In previous editions, it most definitely was and effective mechanic, because focus addiction was the natural and inevitable consequence of excessive focus use.

The SR4 version presented in Street Magic is framed in the context of a Negative Quality, as a variant of the Addiction Negative Quality in the main book. The BBB does have a section on characters gaining the Addiction Negative Quality in play as opposed to buying it at chargen, and presumably this would also apply to the Focus Addiction variant. However, no guidance is provided for setting the threshold for the Addiction Test, leaving the ball squarely in the GM's court for determining just how addictive focus use is.

While this is in keeping with the developer's stance of letting individual GMs decide how addiction issues should be handled at their table, Focus Addiction is also a game balancing tool, and firm numbers would have been a handy baseline. A lack of hard numbers for the Addiction Test threshold may also prompt magic user players to complain that they're being unfairly singled out by the GM. This may be countered by pointing out that Hacker characters also risk Addiction Tests of an unspecified threshold when using Hot Sim VR, but that's an apples/oranges comparison at best.

Has anything been printed in regards to destroying the foci or would we just be making it up.

As Paul points out players can get to feeling like they're being screwed over when you go out of the book for the express purpose of destroying their toys. Especially if they think the threshold should be force x2 or something.

I expect this problem would be compounded for any player who remembers the old rules for attacking foci directly.

You can shut them down (i.e. disrupt the spell), but not damage them directly from the astral, I think.

Bye
Thanee

That's a good point!

Bye
Thanee

For those of you who might not realize Knasser's being funny:

"Note that this spell does not work against the effects of Focus Addiction"
Alleviate Addiction spell description, p.169, Street Magic

Basically if you can do physical damage to a focus it's not any different from taking a hammer to it. So since it's astral when activated nothing stops me from dropping a manabolt into it. Even a manaball, however the ball's radius of effect will only include other active astral forms.

That's nice. That means the things are actually really easy to destroy.(assuming they aren't just disrupted)

But does that also mean a power focus is super easy to drop? It would seem to.

Ah, no. The Spell(s) definitely have to be re-cast every single time that the Focus is activated.

They would probably also benefit from their owner's spell defense as well, such as shielding, if they have it. I haven't seen anything about that in the rules, but it would make sense.

Well the Earthdawn link has been seriously weakened since FASA went down. It's mostly only present in flavor now, and that's only because they want to keep consistency.

Anyway the reason this thread started was because a mage with a six pack of sustaining foci running would be a beast compared to any other character. And it wouldn't take that many sessions to pull it off. We're talking about flying around invisible with four initiative passes, armor and a few other boosts.


However if the spells get dropped every time they deactivate the things and spirits/mages in the astral can pop the foci like zits if they come across the mage than the foci will probably be relegated to sustaining the odd spell for a mage for short time frames. Which isn't a problem.

I consider this what they are designed for. The only occasion where I would do this to a player is in the case where they are leaving spells active for extended durations to avoid the possibility of drain when they need the spells.

As far as spell defense, I'd say it's just like anything else with spell defense. The mage has to declare it.

They are foregoing other assets at chargen, making themselves weaker starting characters than normal. Bonding them first thin is also a choice where they are foregoing other options to increase the characters's power.

As others pointed out, there are limits in the rules as well as focus addiction. Magician characters will always be more potent, as you put it, when they start getting karma. They have their own drawbacks so learn to live with the apparent injustice.

Try inherently unequal if you’re talking about running 4 Sustaining Foci with Improved Reflexes, Armor, Increased Agility and Increased Strength. A mage can have the equivalent of Wired 3, Dermal Armor Rating 4, Muscle Toner 4, and Muscle Aug 4. All at chargen, at the cost of 4 rating 4 sustaining foci, BP to bond, BP to learn the spells. A street sam would just have a negative essence and be dead. Now how is that equal access and make you think that being harsh about a player overusing foci is overkill?

In a world where AR is all around, wouldn't a lot of people be glowing? Using RFID tags, AROs and other AR enhancements, I'm thinking this may not be as big an issue in populated areas as you may think.

In one run, I had my group in a nightclub where there was someone that looked like a 40' troll, having half his body clipped by the ceiling. Obviously it was only in AR and once the group filtered it out they saw the regular dude.

I assume this is pretty common.

So let see if I understand you. If you were running a game you would allow Joe Starting Mage to cast all these spells once and let them run in a sustaining focus for the duration of the campaign?

Because there’s noone here saying that a mage may not do this. My point is that if a mage does they have to expect they will lose a great deal of that original cost when an astrally projecting mage with a grudge shows up and nukes them all with one spell. For a mage to have all this they better be discreet when and where they use it, and you say that’s too harsh?

There are rules for targeting an active focus and there are rules for an active focus defending from spells. Please see my earlier quotes including page references and consult your core rulebook. If you claim that this is unjustified in the rules than you are also asserting that nothing is susceptible to spell damage, and for that matter firearms damage.

So any time I do something that costs a player to lose Nuyen and Karma spent on an item I’m violating some sacred trust? If I tell a player, “You as a player may not understand, but your character knows as a mage that leaving these sustaining foci on 24/7 is a grave risk to their continued existence, and I suggest you be more subtle about their use,” then proceed to destroy them when they choose to ignore that advice, you would say I’m violating some sacred trust, and I’m operating counter to the goal of having fun?

So that quickened spell you have that failed to pass through a ward and is Karma wasted, that’s my bad as a GM I should have been more thoughtful? That Ares Alpha you had to leave at the run to pick up and carry your dying mate, should magically reappear, or I’m being unfun? That bullet that killed your character, and permanently removed all the nuyen and karma ever spent violated the spirit of the game?

This isn’t the A-Team. People die. Players die. Things get destroyed. Making bad choices costs you, some times your life. Making the right choices may even cost you your life. This is a gritty dystopian cyberpunk future filled with death despair and loss.

And a character who leaves a sustaining focus on 24/7 isn't?

As I indicated, I’d be more likely to tell a player that what they are trying to do runs counter to what your character thinks is wise and let them choose.

Here is actually a difficult case, or cases as the case may be.

As far as a powerball goes items carried by your character are part of their Aura. So the player resists a physical spell and he gets cooked from the inside out, the items don’t enter into it. When a spell is being cast from the astral and cannot affect the player and if he has active foci they are present in the astral and must therefore be separate from his aura. I would grant that a dual player (perceiving) would be able to protect his active foci. However a manaball cast by a mage in the physical will have the player as an option as well so the foci would count as in his aura and could not be selectively targeted.

As to a grenade, I would generally say that the barrier rating of most of the items you’re carrying is sufficient to resist the damage of the grenade unless there is some special cases when a player is dealing with something fragile.

I would do all this in the interest of game play. The point about destroying a focus on purpose is that an astrally projecting mage specifically targets the foci for one reason or another. This is a stick I would pull out to curb abuse, not for player torture.

As I see it this thread is basically about how do you stop a player from abusing sustaining foci and getting basically a superior form of quickening from a single Karma outlay.

Nope, nope, nope.

For starters, sustaining foci can only be up to Force: 3 at char-gen. So the increase reflexes spell can only get up to threshold 3, slightly inferior to wired reflexes: 2 (since you only get an initiative bonus, rather than an increase to Reaction, which lets you dodge better as well).

The two increase Attribute spells are even worse off, since the Force of the spell has to be equal or better to the augmented value of the Attribute. In other words, the best you could do would be to increase two Attributes of 1 up to 3. Hardly game-breaking.

Note that even if you took an extremely liberal reading of the spell description, and said "It must mean the amount it is augmented by, not the end total" - it would still not be too overpowered. A mage won't start out with those Attributes that high to begin with, and if he's taking the ranged or melee skills that Agility and Strength apply to, he'll be spreading himself thin to the point of uselessness. Honestly, a mage using these spells would be better off increasing Body and Reaction.

And finally, the armor spell, which I have already touched upon. It's a good spell in the middle of a firefight, but walking down the street with it is not generally a good idea, unless you are in the middle of a warzone in the Barrens.

The cost of this has already been remarked upon. As someone who has number-crunched a lot of spellslingers, I can tell you that you need to make sacrifices if you need any foci at all, and 60 build points is a HUGE hit. Any mage spending that much on sustaining foci will probably have very low physical Attributes, minimal Edge, and a bare-bones allocation of skills. It's really not worth it.

People often don't realise I'm being funny. I don't know why. Sometimes I actually have to tell them to laugh.





On the subject of Quickening and wards, is it really that much of a risk? If you have something quickened at force 1 with no additional karma then it is. But if I were a player, I wouldn't be taking chances. I, like most players, am obsessive when it comes to not wasting karma. For the classic Increase Reflexes, it's going to have to be Force 4 for best effect to begin with. That would let a mage spend up to eight points for effective force to resist disruption already. If you use Quickening Materials from Street Magic, you could get that up to 12. I don't think it's very common to be forced through wards, though I suppose some GMs would have a penchant for it. In the eventuality that a character is forced through, then 12 dice will outdo most wards and I see no reason to disallow using edge, either.

Now you've spent more karma than you otherwise would, but you get what you pay for and I reckon spending 12 karma for permanent 4 IP is a good bargain. If I were playing, I'd probably go for slightly higher force and spend a little bit more, even.

The mage still has some limitations that the samurai does not. He'll have to find other ways past some wards and he has to spend (or ought to spend) valuable early metamagic techniques on Masking and Extended Masking.

But with a bit of overspend and some intelligent playing, Quickening isn't a terrible risk, maybe.

Street Magic: Magical Goods -> Advanced Foci -> Metamagic Enchantments -> Quickening Materials.

I like this idea as a compromise - rebuild for half-cost, say. Or maybe 2 karma to reactivate. It would make it more of an agonised decision whether to go through that ward or not, rather than just unthinkable as it is now. I'm not sure I would use it though or not. Sometimes bad things happen to a character and that's the way it is. I also kind of like forcing a player to make tactical decisions like this - high risk, low stakes; or low-risk, high stakes.

Nah, just talked myself into leaving it the way it is. Very good idea, though.

Fistandantilus (I'm still trying to work out what an "antilus" is, by the way, assuming you are a "fist and" one of them), there was a tatoo artist, dwarf I think, in Runner Havens that it's strongly hinted is using this technique to do magical tattoos on people. I think he had Triad or Yak connections. Can't remember which.

hehe.. I used to do that in SR3. Casting armour on the heavily armoured troll Pys Ad encouraged all the enemies to concentrate their fire on him, and not on my fragile, barely armoured elf mage!

I'll look that up, thanks. Was that in the Seattle section or HK?