The force of the spell limits the number of hits (base, not net) you get. If you cast a spell at force 1 you can only get 1 hit, meaning they have to not get any for the spell to have any effect, and you'll be limited to droppping the attribute by one, which may or may not have the desired effect.

Plus, they don't have ranged Health spells yet in SR4, and a mage trying to get a hit in on a character oriented around physical combat is not always the best idea.

Direct combat spells like manabolt are still decent, even against someone with a high Willpower. The target is only resisting with a single Attribute, rather than using dodging and armor to help soak the damage. One-shot takedowns like they had in SR3 are more rare now, though, unless you overcast the spell.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to do 9 or 10 damage in a single shot now, and those times when you do 5 or 6 you'll probably end up taking some damage yourself, making it harder to get those last few points in.

But with dimished attribute you can bring his charisma down to 0 with one net hit, taking him out of action, armour or no armour. thats the problem with attributes at 1

But the problems for the caster are:

1) You have to hit the target with an unarmed attack, which is dangerous to do against a tank build (they often have better initiative, and usually have better close combat skills), and even worse against a Neo build (unless you have an abnormally high - for a mage - unarmed skill, you will likely miss completely).

2) Even a successful spell only incapacitates the troll while it is being sustained - even if you don't take damage, get knocked down, etc. and drop the spell, you are taking a penalty to all of your actions to keep your victim out of action.


If you're going to use a touch spell, you would probably be better off using one like Knockout, which has such a low Drain code that it can be overcast without too much danger (I mean, if you cast it at Force: 9, you are resisting physical damage, sure, but physical damage of one, which shouldn't be a problem at all).

Actually, he is wrong. If you look at the Sprawl Ganger archetype, you will see that he gets the bonus from his dermal plating and from a troll's natural dermal armor.

Oops. I missed that the example character had a charisma of 1. Decrease Attribute (assuming you can hit) would definitely hurt. But like others have said, hitting him is probably going to be a hard task, and you still have to contend with counterspelling dice so you can't keep the force too low.

I keep coming back to the simple answer... a couple of stunbolts ruins his day.

With a 5 willpower and 4 counterspelling dice he isn't in horrible shape against stun bolts, but they'd definitely hurt. Stun bolts aren't any more of a weakness for this guy than a normal street samurai, maybe even less if they have a 4 will power instead of 5.

The character's real weakness is that he can't really do anything except fight. If he finds himself needing to be even mildly sociable or stealthy he's screwed. With an intuition of 2 and no perception skill he'll never notice anything.

Yeah, I concede the point, I was just thinking of that.

Stupid question, can a magic adept start with 0 Magic (all points assigned to PP/chrome) and pick up points later?

If you use a magic adept gunbunny (or physad) with counterspelling, heavily combat-focused, you're going to be really weak in stealth/social skills, allright... but SR4 rewards min-maxing at chargen, because it's a heck of a lot cheaper to pick up the first couple points in those skills than to advance your core skills from 4 to 6. You just have to figure out how to survive the first few runs without getting into a situation that you can't handle.

magic adept magic loss is applied to the spellcasting magic first, and their ability to spellcast burns out when their magic for spells hits zero, regardless of how many points they have in powers.

So you absolutely have to reserve a point for casting if you're ever gonna cast?

That slows down min-maxing just a touch, at least.

It also recommends that GM's not allow the magic qualities if the player intends on abusing the system.

That recommendation should hold for anything. SR4 was designed with the intention of having GMs be an integral part of the character creation process, rather than the players running of to create whatever they want and then tart playing.

I always over cast, it is so much easier to get rid of physical drain and I rarely take much anyway, a force 8 stun bolt has drain of 3. I average taking 1.

Edward

I really wish I knew why they took away the ineffectiveness against drain healing spells had. Overcasting was much more rare an item, and certainly not generally touted as the best choice. But now that you can first aid and Treat/Heal physical drain you're better off just taking the bloody nose instead of the splitting headache unless you know you'll have plenty of time to rest off the stun.

it is a return to 2nd edition
back then physical drain could be healed

That doesn't explain the reason for the rollback, just that there was a prior example.

thus, precident

Ummm... Yeah. That's what I said. "prior examples" = "precedent."

However, the mere existence of precident is not enough of a reason to change something that's been around and working great for years. There must have been some reason why they decided that magic can now fix drain.

It'd be like Texas dropping the death penalty and then 5 years later deciding to bring it back. "We did it that way before" would not be a valid explanation.

by the way, are you the Anti-James McMurray, the anti-SLJames, some conglomeration of the two (and I'd resent being lumped in with him ), or something else altogether?

I houseruled that you can't heal drain damage, stun or physical. Having a medic sitting there jamming shit into your mage constantly while he overcasts like a madman is not my impression of what the system was intended to make possible

I will houserule the same way when my players start to abuse the healing rules in this manner.