I never send my runners against an enemy team with three mages...

Have the mage cover his sec budies with counterspelling and a mana static spell and that is some pretty hefty protection.

Chris

I´ll counter mana static with aspected mana static from the runner, say that magical guard is just counterspelling and therefore only a teamwork test, and freely admid that usually sec mages should have some aspected background going.

I have stopped my groups combat mage before, but in those situations elemental combat spells were not a convincing answer. He tried. He failed because given about zero expected net successes with the direct spell (hard to turn that into negatives), the target has now reaction+half armor to resist base spell damage. Ever considered a force 6 elemental AoE-spell? Thats 8 boxes of drain, and is unlikely to produce more than two boxes of damage given strong counterspelling. You are better off throwing mana balls and waiting for a bad roll on the defenders part, which ends combat.

No, direct spells can only affect targets that are seen. That's the rule for any area spell. Indirect area spells are an exception (though this was unclear till the errata/faq).

The way we play it with indirect spells and grenades and rockets and such is that it is spellcasting test vs. Reaction. The net hits there - in EITHER DIRECTION - determine the damage value for calculating vs. armor to determine stun or physical and then you have a body + other applicable modifiers to soak all the damage. So if you are in the blast area of an indirect spell or grenade or whatnot then your reaction test only gets you fully out of the way if your hits on the reaction test are equal to or greater than the original damage value + the attackers hits.

So, in the example with the way we play it, QuikRik would have to soak 7P with body+half impact+ fire resist if he has it, and Spazz would soak 4P with the his body+half impact+ fire resist.

That is what we take the "it has to soaked all the way down" phrase to mean and it actually makes indirect spells worth their money and makes grenades and rockets as lethal as we feel they should be.

Chris

Thats good for you DTF, but that isn't how RAW rules it.

This again showcases why typically direct combat spells are better against capable opponents.

Indirect: Sammy gets reaction roll to avoid all together, and body + half armor (usually) (+counterspelling) to soak, with damage under armor going to stun instead of physical.

Direct Sammy gets willpower (+counterspelling) to resist, and otherwise sucks the damage.

Its not so much that the grenade missed hitting the person (as then they should take damage from the grenade as if the person had thrown a rock). The test is of your skill (thrown, heavy, spellcasting) vs their ability to avoid being in the area of effect. A successful reaction test means that they were outside of the affected area. Whether that means your grenade went a little high, or they pulled a table over to block the blast, or that your fireball was cast so that it affected only half a meter over the floor, and they dropped prone.

Wow I never figured I would be starting one of those back and forth "beating a dead horse" threads. Though I do appreciate all the input after reading all these arguments I still find the area a bit vague. It would be really nice to hear an official word on this.

Also, when avoiding an indirect area combat spell, would you not apply modifiers to the reaction test as per avoiding grenades/missiles ie -2? P. 151 SR4

Anyways thank all of you for your input and have fun flogging the horse!

Thanks for pointing that out Tarantula, but there was a reason I prefaced my previous statement with the phrase "The way we play it".

Anyway, I find the way SR4 handles grenades/rockets/Indirect spells ridiculous. You already have a system for scatter and reaction tests don't move the person. I know, I know, Shadowrun is an abstract system, but I also find it ludicrous that reaction tests give you extra movement at no negatives. I let people take a full defense and spend the next IPs movement to dive behind cover if it is available, but otherwise you stage it all down because that seems logical to me. You guys may not agree, and I know it would take a very liberal reading of the books to get anywhere close to this, but that's why it's a house rule.

I don't know how many of you have been in an explosion- mind you I haven't really been in anything that would have been lethal without a lot of bad luck, certainly not grenades or anything of the sort so my experience may not apply, but otherwise they happen insanely fast and they really do fill up an area, you can tuck in the protect vital surfaces(hands, face, eyes, armpits, groin), but you still get burned some it is just a significant amount less dangerous as a result of your quick reaction to the situation. I mean obviously if you have time to run out of the effective blast radius(in my experience just a couple of feet and I chose to tuck instead of run. I might have made it, might have not but because I curled up I got some superficial burns on my ankles, and the outside of my arms and alot of burned hair.

Anyway, just saying I have some, what I believe to be anyway, sound reasoning behind the way I run things and it works for us and removes a lot of the discrepancy between ID and D spells. Also makes grenades and rockets actually decently lethal without having to have someone specialize in firing them. Which I also believe is realistic. No experience with those though.

Chris

Actually, with a grenade defender dodge successes increase the attacker's scatter, which I suppose represents the defender making a silly face at precisely the right instant, causing the attacker to laugh and throwing off his aim.
The actual grenade explosion can't be dodged, and only the target of the grenade attack can use dodge to increase scatter. 0 Net hits on a grenade throwing test means maximum scatter, but people in the blast radius are still going to die. And you can negate the ability of targets to dodge altogether by simply targeting the ground near them, though it is recommended that GMs not allow this. The same is true with rockets and guided missiles.

If one were to treat area elemental attacks like area physical attacks, then one should probably use scatter rules to move the epicenter of the attack while making it impossible for those caught in its radius to dodge.

I would easily consider the damage I took to be at least 3S, when I said superficial damage, I was categorizing the burns. Superficial burns are first or light second degree burns. They would definitely be damage of some type as they hinder the hell out of you when doing other things. I would say I reacted successfully and staged a 6 or 7P wound down to 3S or so. If I had not tucked up I would have exposed eyes and especially lungs to the flame which could have easily been lethal especially if I was breathing in.


Anyway, I feel like a jackass trying to state a real life situation in SR terms, I'll just say I have real life experience behind playing explosions the way I do and leave it at that. YMMV, as it stands I agree that with the exception of trying to hit people you cannot see D spells ALWAYS beat ID spells. That said I would imagine we would all also agree that grenades beat ID spells and guns largely beat D spells because they don't have drain associated with them. Magic should do what it does, and in the damage department that is largely ineffective as far as comparisons to other forms of magic and guns go, especially if the opposition has a mage.

Chris

Also, would like to say when talking about grenades and explosions I was referring to airburst linked ones so that there was no time in between throw/fire and explosion for the person to legally run.

Chris