These spells say that they work like Shatter or Powerball, so presumably they do damage to objects rather than immediate destruction. For walls and vehicles and such, that's easy to calculate. But what if you've got Wreck Gun or Wreck Toaster? Are you just trying to beat the Object Resistance threshold? Or do you need to do that -and- do a certain amount of damage? If so, how do you decide how much damage an object can take? The barrier rating?

i.e. If I had Wreck Gun, and I wanted to trash that machine pistol, I'd be rolling against a Threshold of 3 (manufactured high-tech) with net successes applied toward a Heavy Metal barrier (Armor 6, Structure 7). So I'd have to get 10 total DV to destroy it (1/4 (Armor x2) + 7 Structure). Which, if I cast it at Force 6, would require 7 successes (3 for Threshold + 4 more to up the DV), assuming no counterspelling is going on.

The way you describe it is probably pretty much the way I'd do it, though I'd probably cut the Armor and Structure ratings listed in the book in half or more for smaller objects like guns and toasters. Firstly, they're often far smaller than 1 square meter so doing the full Structure rating in damage to create a 1 square meter hole in it is overkill. A gun, for example, might have a structure of only 2 or 3 rather than the full 7 of that a wall made of a Heavy Material would have.

I'm very glad you posted this! This is my first post on dumpshock, and I'm here because we're dealing with this very issue in our current campaign. When we were balancing our characters, pre-game, I was ready to let a player use "demolish gun" the way you suggest. However, on gameday, the player pulled a loophole on me. His claim, and I can't dispute it from the wording of the rules, is that for direct combat spells, once you beat the object resistance table, the object gets NO ROLL to resist.

So, if you beat the threshold (which I would apply as 4 for high tech stuff), you apply the spell's damage straight to the object's structure. What's more, he argues that since a gun is much smaller than the standard 1x1 meter cube that is the guide for structures, a gun should only have 2 or 3 boxes of health.

What this means, is with the spell "Demolish Guns" at rating 6, you need 4 successes. Never any more or less. 4 successes means that you have automatically done 6 boxes of damage to every gun in sight. You have instantly disintegrated 12 square meters worth of guns. Handguns, Assault Cannons, everything. All the enemy weapons. No resistance. Further, since there is no resistance roll, there can be no counterspelling. This technique is going to work every single time he casts the spell. He'll never even take a box of drain for it.

The "balance" for this, the theory goes, is that the line of sight requirements for direct combat spells means only items that can be seen can be destroyed. Should I just make the entire world put socks on their guns, so they can't be targeted? I don't know what else to do.

I played with this a little bit when setting up an ambush. My determination was that any guns in the area that the caster can see were destroyed if the threshold was reached after coutnerspelling etc. Backup pieces under a coat, or guns that were out of LoS from the caster would be perfectly fine. The presumption on my part was that by the time a spell's Force was high enough to achieve the right number of hits, it is going to need to be high enough to destroy most modern firearms.

It's a very specific spell that has mixed results based on a lot of circumstances that are not always in the caster's control.

An option which I thought of as an Evil GM was to create a more limited spell and say non-ceramic firearms. Then any firearm which had the full-ceramic modification would be safe so that a mage could drop it in the middle of his own team and wash over security forces without worrying about crippling his own teammates.

This is not the right way of looking at it. "Demolish guns" is merely a Powerball that filters for guns only. So, if you simply cast an unfiltered powerball, you could demand that the damage is done to all guns, cyberware, furniture, etc. in the area, in addition to the bodies. Why not?

Because the drain on Powerball is generally much higher than you want it to be if you're gonna be unloading on large groups of people. It's generally better to use Manaball or Stunball, because you can increase the force while resisting with the same efficacy as a less-powerful powerball.

IF your primary goal is to wreck objects, use a wreck X spell.
IF your primary goal is to wreck people, use stun or mana spells.
Only use power spells if these goals are equally important.

thanks, adarel, but I am not looking for tactical advice. I'm asking if my above interpretation of the rules is correct. Is it a blanket 4 successes for a powerball to destroy any object possessed by the opposing team? Four gross successes. Why is this not the primary spell of all my NPC mages?

I'm sure my players would adore it if I told them, "Ok all your visible equipment and cyberware is destroyed in the first round. No, there is no saving throw. Hey, don't complain, the ganger mage got 4 successes on his powerball roll."

This is where you enter that hinky area of "the rules break down with that much fine examination." Since no items have health levels, it's almost entirely up to the GM to interpret what gets shredded by powerball and what doesn't. How many health levels do you need to do to break a pistol? An assault rifle? A commlink? What about something wierd, like a chair, or the cuffs on a perp? There's just no data. So I just ignore that particular oddity, myself, unless it's dramatically appropriate. Because yes, it's perfectly possible by the rules to take a bunch of stacked out swat team members and *strip them totally naked* with a single spell, and that's kinda silly.

The way I determine dramatic appropriateness is this: is it more awesome for people's shit to get damaged? If yes, do damage to items. For expediency, all items smaller than people have 8 or so health levels, and only hits over the OR are counted for purposes of adding to the force of the spell for damage. So say you cast a force 4 powerball and get 6 successes: all items take 6 damage, and suffer appropriate wound penalties. I.E. guns that are damaged have a -2 to accuracy afer 6 boxes of damage, etc.

This probably unreasonably complex set of rules came out of a player who loved shooting people's equipment with APDS.

I like where you're going with this, Adarael.

While 4E does specify how many boxes of damage different materials have (the Structure rating), it doesn't specify exactly how many boxes your equipment should get. It says, for instance, that a dataterm (which I believe to be an internet phone booth), a lamp post, and one square meter of hardwood, all have 7 boxes.

It has been argued that the structure ratings should be extrapolated from the sizes of the items in question. Since guns are smaller than the objects listed in the structure examples, they should have only a very few boxes, say, 2 or 3, if you use this kind of logic. Comlinks, cybereyes, and other very precious devices are all tiny, so size logic dictates that they have a tiny number of damage boxes.

Maybe size is not the best way to estimate structure ratings for runner gear. Maybe the # of boxes should be estimated against, say, the price of the object. If we place the structure ratings of equipment at a more competitive number, it might help mediate the problem. The problem being that, with these rules, any low level mage can automatically sweep naked a room full of the most elite runners in the world. If the structure ratings of gear were higher than the average base damage of these spells, it might add enough chance into the equation that the spells are no longer automatic room-clearers.

That doesn't solve the other problem I have with "direct" combat spells. A Powerbolt, cast at rating 4, multiple times, can destroy any object in existence. Any door. Any safe. Any prison. Doesn't that just seem wrong?

An option is to allow the hardness of the material to roll against the spell as if it were the armor - not the structure, per se, but just the 'armor' or 'harness' or whatever the term is. Because the structure of a 1/4 inch plate of steel and a 1-meter plate of balsa wood are objectively likely to be the same - but I sure as hell won't let a force 2 powerbolt blow holes in the steel while I'll let it happen all day to the balsa.

So in that case, the Balsa has hardness 0, so successive blasts blow holes in it...but the steel has (arbitrarily) hardness 6, and so will pretty much always be unaffected by the force 2 powerbolt.

Conceptually, I have no problem with reducing a large object via successive attacks, even vault doors, if the initial attacks should do damage at all. Now, for a Vault Door, I'd want at least Force 8-10.

I haven't really had to apply this concept, I admit, or not in any meaningful or codified way. But my GMing style is extremely off-the-cuff, and I tend to keep a lot in my head.

Ok, something glorious has happened... I have figured out my original misinterpretation of the rules text. This post is going to be very long, and very nerdy. It will answer Eugene's original question, and render everything I have posted in this thread moot. Hopefully, this post will clarify things for anybody trying to parse some of the convoluted passages in the rulebook, regarding direct combat spell resistance.

Let's start with the following passage from the SR4 rulebook:



Direct combat spells are opposed by a "spell resistance test". A spell resistance test, in this section of the book, is sometimes just referred to as a "resistance test". If that resistance test is made, these spells don't even happen. That is the difference between them and indirect combat spells. No matter what, if you cast a lightning bolt or other indirect combat spell, as long as you get one success, a lightning bolt comes out of your hands. The opponents can dodge the bolt, but they cant flat out "spell resist" it into nonexistence.

Following the "resistance test", the target gets a "damage resistance test". With that in mind, read the following passage, the one which caused my confusion:



2 things about the above passage make it confusing. First thing:


This means that the external armor a living target is wearing does not aid in soaking damage. It's confusing, because they state this right before talking about nonliving objects, without starting a new paragraph. And, coincidentally, a nonliving object's "Body" stat happens to be called "Armor". Thus began my confusion, which was compounded by the second thing:


The juxtaposition of these two statements makes it easy to misconstrue the meaning. The last statement is clarifying the prevous sentence, by saying that the object does not get a "spell resistance test".

The spell resistance test is made before the damage resistance test. So, in direct spells against nonliving objects, the spell resistance test is replaced by a simple success threshold. Otherwise, the casting is treated the same way as casting vs the living. The object gets a damage resistance test, as normal. This is why several sections single out Indirect Combat Spells as having alternate damage soak methods vs nonliving objects, but no mention is ever made of direct combat spells in these instances. Direct Combat Spells are damage resisted as normal, using Body/Willpower for living creatures, or Armor x 2 for inanimate objects.

So, as it turns out, indirect combat spells (at least, elemental ones) are designed to be better against inanimate objects than direct spells!

Thus, spells like Demolish: Gun are excellent for their utility at filtering out things to damage in an area, but will not match a fireball in sheer power, when it comes to melting people's guns.

The damage resolution differences between indirect and direct combat spells are congruent with this interpretation. In a direct combat spell, you first try to cause the spell to fail, then you soak the damage. In an indirect combat spell, you first dodge , then you soak the damage. The object resistance table can cause a spell to fail, but it is not intended to bypass the damage resistance step.

The idea that there IS a damage resistance step for direct spells is supported by this developer chat from may, 2008:



The good news for Wreckers is, that since counterspelling for direct combat spells happens during the "spell resistance test", it seems you really can't counterspell against Demolish: Gun.

Ok i think that's it! Did anybody follow all that? To put it another way, Eugene's original combat example was exactly correct. Except, I'd say that if the machine pistol was smartlinked, it would have been threshold 4 instead of 3.

so first the spell must overcome the resistance threshold (3 or 4 for guns) or it fails outright - then if it has some successes over that threshold the Armor x 2 of the object is rolled as a soak and any successes left over do damage to the structure. Is that right?

Just saying that having a coupla chips in your gun doesn't change it from a manufactured high-tech object like an electronic item, to a highly-processed object on the scale of a computer or drone.

I think so.

that's it! Keep in mind, this hinges upon the theory that Direct Combat spells like manabolt get a damage resistance test at all, for people or anything. That procedural detail is never explicitly stated in the book! But, I believe it would be the only instance in the entire system where damage is applied without a damage resistance test. The game seems to be designed against discrepancies like that, so I think this is the correct interpretation.

OK so the numbers for guns...

a 3 or 4 resistance test then what does the gun roll for it's body?

Bobby was incorrect in this as he stated later in the chat as verified by Synner
YOU DO NOT GET A DAMAGE RESISTANCE TEST IF YOU FAIL THE SPELL RESISTANCE TEST FOR DIRECT COMBAT SPELLS.

If you would have scrolled down further in that thread you found you would have found this.
By RAW DC's are either an all or nothing affair. If you can beat the OR for non living items your net hits beyond the OR threshold stage the damage up. This affects all things in LOS for a Area Effect spell.

back to square 1, I guess. here's that chat. I'm having trouble finding the correction, perhaps Magus could point it out? Magus, any thoughts on the demolish gun questions?

I'll roll up a decker.

ha! Tek is a player in my game.

I found at least one thread, now, that brings up the chat correction. Apparently, the argument about Direct Combat Spell damage resistance tests comes up on this forum about once a month. It seems that there are 2 common house rules to deal with this. One is to just give the damage resistance test anyway, the other is to switch the drain codes of indirect and direct combat spells, to better reflect their power level.

Yes that is one topic that always rears its ugly head. Most people here do not like that to beat a mage, it is very hard to unless one is a mage as well. I like that though. I mean really the sixth age has dawned and there is a new kid on the block. Until one gets to know him and his weaknesses there is very little you can do about it. Look at the progress magic has made since 1ed. Now that the Theory of Magic has progressed we have more crossover between Mage and Shaman. I like the fact that the Dev's have progressed magical understanding.
And on the technical aspect they have (re)introduced Otaku or Technomancers. Evolution baby! Gotta love it.

As for the OT, I would say this. There is no single 'GUN' skill. Weapons are not listed under 'GUN'
They are Pistols, SMG, LongArms, Automatics and Heavy Weapons. Each would be its own Demolish Spell. So if your player lears Demolish Pistols, then the Troll with the MiniGun is not affected. He would need a spell for each category of firearm. This is by RAW as well. ie Slay 'SPECIES' and you have to learn Orc Troll etc etc.

Damagewise Once the OR is exceeded then the number of net hits is what decides the damage level. As mentioned above the GM is going to have to decide by the size of the firearm what it's structure rating would be.

Tying the spell to specific skills is a fine way of handling those spells, even though I think "Demolish: Gun" is an example spell title in the magic book. What's uglier is that "powerball" means "Demolish: All Visible Items". No damage resistance, not many condition monitor boxes, and there seems to be no possible counterspelling against it. Has no one exploited that? It's huge. Why bring guns?

I'm still leaning towards house ruling this one. As for the boxes of damage each weapon should have, I'm thinking pistol: 4, rifle: 6, and 7 or higher for bigger guns.

the errata adds a line to indirect spells that says. "Note that unlike other spells Indirect Combat spells may affect other targets that the caster cannot see if they are caught within the spell’s area of effect."

Exactly. Ram/Wreck/Demolish are all Direct combat spells which means anything out of LoS is safe. Am I misunderstanding what you are saying?

Ah, ok, they are. The errata came up in another thread, and I remembered this one, but couldn't find the most specific piece to quote.