Hi,

I don't post in this section very often so I apologize if this has been discussed before.

I've created a magician for a RL game that will start soon. I thought of giving him a sustain focus (health) and cast Improved Reflexes on it, thus having 3-4 IPs and improvements to my Reaction more or less at all times, specifically during runs. Improved Body could be used in the same way for an other very good effect.

I discussed this possibility with my GM and we both came to the conclusion that it is cheesy and overpowered to do so. Even though it can be dispelled relatively easily, any non-magical opposition (not capable of dispelling this focus) will have a serious problem to contain a mage with 3-4 spells to cast every round, even if they're cast with fewer dice to divert them to avoid stun damage. And that mage isn't alone either.

Actually, after discussion, he even decided that the spell itself should probably be avoided because the 2 dice penalty for sustaining it doesn't correspond to the amazing boost that this spell can give, regardless of the thresshold reached. He said that he would have a hard time to GM a game in which this spell plays an important role. I can't completely disagree with him.

BTW, a bonded sustaining focus costs 3 BPs for force 1 or 6 BPs for force 2, iirc.

What's your opinion on this? Any problems with other spells combined with sustaining focus too?

If youre dead set on getting those IPs, getting the full F2 sustaining focus is definitely worth the cost.

manipulation spells, illusion spells. health spells. i know people that say its all not fair to the non magic types. some spells your gm might not go with are armor and the improved attribute spells, invisibility,and other such illusions are looking sketchy too. personally i allow my pcs to do anything they want aslong as they tell me first and dont break the rules.

IMO, Imp Reflexes and sustaining focus is often the best way to boost a mage's IPs. Any other method requires implantation, drugs or not available to magicians. If your GM thinks that it is too overpowered for his game, then it is his call, but I have not seen many GM have problems with Imp Reflexes.

Ever since first edition I've had a problem with both the improved reflexes and decrease reflexes spells. It always seemed to me that this stepped onto the Cyberthug's niche and in past editions I've banned it outright along with all spells that boost attributes. Casting a sustained spell (or spell lock depending on your edition) is just too easy a means to becoming a demigod. A magician's niche is her ability to cast spells and conjure spirits not throw motorcycles one handed or best Cyberthug in a game of slapjack. If PC mages are allowed to do that then NPC mages will have to match them to compete and pretty soon your cyberthugs are going to be sitting on the sidelines because with superhuman willpower and reflexes the mages are casting 4 fireballs every 3 seconds.

But hey, that's just my opinion.

"Any non-magical opposition will have a serious problem?". The argument is very flawed. For one, any non-magical opposition will have equal amounts of trouble with mundane initiative enhancements. You think a non-magical enemy will be able to deal with the samurai throwing six to eight attacks in semi-automatic or worse, burst fire? Also, non-magical opposition are prime candidates for their own initiative enhancement. If they can't believably afford wired reflexes, then give them some cram or some jazz. Performance enhancing drugs don't hold the same stigma that they do in fifth world society. By canon, Lone Star developed Jazz to give their officers an equalizer against criminals with initiative enhancement (like your magician, perhaps).

I assume there are mundanes in your runner group, right? Do they have initiative enhancement? How many passes do they get? I imagine your GM might start throwing combat drug enhanced enemies at you if he starts to feel those characters are too overpowered, and then your one IP magician is even more likely to be destroyed.

I'd suggest you raise these points with him, and then try to come up with a compromise, rather than him placing an arbitrary restriction on your character that he won't apply to other PCs and NPCs. Perhaps you could suggest doubling the threshold, so that you're more likely to have two to three IPs, matching most mundanes who start with IP enhancement.

Yes, doubling the threshold would go a long way to making the spell reasonable. Currently you never need to cast it higher than force 3. Flat out disallowing it does nothing but make sacrificing one point of magic for a rating 2 synaptic booster much more reasonable.

Bloody oath. I hate GMs like this.

Ask the bloody GM if he's going to ban Wired Reflexes for the street samurai? Oh... oh he's not?? Well tell him to take the BBB and shove it up his arse - you'll take the goddamn spell and sustained focii. Infact, I'd take two to piss him off.

It's got nothing to do with game balance, its to do with the GM's flawed perception of how the game world works and he's probably looking at it from his own campaign setting.

Hopefully a little reeducation is all that's required.

If he's going to be a dickhead however, that's the point you make the most jacked up, wired mundane character you can with a bucket full of dice on firearms and dodge tests, just to make a point.

- J.

im with jake on this. ive experienced my fair share of gimping because a gm thought that tech should always be better than magic.

allow me to bring certain point that have not been raised yet:

1- while linking yourself so a foci and sustain a spell might seem like a great idea, it also make a fine astral beacon that tells any magic active (mage, adept with astral sight, spirits and dual being) hello I am here and I am using a sustained spell.

2- I love stupid mage that let their focus on... soooo traceable!

3- while in astral space, a mage (or a spirit) who can move way faster than you (unless your in a jet) see this very fine conduit that allows him to throw a spell through your focus into the physical.

4- Fab (I, II and III) along with every essence sucker will love the open house invitation.

do you still think its overpowered?

Grounding spells through foci wasn't even in Third Edition. And a single low-Force focus makes a character more noticeable when it is active, but it's not a "beacon" (leaving it active all the time is still a bad idea).

Sustaining foci do have tangible downsides, though:

Background count: The sammie doesn't have to worry about his wired reflexes fizzling out because something bad happened in the area.

Wards: If you crash through a ward with an active foci, you will alert the mage who created the ward, and there is a chance your focus will be deactivated. If you astrally perceive, you can deactivate your focus, then reactivate it again, but that means you are recasting a spell, and risking Drain, several times in order to keep your initiative boost.

Force limitation: A sustaining focus can only sustain a spell up to its rating. You need a Force: 4 sustaining focus (only possible with the restricted gear positive quality) in order to potentially have 4 IPs.


For all of that, though, the spell is almost essential. Any character who plans on taking part in combat should have at least two initiative passes, and really, three or four are better. I see absolutely no rationale to single out mages to gimp, while leaving adepts and sammies untouched.

I'm just curious... will the argument over which is better in SR, magic or technology, ever go away?

@gobogen :
There are lots of things can make a GM's role "challenging" but that's part of my fun as a GM Maybe your GM isn't comfortable with the rules enough that he understands (as many have pointed out above) what can be done with Magi who leave those things on or rely too-heavily on them. Whatever the situation, sounds like you're hashing-out the specifics like a rational human. I never like removing perfectly good things from the game unless the whole group decides it's a problem or we like our House rule better.

This is the reason that I had my combat mage purchase a Synaptic Booster 1. It's not as good as a rating 2, but it allowed me to put all sorts of other goodies on him. This allows me speed without lighting me up in the Astral.

Who cares if an active spell is a "beacon" on astral space? Is there a ritual sorcery team already assembled waiting for you to activate your foci so they can ground a spell out on you? How many hours is that spell casting going to take? Oh, spirits can see me because of this astral "beacon"? You mean they couldn't see me before? Oh, every mage in the area knows that I've got a sustained spell on huh? Since I'm boosting my willpower attribute and juicing my reflexes so that I can cast multiple fireballs per turn did you think that perhaps they we going to miss my presence somehow?

And where do you get the idea that only the poor mage is "gimped" by not casting 2+ spells a turn? Am I to understand every character that isn't Mr. Uber Mage absolutely MUST go under the cybertechnician's knife to survive his first bar fight? The majority of the sample character have ONE count 'em ONE initiative pass. I guess they're all gimped too huh?

Right tool, right job.

SR1 I would say magic, hands down. Over a long enough time and in particular with the advent of SR4 there is very little that magic can do that technology cannot do - it largely comes down to the degree of which, flexibility and speed of doing something. Varying degrees of depth, flexibility, speed - magic wins. If however you have infinite time, money and resources, technology usually wins.
I realise this could be heavily argued but this is just my thoughts.

I suspect this was a deliberate game balance move personally but wouldn't be suprised if it wasn't either way.

In any case, I have to say I am a fan of the present state of play as overall I don't believe either is more superior than the other. Although it is kinda hard seeing magically lose its potency in the face of advancing tech but I guess that has to be expected. At the end of the day however, it really comes down to creativity of the individual playing the character.

- J.

Remember foci addiction as well. Characters who use their sustaining foci for too long tend to get addicted to it.

Look its fair to say that using sustained focii to hold up Improved Reflexes is far more risky than using Wired Reflexes to achieve the same effect.

Having said that, by RAW hackers can now hack cyberware -- which isn't that different to someone attacking your focii.

On a sidenote, is the grounding spells rule really gone? I'm almost certain it is not in the BBB but I haven't fully read Street Magic cover to cover.

- J.

Long, long gone.

Browncoat, if you're talking to me then please state it in your post.

Now my answer to you: Yes, having that foci up and running is going to bring the heat down faster because if you pass through any wards then you let the other side know you're there. With Wired reflexes you might get hacked if you're stupid (why would wired reflexes have wireless capabilities? Rip it out!). Bioware... you can't hack it, you damn near can't detect it, it doesn't trip astral wards, it's self repairing, and it's Essence cheap. Sure it's expensive, but you ALWAYS have it. Unlike a Foci, it can't be taken away from you... unless they do surgery and if that happens, then you're screwed anyways.

Actually, min-maxing aside, it's widely agreed that the sample characters in the SR4 core book are poorly built, especially for starting players.

The general rule is, if you want to be effective in combat at all, you need 2+ IPs, if you want to be combat focused, you need 3+.

The second IP doubles the amount of actions you can take, and is essential to ending situations before severe retaliation and so that every enemy with speed boosts doesn't go twice for your 1 action.

The sample characters are very very poorly designed and often times don't even follow the rules of the game. Not only are they built poorly and don't accept some basic truths of the game(attributes are better then skills, it's more efficient to raise stats high at creation, ect ect) many of the characters have deep glaring flaws that would be horrible for a player who has little experiance in playing(lacking a proper skill to do their job(eg infiltration), or having inadaquite equitpment(i seem to remember the hacker not having exploit), or being combat oriented without extra IPs.)

Shadowrun is a game where those who strike first usually win, and if that doesn't work you need to make sure at the very least your enemies don't go more often then you do.

The hostility level in the thread has begun to influence my posting. Therefore I offer my apologies to any I have offended with my earlier post and now decline to debate this point further.

Not a bad idea. Tempers can flare when people's idea of what shadowrun is and should be are at stake.

It's dependent on what kind of game you are running. If everyone in the team is minmaxed, then this spell is not that unbalancing. But not everyone wants to push that kind of game. And if the mundanes are not too optimized an optimized mage with multiple IPs will make them redundant.

Generally, in a longer running campaign, awakened characters outclass mundanes.

Mages in a properly run Shadowrun game do NOT want to get into a fight if they are on the Runner side.
Why? Because of the first rule of CorpSec:

Geek the Mage first. I remember one time I ran a combat mage back in a 2nd edition game. I had the Increased reflexes spell up, and, well...when I got hit by like 6 stun grenades....things were not pretty.

In 4th Edition, I saw what our GM did to the groups Shaman when the shaman went full bore magical assault: Security pulled back, kept out of line of sight, called for back up...Back Up was 2 Troll Mages, 2nd Degree Initiates, and 2 Force 5 Fire Spirits, and 6 Heavily armoured goons with mild cyber(Wired 1, Smartlinks)...

Actually anyone in any Shadowrun game would not want to get into a fight due to the threat of escalation.

Geeking the mage first is easier said than done. And most people think that corpsec seem to automatically know who the mage is. Well, if he is holding up a sign that says "Me Mage," then sure. Even visibly magical effects on someone may not mean that he is a mage, it may mean that someone of the other side is, but it may not necessarily be him.

Back in 3rd Ed, I had a Druid PC would cast Armor on the Troll Archer and then the Druid would walk behind the Troll counterspelling anything cast at them and then pointing the opposing mage out and the opposing mage would sprout arrows.

I just had a funny image in my head. The bullet sponge troll samurai wearing a "Geek me, I'm the Mage" sign hung sround his neck.

Oh, dear another one, the Monty Python-esque sec squad believing it. Hilarity ensues.

i like those ideas O.o
i just built a high STR Troll with a Bow for a 3rd ed game . . will have to see if there's a mage with armor or something like that around ^^

The magician in my group decided to always have a Force 3 Health Spell Sustaining Focus active, containing a Force 3 Improve Reflexes spell with three hits, adding 2IPs. So now he has a Mild Focus Addiction (Street Magic). If he keeps it up for three more sessions, it'll go to Moderate, and so on.

And how is this response any different for when the street sam goes to town with his Panther Assault Cannons?

I think that there are at least 2 Superior NPCs and 6 Equal NPCs in that group and 1 Superior NPC requires a team working together to take down.

[ All editions had an IP issue. If you don't working on getting yourself some extra passes you'll quickly fall behind the curve. I've seen this as simply another example of the SR's evolve or die philosophy. You make yourself faster,stronger and more prepared then the competition or you fail, bottom line.

In the campaign we are playing now the players agreed that they should all have the same number of IP's. If one PC only has one IP and the rest have more, the poor person with one will be bored out his mind while waiting for his/her turn. And often misses when it should have been this persons initiative because focus on the game is lost.

That depends on how time combat takes up. We do not have many combat-heavy sessions.

I LOLed

Mages with bonded sustaining focus for are a standard character archetype and approach in Shadowrun.

You may want to consider that the fact there is a rule limiting the number of Foci a mage can have, and additionally rules for Foci Addiction, which indicate it's expected that mages will do this, and there are built in rules to manage it. In addition to the rules, there is always the GM controls of the reinforcing the game world reaction to uber mages, "Geek the Mage", smart NPC tactics and "real world" consequences for being a powerful PC.

As has been already pointed out, almost any focus sustained spell is very useful and effective by eliminating the sustaining penalty.

If the GM doesn't like the increased IP, consider getting +4 Charisma and +4 Willpower and see what happens to your Drain Tests as you overcast Lightning Balls.

The comments on Focus Addiction got me thinking.

If an adept with the Living Focus Power sustains a spell on himself too long, does he get addicted to turning himself on?

I think I had that addiction before I got married.

Um. Nevermind.

I like the idea of making him addicted to the focus, for overusing it. Good one!

Well, other than the obvious issue with their significant others possibly sustaining damage on top of inadequate duration while they bump uglies, what exactly is the "bad thing" about being addicted to being a 2+ IP deathbeast 24/7? Y'know, since it makes it harder to ambush you, get initiative on you, and generally makes you harder to hit in non-magic combat and stuff. Oh yeah, on top of casting 2+ spells per turn.

Hmm...there isn't one!

Interesting question...anyone got decent answer (since I'm considering playing a mystic adept in the future it would help me to have a clue on this point )?

Holy *^#*^%#!! Someone took me seriously!

Actually, Speed Wraith, you do have a point. Let's look at both sides.

On the one hand, since many adept powers are 'on' continually without causing the adept any difficulty, she shouldn't suffer from this one being 'on' a lot either. This power becomes a 'natural' part of the adept.

On the other hand, focus addiction is described as relying "...too much on the power granted by foci...form[ing] a mental and spiritual dependence on them, even to the point of becoming magically impotent when they are dormant or missing." (SM, p. 26-27). One could argue that such reliance could come about from using spells sustained by this power. "Stardust, gimme a shot of that armor spell, now! I need it!"

In the DG, p. 8, the GM is advised to test for focus addiction whenever a character has active foci with a total Force in excess of twice her Magic attribute. So, you could argue that any time the adept has Living Focus active with a spell whose Force adds with other active foci to greater than twice her Magic attribute, the GM should make a test for addiction. Presumably, this could happen even if the ONLY sustained spell was on the adept herself, and of Force higher than twice her Magic attribute.

As a GM, I wouldn't force the issue (Get it, get it?), but as a player I wouldn't argue with a GM who wanted to include this power in the calculation.

"Fuckin' HIT me, man! I need that juice!"
Mage casts "Agony" on the living focus guy.
"OH IT HURTS SO GOOOOOOD!"

What's his magic rating? That seems excessive to my thinking.

If he was slinging around a Force 3 power and weapon focus I would agree, sure...

- J.

The most graceful counter to lots of init passes is security guards panicking and spending an edge to go first, then an edge to get a second pass, then another edge to go first pass two. Sure its a level of dedication for a security guard to try SOOO hard to kill a runner but its not like folks see fireballs and say "Meh, the next one will probably only incinerate Joe."

I have to point out that every PC and NPC of import having multiple IP's is a result of min-maxing, and is not necessarily "the general rule."

I've never had a PC nor made an NPC with multiple IP's yet. There's just so much other cool cyberware to choose from.

Characters with only 1 or 2 IP's being "Behind the curve" is 100% a reflection of a given group's play style.

It's just karma! And it was just amusing.

Well, if the addiction persists long enough he'll reach "burnout" status, where he starts losing magic points... and at every level he gets growing negative modifiers against Drain Tests.

I would point out that smart NPC tactics are for smart NPCs. Smart NPC tactics for dumb NPCs just encourages your players to play out of character; as a GM, you are the one the others take their cue from. Want good players? Set a good example.

Touche'.

- J.