sure. ignores half their hardened armor, has a nice base damage even in a crappy gun, might knock 'em out, and if they are fully stunned they are disrupted and can't come back for quite some time. stick n shock is an excellent way to deal with spirits.

While it may be normal, non-magical damage, it s also considered an elemental effect, and Spirits are specifically vulnerable to these types of attacks.

There are two angles: Flavour Consistency and RAW. I think you can make a case with both for electrical damage not affecting spirits in the same way.

Street Magic makes it explicit that materialised forms of spirits do not possess internal organs, nervous system, etc. So it's counter-intuitive that the stunning component of electrical damage would affect them and is a prime candidate for GM judgement call.

But going by RAW, they will usually be immune to electrical attacks. The description for Immunity to Normal Weapons is explicit in saying that it

So stick and shock is still going to have a difficult time having much effect. At best, after the spirit has rolled it's normal defenses, any remaining damage is resisted with Body + Willpower + half impact (3), which gives Freddy the Force Four Fire Elemental 12 dice to shake off the secondary effects so automatic success on the threshold three target.

So for me personally as a GM, I have materialised spirits ignore electrical damage for setting consistency. After all the same question would apply in principle to whether a Fire Elemental was immune to fire which I also consider to be the case. But going by RAW, spirits are still more or less immune to electrical damage. Least ways you're far worse off than loading up with regular ammo and boosting the DV with burst fire and good shooting than you are using stick and shock.

The grey area is magically inflicted electrical damage. The spirit is explicitly not immune to damage from spells. Personally I allow this to affect spirits unless there is an obvious reason not to, e.g. Lightening Bolt vs. a Storm Spirit. But I have no problem letting a spirit ignore secondary effects like electrical stun damage. I can't back immunity to magical electrical damage up with RAW, but when I've described some twisted city spirit formed of iron girders and steel wire fingers lurching towards the party, it violates sense that the electricity isn't just going to run over and through it in a suitably Big Trouble in Little China manner.

Hope this helps,

-K.

I mostly certainly can change the game based on realism. Electricity has its stunning effect because it overwhelms the human nervous system. It is made explicitly clear in Street Magic that even human-appearing spirits do not actually possess this. So while it's possible to make fluff justifications if you wish, such as where you say that electricity disrupts a spirit's materialised form, I see no need to try and come up with such justifications. My spirit descriptions are frequently very colourful. I have storm spirits that are virtually seething monsters of lightening and thunder. Am I really going to let electricity damage have it writhing on the floor?

As I pointed out above, the same argument applies to even more counter-intuitive situations. Is your fire elemental immune to fire damage? If you say that he isn't then it's going to seem silly when players hold it back with a flame-thrower. But if you say that he is then you've just "eviscerated carefully tested and balanced rules" according to you.

There are numerous cases where the GM needs to make sensible judgement calls like this. I consider electrical stun damage to be one of them. And in this particular instance the affect on game balance is a long way from eviscerating because by RAW, spirits do have their immunity to normal weapons apply against electrical attacks and even against the magical ones, most spirits will be able to muster the three successes on a Willpower + Body roll to shrug off the stun effect, even though you are denying them the + 1/2 impact in your game. So the change is minimal and fits fluff.

Been playing Quest For Glory 2 lately?

Am I really in a minority of GM's on this one? I'm kind of surprised. Aside from RAW supporting it, It makes perfect flavour sense to me for spirit immunity to apply to normal elemental attacks. Earth elemental made of stone being quite so bothered about burning itself with matches as a human? Storm Spirit of formed of lightening and thunder cloud being phased by taser darts? I note that your examples were all pretty heavy examples, like jamming loose power lines into their sides, or trapping them in giant sand-blasters. These are fine, high DV, sustained damage attacks and will overcome most spirit's Immunity Power because of that alone. You don't have to remove their immunity to make such attacks work. But conversely if you do remove their immunity, you make them more vulnerable than a human with an armoured jacket. Okay, they might have human samurai-like Body to resist with, but essentially your Force 7 Beast Spirit now has no armour against elemental attacks. I'm surprised your players don't routinely carry flamethrowers as instant Spirit-B-Gone.

I've had to go back and check this and it turns out that I'm wrong in how I've been playing. RAW as written does support increasing DV value for stick and shock by automatic fire as it simply says "increase the DV of the attack" rather than "weapon." But I had always replaced the DV of the attack with the Stick and Shock after the scaling, so Stick and Shock just did its 6(e) damage as always. I'm going to stick with that as it's a quick way of keeping balance.

Even by RAW though, It's not going to result in spirit massacres as it doesn't bypass their armour any better than any other type of ammo and most spirits will shrug off the Will + Bod + 1/2 Armour (3) stun test without noticing because that isn't going to increase even if you're emptying an entire Ingram White Knight of SnS into the thing.

Spirits rock!

Hmmm. I disagree with you there. Well, I agree with your view on spirit's armour simply using the same mechanics, but I don't think armour is the same thing. If anything, you could make the reverse argument with it and say it confers less defense against electricity damage because all it is is a force field that slows down / impedes attacks. You can see that limiting damage from normal bullets, but so long as the stick and shock hits, it's going to glue on and do the same damage regardless of if it hit fast or hit slow.

I suppose you could visualise it clinging on for a moment until it's overcome by the armour spell and goes flying off again like rocket propelled bubble-gum.

I'm not sure if I'm included in with the confabulators. I did comment on the armour spell issue as an aside. But I'll take a stab at this one, anyway. I've never taken the Immunity to Normal Weapons of Materialising spirits as actual armour, though mechanically I treat it the same way. How I do interpret it in game depends on the spirit.

If it's a water elemental or a wind spirit, then I may well say that the bullets have no noticeable effect as they pass straight through the material of its body. I'd have absolutely no problem saying that stick and shock (to go with this thread's favoured example) just falls off. If it were a squat little earth elemental made of stone, I'd probably delight in describing all the little sparking wads of SnS, glued to it. Low enough force that it can feel some of the damage, you might see it stop and start slapping them off it, but normally they just become decoration.

Basically, though I use the same mechanics, there are a wide variety of ways I'll portray the effect.

(And Beast Spirits are just tough motherfuckers, that don't have the sense to realise they're hurt. )

Well the mods have been trying.

(I suspect the original poster doesn't actually know what confabulation is).

Well, no, you see - if you successfully shoot a force 6 spirit (i.e. one net success or better) with stick & shock ammo, then it has to make a damage resistance test.

If you shoot it with normal ammo, you'll need about a half-dozen net successes before the spirit needs to make a damage resistance test.

(Assuming a single shot in both instances.)

Stick & Shock is significantly better -
(bod 6 + armor 6) vs. (6s+net successes)
or
(bod 6 + armor 12) vs. [(base damage + net successes) or zero (if base damage + net successes <= 12)]

You can surpass stick & shock's capabilities if you're using a heavy weapon, burst fire, and/or EX-EX ammo - but that's all harder and more expensive to obtain, less versitile, and much harder to sneak around with.

it's not about sense, per se. the flavor defines what makes sense. to someone who grew up on D&D, the idea of calling some kind of crazy octopus a "succubus" might not make much sense.

in SR, traditionally, elemental attacks tap into something... well, elemental, that gives them power that other mundane attacks lack. a fire elemental is less bothered by matches than a human--but he's more bothered by matches than he is by cutting himself with a carbon fiber blade. for whatever reason--symbolic link, some sort of Superman-esque allergy to chunks of its home plane, whatever--elemental attacks, in SR, are more able to damage spirits than non-elemental attacks.

now, i'll grant that things get stupid when you start pulling in all these 'other' elements. metal and wood, okay, those are elements according to some systems of belief. but sand? light? acid? it seems like everything gets to be an element. that, to me at least, seems... inconsistent. someone, i think, should've put down the Planescape.

Heh! Yeah - the succubus. Nomination for most disappointing creature artwork in RPG history.

We're in complete agreement on this MFB, but we have different expectations of how a spirit would work. In your context elemental vulnerability works, in mine not. Neither of our viewpoints has internal inconsistency. The only point of debate we could have would be about whose preconceptions were most justified. That's not a debate I wish to have as it's of no use to either of us in developing our own thoughts. Elemental vulnerability seems odd to me, and might to your players if they don't have your background in previous editions. But I doubt they'll complain when they realise they can defeat the free elemental adversary with a fire hose.

On an utterly unrelated note, does anyone know how to turn off the board's spell checker? It seems to be based on some bizarre degenerate form of English that can't handle the letter 'U' and keeps mistaking S's for Z's.

Firefox 2.0?

Tools>Options>Advanced>General:Check my spelling as I type.

Uncheck it.

And I know the truth. The Us are for cheating at scrabble.

That makes sense, but you're making an assumption: that elemental spirits are actually made out of an element. But I don't remember reading that anywhere...

It's sort of confusing, because in a way the spirits are made out of their element. If a fire spirit engulfs you, you burn, if a water spirit englufs you, you drown, just like if you were engulfed by real fire or water. Yet, fire spirits aren't immune to fire and water spirits aren't immune to being blasted with a water jet... why? Because even though they share properties with their elements, they are not actually made of those elements. Spirits are made out of materialized spirit... stuff. What exactly that is is an unknown in SR. But we do know its properties - it's highly resistant to damage by anything non-magical.

If spirits were made out of their element and they had all the properties it had, then they'd have some kind of power, like "elemental body" which would confer immunity to just about everything on them. If fire spirits were really made of an element, then only attacks which extinguish flame could hurt them, things like bullets or grenades would be a joke. If water spirits were really water, the only thing you could do to hurt them would be use a heat attack that boils them away... and maybe that wouldn't even work, because water is still h20 when it's steam, they could just condense back together.

I agree with what you're saying so far as it means a cinematic explanation for why an attack fails to penetrate their immunity. If bullets bounce of the hardened armor of an air elemental, it's more cool to describe them as going through harmlessly than bouncing off. But if someone wants to say that spirits are immune to electricity because they're a living element and electricity won't damage a living element, that just doesn't fly.

Also, what about guardian or guidance spirits? They're definitely, positively not made of an element. Are they invulnerable to stik-n-shok too? Why?

The only RAW supported reason for spirits being immune to elecricity is that they're not grounded, and I can't fault the logic in saying that flying spirits, i.e. fire and air, can't be hurt by electrical attacks because they fly. But the RAW doesn't support the notion that all spirits float, it never says that... The spirits who walk, namely most of them, are vulnerable to electricity per the RAW, and that's it.

And I still haven't heard a good reason why we need to tear the RAW to shreds - is it somehow bad that runners can hurt spirits with stik-n-shok? Ought spirits to be the ultimate unstoppable killing machines that you throw at runners whenever you're bored and want to end the game? Nothing is a trump card in SR4, at least not by its pure nature. You can always use a force 10 spirit if you want your runners to pee themselves and flee. But what is the point of making even force 6, something that any good mage just out of chargen could summon, more or less unstoppable except by magic? Why, exactly, is it such a bad thing for mundanes to kill spirits using stik-n-shok ammo?

EDIT: If someone is arguing that immunity doesn't work against elemental attacks, that's wrong. They used to get less bonus from immunity to elemental attacks and explosions in SR3, but that's gone. In SR4, immunity still applies. It's just that electrical, fire, and acid attacks all go against half impact armor, so they effectively cut a spirit's immunity in half.

Hmmm. There are quite a few points in there. Firstly, we actually do know that the spirits are not literally made out of the stuff that they appear to be because Street Magic has a bit on it. They're formed of some very flexible spirit substance that can mimic different materials (which includes super-heated carbon particles in the case of fire elementals, it seems). So you actually have RAW backing up your position there, though you don't seem aware of it. It seems a bit dubious though that something can have the exact physical properties of fire, water, iron or whatever without ensuing invulnerabilities. But then we're mostly of the same position - RAW says Immunity to Normal Weapons does apply. All that remains to discuss is whether a GM should use "common sense" in adding some further immunity - e.g. no amount of fire will affect a fire elemental. RAW the GM should not. Flavour wise, I say yes, though.

That's as far as I'm going, btw. I know what RAW is and I'm consciously saying that (a) flavour requires going a little further in some cases and (b) given the Immunity to Normal Weapon Rules, that little further will barely show up most of the time, anyway. The piece that you quoted above was not suggestions of granting new immunity, it was an illustration of how you would portray the existing RAW immunity. After all, a Force 6 Earth Elemental and a Force 6 Sylph will both have the same protection against bullets, but describing bullets bouncing off them only works for one of the cases.

Going back to the question of electricity and why Guardian or Task spirits would be immune in the same way that an Earth elemental would be, Street Magic has an answer as the same section that talks about spirit composition states explicitly that even when a spirit adopts the form of a metahuman, it still lacks a nervous system and internal organs. Given that we know electricity stuns due to its effect on the nervous system, it seems reasonable to dispense with this for spirits and assume they are naturally immune in the same way that a blind person is immune to flash bombs. Why would the spirit be stunned? Does it just want to fit in.

To address the final point about why it's bad that a spirit should be immune to stick and shock from a game balance point of view, well if they're not, the way stick and shock works (as Mr. Unpronouncable corrected me earlier), it becomes a bit of a spirit killer, by strict RAW. I don't want that in my game. The big Fire Elemental comes roaring at the players shrugging off automatic fire and armour piercing bullets. So the players break out the stick and shock gun and glue a few taser darts to it. Just doesn't work because I don't think there's supposed to be such a convenient way of dispatching them tucked away in the gear listings.

Of course, you may have a different take on it in your game. I think I've pretty much covered my view on this.

"Just cause I wanna" sounds a little pejorative. What I've said is that the fluff very clearly justifies a spirit being immune to the stunning effects of electrical damage. I've replied to the original question of whether or not spirits are immune with by strict RAW, no, but due to X and Y, you may want to make it so. I'm just trying to be helpful.

Again, I'm not saying that people need to make them immune but I'm pointing out the consequences of not doing so. Your solution of piling on bigger force actually makes the situation worse because a spirit's resistance to stick and shock scales more slowly than its resistance to other mundane attacks. I.e.: A force 3 spirit is fairly vulnerable to both stick and shock and regular ammo. A force 6 is significantly more vulnerable to it than to regular ammo and a force 9 would be shrugging off rocket launchers but be less than half as effective at resisting electric chewing gum.

You also have to consider that boosting a spirit just to counter a single weapon constrains a GM in their choice of power level.

People can do what they like in their games and I've never said otherwise. I'm illustrating consequences that may influence their decision.

EDIT: Cross-posted with Garrowwolf. Everything he said, puts it well.

It explicitly states that spirits have a stun track, ergo, they can take stun damage. QED.

(The dumb part about spirit damage tracks is that the physical damage track changes length whenever the spirit (de)materializes.

As for the bit about levitating = immune to electricity:

i.e. it's completely the GM's call (maybe you'll just get some extra dice.)

But what happens when he runs out of fuel?

You know, for a Michael Bay movie, this is looking surprisingly good.

The rules don't specify any types of stun damage that a spirit would not be affected by - the default position is, therefore, that any damage type which does stun, and is of sufficient power to bypass the spirit's immunity to normal weapons, will do stun damage to the spirit.

Arguing that a spirit should be immune to electrical damage would need some supporting evidence.

On the contrary - it is a fact of elemental energies in the SR4 system. There are absolutely no exceptions listed in the books. Until such time as you provide a citation supporting your position, the default rules stand.

Then bullets wouldn't either...good luck running a mundane in that game.