I fail to see how this isn't balanced. Both technology and magic have things that are exclusive to their respective fields. They have a lot of overlap where one is more effective than the other. If magic were the only field between the two that had things exclusive to it then I'd agree (unless it consistently came out weaker in the other areas), but this isn't the case as technology also has things exclusive to it.

Like what? VR matrix things? The mage can go VR too. He can pimp his link and get 3 IP even without having to risk his mental health - he just needs to invest in the skill set a little. Also, he can use electronic devices, or have a spirit use them for him. Mages can do just about everythng mundanes can do, just sometimes, they will not be as effective.

Conversely, mundanes never will bve able to conjure spirits, perform astral scouting, or lob stunballs that clear off an entire area with no effort, and silently.

It would be pretty interesting to have a way of making flesh-form merges into bio-drones, wouldn't it?

I think you forgot how much of a karma sink being a mage already is. Now that it's been made worse by higher attribute costs...

Canonically not possible, but an interesting idea, yes. However, it would not be half as ad hoc as the reverse.


Now he has to focus on being a mage, yes, restraining him from taking over the mundanes completly for some time.

He had to do that originally. Now, he cant afford to branch out whatsoever. Something that every other character archetype can do very easily.

I was always a big fan of the Negotiamancer or the Connomancer.

If your issue with magic is that being a mage isn't a Class and all things that a metahuman can do is open to people with magic too then there's nothing to discuss really. Shadowrun isn't that game. It balances things (like magic) by requiring you to invest a lot of resources (like karma) into getting them. But all options are open to all characters with some limiting factors for overlapping magic with cyber/bio augmentation. They aren't limited to simple weapons or wearing robes, that's a different game.

Uhm, he actually argumented that being a mage should be demanding as the fluff states. Thus if you want to excel at being a mage you must invest a certain amount of the limited ressource karma into being one. In his opinion this amount was way to less for what you got.

Every other archetype doesn't have spirits to make up for much of that. The mage isn't totally crippled now. He's just not able to overpower anyone else any more.


My issue is that the combination of having access to everything else and having a bunch of very powerful exclusive capabilities makes the mages inherently much more powerful than mundanes.


With the recent changes, yes, now it does.

Define 'being a Mage.'

If that was his argument (and I'll obviously let him clarify if he likes) then that would be a reasonable position to take. However he's gone out of his way to not address the investments that need to be taken in magic (or technology) in order to accomplish any of the things discussed so far. And so I find it hard to believe that this could possibly be his position.

As being sort of a buddy to him I know what his stand is

Yes. t's not that I want to prohibit mages at any cost from hacking, just that I don't want them to excel at magic as well as mundane stuff (which would invariably be at the expense of the mundanes). Also, upping the drain is a good idea - maybe it's not implemented ideally, but better than whatever Crizh proposes, if my book.

Especially with Karmagen, mundanes just were shafted, pre changes. Now, they've geen grounded a bit and have to ndecide whether they want to excel at their core capabilities, be a decent allrounder mage, or know a little bit of everything.

Mages can be top notch hackers at cost of karma and essence, two things that are notoriously treasured by mages.

Not so much essence, since you can get VR through the use of trodes. Youll never get a simsense booster installed that way though.

How about leaving the karma cost for magic, edge and ressonance at x3. That way caster, technomancers ect are not unduly impacted by the rules change?

That's certainly something I thought about. I think however, that my group will discuss possible alternatives, including raising attributes to *5, skill groups dropping to *4, skills staying at *2, but upping skill caps to 12 as well as the metahuman costs (value - base_for_varient) * multiplier.

Yes mages aren't completely cripled, after all a mage that could overcast a stunbolt to force 10 can still do with no different drain, he might have to add only a single net hit (the one needed to land the spell) but the stun track is equal to 8 + willpower/2 (round up), which means that the mage can still drop cold anyone with a willpower lower than 7, just like he/she/it did before the change, for no more drain than before; sure mages that casted lower force DCS allowing the other team members to shine will have to pump up the spells force or get the shaft but it's their fault if they don't want to go over the top.




You know back when I got my driving license I bought a used car to put some kilometers of experience on my shoulders before buying a new car; I'm still driving the same car and I think I will keep driving it for a long time; my car is old and not exatly at the top of its possible performances, yet if you think about it it still does the same thing that a Lamborghini could do for me: carrying me around.
Doing the same thing doesn't mean that you do with equal skill, especialy when you have something like magic to develope.

Or you use a nice partymix of Breathtaker,Pepper Punch and Neuro-Stun grenades. And the big bad trolls go down.

Well okay, we can discuss this alternate argument if you'd like:
Let's see, the 100 karma I spent on oranges lets me carry oranges pretty well but not apples. Had I spent 100 karma on apples I'd carry them pretty well. If I spent 50 on both I'd do both pretty badly. It's not fair that mages can carry oranges.

Suffice to say that I disagree that mundanes were "shafted" and that magic didn't cost enough. As to your statement that upping the drain is a "good idea" I'll leave that to other discussions since it seems to have no real connection to this conversation other than to add to the impression that you simply don't like magic.

Depending on the context it can make alot of difference, also consider that mages have already alot of thing at hand betwen the astral and the physical plane, you can't be everywhere and do everything at the same time; the mage can be a top notch hacker but probably is better leave the virtual plane to other people and focus on things that they can't do.

Military armour likes to come sealed.


Four IP are badass enough.


How about not having anything changed by the changes?


That example is badly chosen. Your battered old Fiat will not exactly get you to the same top speed a Lamborghini offers, right? And that is the problem: the mage can drive his car as fast, while also taking it to the air at wish and flying over the pond, which no super sports car ever will be able to do. Since the new rules makes shiny sports cars for mages much more expensive, it keeps them pilots for a while, at least.


Only that mages don't have two equal skills but one that allows them to carry 90 oranges AND 70 apples. This is a bit imbalanced, don't you agree?

The pornomancer is a connomancer - seduction is just a specialization of con. At least the cap of 3 on kinesics lowers it from 51 dice to 49 dice, so people can stop talking about how overpowered it is now.

But seriously - the pornomancer was like the ultimate climbing build, one of those "how many dice could you get for this" exercises. The challenge was making it an actual viable character. Which it is - it's just far, far from optimal. Most of the modifiers are very conditional, some of them have drawbacks (such as pheromone receptors and an addiction to Ex), and the points spent taking con past the point of usefulness, to the point of overkill, could have been better spent on other areas.



As far as the mage nerfs, what I don't like about it is how the rules of the game universe seem to suddenly do a 180. It's like they looked at some of the troll tank builds posted here, and responded by saying that characters only use Body, not Body x 2, for encumbrance, and dropped all of the armor values by 4 points. It would mess up the normal characters far more than it would mess up the troll tanks - but it would actually encourage troll tanks, since they would be the only ones with half-way decent armor.

I understand you there, but by now, the volatile nature of magic *cough* is something the SR universe should be used to.

Or did it escape you how drastically magic changed so often in the past? Like the disappearance of spirit domains, permanent and temporary spirits not being available to all mages at the same time, domains for nature spirits, nature spirits versuus elementals ...?

This is true from an IC perspective---Shadowrun mundanes surely complain, with justification, that mages have an unfair advantage, for precisely this reason.

But from an OOC perspective, the game is balanced by the fact that mages have to pay for that privilege. Yes, a particular mage can choose to purchase particular fetishes, specializations, and so on, in a way that would fill some of the role usually held by a hacker. They could accomplish some of the core features in a different but comparable way---the example given has been getting past sensors. Other tasks (say, looking up how to blackmail guards) would be much harder or have to be handled by someone else. And in exchange, the mage would bring different side skills (the more traditional mage abilities), though not nearly as well as a mage who focused primarily on those skills.

That doesn't make mages overpowered; they pay for having additional options, and then have to decide whether to spend their remaining points pursuing those options or pursuing the options they had anyway.

Put aside the question of magic. If someone is born strong, this is an unfair advantage. If they went on to study just as hard as someone else who was born weaker, they'd end up just as skilled, but stronger. But with PCs, this doesn't happen: we chose them from a stratum where that balances out.

This is one of the distinctive features of Shadowrun: there are no character classes. Given unlimited resources, any one person can do most things, by one means or another. But no one has those resources.

It might be the case that being a mage is underpriced, but it's at least not so far off. There's not, so far as I know, a rash of groups of almost all mages. Quite the contrary, most people who want to play hackers make non-mage hackers, because that seems to be the most effective to do it. And if being a mage is underpriced, well, that argument hasn't been made; it's not enough to just point out that they have more options, you'd have to make a case that those aren't canceled out by all the options they've ruled out with those expenditures.

SR4A, p. 61: "Optionally, gamemasters may choose to cap dice pools (including modifiers) at 20 dice, or at twice the sum of the character’s natural Attribute + Skill ratings, whichever is higher."

And my point is, before the change, they didn't pay enough, especially with Karmagen.


Mind Probe spells and spirit of Man powers are unheared of? Also, this reduces the hacker, at best, to legwork. A very fulfilling role if half the shadowrun is watching in awe as the mage shines and shines. that is in no way balanced.


More than well enough.


since you cannot buy awakened properties later on in the game canonically - no, not true. Ther are classes in SR. Mundane, Emerged, and Awakened. Emerged and Awakened are exclusive, while either can do all the mundane can the mundane, hoewever, is reduced to being unable to do anything either of the other classes can do.


Then I haven't been clear enough. That's the main problem with mages and is somewhat fixed with the more expensive attributes.

So if the latter is higher, you still can go higher than 20 dice.

There is a Latent Awakening quality in Street Magic, so you actually can become a mage later in the game if you didn't start out as one.

Yeah, but it has to be bought at chargen and strangles how much essence you can use, IIRC.


If the GM will let you.

That's not the point.

That neither - if you didn't take that quality, you can't.

I have to say, hermit that I haven't seen the magician dominating the group in actual play. It is expensive to be very good at an area of magic and you will create areas of weakness if you try. A magician who goes on the run and attempts to dominate all the combat with his spells tends to burn out quite quickly. And if they run into background count they can get a very hard reminder how much they need their friends.

If the GM keeps a careful awareness of all the things he should be aware of when it comes to magic - from tight definitions of what constitues a spirit's Service to LOS modifiers for spells and appropriate use of wards, astral signatures, etc. - then I have found magic pretty well balanced.

The change in cost to Attributes and the increased drain cost of Direct Combat spells (though I'll use a flat +1 to avoid all the problems of the other approach) should be sufficient to reign in any brokeness, imo.

If you like, I will demonstrate with an example that a magician cannot replicate what a Samurai can do. I know this quite well because we had a thread on it a while back where we all tried to make the Samurai obsolete.

It was a response to the "Pornomancer still has 49 dice" line. If using this optional rule, there won't be such a dicepool.

But there will still be a Pornomancer.

Taken.


Another change to the rules I likes. Does this apply to Technomancers with threaded CF and sprites and whatnot, too?


I've seen one, but that particular player isn't someone I am still on speaking terms with. Still, magic was way more bang per buck than mundane advancement. Same, only even more strongly, with Resonance.


Yes, it does. It wasn't quite so balanced before though.


With max. 20-something dice.


Sure, shoot.

I don't really have an opinion on the specific question of how much they pay, so if that's really all you're saying, I don't disagree.



That was a single example, not an exhaustive list. And, like I said, harder, not impossible. (Whether it's fulfilling or not is a matter of opinion, and depends as much on the particular game and group of players as anything else.)

If a group actually has one of these "mage-hackers" and also a conventional hacker (and the conventional hacker doesn't specialize in an unusual direction as well), there'd certainly be some redundancy. The hacker in that case isn't "reduced...to legwork," since they could presumably do the same things comparably. But there'd be some pointless overlap and arguments over which one does which.

But that doesn't make any sense. "Conventional hacker" isn't some absolute role that has to be filled. A group that has a "mage-hacker" presumably doesn't have a conventional hacker. And my point was that this is a reasonable decision, but not nearly so overpowered that all or most groups should pursue it.


Being a mage isn't a class---it's not defined by what things you do, but by how you do them. The question is what role you fill by being a mage; the only role a mage can fill that no one else can is defending against magic. (To be honest, I'd prefer there weren't even that exception, but it is real.)


I read back through the thread, and indeed, I did misread your original post. It seemed like you were claiming that the fact that mages had additional options was intrinsically overpowered; but now I see that you were just saying that you thought the price change for attributes made a better balance. I have no opinion on that.

Agree with you on the latter, but can live with that now.

Alsoo, Mage and Mancer are in so far classes as you either are one or are not, you cannot choose to be one later on in the game all of a sudden.


Was what I meant to say. Glad that's cleared up.

Around 30.

22 I'd say.

I also thought you were referring to magic being intrinsically overpowered and after reading through your original posts realize you were saying that the new, more expensive attributes, limit mages more and this is good. I don't necessarily agree that they limit mages more than anyone else at all, but I agree with the more expensive attributes for a different reason. I apologize for misunderstanding you.

An Elf with Exceptional Attribute and Aptitute will have a natural Attribute + Skill Max of 9+7, making the limit (twice that number) 32 dice max.

Agreement? On an internet forum? I'd better go outside and make sure it's not raining pigs...

For pornomancers? Way less then before. And we all know the most smashing argument against the "brokeness" of this build: Not everyone wants to have sex with him.

Still, 22 is a number I'd toss around for most of the dice pools caps.

How?


Since it was cleared up, no problem. It could easily be understood that way.

Why do you agree with the attributes being a god change? Because it makes skill groups viable again?

About three posts up:

Yes, but that was when the Edition changed - and SR4 was so different, it was practically a new game. It would have been a different story if they had sprung those changes on players in the middle of SR3.

But the direct spell change goes against how they have been presented in ALL editions of SR - as the low-Drain workhorse spell. Now, suddenly, these low-Drain spells have super-high Drain.

Missed that, thx.


That change in no way is bigger than rewriting the entire spirit world or cutting out grounding, if you ask me.

Actually, I like dice pool caps. It's easier to reach the point of maximum effectiveness, and then you don't have to worry about it any longer, and can allocate more resources to other things. To be honest, though, I rarely play "pure" faces, so my social skills rarely even approach the new limits.

That's dice pool after modifiers. So, if you want maximum effectiveness, you'll get higher pools so you can compensate for negative modifiers as well.