How do you know a fence has more power than an SNS round? They don't mention the potential contained within and the laws of physics are not part of the Shadowrun rulebook.

BlueMax

More successes means that you hit in a spot that is more painful to be hit in. Ballistics, impact, or otherwise.

I'd also like to point out that an electric fence doesn't hurt as much as a SnS round.

Why? Two rounds of SnS from two guns (Single Shot) will pretty much knock you out cold.

The 9000 volt electric fence in my yard can't do that. It hurts, but I could grab the fence and take four or five shocks in a row* before letting go (they fire once a second or so). I shake my hand and go "ow!"

Good luck sticking a 9000 volt punch into a .22 bullet casing.

*It should be noted that I haven't taken more than 2 at any given time because it hurts like hell and there's no reason to keep shocking myself, but I'm sure I could take 4 or 5 if I wanted to.

Not that it's nice or anything, but if you want to calm them down with the summoning silliness, you could always say that first Aid doesn't work on drain because of it's magical nature. it like, hurts your brain or something. First aid doesn't fix brains. If the medic is using (gasp) medicine on the mage, you could have a check for magic rating loss, which is always fun. Drain ain't your mama's damage. You can't just wave your drone over it and make it go away.

Edit (because i don't like multi-posting):


Uhm... What? So, you're telling me that the bullet is doing damage because it hits me hard? if that is what you're saying, you're wrong as the section on electricity damage explicitly states that it does no kinetic (ya know, like from moving fast) damage.

If that's not what you're saying... then you have not made your argument clear. I agree that SnS does more damage than an electric fence, as I stated, I sat on one once. I mean, you could go outside and start touching your electric fence with different parts of your body and noting if different places hurt significantly more than others. For science?

If the rules said so, I would be all over it. However, this batch of characters was made to test the limits of the rules. We are playing as RAW as we can remember too. Disclaimer because I don't claim to be perfect.
What I have found out so far is that TMs on their own are underpowered but Sprites own any wifi enabled scene.

BlueMax

Which, all of that, isn't RAW by SR4/SR4A printings.

I agree that it's silly, but it's RAW.

Every other exception to the rule is explicitly stated. Why isn't this one? Also, why would a SnS round hitting your shin do the exact same thing as one hitting you in the neck? I mean, it's not like rounds don't have there own mass, and that's going to hurt too.




Where in the rules does it say that net hits don't increase damage from tasers or SnS? Or are you houserulling stuff?

Also, what do you say about APDS or AV rounds working on spirits?



Right out of character gen: Summing 5 +2 Spec + 6 magic + F4 power focus (Restricted Gear Quality) = 17 dice. Force 8 Spirit = 8 dice.

I think the mage usually wins

And yes, every mage should have a power focus.

*sigh* *needs to learn not to talk about things*

Alright, I'm only replying because i was specifically asked a question, but I don't want to argue about it because I've already stated my opinion. So please note that I won't be responding, at least, for the rest of the day.

As I noted above, the rounds do not count as having mass. They do zero damage from kinetic energy (as written in the electrical damage section). Why is this still being brought up? Moving on.

Also, I specifically said that my opinion was not supported by a written rule. APDS ammo works on a spirit just fine, but we're talking about electricity damage, so I'm not sure how this is relevant.

And thanks for the answer about Power foci.

Blue Max: Fair enough. And no, as far as I know the rules do not state anything about that post. I was suggesting a houserule becuase you seemed annoyed with them lol.

Not so obvious as you'd think. Our group settled on the "peak nominal discharge" school (where there's only so much juice so you can't stage up) but it's notable that one of our (usually) more rational players argued the opposite until we eventually convinced them.


I really hope that wasn't directed at me, because I was asking about electricity (say, an exposed live wire?) or pure fire being considered "natural" or "weapons" for the purposes of doubling and hardening the armor. I never meant in any way to suggest SnS would be magial. What I meant was to ask if pure elemental (non-evoked) electricity counds as a "natural" source, the rounds would be very effective, bypassing the ItNW entirely then halving the normal armor to half force (round down?).


That's actually stated in the rules somplace, about not having real anatomy, just being mana in a set "shape" that gives the appearance of substance. Runner's Companion, under Free Spirits as Player Characters IIRC. You can't "crit" them.


You can start with up to a level 2 power focus at generation for 12 BP, increasing Magic by 2 for most purposes (when active). After start, it's fiendishly expensive, hard to get a hold of, takes time and 16 Karma to bind - the equivalent of 8 BP on it's own. So it's CHEAPER to get it after creation, but then it's worth trying to get a higher rating (if you can) because the advantages really outweigh the diadvantages and you can NOT upgrade them. Most people do it because it means they get extra dice for lots of things magical. I didn't. My team-mate didn't. Lots of people don't. In my experience, it's not THAT ubiquitous... think of it as the magical equivalent of APDS. It seems like everybody on here has clips of APDS in their StreetlineSpecial backup at their ankle and in 1,000 round belts for their LMGs. That doesn't necessarily make it "normal".

Thank you for the clarification. 4 successes out of 8 dice would mean 8 drain. I see your point.
I guess that it strikes me as a little munchy to routinely do that. "Sure, no problem guys, I will make my eardums burst, my eyes bleed, and give myself the Muth'r Of All Headaches, just patch me up after, kay?" Yeah, it's RAW, but... wow. OK. Again, thanks for the clarification.

Its very, very, very , very *repeat* munchy. But its also part of our goal. We had been playing lower power but well rounded characters. Defensive shields kept us from embracing twinkerrific madness as presented on Dumpshock. Then I got Bad Moon Rising in the East and all heck broke lose. Everyone wanted to be more focused and stronger. Not one of our shooters has an AG less than 7 at start now. And the number of skills per character has plummeted.

It should be noted that we have 5 full time players and two 66% time players. Not all groups are large enough handle super specialization.

Oh, and we read Butcher's Dresden series. The main character does just about exactly what you describe: take on horrible injury knowing he can heal. Butcher, poisoning the minds of youth everywhere.

BlueMax
/We have three TMs
//each has his own specialty.

Normally considered a "normal weapon" unless the spirit has an weakness to that element: see fire spirits & water cannons.


True - they have no anatomy - but that is not synonymous with saying that damage can't be increased - if that was the case, then an axe would do no more damage than a feather duster to a spirit...as it is, it's a lot easier to get past their immunity if you start with a bigger weapon or a better hit. You might not be able to "crit" them, but if you blow a "limb" clean off...well, that's gonna hurt.

Our group has four full timers and a part timer, and the GM has an NPC along to thicken us up. We have some experienced folks, and nobody is "over specialized" but we still manage to hit certain minimums and keep enough skills to be ... realistic.
As to Dresden, do I need to add this guy to Sabban on my "little list"? But you said it yourself: decides to take on horrible injury. If it's off camera, it's easy to do things like that because there is no enforced "down time". I need to go back and read the first-aid rules again and check the "recovery times". I remember that basic healing took a while. I can't see where a medic could "fix" physical drain damage that easily. I know it's probably wrong, but I always thought you had to heal that damage normally, period, which is why our group tries to keep overcasting to a BARE minimum, of keep the drain low enough to make resisting likely.


I thought that was the case, but I must keep missing the express passage. Can I get a precise cite? that would really help. (I am sure others could use it too.)


Sorry. What I meant was that I didn't believe it should be possible to "call the shot for increased damage" (that was the "crit") because no part is more or less vulnerable. Bigger guns (base Damage Value) do more to begin with and more "solid" hits still stage up normally. You just can't call it. If there is a RAW cite for that and somebody can post it, I will be most grateful. Or conversely, an express CONTRADICTION of that statement if it's in error. Thanks again.

I have always assumed that the "called shot for more damage" mechanic did not help for armor penetration. I was always applying the increased damage from the called shot at the same time as the DV bonus from auto-fire, that is, added after comparing the Base DV + Net hits (modified damage value), but not part of the weapons Base DV. That seemed the most balanced way to apply the mechanic to me.

OOOOooooooooh, I like that. I like that a LOT. Wish we could get an official ruling on it one way or another, but I love it. I will point it out to our GM for sure, regardless. I like your take on things, generally, I have to say. It makes tremendous sense too, since the parts most likely to be "vital" are best protected so it would be a wash.

Thanks. The other thing that I'm not sure people are realizing when they do a called shot for damage, besides not improving armor penetration (at least by my rules), is that they are actually increasing the chance that the attack will miss entirely. I suppose the munchkins will compensate by doing Wide Bursts, but I would rule that the very nature of a Wide Burst makes it impossible to also Call a Shot while doing so.

I'd like to point out that despite both using electricity, an electric fence isn't a very good thing to compare SnS rounds against.

They have entirely different purposes and methodologies behind their operations.

An electric fence has one purpose. To discourage people or critters from crossing the fence. To that end, they're designed to deliver a painful jolt, but not immobilize. You want the target to leave, not get stuck attached to the fence doing a jerky dance.

Stick n Shock has a different purpose. To incapacitate and stop the target. They are probably based around using specific modulations of pulsed electrical signals designed to lock up muscles, much like modern stun guns work. Pain is often a useful secondary effect, but not the primary function.

Heck, Taser International already has a Stick-n-Shock round in real life for shotguns.

Given this probable direction in development, I'd have to say that SnS round, by nature of trying to short circuit the muscles rather than trying to overwhelm the body with raw electrical power, would have little if any effect on a spirit.

Now, what I am surprised at is that nobody's tried to develop electrical projection weapons in the sixth world SPECIFICALLY to combat spirits. A high amperage lightning gun would both look cool and probably make most spirits pause if they realized what it does.


-karma

Foci do not provide dice for resisting drain, if anything, Foci are going to give you more drain to resist because they are increasing the force of the spell/summoning. On the other hand, most mages are going to have as many or more dice than you indicated to resist drain. In my experience as a GM, the typical awakened spellcaster/summoner is going to have 10 dice for their combined attributes, plus 1 or 2 dice for Focused Concentration, plus 1 or more dice for Centering (initiation metamagic), giving 13 or more dice for Summoning. Add a couple of dice when spellcasting for using a Fetish, and you are up to 15 dice for resisting drain without breaking a sweat. Summoning a force 8 spirit is still going to knock you around though, unless you have some pretty hot dice.

As far as the discussion regarding healing drain damage with First Aid, you really have no choice other than a trip to the nearest hospital/clinic/streetdoc, as you cannot heal drain damage with magical means.

Centering Foci being the key exception.

Again, an excellent point. And a very common sense solution. I would agree that just ripping off a bunch of bullets in a general area is certainly incompatible with "aiming" for a particular small target. That's the other reason heavy encumbrance layered armor is a problem: it makes it that much easier to stage up the damage to where it's punching through regardless. And lest we forget, most sammies have less stun track than physical anyhow, so converting to stun isn't necessarily that big a help in the combat turn. Especially when the enemy can walk up and step on your neck while engaging the rest of your team to finish the kill.

About that stun track physical track deal-y

Most NPCs have one shared track. My party also abuses this to no end.
The cinematic effect is that this is when mooks fake death or run.

BlueMax
/Our Sammy has 11 boxes of Mental
//12 when is pump is on

I had thought that was a big change in SR4, and it applies to totems-er, mentor spirits too. They USED to help with drain in their respective schools. But everybody seemed so sure you could still hold back dice from the focus... oh well. I need to go back and re-read again anyhow, just to be sure.

And I think most people were sure you couldn't heal drain with magic.

It's in the errata, that's it. Didn't make it into the latest printing (not counting SR4A).



We've had at least one discussion on that and by RAW you can.

Do you have a link or a search string I could use? We use magic on Fading at my table but never drain. We must have been reading the RAW as RAI.


BlueMax

No, sorry.

Someone can explain this better than me, but volts don't kill you. You can take 9000, 10,000, or 50,000, and you won't necessarily die. What kills you is amps. Your electric fence converts amps to volts, which means you get a lot of shock and pain with no death. I imagine that the same amount of electricity, with the amprage up instead of voltage, would kill you quite easily.

Now, that doesn't mean SnS is realistic. The problem is that all stun damage in SR4 can kill you, even if it's non-lethal like pepperspray. A taser probably wouldn't kill most people even after repeated shocks, unless that person had a heart problem or other infirmity. It almost certainly wouldn't kill a healthy person after two shots. That's just how damage works in Shadowrun. Not like it matters much IMO -- if you can knock out or incapacitate someone, you can kill them at will. So it's not a game balance problem that SnS can kill. It's more of a realism problem, but there are too many of those in the game to worry about without rewriting the whole book

Correct. Volts jolt, amps "vamp."

drain has been errataed to explicitly not be healable using magic. iirc, the ruling is explicit in street magic, might have made it into errata elsewhere...

A summoning focus does let you retain power dice for the drain test if you don't use them for the summoning test. Just saying.


@Drain pool 12 - then I guess you have to hope for the 2% chance of a 12P hit straight to the brain ideally with a bad roll on his part

not since SR4A. they finally got that (they had changed the spellcasting focus and missed the conjuring focus, but in SR4A they got both. which is a shame, because that would have made the spellcasting focus a lot more generally useful rather than just situationally useful.)

Ah. Weird. So power focus reigns supreme?

Hear Hear...

SR4A says it in the section explaining Drain.

I'll Bite... Casually summonning anything above about a 3 is crazy... Summoning 6+ should be a serious task, not to be attempted lightly... can a character build do it... Sure... should the character get a free pass to do so... NO

Spirits can resist the summoning and should if they are high force spirits... They DO have their own agenda you know...

Ever think to have the spirits resist the summoning by spending a point of Edge... with a double dice pool, I can guarantee you that the casual summoning of Force 6+ Spirits WILL stop ...

You do realize that to the standard Hand Zapper today (fairly small) packs about 50,000 volts in a charge, Right?

Correct, Drain cannot be healed using magic

A force 3 spirit resists with 3 dice. How crappy of a mage do you have to be to not summon that in your sleep.

For the record right out of chargen no karma spent:
Magic 6+summoning +power focus 4(woo hoo for restricted gear quality) So I roll 11 dice. I consider beating a opposed test by 3 dice fairly reliable. Now last session I was summoning a force 5 spirit and failed 3 times in a row since he got 4 out of 5 successes 3 times in a row tieing my hits each time, but that is fairly rare. Usually I can summon force 8 eat some drain, get patched up and move on.

Charisma 7, willpower 5=12 dice for drain resist.

As for the spirit using edge, why would they. There is nothing that implies on a simple summon they would resist with edge. A binding you might have a point though even there I think its rare, but a summon I don't see it.

For those who think its mucnhy or metagamy to summon a force 8 before the mission accepting a nose bleed etc, well good for you I don't. Ok its a bit mucnhy because spirits are brokenly powerful, but not metagamey at all. Would I take a headache, nose bleed etc in order to increase my chances at surviving a probable gun fight. Um yeah in a second, everyone here would. If someone told me dude I'd totally summon a more bad ass spirit that could save our hoops but I might get an boo-boo a few hours before the mission, I'd shoot them in the face and get a non wuss mage.

And my GM thought it would be broken me taking "restricted gear" to take a Suprathyroid Gland. The binding costs at char gen are trivial for the power focus, especially at that level. Suddenly I am seeing something more "must-have" than the dreaded FFBA from another thread! Egad, I never considered just what the abuses of that quality might be. That's frightening. A starting mage with Magic 10. *shudders* If you aren't overcasting, it's a lot less of an issue. Well, I guess we all now know what the de rigueur accessory for a mage/mystic adept is this season. Suddenly I no longer want to argue with my GM about banning that quality.
Non-wuss mage. *sighs* I think I'll just go back to my room and play with my dolls now. Somehow I missed where Shadowrun turned into Barrens Chat. A boo-boo, if it's stun, and your medic is fixing it up, it's munchy as drek. But I guess not all of us got our epic [Focus of Doom] on the last 'run, so we're n00bs because we wasted points on skills and abilities that have nothing to do with 'running. Those of us without that purple item will just have to stick to trying to bring in wussy spirits vulnerable to man-portable weapons without special ammunition. I wonder who will hire us?

Yes, a force 3 spirit is easily summoned, by mechanics... however, by fluff, spirits are powerful and mysterious beings...

Why would he NOT resist the Summoning?

Please, can you provide any reasoning why you, as a character, would willingly go to the "summons" of a person (say a Mob Boss) that you fully expected to put you in a dangerous, possibly fatal, position that you might not come back from? Would you willingly go to your death just because you had nothing better to do today? And before you go there, yes, there are people that do that as part of their job (policemen and firemen come immediately to mind)... but I would argue that very few of those professionals would take on a suicide mission willingly, unless you are describing fanatical jihadists...

Spirits are entities with their own personal agendas... they are not just sitting around the deep metaplanmes waiting for the next joe-blow magician to summon them up so that they can go out and play... and magicians get reputations in the metaplanes for their treatment of spirits... have a spirit bind a spell for you such that their force is reduced, or constantly send your spirits to their "death" in combat and eventually this is going to get around the metaplanes... eventually (probably sooner than later) the spirits are going to resent you and your summonings and they are goint to resist with every fiber of their being...

Spirits spending edge to resist is perfectly acceptable, and it will put a kibosh on those characters that think summoning a Force 8 spirit up "just casually" is something to do all the time, as is so common a statement here on the forums...

You probably will not agree with me, but there it is...

I seem to remember something very specific once about that whole "reputation" with spirits thing. Wish I could remember where. I seem to remember something about getting screwed by a GM as a lesson and an example being given, but maybe that was back in SR2? Binding is an uncomfortable thing for a spirit and many mages/shamans/whatever see it as an afront to a spirit... hmmm, now that I consider it, how about a "metaplanes cred" stat for spirits, where if you never bind them or mistreat them they come more willingly and if you always bind and abuse them they start looking for ways to screw with you, or maybe a free spirit comes looking to 'splain a couple things to you?
In fact, I think I will propose that to our GM; once our DnD party was walking along and suddenly were someplace else and facing a bunch of bad guys we felt a need to kill and a fella in fancy robes behind us we felt nicely dispised toward, and when the fight was over, we popped back where we left. A very high level mage had grabbed us with a "Summon Monster". Our mage NEVER looked at his summoned minions the same way again. Food for thought.

Because being summoned is how they get their version of EXP.

great idea, let's also add a ruling that if the sammy builds an effective character, he automatically takes 5P damage just because you don't like it too! [/sarcasm]

k, first order of business: power focus doesn't add to magic kerenshara. it adds to magic *tests*.

secondly, if i were a spirit, i have no idea how i would think because spirits don't think the same as us. it's quite obvious that they don't function the same as you or i. you and i cannot be summoned into another plane. when we get there, we aren't nigh-invulnerable to small arms fire. we can't jump into a different plane of existence, hurl balls of fire on a whim, float through the air, or many other things that various spirit types can do. and yet, even though they can do all of those things, they're fine taking orders from humans.

now, i would argue that if you're going into a major battle, summoning force 3 spirits is going to be the one that gets you a bad rep, because those spirits are going to eat it. if you summon a force 8 fire spirit and tell it to fight a bunch of your enemies or something, well, burning stuff is what fire spirits do. and most of their small arms fire will bounce right off it, assuming they can even hit. the spirit is facing relatively little risk, especially compared to a force 3 or 4 spirit. and even if it does die, it isn't dead, it's just banished for a while. you don't even have to bind it, you can just summon it, so the binding test for a force 8 spirit is irrelevant, and it's attitude towards being bound is irrelevant, because it isn't being bound. even then, it's still you deciding to screw over the character. you may as well just tell them they get hit by a cow from orbit. spirits spending edge to resist summoning binding should be reserved for situations where the spirits have legitimate cause to hate the character. if the character has legitimately been abusive, that's one thing, but if the spirits they've summoned haven't been abused, the spirits don't just randomly decide to screw over the player (well, maybe on a glitch or critical glitch or something...)

having all your spirits spend edge because you don't like the mage summoning is stupid. if you're going to punish one character for using their character's abilities, you should do it to every character. otherwise, a few boxes of stun or even physical drain now is well worth it if it means you aren't as likely to get shot with bullets later. yes, it sucks, but that's a price the magician is used to paying; it hurts whenever they do just about anything. either get over it, or stop calling yourself a magician, because drain is going to be your constant companion. and would you rather eat a few points of physical drain now, when nobody is shooting at you, and you don't need to panic, or would you rather eat the drain later, when you don't have time to rest and recover, get treated for your injuries, and you've also got bullets flying at you? these aren't normal magicians we're talking about, they're shadowrunner magicians. when you go to meet the Mr. J, it's entirely possible that the meet is just a setup and you're going to be meeting with half a dozen hidden yakuza thugs with AK-97's shooting at you from ambush while you're at the wrong end of a blind alley. when you break into a high-security facility, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that you're going to be meeting some sort of security forces, and that they will try to kill you. they aren't going to ask you nicely to return that multi-million nuyen prototype, they are going to put half a dozen rounds into your skull. having a high-force spirit can be the difference between life and death in this situation.

Amen Brother Jaid

Preach on.

Also, summoning and binding those high force suckers is a high risk occupation... I remember summoning a force 6... no problem... then trying to bind it... I edged my binding roll to get 7 hits, figuring that'll translate into a lot of extra services... GM rolled 7 hits... soaking 14 physical drain after I'd already edged... By minor miracle of the dice, I managed to get it down to 8P... needless to say I was laid up for the next few days and almost useless.

The drain test is a different test than the binding, you can use edge on it too.

*rolls eyes*


Quite right, I should have written it as [Whatever + Magic (10)]. It adds to just about everyting worth mentioning, in terms of the crunchy bits. There are other things where it won't, sure, but compared to spellcasting and summoning (and if IIRC, checking to see if it's overcasting/oversummoning drain), I will leave my generalization as is.


What makes you think they're "fine taking orders from humans"? They are compelled and forced through magic. That's why they get to make an OPPOSED ROLL against the summoning mage. It's the level of their resistance that sets the mage's drain threshold. They can be forced to sacrifice themselves painfully for their master. I fail to see where "fine" comes into that.
And so we're clear, the DnD reference was to illustrate how a summoned creature might see its servitude, and how that understanding might color how summoners view and treat their spirits. Street Magic goes into detail about how different traditions (when viewed globally, they probably actually as a group far outnumber "hermetics") view and interact with the spirit world.


Not everybody thinks a fire spirit is a handy-dandy-flamethrower-pitbul-with-benefits. And spirits (especially lower force spirits) are very useful outside of combat. And we're back to how "easy" or "hard" it is to summon a high-force spirit on-the-fly. It's a lot harder to get the team medic (What sissy is playing a softie support character like that, anyhow? Must be an NPC) to heal you of your drain damage under fire, and unil it's healed, you're down dice. I think we were pretty clear about an "astral reputation" being based on intent, rather than just consequences. "Screwing a character" was supposed to be a final act against a callous and cruel summoner. The form of retribution would be in kind to the form of abuse - a spirit getting even. That's hardly a "cow from orbit". And finally, there used to be (wow, I have a LOT of old books to dig through) references to mages frequently getting the same spirits, since each DOES have a true name, and your idiosyncratic summoning methods are going to be most likely to draw a certain spirit - evidence how a fire spirit from a shaman and a shinto priest and a hermetic will almost always look totally different, and even spirits summoned by two mages of the same tradidtion could manifest in entirely diferent forms with diferent individual powers.


A price a magician is "used to paying". Wow. OK, I guess I can't argue, but I never got the impression that mages routinely summoned (or cast) with such force they would be taking noticable amounts of damage (especially physical) except under the most severe circumstances. There are other ways to keep from getting hit by bullets, too: Deflection comes to mind. An extra 6 dice (avg 2 hits) to make the other guy miss outright? Especially since the spell description says he usually won't figure out why he missed at first? Physical drain is not minor stuff. I keep likening it to being shot in a non-vital area with a light pistol while wearing light armor. Without medical intervention, it takes a long time to heal, relatively. To deal with the hidden Yak thugs, I have two force 4 sustaining foci loaded with "Detect Enemies, Extended" as well as "Spatial Sense, Extended". So if they are screened by warding, I know about it; If not, I know about that too. Out to 40 meters. Plenty of time to call off the meet. Why not focus on evading the security force? Or distracting them? Because if your team gets a rep for killing (you ask your force 8 spirits to subdue?) guards by the gross, Johnson won't want you for anything delicate, and corps are going to start seeing recouping losses in recruiting, training, development and retention (not to mention medical costs for survivors and survivors benefits for the families of the ones that don't) out of your hides as profitable or at least stop-loss. It's bad business to become known as forgiving of people who kill your employees in job lots for money while ALSO buggering you with the actual objective of their mission. By going in with a high force spirit in "facial ballistics" mode, you're setting the expectations and tone of the encounter. What about the Sleaze/Face character with the insane Con skills, who can convince those guards, with the correct hacked/forged doccuments and passes, that they have legitimate right to be there in the first place? If your mage is so Billy Badass, why can't he just toss an overamped stunball on the guards and end the fight before it starts? You're bringing an elephant gun to hunt squirrels. What you wind up with is an inedible fine bloody mist, lots of racket, an expensive piece of brass and a sore shoulder. A BB gun or a poisoned acorn would have worked as well, or better in a lot of cases. If you and your GM can't figure out ways to circumvent security... *shrug*

Diplomacy with Mr. Johnson for how much you're getting paid is an opposed roll too. Does that mean that the runners don't want to go out?

No, it means that they want more money for less work.

Spirits get paid in magic, so they want less work (services) for more money (mana). The price is paid up front by the mage (drain).

Rational for why a failed summoning still has drain:
The spirit was too strong and just took his payment by force and said, "You're too weak for me to serve."
Which is functionally equivalent to a runner party getting half the cash up front (which ends up being how much the Johnson wanted to pay for the job) and not doing the job because it was below them.

OK, and spirits that go uncontroled are likely to turn on their masters, why? Everything I have seen suggests that they agree to serve because you are stronger, leaving them no choice. There is no payment in magic, that's free spirits and another issue. That's fully consensual. Spirits are bound in circles, to keep them captive. I understand you're making a (reasonable) attack on part of my reasoning where I use game mechanics and compare a separate instance with the same mechanic. But there are circumstances where you have to beat an opposed roll even when the target would wish you could succeed freely, so it all comes back to cases. Your argument has merit, but I would want to to reframe it before I could give it any more weight.

kerenshara: power focus does not add to magic. why would it have any effect whatsoever on whether drain is physical or stun? that's based on your magic attribute, nothing else. nothing in the power focus says or even implies it changes anything about drain.

low force spirits are indeed fine. but if you're sending spirits into combat, you want the biggest, baddest spirit you can get. this not only increases the likelihood of your own survival, but also the spirit's. there is nothing abusive about sending spirits into battle, it's quite normal. if it wasn't normal, i can only imagine the devs would have indicated so; they certainly mentioned other services that the spirits find extremely distasteful. depending on your tradition and mentor, it's entirely possible your spirits will gripe about *not* getting to go into battle. if you're not abusing your spirits, having the GM treat it like you are abusing your spirits is crap. you suggested that the solution to someone summoning high-force spirits was to have those high-force spirits use edge. the act of summoning the spirit is not inherently abusive towards the spirit, and there was no indication in the situation in question that the spirit was being abused in any way, shape, or form. therefore, it stands to reason that if you're advocating the spirit spending edge to resist in response to a magician (of whom we have no evidence that he has been abusive towards spirits) merely summoning the spirit, then you are punishing the player for having their character use their abilities.

and while turning a high-force spirit loose with orders to kill everything in sight is not always a good choice, it is ALWAYS better to have the option to do so than it is to not have the option. it is likewise also ALWAYS better to have a force 8 spirit on hand to use concealment, influence, magical guard, or whatever else, than it is to have a force 2 or 3 spirit (notwithstanding the force 2 or 3 spirit is also useful). conveniently, you don't have to summon a spirit and immediately tell it what all of it's services will be, you can just ask it to stay close enough to support you if you need help. so that force 8 fire spirit can be sent into combat, or it can be sent to do any other service it is capable of as well. but the difference is that if you prepare beforehand, you can have a force 8 spirit available if you need it, and you won't have drain damage, whereas if you don't prepare beforehand and you do need it, then you're pretty much screwed. nothing about having a force 8 spirit available to you in case of an emergency prevents your face from sleazing past checkpoints, or you from detecting enemies better. but if the enemy team has enough counterspelling to block both of your detect spells, or is more than 40 meters away when they engage you, you've got the spirit available. walking around sure in the knowledge that your enemy will never have the advantage is going to get you killed. (not to mention, not everyone can have 2 sustaining focuses and the 2 spells known for that... last i checked, using ONLY the spells from the BBB, it was hard to pare down the list to as many spells as i was allowed. having to cut out another 2 spells so i can fit in detect enemies and spatial sense is not going to be an easy choice; they're competing with the likes of influence, heal, levitate, physical mask, trid phantasm, stunbolt, manaball, magic fingers, and so forth)

and yes, shadowrunning magicians are used to eating drain. it's part of their job. they are routinely facing situations where the slightest screwup could mean death, and throwing less than everything you've got at something can get you killed far more quickly than throwing everything you've got will. sure, joe wagemage probably doesn't have much call for launching force 8 powerball spells. but your average shadowrunning mage can run into that situation quite regularly, and an unwillingness to do so can get him killed. as a shadowrunning mage, you don't have the option of saying "no, i don't feel like using an overcasted levitate today, it's too painful", because if you don't lift that obstacle out of the way (or lift your team over the obstacle, or whatever), you and your team are probably all going to die. or get captured and psychotropic IC'd into obedient little wageslaves who are more than willing to actually take some drain for their new bosses, who are just so wonderful and mean everything in the world to you.

who said anything about binding? you don't have to bind a spirit to get it's help.

It's a bit late for me to go trawling around the various SR4 books for this myself.