ok question number 1. What happened to fetishes? Street Magic bring them back into the 4th edition as a way to learn spells for less karma if they require a fetish

question number 2. I was kind of curious about counterspelling. If a mage is counterspelling does he lose dice if he counterspells more than one spell before his next combat turn? Kind of like a regular defense role, where you start to get overwhelmed. Do mages suffer from this as well

I have yet to get the Street Magic book hoping to get it this weekend or next weekend.

Ohh thought of another question. Does street magic have rules for attacking and dispelling focuses? like you used to be able to do in previous editions.

No special rules for attacking foci in Street Magic. They're now simple items that exist on the physical plain unless you're projecting with them, so no safely blasting them from the astral as before. You could attack a spell sustained by a sustaining focus as normal, but the foci themselves can only be damaged in the normal grab them and whck them with a hammer, etc.

The principle here is not that you have to know everything, just more than your players.

Thanks for the correction and apologies for the wrong information. Will now be creating large heavy foci the better to bludgeon astral entities with.

Please to be pointing me to the rules for attacking nonliving astral "forms." Are Soylent Foci made like people, with attributes equal to Force and a condition monitor? Or are we back in the adhocracy of of inanimate objects given structure/armor ratings? So an astral "form" in game terms is the same as an astral "barrier," except when it's not (i.e., alive)? Do damaged inanimate "astral forms" heal? When? How? When an astral form is destroyed, what does that mean for a focus? Deactivated? Enchantment destroyed?

The "astral form" copout is one of the sillier "there really are rules" bits of nonsense commonly floating around here. We have rules for astral combat with mana barriers and animate objects (people/spirits). "Astral forms" are descriptions without any rules. An alchera is probably an "astral form." Can I attack it in astral space? Will that damage show up on the mundane plane? Who knows.

I did find that foci use their force to resist astral attacks like a mana barrier does, but I never found anything else very helpful. ^-^;

Would it be far fetched to use the sr3 rules of what happens after combat for result? That gives two potential outcomes of beating up foci

1) You temporarily supress it (unless you try to blow it up, magically speaking)
2) You blow it up after suppressing it (or with a spell) and utterly ruin the focus in question and make hte mage kill you for wasting all their karma?

I suppose that might be one reason they were vague on foci - all foci are relatively expensive in karma cost, and reasonably easy to destroy without any protections.