Magic doesn't reign supreme. Wow.
Yeah it truly is my fault to lack a pessimistic perspective and see the chances that this overdue nerf brings with it.

I don't even know what you are trying to say.

Him and a couple others are beating the drum that in 4th edition SR magic is so ridiculously overpowered that no matter what you do to nerf magic its a good idea. I think magic was a bit overpowered but not nearly as bad in practice as a handful of people are pretending. But even though it could use a nerf, these nerfs are poorly designed.

Nope, I don't want to see Magic nerfed into oblivion. As stated elsewhere I myself play a Mage. But I want to have Magic a more distinctive Place in Shadowrun than "oh, look. It's Magic! So shiny! I feel the Power, let's save earth from everything and get some fancy giant robots to do so, powered by Magic!".
I want Magic to fill a distinctive role. By defining what I can and cannot do with it. I want Magic to exist alongside Technology, not making the latter one obsolete (yes, I know there are resorts where either one shines and the other can't reproduce the effect but they aren't big enough imho). I want Magic to have this ancient not that quite reasonable style with lots and lots of secret rules and mystic machinations one leads to accept that Magic is... well, Magic. The implimentation of a higher supernatural ruleset to accomplish tasks in our reality that seem quite impossible that way.

Thus, I like the fact that to affect technology one should try to use the principle of technology against it and that there ARE rules of Magic which hinder a Mage from doing something easily that seems obvious (like fooling a camera by being invisible) because there ARE higher supernatural rules that take into this mechanism and shows that magic isn't quite that easy to understand.

Thats why I like these changes. It gives a Mage back some flavour in my not quite that pessimistic view.

I've usually heard the word "nerf" in connection with things that were very overpowered. ORs of 4 were already quite difficult. The revised ORs are beyond the means of normal magicians. I'll probably be keeping them but more because I dislike house-ruling things and because I'm willing to accept that magicians wont be able to affect technology much. But I don't dispute that this is the case. Nerf really implies to me that it was very overpowered before.

"Nerf" doesn't imply that to me. It means to me, that something was lowered in its power over something else. Regardless if it was good or bad this way.

You're both wrong. The term 'nerf' is derived from a time in, I believe it was ultima online, in which they changed the sword rules. It was compaired to hitting one another with nerf bats. Thus the term 'nerfed' was born.

To nerf something means to take something that was useful, and make it useless or next to useless. Something has not been nerfed until it is no longer worthwhile. How powerful it was before is irrelevant as is how powerful it is in relation to something else. If it's been reduced in power to the point of using it being futile (like trying to kill someone with a nerf bat), then it's been nerfed.

Interesting. In that case, I'd agree with Malicant that a large number of spells have been nerfed except for use by very powerful magicians. A Physical Mask spell, for example, is not like a Combat spell where you are content to knock a few boxes off an opponent in the midst of your team mates gunfire. You use a Physical Mask spell when you want to sneak past the security drones or somesuch. It's usually a critical part of a plan and a fifty-fifty chance of success (and that's with a specialised mage) makes it a non-viable option to try unless you're already in trouble.

Both of these were already true.




That's great, if you're playing freeform.

But that's the magic I know in SR.





The grand, vast majority of SR games that I've played in (and, I'm going to go out on a limb and say others play in as well) are heavily tech dominated.

I've never personally had a chance to play in an all magic campagin, and I suspect they are relatively rare in comparison.

So what you want is for magic to be nigh useless in what is probably the most common SR game?

What I don't like about these changes is that it takes spells that were specifically designed to affect technology, and already balanced against the mage with their higher drain costs AND the previous OR table and suddenly makes them all but useless to any but the most powerful of mages.






If by flavor, you mean "exceedingly limited", like casting magic missles 3x per day and then resorting to throwing darts, then yeah I see why you like these changes.

So by forcing a mage to have obscene dice pools to affect technology, and thus guarantee they can manipulate and explode living targets with ease this creates some kind of flavor for you? Well when mages start tossing 20+ dice at NPC's because the have to have that many dice to even change the oil in their car, don't come crying to me.

Actually I see the increased OR as a sort of demotivator to try to accomplish these tasks with magic. You can do anything by brute force regardless if it is physical, magical or technological.

Well if I can't do magic then why did I spell all the bp/karma on the magacian quality, the magic attribute, and sorcery skills, and each and every spell I want to cast? Why did I spend the money to buy and karma to find those foci?

Why is magical research an area where corps are spending all this money, if I can't even use telekinesis to push the button to call me an elevator without suffering brain hemorrhaging?

Why if magic so being limited in this way is anyone spending the time and effort on it? When I can't even do something so simple as pass someone a comlink without needing a force 6 spell and 18 dice does anyone care about it?

Because there are still enough things one can accomplish by magic. Like Mindreading. Like those shiny special effects on trid. like summoning. like levitating oneself or a great mass. like healing. like anything else that does not interact directly with magic. It MEANS now something if a mage is powerful enough to enfoce his magic on technology.

I see it as an attempt to make Indirect Combat spells more useful, without upgrading Indirect Combat spells, because that would require lots of errata to the spell design rules in Street Magic.

And then what happened, is that Phys Illusion and Phys Manipulation spells were either inadvertently also nerfed to rubble or seen as acceptable losses.


Were those categories of spells a problem in any of your games?


So what we got after all this is:

• Direct Combat spells take a double nerfing
• Phys Illusion and Phys Manipultion spells also get nerfed
• Indirect Combat spells see no change, and thus still aren't very good.

If spells are going to be that exceedingly weak against Technology then the drain needs to come down and dare I say they should cost less karma. I know any mages I play in 4A will not be bothering with them.




It's always good when a game loses options, isn't it?

Incorrect. While that is essentially how the term originated, that is not what the term means. To nerf something is to diminish its overall power or effectiveness, regardless of how much. The term is usually used to refer to a change so drastic that what has been nerfed is no longer a viable option, but that is not the limit of its meaning.

If it was out of the reach of a min-maxed character I might agree. But since I can min max a starting character to do this with the stylish side effect of making me disgustingly overpowered when I am not facing tech, guess what I am motivated to do.

Honestly what I wanted would have been a nerf and would have been more logical. vs people perception+intuition, vs objects sensor+clear sight. People can get absurd perception pools, and objects can have decent ones. So you can usually succeed with a non min max character but it is far from guaranteed.

sadly it never stops people from crying nerf the moment their favorite combo in some game gets altered, and they had to adapt and adjust the math...

bascially, this is looking more and more like a mmo forum...

See? That's too logical for my liking of what should be considered the rules of magic. I totally unterstand why you propose this. But where is the mystery in it?

The "mystery" should be in the fluff, not the crunch. The rules for gameplay should be as clear and consistent as possible.

People have been pointing out that you can min-max already - all the change does is make min-maxing near-mandatory for people who would have built more reasonable characters before. So the result of these changes is more overcasting, and more min-maxed characters. And it's not about "adjusting the math", it's about having less viable options in the game.

The rules are as clear. It just seems that many players over here are not at ease with them. that's all.

I'm talking about the variable, rather than fixed Drain, making casting a direct combat spell turn into Russian roulette. And consistency-wise, I'm talking about changing how things work, on a fundamental level, in the middle of everyone's games.

Incorporating rules changes in existing games is never that good of an idea no matter how small or big the changes are.

Besides that, I think you overestimate the drain-thing on direct combat spells. It does cap them in their power niveau but let the user choose if he want's to risk some extra drain in exchange for some extra damage.

The one Thing I had some hard time to make peace with is everyones pet issue, the increased OR. But after realizing that it nerfs Mages and moves them out of the hackers and riggers playground back into the more general toolkit approach to magic I'm quite fine wit it.

And again, no - what it does is give the mage a choice between doing minimal damage with relatively high odds of full resistance (since successes are capped by force) OR overcasting at their maximum force with higher odds of success, much higher base damage, and not significantly more drain.

A force 5 stunbolt has base 1S drain, a force 9 has base 3P.

So, you see, upping the force by 2 is better than using a net hit.

Not really, it just makes it so that it's better idea to overcast the spell and take the enemis out without using any nethits for damage, instead of casting at lower force and hoping you get lucky and get lots of nethits.


Well all those mages providing special effects for movies and tridshow must be happy now that their all fired for not being able to do their job.

No. As trid entertainment requires the targets to be volunteering the OR doesn't come into the equation.

Except Trid Entertainment is a Physical Illusion, and thus is affected by OR.

I can't actually see anything in the spell description that states this, actually. And whilst I'm happy to accept that a human may willingly fail a resistance roll for the purpose of entertainment, I'm wondering how you tell a camera that it should do so.

This is a tangent and it doesn't matter to the main argument I think, but by RAW as far as I can see, there is nothing in the spell description that contradicts the general rules for Illusion spells affecting non-living targets. I checked the Invisibility spell description too and it doesn't specifically state a need for an object resistance test so the lack of specific instructions in Trid Phantasm doesn't seem to carry any weight as they're lacking in Invisibility also.

Just some side-thoughts.

K.

It's description says nothing about special rules of not needing to beat the cameras OR, so it follows the standart rules for physical illusions.

Not according to my book. They're obvious illusions, but they're still Physical, which means they "are effective against technological systems, assuming the caster achieves enough hits to meet the Object Resistance threshold."

The difference between Trid entertainment and trid phantasm is that the latter one is realistic while the first is obvious. Do you guys really think that somebody or someone who resists the trid phantasm doesn't percieve the illusion at all? Or is he percieving it, while knowing it is an illusion and can see through it? Doesn't make this the illusion "obvious"? and isn't that the defining trait of trid entertainment? being obvious?

No. If you fail to beat the Object Resistance, the sensor does not see the damn illusion. Trid Entertainment must defeat the cameras OR, or not be recorded.

To put it another way, if you do not defeat the OR, the illusion has no effect on the camera. The camera cannot decide to ignore something, or "believe it's not real" - the camera either records it, or does not. Thus, if the camera is not affected, then it is not recording it, & does not 'see' it.

"Physical Illusions: Physical illusion spells create actual images or
alter physical properties, such as light or sound. Physical illusions are
effective against technological systems, assuming the caster achieves
enough hits to meet the Object Resistance threshold (p. 183). They
are resisted by Intuition + Counterspelling (if any); non-living devices
do not get a resistance test. The spellcaster must generate more hits
than the observer for the illusion to be considered real. If the spell is
not completely resisted, the character is fully affected by the illusion."

Obvious Illusions are never considered real. That makes them obvious

Once again, a camera cannot discern between what is real & what is not. There is only what it 'sees' & what it does not 'see'. If you fail to overcome the OR, the camera does not see the illusion. It does not matter if it is obvious or not.

As long as we don't have a official statement regarding obvious physical illusions this discussion gets more and more idle imho.

We do have one. It's called "the rules". The rules state that physical illusions affect sensors as long as the mage beats the OR threshold. The text for obvious illusions does not have special rules for interacting with objects; thus, we use any other rules that govern such interactions. In this case, that's the rules for Physical illusions. Thus, wage mages in Hollywood all get fired.

And should have gotten before. The OR for cameras went only up one point. As we have no stats it is save to assume that special effects wage mages in hollywood are having a speciality in illusion spells (2 dice) and are at least veterans (as today there are only a small amount of special effect crews that get regularly hired) (4 dice) which leaves us either with a magic attribute of 6 or using a illusion spellcasting focus.

A magic of 6?
So, only Olympic level mages who could be making 6-7 figure salaries working for a RnD lab.... doing stage magic....
Ya.... that makes perfect sense.... You stay there, wait a minute, I think I saw something funny over here. I'll be back when I'm done laughing.

If money is your criterion, stage performers make a lot of it... 6-7 figures even.

Not stuntmen or special effects grunts.

But they get jelled at by people who make 6-7 figure salaries. That's something, right?

Yeah, but they have a cool side job of being bounty hunters and drive around in an awesome truck with an annoying cousin and a hot blond.

I like the OR changes, it makes a mage in one of the games I am running nearly useless against waltzing past drones, which is a single runner activity that should be reserved for specialists or the experienced (though the spells specifically for having an effect on objects should be addressed). One thing that was missing in this group was a hacker nearby anyway. It seems that the OR rules put more emphasis on hacking abilities for more runner activities, which I do like.

While I dislike the direct combat spells drain rule changes, I would gladly use +1 or +2 for direct spells drain modifiers.

Most of the other changes I like perfectly fine.

Higher cost of attributes...? I love this change because it makes the karma multiplier half the BP cost, just like skills and skill groups (spells are a bit more at creation time, adepts have funky old rules that should be more like 4e style rules, and technomancers should not be using 3e mage rules for their rules). Players who claim they now need to start with higher attributes because it will take longer to increase them should be ignored or laughed at because attributes (for humans, not other meta inflated penalties) were a good bit cheaper to upgrade with karma than with BP with the odd 3x rule.

How much to 'special effects artists make? Cause anything you're doing with magic can likely be done with software, so you have to at least be competitive in terms of price structure.

Special Effect Mages make the big bucks in my campaign when dealing with Simsense. They can do stuff that feels real, which is one up on the software wizards. And since the simsense recorders only care about what the actor feels and sees, OR doesn't come into play (at least in my campaign).

Since it seems pertinent and most people seem to have overlooked it here's a paraphrase of a reply to a previous post regarding Physical Illusion Spells and Object Resistance.

Physical Illusion Spells create an illusion around the caster (or on a target of the caster's chosing); an illusion that results from the magical manipulation of light (and potentially other things) - a magical hologram if you will, which is then percieved by other living things and innanimate sensors. So how does this interact with Object Resistance? Well OR is a more nebulous Attribute than people often think, it reflects the complexity of the technological system and its inherent resistance to being affected/modified/fooled by magic (directly or indirectly).

Physical Illusions don't alter how the sensor processes the illusion, but instead alter what the sensor actually senses. In other words the OR threshold of Physical Illusion spells reflects the detail, cohesiveness, realism, and versimilitude that the illusion requires to fool a sensor. If the illusion is not good enough (fails to reach the desired OR), the sensor "sees through it."

This is also the rationale for treating Sensors (even on drones) as OR4 regardless of whether they are installed on a more complex device or not. You are trying to fool the sensor that is "percieving" the illusion directly, not trying to affect the complex, highly sophisticated computer system that is processing the (potentially false) information that sensor is reading (be it installled on a drone or a commlink).

It would appear that you are implying that all sensors of a visual nature are equal when it comes to detecting the differences in a magically produced image. Would this effect not be better shown by the use of the sensors rating + software as a visual sensor would use those attributes to detect the differences in a non magical produced image?

Not all sensors are the same except when it comes to magic seems abit strange.

Great to hear, thanks! Would that be the canon ruling?

Not really, as you don't need to bother with that for the Magic part:
If you are out of sensor range or the sensor doesn't make the preception test, he'll won't be able to perceive you anyway.

So there's been a misunderstanding and it's been as I have proposed earlier - that if, for example, you cast Improved Invisibility to sneak past a drone, that you are targetting OR 4 (for the cameras on it) rather than OR 6 (for the drone itself)?

That's the way I understand it too.

Still leaves spells like levitation and fling who clearly target the whole, complex, sophisticated computer system.... or not?!