OK, time to ad my $.02 to the discussion about Magic, Overcasting and my idea for dealing with them.

Change all Direct Combat Spells from "F/2" to "F". This is pretty damn hard for Direct Spells.

As for overcasting... make it so Mages can only go to Magic * 1.5 rather than Magic * 2. I know that isn't much, but it does prevent uber spells from being tossed about.

The thing is, we can assume the Designers find no flaws with the current way overcasting works. Otherwise they would have changed that.

Instead they changed the way drain is handled for successes. Which many people seem to be shaking their heads at.

Honestly, the way overcasting now works fine IMO and I think the real problem is how it interacts with first aid.




Are you going to impose a similar nerf on the amount of targets you can hit with a grenade?

If you were going to implement such a severe nerf, at the very least make it MAG rating = # of targets. Otherwise your change hammers starting casters who generally start with a MAG 5.

OK, so, I am reading the spell casting rules here, and I notice that Object Resistance only applies if the target is the object. So, casinting Improved Invsibility or Lightning Bolt on a Drone needs 6 successes, on a Camera Needs 4, but on the person who is skulking about protected by the Imp Invisibility? It does not need anything more then to pass their resistance..well, unless you want to count their clothes in for an OR of 2. I see no-where where it says that one has to beat the OR of things NOT targeted by the spell for it to take effect.

Oh, wait..I take that back..continuing on, Indirect Combat spells are treated as a ranged attack, and are against the targets reaction. Downside is, unlike Direct Combat spells, there is a damage resistance test, that armour applies to. However, it is half IMPACT armour. Object Resistance does not apply to these spells, so Lightning Bolt becomes the spell of choice for shooting down drones(since it is also Electrical Damage).

Of course, I can see Imp Invis not being completely reliable against Drones, since it only effects visual senses. Give a Droone somthing like Ultrasound or Radar? Does it matter that the visual camera cannot detect the target?

The clothes aren't looking at the invisible person, except if they have built-in cameras, so there's no need to beat their OR.

Going backwards through your post, there's a table on pg. 152 of SR4A that lists visibility modifiers for different types of "vision". Ultrasound is on there. If we were to suppose that being invisible were equivalent to "Full Darkness" because you can't see your target at ll, then you'd be look at a -3 penalty for relying on pure Ultrasound. Radar uses the same visibility modifiers as Ultrasound (as stated in Augmentation).

Regarding who is the target of illusion spells, the book explicitly says that you have to overcome the OR of any non-living thing for the spell to "be effective" against them. You cast it on yourself, but its the viewer that resists the effect.

With Lightening Bolt, you do not need to get six success to affect a drone, etc. You create an actual physical effect - a charge of electricity in this case - which is no longer magical but actual energy, and you fling it at the target. You would need to overcome the OR if it were a Direct Combat spell.

Shall we nef the sams the same way, as they also do massive amounts of damage?

I propose that guns can overheat or even explode , doing their damage code + net hits damage to the shooter.

Now we only have to agree on a meningfull roll to counter the heat build up and a target nr when the gun explodes.

I say we take base damage value hits as the target nr of overheating, each hit above that imposes a - 1 die penalty on supsequent shooting actions with that gun and lowering the overheating target nr.
The gun explodes when one has 2x base damage value hits.

This would about nerf the Sams the same way as the changes in OR, attribute cost and direct combat spell drains neft the mages

No... I see no reason. I was using a mechanic already in the book. Dual casting... Split your dice pool and cast two spells at +1 drain to each spell per spell cast. I chose 1/2 magic as a base because it puts a significant restriction on very powerful spells. I was also thinking of adding a metamagic to allow a mage to hit additional targets up to grade without increasing drain. It would work best when combined with the SR4 version or drain instead of the SR4A version.

I am on your side when it comes to the magic debate... However, I don't mind compromising when it comes to making the game better.

I think everyone is forgetting a few things when it comes to mages. Most mages only have one initiative pass while your street sam can and usually has more. Yes, a mage can get Increase Reflexes.
Save all the arguments and counterarguments for that spell we have talked about them enough already.

Why are direct Damage spells so good? Simple... At least from a SR1 standpoint when it was harder for a mage to get multiple passes. I cast once per turn, I fry one person... A street Sam shoots multiple times per action and gets multiple turns and fries 2, 3 or more targets. That was the balance then. Things have changed. Now the mindset for the game is that everyone needs multiple passes and anyone who only has one is worthless.

I have argued till I'm blue in the face about spells vs. guns with my GM. I have even done it here to some extent. And with the current way of thinking with inflated dice pools and multiple passes mages need a good kick to the nuts to bring them back down. Mages have 10x the amount of tricks than any other character. A fact everyone seems to forget. "Quick, we need to get off this rooftop cast levitate on us!" or "We are being overrun bring out your elementals!" or... I think everyone gets my point.

I play mages almost exclusively. I never had a mage with Improved Reflexes. You want mages to be back to the way they where... Say mages can only cast one spell per initiative turn (not pass) no matter how many passes they have and put everything else back to the way it was.

And this is why my post count is so low... I try to avoid these arguments...

This might already have been mentioned but Bow damage has been adjusted with SR4A. Lot's of clarification stuff I'm coming across too.

No more Cybered Trolls doing Rail Gun damage with a bow? It's about time.

Since the BBB states that Imp.Invisibility really wrap the light around the subject, i only consider the OR when the camera/sensor has any way to process image (like a drone's sensor or a camera that automatically detect movement and sounds an alarm). If the camera just generate the image and show for someone (metahuman), without any kind of process (just like a normal digital camera), i oppose the test with the metahuman whatching the footage.

Is that right? Wrong?

Well, any time an object is subject to a physical spell (except powerbolt/ball and its variants) you must beat it's OR. There is no perception check at all, ever. You get 4 hits on imp.invis. you become invisible to cameras (any cameras as far as I can tell) you get 6 hits you are invisible to drones, any drones... No perception check.

As far as I can tell anyway if I understood Synners post a few pages back.

Sorry, it just seems like posts are coming out of the woodwork with dozens of new ways to nerf mages.

As for your idea, half magic is very drastic in my opinion. And adding drain for each extra target only makes it worse.

I also don't think it's necessary.




I just don't see the need for that kind of "balance" in that particular example (street sam vs. mage), unlike many people I don't actually disparage D&D 4E for the current balance it has. But when I want to play that game, I'll play that game.

What's always attracted me to shadowrun is that characters/character development has an organic "real world" feel to it, allowing characters to learn a variety of skills/abilities outside of their archtype.




You don't think the karma costs for a mage are enough to balance that out?

I know karmagen is very popular with some crowds, but no one I play with uses it. It's all BP generation.

And no mage can do it all when they first start out.




Well I personally don't have a problem with it.

However, maybe as a houserule you could add a cumulative -1 or -2 to the mages spellcasting dice pool for each spell cast in the same combat turn.





Nah, keep posting my friend. You make some good points.

These kinds of dialogues are the heart of "working things out". It's how things improve.

I don't see the reason it needs to be balanced eather. But if the Dev's and some players feel that it needs to be I would rather a fix work within the already established rules than invent new ones.
I am with you on the character development and creation. Shadowrun has, in my oppinion, the best overall creation system available. It allows for virtualy any character concept and is not overly complex. At my table we don't use the BP system we use Karma but it is vastly different than the one in RC and the characters that come out of it tend to be more balanced.
To be honest, my first thoughts on the casting issue was to make mages like TM's with spell threading and such and have spells karma costs like active skills. But that is WAY over the top...

Making indirect spells once again shitty and less useful? The problem with indirect spells is that no one was using them, not that they were too powerful.

To be honest, I would simply rule that you can't use first aid to treat "mana burn" (for lack of the better term), either. It's an entirely internal effect that burns from the inside out by some of the splat descriptions. It's not like you can just slap on a bandage and call it good after a bit of neosporin gets put on it, fer chrisakes.

That's almost verbatim what I said to my players last night, Phipps. I'm in full agreement with this. I can accept treating bruises and minor cuts with first aid, such as from getting a beating or soaking up bullets with heavy armor. I can accept first aid setting broken bones, suturing cuts closed, and applying salves.

But I really can't see first aid helping supernaturally-induced weariness - outside of Stim Patches, anyway, which is another mechanic - or internal bleeding caused by your body tearing itself apart. I personally don't let First Aid heal drain for those reasons. I'd let actual medical care do it, but not First Aid alone.

With my mages I was used to go for as many passes as possible and than working in concert with sammy, a bounch of mooks start the fight too close to each other? force 5 stunball, the stun isn't enough to 'em out but it imposes at least a -2 penality to every test, than there's trid phantasm for confusing the opposition, levitate to toss things around/manipulate the battlefield, seriously there's so much fun to be had working as a team; and if you make impractical overcasting one hit knock outs are much harder to pull out leaving sammy with his/hers/its share of action.

My proposed fix was for "ball" and "mob" spells. Like Stunball and Mob Mind. Not Indirect spells, I treat them like grenades... Once it is there thats it... My idea was for spells where the caster needs to know who he is trying to hit and where to direct the mana to, which is why it's like dual casting.

Which is why I don't think there was as much of a problem as people say there was. Yes, I did say DDC spells where powerful and that they needed to change but that was in referance to people having problems in other games. The issue almost never comes up in my group. But if, as a group, people feel it needs to change I would rather see a fix that works within the rules than starts inventing new ones. Which is why I try and come up with ideas that have a grounding in some other rule.

Brings up an idea for a focus. (not that it belongs in this thread but...)
With all the talk of mages directing mana to targets and such how about a focus that is two seperate ones. The mage bonds to both gives one to a friend and can cast spells on the focus to affect the person carrying the other. (would still need to be within LOS) Really only useful for touch spells at range (Heal) which could get broken quick... remotely like Wheel of Time Sa'Angreal. (sp?)

Sa'Angreals are really good power focusis, not somekind of affect the carrier from afar thinks.

Yes, I know. Sa'Angeals are one device with two parts. Well at least the one Rand had was. The big statue gathers the Source and funnels it to the smaller one. That was the effect I was going for... Should have been more specific. Sorry

That's an awesome idea. Now there's no need to keep yourself from flinging around AOE's every chance you get, because you can always prioritize your "affected targets" in such a way to toss a Stunball into the middle of a room and not hurt your buddies who are standing there.

I can see the Nano-medics in the Saviour Med-kit being able to heal this sort of damage and potentially custom drugs developed to target the areas that suffer damage when overcasting. Sixty years is a long time in medicine....

Still that would be my first or second port of call in nerfing overcasting.

Not entirely sure if you where being sarcastic. *shrug*
And yea, it would be a side benefit you could cast with your buddies in the AOE and not care. Just remember, the mage can cast AFTER he declares spell defense on his buddies so the chance to hurt them is small anyway.

Turns on sarcasm detector...

BEEP!!!! BEEP!!! BEEP!!!

It's like a grenade without the drawbacks

Any changes to Move-by-Wire?

No changes considering that Move-by-Wire is in Augmentation not Corebook.

As I understand it, the Anniversary Edition includes consolidated tables for all the other 4e books. If that's indeed the case, then I could see them making changes there.

You're incorrect; Anniversary Edition has an index of the other fourth edition rulebooks, and an index of all the tables in them, but it doesn't contain all the compiled tables. Those wil be in the Runner's Toolkit.

Thank you for the quick clarification

I've noticed that nobody has mentioned spirits AT ALL in this thread. Assuming they were not in fact gimped as direct combat and illusion spells (vs. drones) were, wouldn't that make conjuring an even more attractive focus for a mage?

Especially for things like conjuring a spirit of man and having him cast for you

Oh good point.
Have the "old" spirits been brought on par with those from street magic?

If only we could all just delete those annoying double posts...

No, but they get nicer artwork.

Actually there is one minor change, but it's not a boost. Spirits of Man with the Innate Spell power are limited to casting up to a Force equal to their Magic rating. That's actually a negative for me as spirits in my game wouldn't exceed normal Force (which I viewed as exceptional effort) on request, just as they wouldn't spend Edge on a summoner's behalf. But they would do both on occasion along with other freebies such as when a Beast spirit was enjoying combat so much that it continued on storming around the compound eating guards at no cost. It was partly affected by the magician's normal relationship with spirits. I guess the idea with this change is to prevent players from overcasting if their GM lets them run spirits as second PCs.

That's when you fudge the rules - GM prerogative

As pointed out, no. Though I wanted more for the street magic spirits to be brought on par with the main book spirits. I detest power creep.

With no offense offended: Pure fail. Dead stop. Without changing both the Karma cost AND the build point cost, all you have done is amplify Attribute front-loading issues. It will be nearly impossible to consider blowing points on skills as a starting character if you can at all do without them for a run or two, because DEAR LORD is it expensive to raise attributes now.

On a similar note: I'm glad you feel that the new OR table is more "in line with an augmented world" as what it essentially states is that Improved Invisibility is the biggest joke in the world for casters with a Magic Rating less than 8. After all, it's simply not all that useful to make yourself invisible to metal, rocks, and alloys, when you cannot make yourself invisible to cameras and drones, now is it sir?

Again: Pure fail. Dead stop. You have not accomplished your goals, and you have managed to torque off a lot of players in the process of failing to achieve your goals.

The simple version is, you can expect some people to dislike / disagree with changes to the system. Some people. Pissing off 30%+ of the player base is a bad move, and screams poor choices / implementation. Especially when some of it can & will directly lead to loss of sales (rules changes will on a small scale, but the adds - that will likely have a noticeable impact).

And don't forget that your hits are capped by the Force of your spell. Therefore, to affect a camera, mages must not only twink their dice pool, but likely overcast as well.

Honestly, if net hit's used for damage would simply add to force before calculating drain, the whole issue with overcasting being better would go away.


You know... you now can choose to use net hit's to increase DV and Drain - and you can choose for every target, Drain being the max hits used.
So, if you want to be cheesy - don't use any net hits for your friends and make the spell fail on them.

I've been a little busy this week, so I haven't popped in. Nice to see controversy still raging...


Opinions. Everyone has one. Everyone is entitled to one.

Though in this particular case I believe a lot of complaints derive from a mistake in the PDF that was released and that we didn't catch - yep, we're only human. I want to thank Cain, Tycho and several others for bringing it to my attention and want to assure everyone it will be fixed in an updated PDF and the print version.

The error, actually 3 updates that didn't 'take' due to a mix-up in editing, isn't a problem with the Attribute costs though, but with the Karma Awards Table which was intended to be updated to increase pay-offs (hence my previous comments in this thread).

Karma Awards are (now) intended to be: 1 Karma per objective accomplished (in line with published adventures) rather than for accomplishing most of the objectives. "The adventure was extra challenging" entry was also updated to "Challenge/Threat level to group" and given a range of "1 to 4 Karma" (also in line with many of the published adventures allowing GMs to tailor payoffs to the actual difficulty the run posed to their group), finally the "Survival" award was tweaked to "1 or 2" (depending on whether you simply made it through the run or survived a harrowing run.)

This means basic Karma Awards are being raised by two or three points for your average difficulty run - before the "individual" roleplaying Awards kick in. This explains my previous reference to 9 Karma per run.



As I've mentioned before a Sensor, particularly a camera (which is what's at stake when people bring up Imp. Invisibility, Physical Mask, and Trid Phantasm), should be considered OR 4.

Object Resistance is intended to be a nebulous attribute that reflects not how an inanimate object resists a spell, but how hard it is to affect or fool (directly or indirectly). Especifically, when it comes to Physical Illusions, it's not so much about magically altering the camera's feed - because in SR4 what you're doing is creating an illusion around you, not magically affecting the camera itself - but making sure that the illusion you're weaving is complete, coherent, and realistic enough to fool the camera looking at the illusion. OR in this case represents how difficult it is to make an Illusion good enough to fool a camera (or other sensor). Note OR 4 does not require overcasting for most magicians.

On the other hand you have OR 6 for drones and vehicles. In terms of Illusion spells, the main reason for this is because neither uses simple sensors but rather sensor suites, which increases redundancy and makes Illusions less likely to fool the overall system.

Double post.

Um... everything is a Sensor Package, now.

No matter if it's installed on a drone/vehicle or not... so, I don't see the point of treating vehicle-installed sensors any better than those not.
If the package has UltraSound, Ultrawideband Radar or Radar, it will beat Improved Invisibility automatically, anyway.

BTW: Adding Net Hits used for increasing DV not directly to Drain, but to Force would migitate the issue that overcasting now is the better choice.

This is incorrect. "Everything" is not a Sensor Package. There are plenty of freestanding security cams, traffic cams, personal cameras, commlink cams, etc (just to focus on the Visual illusion-related sensors) that are not packages.

However, as you noted the impact of the OR change on Sensor Packages is in fact minimal, since in the original SR4 (and Arsenal) Sensor Packages would foil most of the illusions people are complaining about anyway.

Very true. Maybe some GMs are giving mages a lot more leeway than intended by the RAW.

There is one change I wish they had made.
When they were doing the new sample characters, I wish they had done ONE Mystic Adept...

I mean, seriously...It would be nice to see one. We have, what, 4 full magicians, one adept, and one technomancer..but not a single Mystic Adept? I would ahve thought the Occult Investigator would have been a good call for that..but..

On the contrary - there is no way to define a Sensor except a Sensor Package, by RAW.
Without choosing a Sensor Package first, there is no way to determine the size or range of the Sensor - even if the Sensor Package only includes a single Sensor.

That's what I meant with 'everything is a Sensor Package, now'. Thus, it doesn't really qualify to find out OR...

That's my point:
There should be only one OR for Sensors, no matter if they are installed on a drone, a commlink or a lamp post.
Then let the specific Sensor rules take care of the rest.

That would streamline things a lot. Of course, I'm well aware that the OR table is only a guideline, but the issue is pretty common, so a definite example (Sensor = OR 4) would be great.

That does make much more sense. I'm still curious as to how this will affect the Missions environment, though.

And while I wanted to stay out of the OR issue, it should be pointed out that computers (meaning, Commlinks) are OR6. Does that mean anyone using AR has the higher chance of resisting Improved Invisibility? You stand a higher chance of beating it with your cameraphone than with your eyes?

As mentioned before: No. If you use several sensors distributing digital feeds to your senses (possibly decrypted by a cryptosense-module) then: yes. Thats the reason Synner mentioned sensor packages and individual sensors.

..then it doesn't change a thing, OR wise:
If you run Improved Invisibility, you can beat the Camera with Force 4 and 4 Hits, and nothing else. Of course, if the Camera has the Ultrasound enhancement, you can't even beat the Camera.
The Microphone is completly unaffected and gets it's Perception Test using Rating+SensorSoft, as is the Olfactory Sensor.

Just even individual Sensors are Sensor Packages by RAW.