After a little research and thought I've come to the conclusion that the LOS rules for casting magic don't make sense.

Why does a mage need to see an opponent with "natural" or "optical" vision? Why will digital imaging (thermographic goggles) not work? I seem to remember "because you would be casting it the image instead of the person" but the same could be said for mirrors, fiber optics, binoculars, heck, even my glasses.

How do mirrors and fiber optics work for spellcasting? If a mage needs to be spatially aware of an opponent, the only reason that I can see for the necessity of optical vision, then I fail to see how mirrors and fiber optics truly pinpoint opponents.

Honestly, I've always despised the fiber optic crap. In the old systems when it was introduced it didn't seem to gel well with the explanations of how magic worked. It seemed to be another mechanic introduced for its "KEWL" factor.

I'm willing to change my mind here. I do not want to make house rules to resolve this, I just want to play the damned game as is. I just need to be able to explain it to my gamers so we don't blow the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing.

Thanks

Because you are seeing the actual person through a part of you, rather than through an electronic relay.

With potentially no idea as to their actually spatial location relative to you. Don't have the capacity to assense them, so you can sync up the mana in the area with their aura, which is the general description of spell casting in shadowrun, so why can you cast at all?
Why would casting at someone in pitch blackness through a set of thermal goggles be impossible, when you could still assense their aura, and doing so from 20 kilometers away through a fiber optic cable be perfectly fine, when you can not see any portion of their aura?

Refracted light and the way magic works. You can physically see them even without being able to see their aura, so you can form the imago, energise it with mana and slam it into their crotch over and over should you so desire.

Fiber optics and mirrors specifically work for casting spells. See: Mage Sight Goggles.

every thing bought with Essence is valid for targeting... except those break the game like RADAR and Ultrasonic vision. You pay the Essence, but get none of the benefits.



If there is any electronic boosting of the signal (such as extending the distance you can pump a light pulse through a fiber optic cable) then it becomes invalid for targeting with spells.

As has been implied, digital imaging doesn't work for spellcasting, because you can't see the target's aura. Fiberoptics and mirrors apparently reroute astral vision as well as light rays. Personally, I prefer to disallow targeting through fiberoptics. I feel that the spatial link between you and the target is lost. I don't care how well you can see the aura, if you don't know where it is, you can't connect (depending on what's between you and it, I might allow a perception test). But if anyone wants to try to convince me otherwise, feel free...

Because then one mage (which by the way are 1 in 1000 rare) can cover a whole floor of a corp or more.

Except you DO know where the other end of the fiber optic cable is. I would think that would be the FIRST thing that the corp trainers do. I mean think about it. You are Joe the Corp Mage and you just stunned* a group of 'Runners. You need to tell the grunts where to go to pick up their dumb asses.

* = Stunball and stunbolt would I think be the first spells taught to a corp mage. It's not messy, it doesn't kill unless you want it to (by repeat castings), and it's low drain.

I understand the RAW of the mater, what I am questioning is the logic behind the RAW.

ANY sight bought with essence works. It just so happens that Radar and Ultrasound are not sight, regardless if they are implanted or not.

The basic rule for targeting spells is that if you can see the light reflected off the target, you can cast spells on them. So mirrors and fiber optics work.

Personally I'm okay with casting through mirrors or transparent solids(like glass), but I don't like fiber optics or casting through invisible objects and typically don't allow it.

if you want a game world answer:

one thing works, another does not, all found by trial, error, and the odd lucky discovery...

basically, they have yet to nail down the hermetic explanation as to why it works, but for some reason it does, under certain conditions...

Remember that magic doesn't conform to human logic, or any physical laws. Just when you think you figured something out, the astral plane will throw a curveball at you, just to tee you off.

Trial and error is the only way anyone knows anything about magic.

If you try to formulate some sort of consistent scientific "theory of magic LOS", then no, they don't.




The hand-waving answer that I seem to remember has to do with the fact that light reflected from the actual object that you're casting at needs to enter your eye in order for the "mystical connection" required for spellcasting to work. Seeing a reproduced image of the subject will not suffice. Mirrors and fiber optics work because light reflected from the subject is actually redirected to your eye, as opposed to captured on a CCD and then reproduced for you. It would be akin to casting at a subject of a photograph. It has nothing to do with simply being able to pinpoint your subject.




The official explanation as I understand it is what I mentioned above.
You can get into all sorts of nitpicking about "how is a cybereye different from a camera", and whether any particular cyberware system has a direct input to your visual cortex and therefore should work, blah blah blah. To be frank, I think the magic theory and LOS systems were not meant to stand up to such scrutiny, and the rules are there mostly for game balance rather than because they are internally consistent under scientific analysis. But if you simply want a semi-plausible explanation (and really, what more can you hope for in any RPG incorporating magic?) for mirrors and Mage-Sight Goggles, then I think that the official line actually works quite well.

Exactly. It's part of you.

You mean aside from the same benefits that anyone else would get with that modification?
Being able to see through several walls certainly has its benefits, even if you can't spell-target with it.

My thought was that the image must get to you uninterupted, so it's not a new image, but just a bending or distortion of the old image, because technology can't see magic, and thus can't target it. If it's a new image (such as in the case of a camera taking a picture and converting it to digital to send it, then having it converted back into something else on a screen) then you're not really looking at the magical image of the creature, just the digital recreation of it. But evidently mirrors and the like can indeed reflect everything, including whatever the magic needed to see.

JaronK

You can't apply physical theory that cleanly to magic. Hermetics may hold that as a valid theory, but unfortunately magic doesn't like to do what mages think it should do.

remember one thing, in earlier edition there was different variant on cybereye modifications, one optical and one digital, so that mages could gain the benefit.

these days i think its mostly boiled down to fluff, for ease of bookkeeping.

as for radar and ultrasonics, they are both waves that a metahuman is not equiped to deal with, and as such needs to be interpreted by electronics before it can be understood by the mind.

the visual spectrum on the other hand can be piped relatively unaltered to the brain as long as the visual nerves are mostly intact. i suspect that cybereyes, regardless of name, are mostly analog in nature, less work that way.

hell, i suspect that a lot of tech in SR, at least the type that involve brain interfaces, are analog, or at least pack so finegrained analog/digital converters that one could not tell the diff unless one hooked a equally sensitive scope and overlayed the original and the output of a A/D-D/A chain.

oh, and here is another one. mirrors work on the astral, no? but computer screens are unreadable on the same plane, yes?

From what I recall, yes.
You get a vague sense of what's on the computer screen ("Lots of numerical information, probably accounting data" or "An internet browser at a news source" or "some kind of simulated card game" vs. "An excel spreadsheet showing the company's expenses over the last two months," "The internet is open to a webpage, NPR.org," and "A game of solitaire").

Exactly. Astral space, and thus aura reading, would allow you to read somebody's aura either through something that is transparent in the real world (glass is still transparent in the astral), or off of something that is reflective in the real world. If you looked through Magesight goggles in the astral, you should still be able to see their aura.

hmm, i was under the impression that computer screens where basically blank, as they didnt present any "emotional" content, vs say a book (how that deals with a printed copy im not sure i want to get to deep into, tho i guess the emotional content would be somewhat subdued vs a handwritten version of the same text).

thing is that if one gets technical about how a fiber optic wire works, its like a rolled up mirror in the shape of a hollow tube.

so in a way it becomes like having a mirror at every corner of a hallway, so that the same can stand in one end, and see reflections of reflections...

Mmm. It's hard to say. My group hasn't encountered computer screen devices when someone's astrally perceiving yet, though we have run into signs and the like.

It's all about the interaction of photons in the 380 nm to 760 nm range with the metahuman aura. Only photons which have come directly from the target have the auric resonance required to allow magical effects to track back. This is a quantum thaumaturgic effect known as the Granger relation.

Well, we already know technological devices lack the ability to see magic itself, only the effects of magic. So, that's why I go with my theory that any mechanical device that translates the image into something else (as opposed to simply redirecting the image) simply fails to make the translation of whatever it is that magic needs to see.

Photons that come from the target does make some sense, but would that mean some sort of bat shapeshifter that only sees via ultrasound can't target things? That doesn't sound right to me at all.

JaronK

/thread

You have just won, sir. Success!

That's the much more technobabble (Magibabble?) version of what I was thinking. It's the same difference as using an teddy bear that belongs to the target to cast a spell at them and using the same brand of teddy bear, you need the light that has interacted with them, not a copy.

now that we know how, through photons. We just need a page reference of a nice chart showing us which visual enhancements can be done optically so we know what can be added to your mage sight goggles. Page number, anyone.....

Photons have a an astral aura!

particle. wave, astral signature, it has it all...

I think you're thinking way too hard about it.
The explanation is there to make the rules sound plausible, the explanation is not a rule in and of itself.

The fact remains that people are attempting to formulate some sort of scientific theory about a phenomena that is completely made up, and which conforms to certain rules more for the purposes of game balance than because they have internal, logical consistency. Just because a rule isn't consistent with another rule on some deep, analytical level doesn't mean that it should be changed. It means that it is there for game balance, and any explanation for it is just hand-waving for the purpose of making it SEEM plausible on the surface so that we can have some suspension of disbelief. Analyzing it to death is useless and irrelevant.

By the way, bats have excellent eyesight. Ultrasound is just more useful for spotting small, moving insects at night.

I'm not saying that any rule needs to be changed... just that I think the in game reason for magic not targetting through digital translations of images is because technology can't see magic. And analyzing it isn't useless if it's fun!

Besides, you can target magic if you can see something's aura, even if it's in an entirely dark room with no photons bouncing around in it, so clearly photons coming from the target is not the explanation.

JaronK

Only if you are astral perceiving. Otherwise your eating a vision modifier on the spell casting test.

Of course, I did indeed mean while astral perceiving. Suffice to say, normal photons don't seem to be astral per se, so it's not the photons you need to target.

JaronK

Haha I agree with you there.
I'm just saying, some people are tempted to house-rule or change things based on the idea that it "doesn't make sense", or doesn't jive with some other rule logically. I think that, in most cases, this is a poor reason for a house rule, especially considering that we're dealing with something (magic) that pretty much inherently doesn't make sense.

Well, when dealing with something that has no basis in reality (such as magical targetting rules) I think the thing to do is to read the given rules, and figure out what makes sense from there. After all, that's exactly how science works... you see how something works, then try to figure out why it works that way. If your version of sense says something shouldn't work but it does, then it's your idea that's wrong.

So, we know a few things about how magical targeting works. We know that it's visually based (you can't target from hearing alone, IIRC) but that it doesn't actually require functional eyes (since blind astrally perceiving characters can target just fine). We know that as long as you can see an image of your target, even if your eyes are closed (and perceiving) you can fire, unless that target has gone through a technological filter that converts and reproduces the image in some way. Line of Effect doesn't matter since you can target through fiber optics and windows. In fact, ritual magic creates a magical targetting function without any line of sight at all.

So clearly, there's some magical connection between the mage and the target that does not function if there's any translation via technology, but which can be created by ritual magic. To me, that says that the technology is simply failing to translate whatever the magical connection is... it's not photons or sound waves or whatever, but rather something else, something which doesn't actually scientifically exist.

JaronK

Astral photons from the astral sun pass through the earth.

I understand that some of you have the opinion "because it's magic". Valid but not acceptable. The rules are necessary for story writing purposes as well. I need a firm understanding how this system handles it's magic so my stories make sense and the player's don't think I'm just "bouncing things off the deflector dish".

I can understand binoculars because it's a spatial thing. You know where he is at, you can see him and you can toss a fireball at him. I can't remember if mirrors were always allowed because they seem to have that whole spatial issue. It'd probably be hard to bank a fireball off of a mirror anyways (humor, don't get your panties in a bunch). Wasn't there even a problem with windows? I'd like to say "I'll check" but that's a lot of books to thumb through.

And here's something else to think about. Indirect Combat Spells are physical manifestations that enemies can see coming, hence the Reaction roll for getting out of the way. If this is so, where does the spell come from, the fiber optic? Really? Before you answer, REALLY? Think about it. I understand that the fireball doesn't open the door, take an elevator and then zings the bad guys but this seems terrible story material (and pretty shoddy rules).

As said, I don't feel like house ruling anything, and while I rather just play, I want my stories to feel like they make sense. I'd be much happier if a dev can chime in with something.

I thought that indirect spells have to actually travel from the caster to the target and therefore useless for casting through magesight goggles. Like I said in a previous post, Stun Bolt and Stun Ball would be a spell in EVERY Corp Sec Mage's playbook. It's clean, low drain, with it you can take prisoners, and it can disrupt spirits as well.

Actually, Indirect Combat Spells are, literally, a fireball (or lightning, or whatever) from the mage's hands that flies to the target. It couldn't use magesight goggles unless you felt like hurling the fireball around the corner, like firing a gun around a corner using Smartlink only. You also can't throw fireballs through glass; they'll explode when they hit the barrier.

Now for DIRECT combat spells, well... that's really the "magical" part of it all. It's less like a bolt of lightning or fire leaving your fingertips; you're actually channeling mana into a person to cause some sort of ill effect (knocking them out, causing massive physical injury, whatever). As long as your mage can make the connection with them; that connection being most easily attained via physical verification of them and their aura, then BAM, it's good.

The astral, if you remember, is a shadow of our world. Some of the rules are different, yes (like, you know, no gravity and no clipping), but the IDEAS of the world remain the same. Ergo, glass is still transparent, walls are still opaque, and mirrors still reflect. It is that psychic link formed by seeing the person (a link that technology just can't translate) that enables the mana conduit to be formed in order to shunt massive energy into the person to cause said crippling injuries. The psychic "reflection" is as good as the real thing, since the whole astral linking is, more or less, a certain type of psychic phenomenon. It's not like shooting someone with a bullet.

At least that's my two cents.

I think RAW isn't explicit if Indirect Spells Manifest at the Caster and travel to the Target, or Manifest at the Target. You can pick one model, and then it's fairly easy to answer most of the questions. I have a feeling it's meant to be Manifest at Caster and travel to Target, but I can't find enough supporting information in the rule books to be certain of it. Personally I don't mind either model, but I do need to choose one to be consistent for my players.

We simply houseruled against fibre optics for casting. Opens a huge can of worms when mages can zapp you out of nowhere.

That was for vision magnification. First mentioned SR1 SSC p85, for those playing at home