Or simply making implants cost less essence...

Cheaper implants would make mages more powerful. The essence cost is what discourages them from taking cyberware in the first place.

..for mundanes.

Why not make it so that mages can only have a certain level of magic loss set to whatever level you want? If you want them to have some communications stuff and some visoin enhancements then restrict it to 1 essence. That way you don't have to worry about changing the essence costs causing imbalence with them.

Another way to do it would be to come up with a list of cyberware that you don't mind mages having. these could be things like the senses and communications and some bioware kidneys or something. Use the normal essence costs on them. Then allow them to go hog wild on that stuff but don't allow the rest. Maybe the reason is that the magic conducts and causes feedback from other kinds of cyberware. Whatever the reason, your mages wont be out of control and you can amp up your mundanes.

How about instead of thinking up new rules to remake the game, you guys use the rules that are already there to limit mages? Background Count, anyone? Focus Addiction? Wards? Magicly active moss? Dual natured critters guarding a compound?
There are alot of options already in the game to slam mages who are amping up their 'endless' magic stat.

Really, the only thing I've read here is the age old 'Sam vs Mage' crap. Sure, you threw TM's in there in the first post, but anything else has been drowned out by the 'Mages are too powerfull' and 'Mundanes are too weak' junk.

My two at this point.

Konsaki, how does any of the things you listed reduce the power level of the mage themself or restrict the cyberware?

Background count can be avoided. You don't have to use foci to become ungodly powerful, so focus addiction and wards are not that much of an issue. Magically active moss and dual natured critters limit one ability each (astral and invis).

You didn't address the issue, you pointed at a road sign that said, "No Tanks on this road!"

Well, what's the issue? Why do you think that mundanes are so weak that they need something like this to waste karma on?
What is the point, karma wise, where mages are way too powerful? When does it come to a point where both mundane and mage just have way too much Karma on their hands to spend and it ceases to be 'Shadowrun' and is instead a game of 'Demi-god'?

Once it gets to a point where your mundane has to whine about mages have a magic stat (wow, who would have guessed that mages have magic) that they can waste their Karma on and the mundane is maxxed out, I think it's time to restart with a new character or just snag 'Latent Awakening' from the MitS book and start your own magic stat to waste your non-mundane's Karma on. (Whew, long run-on sentence)
I can estimate that it would take around 400+ karma before you even get to the point where the 'endless mage' problem even arrises, if that. Course, I may be wrong, it hasnt been the first time.

Except that requires even more effort to maintain balance and it also destroys the flavor of the game.

How about this

Positive Quality -
Cybermancy 20BP
Characters with the cybermancy quality have been exposed to unnatural magical rituals designed to prolong metahuman life. They do not die when their essence reaches zero and can continue to add cyberware as their essence drops into the negatives.
Characters with negative essence may not possess Magic or Resonance attributes. If a character with Magic or Resonance reaches negative essence, he automatically loses that attribute.
Cybermancy is a rare art and the treatment is only available from the most SOTA Delta Clinics and the most vile of back-ally bloodmages.
It is strongly recommended that characters should not be allowed to take this quality at chargen.

Negative Quality -
Astral Hazing -5BP or -15BP
The mere existence of characters with the Astral Hazing quality disrupts the flow of mana around them. If a character with Astral Hazing stays in an area for an hour then that area will develop a background count of 1. The background count will increase by 1 every hour until it reaches the character's essence value/2 (round up).
When the character leaves the area the background count fades by 1 point every hour.
Characters with a negative essence value and Astral Hazing produce mana voids in the same manner, with the background count decreasing by 1 every hour until it reaches their essence value (round down).
The background counts produces by Astral hazing are never aspected. Magicially active characters with this quality suffer the same penalties as everyone else.
The qualiy is -5 for characters who do not have a magic attribute and -15 for those who do have a magic attribute.

Because it still dosen't adress the fact that you're talking apples and oranges - or and karma. Sure, there may be an exchange rate, but it's ALWAYS a disadvantagous rate.

So even if your DM is letting his mundanes trade in Karma for in huge lumps, he's still never going to afford enough to get all that delta he needs. And you do realize that to buy the Cybermancy positive quality with Karma, you'd need forty Karma. That's a pretty damn significant chunk, and it dosen't even adress the cost of the cyber itself.

And anyway, cyber only goes so far - you're still limited by your augmented maximum. A human can never have a Body stastitic higher than 10, with the Exceptional Ability Positve Quality. Not even if he's the goddamned Robocop, a full-conversion Cyborg with obvious CyberEverything...

That's still less than an unaugmented Troll, and it's a lot less than what a mage or PhysAd can achieve with his spells. Plus, he's a freaking full-conversion Cyborg!

I think you're missing the point. The point is that while the ability to install all the cyber you want is theoretically neat, the fact is that it's not all that good. You're still limited by caps, plus you're outlaying ridiculous amounts of for all those goodies. Whereas the Mage and PhysAd need only Karma.

I'd say just go with the OP's "Self-Actualization" routine. It's entirely appropriate, balanced, and fits nicely within the rules we have already.

ShadowDragon8685, seriously, man. if advancement is easier for the Awakened because karma is more readily available than cash, then maybe the GM should hand out more cash and less karma. my GMs have tended towards the opposite, actually; most of my characters live comfortably, but i have to squeeze every point of karma to get maximum value out of it. neither situation is optimal for every group, and if there are problems, it is the GM's job to fix them.

and as far as augmented maximums go, it's been suggested that removing those maximums would go a long way towards correcting any perceived imbalance between high-end Awakened and mundane characters--without making up completely new rules that go directly against all previous material.

self-actualization as presented here is entirely inappropriate for SR. the whole point of cyberpunk is that you're trading in your soul in exchange for power. yes, the fantasy aspect means that's not always necessary--in which case, such mechanics should be fantastic, which means magical. man, unaided by either augmentation or magic, should be limited because that is the basic premise of the SR world.

mfb, my point is that Karma awards and cash awards aren't even comparable.

For the amount of money it would cost to turn someone into a Deltaware Monstrosity, most mages could have set up their own Oricalcum factory and lived forever in luxury. Most of them WOULD have. They could have a set of armor made out of solid oricalcum, backed with Ubotanium, dikoted and then coated with Rutherenium... For every day of the year.


But even ignoring that, there is the fact that even Cyberware is capped, Magic isen't..

I have a question - who are you trying to reflect?

Please give an example from movies or something to show the kind of person that you are trying to reflect with these rules. Are you trying to show a super genius or a super athlete or what?

Sure... Give out free cyber - and who's installing it?


Yeah. I thought so. The Runner who's stupid enough to go under Mr. Johnson's knife is a dumb fuck.

yeah, gosh, it's impossible for runners to get cyberware installed. that's why nobody has cyberware. crazy world!

one more thing the GM can handle. it can be as easy as providing them with a trustworthy street doc contact.

You know, there is a reason why my little writeup didn't say anything about deltaware being necessary to the process and that it is available from the vilest of back-alley blood mages. Characters who can afford deltaware don't need cybermancy unless Augemntation makes Move-by-Wire baddass again, and I don't see how that is possible without destroying the augmented caps.
The ability to apply cybermancy to lower grade ware makes it far more accessable, even if finding someone who will perform the procedure takes some effort.


40 karma being too extreme a cost, consider that a magical character has to pay 293 karma in order to initiate and raise his magic attribute 6 times in order to gain benefits equivalent to six negative essence points worth of 'ware.

Of course, 40 is a lot of karma to pay up front so a leveled system would be better, say 5-10BP per level with each level allowing the character to take another negative essence point. Or maybe 10 +(level*3) karma per level with the quality being unavilable at chargen would be more appropriate, bringing the costs in line with initiation.

As for magic being uncapped, well the magic stat is uncapped. Magical stat bonuses should be limited by the augmented caps. Adept powers are limited by the augmented caps and Samurai have far more in common with Adepts than they have with magicians. The big complaint is that Samurai eventually hit their essence limit but Adepts can keep initiating and gaining powers forever, nevermind that most adept powers are less efficient than the equivilant 'ware is. Adepts can get the 'ware and have the powers.

The problem is that mundanes don't have a special mundane stat that they get to raise as high as they want to while magically active characters and technomancers do.
Well screw that, mundanes don't need a special stat. They already have the ability to sell chunks of their soul with very little real consequences while magicians, adepts and technomancers feel those consequences acutely.

Cybermancy puts them back on equal footing. Samurai will be able to keep getting ware so long as they can pay the costs are are willing to deal with the healing penalties. At some point, healing penalties make further cybermancy impractical, but that is how it should be. At some point karma costs make getting more adept powers impractical. All things being equal, adepts and cybermantic Samurai will face very similar caps.

However, the magician kicks both their asses. The magician kicks both their asses for exactly one reason and one reason only, his special capless magician stat is rolled for pactically everything that he might want to do. An Adept's dice pools are determined by his capped stats, capped skills, powers that modify those stats and skills, and (occasionally) powers that provide bonus dice to specific types of tests . A Samurai's dice pool is determined by capped stats, capped skills, 'ware that modifies those stats and skills, and (occasionally) 'ware that provides bonus dice to specific types to tests.
The magician's dice pools are determined by a capped skill and his uncaped special stat, a fact that allows the magician to Powerbolt the Earth into dust if he initiates often enough. Samurai and adepts have an upper limit on what they can accomplish with a dice roll (before edge). Magician's do not. There is a way to correct this, of course, but some people want like it. It is simply really, exchange Magic's role with that of the tradition-specific drain stat. This caps spellcasting out at 14+bonus dice but makes it much easier for high-grade initiates to resist the drain of powerful high-force spells.

Balancing Technomancers with hackers it a much different problem, however, and I'm not familiar enough with the matrix rules to tackle it at the moment.

Is this really an issue? What is the likelihood that a game will run so long, and be so karma intense, that the sammie will have 5.99 points worth of delta grade cyberware, the best weapons and armor on the market, a full slate of maxed skills, and still be significantly less powerful than the mage or adept? Fairly low I'd say. Further, if it does come up, so what? The universe isn't game balanced.

I see we are having another Magic is Broken discussion.

Shakes his head

it's not a problem because people do it; that is, it's not in and of itself unbalanced or broken. it's a problem because it makes for a very limited game--and i'm using a specific definition of "game", here: the part of the RPG experience where you earn advancement, the same way you earn advancement in parcheesi or monopoly. the game of SR is limited sharply; you can take your character to its extreme reaches right at chargen, or hit them right after chargen, and from then on you're stuck advancing in secondary and tertiary interests. this is somewhat alleviated by the fact that SR4 has a wide variety of skills useful and even necessary in a given area of expertise (in other words you can't generally be a one-skill wonder and survive). that still doesn't remove the chafing feeling i get when i make a character who's as good a shot as a Ghost.

which is basically what the OP is trying to fix, albeit only for mundanes. i just think he's going about it completely backwards. (i also think it's like shining the silverware on the Titanic, but that's for a different thread.)

hyzmarca, unless 4th's version of Man & Machine has Cybermancy rules that really blow my socks off, consider your second version (The one that costs the same as Initation) as stolen for my campaigns with some very minor tweaks.

It's brillant.

Then talk to your GM about raising the Skill caps after chargen to 7, 8 or 9...

heh, my GM would be like, "skill caps? what do you mean, SR3 doesn't have skill caps!"

raising or removing the skill caps is one solution, but i don't think it would work very well in the long run. part of the reason i don't like SR4 is that at the high end, it's too easy to do hard things. removing the caps would exacerbate that issue even more.

this is a long discussion that can be cut short, unless people really, really want to discuss it. basically, the only solution to the cap problem that works to my personal satisfaction is to scrap the entire basis of SR4--the fixed TN mechanic--and go back to variable TNs.

I think I will skip that discussion.

Been there, done that.

Didn't find it worth the effort involved, specially as TPTB don't have any plans on changing the whole system.

Has any one thought of not allowing the awakened and technomancers to increase edge? Making the edge trait a mundane's speciality. Fluff-wise, awakened characters make their own luck with magic.

SR4 does have variable TNs. They are called Thresholds and dice pool penalties.

Um, Farceseer Siranaul, are you suggesting that Human Mages have Edge 1, or that they lose the bonus for being human?

Also would Mages be able to burn a point of Magic in order to pull a 'Hand of God'?

Still, personally I don't like it, but then again I don't think there is a problem with Mages vs Mundanes being unbalanced...

I only suggest they are unable to raise it by expending BP or karma. A human mage can still have an edge 2.

Hmm, not as bad as I first thought, but personally I still don't care for it...

And then there are opposed tests... there's more then one dimension to the probability curve.

Alot of what was a penalty to TN became dice pool penalties. Then you have a threshold on top of that. Then you have less dice in your pool to work with in the first place. I think that the math would work out about the same. That hard roll shouldn't even have the 15 dice. I'm not saying that they are exact but it's not like we have a real world stats for all of this so one general guestimate is as good as another.

...in previous editions however there was both the Variable TN (that acted like a Threshold) and a Resistance test so the character in a sense had two "chances" then. Consider that most mundanes have an average of 3 WP which is (if they are lucky) only one hit. The spell will most likely still have an effect or do some damage unless it totally fizzles.

One limit would be to use only the Target's Unaugmented Attribute. This would keep it from getting too out of hand.

But you have to remember, KK, that in 3rd all you had to do was roll 1 hit to actually hit and rolling a 6 with a dicepool of your magic + the magic pool wasnt hard at all.
Rolling 3-4 hits in SR4 just to actually have your spell land with a dicepool of 12 (6 magic + 6 skill), then having your target roll their stat again, god forbid they have a mage counterspelling them, would be a little bit of overkill. You would have mages burning edge just to cast a stunbolt, plus the fact that all spells would have to be, at minimum, the TN+1, so you are actually encuraging high force spells.

[Not a completed post]

...let's use an example.

My namesake in SR3 had a 6 Willpower. This meant an opposing mage needed to roll 6s to succeed. Of course this would normally limit the number of his or her successess since 6s come up less frequently than 4s. Ergo there is a good chance the spell does not stage up but does hit for base damage.

So, offending Mage with a magic of 6 & 6 Spell Pool casts a Force 6 Powerbolt at KK getting 2 successs which is still base damage. KK rolls her WP (6) against the spell's force & gets only 1 success taking a moderate wound effect (3 boxes) She now has -1 to reaction and all tests.

Now in let's take it to SR4. KK is hit by a mage with a magic of 6 casting a force 6 powerbolt (not hard for a beginning level character to have) The mage gets 4 hits on 12 dice (TN 5). She has a willpower DP of 4 (needing 5s as well) to soak the damage. She only gets 1 hit. The mage now has a net of 3 hits + the spell's force, leaving poor KK to take 9 blocks of damage. She now has -3 to all tests, - 3 to reaction and is only 1 block away from going down.

I would say magic needs nerfed a little. Just trying to find a more streamlined mechanic to handle it.

I dont disagree with you, but using your example with your own suggested rules, which I like I might add, it would have a different outcome.

The mage gets 4 hits which is equal to your character's willpower, thereby meeting the Stat given 'Hits Required' TN. Since he just met the casting requirements, he does base damage of 6DV.
This is all well and good, no 9 damage, just 6.

Now this right here is why I would disallow any resistance rolls from the victim. KK now rolls her Will (4) and gets 1 hit. Now the mage who had 4 hits, which is good off of 12 dice and just barely hit the requirement for her willpower, now has a fully resisted spell.
Remember that this is a 6/6 mage we are talking about. In SR, thats pretty powerful.

I say, instead of letting the victim set the 'Hits Required' TN at their stat AND letting them resist, we dont let them roll resist but let Counterspelling take up the slack and make it more important.

...but, depending if the team has a mage and the mage has counterspelling skill, makes this option too much of a variable.

To maybe better illustrate, if the Threshold of KK's WP is met and there are no net successes, the Spell's power still has it's effect on the target meaning KK would have to soak the remaining 6 hits with her WP. So, she gets her 1 hit and still takes a resultant of 5 blocks instead of 9.

This would be analogous to having to stage down the "base damage" of a spell in previous editions.

Ok, so you soak like you would a bullet then instead of how magic rules are in RAW. I like that better too.

Thanks for clearing that up, I thought you were using RAW with your modded TN.

We allready know direct damage spells are overpowered, I think it would be a good step to balancing magicians to only allow indirect damage spells, or at least to give direct damage spells Drain equivelent to indirect damage spells, the direct damage spells would still be better in many circumstances.

The thing about having extreme shots is that I think that is the main reason to NOT have such high dice pools in the first place. An impossible shot shot should have almost no dice left and a high threshold. Only with edge could you take the shot at all.

The problem isn't the dice mechanic. The problem is that there is no sense of scale to these numbers. People are starting with inhumanly high numbers and don't realize it. There is no grittiness to this game because it is too easy to be too powerful.

Off the top of my head, barring edge, I came up with 27 dice in the biggest Ranged attack pool.

12 - Agility + Elf + Pos Quality + Augmented
9 - Skill + Specialization + Pos Quality
2 - Smartlink
1 - Reflex Recorder
3 - Adept skill power

This is supposed to be the best of the best, but yeah, you can get it straight out of CharGen.

Edit: Removed 'Enhanced Articulation'