A Spirit’s Immunity to Normal Weapons is more powerful now. They are not subject at all to ballistic damage. No amount of machine gun fire will hurt a spirit. This is not to say that they are invulnerable to damage. Magic effects them as normal.

There is another way to damage them and it is something available to mundanes. Spirits can be effected by directed Will. What this means is that a person can make a touch or melee attack and can do some damage to the spirit. The damage is based on your willpower/2 ru. The type of weapon doesn’t matter since it is only a tool, but reach bonus will add as normal. Roll Intuition + Weapon Skill or Martial Arts Skill and add successes to the base willpower/2 damage.

The physical track for spirits is equal to their (Body x 2) + 4. Stun weapons don’t work on spirits. They ignore elemental effects from spells unless it is of an opposing element.

Spirits can dematerialize partially or create holes in the path of attacks. They get to add their force to dodge attempts. This doesn’t work against spells.

First off most mundane runners don't have much of a will power.
A runner sprit ally with immunity to non-magic weapons could plow through most grunts with impunity.

A mundane runner with a will power of 4 could deal a maximum of four physical damage. Base DV 2 plus a maximum of two hits.
How easy is it for a spirit with immunity to non-magic weapons to resist that?
Especially with there new dodge bonus, and now higher body.
Even ignoring the second two rules with the first one I don't see how my street samurai could stand up to a force 4 spirit with immunity to non-magical weapons.

If I could keep all the dice from my skill roll I'd stand a chance but being limited to my will power/2 and that same formula limiting by base damage.

If a spirit can physically interact with the material world the physical world should be able to interact back.

don't be ridiculous Jack... clearly spirits need an extreme boost. all spirits need this extreme boost to their power in fact. while we're at it, we can bring back watchers at higher force, and allow them to manifest too, to provide fodder for those poor, underpowered mages.

in fact, clearly we should also give mages this new immunity as well. they're not nearly powerful enough as is. [/sarcasm]

in other words, no. this is a terrible idea, imo. i wouldn't touch a game that used these rules with a 29 1/2 foot pole. not even as one of the people who could use magic and conjure spirits... i'd feel like i was cheating the whole time, and wouldn't be able to have fun. it's like playing a first person shooter with god mode, infinite ammo, and all weapons cheats... sure it's fun for the first few seconds, but then when you realise you simply aren't being challenged at all, it gets really really boring.

Things like harden armor and immunity to non-magical weapons work againts Grunts but don't expect them to ever work againts shadowrunner weapon specialists. Don't ever expect them to. Not every mundane runner shoots for a 16+ dice pool with a weapon. The street samurai will likly do just that and you can't blame them for trying. They are a street samurai.

But the hacker/rigger/technomancer might actually want a chance to effect combat in the meat world at times. With these guys the standard harden armor or immunity to non-magical weapons could easily come into play. My char Lightning Jack may not have trouble overcoming Harden Armor/Immunity of Non-magical weapons of 8. But his buddy Brodie would.

Your new rules could work if the spirts were universally giving allergies to say silver

There are actually old folktales of elves and spirits being allergic to iron.

Wait that was supposed to be willpower/2 as the baseDV, not the limit. There is no spirit armor applied versus this. This would work similar to astral combat. I've just based it on willpower instead of charisma.

I didn't change the body rating.

A runner with an ally spirit CAN run through most grunts. I didn't change that either. I just took away the idea that a really big gun (which most grunts wouldn't necessarily have) can hurt a spirit. Most other games don't allow ANY damage to spirits without magic.

It means that the big gun is not the best solution to all problems and the player have to think about what they are doing.

This actually makes it so that more characters are able to effect spirits, not less.

Actually I did give them a form of allergy. It was the additional elemental effect stuff. It is more fluid because it is based on what your religion or belief system believes will work so you are giving it an extra boost (since it is will based)

Due to massive changes above this post became largly irrelevant.

okay I cleaned it up a bit. I got rid of the success limit thing to open it up.
I limited the elemental effects thing to spell effects.

I edited the first post with the changes.

Any other feedback?

Hmm this is a lot better, it makes immunity from non-magical weapons an issue but still allows highly skilled characters not to have most of there hits not counted. Before there wasn't much difference between a skill dice pool of 6 in melee and a skill dice pool 12 againts sprits.

You might want to concider charisma anyway. Prevents that from being a dump stat. On the other hand will power is the only mental stat that all metatypes can get to six. So Orks and Trolls aren't being penalized.

Some things that aren't clear is if the spirit makes a body resistence test(you already stated no mystic armor) or gets a chance to dodge/parry the direct will assault. I assume that its so as you don't say other wise.

You may want to take the sample street samurai/bounty hunter/enforcer etc and play test him againts spirts using your new rules. You can then look at other mundane sample characters like the smuggler, the hacker, the face. Get a feel as to how well varous archtypes of mundanes can fight againts your type of spirit rules.

You may not want to here this but I should tell you anyway.
Spirits are grunts they have to be as an ally readly availble to the PC's they need to be grunts. A really powerful high force spirit could be called a primal spirit (instead of prime runner)

Thanks for the feedback

About the body and parry - yes as it is the same as Astral Combat (assuming I'm not forgetting some change about Astral Combat). I changed the Charisma stuff to willpower in Astral Combat anyway.

Charisma as a dump attributes is a bad idea in my game. My games are contact heavy and having low charisma isolates the characters. Those that did that corrected it quickly once they started playing. I also play the fixers and the johnsons as to be quite willing to dump your ass for being rude or unprofessional. I am always willing to save a prepared mission for later if there is reason to and you can end up with a downtime session. Eventually the other team members will bring rude characters in line.

Low Charisma doesn't mean a character can't have decent social Skills though.

I tend to see a character with a low charisma but high social skills as seemingly insincere. They are gruff but containing it. They don't look like they fit in in nicer places and fall back on staring and ruder behavior. They look like they've been trained to behave.

Someone with high Charisma can be charming all the time even if they are actually rude. They can be that life of the party with little social skills that people find appealing but don't trust at all.

The dice pools may end up the same but the actual effect is a bit different.

My Elf Samurai Face however is happy with his
Charisma 6
Influence group 4.
Decided to skip out on athletics and heavy weapons and went for charm instead. The team also really really need someone with the negotiation skill
He's a fast talking, machine gun shooting, monowhip slashing, Plastic Explosive using Samurai Face.

Its kinda funny, he's the first to talk and the first to shoot. Guess you could say he's a fan of agressive negotiation.

Nice. Give him a bucket load of contacts and he would be good to go.

13 contacts and counting. Including the 2 he started with.

Yes I brought up these problems to him, at great length at least a few pages. His rules are far more forgiving to mundanes now then originally written.

You make a will attack with your melee weapon. I'm not sure about the force of will from SR rules. I think thats only in street magic.

Well the idea is that you are not actually hitting them with your axe (or fist or whatever) but applying your will against the spirit in a way that your mind accepts.

my mind had difficulty accepting that I can't hurt spririts with my axe I get it though. That's the way it used to be in SR3. IIRC you rolled will vs. (target numger) to hit with a base damage of, L (i think)

I like the new idea that mundanes can engage in melee combat with spirits (and actually have some effect). It would indicate to me that SR4 spirits are more closely associated with their physical forms than the were in previous versions. If I can hit a spirit with my axe by rolling my agility + skill and the spirit takes damage based on my strength and weapon it just means that I'm physicly hitting the spirits physical body instead of some matter that the spirit decided to animate.

To me this seems ballanced. If a spirit manafests physicaly on the physical plane the spirit is present as something more than a manifestation of its will. If a mage progects to the astral plane the mage is present as something more than a manifestation of will and the spirit can make 'physical' attacks as they work in that medium.

to boil it down: When you're on the physical plane you're a physical being
Astral = astral skills + astral attributes & astral damage
Physical = Physical skills + physical attributes & physical damage

IMO if you don't want yer spirits to take physical damage from physical attacks don't put em on the physical plane.

It's a dark setting there should be some things that just kick your ass but those things shouldn't be as common as low force spirits. That just sucks. It puts even more emphasis on the party Mage(s). I've allways hated that.

[edit] as a story teller and a GM I'm not looking for spirits to be mundane pieces of gear like drones or agents. they should be wierd and scary to mundanes. they shouldn't be untouchable at any power or undefeatable at lower power.

well spirits had immunity to normal weapons in 3rd ed as well so that didn't change, just the game mechanic. I made it a bit easier then the rules do to hurt a spirit.

The game itself says that "it is very difficult for non-magical characters to attack and damage a physical spirit. Only the truely couragous, driven, and mad have enough force of personality to effect a spirit." pg 177.

Now I think that if you are going to be dealing with spirits you should have a magic user involved. I personally like the idea of having specific areas that you really need one character type or another because I want everyone to have a chance to shine. That is easier if there is a set of difficulties that a specific character is needed.

As a GM I would never do that to a character anyway. If they didn't have a way to deal with something and it is not a part of the story for them to leave and come back later with another story element then I won't throw it at them. They won't encounter spirits hardly ever unless they are going into a place that they know that they is a summoner there.

As a side note, I give spirits more freewill and personality. They are more wild and chaotic then usually described. They will fight for and help out a magic user but they don't want to get killed so they will not necessarily fight to the last. They will also not do tedious work like patrol. They will sit and guard a person but they don't make good patrol types.

It's harder to hurt a spirit in 4th?

Ha!

Practically all you have to do now is hit them.

It used to be next-to-impossible to harm a spirit with a gun - now a hold-out loaded with stick-and-shock (6s, -half ap) will harm up to a force 6 spirit - net successes on the test are just gravy.

A strength 1 character using a combat axe will bypass a force 3 spirit's "immunity to normal weapons" if he hits at all.

Mr Un, where are you getting this from?

Normal rules on 288 state that they have hardened armor equal to twice their Magic rating (their Force) to any non magical weapon.

Even if they do more damage their their armor it still applies as armor.

I'm not sure if stun damage would work on a spirit. It is stated that electrical damage may or may not effect floating characters and it says that spirits usually float.

I'm going to start a thread to see if anyone has more info about that.

People need to read the rules carefully! Immunity to normal weapons is not that good.

Read closely where it gives the rules for hardened armor: AP MODIFIES IT. And you use the modified DV, including your net hits that add to DV. So spirits aren't nearly that hard to hurt.

Example: someone with an Ares Predator loading ExEx has DV 7, -3 AP. He shoots a force 6 spirit, reducing its armor to 9. He needs 3 net hits, which he will get if he is reasonably good. Assuming the spirit has 6 body just because, it rolls 15 dice to resist and takes 2-3 damage. That's not much, but it adds up, and that's just from a pistol.

Lots of weapons don't even need a great hit to hurt a spirit - HE grenades are DV 10, and knock a force 6 spirit down to 10 armor, so they just need 1 success. An ExEx Walther has DV 9 and -5 AP, so it just needs a hit to do damage. ExEx elephant rifle gets DV 11 and -3 AP, same deal. And let's not mention panther cannons or anti-vehicle rockets...

You can't easily damage spirits with small weapons, and that's how it should be. But spirits are not actually immune to normal weapons, far from it. Not so much that you need to create house rules about it. House rules always create more problems than they solve, necessitating more house rules until your game is just a mess.

Yes, the will attack was included in Street Magic. And there are also at least 10 elemental types of damage (fire, acid, electricity, light, wind, metal, sand, smoke, sound, blast, ice, water)