I'm thinking it might be; I would really like to cheese out the foci with an enormously powerful enchanting character, but then again, there isn't focus addiction in SR the way there is in earlier editions, nor is there a limit on the amount of force you can have. Maybe I'll allow orichalcum to cut down on karma costs with the caveat that focus addiction is reintroduced. Magic loss would be a Magic+Willpower(magic/2 round down) test every round.

Does this sound good?

Emo, my man, their is focus addiction in SR4.

If you pick up Street Magic (the book where orichalcum is talked about in SR4), you'll also have picked up the rules for focus addiction.

Yeah, it's in SM. You won't lose Magic until the very end, but you'll be suffering drain penalties that range from painful to crippling along the way.

In addition to risking being uable to use magic without foci if I remember correctly.

I am actually interested in any replies to the original question, as opposed to the side discussion on addiction.

Have any of you used orichalcum to lower bonding costs? And how do you think it affects game balance.. I was toying around with the idea as it seems that except as flavor fluff orichalcum is pretty much mechanically useless..

any thougts?

Bunsen

i wouldn't say it's useless at all. beyond a certain force rating, you will need orichalchum or it will:

1) take you eternity and a day to finish making it.
2) be hard to successfully make it, assuming you use the optional rule for extended tests being limited in the number of intervals (most people seem to)

Yeah. If you don't allow infinite retries on extended tests then you're going to need orichalcum to have any hope of making, say, a force 6 focus that uses a factory made physical basis, like a comlink or fancy alloy knife. How many runners are going to spend the karma/BP for Enchanting 6?

Karma reduction is a bad idea. The whole point of foci is that they're bargain karma ways to get dice than improving skills, Magic, or initiate grade. Also, if you allow orichalcum to make enchanting easy and costless in karma terms, the GM has a hard time explaining why every ultra rich mage (or very important one working for a megacorp) isn't always sporting a Force 10 power focus. You can get 47 units of orichalcum for the price of a basic GMC Banshee without weapons, sensors, ECM and ECCM. Think a corp or national military won't be willing to spend that kind of money or more to give a super focus to a dozen or so of their most skilled and committed mages?

(At least then we'd know why Great Dragons and immortal elves don't need to roll dice to kill you. They'd all spent a billion nuyen on a small hill of orichalcum and have a Force 100 power focus filling implanted in a back tooth.)