Thinking about a House Rule to curtail a bit of min-maxxing. A smart "munchkin" mage-type will actually do his/her best to keep her Magic Rating at 6 (or lower) to avoid possible Magic Loss. Best way to do that is the 'best of both worlds' by filling the body with Cyberware as you Initiate. For 150 karma, no group, no ordeals, any mage can get Initiate Grade 6 (125 w/ ordeals, 100 with group, 75 with ordeals and group). In games that exceed the 200 karma mark, It'd be fairly easy to see Mages able to do that, and having a Magic of 12 is a no-roll-needed to lose Magic.

Anyhows, I'm thinking of starting a House Rule that says you double the Karma Cost of Initiation for every Grade higher than your Essence rounded-down. Seeing a Grade 12 is still probable amongst players who play Mage types w/out Cyber enhancements, but less probable amongst people with some amount of internal-adjustments. And, in the process, seeing Mages higher than Grade 6 becomes an improbablity since even with a Group and Ordeal (not that there are any Ordeals left after 6) would cost 36 karma, and 48 without an Ordeal.

Anyhows, for those of you who exceed the 50 karma type games... do you think this sounds like a reasonable House Rule? We've just got our first Grade 6 Initiate in our game today and he agrees that any higher should be double, so I feel a little more confident in suggesting it to the group. More importantly though, characters who start out with alot of Geasa'd Cyberware (a true munchkin sign), would be alot less likely if they have any plans to be a high-grade initiate some day, something a bit more powerful I think than a few Essence points of Cyberware.

Sphynx

Sorry, I'm useless here. I've never played a game with that kinda power level. But I've noticed that none of my characters can go 'ballsout' on only one skill (or magic) like that. Don't they lose balance if ALL their points are spent initiating?

...ack, topic drift. Ignore post.

To be fair, I've never seen a character in game move past Initiation 3.

Although I suppose for games that have problems with power levels, it would be a reasonable patch.

-Siege

That rule would effectively limit non-cyber mages to grade 6 where the price break occurs. The relative rarity of magic loss, and the value of having that high magic rating at a high level seems to balance out fairly well.

I've been in multiple campaigns where characters eventually reached initiate 4, 5, or 6. In all cases so far, the characters were retired or the campaign ended before the rule you suggest would have made any difference.

The standard cost for initiation already rises each level, the magician is running out of ordeals to make it cheaper, the remaining metamagic techniques are not as useful, and its getting harder and harder to successfully learn a new technique. While I have no experience with magicians attempting initiate grades 7, 8, or 9, you may find that the players naturally start putting their Karma into other things or that the higher grades don't actually affect things that much.

Your magicians who go the cyber route are already making a tradeoff between 1 point of cyberware or 2 points of foci. I'm not sure I'd further penalize the one who goes the cyber route.

As an aside, our team adopted a house rule that rolling a 12 to avoid magic loss results in automatic non-loss. We felt this balanced the automatic loss when rolling a 2.

The cost list for those interested is:

Best case: (group, ordeal)

Grade........Normal......House Rule (ess = 6).....House Rule (ess = 4)
Grade 1........9......................9..................................9
Grade 2.......10....................10.................................10
Grade 3.......12....................12.................................12
Grade 4.......13....................13.................................13
Grade 5.......15....................15.................................30
Grade 6.......16....................16.................................32
Grade 7.......18....................36.................................36

Worst case: (no group, no ordeal)

Grade........Normal......House Rule (ess = 6).....House Rule (ess = 4)
Grade 1.......18....................18.................................18
Grade 2.......21....................21.................................21
Grade 3.......24....................24.................................24
Grade 4.......27....................27.................................27
Grade 5.......30....................30.................................60
Grade 6.......33....................33.................................66
Grade 7.......36....................72.................................72

I eliminted this by changing the roll for magic loss. We make magic loss an essence test. If your essence drops the chance you lose magic dramatically increases.

I think it's a damnned good house rule, and one I'm going to incorporate. I've always had a serious hangup about cyber-mages. Yeah, the rules punish them.... but not enough, imo. The textual description of what cyber does to a magician is pretty damned harsh, losing yourself, harming your gift, etc, and I don't think a good roleplayer can reasonably justify his magician getting cyber with that kind of IC consequences.

This is ironic, actually, since I play our campaign's only awakened character with cyber (A smartlink), but she's grade 4 and probably won't get much further. Our highest initiate (Also mine) is grade 14 (Yes, insane I know, but he's been played for about 10 years now), and I'd tear up his character sheet myself if he ever got below an essence of 6. IC, I just can't mentally justify a high level initiate, who's supposedly more attuned to his "gift" than a lower level initiate, having cyber.

So yeah, I like the rule, and I'm definately using it.

An essence (magic) test? Oooh, I like that. It virtually eliminates burnout, though...

no, It doesn't. if your essence is under 1, the magic loss is automatic, as you have no dice to roll.

But if you have Essence 6, you really can't get below 3 or 4 in Magic unless Lady Luck hates you.

I mean for a regular mages. Right now, if your magic is at 2, and your essence is at 6, you have a 1/36 chance of burning out any time you check for magic loss. With the system you're using the chance is only 1/46656. The basics are:

Current chance of magic loss (rating : chance)
6 : 15/36
5 : 10/36
4 : 6/36
3 : 3/36
2 : 1/36
1 : 1/36

Our house rule is similar to Bit Bashers, though slightly different (and probably more convulted). Magic Loss Tests require the magician to roll his Magic Rating against a TN equal to 10-Essence with Bio Index (rounded up) acting as a dice penalty with a minimum of 1 die. So a starting magician with an Essence of 6, Bio Index of 0.40 (Trauma Damper), and Magic 5 (since you can't normally offset Bioware with geasa), he'd roll 4 dice against a TN of 4 to avoid Magic Loss whereas the same character without any implants would be rolling 6 dice in the same situation (thus encouraging "clean" magicians).

While, yes, this does mean the higher your Magic Rating is the less chance you have of losing another point relative to others with the same ratings, it makes more sense to us that way anyway. Your connection to magic is *increasing* as you initiate, not weakening. But if you do start turning down the path of the burn-out, it just gets harder and harder to keep your Magic the more you abuse your system.

Of course we also require Magic Loss tests a bit more often, such as anytime you're drugged on with anything more potent than alcohol (and even some drinks require it), CalHots, or tabacco.

If it were as easy to lose Magic as the core rules make it out to be, Dragons and Immortal Elves wouldn't have scores that much higher than a normal character, especially a drunkard like Harlequinn.

Of course we don't really do the whole "powergaming" thing, and the sheer idea of an Initiate Grade 6+ just makes me cringe.

We have a grade 9 adept in our group. He's not really all that unbalancing, because he took a bunch of "fun" powers instead of the more dangerous ones.

No Killing Hands, no Improved Ability, no Distance Strike, no Increased Attribute, no Attribute Boost...

I have a player who we switched to a solo campaign because he eventually ended up being a one man team with his various cyberware, gear and magical skills. He has 4 essence points worth of deltaware including a Rating 2 VCR and a couple of removable forearms to keep the essence costs of things installed in the arms to a minimum. He's a grade 9 mage with a magic rating of about 10 due to magic loss after a deadly wound. Yes, this character is so munchkinned he's thinking of audtioning for the remake of the Wizard of Oz. But, interestingly, he also used his hand of god roll on his very first run, and has survived since. His munchkin status is not in question. But bizarrely, I'm going to use him as an example of why I think the rules don't need tweaking. Do feel free to disagree with me, its just my opinion:

Up until he got to about grade 4 (by which point he had his cyberware for 2 grades already and had suffered the limitations accordingly), he didn't unbalance the rest of the game. When he got this powerful, however, he became as powerful as a normal mage (i.e. magic 6) with the benefits of 4 points of shielding and other metamagic, an arsenal of spells, a bunch of foci and enough toys to make Nightfire himself drool. He became totally unbalancing and I told him I was forcibly retiring him except for solo games because basically other characters weren't needed when he was around, and some types of jobs actually benefitted from less people being involved. So off he went to work exclusively for novatech and earned lots of money and had Interesting Times running about the arcology playing hide and seek with Deus. Go him.

By the time I considered him unbalancing, however (by which I mean unbalancing the team, not the game world - there's ALWAYS something tougher than you are), there was a grade 8 physad and a grade 9 mage in the group, the sammies didn't have a full essence point between them and everyone was looking at retiring their characters and starting again anyway because the only sort of jobs that could give them a challenge would also result in a 100% chance of death. You know, assaulting lofwyr's lair, trying to hijack Zurich Orbital, that kind of thing.

The point being that even having seen this uber-PC, and the utter uberness of the rest of the team he started with, I think the penalties for the loss of essence in the first place actually do compensate enough, until the mage is powerful enough to compensate with foci and so on (and no we haven't forgotten the focus addiction rules. We just thought they were a bit harsh given what spell locks used to be like and tweaked them. But I won't bore you with the details here. I've bored you with quite enough drivel already). By the time a mage is poweful enough to compensate for it, consider how powerful they'd be if they hadn't spent the essence - because THAT's the frightening part.

And crikey - don't the Awakened have enough things to spread their karma over without adding to their woes?

I think the key to an alternate system is that it keep the normal distribution of magic loss chances for characters without cyber/bioware while maintaining the cyber/bioware mage as a viable character. The simple method would be to simply discount the mage's current magic rating and use their "pure" magic rating (ie, before bioware and cyberware penalties and with a bonus equal to their initiate grade). Ie, a mage with four points of cyberware normally only has a 1 in 36 chance of loosing a point of magic.

The same mage under such a system would have the standard 15/36 chance of loosing a point of magic. Following that, his burnout roll would be a 10/36 chance the same as an unaugmented mage loosing his 5th point of magic.

This pointedly ignores sheading geasa since doing so leaves a mage in the same position as if he had gained a point of magic and then added the cyberware. Thus a mage with a geased point of cyberware at grade one who chose to shead the geasa has an effective magic of 7 for loss, the same as one who did things in the opposite order.

I reread the p78 passage and it doesn't seem to specify one way or another on the magic loss issue. However, your interpretation is logical and consistant with what I read of it. I didn't see something that would prohibit the opposite viewpoint, though.

In our games we swapped the magic loss roll, you have roll under your magic to lose a point. We just thought it was silly a mage at grade 3 or 4 stands a pretty good chance to lose a point, where a mage who jammed so much ware into their body they would sink in a pool would not lose a point. A mage at grade 3 or 4 is supposed to be very intune with magic, very strong in the magic arts. A mage filled with cyber or have been beaten among the head and shoulders so much they can bearly walk resulting in very little bond to magic being able to resist magic loss better then the high level initiate. Also mage at magic 1, can not lose his last point of magic unless a vampire or something sucks all his essence or he just says screw it and gets more ware.

Mages I think have so much stuff to worry about with karma, that penalizing them with a boost in karma costs seems just wrong.