You can't do that until you understand what it does.

As one version totally means that the version of the world portrayed by the game is totally wrong and is a game-buster; and the other doesn't and isn’t I know which one I'm going with.

I'd assume that it means you are suddenly moving x times faster, with no additional fuel cost, but with all the other effects of moving x times faster. Like you have x^2 energy when you hit something and it's really a lot harder to make a sharp turn at 240 MPH than at 40.

Given the obvious abuses possible and their effects on the world I'd probably want it to only work on either living objects or by those that would be threshold 1 on the object resistance table, or just remove the phrase "increase or" from the power.

Of course, if you want to assume that every ship moves at 120 knots and every puddle jumper jet flies at mach 4 that's ok, but it has that cascade effect as faster movement is insanely valuable commercially. And you have to work out effects of applying the power in bizarre fashion. Can a force 6 spirit allow you to shoot someone at 2.4 km by applying movement to the bullets? If it just arrives faster that should make it easier to hit. . .

Right on. I was asking because in SR3, I almost never even look at critters (just not a favorite aspect of the game), and I've never so much as glanced at that part of SR4.

So, if you turn on Movement 9 in a t-bird, it would rip itself apart from excessive aerodynamic forces? That's what it sounds like...

Except that... if you allow straight-line Movement but enforce physics as normal for that speed and impose difficult rolls on trying to maneuver with it on, that discourages putting it on your van and encourages trying to munch out munitions with it.

Well, that sounds more like a house rule; if that's how it's supposed to be in RAW, then they really need to come out and specify that you can't use it on objects like your van or your bike. Because those are the first things that I'd think of when given the opportunity.

It would probably be a house rule, if nothing better comes around. I'd like to have a better explanation myself. That you can promptly kill yourself with a critter power is "a feature, not a bug" to my way of thinking. Compelling an extra planar critter to use it's powers for you doesn't mean it is interested in your welfare.

The "long-term services" bit in SM is what makes it have massive commercial effects and would result in EVERY commercial (and government) entity using them. It's like having a fleet 6 times larger for no money, or cutting your fuel cost by 90%, or being able to sell seats on a 60 minutes to Tokyo airplane using 40 year old airplanes.

Exactly. Also since anyone who can summon a spirit with Movement can summon a spirit with Movement and Guard it's not even a meaningful limitation on vehicular movement. Kzt's mods represent a massive overturn of Shadowrun's Magic and don't even help.

People do use spirit movement for transport in Shadowrun. Doc Wagon has a 10 minute guaranty and that just wouldn't be possible without using the Movement power on moving vehicles.

-Frank

You are arguing it wouldn't be "realistic" to have them NOT drive at mach 1.5, on city streets? Am I getting this right? This is the game where you can buy an armored limo for 20K and an "An opulent luxury yacht" for 12.5K? The game where the living 6000 Utes have managed to have 1.5 million kids in 60 years? The game where NONE of the detailed descriptions of the DocWagon aircraft have ever allowed the crew and patents that are listed in descriptions of DocWagon to fit?

Can you cite where in the rules it says that DocWagon typically uses critter movement power? Considering that the only detailed discussions of how DocWagon works I can find (the one in "Missions") sort of doesn't mention this little detail. Perhaps they do it the way modern EMS systems do, and just have lots of ambulances? Which is, oddly enough, what they described in "Missions".

As you claim you are trying to restore Movement the way it worked before they broke it in SR3, have you actually looked up how Movement worked in SRII? I have. And it doesn't seem to resemble what you say at all.

"A creature with this power can increase or decrease the movement rate of victims within its terrain, using its own Essence Rating as the maximum multiplier/divider. Unwilling victims make an opposed test pitting the creatures Essence against the targets Willpower to avoid the powers effects. Unwilling targets forced to travel at dangerously high movement rates may make an additional opposed test each time they suffer damage as a consequence of the forced movement. A creature using the movement power cannot run a victim into a state of terminal exhaustion without prompting additional resistance from its target. The number of victims the creature can affect at any time equals the creature’ essence x 3.”

So you do take damage when you are run into things at high speed because you can’t avoid them like you could when moving slower (otherwise they wouldn’t be “dangerously high movement rates” would they?) and you get tired faster. So of your three key points, the detailed description of the rules you are claiming to be restoring EXPLICITLY says that two are wrong, and really strongly suggests that the third is bogus also.

So, once again, do you actually have anything that explicitly supports your interpretation?

No. I am contractually obligated not to quote that passage.

Considering that my quote of the power was from page 219 of the SR2 rulebook rather than a cut-and-paste from the current PDF, I think that it's a fair bet that I have.

I honestly don't know where the quote you are throwing around is from. I'm looking at the SR2 rulebook right now. It's open to the appropriate page (219), and I do not see the text you are quoting. Care to throw out a page reference for us?

That's awfully specific text you have there, and quite different from what the book actually says. Which is:

That's the whole power description from beginning to end. I figure you must be reading from something, but it sure isn't the SR2 Movement power description.

-Frank

It's a bit of a cheat to cite something that would have major impacts on the setting, then not be able to explain it. Cause if it is, DocWagon won't be the first or last user by any means.

Predator & Prey, p94. On p74 "Powers and weaknesses listed are the corrected versions: if they differ from those given in SRII, use the descriptions under Critter Powers, P88."

It's sort of useful that everyone agree on the basics of the world setting. The implication I got was that there is, to me anyway, a massive and fundamental change in how the setting works that other people don't see as a massive change, much less a fundamental change. As the guy describing this is one of the free-lancers who is presumably doing this as part of a project for FanPro, it will sort of matter whether suddenly having every airplane and ship in the world has long-term services critter powers on it.

This is the difference between a magic pervasive setting and setting in which magic exists. Currently the world is described in all the source material (Street Magic included) as magic being a rare tool used by very rare specialists that doesn't typically impact a mundanes daily life, hence one in which magic exists.

If every time you get on an airplane or train you are being moved at 6-9 times faster than normal by magic than that's a huge impact that the typical person does have. Now it’s suddenly it’s a magic pervasive setting. So that is a huge change that will have major echoes throughout the setting. And if it was possible before, why did nobody do it?

It's a fundamental change, but not in the direction you're thinking. Wage Mages have been a big part of the game since the beginning. What they actually do, and why it is that Fuchi gave a damn about them was generally not described. A big part of it is using Movement on transported goods. Always has been, but this hasn't really gotten a big part of any book. That's mostly because noone has ever done "A day in the life of a corporate wage mage." probably they should at some point. It's always been put off because the PCs are not corporate wage mages.

That being said, the fundamental change is this: we aren't pretending that the speed up version of the movement power is an attack anymore. Various attempts have been made to try to make it an attack power, but they've all been... lame.

At its core, movement speeds you up by a multiplier. Hitting someone with a movement increase is never going to inconvenience them for longer than a single combat round, because they can jolly well slow down if for some reason they don't want to go so quickly. The target can move up to their maximum speed. So slowing them down has real consequences, but speeding them up doesn't. Even if you were to speed them by a factor of 100 they could just cut their speed down to 1% and not even notice. You'd be doing them a favor.

So various things have been tried to make it spookier. From allowing Movement to give velocity to things that weren't moving to complicated rules preventing you from deciding how fast you were going base while under hostile movement, but none of it was good. So it's all gone. And good riddance.

Meanwhile, the beneficial version of the movement power has always done exactly the same thing. You go (Force) times faster. Sometimes the version requires you to have Guard up while this is going on, sometimes it doesn't. But it also doesn't really matter because spirits actually also have Guard and asking them to "Help transport this freighter full of bananas quickly and safely to New Orleans." is a perfectly valid physical service and always has been.

Movement has never been intended to be used on the bullets in a Sniper Rifle to make them travel at 5.1 kilometers/second. That's never been on the table. So no, it doesn't square your kinetic energy, that would be broken.

Shadowrun is a world that is after the fuel crunch, and yet it still ha a globalized economy with cheap junk in the Stuffer Shack that comes from Miyanmar. Haven't you wondered how that happens? Don't you wonder sometimes why it is that people still have things fabricated on other Continents after the big oil collapse? It's because fuel consumption is many times lower on big transports (which can afford magical movement) than it is for smaller shipments (which can't).

That's why people do Arcologies. Fuel is crazy expensive, so moving things around cities is prohibitive. But big shipments are subsidized by Efreet. And that means that supplying super-sites like arcologies is a totally good deal. That's why Barrens happen. It's just not economical to bring supplies to suburban areas anymore, so corporations and governments don't do it.

The entire Shadowrun infrastructure is dependent upon the Movement power and always has been. The only thing that's being phased out is the power's ability to pull your X-Wing out of the marshes of Dagoba. And that's only been removed because it was dumb.

-Frank

Are you just being facetious? The way you explain away the movement power in your game is hardly related to whether you're using other books.

And as far as "finding players", if a player is so caught up in "the game has to be canon" (the way d20 wants them to be) that they can't accept some small differences in world setting from GM to GM, I don't want them in my games anyway.

Well, many of the Cyberpirates have boat mages, what did you think they did?

Props boasts about using Illusionary Fire, and the Gingerbread Man's gang makes "good use of magic", so I honestly don't think it's much of a problem.

In fact, the pirate ships probably toast the freighters in the water. The freighters get a spirit of a Force that a wage mage can summon and bind safely and reliably. The pirate vessel has a mage on board and is willing to take risks for extraordinary speed when they jump the target.

The Cyberpirates book is completely consistent with a widespread use of Movement on major freight.

-Frank

Not completely. The bound watchers that alert the corporation’s mage that the ship is under attack (either by reporting or being dispelled) so that you can get you KE contract mage to show up, along with his 10 buddies on duty and their 3 elementals each are not exactly mentioned IIRC.

That however isn't a factor of changing movement. It’s a factor of changing the magic system.

However claiming that they just never mentioned the minor detail that the normal freighter is moving at over 100 knots and a pirate speed boat at 500 knots seems pretty weak. It's like saying, “Well of course English at Agincourt were really using rifles. They were just mistranslated as longbows, and all the pictures of longbows are just because everyone had to portray them as what they were familiar with. But they couldn’t really do that with longbows, so it had to be rifles.”

You’re convinced, right?

No it wasn't. And haven't you wondeed why? Distress calls go out by Sattelite at the speed of light, and bound elementals can be dispatched anywhere in the world at the speed of thought. Haven't you ever wondered why these corporations that definitely have Magicians on staff don't dispatch dozens of spirits to deal with Shadowruns or Pirate activities that threaten their interests?

It's because of Movement actually. However many services the Wage Mages can pull up is how many shipments a corp can economically send. That's big. That also means that the spirits of any Wage Mage are spread very thin. Every service is money in the bank for their employer and are scheduled months in advance.

That means that the reason Aztechnology doesn't respond to every pirate assault with the crushing weight of 40 spirits is because their spirits are already called upon for duty elsewhere. They have shit to do, and keeping dozens of them in reserve to hurl at military problems just doesn't make economic sense.

The reason you as a Shadowrunner can get away with anything is because the spirits of the mighty are constantly called upon to make the economy move forward.

-Frank

No, it's because shadowrunners are subtle and quick. If you set off the alarm and wait for 10 minutes while the various security services call each other and get enough magicians together it will get ugly. Those that are slow and obvious become inmates or dead.

Sadly, it's hard to compete a hijacking in 5 minutes, or even 20 minutes. That ship is hard to hide that quickly.

Knight Errant doesn't have its magicians making people boats go faster, it has it's magicians making wards and responding to alarms from well paying customers. If the customer doesn't pay well enough, then they won't be a customer that gets a reaction.

This is also why pirates (who don't want to die) go after targets that are unlikely to have complex and well organized physical and magical defenses.

Spirits behave unpredictably near fissionable materials. Plutonium, even shielded, isn't something that spirits like to be near. But there's no reason you couldn't have chemical weapons or massive conventional explosives on the same setup.

-Frank

It gives the object an astral signature. It doesn't leave a trail of magical signature spooged all over the place the object has been while the effect was sustained. (If it did, masking sustained spell effects would be pointless unless you intended to stand in one place.) So you've got a VX missile casing with a signature, but unless you've got some sort of file detailing the signatures of every enemy magician it's not much to go on. I'd buy Psychometry as a solution, though.

That's not in question, although it's a valid point. But I'm speaking of a situation in which the aggressor already has the weapon to be delivered. Also, assuming you're careful with timing, routing, etc., who's to keep you
from slapping a spirit with concealment on the truck in question? Or moving it by air.

Not trying to beat a dead horse here or anything. I agree with you that these aren't new capabilities in the SR world or anything. Just clearing the issue.

Well, it's true that you're giving it an astral signature. However, there's no "mage-dar" that scans the skies for astral signatures. Do you propose that for magical defense, a nation-state is going to hire mages to sit at the border with binoculars and watch for fast-moving astral signatures? (Or watcher spirits? Which would work, but we've already covered that such large numbers of spirits just hanging out on standby is bad economics. Come to think of it, that'd be a limiter for border-mages as well.)

And, at the speeds you yourself are giving, nothing is going to stop that missile from reaching the target in between a mage getting eyes-on and it hitting the ground.

And while

is possible (assuming that someone can get there, with enough protection to stay alive, and get there before MAD kicks off),

this sounds dubious.

This is the first thing I thought of, as well.

I do pretty much agree with you on this, but with the rampant instability in the SR world, I wonder that it might seem a little heavy handed to ignore the potential for this becoming a major issue. But again, that's just my take on it. As you have said and I have acknowledged, none of these powers are new. It's just that this thread has gotten me thinking about it.

Jigga what? I know you can track someone with an astral link. Or are you talking about Search power?

symbolic link tracking was what I was thinking of. Your threshold is 4 (IIRC) if you've seen the subjects aura. Wonder how that would apply to seeing spell signature?

Worse, it's never been stated that there is systematized way to classify an aura/signature for use by people who didn't actually see the guy. It makes sense that such a mechanism exists, but it's never be put into the game IIRC.

Thanks, I missed that.

No, there's no official cognizance of this at all. It just obviously follows from allowing Movement to effect vehicles. I agree with Mistwalker's solution - it doesn't effect vehicles. That way I don't have to worry about how the hell anyone manages an air defense post 2011. Astral spirit bombing is a big enough headache, thanks.

And Movement even on people/critters walking/swimming/flying is rough enough. I'd treat it as a sort of bubble effect that prevents you from interacting with the outside world while you're under the influence - no strafing attacks. Just use it for long distance travel on foot or (for dragons) wing. Abandoned in the desert a hundred miles from civilization? Good news, you've got a Force 6 spirit with Movement to help you. Wait, got a vehicle instead? Forget the spirit, then.

I like the no vehicles bit. You could maybe somehow use the object resistance factor threshold instead, but I'm not exactly sure how right now. Maybe subtract ORFT*2?

*On second thought, no, the ORFT isn't such a good idea, no vehicles is fine*

I'm not sure about the buble thing. Movement is a critter power, just like Influence. It's designed to screw up someone messing with the critter or the critter's prey. Consider fighting someone in hand to hand when he can multiply or divide your movement by 6. You do you patented leaping reverse spin kick, and find that you leapt 15 feet into the air and 20 feet past him. It's only a 4 die fall, normally, but your going to be moving mighty quick when you land this time. Probably going to leave a mark.

Or you lunge in to attack him with your weapon focus 6 sword and find that you have moved only a foot, before he obliterates you.