Strike one more thing from my TODO list!

http://www.shadowrun4.com/products/product.php?i=26004

http://www.shadowrun4.com/resources/sr4/sm_errata_v12.pdf

Congrats! And thank you, will go look now

Ta DA! *claps*

Note that the published errata does not include minor typos and page reference mistakes which we will be fixing in the next print run.

Awesome!

Now, err... well, this doesn't look right

"p. 171 Stench spell
Range should be LOS(A) The third line should read:

p. 176 Counterstrike
The third line should read:"

Fixed.

Errata the errata ?

PS : Thanks for the hard work!

Great! And thank you Adam.

Big thanks Adam, now you have room on your todo list for more todo hehe.

Aspected mana static in appendix, should be removed? Same drain as non aspected?

Booo. Energy Drain is still in there, and because Evanescence didn't work out at all, they just made another exception to an exception.
But apart from that, I'll accept it. The loss of Spell sustaining and Spell binding does make me feel sad, but I completely understand it why they get dropped from the list of Open-ended services Ally Spirits do grant.

Thank you muchly!
Ooh, I like the tweaking the rules suggestion that adepts can take a power point instead of a metamagic. I have a 80-100 or-so karma game where the grade 2 magic 8 adept is facing a seemingly insurmountable karma-wall between her and advancing her powers, while everyone else still gleefully shops through Aug and Arse. I'm using this one.

Didn't energy drain get fixed with the cap added to it?

Nice fixes, but I was hoping for some revision of adept power costs. But I guess you corrected the most critical flaws with this first. Good Job though!

And there was much rejoicing!

either i'm blind or the much maligned power throw did not get capped at 1,5 somethingsomething as people said it would O.o

yep, i'm blind <.<

Boo Hiss Boo My throwing adept in Missions just got nerfed. I wanna refund!!

Power throw is capped by the number of levels that can be taken (3). Just like I said it would be. I've said this before but Power Throw is not a base Strength Att modifier. It modifies the Strength rating only during the calculation of damage and range values.

yah yah yah <.< i've edited my own stupidity in there allready ._.
*grmbl* the last thing in the whole frigging errata right after the pantheons

Bloodzilla is dead, indeed.

I mean, it is POSSIBLE to get any force necessary, but that just shows you one more reason not to go to the Blood Metaplane.


I am SUPREME PRIMARCH of the Plan of Blood. <<Force 50 blood spirit takes action and ENERGY DRAIN>>

Huzzah!

Initial reactions:
-The ability for adepts to use Magic instead of Logic for Arcana is good, though it would also be nice to see mages use their appropriate Drain attribute instead of Logic as well. Not everyone draws diagrams for arcana like hermetics do.
-The loss of Spell Sustaining is a big hit to ally spirits. Didn't they used to have this in SR3?
-Catalog retains its absurdly high Drain and double-Threshold.

Magicians using their tradition's Drain Attribute instead of Logic for Arcana has been in the basic Tweaking the Rules section all along - we've just added Magic with regards to Adepts.


As Frank noted the inclusion of Spell Sustaining and Binding was a mistake, a cut and paste error from a previous draft. The fact that Allies can cast their own spells and sustain them was deemed more than sufficient for SR4.


I will be reviewing Catalog in the future but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with this.

Catalog kind of pissed me off in SR3. Mages ignored the other detection spells, because catalog was so good. I don't really understand what's so good about knowing a list of an area's contents without knowing where it is, and that added to the annoyance. People fixated on catalog and didn't use anything else. I can't really speak to whether it has the right amount of drain or not, but I'm glad it's no longer King of Detection.

On Power Throw: I assume that capping power throw was intended to limit the very high DVs of troll throwing adepts? Str 16, with power throw and missile mastery 6 would make DV 17 (assuming throwing knives are S/2+2, which I'm pretty sure about), more damage than a panther cannon and enough to destroy a car very easily. I can only assume that the limitation was based on the idea that this was too much?

So, given that, can we expect a fix for bows? Something like changing them to S/2+3, or giving them a max rating of 8 or 10? If throwing knives aren't supposed to achieve DV17, I would think that bows shouldn't either, especially because a bow shot can't be magically enhanced like a throw can.

flame aura on arrow *snickers*
you'd just need a fireproof bow . . oh, and hands of course *g*

I won't disagree with you that troll bows are crazy powerful, but as a slight limiter bows at least require...a bow, which is not the most smugglable item. A throwing adept with missile mastery can destroy a car with the buttons off his shirt or a deck of cards.

Honestly, I've been shaking my head about the Power Throw change since I first heard it being rumored. I think I'll stick with my original idea of enforcing an arbitrary "8 DV before hits" instead. With this errata you'll still just have trolls/orks/dwarves with jacked up strength threatening to one shot people with a handful of poison-laced thumb tacks via a combination of high strength and magic while the human and elf pure or lightly cybered adepts who relied more on sheer magic rating are taking a rather unnecessary bop on the head from the nerf bat. This errata won't be in effect at my table. I prefer to address the problem of high damage value by limiting the damage values, not daring my players to merely take a slightly different route to reach them, especially if that route includes crapping on the Elf and Human characters who were using rating 4 and 5 Power Throw simply to keep up with the Joneses. I realize this means that trolls in particular are prevented from reaching the tremendous heights they're normally capable of achieving, but I'm fine with that since they still have an easier time hitting the DV cap than any other race and still gain other bonuses from having a high strength such as enhanced Athletic pools, improved melee damage and a greater effective range on their fastball.

Huh, and here I always thought that Clairvoyance was the King of Detection, both because it was unresisted and because you could pour all your cyberware eyemods through it. My Detection specialists would always make this spell a cornerstone of their lists; Catalog was a nice also-ran, as was Detect Life, Mind probe, and the rest.

Problem is that now it's the red-headed stepchild of Detection. Not only is the drain code absolutely crippling (F/2+2? The same drain code as Manaball and Shapechange? Seriously?), but frankly Catalog is just a fancy way of saying Detect(Arbitrary object). The spell itself isn't all that different from Detect(Object), except that it detects *all* objects rather than just one type. So, it stands to reason that it should follow the same pattern as Slay(metatype)-->Manabolt, and take the template of Detect(Object):

Detect [Object] (Active, Area) Type: P | Range: T | Duration: S | DV: (F/2)-1

and add 1 to the DV, for a final DV of F/2:

"Active" Catalog (Active, Area) Type: P | Range: T | Duration: S | DV: (F/2)

Unfortunately, this change still forces Catalog to deal with a "double Threshold". Not only do you have to contend with OR--not an easy feat in itself, given that most interesting objects will have OR 3--but you also need a minimum level of success to get any useful information out of the spell--up to 2-3 successes, just to identify what class of object it is! In other words, to actually identify a type of drone takes 4 (OR) + 3 (successes necessary for details) = 7 successes, requiring a minimum Force 7 spell! You can usually Powerball the drone and completely destroy it with less drain than it takes to find it; this makes no sense IMO.

The solution is to make Catalog a (Passive, Area) spell. This IMO makes more sense, as the past text for Catalog was really more of a limited (objects only) area form of Clairvoyance than it was an active detect (All Objects) spell:

"Passive" Catalog (Passive, Area) Type: P | Range: T | Duration: S | DV: (F/2)+1

This takes the Clairvoyance/Cryptesthesia line of spells and adds the -1 Restricted Effect (Objects only) and +2 Area modifiers. Its advantage over the above Active version is that, since it doesn't actively detect the objects (that is, pull information about the object directly from the object itself), it doesn't have to beat OR, which was also one of the big deals in the SR3 and earlier versions.

You're right; I completely missed that. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hm. Yes, I agree, and spell sustaining is rather broken on an ally as it gives the mage infinite sustaining foci essentially for free, though for low-Force allies he'd have to spend actions shifting spells back and forth from him to ally. Spell Binding I really couldn't see a mage ever using on an ally; they cost too much karma to raise in Force.

Er, yeah; I guess I kinda disagree here (see above).

Power throw is listed twice. Just FYI.

Ones for the adept powers section, and one is for the index. A much better job then the SR4 errata's that didn't update tables, just the text on the actual ammo. When I get home tonight I have to go over my SM book with the highlighter and hit all the errata'd sections.

That should be "The end of the sixth sentence should read:"



That should be " The third sentence should end:"

Lars

That is a good point. It's one thing to kill cars with perfectly legal and concealable items like playing cards and boogers. Throwing weapons are also silent. Bows (especially trollbows) are big, they're Restricted, and they go CRACK!!! when you shoot them.

Totally with you. Energy Drain is still there and still totally broken. No longer infinite, but still more than enough to kill Great Dragons with, so it hardly matters.

But they did fix the Ally service list. That makes my life easier.

-Frank

HOORAY!

I would do one of those this with an arrow up things but they annoy me. But basically that is my thought as well. I find it particularly frustrating since I think the throwing themed character is usually not a Body builder physical build type, but a lighter, quicker type. So this not only craps on the humans and elves it craps on the basic throwing master arch type. A fixed DV max is a much better solution or I could accept a flat out increase in cost. You wont be on par with heavy pistils at +3DV without having what I'd consider exceptional strength and i don't consider that a good thing to enforce thematically for a physical adept focussed on throwing attacks.

I don't mind this for adepts, but I am not a fan of the every tradition gets there drain stat for it. Do logic and intuition based casters get to use logic or intuition for conjuring and summoning? Let the logic based casters have one benefit in magic they are better at arcana, intuition are better at assensing and chr is better conjurors.

Shrug. I can only speak from personal experience, but in all 19 years that I have been playing and GMing Shadowrun, I have never, not even once, been involved in a game with a throwing-based character with a low, or even moderate Strength Attribute (even as an NPC ).

And even if the change does adversely affect low-Strength characters, they still have the in-game option of improving their actual Strength Attribute instead of increasing their Magic in order to spend their Power Points taking more levels of Power Throw.

The reason you have never seen a low-mid strength thrower because the rules enforce that you need to be super high strength to even be effective. In SR4 they finally came up with a way for the throwing adept to actually fit his archtype of not being a giant troll or steroid abusing freak of nature. Now they say, nope lets go back to must be a troll. Limiting power throw may have been needed, but this was a bad way of doing it.

Even in SR4, all of the 'throwers' I have seen have had high Strengths, typically with Power Throw chucked on top. I have no problems with this limitation.

Cool for you. For me in SR3 and earlier all throwers were trolls, in Sr4 throwers focused on 4+ levels of power throw and agility+skill with a athletic but not muscle boy strength. Now this rule pushes people to go all troll again, I prefer variety, and reinforcing the arch types. In SR4 I could have a 4 str thrower with enough points in power throw that he was competitive with pistols at least. Now I can't compete without having a strength level that boarders on absurd. And once I go absurd strength I minds well go ridiculously absurd because the concept of an agile skill based character was already shot to hell, and I end up with someone still doing stupid levels of damage with throwing weapons. A hard cap on DV would of allowed more variety, reinforced the classic arch type, and would be balanced.

This isn't game breakingly bad or anything it just could of been better much, better.

Strength of 4 (or even 3, since it rounds up), with 3 levels of Power Throw, throwing a normal everyday knife has a DV of 6P. Up the Strength just one to 5 (still not ridiculously absurd) and the DV goes up to 7P. Throw in Missile Mastery and you get 8P. Seems reasonable, and pretty comparable to pistols, being better than all but the heavy varieties, and even quite close to those.

Maybe I'm just far to used to everyone using specialty ammo heavy pistols, but yeah its not terrible, so I may be overreacting. I still think a hard cap on levels just reinforces people shooting for a high strength though which I think thematically is a bad idea.

Eh, please note that I never intended for my post to be all like "This is ridiculous and broken." To me, it was more of a "This doesn't really fix what few problems I'm having. I like my way of handling the situation when it comes up better." I'm on the record as saying I think SM is likely the best SR4 book out so far and I stick by that feeling.

I did not take your post that way, and I don't mean to say it is ridiculous and broken. I just think it reinforces one type of thrower too heavily while reducing the playability of the classic thrower stereotype.

Like the changes; the physad in my group is going to be happy, I guess.

Question: unfortunately, I picked up the SM in German. Any idea when the German erratas might be out?

there's german versions of the books? O.o
i only found SR4 core book in german once, and that was before the whole catalyst switcheroo i think *g*
as of right now, there's as far as i know no german license to do such things . . and if your english ain't good enough to use the english errata on a german book, then ask somebody to translate the english errate for you i'd say . . it's not even 3 pages of text, that won't take long . . the biggest problem in that would be the page references, as they are more or less shot all to hell in translated versions <.< . .

The page references would be my problem, yes. The text, not so much. I'm only asking due to being way too lazy to do the translations myself if there's a German version coming up soon...

Unlikely as now one has the license to do one....

Additionally there are a lot of (rules) typos in the german version: different drain codes, action of complex becomes simple etc...

Rules typos? Nice... so even if I put in the effort of transferring the English errata to my German version, I'm still settled with an incorrect book?

Any plans on granting a license to errata the damn thing?

I think there are plans to translate other books on top of that. (And the typos would hopefully not be the same for the german edition anyway.)