The abouve quote taken from here linky

Ok I knew I read on here somewhere that some people had at least in part agreed with my line of thinking.

I like the thought that a player making a character for a game can buy cyber/bio/nano/gene/transgene as a magic/techno character and the only hit is in a lesser overall max rating available to him/her.

Example: Larry want an adept magic of 5 for 40 bp with a level 1 nano hive alpha grade. the hive costs 05 + .25 per level or .75 essence - 20% essence to equal .6 essence he does this to get limbic 3 nanoware so his intution skills (counterspelling) are increased by 3. he has a magic max of 6 useing .6 essence allows him to have a max magic of 5 which he has no other penalties added to his character.

I see no reason for him to have to buy his magic to 6 then lose a point to 5 due to cyber thus screwing Larry outta 25 bp during character creation and then making his magic cost more karma in game it's like a doubble screw you to the magic player.

Thoughts?

I thought it was crap too. I'd love to have a technomancer with some sort of headware memory and cybereyes but the Resonance/BP cost is too high for my tastes. Once I get playing and can Submerge I'll get them, but its lame having to wait post chargen for things like that.

But why should he only pay 40 BP for a Magic of 5? If 5 is his new maximum, he should be paying 25 points for that 5th point. He would still be saving 10 BP from how it would be under RAW.

If you do this, two things will happen:

One, more (if not most) awakened characters will get one or two points' worth of 'ware, since it is far less of a drawback.

Two, awakened characters will be substantially more powerful. I have made asskicking adepts who took Magic 6, then took two points of bioware. Now those builds will have 35 more points to play with. Similarly, mages will be able to start out with Magic 5 (the sweet spot) more cheaply, and still have things like cybereyes and cerebral boosters.


As far as technomancers, they are way too similar to mages, rules-wise, even when it doesn't make sense. Cyberware should not hurt them! I wish they had been handled somewhat differently than they were.

I cringe at the rule, but I suck it up because (while I don't like it), it really is balanced as far as I can tell.

To start with the easy one: technomancers. If they could get implants without affecting their starting resonance (except max), what makes Hacker's special? The Techno could do everything a Hacker can (implants wise), and have computer magic.

Then Awakened. Same deal, but towards Street Sams. If you can have a dude with kickass magic AND all the implants you want, why would you not play a magic character (unless it's "in character" of course).

Basically, those lost points are for the privelage of being able to get augmentations at character creation. If there was no cost, anyone would choose the Awakened/Technomancer route. And why not?

Latent (fill in blank) is balanced because the GM chooses when you get to benefit from it. And if the GM feels your just being a cheese monkey, then you loose 5bp because it will never come into play.

If it never comes into play, the GM is being a dick. If the GM feels the quality is being abused, he should disallow it, not let the player waste 5 BP on nothing. But it's hard to see how it can be abused, since the character basically starts out with no awakened skills and a Magic rating of 1, far behind other awakened characters on the power curve.

Obviously, I disagree.

Latent Awakening: "...the gamemaster may decide that the character Awakens. This decision is completely in the gamemaster’s hands,
and should be based entirely on creating a good story..."

Furthermore, from the core rulebook: "...Though this quality is inexpensive, gamemasters should be careful not to allow it to be abused. It should only be taken for characters that are intended to be played as" (fill in Adept, Mystic Adept, or Magician).

The latter was relevant, because it means don't abuse the rules to build cheese monkey characters.

And how can it be abused? Make a gunslinger, get all the agumentations you want, then buy Latent Awakening and make it clear to the GM that you will be pissed if you don't Awaken into an Adept or a Mystic Adept. All solely because the character wants the biggest dice pool he can get, with no actual interest in roleplaying.

In that case, no, I don't believe the GM is "being a dick." The player needs to knock it off. Buying Latent Awakening is not a guarentee you'll get magic. It's a "I would like magic" for whatever reason, and if the GM feels it will make a good story, then he'll fit it in.

It's like the "Faith" advantage in 7th Sea. Do you have faith? If you do buy it. Sometimes Faith pays off. And sometimes it doesn't. But you won't know unless you have it.

Ok so let me re-work this magic of 1 is free magic 2 to 4 is 10 bp each and 5 is 25 so that's 55 bp for max magic with one point of cyber/bio in essence would this seem less broken to you?

rather than the 5 for 40 points?

This I could go with as well as for the most part it still does not screw the player as much as paying the 65 for 6 then loseing a point to 5 the play gets more or less a 10 bp discount.

Like I said Casazil, I do cringe at the rule. As a player I would much prefer if it was easier to get augmentations. So do what works for you game.

(I don't mean to not be helpful with the numbers, but it was really warm today and I was out boffering for 3+ hours, so my brain is a little frazzled at the moment. Hopefully someone else can answer the question, but if not I'll try to answer it later.)

Essence Loss resulting in a reduction to both Maximum & Current Magic/Resonance values is there for game balance purposes, and I see no problem with it. A Magician is very powerful in the system, and allowing them to supplement that with nearly no penalty through augmentation is unbalancing. Even with the rules as written, quite a few Awakened characters sacrifice a point of Magic for some augmentation - changing it so they do not loose that point, only their maximum, really is, in most cases, not a downside.

Actually it saves them at most 10 bp. That is hardly game breaking or unbalancing. Not a big issue in games I run, since I tend to give out more bp for making characters. Usually in the range of 50-100 extra.

Muspellsheimr that's not quite the way I see it let me try to explain.

My issue is with spending the 65 build points for a magic rating of 5 because I got 1 point of augmentations.

What I am looking into is that I still pay for all 5 points of magic even to the point of paying 25 for that fifth point and then having a points worth of augmentation.

I don't see this as being too unblanced I get to save 10 bp not really allot vs. the total 400.

In the case of an adept this leads to a high amount of karma in game just to get a new power as now he MUST initiate first then he can raise his magic to 6 and get a new power. (unless your allowing the use of the optional rule gain a power via initiation)

This also limits other magic classes too as no spells can be cast more than 2 times your magic so again they MUST initiate to get more magic attribute and thus more power to their spells.

Where as I play a completely unaugmented magical character start with 5 magic and as soon as I have the karma to go to 6 magic I get more powers and or more powerfull spells NO initiation needed.

This I hope shows why I think allowing players to only pay for what they are actually going to use makes sence and is not unblanceing as it makes all magical characters spend more to power up rather than less and they don't start any more powerfull than a non-augmented character.

Personally I've always hated the way that Magic Loss is handled as well, so I too say that implants affect your Magic Cap, BUT in order to help keep things balanced I also have ruled a Hard Cap on Magic of 6 (9) that is affected. Of course I like lower dicepool games myself so the Hard Cap is mostly theorical in nature, but it would prevent the equally theorical UberMage with unlimited Karma from being both a Street Sammy and a Magic 9 wizworm.

I prefer the lowering of the natural cap and then making you pay the premium for the last point to max it.

So if you got 2 points of 'ware lowering your natural Magic cap to 4, you'd pay 10 BP for each point up to 3 and then the 25 for point #4.

I have to say I agree with AngelisStorm. I'd make you pay for the six if you wanted five active points of magic. That doesn't mean you don't get the power associated with the six magic, you do, you just can't use it until you initiate. It is a great way to build your character, come up with a story for how you got the cyber and lost some power. Magic should be expensive in terms of build points and karma, at least that's the way I look at it.

I don't feel you should have to pay for something your not using in your build points. If it really was a balance issue then Magic rating should have cost more. The whole idea behind a point buy is balancing the characters it should not have been influenced by the old priority system ideas. They could have thrown in optional rules if you want less magic or some such thing.

It's not about the balance of hight magic, but about the balance of cyber mage.
Those who want to cyber them self up should pay more for their magic, becouse their also getting the huge bonus the ware offers.
If you change it so that the mages only pay for the magic rating they get, you will see even more powerful cyber mages.

I'd have to vote with Muspellsheimr on this. Magic is really, really powerful in SR, and the only significant restriction on magic is that it's a huge karma sink. Making it less of a karma sink is a bad idea, unless you're going to add in other other drawbacks.

If you go with this approach, there's really very little reason not to go magical. Say I build a street sam, and I put 5 essence worth of cyber and bio in him. If I use you're approach, I can make him an adept and get the single point of magic (which comes free with the quality) for the same cost as one level of a skill group, and I open up a whole world of new advancement possibilities. (In comparison, by the core rules I'd have to pay the prohibitive cost of the quality plus 6 points of magic.) It's like latent awakening where you don't have to wait for the GM to give it to you.

Which is why the adept quality should cost more, period... The bulk of the cost should be the quality of gaining magic at all not in the raising of the magic rating.

You are using your build points, the cyber you add reduces your ability to use your magic rating to it's fullest, but it is still there.

It's like taking ambidexterity and starting out one-armed. Sure you can't use it at start, but you can get a new arm and then the effect is useful.

Also remember that character creation order is not set in stone. You can do things out of order. Get the ware you need, then start recalculating max/min costs and start raising attributes. So 2 points of ware means max magic 4, and spend BP to get there as appropriate.

If the GM wants to enforce a penalty on people wanting to play cybermages, then sure, force them to buy up their magic as high as they want before taking the penalties. Realize that if you do that, you're costing the player a lot of BP. BP for the gear, for the Magician Quality (or Mystic Adept), and then the BP for maxing out magic that they now can't use at that level. Potentially you're looking at 45ish BP that are taken up just on those items alone. That's not a small chunk by most standards.

It's my personal opinion that it should be a lot of BP. Mages get to do everything faces and sams do, but better. And they get to do a bunch of things that faces and sams will never be able to do. And they have unlimited room for advancement within their speciality if they so choose. They only thing that prevents them from ruling the game with a virtual "I win" button is the fact that it costs so many BP to be a decent mage that they've got to sacrifice BP that would have been spent somewhere else.

I have played a spellcaster that started with magic 4->3 for a long time, and never got around to increasing magic.

I think that the magic 6 paradigm of SR3 resulted in some universally accepted powergaming for spellcasters. The required offensive dicepool for magicians is 8+ at a force cap of 3+. That is enough to have one expected net hit against a resistance stat of 5.
The level I usually see is more like magic 5 + spellcasting 5 +specialisation or mentor bonus, for at least some 12 dice. IMO a waste of BP for everyone but combat mages.

And if you want to play a combat mage, talk to the GM about the magic power level. Keeping it to magic 3/force 5 on both sides is IMO a sweet spot for the mundane/awakened balance, and it makes building a spellcaster very easy. Way better than a cost adjustment.

doesn't work like that. your magic attribute at chargen is reduced by the number of essence points you've lost (or fraction thereof). just because you can go back and redo something or change something or do it in a different order doesn't mean you get to ignore all the rules that apply to it.



you mean if the GM wants to enforce the rules and the flavor of the setting? yes, you are costing them a lot of BP. there's a reason for that. the cybermage is *supposed* to be sacrificing their magic for the cyber, that's a pretty huge part of the theme of the burnt-out mage. if this wasn't shadowrun, it might work to have it just be your maximum power that is limited, but it is, and it has always had that sacrifice in there, that magic and cyber don't play well together.

You can use any order when it doesn't create a difference in the outcome. When it will make a difference, then use the established order.

If a player is told they get 2 * 3 + 4 nuyen, gee, which way are they going to go when depending on the order of operations they can get 10 or 14?

Bonus if you know what the correct answer is.

Mathematical order of operations aside (10), the balance of the mage versus the cyber (not versus the hybrid, as that's not generally the baseline comparison), is that the mage wanting a max magic must spend 15 for their quality, 10 for their mentor (optional), and 65 for a stat that a cyber character has no use for.

Even if you lower the cap first before applying the magic rating (and thus affecting the cost of each point), the cyber mage generally will be spending as much or more than the normal mage anyway due to the higher gear bp costs needed.

Honestly, it seems like it's open to interpretation. I'd be willing to let a player pay 10/point up to the augmented max of their magic, with the last point being 25 points (so 10 for Magic 2 and 3, 25 for 4 if they had 2 essence gone). Yes, long term the character is going to be beefier than a pure mage or pure cyber character, but that's long term. And not a lot of runners make it that far.

I am a little new to 4th edition, and magic in SR in general (I usually to stick with more technology based builds).

I found this topic quite interesting. I remember mages burning out and what not in previous versions (2nd and 3rd) so I was looking up Essence and Magic loss in 4th edition.

In the game concepts, under Magic it states
"Some burned-out mages, who have lost a bit of their Magic from accidents, drugs, or other abuses to their bodies, attempt to compensate for their weakened magical ability with more cyberware"

however in Street Magic on page 31 under Magic Loss it says
"Unlike in previous editions, magicians don’t lose Magic from grievous wounds or by abusing certain drugs, like stim patches."

I was actually trying to find what happens to your magic rating when upgrading with cyberware in game. What if a player takes no cyberware and starts with a rating 4 in Magic. (I believe that would be 30 BP + Quality). Then in game purchases approximately 1 Essence worth of cyberware, reducing his essence to 5 even. Does he lose a point of magic as well? Can someone direct me to where the rules are on this?

It says in the rules your current and maximum rating are reduced. Think of it as taking the point from the bottom of the stack rather than the top.

Also, someone mentioned that they interpreted it as having a magic of 6 but only access to magic of 5 due to the 1 point of essence loss.
Assuming that view to be the case, when the person goes to up their magic, would you make them pay the cost from 6 to 7 or 5 to 6. Given that this view would indicate that Magic is "augmented" to 5, you should be paying to increase your "natural" rating, which would be 6.

Which of course hits a cybermage even harder in the karmic pocketbook.

i'd leave it as it is, lowering both maximum and current rating FOR STARTING CHARACTERS WITH ACTIVE MAGIC.
for latent awakening, i would only lower maximumn, as you would lose your CHANCE at magic as soon as your essence is reduced below 6 for ANY reason . .

What about for the Magic 3, Essence 6.0 character who decides to get a pain editor installed after chargen? Would you take their magic down to 2 in addition to lowering their max to 5? If not, why not?

From what I remember of reading the description, Latent Awakening specifies that you get to keep your chance at magic as long as you have at least 1.0 essence. (Which makes it a great option for street sams who will eventually run out of things they want to spend their karma on if they live long enough. Eventually getting that magic rating of 1 when you've got 5 points of cyber only costs you 5BP, while buying those conditions at chargen would be [Quality]+65BP.)

provided the GM gives you the awakening you want, maybe. i mean, you *could* wind up as an adept or a mage. but then, you could also wind up with a spell knack.

Or Astral Sight.
There is no kill but overkill

Per RAW, yes, you'd lower both current and max.

SR4 p 164

"Anything that reduces a character’s Essence will also reduce
Magic. For every point (or fraction thereof ) of Essence
lost, the character’s Magic attribute and her Magic maximum
rating are reduced by one. A character with a Magic of 4, for
example, whose Essence is reduced to 5.8 has her Magic immediately
reduced to 3 and her maximum to 5. Further Essence
reductions do not reduce the character’s Magic again until
Essence drops below 5.
If a character’s Magic is ever reduced to 0, she can no longer
perform any kind of magic. Th e magician has “burned out,�
losing all magical ability and becoming a mundane forever. She
retains all magical skills and knowledge, but lacks the ability to
use them. Active skills become Knowledge skills."

I use the current score for determining improvement costs. Keeping track of the entire historical record to calculate karma costs for attribute increases is a pain and unnecessary.

Some may note that tracking "natural" rating is in fact making the order of operations very important, which is an interesting contrast in methods.

oh hell yes i would O.o
i would, provided they do not know it allready, tell them, that they are going to lose magic and if they still wanna, fine, they can, it's their character after all . . and if they accept the consequences, they will have to live with them . . as for keeping track of attribute ratings . . i don't know if that's just me, but could one not save karma by cybering down to magic 3, initiating, raising magic, cybering down to magic 3, initiating and so on?
i have probably overlooked something that says one would have to pay higher cost than the raising from 3 to 4 again and again O.o

In both cases I would make you pay based on your unmodified magic rating. Yes it costs more, cyber ain't cheap to the awakened. So you if you want to have a magic of 5 at generation and cyber 1, you have to buy magic at 6. If you subsequently add 2 more points of cyber, in order to get back to that 5 Magic you have to buy up from 6 to 7 and from 7 to 8. Anything else encourages munkinism, IMHO. Feel free to disagree, but that is the way I understand the rules. I'll read it again when I get home.

hey, you don't have to tell me, i love playing my can-troggies, i don't really deal well with the magics stuff ^^
more costs to the magics, more power to me ^^

Previous editions did make you track your "natural" magic rating. There is nothing in the rules about that for increasing magic, only a multiplier for new rating.

Karma-wise, you may be saving, but time-wise, your character will be tied up getting operations, then initiating, then getting more operations, etc. Plus, you will be stuck as the guy with 3 Magic while the "pure" mage becomes more powerful, and he will be buying spell formulas and magic foci while you are paying for operations. It's really not an effective powergaming strategy, even if it seems that way at first glance.