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Crusher Bob
Was running the numbers on the ward rules, have produced some interesting results:

1 Assume all ward making mages have magic 4 and willpower 5.
2 Assume all warded areas allow for a 3 meter ceiling
3 Ignoring the effects of glitches during the warding tests (or course, maybe they just summon up a guardian spirit to make them immune to glitches)

The cost of wards to last the year on a per point of force and per square meter of warded area is roughly:
(each mage adds roughly 66.67 square meters of warded area)

1 mage: 26Y
2 mages: 19.5Y
3 mages: 15.6 Y
4 mages: 13 Y
5 mages: 11.14 Y
6 mages: 9.75 Y

If we assume that ward making teams are capped in a manner similar to how ritual sorcery teams are capped, then we can really only expect most ward making teams to consist of 3 or 4 members. It takes roughly 8-10 ritual hours per force of the ward for a team of 4 ward makers to get enough hits to make the ward last a year. So a force 4 ward lasting one year would require roughly four and a third days worth of rituals (with each mage taking home 3500 Y for the job). Note also that these guys only ward 800 cubic meters at the time (around 267 square meters with a 3 meter ceiling). So to ward the entirety of an American football field, these guys would have to create 20 separate wards, and warding the whole place for a year would take around 17.5 weeks (at 40 hours a week doing ward making). This means that warding the entirety of, say a hanger big enough to hold a 747 (~80x100x25m) would keep around 5 teams of 4 warding mages busy all year round! But wait, you say. They can just pay karma to make the wards permanent and get on with world domination. The hangar requires around 250 different wards to be erects to cover the entier internal volume! This means that your team of 4 guys would each have to pay out 1000 karma...
Backgammon
Very interesting post.

I have some issues with your numbers -

A) I would not assume magic 4 willpower 5 mages. That sounds to me more like senior mages. A senior mage is most likely better off doing something else. Wards are intern/apprentice work.

B) Because of the time spent, I think your nuyen figures are much too low. Hitting a specific point-
QUOTE
(with each mage taking home 3500 Y for the job)


It would be the mages's COMPANY that would take home the cash, and the company would turn around and pay the mages a regular salary. Mages, even if they are juniors as per my point A, make pretty awesome salaries. So whatever the mages is being actually paid by his employer on an hourly basis, you can expect the employer to charge 6-8 times the worth of the mage's salary as hourly wage.

The conclusion, though, is pretty much the same: Wards are insane expensive to set up for a corporation. I think it's been said in the material, but this reinforces it: only vital areas would ever be warded. You simply can't ward an entire building.

Spike
Since we're talking numbers, remember that 1% of the population is awakened, which means that mages, while 'rare' and valuable are not so 'tight' that any given mega corp is only going to have a couple of ritual teams floating around. The more ritual teams working, the faster an area can be warded, and the more likely it is to be 'permanent'.

The 1000 karma to permanently ward your entire research compound isn't being spread over the 4 man ritual team working otherwise year round (and since they are company employees, you can certainly justify them doing so to cover your multimillion dollar research project(s)) its spread over a hundred mages or more over a period of time. By 2070, mages and warding have been facts of life in corporate security planning for a while, and 'ward engineers' are included in the construction phase of any building likely to need wards, both to ensure the building is easily wardable, and to ensure that the most cost efficent coverage of wards is done. No need to ward the 'mens room' or most hallways (certainly not 100%, just enough to disrupt unwanted magical intrusions by leaving no unwarded access to unwarded common areas). Heck, setting up a permanent ward on a specific area could be a 'graduate exercise' for mages being trained by corporate sponsored programs.
Slymoon
Just think of the power the ritual leader has: Get pissed off and leave the company or payed off to attune the ward to others re: shadowrunners. Both costs the company quite a bit to re-establish a ward. Particularly if they were permanent.

iirc: The ritual leader is the master of the ward just as a single mage is the master of his ward.

This leads me to believe not only are the ritual leaders very very well paid and likely not a Jr mage, (though his ritual team likely are) they are also likely highly tracked and secure in other ways. Physical and magical security as well as likely near perm. hosts of an arcology or similiar. Escorted to secure sites ward areas.

Imagine if a runner team is able to find out who the ritual leader is and manages to extract him. I might even imagine cranial bombs are part of the job description along with a plethora of other measures.
b1ffov3rfl0w
Wow, Slymoon, I was totally just going to post that. Finding out who's the "master of the domain" would be a great bit of legwork. Not so sure about the cranial bomb thing, but if setting up a permanent ward is a "graduate exercise" then I could easily see the mage having to store a copy of his Thesis (as in the sort you produce as an Initiation Ordeal and which serves as a permanent ritual link to the writer) with the corp (or with the magic division). Same sort of control, a bit less dangerous (presumably a cortex bomb could be hacked/spoofed) and it's something a guy would actually *want* to do, because who doesn't like Initiating?
stormcrow
Seems a lot cheaper to use living materials and ward the entrances or simply ward the exterior surface rather than ward the total volume. Why ward the inside of the hangar when the entire outside surface is warded? Iirc, you need something to anchor the ward to, like a ring of stones, painted circle, etc, so warding empty space (like much of the interior volume of a hangar) isn't feasible. Ivy is cheap and stops astral trackers, the point person on a ritual spell casting and astral recon.
b1ffov3rfl0w
I don't think ivy works anymore. Since an astral projector can actually pass through the aura of a living person (causing them to feel a distinctive shiver), going through a plant should be no problem. Unless it's some kind of dual-natured ivy -- does that exist? Because dual-natured living things do impede astral forms. There's biofiber, which is some sort of genetically engineered dual-natured plant that grows in big sheets, with a barrier rating up to Force 10, but it's difficult to maintain (which I suppose means expensive).

Jaid
the focus for the ward could conceivably be a line of runes carved into the floor or something (and subsequently having clear plascrete poured into them to make it level?)

anyways, if you want to make your facility hard to get into, you could always make the outer walls have a 1 meter walkway through them (which could then be warded) and a similar area for the ceiling. of course, this just makes physical insertion more of a possibility imo, but you can't have everything =D
Crusher Bob
Note that the 'outer shell ward' defeats some of the rules ideas of wards. For example, the 'one ward cannot be contained within another'. If you have a shell ward, you can place another ward inside of it since the shell ward doesn't actually ward the inside of the building.

I think that all members of a warding team can grant access to wards, not the the ritual leader; at least, that's how it used to work.

Of course, wards should be cheap enough that the following two alternatives are not much cheaper ways of making your place mostly magic immune:

Buy up land that already has a background count and do your super sekret research there.
This allows your runners to have plenty of gunfights in cathedrals. But it means that rather tackily, you now have the main sader-krup research facility located just outside Dachau because the background count it high enough to keep mages out.

Make yourown background counts
Just sacrifice a few dozen barrens dwellers in the basement of your building. Watch the background count soar. Never have to deal with those pesky spying mages again. If you are worried about the need to round up barrens dwellers on a semi-regular basis, then just run your own ork farm. As an added bonus, the ork farm site itself generates its own background count, so you can keep moving it around to provide more protections for potential building sites.

-------------

Anyone want to come up with some house rules to make wards cheap enough to actually use?

I'd try something like: the area to be warded must be specifically prepared for warding, costing (some) Y per area. Then a ward team can ward the whole prepared are at the time. This prevents the use of cookie cutter ward areas and makes simply warding your building more economically attractive than semi-annual human sacrifice.
ornot
In Runner Havens they discuss the importance of feng shui in Hong Kong. Can't they use Geomancy to aspect the background toward one tradition or another?

This also plays an interesting role in discouraging twinky home brew traditions, as there's always a chance that the corp you're infiltrating employs mages of your own tradition to do the geomancy.
Pendaric
I see warding as the principle method of money making for most magicains. It nice steady work on a on going bases for a very small work force. High wage to meet the demand. Check my sig for a free lance company doing wards.
Pyritefoolsgold
um, with how cheap and permanent mana lodges seem to be, why would anyone ever use wards, rather than a force 50 or 60 mana lodge? Or am I misunderstanding how mana lodges work?
kzt
You can most effectively use wards to cover areas that are otherwise extremely difficult to get into magically. Like buried in earth, with the ward covering the elevators, stairs, power/plumbing risers and air shafts. This allows you to use a single mage to do a honking ward. Nothing like the shadownrunner with a increased reflexes hitting a force 12 ward at 20 meter/sec when the elevator passes through it. . . Instant trip to the land of full stun monitors.

Also, you can use spirits to do wards. Summon one, tell it to make a ward. Sadly you can't do this all day any more, as it still counts despite the remote service.

For large scale wards it typically makes sense to not try to get super power. It's a tripwire, not a wall.

Putting in a ward just so you have a place to park a long-term bound spirit is also kind of cool. As the ward is opaque you can't effectively engage it while it hangs around on the astral looking at the people wandering by your checkpoint. Attach it to the ceiling, so you can't just stick your head in.

I've assumed that the heavy hitter magical security companies have all sorts of tricks that allow them to manipulate wards. Like transferring the notification and integrating wards, all only useful using ritual magic and other stuff. That's why they get the big bucks, but it's only used for the people who pay the big bucks.
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