Which of course then begs to question. Does APDS work agianst spirit armor? By them stating that the halving of armor by an electrical attack does not do so... then I'd actually say no. Your APDS armor does jack all to reduce that spirits armor and you might as well be using normal rounds.

He said that it might make it into the next revision of the FAQ.

I send off another e-mail asking about the AP versus spirit hardening as well but I haven't heard back yet.

I don't know if they will change it because of thinking in a new direction or not but I personally already have this as a house rule.

I have been trying to alter the balence of magic in various ways. I want spirits to be more powerful at lower levels but make it harder to summon anything higher. Basically the summoner would be the same power level for the most part but would be summoning lower Force rating spirits. Basically I want lower and midrange spirits to be the norm instead of high force spirits.

I am trying to make lower level magic more powerful and then limit the power level.

On the flip side of the no AP thing we use a different damage table for guns which makes some higher damage and higher AP to start with.

Well EX-EX should still help abit because it boosts the damage level by 1 I would think. ANd maybe gelrounds could do something if you were really bloody lucky.

It's really just the AP attribute one has to wonder about then. Because if one thing doesnt affect the armor value, does anything else? Though in all cases the base power seems to still at least do somethign. So yoru stick n' shock still might do something, just that ti's not any better (and possibly worse) than regular ammo.

Which is more or less the way I've seen spirits to be all along.

Hardened armor specifically states that AP does apply. Rob Boyle's ruling doesn't say anything about changing the way hardened armor works, it just says that electricity doesn't get -half armor.

If you say that AP does not apply at all versus spirits, immunity goes from good to broken. A panther cannon would not hurt a force 6 spirit without 3 net hits. Spirits are supposed to be really tough, but almost immune to anti-tank weaponry? That's ok for uber high force, but for force 6 which can be summoned by a just-out-of-chargen mage it's a bit broken.

In order to control summoner characters as a GM in a world where AP doesn't work against immunity, you'd have to have tough magical security everywhere, which would misrepresent how rare mages are. And you couldn't throw spirits against your runners as a "challenge" if they had no mage - it would be an out and out slaughter, and there's not much fun in that.

@Garrowolf: If you want to lower the normal force levels of spirits without mangling the rules too much, you could just increase the binding costs. Doubling the materials costs would make that Force 6 spirit set the player back 6,000 . It doesn't stop them using big forces where needed, but it keeps the average force deployed a little lower. It sounds like this might be the effect that you want.

I find that many people from previous editions have trouble recalibrating the power levels for SR4. The average mage has a Magic of 3 now. Someone with 6 is the equivalent of Magic 9 by the conversion rules. This is explicitly stated. I see the typical spirit used for security as being around Force 3 which is maybe why I don't think their invulnerability is terribly over-powered.

Oh, good...another ruling in the flavor of "since the expanded melee rules state that you can use a called shot to bypass impact armor (and this also applies to injection-vector firearms) therefore a called shot can bypass ballistic armor," even though that is easily demonstrated to be completely broken.


Way to go, Rob.

I'm happy with electricity doing half-impact. I just don't allow the secondary stun effects. That makes sense to me. Of course stick and shock are a special case because their entire damage priniciple is based on those secondary effects.

Aye, but I've allways been under the impression even in SR3. Low force spirits are ment to go down easy. High force sprits (Whcih a force 6 under SR4 most definately is indeed) on the otherhand is hell to deal with. Willpower or otherwise unless you've got a spell slinger or an adept who's geared for fighting spirits.

Also you might not allways have a burst fire weapon available. In which case under certain situations using a force of will attack is infact better. It also handily bypasses that immunity to weapons power which is a great equalizer in some cases.

Wow I still can't believe how broken YOUR games sound. If you can't kill it with a big gun then it shouldn't be around. Can you hear yourself?

For one I'm talking about changes in my own game not changing your game. My change is one that my players thought was normal anyway. The idea that you could shoot a spirit at all was considered stupid all around.

I didn't catch the force of will thing from Street Magic and basically came up with the same thing. Since it is already there then I can use that. Now a mundane has a MUCH better chance to hurt a spirit with something that makes sense.

So why does it make more sense that a non magical object will work on a creature of magic and will but a will based attack doesn't.

The reason that I was wanting to lower the ratings was that for one I was trying to cap magic at 9 to bring it in line with the other attributes. I want magic users to have a lot of possibilities but not be so powerful that they can't be stopped. I wanted the power curve to be better and the low end but top out instead of going on forever.

Another reason is that I have some old characters that if I didn't cap the magic rating it would make sense that they would have very high ratings. The PCs wouldn't survive unless I continually fixed the dice. The old characters are important to the story so I want to keep them from being godlike in power.

I don't put characters into a game without thinking about it. I always have my games tailored to my PCs. If you or your GM doesn't do the same then I could see why you would panic about spirits being powerful. But then the problem isn't with the rules...

Woah, chill Garrowolf. I don't think any offense was intended. Just open discussion of how we all play.

With regards to wanting to cap magic at 9, I don't think this will be a problem for players as it takes a horrible amount of karma to get there and there are plenty of other things to be doing with that karma instead anyway. But is 9 really low enough that it will affect your game? A mage with Magic of 9 is horribly powerful. Remember that the average mage has 3 in SR4. I wonder if you're aware of the conversion rules between SR3 and SR4 as you say you're bringing characters through from a previous edition. The reason I ask is because someone with a magic of 9 in SR4 would have had a magic rating of 13 in SR3. That's awfully high and I'd be frightened of an SR3 game where there were many characters with Magic of 13 running about.

Sorry I had a lot of RL stress going on when I wrote that last one. Didn't mean to get so bent out of shape.

Sorry about that

Well I have made magic more powerful in some ways because I have given them more resistance by way of ignoring Hardness with Armor spell. This is partially in response to having more AP in weapons because I am using a different break down on weapon damage by ammo that my friend wrote up. He is more into ballistics then I am and had a problem with the break down of damage. He set it up by caliber and weapon length so we could use real weapons and just give them upgrades.

BTW it wasn't directed at you Kesslan. I was snapping at Vaevitus (which I appoligize for) because he was frustrating me, which I shouldn't let someone else control my emotions like that. I should have quoted what I was responding to at the time, but I wasn't being calm about it.

Part of the reason that I am keeping the magic rating down is that I have a story where creatures that have been around since the fourth age are around. They have alittle higher max then humans but I wanted a reason that the creatures wouldn't have a 30 or 40 magic rating which it could have been if it was just a matter of XP. There is also a part of the story where they will be going to different times along the awakening where the mana level will either be higher or lower. On the times when they are lower then it will lower their magic rating as well.

If you hadn't figured out yet I am not running an episodic run based game. They do shadowruns occasionally in order to have the money to actually follow the plot. So far it has been alot of fun. My friend is a co-GM for the game so we both have PCs and we take turns with plots under a larger story arc. It's been a blast.

Later

Garrowolf I was wondering if you had ever heard back about AP?

Although, personally if electricity doesn't get to use -half AP, then of course other mundane elemental sources don't either, although I suppose that should go without saying...

Well to supports Rob's comment:

Well I think that the important thing is to think in terms of why something is occurring. They show pictures of the guy shooting through a spirit in SR4 (I think). They have also said that spirits have no CNS. The immunity is basically that they are not living creatures in the sense that we are. We are very suseptable to electricity because we use it ourselves in your nervous system. A spirit has nothing to interact with electricity.

The way I process the statement about electrical damage is that it is a generalization about armor, not a rule about electricity. Basically they have a listed B/I for all armor but if they were totally complete about it they would need to list the armor's resistance to every kind of attack. To keep themselves from having to do this they just said that most any other kind of damage is vs 1/2 impact. Then you have to buy up armor mods from there.

I think that this is a better way of understanding what it going on. It has nothing to do with elemental energies (which isn't that useful way of thinking about it especially in SR4) but an easy way to deal with several different damage types.

Personally I think that the game uses spirits too much of a summon henchman type thing. I like to keep a good amount of mystery and strangeness to spirits. They are not human, or flesh and blood, or automatons. They are strange alien intelligences that will not do stupid things.

I alter the rules about immunity to normal weapons for my game because I interprete the reason for their immunity to a partially insubstantial nature. The forms that they manifest I see as an extrution into this world and not their core selves. Therefore the logic of a bigger round doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can make a willpower attack against them so I don't think it is that much of a problem. Besides I don't have them as a part of standard security. I think that any wage mages are going to be doing bodyguard work instead of guard duty. Now a response team would have a mage as well. I want magic and spirits to be more mysterious and frightening so I make it rarer.

No I haven't heard anything back from Rob Boyle about it. He probably forgot.

Even if you use that idea: modified damage = base damage + net hits. i.e. a force 3 spirit would NOT be immune to stick and shock, because the 1 net hit it took to actually hit it modifies the damage to 7(s)...more than the 'hardened armor' that immunity to normal weapons provides.

So now I wonder, does Rob's ruling mean that a spirit's energy aura is next to worthless when fighting another spirit?

Well Mr. Unpronounceable given that Energy Aura is clearly a magical effect and even mentions the critter's Magic Rating in its text I'd say that it works just fine.

Actually, since it's a critter power, it's explicitly exempted from being blocked by the immunity power. (like I said - it was just a random thought, not researched yet)

Of course, since that's the case, that means that a spirit has no armor at all against energy aura. (since spirits have no armor seperate from the immunity to normal weapons power, and that power specifically doesn't activate...ouch. Spirit vs. spirit fights must be pretty fast & deadly.)

Ah, well, now to argue what happens when a heavily damaged earth elemental de-manifests (body stat changes from F+4 to a mere F, thus reducing the length of its damage track by 2 boxes - and no, it doesn't clear - even astral forms have a physical and a mental damage track now.)

Well, without researching the issue, in my games the spirit would then go into overflow and be disrupted.

Toturi:

Hmm thats what I get by looking up in my first printing book, rather then PDF. My book doesn't list the -half AP for Stick-N-Shoot but just a "-".

If one was to look under the section "Electricity Damage" in the BBB, or any section that covers any other elemental effect, one would read "Electrical damage is treated as Stun damage and resisted with half Impact armor (rounded up)—metallic armor, however,
offers no protection."

Combine that with the section from hardened armor, "If the modified Damage Value of an attack does not exceed the Armor rating (modified by Armor Penetration), then it
bounces harmlessly off the critter; don’t even bother to make a Damage Resistance Test. Otherwise, Hardened Armor provides both Ballistic and Impact armor equal to its rating."

So a force 4 spirit would not take damage from a Stick-n-Shock round, assuming the weapon has no AP, unless the attacker had 3 net hits to bring the modified DV to 9 which is higher than the Hardened Armour rating of 8. If the round was to do damage it would then be resisted with half impact armor. Hardened armor provides a ballistic and impact armor equal to it's rating, as above.

I would also argue for the secondary effects of electrical damage. Spirits still take modifiers from wounds, so there does have to be some sort of signals transmitting from their bodies to their brains. If there are lines of communication then they can be disrupted, which is what a taser does.

Where does it say spirits take modifiers from wounds? I wouldn't, partly because that's just extra book-keeping.

I've not had a problem with people abusing the rules for spirits as yet, so maybe I'll want to introduce some kind of 'spirit-be-gone' at a later date.

Where does it say they don't? They have damage tracks and when you get 3 boxes of damage in a track you get a damage modifier. That is excluding some qualities, adept powers and cyberware obviously.