Also a good point, in the end the magical healing comes last. Either as a last resort, or as the last option in the treatment. Part of the cynic in me for the SR world though would think that they will want you in that hospital as long as possible paying them as much as you can afford (and probably then some)... then your out the door tubes and all. The tubes cost extra though.

Of course. They will spare no expense in ensuring that you are in the best of health before letting you go (even if you just want them to fix up your leg). Expect regular Healthy Glow castings, because it's good for Hospital PR if all the patients look as though they are in good health (especially in the cancer wards). Hence the covering the cost of the adept's care in addition to paying a hefty sum for the service in the first place.

Magical healing should definitely come last, because it probably has a tendancy to seal up wounds around foreign objects. Mundane medical care goes through and removes as much foreign material as possible in addition to doing whatever good it can.

You know I hadn't really thought about that but yeah. Much amusement awaits me as my players turn themselves into junkyards of bullets, shrapnel and assorted items.

Remember, it isn't unknown for a govt to control what their magic users learn. Remember in Tir-south-of-seattle they intentionally train their awakened children hermetic magic, rather than shamanistic in order to shape the way the kids see magic, and thus how they will use it.

Such a waste, given that most of the people in the Tir who have the chance to get a decent education get +2 CHA...
They should really switch over to that path magic stuff from the other Tir.

Another possible way of dealing with BC is just to cycle the wards around. Moving maternity should help

1% of the population can possibly qualify for certain jobs. There are only 10,000 positions that use those qualifications. What do the rest of the qualified candidates do?

The feeling from the world always seemed that more than just a few could use magic effectively, if perhaps just a team composition thing.

Playing the one percent very strictly seems to push the game toward the "oh no, my mage is too strong" scenario; versus the average run, which always contains some kind magical security- something they wouldn't have if there was so little active powerful magic in the world.

I've personally never bothered to quantify the amount of Awakened in the world.

I still don't quite consider it a "high magic" setting where any character is using a "+5 zweihander" but still think of it as a place with a lot more magic than the canon text lists.

Magic gets concentrated in certain areas of endeavour. It *doesn't* mooch around in the "average".

Separate from pure statistics, that doesn't deal with the "feel" of the world. There seems to be a lot of magic around- even taking into account that the "average" Shadowrun is well outside of the norm for the average mundane person

-and why would a group have (depending on size) both an adept and a magician when those people could easily get jobs for corps or even (for the mages) freelance to put up a ward once a week for various sites with a regular paycheck to have the pocket secretary (or comlink for you 4e people) on - not even dealing with the whole "wage mage" situation?

In my personal opinion there just seemed like a lot more magic than the developers let on, so I just pretended the "one percent" stat wasn't ever written down.

This is an interpretation of the setting thing- everyone will approach their understanding of the SR world differently.

To me, it's a fantasy game with a lot of cyberpunk tropes. --and I came to it thinking it was a sci-fi cyberpunk game with a few fantasy tropes, but that opinion changed as I read more into the world and the content in general.

I ususally go with the magic is somewhat rare approach and it works out perfectly. Every character has reasons to participate in the campaign and not to be elsewhere. The problem of keeping the mage in check without magic seldom arises and so I do not have them confront magic at every corner. Else I would have the feeling of magic becoming to mudane. Also I see the Team as something "special" one way or the other, as they are the focus of the story. Someone playing an awakened character, for example in a street-level-setting, should include some reasons why he is doing what he is doing in his backgroundstory...then again everybody should.

However I agree it is a matter of opinion, preference, interpretation, stetting and what ever.

If that's a possibility for your Awakened PCs, then they need to account for *why* they haven't taken that "easy" job and have elected to run the Shadows. Whether that's some personal crusade or whacked-out desire to test themselves in combat or whatever, if "going legit" is easy, the reasons why that hasn't happened need to be explored.

I think that streetsamurai with 250 000/1M nuyens worth of 'ware and 0.025 essence, highly skiled de/ha-ckers and many other starting characters are also part of less than 1% of the population. They all need good reasons to be running the shadows instead of going legit.

Huh, we hadn't mentioned that yet.

Anyway yeah. It takes some explaining why your character at one point had over 100,000 nuyen and they chose to put it into that big fancy piece of cyberware and are now back on the streets.

And most decker characters could be highly paid in a corp setting.

Though I suppose the path to legit money is quite as clear as with mages.

How about this?

1 percent of Metahumans are magicaly active.
Far far less than 1% of metahumans have the advanced combat training necisary to be a street samurai
shouldnt their be more mages than street samurai?

1% Is actualy quite a sizable portion of the population. We're talking millions of magicians around the world here.

Edit: doh beaten to the punch

Tens of millions, neh? (xe9/100 = xe7) Or did the Big Disasters drop population by a whole order of magnitude? I thought it was more decimation than 90% casualty rate...

Highly skilled shootists actually have pretty limited job opportunities, unlike mages with the heal spell. Consider the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare vs defense and you'll see what I mean.

Most characters actually have a highly limited skillset for 'civilian life' except for full magicians and some mystic adepts.

Hackers could still work as admins, network specs, programmers etc.

Riggers have a wide range there for piloting whatever needs a pilot, and thats just the tip of whatever sank the titanic.

Streetsams might not be too civilian in their choices as Bodyguard or such, but many might try to be a teacher in selfdefense or something like that... but they are basicaly somewhat military oriented yes.

A face... enough choices I'd say.

Depending on the character they should have some choices, I admit though, that mages have a base talent, that is worth quite a ton.

It comes down to who are you and why are you doing this every time. It is one of the most important questions you should have your character answer to, when you create "it".

One in a hundred is not a low number for the awakened but do not forget, that this number includes those with lesser talents, latent awakening and so on. The number of fullfledged magicworkers is (in my opinion) far lower. However I guess it still finds a balance somewhere between the general rarity and the demand, making magic services highly paid, but preventing them from being irreplacable.

The worlds pupollation indeed got heavily decreased during the early time of the awakening, though I do not recall the numbers atm .

Certainly, though remember a significant proportion of system administration tasks will have been automated. I would actually suspect that the range of jobs for IT professions would decrease significantly, except possibly for people who just cut new access IDs into ICs/agents, which would be a boring job and has a maximum possible salary that isn't very high before it becomes uneconomical to pay you to perform the work.

Riggers are in much the same bind. Rigging work is actually very easy to outsource as there are few to no prohibitions on remote piloting, and the vast majority of work is handled by pilot programs and riggers jump in when required - as outlined in the description of one of the armored trucks in arsenal.

Given that, and that only a tiny percentage of all trucks would be under active armed attack at any one time, this entire operation could be run out of Bangalore, or using a tiny handful of riggers shared amongst entire fleets. The military is the most likely employer as simple military realities are going to require actually sending the rigger out with the tanks.

I can actually see plenty of reasons for these people to end up in the shadows because they hate the work (I would!), and actually lots of mages

The urban shamans described earlier with low educations are unlikely to be able to secure a job at a corp hospital because they are likely to be felons - but they are similarly unavailable to be corp sec mages or other professional employment.

IMHO the awakened overall would be a significant percentage and perhaps the majority of all runners. If your a gang, no-one you can ever get access to is going to have pistols 6 and loads of cyberwear. But you merely hve to get lucky to have someone with magic 2, and they can cast heal and summon spirits. A huggggggggge asset - and as lots of people are born into the urban combat zones, lots of them are going to go on to become criminals, and mages are spectuclarly likely to be good at it. You're going to keep them alive and the school of hard knocks is going to make them half decent.

A pistols 6 super sayan with hundreds of thousands in cyber or seriously good rigger however needs a significant overhead for training and a matching capital investment (most barrens gangers are not going to have hundreds of thousands of nuyen pass through their hands in a lifetime.) - meaning these people are likely to have come from the military of the corps and are less likely to have come from the street - and are thus less likely to become career criminals.

So anyway, I guess my point is that the awakened are disproportionately going to become shadowunners due the alignment of very poor socioeconomic situations and the lack of need for special training, whereas 'professional' awakened are disproportionately less likely to do security because of the range of other jobs available.

Well if such a portion of the awakened is going to be criminal, the corps are in need of awakened security. As they sure as hell have the major say about where the awakened will find jobs worthwhile, they can make the awakened take the job. Also some people still like that business.

However I see this as a discussion without an end, as the topic it self allows many viable opinions and there is no "goal" to be achieved.

I guess there are many reasons to be a security mage, there are as many not to. After all it is a matter of individual choice and circumstance and in the end we end up having a SR setting we see to fit our campaign.

Actually, what I'd suspect they do is have very few sec mages held centrally in lone star response facilities and the majority of security will be guys with special and specific training and equipment to deal with magically active characters.

A cop costs 40k and a mage logically costs 300-400k or so, imho. But more interestingly a drone with a LMG bolted on costs 3-5k.


So, if I was in charge, what I'd do is instead of a sec mage, I'd have a much stronger physical presence including heavy drones with mounted grenade launchers on site. Then I'd get my outsourced riggers from bangalore to jump in when a threat is detected and bust out 10-15 drones (some rigged from bangalore which players can shut down with jammers, and some using their own pilot programs), in a half/half mix of thermal smoke spam and LMG/stick n shock/stun grenade spam. Drones have object resistance and with the thermal smoke popping everywhere it is going to be virtually impossible for the mage to get sufficient net hits to beat object resistance. On the flipside my drones have radar and don't need no stinking visual confirmation to start shooting.

My onsite guards are also all going to be packing good optics so they can see with the lights out, and will make extensive use of smoke grenades and suppressive fire. Background count in the facility if any will be mapped out and the guards will have that designated as their rally point in case of magical threats. Any magical threat detection will cause the buildings security rigger to instantly cut the lights (all my dudes can see in the dark) and if its a highly secure facility start venting smoke into the rooms.

Well my combat mage can also see in the dark and has more dice then the quards so the smoke shawts the security more than him.

I presume your using the low light optical mod? A simple 'upgrade' to that strategy is just to add some lone star iballs with flaskpaks under desks, and have them rollout and burst, as the radar sense equipped secruity guards open fire through the drywall from another room.

Radar sensors actually makes the drones and the guards actually defacto immune to all the smoke they are throwing down. Your not going to be in a happy place vs a couple of steel lynxes just hosing down the area through drywall, with smoke or flashpaks in your room.

You're right to point out that additional non visual senses are better.

Yes low light+eye light+flarecompt so those iball don,t do anything eather



well he gets nice extra armor from that wall and then he just napalms the lynxes trought the holes they made in the wall, that should mess up the drones nicely.

The simple answer as to why mages don't all wind up making a billion dollars working for corps is as easy as answering why talented people in the real world wind up in dead-end jobs or wandering the streets. Stuff happens. People who were doctors in their own countries work retail in the U.S. American citizens with PhDs wind up wandering the streets or working for crappy pay at Community Colleges.

First, I think everyone here is really underplaying the importance of being born with a SIN. It's not as simple as 'hey, that guy threw a fireball, throw him some money and let's go'. I'm sure there's an undocumented worker who'd be a badass housekeeper out on the corner, waiting for day labor work. Would you want to give him your housekeys though? Just a random guy off the street with no background, no papers, totally untraceable by the system or anything else? No fingerprints on file, no listed address, no nothing; he's a ghost. He could butcher you in your sleep and nobody would ever find him.

Mind you, in reality, he's not much more likely than a natural-born citizen to butcher you in your sleep if you let him work in your house, but fear an paranoia doesn't need a fully-realized logical explanation; it just has to sound plausible and alarmist.

Secondly, there's the matter of the fear/distrust of the Awakened in general. Keep in mind that it's been, what, 60 years or so since the Ghost Dance wrecked America? We're talking about wide-spread destruction directed at people all across the country at the whim of some shamans. To say nothing of the dragons, metahuman weirdness, Bug spirits, horrors, etc. Think about how badly people treat Arab-Americans (or anyone who wears a turban, for that matter) in America now...and the death toll from various magic-related crap far outstrips American deaths from terrorism. People are superstitious *right now* about 'voodoo', and we aren't seeing visible proof that it exists everyday. Would you really trust some magic-slinging weirdo to hocus-pocus your flight? What if he sneezes? What if the planets aren't in alignment? What if he just doesn't like the look on your face? Again, the "real" risks aren't much greater than the risk of trusting automated airplanes or human pilots, but that doesn't matter; what matters is perception.

We already live in a world where if you LOOK like someone (and by "look like", I mean "have a similar skin tone/ethnic features") who did something bad, a decent portion of society is going to shun or at least distrust you. And The Sixth world is a hell of a lot more dystopian than our world. They've experienced more disasters, and on a larger scale. Within corp wageslaves and their bosses, paranoia regarding people who are outside of the norm would be totally out of control. We're talking like every bad parody of the 1950's multiplied by 1000.

Yeah, cybering the mage helps considerably, but also does drop the magic ratings of the mage, so the drones are still significantly up.

So first you need to make a perception check with a -6 modifier (drywall with bulletholes is easily 'good cover') to see the drones - what is your perception score? If you are not an intuition tradition, you are unlikely to actually pass this hurdle. What is the perception score of the typical mage? My review of the characters in 'welcome to the shadows' indicates that it is significantly less than a DP of 8, and thus they are unlikely to succeed.

Assuming you then successfully pass the test - which is highly unlikely - then your spell casting pool is reduced by 6, -4 from cover, -2 from smoke, giving you a significant dice pool penalty. Assuming you have magic 5, and spellcasting 6, with a +2 mentor or spec bonus, you're still down to 7 dice - you're only likely to get 2-3 hits, less than the 4 required to overcome the drones object resistance.

That is assuming you actually survive the LMG assault from the lynxes. You get 1 point of armour from the barrier which is not significant vs 3 or more LMGs. Wound penalties would make the perception test impossible for starting mages and make the spellcasting test very difficult.

So when you go to napalm the drones, you'd need some very considerable luck. I'd estimate that over 90% of the time you could be unable to do it.

Visual perception pool of 9, so shouldn't be a problem


magic 4 + spellcasting 5 + spec 2 + mentor 2 + foci 3 = 16 - 6 = 10 dice and napalm being indirect combat spell doen't care about OR



5 body + 10 armor + min. +2 from the wall = 17 dice to resist damage + platated factories should help in surviving.


But all of this is very theoretical as it asumes that he just walked alone in this room that was decined so that lynxes from the other room can just hose the person in the room,
it's not very good if your plan against mages is comptletly dependant of them walking alone in to your trap room.

A bunch of drones with LMGs? Simple, a force 6+ spirit to play with them. Grenade launchers on the drones, no problem really either as the spirit can float high enough and toss elemental attacks on the drones. Spirits would move fast enough to avoid most hits from GLs and the LMGs merely tickle them.

If one has to use spells, indirect combat spells with area effect don't need that much targetting. You can see the muzzle flash and aim to that as the drones can't be much moving to hit anything with the LMGs.

For the radar as visibility, those are easy to jam.

Having just some drones as guards the thing is that the drones don't think too much. Having people around who can think make a lot more sense. When things start going wrong, then it's good to have some single minded bots to do the actual fighting but to figure what's going on, people are usually better. Of course one can always trick a person but it's not quite as easy as to trick a bot especially if you know it's parameters how to behave.

As long as one knows what is there up against, there's always a way. Always. No foolproof way to protect anything, mages or no mages

and not to derail too much: when it comes to the 1%, as it was mentioned so many times before: it happens.

The interesting part is that the number of drones protecting the facility could be ramped up almost indefinitely which oblivates any need for a specific trap room.

Remember it costs 80k plus for the most basic low level security guard (once you factor in the overheads of employment). A drone with an LMG costs 3k, and a drone with repair tools costs not much more. Assuming and overhead for main replacement and wear and tear, you can have 60 drones instead of 5 sec guards. So instead of a rather boring team of 10-12 security guards, one could five security guards and 66 drones for the same annual cost. You bring any thinking required in via riggers from external locations.

Admittedly I wouldn't run all steel lynxes, I'd go mostly for Nissan dobermans, and with about 50 hunter killer drones to disgorge themselves from the ventilation system.

And LMGs loaded with APDS rounds blow straight through even high force spirits, particularly when you consider that the drones actually have more IPs.

And this is some pretty low key security. Whatever it is is important enough to warrant sending 4-5 professional mercenaries after, so it may warrant more than 10 security guards

(also, why would the drones care if we walked in alone or otherwise? They are just going to try and kill whoever comes into the room via spamming through drywall. The things that make it hard for the for mage also make it hard for anyone else. Incidently, as I pointed out above, we can easily ramp up the lethality of the installation. )

Also, that mage isn't as tough you might think - you only get 1 point from the thin dry wall (per example in the book no less) And full auto narrow burst that scores one net hit loaded with APDS will have a DV 16 - with 13 dice to soak and body 5 you'll probably survive, but you won't be able to pass the perception test to see the drones anymore due to a DP of 0 on perception tests from average number of wounds.

Your chance of actually failing that test is bit less than 30% too in the uninjured case. A 30% chance of just doing nothing and picking your nose is a pretty sweet deal, especially considering that the drones will almost certainly get to fire first, so they'll have two shots 30% of the time if you don't get them.

However, the two drones with grenade launchers are likely to cause more havoc. Frag grenades through the door will hit the entire contents off the room with serious damage, and don't rely on the drones actually hitting anything. If you want to be 'serious' you could fit fully automatic launchers, which would kill any runner in the target room in one IP.

Serious ambush capability, and give the number of drones you can cost effectively deploy, is cheap and ludicrously effective. These guys would cause spirits serious problems too, though you may want some models to have sniperrifles too, as with APDS even 1 net hit will overcome the spirits immunity to natural weapons.

Overall, this looks like a reasonable effective trick against an awakened threat (or really, any threat)

Which version of the book you have, becouse my original V.1.0 only lists standart class for armor 1 so your building has pretty weak walls



But your still assuming that your drones get to ambuss the runners, what if the runners gome in trought the wall behind the drones.
Security measures like this are were the legwork really pays off.

Guess gotta beef up the spirit a bit: force 7 earth spirit with armor and deflection spells on it can pretty much run through the whole drone defense and if you got 60 drones in a normal building, those APDS LMGs will make more damage to the building itself than to anything else. The spirit has 20 dice (assuming 4 on deflection) full dodge when it's passing by all those drones. And having 4 on armor spell negates the APDS so then you have to do more than 14 damage per shot, so even with the heaviest sniper rifle, you gotta get some hits. Having an assault cannon on the drone could do it, but think of the collateral damage when it misses. Not to mention the location of the drones, they can't all be standing in the line waiting for the whatever threat to come from the door and knock first. If they would use grenades indoors, it would damage the drones almost as much... not to mention the collateral of those Some military complex or a big, open area could be really effectively protected by an army of drones, but for indoors, I would think it few times as nothing would be more harmful for the company image if the entry lobby would be full of bullet holes and small craters from grenades/assault cannon shots.

And the spirit could carry a ballistic shield just to the fun of it, making it even more easy for the drones

Pushing a shopping cart full of explosives and 20cm thick steel in front to the room would be fun, too

And as was mentioned, legwork can avoid most of the drones.

Drywall is actually very weak. I'm not super awesome, and I can punch through it. I probably have strength 2 for the purposes of evaluating it. Brick walls are very tough, but they are typically only used for external walls.

As for the legwork bit, Yeah.. if you never actually get caught or noticed, then you're sweet (drones have legs and can move around, so its not helping you to know where they all are in advance, I'd presume they move) But thats not like the exclusive preserve of mages or anything and is indeed the point of shadowrun

interestingly, summoning a force 7 spirit can just arbitrarily kill the mage if he gets unlucky and forcing the other team to take lethal risks before they turn up is a good thing - and again you might actually want to protect your assets. Summoning and using a high force spirit effectively puts the runner team on a shot clock. The external lone star high threat response team including multiple sec mages and high force bound spirits will be inbound after the first 100+ rounds are discharged even if your hacker has the buildings systems totally locked down. Astral movement speeds are very high, so these guys could be here very quickly. Once they are, you have to deal with multiple sec mages, multiple spirits and the the actual SWAT team coming behind them.

Then it becomes not a matter of the drones winning, they merely have to not lose until the big guns turn up. Engaging in open combat with them is not likely to be productivity. Using a spirit to run through in full dodge doesn't actually achieve anything - what does he do at the other end when it comes time to hack the mainframe? So the mage is back to ahving to act with subtlety rather than all guns blazing total domination and napalm.

As for reputation - what, you mean that having an entire security team disappeared/murdered and all their valuable research data stolen isn't going to adversely impact their reputation? what the hell?

Not if nobody finds out and cover ups are easier if your down town office doesn't look like a warzone



You must have very weak walls where you live becouse I'm propably strength 3 and there isn't a single wall in my home that i could punch trought.

and i ask again which version of the book you have, becouse my original V.1.0 only lists standart class for armor 1 and drywall as armor 2 in the barrier table in page 157.
Personally for a corp facility i would go with plastiboard walls and those are armor 4.

Yeah you're right, I misremembered. It doesn't exactly dramatically change the outcome though. One full auto and you're still virtually dead with no DP.

Ideally of course if your office looks like a warzone, the runners are dead

Oh, I thought to the idea was that how to beat those 60 LMG/GL drones. If you are going to go with the "then the lone star" comes, why did one buy 60 drones when 4 would have been enough and if one is destroyed the LS comes in. I think many corps prefer to keep things in own hands and not call the cops after 100 shots. Facing such guard on a run that is to steal something is not smart anyway. If you can't beat the security without raising hell on a covert run, don't do the run.

I didn't mean the spirit to run through the drones to the upstairs toilet but a single such spirit can kick the ass of all those 60 drones if need be. Yes, summoning a force 7 spirit IS risky, but on average, it's only 1 more drain than a force 6 spirit -> 2 more dice, thus max of 4 more drain but as it's calculated to be 1 success per 4 dice...

Shotgun wads will go though two layers of drywall with enough energy to hurt someone on the other side. Much less buckshot or bullets. A typical issue with RPGs is that you can produce a defense invulnerable to bullets with 20 layers of something worthless at stopping bullets. That's a GM issue.

Double or triple brick will stop bullets, for a while. You can cut holes large enough for a man to enter using MG fire in well under a minute For example, 250 rounds of M249 fire will breach a 12" thick cinderblock wall faced in brick.

Of course, this varies by region, age and function. I've never been in a residence that doesn't have brick or concrete interior walls, for example.

Lone Star is a corporation. It's not a government agency. No corp wants another corp snooping around on it's turf. They are not your friend, and the only reason why they will help you out is because they have a contract, which if constantly they will follow to the letter (no more no less.) Don't hold your breath and be very happy if they even give you half of what they promise on their contract. If everything is about outsourcing, and corporations have more power then any government in the 6th world, Lone Star is not your friend. If you call in another corporation they might "accidentally" cause tons of collateral damage to the facility in order to neutralize the threat to the surrounding areas... that is assuming someone is dumb enough to call to LS for help in the first place. a single A corporation might ask for LS's help, but the cure might be worse then the disease in many cases.

Corporate private security will rely on what they have on sight and if absolutely have to call for help from their parent corporation (and if it is a AAA well then they will just bring the big guns if the situation calls for it.) If they don't have a parent corporation then they are probably SOL. Even if they can call for the big guns it will take time and at least allow Shadowrunners ample time to escape. I always thought the reason why local security enforcement sucks as well, because it's looking at profit margins and the bottom line. Calling Lone Star means you go through a few layers of corporate bureaucracy, and red tape (that is unless you are willing to make a large donation to the LS 'chief of police'.) Lone Star will come out if the scuffle between a corporation and runner team spills into the streets, but I have a feeling if you are going to be attacked by drones it will be the corporations drones and not LS's drones (well... unless you do a hit on Ares then expect Lone Star to tie you up, until the hammer comes and smashes you to bits.) It's just more cost effective that way, and no one wants the government or a corporation setting foot on their facility. A stuffer shack probably, a refinery/lab/testing facility/training facility/warehouse/bank hell no.

1) i think you have confused lone star with knight errant

2) actually, when it comes to private entity contracts rather than governments, i would bet lone star is a lot more thorough. governments are much more forgiving than corporations, who have many more choices for security; governments are looking at needing a security force big enough to cover their cities. that research facility just wants a strike team or 3 to show up when they call in for help, and if that strike team doesn't show up, LS doesn't get paid for their strike team showing up.

Sorry I tend to get the security a little mixed up in my head sometimes.

LS is a corporation. I also thought that LS generally works more towards helping the public domain and not the private sector. Many corps wouldn't want the help of another corporation that is in no way affiliated with them. When LS says "We are impounding this vehicle for evidence and the data files recovered on the runners" I think the gist of it is that they are just going to sell off the vehicle and use the data recovered (if they can.) Hey evidence gets lost right? Um... yeah we were hit by a different Shadowrun team and all the data was stolen.... yeah... see the video thats totally not altered see you can even see the time code and I hear those are very hard to fake.

I guess it comes down to different SR universes. I view Shadowrun as a world where everyone is trying to stab everyone else in the back as subtly as they possibly can (although not always the case,) and there is some frail agreement not to smash the game board everyone is playing on.... and even then.... I view LS as mercs, not even good mercs. They are paid to protect people, and there is a lot of wiggle room when someone is resisting arrest what kind of steps need to be taken. They can be bought, bribed, and generally made to forget what they just saw if you have enough . It is how I view Shadowrun in the way that I view not every mage is going to aim for a single well paying field. The problem in the end to this whole discussion is it's all relative.

If you're unwilling to contract to lone star, but do provide onsite security, you obviously have your own security force that can do 'strike missions' in place of an outsourced arrangement.

Older homes in particular didn't use drywall. Instead using something called lath and plaster. Also, especially when building for fire resistance or sound proofing, drywall can be thick or multi layered.

However most drywall is thin and trivial to break through.

As for spirits an interesting issue was raised. How does immunity stack with other forms of armor. I.e. if there is immunity armor of 14 and some other armor up to 20 and an attack hits with 16DV what happens?

Regardless the way to go with spirits is elemental attacks and other stuff that halves armor.

Also on the "60 drones" thing. Even having a dodge pool of 20 isn't going to help greatly if they're firing at once. Each drone can shoot twice in an action. and each shot reduces the pool for dodging by one. Meaning after the first 10 drones have fired the dodger is just sitting there wide open. At that point remaining shooters are free to use the +4 damage called shot option.

And at any rate reinforcements are an important and realistic part of shadowrun once your team ventures out of the barrens. Its a matter of how obvious they are, how soon, and how much death and destruction they cause that determine the magnetude of the response.

Getting caught on the way out and not doing much damage means LS may well take a pass if the runners commited the crimes on some exteterritorial corp turf that isn't in their jurisdiction anyway, and the hit corp may not have much time to respond before the runners are gone.

However give them time and cause and the corps have high grade initiatates (maybe over in Japan but what's that to a mage?), and they probably have some armed and warded banshees in the area. Also the Metroplex guard is around.

Remember they are drones. They don't take recoil penalties. The initial drones use full wide bursts and smartlinks with tracer. +5 dice to hit and -9 to the defenders pool. So the first one has 15 dice vs 11 dice.

He might theoretically soak that much damage though without using APDS, assuming 1 net hit, the drone is only looking at 7P which the theoretical intruder will soak ~5 including platelet factories.

However, yeah, the drone can shoot again and you're going to be worse off.

Please note though that using all 60 drones to fire at any one thing is hopelessly impractical. You're rather going to have some sort of layered defense system bringing a handful to bear at a time - but as you point out breaking out called shots will turn anything into bulletholes after a while.

Fitting out 1 drone per 5 with a sniper rifle with APDS is probably the right plan - that will blow straight through immunity to normal weapons and inflict massive damage.

Where does it say drones don't take any recoil penalties. I missed that.

Also I don't think you can combine smartlinks and the tracer modifiers.

@Cthulhudreams spirits can't have platlet factories. And while 60 is an awful lot, if a earth elemental is just barreling in I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't arrange for a dozen to be firing at once. And yes if so inclinded the first once could be firing rounds with low penetration to herd the spirit (i.e. reduce its dodge pool) for the shots that will come a split second later that are meant to put it down.

Regardless though spirits are darn powerful, especially against goons and people who don't have an armor halving weapon.

Don't forget about Aspected Magicians, particularly the Spell Category type with appropriate Incompetencies. If the only spells you can cast are Combat spells, then that has to increase your chances of becoming a security mage or the like. Even if you are a kick-arse combat mage, you are basically just a glorified gun, and are performing a similar role to any other type of security. You could imagine that employers would try to swing it that these folks wouldn't get paid that much more than the regular type security guards.

I liked the old take on Aspected Magicians (a.k.a. Adepts of various types back in the day), where you did not have to take an Incompetency and even got a few more spell points using some cannon character generation methods. The new way of crunching the numbers gives the feel that there is something wrong with an aspected magician rather than them being just a more specialised variety. If out of the 1% there were lots of aspected magicians, especially of the "Incompetent" (yuck!) variety, their natural magical area(s) might not mesh well with available oportunities and/or ambitions.

Just a thought.

I know, I was talking about the mage mentioned as an example mage earlier in the thread! sorry.

Arsenal P105. It's kind of evil, isn't it?



I don't see anywhere they prohibit it. It sort of implies it, but doesn't say they don't combine. Logic doesn't have much to do with the SR firearms rules (and reality has NOTHING to do with them), so you just have to use the crazy rules as written unless you want to go at them with a chain saw.

I think on spirits the armor is layered so that the last armor has the immunity. So if you got armor spell, first you reduct it and then if it's still not more than 2*force, it's harmless. So a good armor spell on a kickass spirit keeps the spirit nice and safe, even against those sniperdrones. And the spell if I'm not totally mistaken is always effective against bullets even when the pool would otherwise be reducted to 0. The spirit is moving all the time anyway so that alone gives it +2 for running on defence. The drones would not really have a clean line of sight on the spirit as it can materialize in the middle of the drones and let them shoot eachothers

Smartlink and tracers don't add up as the smartlink is a guncam so it sees paraller to the barrel while a metahuman aiming has totally different view point and thus can see where those shiny stripes fly unlike the guncam. Yes, if the gun is firing to long distances, then even the guncam can see the bullets dropping but that's really unlikely in most situations and the smartlink system knows how to compensate the bullet dropping anyway.

And besides on bit of reasoning, the rulebook sayth:

I can't believe this thread has to degraded about a hypothetical "Ok so my force 7+ spirit walks into a room and there's 50 drones with machine guns and sniper rifles there"

Where's the punchline, guys?