Okay so break it down for me, oh legions of DSF, if a Mage casts a area effect spell on multiple targets how exactly does this work, from start to finish: In example Fred the Bear Shaman casts a force 6 Stun Ball spell (Fred has a rating 6 magic attribute, and a spell casting skill of rating 5.) on a an approaching group of corporate goons (They each have a Will power rating of 4; and they number 9-and have no spell defense dice allocated to them.) From casting to drain how does this work, step by step.

I have a reason for asking for it this way, and I want to see what other people say before I reveal it.

Mage decides centre of area of effect.
Mage decides on radius - default is Force, expanded or reduced by 1 metre per die sacrificed from spellcasting dice pool
GM determines how many are within the radius
Mage rolls spellcasting dice pool
Targets each roll Willpower
Each target's roll is individually compared to mage's roll - if mage has net hits target is hurt
Hurt targets take 1 box of stun damage per point of Force plus any net hits added by the caster

This last step is tricky in that RAW does not forbid the caster from adding more net hits to the damage taken by one target than by another, but that would give IMO an unreasonable degree of control over what is essentially a mana grenade. I would play it that before any resistance rolls are made the caster must specify how many net hits will be used to increase the damage, limited by the resistance hits of course.

Now rolling nine separate resistance rolls is a bit of a faff but that is RAW. The disadvantage of making just one roll for all of them is that you get no variation - either all nine will still be standing or none will.

Does it happen to have anything to do with this coincidentally similar thread on Area Direct Combat Spells, Net hits and raising drain?

In B4 pointing out the optional-ness of the stupid rule.

Yeah, had I seen that 3278 had posted I wouldn't have made a similar post.

Just about every session we have at least one WTF moment where we find a hole in the rules or in our comprehension of them, so the morning after is an exciting time of learning for us. This time it turns out the problem is our bad habit of using pirated PDFs to spare wear on our precious hardcovers [and my bad habit of not keeping a hardcover within 30 miles of me].

Oh, I certainly understand the use of PDFs. My group (tends) to own only a single copy of the hardcover rule books (whatever the game) but everyone with a laptop has the PDF (legal or otherwise, heh heh).

I actually have legit PDFs, I am just not up to date on their revisions. Something that is currently underway, though. Some of them I get the notifications for the updates from BattleShop, others I either did not check it or are early enough they missed that feature. Either way, I will still prefer traveling with my PDF library on the iPad over the physical library. I refuse to purchase roller luggage to haul it around!

That being said, a liveUpdate feature for PDF documents would be grand...

I've got at least one book as legit PDF (I got a notifcation a few weeks back about it being updated) I think it's the BBB.



Heh, if only.

Now, "they" could probably do a little javascript magic* and have a PDF that lets you know that an update is available, but I doubt it could self-update.

*JS works in PDFs, did you know that?

Then it won't do any harm to update, but this rule should already appear as "optional" in your copy. This is basically entirely a case of my encyclopedic rules memory and my crushing poverty combining to waste everyone's time.

It is optional in the dead tree version of SR4A I have, but not my PDF.