A recent spell related thread mentioned the wide variety of magic experience between teams. What does your team generally host? My experience is generally three awakened characters, one adept, one hermetic, and one shaman.

How do you think this affects your perception of the way magic works and its importance to the Shadowrun setting? For us, it makes it very integral, and we tend to face magical threats as often as not.

The teams my players come up with typically involve only one PhysAd. They tend to focus heavily on combat and someone will almost always go the way of the Physical Adept. Occasionally I'll get a second when somebody decides to copy the successful PhysAd that's already in the group. This makes magical threats interesting, a spirit that uses hit and fade tactics, and hides in the astral almost always is enough to stop the team. That and almost always during infiltrations they get spotted. My teams tend to avoid the complex characters: mages, deckers, and riggers. Almost all of them tend to be some form of street sam, now that I think about it the teams my players usually think up have never been too much fun for me to run for. :sobs: Oh well, I'm trying to get a new game going with some better characters.

My team (as in the one I'm writing about since I don't play anymore) involves a Fire Elementalist (Element-specific Hermetic), his Alley Spirit (see previous topic by me), and his Blind Physad cousin. I write her as a combination of Daredevil and someone that uses Astral space to see.

I guess that would actually be 3 people, not two. Sorry.

TinkerGnome,

As you know, I have usually seen two, a Shaman and Mage. I have seen three (with the third being a PhysAd). A shaman/mage or two shamans or two mages is a very vicious combination in my experience.

-Polaris

Gah. With my players, it really shifts. In one campaign they have one shaman (mage died when they sent her alone in VERY dangerous area, stupid bastards)

In second campaign they have two mages, and this number will increase to three quite soon.

(Player-created totem Mockingbird) shaman, sprite Sun shaman, fomori druidic Sun shaman, troll physad, ultra-quick samurai, and a SURGE changeling who's non-magical.

Ork Adversary shaman, ork infiltration/assassin physad, human thief physad, human hermetic conjuring adept/face, elf speed sammie, troll sammie.

So yeah, 2/3 of my group is magically active. This is well above average for us.

We have a Night Elf Physical Adept, a Elf Shaman and a human Hermetic Mage. The shaman and mage are both from Tir-Na-Nog but with vastly different views on magic, go figure.

My former crew tended to be relatively magic-light.

A phys-ad (who may or may not have been a combat spec) and usually a hermetic mage, unless the power monkey was feeling adventurous and started making shamans.

-Siege

We have a night one cat shaman and a human coyote shaman who are pretty much regulars. There's also two human and one elf physad, who only show up on occasion.

Aside from them, we have a human decker, elf covert ops, human rigger/sam, and a pair of ork mercenaries who only show up on occasion.

If the entire group were to work together on one project, they could cause a lot of damage... And yes, almost all of them know each other in some way.

I'm the GM. Our current group has:
1. A phys-ad, sneaky guy
2. A full shaman. Woman
3. A hermetic Sorcer/face specialising in mind-bending. Woman
4. A troll street sam Hand to hand monster
5. A human skillwire/skills monkey.
6. A human wired B&E specialist. Woman.

3 magic people, and 3 females. The skillwire guy will be deported back to India soon, to make room for a rigger.

Here's a fun idea - an Amazonian strike team:

Three free spirits
One Naga physad
Two Naga shamans
Two Tiger shapeshifter physads
Two Drake phyasds
One Centaur shaman
Two Mermaid shaman
One Sprite hermetic sorceror
One Troll hermetic sorceror
One Elf hermetic conjurer

For us its a 50/50 split between 1 and 2 usually. We had 3 once but I warned the party up front what that would really entail (one adept, one aspected mage, and a shaman) on my end, and they were cool with it. Im going to vote 1 because usually there is one but I think recently a shift is starting towards more magic (not because of magic, but simply because players need variety and magic is the area most have not played). Im also curious about how the "search for something new to do" affects the team combinations.

My group (I gm) Is currently 1 Phys ad, 1 mag ad (50/50 split between powers and magic points, 1 Full mage, and a face who's literally a bloodsucking lawyer (vampirized post creation) so that makes 3 magically active characters, and one dual-natured character.

The group was originally seven, so that puts us at just about 50% magical.

makes high background count areas unusually hampering to the team, I might add.

Well,

It looks like my own experiences are fairly widespread. It would seem (so far) that most teams are pretty heavily weighted in favor of awakened characters. That's interesting.

-Polaris

If anyone cares, as of 52 votes, the average number of Awakened per group is about 1.90; the average number of shamans/mages (with some possibly wrong assumptions about the meanings of "other" and "mostly") is 1.06.

So, it looks like two Awakened per group, with one of them a spellcaster, is a feasible rule of thumb. I may make another poll specifically asking about spellcasters...

1 shaman, 1 mage, 1 physad.

Among the diffrenet teams I've been a part of.

1st Team: (my first SR3 gaming group)
2 street sams (human)
1 cyberzombie (human)
1 rigger (human)
1 weapons specialist (human)
1 face (elf)
1 physical adept (human)
1 physical mage (human)

Other Teams: (current gaming group)
1 street sam (human)
1 weapon specialist (human)
1 face (human)
1 shamen (ork IIRC)
1 rigger (dwarf)

1 sorcerer (hermetic, human)
1 mage (human)
1 street sam (dwarf)
1 face/sam (troll)
1 physical adept (night elf)
1 rigger (human)

1 face (human)
1 go-ganger (elf)
1 driver/hacker (dwarf)
1 psionic (human)

1 sorcerer (hermetic, human)
1 street sam (human)
1 street shaman (human)
1 rigger (dwarf)
1 demolitions/sam (human)
1 decker (ork)

1 rigger (human)
1 physical adept (troll)
1 mage (human)
1 sniper (elf)
1 sam/electonics expert (human)
1 sam (human)

(current campaign)
3 physical adepts (2 human, 1 ork)
1 decker/face (human)
1 bio-sam/face (human)
1 mage (human, elf-poser)
1 street sam (human)

Our team consists of one human Combat Mage (hermetic), one elf Physical Mage, and a Surged human PhysAd that is Dual Natured. Plus a samurai.

The characters are part of a larger 16 member team containing a total of ten magically active members. Three of which are full mages (hermetic), the rest are phys ads. One of the phys ads came about due to a nasty surge result on an npc Samurai.

2 Shamans, 0 Hermetics, 2 Adepts, 1 Mage/Adept, 2 Cybers, 1 Rigger/Decker.

Sphynx

2 Shamans, 1 Hermetic, and one Cyberzombie. (Hey, he's dual natured, that counts, right?)

We tend to play with small groups, and they tend to have a 'theme' rather than being generic Shadowrunners. As a result, we usually wind up with nil-magic groups, or really magic-heavy groups.

As an example, in two of the games we've got going right now:
1. Two magic-heavy characters (both using the Variable Magic edge from TSS) playing FBI special agents in the Shadowrun equivalent of the X-Files.
2. A large team, one of whom's a magician adept of the wolf totem, another is a shaman following the goddess Isis, and all the remaining team members are unawakened proto-shamans of various totems.

Well, my team has at least 1 physad and 1 shaman.

Present team:

Core players

2 Physads (1 elf, 1 troll)

1 Sun Shaman (Human)

1 SURGED Street Sam (Minor Awakened Japanese Dwarf)

1 Rigger (Human)

1 Otaku (Human)

Add-ons

1 Were-leopard Shaman

1 Hermetic Mage

the team on my runs.

The Lost Souls
1. Face/Decker Elf with little bioware/cyberware
2. Wolf Shaman
3. Physical "Speed" Adept
4. Otaku kid
5. Wolf Shape-shifter with no other awaken abilities.