when you use the scrying magic sometimes the things you see are so shocking that you'd rather close your eyes to the astral than take a look.

Wow, I like that. A nice way to balance the power of t3h mages.

(I still recommend Clive Barker's Undying as a kickass game: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...ce&s=videogames )

Ahem...

The first time a DM did all of that to me, once I got over the disgustedness factor of it, he would be resisting 3 + (1/2 my STR)P as I picked up my chair and swung it at his face.

I'm pretty sure that chairs cause stun damage. That's what professional Wrestling has taught me.

And Western movies

I was on a run once where my mage was doped beyond belief the entire time we were captured. Trying to cast or even astrally perceive hurt me and hurt me bad. I had a blast.

Just checking, the mage was doped up, or you were?

I, being the mage, was doped up. Didn't cast a single spell for almost the entire time, but really enjoyed the game. It was one of the more memorable ones I've played.