I'm pretty much just refering to combat spells here as the advantages for overcasting other spells are debatable unless ones magic is weak.

Going from 5 damage to 9 is pretty huge in the game (the difference between dropping most people in one hit vs having to zap them twice). However for the direct combat spells it would seem the drain is still pretty easy to handle.

I suppose the first question is if there are any big disadvantages I'm not seeing to throwing high power manabolts/stunbolts/AOE.

The second is if that's even a problem. After all with a decent weapon, maybe even a pistol, the sammy can take out most targets in a pair of simple actions.

Though I suppose in this edition grenades are weak so the AOE is pretty awsome when overcast, but at least that should sting a little.

Not really.


Well Firearms can both be dodged and absorbed, there's no realistic chance of "dodging" a stunball without counterspelling, and even with counterspelling it's probably harder than dodging bullets + no damage resistence test at all. For mooks the difference is small, but against qualiry oposition I'd say there is a big difference.

A min/maxed magician can easily eat the drain. But you always take your life into your own hands if you don't get any hits.

In my games we adjusted the drain values of direct combat spells by +1 or +2 (I do not remember which)

This was done for various reasons

a. mages are quite rare and expensive, and so happens with counterspelling, so the difference of having a caster was too overwhelming.
b. To balance direct and indirect combat spells and make elemental indirect combat spells more likable.
c. To make magic a more dangerous tool. We did not like cheap force 9 manabolts "I roll 15 dice you roll 4"

It works for us.

And it doesn't make the mage useless at all. The samurai in the groups still chews much more opposition.

Cheers!

Max

I posted this in another thread, but it may bear repeating here. I had a table with some hugely powerful mages and I instituted the following rule to try and curb overcasting. It's not terribly balanced, but it did the trick. And, of course, I applied it to NPCs as well. Definately helped cut down on the force 9 stunbolts.



I've since decided that I might keep using the rule but indicate that the Magic Loss can be "repaired" with karma or something.

Have you done any probabilities on that? What are the chances of magic loss overcasting to a f9 stunbolt?

Probabilities would depends on the character and my math skills are not up to the challenge, but there was quite a bit of magic loss due to overcasting at that table. Which, to a certain extent, makes a lot of sense. Forcing your body to channel more magic than it wants to could burn out important synapses or something. But, that's always why -- after the fact -- I'm debating changing the rules for Magic Loss to indicate that it reduces the current attribute, not the maximum. Thus, you could buy your Magic back with Karma as necessary. I'd probably still want to indicate that Magic Loss could effect your maximum as well as your current at the GM's discretion.

Granted, this only creates another sink of Karma for magicians, but if you want to curb overcasting, I can speak to the fact that this worked really well. I didn't see almost any overcasting once people realized that it was far more dangerous than simply some physical damage.

Another possibility, one that I would recommend above Magic Loss, is require a Body + Willpower Test (half Drain Value) to 'take the pain'. Failure means you fail to overcast, and instead throw a Force [Magic Attribute] spell. Maybe give Magic Loss if they Critically Glitch, & a dice pool modifier to the casting from distraction if they Glitch.

Hmmm well since people are mostly just going to house rules does that means.

1. Mages that know what they're doing overcast manabolts/stunbolts as default.

2. People don't like this/consider it overpowered.

<shrug> Mages have always been considered overpowered. And while I see why people think that, it basically just means they have "bad" GMs who don't fight fire with fire.

Besides my "If you can do it, they can do it rule", there's also the simple fact that magic is noisy and messy, and the bigger the spell you cast, the noisier and messier it's gonna be. Magic leaves behind an astral signature, and it lasts longer and is more easily recognized when a mage has been dropping force 9 and 10 spells.

From Lone Star and a Corps standpoint... Obviously this is a very powerful wizard, and a very dangerous threat. After all, if they have the juice to toss around that much mojo, well... They either need to be in jail, working for us, or dead. So they just did what no Shadowrunner should EVER do... Attract attention to themselves. It's like ribbing a liquor store with a Panther Assault Cannon instead of a Tiffani Defender. With the latter, you'll have a couple beat cops ask questions, look at surveilance, and you'll go in a file somewhere. For the latter, you're gonna get High Threat Response Teams and possible even the National Guard called down on your ass.

For magic, it's the same thing. Any mage tossing that much magic around on a regular basis should quickly learn that it's a BAD THING.

Honestly, anytime a Shadowrunner goes above and beyond the "normal" street level of things, it should escalate the game very rapidly. Whether it's Mages, Shamans, Decker/Hackers, or Street Sams with too much 'ware and firepower.

Bull

1) Power-gamers tend to overcast as default - they forget that even if they fully resist the drain, overcasting hurts

2) I do not feel it is overpowered, if used in moderation. The only people that should be overcasting regularly are masochists.

All in all, as long as the GM knows how to counter magic, it shouldn't end up being that OP. I mean, yeah the average ganger isn't gonna have mage back-up, but he was probably only gonna last through one or two rounds of combat anyways, so what does it matter if the mage knocks him out before the Sammy? Whereas, the High Threat Response teams should certainly have a mage on hand with at least some counter spelling. And then, as has already been mentioned, there's always the threat of bad things happening if you leave behind a huge astral signature. Personally as a GM I kinda look down upon powergamers, and I don't really hesitate to bust out the big guns.

I am a player and not a gm, just throwing that out first.


I have found that a force 8 stunbolt to be the perfect spell. It has never not knocked someone out in one hit in the games I've played.

Saying that, however, I do not always have mages that can cast at force 8. I have had mages with as low as 3 magic. I also do not always pick the most powerful spells, I pick the ones that make sense. I have had a character that knew Invisibility instead of Improved Invisibility. I think it makes for characters that are more fun if they are not uber-powerful (this goes for all types, not just mages).

I do overcast a lot, but you can't really help it if you have 3 magic. I have seen no problem with magic in the game, even when there are not other mages around.

Ok, here's my two cents on this subject, which I've given much thought to.

1) I don't want my game to have the rule, "Geek the mage first." It makes for sucky gameplay. And the dice pools aren't balanced...there are cheap ways to resist damage from bullets, but no cheap ways to resist magic.

2) We shouldn't even be discussing whether mages > other chars, which they clearly are. Mages should be less powerful than other characters because they're so incredibly versatile. They can do magic...i.e. things that no other character could do. They can sneak around on the astral. They can make the guard down the hall suddenly get an urge to take a leak. They can freaking fly. And we haven't even talked about summoning. So why are they also the ultimate combat monster?

And I think the idea of bumping drain on direct combat spells is good. I've been tempted to base drain on Force, instead of Force/2, but that's been too radical a change for even me to just jump into. Fortunately, my players aren't playing mages just now, so we haven't had to worry about it lately.

Hmm...I guess I come from the other side of it. Mages are no more powerful than a Troll with a LMG, and they tend to get dead quicker. Yes they are versatile. They have things that no other character can match. Same goes for a well made Sam, or Hacker, or anything really. A mages big payoff comes down when the drek hits the fan. Ultimately a mage is an equalizer. You are often going to have a 4-6 man runner group, right? How many people do you put on your typical security detail? Even for a medium sized facility, there are around 12 usually. This does not take into account drones which can increase the threat response another 2x (and which mages suck against). Mages are great against living, breathing humans. They are able to throw a grenade without having one with them. But a Sam with a little throwing skill (like 2) can easily throw a greande with 10 dice that pretty much will have the same effect (make it a Neurostun gas grenade and you have pretty much the equivalent of a stunball). They fill a niche in a runner team that allows them to remain useful to the team. The are not unstoppable. If a mage is running roughshod over a group of sec goons, they should pull back and bring up the drones. It doesn't make sense that if they are losing people left and right to one guy that they would stand and fight. I just don't buy the whole mages are teh uber and pwn everything. They do their job as well as any other character, less they lose their job. I mean all the examples of mages runnign rough shod over people can easily be taken care of by wards which are pretty easy to get (like what Forcex100 ). A secure facility would at the very least have multiple layers of wards to prevent astral snooping if they don't already have a sec mage on duty. It's really dumb to think anything differently.

As for overcasting, I think the thing to remember is Astral Signatures. It is extremely handy to throw that Force 7 Stunbolt that will most likely take out any one character in a Pass (which most mages only have 1 without magic, and sustained spells are a bitch to get past wards unnoticed) when slinging 10 dice. But so is throwing lead that will hose the fragger in the same ammount of time, and the lead is a lot harder to trace as a gun can be ditched. Without initiating, I can't ditch my aura. My most recent experience was while I was playing my augmented street witch. My GM made the mistake (and I'm sure he noticed it after the fact) of letting me buy hits for drain. So I illustrated why he shouldn't do that, by repeatedly throwing Force 9 stunbolts at gangers (total overkill). It totally took him by surprise that every turn there were 2 gangers down (I have some ware). But by the same token, the two sams in the group dropped people twice as fast as I did (two short bursts or pistol shots here and there). The only people left outclassed were the two melee characters that were unable to close with the enemy and instead were hanging back to keep close to the prinicpal. I know that I can be hosed for leaving the signature all over the place, but I figured, "Hey, it's only a stunbolt and they were packing SMGs and Grenade Launchers. I should be in the clear." The one part I feel that broke the whole thing was letting me buy hits for drain, because if I would have had to roll for that, I probably would have taken 2-5 damage then stopped overcasting in order to remain effective.

I never quite understand this complaint...

An ARES alpha is at least as deadly with a similar dicepool against anything but a tank-troll. (He can shoot 2x per pass, after all.)

Besides, a little bit of background count (at, say, a rating 2, that mage with magic 4 is only going to be able to overcast up to force 4 instead of 8 and will have a beefed up drain code too) and the occasional mook with willpower > 3 is more than sufficient to remind the players that magic isn't everything.

You could just make it temporary and have it automatically return at a rate of 1 point per Magic Rating in days.

So that mage with Magic 9 that lost 3 points due to overcasting... takes him 9 days to get back each point he lost. Think of it as time spent by the body / aura repairing itself of minor damage.

It's a lot like smashing your thumb with a hammer. For a few days, your thumb is sore and you adapt to working without its full functionality until your body fixes the thumb.

Same concept with overworking muscles. For a few days, you can't reach full strength after overworking them. Take some time off and voila, they are back to normal and you are at full power.

Just a few thoughts.

You overwork your muscles and the next few days you are sore. You feel pain when trying anything strenuous, but do you actually have less strength? Perhaps the doctors and sports scientists among us can tell us.

However I think it is generally accepted that when you overwork your muscles, your muscles tend to heal to withstand that load. Using the same argument, your player could say that since you were penalising his overcasting and using this argument, he could use the same and argue for easier Magic increase. Overcast and then take a penalty to Magic for a couple of days to gain more Magic after the penalty ends.

Mages need to overcast, in order to compete with Sams in the killing speed arena. And still they are usually behind.
Effective AoE can also be done by throwing out a couple of grenades. So they are not the masters of that either, the demolition guy is.

The real strength of Mages is that they can substitute every class (With the exception of maybe Hackers) with a spell.

If there are a lot of Power Gamers (p.c. optimization-concious people) in your group, your mage needs to overcast to compete. If not, not.

I have rarely seen overcast outside of combat situations, except for the occasional big spirit. So, unless your mage is dominating combat, this should not be a problem.

As for house rules: I used to play in a group that allowed mages to cast only one spell per round, regardless of IP. They felt the Improved Reflexes, Sustained Focus combo was overpowered. That changed power balance quite a lot, but the mages were not useless, just had a different job. And they were still slinging (overcast) combat spells.

Indeed.

Mages are the guys who pack a holdout pistol and assault cannon all in one package. Only problem they got is the recoil of the big bangs as it can kill them. Overcasting gives bit more punch to those otherwise weak offensive spells. Predator packs about same punch as normal spell but carrying it to high security place is bit more difficult than packing a mage

I think most feel mages shouldn't be able to keep up with or exceed a Sam in dropping people due to the fact that the mage can also do a ton of other stuff the Sam cannot.



In 4th grenades are not so effective. Your hits don't add into damage, and even if you reduce scatter to nothing your opponents have a chance to run (generally). And the damage is such that even a direct hit is unlikely to take out a goon, though they'd be hurting. At any rate the grenades drop power with distance so unlike with spells the guys a few meters from the central point may just shrug it off.

Again that falls back to that mages shouldn't be as deadly as a Sammy and also more awsome in tons of other ways.



Sustained focuses are pretty awsome. Note that this also puts you in the "thinks mages are overpowered" catagory. It's just you're focusing on speed as the way to tone them down.

About the only thing in game holding sustained focuses back is wards either knocking them out or at least warning the creator that someone has broken through the ward, meriting a call to security if it's in a secure zone. Forcing mages to recast their spells mid run. Though that still leaves them pretty awsome.

Greandes don't benefit from net hits??? Where'd I miss that?

I've read this before and I think it's generally accepted house rule to combat the vagueness of the FAQ answers about dodging grenade/AoE effects. Usually, it comes up when someone wants to roll a success test to hit a specific area with a spell/grenade/rocket/missile and thus avoid any opposed roll. Thus, every hit they get would be a "net hit" and the DV would be increased far more than it would have been otherwise. Which, of course, indicates that grenades are more powerful when you don't aim them at someone, which is unfortunate. Thus, if you're just thowing towards a group, net hits don't stage the damage, but if you're targeting a specific person, then they do.

I'm not sure if it's RAW, but I know I've seen it around a lot.

I've never seen a sam out-kill a mage. Hands down, mages are the biggest ass-kickers at my tables and, in general, people who thought they made ass-kicking sams (or whatever) tend to get sad when the mage (a) kicks more ass than they do and (b) does a whole bunch of other stuff.

Oh well ... YMMV.

You all seem to be ignoring the fact that STUNBOLT IS NOT LETHAL!!!

You have no problem with homicidal trolls wielding a katana (8P) and a BOW (12P, or 13P with explosive arrowheads). Trolls are more common than mages, and Strength 9 is no more out of the ordinary than Magic 5.

Don't forget Augmentation. A starting troll can get +2 STR with muscle replacement or augmentation (avail. 10R).

When confronted by a troll gang, go ahead and geek the mage first. Just hope that troll with the weird look in his eye is high on Kamikaze and not K-10.

Talk about overpowered....

I think the confusion comes from the distinction between trying to get a grenade onto a specific point (success test) and trying to get it at the feet of a mobile target (opposed). (If you throw a grenade at a spot against a moving target they won't be there when it blows)


Regardless other people in the vicinity just roll damage tests, no hits boosting damage no dodge to reduce, see both the examples in the book and the (kinda poorly worded) FAQ.

Though even with the success test against the mobile target the hits still go towards reducing scatter not damage.

I'd make an exception if the weapon was rigged to go off on contact and you're trying to directly hit the target. In that case hitting them in the head is different than hitting a shin.

Actually I think that's the reason for not adding hits in other circumstances anyway, what did you do? Charge up the grenade with your super powers. You throw it, it winds up someplace, then in the next pass it explodes. How could your successes increase the damage for someone standing five meters away?

I'm facing the same problem. I don't really have an issue with overcasting being too powerful (even if that can be a problem if abused), but with it being too common while the fluff make it looks like something very strenuous and to be used with caution.

As it's more of a roleplaying issue to me, I think I'll deal with it in roleplay (mostly, but roleplay and rules often interact).
First, I'll start to describe how strenuous it is, maybe give a few negative modifiers for a few turns after overcasting to make it stick (for those who don't care about descriptions as long as it doesn't have any impact on the rules).

My players, please keep out of what follows:

Oh, it's doable, and I've seen it

However, Sams rely on gear, very heavily. Gear that's hard to lug around, and impossible to hide, and 100% illegal.

Wired 3 or better yet, Move By Wire 4, and a lot of bigass rocket launchers, with a large mass of bad guys down below. The mage probably has AoE spells, and if we're assuming the Sammy has all his toys, the Mage is gonna have a Sustaining Foci with Increased Initive. So that puts them on mostly even ground.

Course, if the enemies have a mage or three with Sheilding, or their a background count, or someone attacks the Sustaining Foci, etc, etc, etc, the Sammy gets a bit of an edge. But I think that balances with the unwieldy, expensive, illegal, and hard to get gear. So again with the balance.

As with all things, it depends on the GM and his ability to balance and control his game. It's not fun for the Sammy if the Mage is vastly more powerful and more versatile, and left unchecked. And the same goes for the Mage if he's getting constantly cock-blocked, but the Sammy gets to run amok.

Besides, the Decker is the most powerful character in the game. Just no one knows it, cause no one plays them.

Bull

Some players hear this and say, "So what? Stun damage can still drop people. I'm sticking with Stunbolt."

I love those players. I love the look they get on their faces when the drones come out shooting.

I've always had an issue with the fact that Stun spells get less drain because they're non lethal. I argued that when we playtested 3rd ed and 4th ed, and got ignored both times :/

Who cares if it's not lethal. For one, in a fight, unconscious is as good as dead. Two, once they're unconscious, all you need is a cheap 5¥ knife to off someone. No skill, no fancy hardware, nothing. For three, at least 75% of the time, unconscious is better than dead, because it's much less likely to cause problems down the road. Granted, that other 25% it's a royal bitch, when they come back for revenge, but hey, that's where the cheap knife comes in handy.

Bull

I think a lot of GMs underplay the power of elemental effects. Sure, the descriptions of elemental effects use a lot of ambiguous language (e.g. "may," "can," that sort of thing), but I think the intent was that every time an elemental spell is used, Something Else happens other than the damage code. I've found that, as a GM, when I make sure that Something Else happens with every elemental effect (scaled to the Force of the spell, of course), players find plenty of reasons to cast those spells.

Case in point: one of the PCs in my game is having a great time Flamethrower-ing and Napalm-ing the baddies (when his dice are cooperating), and his teammates are enjoying the advantages he gives them against the survivors.

Well, yeah. Any mage that doesn't also have some kind of physical damage spell is an idiot. STunbolt's a great spell, and IMNSHO broken as all hell (It and Stunball are the reason I stopped allowing Physical Mages in my games ages ago), but it's NOT the only spell you should be carrying.

Stunbolt/ball, Invisibilty, Ram, Fireball/bolt or Lightningbolt/ball, Heal, and at least one Illusion spell should be in every mages arsenal, unless they're playing a specialist mage, or an unusual concept character, in which case, cool. (My main Mage character, Chaos, used almost nothing but Illusion and Fire spells for most of his career. Of course, he was also suicidal and had a severe case of pyromania, but that's neither here nor there.)

I think they do. In SR I think they prefir if the PCs aren't total bastards and the great stun spells and stick and shock contribute to that because you aren't leaving so many bodies behind. Just a theory.

That said I'm sure powerbolts are overcasted a lot of the time as well. Though some drain damage probably comes creaping in if you do that.

From a player standpoint, I agree with you. I think Stun spells are the way to go, and not just because they're bloody powerful. They're a much smarter way to run, most of the time.

From a GM standpoint and a balance standpoint, they irk me to no end. I usually put them on the same drain codes as the Powerbgolt/ball spells.

Generally, if overcast powerbolts are needed (such as for destroying an inconvenient nuclear blast shelter) you're better off over-summoning a spirit of man, giving them the powerbolt spell, and letting them take care of it...that'll potentially get the force up to 4x your magic rating, and you personally only have to deal with the summoning drain.


OK, so it's a little power-gamery.

Problem with that is, I seem to remember reading somewhere (probably Street Magic) that spirits will not overcast on their own unless absolutely necessary, and tend to take a disliking to those who force them to overcast (and thus begin to use Edge to resist being summoned).

Not in the rules anywhere (just did a text search through SR4 & Street Magic)

I'd guess you might have seen it on these forums though. Probably in one of the innumerable "mages are overpowered and it has nothing to do with my not using the RAW" threads.

Still, as I said - powergamery. Not something I'd encourage, but over-summoning has its own built-in drawbacks: for example - the last time a magic 6 mage summoned a force 10 spirit, they ended up needing to invoke the hand-of-god rule to avoid the incoming 18 physical drain (no edge spent by the spirit) even though they successfully summoned the spirit.

There's almost never a good reason to dump even more drawbacks onto what is already (theoretically) only used as a last resort. Personally, I just wait for the odds to catch up to them - it's usually more spectacular that way. And a better lesson.

Yeah...spirits are another whole can of worms. I don't think that having the ability to summon something that will end any fight, with the drawback that you have a coin-toss chance of surviving the drain, is good for the game. It's cool as a concept, don't get me wrong. But I don't like it as a gameplay element. We've houseruled over-summoning at our table for that reason.

What you think more people need to die in your campaigns? They have exactly 1 lower drain. Well, I suppose a point of damage every spell would add up pretty quick. Still, I kinda like the fewer casualties as a GM.

As for spirits I don't have a problem with them. You want to overcast one of those you're taking a risk in a way you simply are not with overcasting spells.

I don't have a problem with overcasting spirits. But I think that the mage should be limited in-character from expressing meta-gaming concepts like edge, or being able to force their spirit minion to either overcast spells or use edge in their spells.

Actually we've got some playtesters here right?

I think my issue with overcasting is that I think this time around they didn't really want to make mages/adepts to be just better than their unawakened bretherin. They did a pretty good job with adepts of making them different and not just super samurai. I think part of that is that overcasting was designed to be a rare thing. If mages aren't overcasting their one shot kill potential is pretty low until they've initiated a few times or some such. A typical softmaxed starting character would be throwing five damage spells.

However it would seem they forgot to invite some local powergamers over to the playtest session to discover that the average force of manabolts and stunbolts is 9. Which turns the mages weapon from hitting like a pistol to hitting like an assault cannon. Now I think they intended for the spell to hit like that, I just think they felt the consequences would keep it from happening routinely.

I assume they knew that we'd be rolling 18-20+ Dice for our specialities, right? The buying hits table goes up pretty high.

In my experience one of the things that limits mages is not raw magical power (overcasting provides this) but starting ability.

If you want to make a balanced mage (fairly able in all skills) you need to buy all the important magic skillgroups at 4, namely conjuring and sorcery, then you can hard or softmax your magic to 5 or 6. That's about 10 dice. Around many tables, a DP of 14 is about right for a specialty, and mages are far off that. And while there is drain reducing ware that they can take, there's not really much to boost their DP, unless you want to take foci up the wazoo and then have to leave it behind every time you hit a magical barrier.

How does everyone else deal with this?

Deactivate your foci, walk through, and reactivate them. At worst, you must recast any sustained spells. At best, it is a mild annoyance.

Also, it is not difficult to achieve higher dice pools on a mage. One of my characters, starting, had 16 dice in her specialty (Health), 14 dice in Combat, & 12 dice in the rest - without any foci.

More accurately - put in a background count.

A background count of 1 (which isn't supposed to be uncommon) is going to noticeably weaken any non-munchkined starting mage.

The available-at-chargen force 2 power focus gets shut down and a force 3 health focus isn't going to be sustaining any increased reflexes spells in a background count of 2.

An enemy mage who has initiated for the aspect-changing power effectively gains an advantage of 2 per background count vs. pc mages in his home ground (unless they happen to be the same tradition.)


edit: and just out of curiousity...what mentor spirit gives +2 to health AND +2 to combat spells, since that seems to be required to get those numbers?

I've often used higher background counts to limit the power of mages. It does keep magic use suppressed, but tends to be a pretty blunt hammer - the difference between BC0 and BC1, and between BC1 and BC2 is huge, and anything higher than BC2 effectively makes mages close to useless unless they're very optimized/munchkinized.

Also, it can be a pain trying to keep track of all the modifications to magic and spellcasting the mages have to calculate, as the jump back and forth between varying levels of BC.

Buh. Buh, what's it called? Dark Queen? Dark Mother? Something like that. Its basically Kali.

Ah - Dark Goddess from SM. That's a powerful combination with a fairly severe RP drawback - surprising, since I thought they were trying to keep most major drawbacks mechanical.

Still, 111 bp as absolute minimum (before spells, summoning, binding, countermagic, etc.) not all that cheap, actually.

Yea, and it doesn't help that I tend to over-play said drawback.

I often play mages, but I almost never overcast my spells. If anything, I often try to bring the force lower so me and the sammie can deliver a one-two punch to knock out the opposition, and I don't have to risk suffering drain. Sure, on average you can soak it all, but it only takes a couple unlucky rolls to make you start feeling those wound modifiers. The one exception was where I went all out and fired a Force 12 Stunball at the boss, edged, with twelve total hits. The boss got six hits of his own, so the GM said, "Okay, six net hits, so he takes six stun, he's hurt, but he's not down."

"Er, no...that's six net hits, plus the Force 12 Stunball."

"Oh. Right then. Good game."

That's the whole idea behind this thread, isn't it?

Sammies of the 6th world, unite. Let's send magic back to EarthDawn - where it belongs!

All you Sterling fans should be playing Cyberpunk.

There's a name for people like you - HUMANIS!