.... It's how you use it.

If you have any of your own "let's make the GM cry" interpretations of spells, why not share? I am positive that many of these have been thought of before, as they seem kind of obvious, but in the hope of others being encouraged to greater originality, here is my guide to the more original uses of spells.

Turn to goo

leaves behind cyberware, and other non living materials, right? Sure you could use it to seriously screw over the cyberzombie comin at ya, but good luck beating their body... So what's it really for?

Why not use it to get rid of implanted RFID tags on the wussy scientist you are busy extracting... You don't even need to damage/deactivate the tags. A braver than average corp lackey swallowed the keys to the safe? Your drug mule got heat on his tail and you don't want to leave surgery scars? Turn to goo, your best and only non-surgical bullet removal system!

Physical mask

Does not say that the target has to be metahuman, or even living. If you beat the OR threshold nonliving systems cannot detect the change.

Oh did I mention cyberscanners are non living, so are MAD's, and chemsniffers. "Nooo, this ain't 12 pound of C12 in this nice moss-lined astral LOS blocking suitcase, it's a birthday cake for me dear gran."

Sure you can mimic the corp you are attacking but when your RFID tags don't match the enemy's IFF has you painted. Why not switch faces with the troll armour bunny, so the mage casts his mana spells at you and all the sniper bullets go flying at your tank?

Another thing you may not have thought of is that a lot of spirits are vaguely your shape, trade faces with your spirit of man - most corp secs are trained not to bother shooting at spirits, and to go for the mage...

Here's another... physical mask does not have to be placed on a willing target. If you can sneak up behind Johny Corp, touch him, and get 4+ successes, all his lovely kit will suddenly be convinced that some bugger with all the wrong biometrics has stolen it. This can be particularly funny in a building that packs auto turrets.

Sure it is a waste of an opportunity, but boy is it comedy when all his safeties lock on and his comlink won't even let him radio for back up. Though it will probably ring an alarm or two.. so all his mates will come and slot him for kidnapping their good mate Johnny.

Laugh as he tries to tell them in his thick Russian accent that he has no idea why he grew a moustash, a mohawk, and a slogan on his shirt saying "Зарежьте корпоративные свиней!" (thanks, Babel, hope I got that near right).

If you are feeling especially munchkin ask the GM if you can change red shirts to green shirts, and Hugo Boss to Eau de sewage overflow why can't you change "Why are you looking at me funny, guys?" to "Ha ha haaa! I Killed Johnny, what are you going to do about it corporate-whore pig-dogs?"

Final trick with physical mask, few mundanes are trained to shoot somebody who is dead already, a few bloody holes in the chest armor, no pulse (Affects multiple senses remember?) and a rapidly cooling corpse can get you a nice cool ride to the morgue. Use at your own risk, sometimes Joe Sixpack likes to make sure... By the way, biomonitors are non-living.

Stealth
Silence on a door means it don't matter if it bangs against the wall after being kicked in. It doesn't even cause the lock it's tearing open to make a sound. Silence on your victim is on occasion handier than silence on you. New meaning to "nobody can hear you scream."

Bung it on a helicopter. That and improved invis removes a lot of the stress from finding an entry point for your run.

Mob mind

A force 5 mob mind spell will take out a group of aggressors in close proximity, imo, more reliably than a combat spell, for less drain and with far less worries about collateral damage.

Mob puppetry allows free action for people not being commanded, but mob mind makes no mention of this, therefore as soon as the spell takes effect you can't do a thing the caster don't want you to. He has complete mental control.

Enemies roll willpower 6 if gm is being silly VS my spell pool of 9 if I am not even munchkining it. While you are practically forced to overcast kill spells to be sure of dropping somebody with them, you don't even have to worry much about threshold on this one. First command, mass broadcast to the mob, kill that enemy who managed to resist this spell.... and if the AOE caught a few of my chummers, so what?

Interesting thing is that from the description of AOE spells anybody leaving the area leaves the effect, anybody entering it enters the effect. You then have 5 rounds of shuffling chummers out of the AOE, then deciding how many mini grenades to feed the rest of them.

Note that mob mind uses the term "mental commands" and does not mention that the targets have to be human. Ever wonder what would happen if a mob-minded flock of 30-odd feral pidgeons was sicced on you? or a Africanised honeybee nest? Or a bucket of black mambas from that exotic pet shop you know? It's not even like if they managed to break out of the spell after x rounds of building up resistence successes that they would come after you, what with this screaming stampy fellow right next to them and all...

You can cast mob mind at a choke point and so long as you are sustaining it all the patrolling guards going through that door have a sudden urge to drink the tasty looking gator aid then take a nap just out of sight of the door.

This kind of spell is ideal for setting up ambushes as half the poor buggers through the door are surrendering before they even know they are under attack, and if you are a quick enough thinker you can get them to call all their mates into the trap for you, and the people who did resist do not know what is wrong until their pals simultaneously arm all the grenades they are carrying.

Mob mind and quickening make things like that even more intersting. You enter my house and you my bitch even as you are kicking the door in.

Remeber also that anything includes getting their security rigger to hand control and protocols of the building and drones in it over to your rigger, the guards to transfer all of their cash into certified credsticks, and everybody to remove and disable their commlinks then say out loud a list of the cyber they have implanted and abilities they have. If you managed to catch a mage with this (lucky lucky) get them to dismiss all of their spirits, and hand over their foci and fetishes.

So what if it wears off after a few rounds? by that point they have had time to give you all of their cash, disarm themselves, and kneel patiently for a coup de grace from your street sam.

From what I read of Mob Mind, is that you can only use it on Intelligent creatures. I don't think it'll work on critters.

Mind control spells in general are pretty munchy.

Mindslave the troll, have it turn around and geek the mage for you.

Mindslave half the enemy party (or most) and have them geek the other half, then themselves.

Unless the opfor has counterspelling active, they're pretty much hosed. Even a Force 1 or 2 Control Thoughts can destabilize the other side and all but wipe them out if coordinated with your team.

Actually6 we had the seductress shaman and the ex D.A. both assisting int he negotiation tests, and even rolling ungodly dice (asfter the assists about 19) we still only got two to five hits, while the johnson got his one or two so our pay was only increased by 10-15 percent.
I'm thinking of changing my signature to "guns I don't need guns; I just have my enemies shoot each other."
BTW I like the using of earth elementals to dig out a tunnel for you; I tried to get a thread regarding what legitimate uses of spirit physical services are, but about the only response I got was having hearth spirits (no longer in existence) to open locked doors. One idea I had for throwing off pursuit was to have the earth elemental dig a trench across the road directly behind my fleeing car. And of course don';t forget having your air spirit fly you around.

Ankle Biter has never found any exploits that really bother me. I can nix the physcical mask thing by pointing out that in SR3 there was a vehicle mask spell, which is enoiugh confirmation to me that shaping an object is harder than a person. Cyberscanners would still spot cyber in the target as The spell mentions nothing about altering cyber. Turn to Goo does change cyber that essence has payed for in my eyes, it just doesn't transform all the cyber limbs you keep in your pack for extra phys hits.

I am fine with Mob Mind being used on lots of creatures. I'll have to read up to work out a screw over on that one.

I have been looking at these spells myself. I have to write these ideas down so I can try and use them on my GM.

I hate not having my BBB at work...

IIRC, Turn to Goo gives the body a barrier rating, so fishing out a tag may not be that easy.
Also, I don't think Physical Mask changes what something is, only what it looks like, so C-12 may look like Granny's homemade Bundt cake, but to a chemsniffer, it smells like plastic explosive (which may also smell like Granny's cake, depending on how many hits she got on her Intuition+Baking test)
For Stealth, you can use it on a chopper, but that would give it a pretty high threshold for being such a highly processed object.

Yeah after reading that I would have to say I don't think most of that would work unless you had a push-over for a GM. There's creativity and then there's playing lawyer with the spell wording.

They brought back Turn to Goo? Did they resurrect Turn to Tree as well? That was always a nice one...

Note that in the spell description it says that Turn to Goo has to be cast on a 'willing target', it doesn't work that well as an offensive spell.

[edit]
Nix that, I was reading Shapechange... my mistake.

I've got a player in my group with Mind Control. He's used it once, ordered the enemy mage to drop a maxed-overcast lightning bolt on the guy standing next to him.

At the next session, one of my players said to him "Uh, maybe we should talk to Mike about control spells and stuff in the game... because it really sucks when your character gets mind controlled, and anything we're using is free game to come back at us."

This was the same session the party ate a F5+5 stunball while on an open-decked boat. They're learning

True, regular folk are ganked, and they are when you point an automatic at the same crowd.

Part of your problem is the enemies ran into the wrong enemy at the wrong(?) time. If they had a mage who was counterspelling, they'd have a fairer chance. Just like a guy that packed on the body armor, there are protections against both, you just need to get the materials.

This is what happens when magic suddenly appears from nowhere and is only, at best, a century into it. Adequate defenses aren't developed - there are few mundane protections, etc, etc. It's a classic DnD problem:

Wizard Vs Fighter: Whoever gets Initiative first will most likely win.

Wizard fireballs you or death spells you
fighter cuts the wizard into several pieces.

What people should start using is a smoke screen, then a vision that can see through it. Just a thought.

Need to come up with Anti Magic

As I recall, there was some kind of special archetype back in SR1 or SR2 who was kind of like the "Anti Mage". I'll have to hit the archives on this.

Bio-fiber body armor. Think of it as being "chemical seal" or "fire resistance" except it gives you dice against things like direct combat spells. Not sure how to work something like control magics, but it'd slow down the stunballs somewhat, at least.

Adepts with Spell Resistance (or mundanes with Spell Resistance, for that matter).

just go with the age old adage- geek the mage first... he's probably at the back so he can keep all his budies in los for counterspelling. Use a bfg on narrow burst, or a grenade launcher (isn't the mlg now a sa) or go with two handed mlg firing if you want to get really nasty.

There is no grounding in SR4.

Thank god. I *hated* telecommuting mages.

The bio-fiber is astrally present, yes, but what's the worst thing that happens? A mage starts fragging your armor, you call magical HRT and look for cover. All he's done is given away his presense to someone who didn't even know he was there a minute ago.

Technically, though, riot shields are "armor," and don't provide a cover save (that I know of... I might have missed something in the rules).

Besides, given the chance to advertise "better, more cover-providing riot shields for your security forces to hide behind when attacked by magicians" or "astrally-active body armor that actively interferes with the ability of a mage to target your security forces," which do you think would have the larger profit margin?

Aw, c'mon, Shrike, roleplayed marketing campaigns as proof of concept for a game mechanic is like a lie on top of a fairy tale.

But yeah, mixing cover rules and armor rules is tricky. It's best if we try to keep them entirely separate.

I can't stand it when a player says, "Well the rules doesn't say I can't do that!"

The rules don't say I can't beat you about the head and neck either, but that wouldn't be fair now would it?

Looks like I put this in the wrong place, so forgive my double post.

I don't know if I would say they are unbalance but mages are the hardest to deal with from a gm's point of view.

As a gm I can just geek a dumb pc mage that is not the problem, pcs do it to npc mages all the time. It just makes me feel dirty. What can I say don't like beating on the retarded kid everyday ether.

On the other hand a smart pc mage will drive me nuts because they will tend spend hours pouring over the ill written magic sections looking or the next rules hack to spring on me in the middle of the game. I hate the line "but its magic". Since the laws of physics don't apply they seem to think common sense shouldn't ether. I wish the magic rules were written like computer programs with clear inturperations. I wish mages wouldn't come up with crap and try to spring it on me in the middle of a run.

If something sounds to good to be true could you at least run it past the gm and get his ruling on it. I know, I know you must hord you new found toy, or the npcs could prepare for it since they know what the gm knows. But think about it do you want your gm to have to tell you are wrong during a combat where you could die or out of game where it wont effect the game.

The gm and the pc should always be on the same page. That is the first step to a good game. If you play a mage do you and your campaign a favor and play smart. Remember you a soft and popable your first action would be better spent finding cover, even if that cover is a street sam, then casting your biggest aoe spell before other pcs get into your line of sight just because you want to feel effective. Second talk with your gm and get on the same page for spelleffects and spirt powers.

just my rant

I'll agree... the things that cause the most surprising turnarounds in how or where a game is going are usually stunts one of my casters pull.

As for managing crazy stunts they pull, though... if I think what they're doing violates (or bends) a rule severely, I'll ask them to explain why they can do whatever they just did. If it's illegal, I'll let them know it. If it's a rule hole, I'll say "ok, it works this time, but we'll talk about it after the game." If it's something that's clearly legal (and just annoying), that becomes a schtick with the character, I just remember that the door swings both ways. Someone else in the wide world of shadowrunning may have figured out the same trick, or if nothing else, the character might find himself on the recieving end of the tried and true First Rule of Shadowrun Combat... geek the mage. Nothing draws fire faster than casting a force 6 or higher spell, and your teammates standing nearby *hate* it when the corpsec team they're engaged with decide to stop worrying about damaging the facility they're in and just use grenades, because there's a fraggin' mage over there...