I just got an awesome idea. A mage could summon watcher spirits and have them manifest and distract enemies during combat. This would be especcially useful in car chases. Imagine trying to drive with a semitransparent image moving around right in front of your face. This could easily cause a pursuing car to crash.

As far as I know they're not any temperature, since they can't actually physically manifest, just appear as a ghost-like image in the real plane. As for on the astral, your guess is as good as mine as to whether temperature even exists there...

Distracting people is cool, but the best is screwing with dual-natured people/critters and spirits. Just sick a whole cloud of watchers on them and and send in one actual combatant. The cloud o' watchers will ensure that the combatant kicks some serious ass. My conjuror does it all the time.

I second that watchers are great for astral combat, but you don't even need an 'actual combatant'. Take 6 force 3 watchers versus a mage with all mental attributes at 6 (and some combat skill at 6):

6 force 3 watchers.
W1: 6TN4 Vs 12TN4 Character gets 3 extra successes and does a serious wound
W2: 6TN3 Vs 9TN5 Spirit gets 1 extra success and does 3l
W3: 6TN2 Vs 6TN6 Spirit gets 4 extra successes and deals 3S (Light Damage)
W4: 6TN2 Vs 6TN8 Spirit gets 5 extra successes and deals 3S (Moderate Damage)
W5: 6TN2 Vs 6TN10 Spirit gets 5 extra successes and deals 3S (Moderate Damage)
W6: 6TN2 Vs 6TN11 Spirit gets 5 extra successes and deals 3S (Moderate Damage)

OK: so the defending character could have split his pool better, and damage is only stun, but that's one combatant taken out (or at-least seriously injured).

If you start taking into account karma pool it goes even further against the character as watchers, being spirits, get karma pool 1 + 1/summoning success. Can we say 2 rerolls (or 4 burned for successes) each?

Panzergeist, yes, that's a great idea. Nature spirits, elementals, and astral magicians can all manifest as well to distract shooters, either by their ghostly form or by talking to them.

Prospero, the word you are looking for is Materialize. Watchers can manifest on the physical plane (audible and ghostly-visible), but not materialize.

Lilt and Prospero, in our team, we found that the astral-swarm of watchers was very annoying. Because of the effectiveness of the technique you describe, every magician had to conjure <charisma> watchers every time he wanted to astrally project. It greatly lengthened the time to resolve an astral combat, without making the game any better or more enjoyable. While we didn't ban them outright, we made house rules to make such a swarm less effective and our astral combat now goes a lot faster. The mundane people are the happiest ones to have astral combats go faster.

It's still good to remember. Considering that they're pretty much disposable combatants, they won't hesitate to use that point. The victim, on the other hand, will hesitate to waste a precious karma point to combat a measly watcher.

Ah yes, the old "horde of astral weenies" vs a single "badass". Yawn.

The way most GM's handle this is, the first attacker (or attacked) "weenie fighter" gets no "friends in melee". After all, nobody else has actually fought yet, right? One on one, he likely gets splatted. Then the next "weenie" doesn't have a "friend in melee", because his first friend is now DEAD. And so on it goes.

As long as the lone badass can defeat a single weenie without using any pool, there's really not much for him to worry about.

Yes, you can kick ass with watchers, but can you look good doing it?
Considering watcher spirits, I doubt it.

~J

And if the watchers all rush him simultaneously? Ooops, there goes your non-Canon House rule...

Since the little bastards can manifest, our mage used them to mark enemy combatants so the samurai knew where to lay down fire.

Our GM was a little flexible with how the watchers manifested, so our mage went for the bizarre motif -- one was shaped as a fat lady on a fat pony singing "Flight of the Valkyries".

-Siege

Ha! I like.

Reminds me of the description for a task of a watcher in Grimoire 2. It goes on describing summoning, getting the task (Message delivery/retrieval), and the time it takes to get it all done. In the end...

"'I found her, boss. She says...gleep!' The spirit's time runs out and it vanishes. Janos is not pleased."

That is the official way all watchers go away now. With a hardy "Gleep!"

Yes, but how would you summon them properly? You'd have to mask your aura to appear like a pain elemental.
Besides, Watchers lack that certain je ne sais quoi.

~J

Perhaps, but *sniff* the fashionable mage does not use such methods.
I like the idea of the Pain Elemental suit, though.
The distracting swarm idea is one I shall indeed have to use at some point.

~J

Looking for a definition of friends in melee, it is the number of friends you have within 1m who are fighting the same fight. IE: They all just need to fly 1m from the character and then attack whenever they want to.

the friends in melee rule works on the simple thought that one person haveing more then one person around him that wants to hurt him cant focus on only one of them. the dont need to hurt, only threaten...

A couple of people have already mentioned this, and maybe it's a little off topic, but I'm curious -- what do your watchers look like? My current combat mage has watchers that look like bats with the faces of human infants (ala T.S. Elliot's Wastelands).

In a run in the Amazon the PCs were on the river pursuing some natives. The Native shaman conjured a watcher as a messenger, it flew to them in the form of a humming bird before transforming into a miniature version of the shaman to relay the message.

No game mechanic effects but it just felt magical.

My watchers tend to look like hulking armored mecha out of Battletech and Macross (the non-transformable ones). Of course, they're only 3 inches tall and speak like a drill sergeant on helium, but they look real mean!

Disposable ones look like the group's sam, who my character considers an arrogant prick.

Does this worry the sam in the least?

~J

The "average" watcher in my games looks like a little astral puffball. Remember those little Koosh balls, lots of rubber strands from a central point that made a vague sphere? You could get them with legs and arms and a pair of little eyes. Default watchers look like that. WE've got an Adversary shaman whose watchers look just like that, but matte black.

And yes, they generally say "Gleep!" when they disappear. Watcher spirits are one of the few not-gritty-and-depressing aspects of my world.

I like that. A lot. I think from now on most Watchers in my game are also going to be koosh balls.
Man... where did I put those koosh balls...

~J

...and this also means, that on the rare occasion someone gets a watcher that doesn't look like a Koosh ball, everyone flips out. "OMG WTF THAT NOT TEH WATCHZ0R LOL!!!!!111" or whatever. It'a always funny to see the mage working his ass off to avoid combat with something because it doesn't look like a koosh ball, when it's a force 2 watcher anwyay.

Hmm...might have to make up some watchers that look like critters - the ones from the movies of the same name. I think I'll teach them to manifest and fly at people's faces as I pantomime throwing. L'il furry ball of teeth heading your way might be distracting.

great form watchers!

Nonexistant.

But they would be funny.

What would the difference be between great-form and normal watchers? I think it would be funny to allow them as Hyper watchers that do everything verryverryfast.

(they vanish with a "Gleep! KaBoom!" too)

Perhaps different people could have different sorts of great-form watchers? What would yours look like?

A fluffy bunny like this one.

Mine would look like this.

I had a player once who was running an ex-military Hermetic. His watchers always apperaed as different GI Joes.

Mine would look like Ancient History.
By the by, I found proof that he existed in the Fourth World. *Digs for sourcebook*
Edit: P7, Scourge Unending: "In fact, you probably found this tome by accident, when searching through the Great Library looking for information on lost kaers, hidden treasure, ancient history, or following in the footsteps of some great legend."
Apparently Quinn Agair is a poor capitalizer at times.

~J

Awesome.

Whoa.

Edit: looks like the MESSAGES section of that group is pretty much pr0n spam. That's a nice feature.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot anyone can do to stop that kind of thing, apart from making membership only available upon approval. While that is possible, it would deter a few people that would otherwise join up.

Most of the members use Dumpshock (and now Underworld) for communication purposes, as opposed to the Yahoo group message function.

I always made watchers look like little sprites/imps, depending on how my character was feeling at the time and what job he had in mind for the watcher to perform.....

It's easy to correct that problem for the member gallery, as it's not supposed to be used for messaging. The owner of the group just has to set it so that he's the only one that can send messages to the group.

For other groups, the simple adjustment is to have the owner moderate (i.e. deny or pass) each posting to the group before it goes out. I run the 4th and 7th largest Yahoo groups in the Category of Shadowrun, and a day or two ago I offered to the owner of the Dumpshock_Member_Gallery to moderate his group as well. I've not yet had a reply.

OK. That's my grinning mugshot up on the gallery. So which one is Ancient History?