And... Yes. I have three times so far, and it was for the exact same thing by the exact same person every time. So I don't particularly feel like getting mod-raped yet a fourth time.

And you know full well it's not just because of what you say, but the endearing manner in which you say it. Others have said essentially the same thing without getting suspended. They just made their point more diplomatically.

That's a diplomatic way of saying it. A VERY diplomatic way of saying it.

What are you like in RL, SL? Are you anywhere near this surly?

You love me thiiiiiis much.

That's in real distance, by the way, on a scale of 0 to infinity.

Now you are talking about a single success at TN9, instead of the multiple successes you mentioned earlier. Also, you will need multiple successes on the drain test to avoid Serious Physical Damage, 6 more using just Charisma dice and any unused Conjuring dice - again, no foci to help.

It takes 6 Conjuring dice to get that single 9 half the time, but you've got to resist the drain evey time. Lets say you have 9 dice for the drain test somehow (charismatic elf, or very charismatic human with very high Conjuring with left over Conjuring dice.) Using the calculator in your sig, the first Conjuring test succeeds (it could have as easily failed) with 1 success. The drain is (Force)S Physical. Your 9 dice yield 1 success, so you have given yourself a Serious Physical wound for the duration until non-magically healed. You use the single service of the spirit and summon another. This time, you fail to get a single success according to the expected outcome (and this is ignoring the TN modifiers due to being wounded), but must still resist drain, which this time puts you into overflow damage. Check for Magic loss, etc..

Or am I missing something with this Force 9 spirit? If you scale it down to a Force 6 spirit, then the numbers are equal to the Force 6 spell for easier comparison. The drain will probably only be M Stun, using a well built magic user. But it is still 4 successes at TN 6 to fully resist conjuring drain. Magic Fingers is +2M, or 5M at F6, but is still twice as likely to be resisted.

Oops.

I am because I think your assertion of the ease of conjuring a Force 9 spirit is absurd. Even for your character, you are looking at taking drain.

What is nonsense? I used real numbers not abstract "full capacity" or "full force" descriptors. A 250 karma character should have a good chance of learning a Force 9 spell. It hardly takes a dragon to cast it at full force, which is a single 6.

The reason I even responded was I thought there might be some special summoning rules for Psi's that I had overlooked, making it possible to do the things with ease as you claimed. You made it sound too easy and I was pointing out a few things I thought you may have overlooked.

Instead of making statements to me, which are not backed up with any facts, try responding to the discussion. I fail to see how you are "right". Making a roll of TN6 is going to be just as difficult whether you are rolling Sorcery or Conjuring dice. Resisting the drain is going to be less for the spell though because of the drain code. (Unless the Force is reduced to F2 or F1, which has not even entered the discussion. Neither has the possibility of F3 to F5 spirit/spell, which would make conjuring easier because of the spell's fixed TN.)

At higher Force than 6, Drain becomes a concern for the conjurer, and learning the spell becomes an issue for the sorcerer. Even her however, the sorcerer can do things to help learn and only needs to do it once. The conjurer gets no enefit from foci to help and has to deal with drain every time they summon.

[nods] Never could put my finger on it, but your right. Which is ironic, because it shows how little Kenson would then seem to know about real Hermeticism (not that SR Heremeticism had anything to do with that til SOTA 64 of course). But yeah, that is a common Wiccan perspective.

I'm kinda neutral on Kenson - like some of his stuff, didn't like other bits. My biggest gripe is actually Talon. As much as I liked the novels, the guy's a total munchkin (not as bad as Ryan Mercury though [roll eyes]). Fake Hermetic? Maybe, more Wiccan than Heremtic to be sure. Kyle Teller was a much better example of Hermetic if you ask me.

No.

It was very much the content of my posts at issue. Or rather, what a mod imagined into the comments I posted.

In short, you're not being persecuted.

I liked the Supremacy dueling idea, but it could have been implemented better (maybe). The metamagics were just, well, meh.

That's the great thing about 4th - my namesake character started play back in first as a shaman, and was then remade as a hermetic in another 1st edition campaign during which it was retconned that his magical training came from his time in the Souix Wildcats (hence the familiarity to pose effectively as a shaman - he never conjured anything in his first incarnation). Later in 2nd edition (under a different gm) the gm decided that he should have a totem even as a hermetic due to the Wildcats training. When I converted him to 3rd, I kept this oddity cause it had had effects in game, and now in 4th it's legal - some essentially they unknowingly validated the rules mess that he had become.

That is an issue, damn it. When one of the moderators of a discussion forum is willing to completely avoid discussion on something directly to do with the topic of discussion (and make no mistake, someone heavily involved in the shaping of the Shadowrun rules and flavour becomes themself inevitably a part of the discussion), and to advise others to do the same, I find that deeply alarming.

~J

Deeply alarming? To say the least. It's usually the type of draconian squelching of free speech that I expect to see on certain religious boards, which generally a) pisses me off, and b) eventually leads me to leave said board. That Dumpshock could be moving in that direction....displeases me.

Chaos mages rock my socks right now, being quite definitely one of my favorite traditions. It also allows with some ease of creating a possible and comprehendible backstory for a street mage....when you can't find a teacher or get into school for magic what do you turn to? Books and chips and whatever you can get your hands on to help you learn about your mojo and then leads to a definite mosh pot of magical theory and influence.