Tailored opposition is the way we go as well... but the point I was making is that If the team has a MAge, expect the Opposition to have a mage as well... Mages are not so rare that having one makes an "I Win" scenario..

I think Cain's complaint was it has to be internally consistent and realistic. I don't disagree with this, but the missions should be tailored to their skills to make the mission tough, but not impossible. If the players aren't challenged then the GM is not doing his job or the players are intentionally taking milkruns. If the shadowrunners are attacking sock factories or mom and pop grocery stores than they won't meet magic opposition. However, if they go to the next level then magic opposition is more likely.

It is the runs with big payback where manaball, Automatic grenade launchers and spirits have multiple counters. Cyberzombies, biodrones, toxic magicians, Black IC, Spiders, Red Samuari and paracritters make shadowrun the game we love.

Caine's complaints are his own... I will leave it at that... as for the rest, I agree... any significant level of payment will almost always insure that there will be appropriate opposition, whether it be magical or mundane... that is the nature of the business and the reason that some shadowrunners get paid the really big bucks...

And as for internal consistency... my take on that is that if you (the team) have your own magical support) it is internally consistent that the opposition, with an appropriate run, will also have their magical support as well... Tit for Tat... keeps the playing field somewhat even... Now, have we had major runs that did not have Significant Magical threat... Sure, but the threat level (and tactics employed) more than compensated for any lack of "significant" magical abilities on the opposition's part...

It's more like 0.1%, with probably 75% not involved in security. So you get to pick from 0.025% of the population. So in the modern US you'd have about 75,000. That's about how many surgeons there are. There about a million security guards and about 900,000 police in the US today. It's also about as many computer hardware engineers there are.

How do you know 75% aren't in security? Do you have a source or did you make that number up?

In 2053, it was 1%. Not .1%, one percent! one in every 100 people! Which make 3,067,040 magic users in modern US. That's 3 million people. Even if you assume only 1/4 are magicians, thats still 767 thousand magi. About 10 times as many as you estimated.

And this is before half a dozen different types of Adepts were discovered, so it mostly refers to spell-slinging mages

My reading on the 1% was that only 1% were Awakened or had magical capability, but that only a fraction of that amount actually ever did anything with it. And with being such a minority (mages are referenced as the most minority group in SR), the level of persecution and violence stemming from a lack of understanding and fear is going to have a major impact on what one as a mage would decide to do.

Nope.

SM P22
"First, the Awakened comprise the smallest minority of the
world’s population. Less than one percent of the Sixth World’s
populace even has the potential to use magic. Of that one percent,
only a fraction has the training, focus, or discipline to use
it effectively; the rest either go mad trying or spend their entire
lives ignorant of the power at their fingertips."

I think there's a huge difference between the percentage in the world and the percentage in a city like Seattle.

But the two go together. Realism will generally mean that a Mr. Johnson knows exactly what level of skill is needed, and hires the cheapest/weakest group that can do the job.

This is not to say that every time a mage is hired, that means there will be magical security. But it does mean that the PC's can expect to be hired for jobs that (a) they can do but (b) will be tough. If a job is too easy, Mr. Johnson overpaid for talent he didn't need. If the job is too hard, Mr. Johnson is going to answer to HIS boss about the screw-up. So the PCs can expect to encounter problems for which their talents are suited...because their employers aren't stupid enough to pay for greater skill than they need, or hire the PCs for jobs they have no chance of completing.

Unless, of course, the runner team is being set up...

Actually the system I mentioned is exactly how Executive Management manages their companies. I'm not going to explain it to you because you are just going to ignore me anyway but for anyone else who is interested I was talking about Cost Accounting and Wikipedia has a good primer on it.

REALLY!!! Training institutions don't charge for training!!! Holy crap I should go back to the University of British Columbia and the AIMR Institute and ask for my money back because they cheated me!!!

The training arm wouldn't be penalized. They just charge the full expense of the training back to the Security department.

Actually the military arms of the Corporations are incentized based on the revenue they generate. It sounds like you don't really know much about the world of SR so I'd suggest reading up on someting called the Desert Wars. Theoretically the Corporate Military is part of the Entertainment segment of the business. You telling me that the units that pull higher ratings don't get more pay from their parent corp?

The problem with costing the Security department is that (you are correct) they don't generate money, they save money. So using Cost Accounting you treat the expense of Security as an Overhead (Fixed) Expense and you cost it out to the revenue generating branches. So all the expenses of Security are charged to Security (to make sure the true expense is known) and then divided across the departments they are protecting. Theorectically if the Training department needs magical security they would send a bill to the Security Department and then the Security Department sends a bill back to them for the cost of protection.

Actually I think I have Wall Street licked much better than you. For any who decided to read on Wiki you'll see that Cost Accounting is for internal managerial and performance reporting. This information never even gets as far as the Board of Directors. The Shareholdes and Analysts only ever get to see the Audited Financial Statements which do NOT include Cost Accounting. So you are theorectically correct that OVERALL to the Owners (Shareholders) my assertion is incorrect but to the Middle Managers and to the Senior Managers to whom this performance determines their promotion and compensation chances and to the profitability of departments it is important. If a manager goes into a quarterly review session with his superiors and they are raking him over the coals for increased expenses due to the increased activity of a different department then you have a wonky system.

I actually quoted the Rulebook for what I said about Security Mages. Show me something that has been printed that says otherwise.

The 50% was a ballpark. Here's some more numbers: Seattle 52%, Korea 62%, Japan 71%, India 38%, Russia 32%, France 19%. As I also pointed out most Census data doesn't include Homeless (ie. SINless) in the numbers. Unless there is a note somewhere in the Shadows books that I've missed or forgotten (or a dev says otherwise). My point still stands (although the actual numbers for Seattle were 3 million SINners).

That's exactly what I've been saying. They keep track of their costs by how much they protect in assets, not by revenue generated. Where we disagree is that I think training a mage would allow them to protect more, since mundanes are basically helpless against magical attacks. Any security department that doesn't train mages to try and save money is going to make the corp hemorrhage resources. You're telling me that a mages is so expensive that there's no way they can break even on the cost of training them. I simply call bullshit on that. If it were the case, magical security would not exist. It does, however, exist. Therefore you cannot be correct.

You're also making some kind of bizarre assumption that magical security doesn't have its own department with its own budget, as if the mages get lumped into the same program as the other cadets, just shunted off into a specialty. I don't think that's likely, really. As I see it, the mages would go into their own department, which would be solely responsible for magical training. The managers of that department would not get yelled at for training too many mages. They'd be expected to use their budget efficiently so as to not have cost overruns, but if they were yelled at it would probably be for not being aggressive enough to secure enough magical talent for the corp. As you point out, if someone just lumped the mages together with the regular security, it would create perverse incentives and fall apart. Bottom line, you're proposing very wacky, unsustainable incentive structures for magical security training which would cause corps to fail in terms of security.

Then you are calling Bullshit for the wrong reason. No where did I say it was too expensive to train them. I pointed out that the Authors of this Game said that mages are more valuable doing stuff OTHER than magical security. It is something they do IN ADDITION to their other duties. It is right there in black and white in the book. I didn't make that up.

So if a mage is more useful doing OTHER stuff the magical security aspect of their job is actually inefficient. They could make more money elsewhere. Presumeably the corporations do their magical research on a project basis and once your project finishes then you go do a "tour" as a security mage for a while. But as soon as you are assigned to a project again you are off the security beat.

The reason magical security exists is because there are players who play magical characters. That is the only reason. I have run entire campaigns where there is NO STATIC MAGICAL SECURITY and the corporations didn't come out on the losing end. As people have pointed out -- what's the difference between a Manaball and a grenade? The corps don't go to extreme lengths to protect their installations against grenades -- why do the same for magic which THEY CAN'T STOP ANYWAY. This is the same reasoning as Frank's critique of the Matrix rules. It is better to just opt out.

The actual structure of the corporate security department is largely irrelevant. All my examples still hold if the magical security department is separate. Senior managers will set targets for them and expect them to stay within their budget. If a manager is consistently over budget he will then be judged by how well he did defending the corp's assets. If there were lots of incursions and he stopped them all he will be applauded and he will get a bigger budget next year. If he did a poor job defending or he was way over budget with no incursions then he will be raked over the coals.

I will also state again just to make sure it is heard. The stuff I quoted is straight out of the basic rulebook. The developers of Shadowrun have stated in print that a mage's time is better spent doing other things and that magical security is NOT as tight as a lot of people here seem to think it is.

That's a non sequitur, a logical leap taken without proving the necessary premises. If they make money doing other things, then security is inefficient? You have to posit that they cannot protect enough assets to make their security duties worthwhile. I don't think that's borne up, considering just how dangerous magic can be to a corporation's assets. They normally won't be on fulltime security duty because they're not needed against nonmagical threats, and magical threats are rare. It does not follow, however, that deterring magical attack is an inefficient waste of their time. They might generate steady revenue over time by doing research, but what if they stop a shadowrun that was going to cost the corp a million yen? All it takes is a little extraction, sabotage, or theft to set the corp back a lot of money, and a successful security mage can preserve that money all in one night. That makes successful magical security efficient essentially by definition. There is no better way to prevent so much lost money in such a short period of time than by sending a mage out to respond to an intrusion.



Wait, you're actually arguing that, based on the fluff, the fluff can't be right? That's fairly mind boggling. You're saying that the fluff makes mages too rare and valuable outside of security, therefore by fluff there cannot be security, therefore even though there is magical security by fluff, by fluff there can't be. If that was confusing, it's because your chain of logic is twisted back on itself. You are cherry picking. You like certain fluff, so you exaggerate and overemphasize it in order to denigrate a part of the fluff you don't like. You are free to play it how you want, but you can't claim canon here. You're altering canon to suit your own preferences and your own vision of the game world.

Altering the game world for your own personal preferences is a fine thing to do. But remember, the OP is about how to protect guards from manabolt. Under your version of the fluff, you can't. You cannot claim that the rules are broken, while simultaneously changing the fluff to reinforce that. If you use magical security, then the rules aren't broken. If you don't use magical security, then they are, but only because you're playing in a way the devs didn't intend. If you do indeed want to eviscerate part of the fluff in favor of your own version, go ahead, then you will have to nerf magic to make it balanced. Just don't tell us it's the system's fault. You're committing the Frank Fallacy here, yet again -- using the most unworkable interpretation of everything in order to force the rules into a broken state that *must* be house ruled. Except you just said that you know how to make corps win without even needing magical security, which would place you more on my side, with the camp that says house rules are unnecessary. So I guess I have no idea why you're arguing with me, unless you're just trying to stir shit up.



Umm, so you agree with me? They will train as many mages in security as they have budget for. They are not penalized for doing their jobs. They do not have incentives to train less personnel than their mandate. Don't you think that not doing their job is just as serious as budget? Ideally, they must do their job to the letter and also spend within their budget. That's efficiency. What you're proposing seems to be not doing their job in order to save money, which is the opposite of efficiency. If you sacrifice benefit to save cost, you save nothing at all. You want to maximize cost and benefit both. But if you just slack off in order to stay under budget, you lower cost and benefit equally, at the same rate, which insures a lower benefit from your division, which offsets the lower cost, which does NOT get you promoted. The way to get promoted is to maintain or lower costs while increasing benefits, i.e. find ways to train mages that are cheaper, faster, and more effective. Training fewer mages than you have funding for is not a substitute. Don't be like Cain here, don't commit the error of looking at cost and ignoring benefit. I know that's how us regular folks look at the world, but it's not how a corporation sees anything. Cost and benefit are both indispensable parts of any calculus, and you cannot save money by sacrificing benefit -- that doesn't help the corp at all. The only time that makes sense is when you're running out of money, which isn't happening to any of the megacorps AFAIK.



Right, so you admit magical security exists. What could we possibly be fighting about then? My whole beef with you is that you seem to be positing a world where it doesn't exist, even though the book says it does. It might be less prevalent than people think, but that's far from the nonexistence that you seem to propose, right?

I have said several times that the best defense is to have no static defense. That would be my posit to the OP.

I'm not saying by fluff that magical security doesn't exist. I've reposted it below again. Under my posit magical security only exists as a response to a run. The reason there are any static defense at all is to make the mage feel useful during the planning and execution phases of a run. If you take that out, and forewarn your PC mages, then they can build more well rounded characters and contribute in other ways. Without going apeshit crazy with magical defense there is no way to protect against a mage and in fact there is very little a mage can do to pull off a run through PURELY magical means. The mage can pull off the run with magic as an assist but it won't solve all his issues. So my response to the original poster is: don't bother with any static magical defense. Wait for an alarm. Concealed guards waiting outside the lines of retreat can do wonders towards TPK.

This is quoted for what the authors of SR think about having mages guarding sites:



So except for the "most sensitive of installations" the best protection that the AUTHORS afford to corps is the mage with the above stats and he is a researcher -- not a security specialist.

So if you play D&D style and you are always running against top-of-the-line facilities then I suppose what you are proposing is fine Larme. However, when speaking in general we have the answer to mages on security duty.

I suppose that once again what we are arguing about is our differences in play-style. I play what you seem to call "street level" and you play what I call "heroic." Your runners are always going up against the best at their level. Mine weren't because they tended to be sane. As I said in the thread-that-must-not-be-named we have had campaigns end and characters retire because they got to the point where they could bang off a milk run in 1 night with 0% risk and earn 1000 nuyen or they could spend months and have a 90% risk to earn enough to retire on. Most of them decided "My character can make a good living with no risk so he is going to bow out of this run and retire." If you could make 1 million nuyen but had a 90% risk of death or imprisonment would you take it?

Now that I think about it how often do PCs die in your game? How many TPKs do you have? We have lots in our games. Tends to make the players very cautious and make the PCs behave a little more like real people and less like suicidal maniacs.

Ok, so we're not really arguing about much after all. It's a very fiddly question of degree that can never be precisely pinned down, not a basic question of nature. I guess I just assumed you were hostile to my ideas when you launched an attack accusing me of ignorance of very basic economic principles, and including 50 exclamation points.

It's SR fluff, where making sense, consistency and logic are strictly optional.

Which was in itself a knee jerk response to you accusing me of ignorance of very basic economic principles. People get touchy when you accuse them of not knowing their own profession (Financial Analyst).

Seriously however, what can a mage actually do to finish a run using purely Magical means? As I've said before he can't physically touch anything while Projected. He can't cast spells at Physical targets while astrally projected. Wards don't prevent him from snooping thanks to spells in SM. Wards only prevent him from having spells up while he walks through and assuming no Masking.

Manaball is hideously broken. And here's why. A grenade does about as much damage but you can't:

1) perfectly pinpoint its detonation point
2) limit the size of its blast radius
3) sneak it past chem sniffers, cyberware scanners, or MAD sensors
4) avoid damaging the premises
5) avoid making A LOT of noise

Manaball (and by extension Direct Combat spells) are inherently better than even Indirect Combat spells. IC spells:

1) need to roll to hit against Reaction (+dodge) with normal ranged combat penalties
2) don't bypass armor
3) leave physical traces
4) damage the premises

The reason people like Cain and I argue about it being so broken is because it is the best choice in pretty much any situation where combat is anticipated. A hacker and street sam need to work their butts off to get the sam's weapons inside a facility. The mage doesn't. But again it is only broken in combat.

The mage still has to contend with the physical aspects of a run and I think that that is the best place to stop them. Let the mage astrally scout the site. Let him know patrol routes. As long as you have the physical security in place the only way he can really hurt you is via Imp. Invis. and that is easily defeated by Awakened plants (very cheap and can be placed in doorways).

If I'm a corporation I don't care if my Low Lifestyle Corporate Security guards get ganked by Manaball. Let the mage do it. I just need a way to make sure that we spot him doing it and raising the alarm. 300 nuyen biomonitor underwear does that trick for me. No need for Counterspelling. No need for wards. Nada.

As a final point I will mention that the devs found magic broken enough that in SR4.5 they were planning on raising the Object Resistance Thresholds (don't know if they actually did). I plan this weekend to design a one-man Runner team using only a mage and no optional rules (explicitly marked as such). I'll show you just how cheesy a mage is through the fact that he can replace all archetypes (except for Technomancer with their darn Resonance Realms) by himself. I'll see how it goes.

For the record, I was accusing Cain of that when you entered. People always assume I have some kind of overall comprehension of the entire thread of the argument, including all of the players and what they think. That's usually not the case. I didn't know you were even involved until you smacked me with your 50 exclamation points. In the future, if you don't jump to conclusions that people are talking to you when they don't address you directly, maybe this whole kind of thing can be avoided.



...you forgot how it's totally free, and has no chance of hurting you when you use it! Oh wait, you didn't, because those are balancing factors. Mages pay almost all their points for the ability to cast combat spells. Sammies pay a tiny fraction of their points for a kitted out grenade launcher and a whole arsenal's worth of grenades, and yet they're very nearly as powerful. Again, you're ignoring cost and looking at benefit only. Benefit to benefit, magic pretty much wins when you're fighting mundanes. But cost to benefit, magic is grossly inefficient. You just don't need it. Mages can be defeated physically. The only reason you need magic is for anti-magic. It's true that magic is great and powerful and awesome, but that's not the same as broken. Broken means great, powerful awesome, and doesn't cost much. As long as it has a cost to balance its benefit, it simply can't be broken. Otherwise, nuclear bombs would be broken. But they aren't, because they have an astronomical cost and an availability of N/A.

Now, I don't think the devs were planning to nerf magic in response to it being broken. They were planning to nerf it in response to people like you and Cain calling so vociferously for a nerf. And then they reversed course, because the backlash was even MORE vociferous. But seriously, they handed you your nerf on a silver platter as a set of optional rules. How about use those, and call it good?

1) perfectly pinpoint its detonation point
All you need is a decent dice pool. Just like the mage will need a decent spellcasting pool to cast his manaball, the grenader will need a decent throwing weapons (grenades) pool.
2) limit the size of its blast radius
True
3) sneak it past chem sniffers, cyberware scanners, or MAD sensors
Pepper Punch grenades are legal. They can be restricted in some places, but so can awakened characters.
4) avoid damaging the premises
Most gaz grenades don't damage the premises.
5) avoid making A LOT of noise
Gaz grenades are quiet.


Partly true. They're extremely efficient (I've actually house-ruled drain to make them more dangerous to overcast), but they don't work against drones and the inability to damage things can be a drawback in some cases.


Not that much. A fake licence can be bought at chargen for the streetsam and a good sam has a lot of ways to enter the facility without going through the checkpoints. I don't say it's a breeze, but it's not as hard as you make it sound.
And as I said earlier, awakened characters can also attract suspicion, so I guess it's not necessarily that much of an advantage for the mage.


I agree. Just like combat isn't the best way to stop the street sam and Matrix the best place to stop the hacker, magic/astral isn't the best way to stop the mage.



Some cheap and easy countermeasures (such as the awakened plants you mentioned) are still a good to have on your side. For me, wards are still a must have for most buildings (just like having a lock on your doors or a firewall in your Matrix system).
Active magical protections (counterspelling, guard mages or spirits) are still a good idea against threats such as spirits.


Yes (even if OR might have been raised as a side effect of the more general raising of the target of standard rolls). They also added a (not very good, IMHO) system to raise the drain of direct combat spells.



I'd be interested to see this.

Consider a free spirit PC. Materialization changes everything.

The post where you questioned my basic economic knowledge you directly quoted me. I assumed that meant you were talking about me.

I actually blasted you with the 50 exclamation points earlier in the thread when you admited to using a D&D style system for creating your runs when you were lambasting me in the other thread for saying that D&D4 was a better system than SR. For that knee-jerk reaction I sincerely apologize.

@Blade:

Good points about the gas. I've tended to prefer gas myself to grenades. Gas still has a problem with point 3 however since it should still show up on the chem sniffer.

Direct combat spells do work against drones. Manaball doesn't. Powerball does. As does Wreck(Drone). And they are more efficient choices than Indirect Combat spells. Point taken about manaball not hitting drones however.

A fake license doesn't mean you are allowed to take your weapons everywhere. Ie. just because I have a gun license doesn't mean I can take my gun into a government building with me. Yes, anyone can arouse suspicion while going through a chokepoint. The sam who has a licensed gun he is trying to take in is going to be red flagged. The mage won't (bar using passive detection such as the aforementioned plants). Also I'd say a mage has an easier time getting through other access points than a street sam. (levitate, imp. invis)

Wards are more of a why not for me. They are cheap so there really isn't any reason not to have them. But they aren't as effective at stopping a mage as a locked door is at stopping a street sam.

Point taken about thresholds in general. I found it extremely amusing that they didn't see the high dice pools coming. If anyone has any house rules about how to achieve making it harder for high dice pools in a less clunky manner than this I'd be interested in hearing.

Ugh...guess you have to by RAW. I'd never allow such a thing in my games. Yes that is pretty much a game breaker in terms of magical security. A PC spirit will likely be much more sneaky and clever than a summoned spirit and will be less likely to raise alarms.

I'd also counter that with the assertion that if you have Free Spirit PCs you probably aren't playing anywhere near "Street" level in your campaign. I might try making a Free Spirit PC as well to see how that stacks up.

Right, it wasn't about you until you came in and attacked me, i.e. you recognize that you were the first aggressor. Since we're not in disagreement here, let's just drop it.



Free spirit PCs are horrible starting out. Literally god awful. They start as the equivalent of maybe a force 3 summoned spirit, if you're being charitable. A summoned spirit can kick the tar out of them in its sleep. Some day a free spirit could become useful, but they set the BP cost so high that they are anything but game-breakers. In fact, I think they'd fit in great with a street level campaign. On the plus side, they're essentially immortal, so it's nbd if they get blown to hell every run, especially if they have a friendship pact. They make good decoys

They can still do crazy crap. Like swim through huge amounts of earth (that would kill a human mage) to get into an underground facility without going through the wards on the elevator shafts, then hide inside the security command center bathroom and wait for an employee to come in so he can become his bestest buddy (using influence).

From what I was told, SR4 was supposed to have dice pools ranging from 0 to 12. They could go higher but that'd be rare and limited.
But when the other books came with their bonuses, the scale was changed, requiring a change of the difficulty of an extremely hard action.

The new treshold (1,2,4,5) look ok to me, but a friend of mine uses an alternate rule that seems to work pretty good too: no matter how high your dice pool is, you can never roll more than 12 dice, all other dice can only be used to remove negative modifiers. For example, if you have a dice pool of 15 in automatics and want to shoot someone with a -2 penalty, you'll roll 12 dice. If you had 12, you'd roll 10.

I never thought about that, that's kinda neat. Not neat like how a Naga or Pixie can be the Magic Apocalypse coming out of chargen, but still neat

Did I miss something here?

So doesn't this mean that in SR Horrors = Auto Win? The reason you don't ward the non-door parts of underground facilities (and kaers) is because spirits aren't supposed to be able to press through that much earth.

That's only consistent if every run is against high-security installations. If you're running "Food Fight" for a bunch of newbies, a counterpselling mage isn't called for. Further, not all runs are against corporations. There should be things that challenge mages other than another mage. For example, in Kowloon Massacre, sheer numbers should be frightening, not just additional targets.

To defend against manaball, according to RAW, you need either Counterspelling or Magical Guard. Both those are fairly rare, and expensive. (Despite what larme says; even if your truck will save you enough money to break even, you still had to pay a lot of money for it.)

Mechanically, using the original rules, there would be a limit of roughly 4/3 Force^2.

That would be the average number of metres you could push through with an extended test if you limited re-rolls to the number of dice in the pool. It would be much less if you were using the SR4A optional rules for limiting extended tests.

Actually no. The rules assume that you are projecting. A free spirit isn't projecting. It can't run out of time and die. So it can keep retesting until it gets there. Or it gets bored and metaplanar shortcut home. And when it wants to try again it can metaplanar shortcut back and keep going.

I agree that providing constant Counterspelling to a facility is highly expense (not just monetarily, but also from a resource allocation and lost opportunity cost point of view) and will only be seen in the most secure of facilities. Generally, my "minimum" of Magical Security on a site is to have wards around the one or two most sensitive areas and one or two Bound Spirits patrolling. The job of those Spirits is to simply watch for Astral intruders or any Awakened intruder, then run and tell their Summoner. This would in turn trigger an alarm and the specific targeting of the Awakened intruder. This when that "High Threat Response" team with its Magical backup (a trained Combat Mage who most certainly has good Counterspelling) comes in to deal with the intruders. I think it has also been a general agreement on this thread that detecting magic after the first spell has been cast is fairly cheap/easy to do as well.

So, if all of the above is agreed upon to be reasonable, then simply busting in and manaballing everything should not be the "I win" solution to every run. After the first Manaball goes off the HTR team is called and all the people run to their warded, mirror-glassed, "Magic panic room" and wait for the big boys to deal with the problem. If the players can sneak around, dupe security, and do whatever to get themselves into a position where that one Manaball is all they need to complete their mission: good for them. They probably earned it.

Well either that, or you need to have your eyes on, notice the mage before he casts, and kill him. The best defense is often a good offense. Either that, or let him kill all the rent-a-cops, then send in the ghost special forces to ambush him and slit his throat before he can cast. Whatever. The point is, situations are too variable to say that one tactic wins in every situation. Like we already hashed out in the thread that got locked, you're only right if every situation involves oblivious guards all within LoS and AoE. Maybe that's how you play it, I dunno, but it doesn't have much in common with my GMing style, or that of anyone I've played with. You're right if you mean actually rolling dice and successfully resisting (without a bunch of negative mods to the mage and a large Edge pool for yourself). Which I guess I'll assume is what you mean so we don't have to argue about this same shit anymore.

Unless the GM, quite reasonably, wheels out the limitations on how many times you can roll for an Extended Test.

The getting lost rules are pretty painful and I imagine most GM's wouldn't allow a Spirit to shortcut back to the same point inside the Earth's Aura. Even if it was allowed you would have to check for getting lost every time you did it.

And has been said many times, Grenades don't hurt you (unless you explode it in your face). Oh, and good luck taking out that drone with your Manaball.



Already beat you there.

One Man Army, the Swiss Army Mage

Made using SR4 rules for Skillwires. I think I messed up a little regarding hacking skills, but should be easily fixable. You're welcome to try and do better. Using a Possession Tradition with Task spirits is more than a little cheating.

See my reply to Blade about drones. Powerball and Wreck(Drone) ruin a drone's day.

Pretty interesting build on the mage. Wasn't actually thinking of the MBW route. I'll see what I can do without the MBW and get back to you. Pretty much along the lines. Why no Ogre btw (for the reduction in lifestyle--easier to eventually retire)? Was this pre-RC?

Edited: for reading all the way down to the bottom of the post.

If the same tactics are coming out in every combat, it's safe to say they're highly effective. If they're ending every combat, except for maybe the mop up, they may be too effective. Trying for diverse combats is not a bad thing; but if it always comes down to: "Manaball. We win.", something is wrong.

As has been pointed out already in this thread, noticing the mage before he casts is a difficult trick. Noticing him *as* he's casting is fairly easy, but there won't be any survivors to report to the next team.

Both of those spells have to beat the OR to work because they are direct spells. They've got favorable drain codes because they're target specific, but you need to cast them at least at force 5, rolling at least 15 casting dice to make the grade, on average. Force 6 and 18 dice if you use the optional table. Which you seem to suggest is the right thing to do, as you believe mages to be broken.



IMO, that build is a joke. First of all, activesofts have suffered a serious nerf, i.e. Rating x 10k cost. Way too expensive to provide real versatility, especially coming out of chargen. Just 1x rating 4 is nearly 1/5 your money. I love how everyone conveniently forgets about the SR4A activesoft price hike whenever they want to complain about this build or the other replacing everyone using activesofts. That build has pretty much been crumped up and thrown in the trash by SR4A, because its entire concept hinges on being able to have a crapload of extra skills using activesofts.

Second of all, all of its dice pools are pathetic. Put it against any min/maxed build and it's toast. The min/maxed samurai goes first and ganks it in two simple actions, 15 ballistic dice is nothing. Min/maxed combat mage goes first and blasts right through those 9 counterspelling dice like they weren't there. It's a useful build in some ways, it can puppet mundanes nicely, but not as nicely as if it were a real mage.

Reading this just made me think of a relatively cheap way to make casting Stun/Mana/Power Ball more harmful to runners. Just put mirrors on all the walls... Good luck casting without being within your own AoE range. Yes, you can still spell defense yourself and your teammates but you only have to roll sucky once to have a TPK.
Could make for a good security chokepoint too. Set up the hallway in a geometric pattern (say a simple triangle) that limits cover on the aproch side as well as using mirrors to make spells harmful to use on the guards.

**Not like it has not been thought of before but whatever...

That is pretty wicked, but then again the runners could impose glare modifiers on the enemies by shining flashlights and lasers right back at them, destroy the mirrors, or use smoke to obscure everything... Better for the mage to just use a periscope or mage sight goggles, so he can be a little less obvious about it.

Actually I didn' conveniently forget. I didn't know until you pointed this out. I'm actually going to have to sit down and read this thing now. Seems the game has actually changed a fair bit (activesofts was one of the unfun things for me but didn't remove it since it was the balance against the mage). So even if the GM is being a little silly your activesofts still cost 1000 x Rating instead of 300 x Rating.

Mage Solo:I have to say that in SR4 it is impossible to make a mage that can replace all the other character "classes." I retract my earlier statement. My definition was that every dice pool that a "class" would be expected to roll had to be higher than 12 dice. You cannot do that in SR4 unless the GM is silly and allows the matrix to be Att + Skill then it might be doable. You can get close and probably replace two but not all. However, 2 mages could easily 2 man most things in SR4.

I don't get it. Are you suggesting that a character can suffer the effects of the spell if one of his reflections in the AoE?

No, it's you can't hit targets you can't see with mana spells. So, in some interpretations of this rule (since the developers didn't define what the hell this means) it is assumed that you don't see yourself when you cast a spell and hence don't affect the caster ever if in the AoE. Most people don't see themselves when looking straight ahead, so it makes some twisted sense. The mirror is to make it so they can always see themselves. And mirrors are defined as providing LoS for mages.

I guess information travels more slowly than one would think. News of all of SR4A's evil magic nerfs spread like wildfire. News of those nerfs being toned down or made optional still has yet to filter out to a lot of people. News of the errata being free is still a bit scarcer than you'd think. And news of almost all of SR4A's beneficial changes seems almost nonexistent. Funny how that happens.

Also, you just forgot 0's in there, right? It's 10,000 vs. the old 3,000, not 1000 vs. 300. 300 x rating would be omgwtfnowai.



What does that even mean, "most things?" It's not an MMO with set levels of NPC power. There's an entire world of NPCs out there, and no end to the ways they can kill mages. Do you mean that a mage can 2-man things that would ordinarily require more than 2 non-mages to take care of? I don't think that's a judgment that's possible to make. What kind of mage build + what kind of backup, vs. what other archetypes? What situations are they in? A flat out statement that mages can "2-man" is practically nonsense, and invokes so many variable factors that it could never be demonstrated or disproved.

The numbers I refer to are the Unwired pirated costs (an optional rule I tend to use but was not using for my proposed builds). 2 man most things refers to being able to handle most of the high-tech dungeons that SR is made up of. I was going for 12+ dice in all the following:

Street Sam -- Physical ranged, physical melee, perception, dodge, armor
Hacker -- Exploit, matrix perception, spoof, scan
Face -- Etiquette, negotiation, con
Mage -- spellcating, summoning, astral perception, astral combat
Rigger -- pilot: groundcraft, aircraft, gunnery, repairs

Which, in SR4, makes a pretty damn well rounded and powerful character. Yes, now that I am going through SR4.5 (sorry it is a mini-edition from what I am reading -- although good on the whole so far) I can see that 12+ dice don't cut it. It was pointed out in this thread that SR4 was generally designed wth dice pools of 12+ being quite large so that seemed like a good benchmark.

And I admited to being wrong about something. You don't always have to be such a jerk about it Larme.

I prefer to call it rigor.

As for the piracy rules... Those are just a gaping wound in Unwired. My take on the piracy rules is that no GM should let their players pirate all their programs, especially not activesofts, because that just makes them too cheap to be balanced. Maybe if you wanted to allow low-rating progs to be pirated that would work, as a way to let non-hackers have access to the matrix without breaking the bank. But as I've said elsewhere, balanced is where cost and benefits are roughly equivalent. Using the SR4A costs, the costs and benefits of activesofts become fairly balanced with each other. Using the piracy rules just tosses that out the window. Maybe you want skillwires to be a total no-brainer that makes everyone into a swiss army knife for barely any cost. But I don't think that's a good thing to allow, it tends to denigrate the need for a team and makes the players working together start to seem more and more unnecessary and thus implausible.

I've never found money as a limiting factor to be effective, as a player or GM. Unless it's crazy expensive (Deltaware synaptic booster 3 expensive) a competent group of players can get the money. Jewelry stores and computer stores don't have the security that most SR targets do.

I never said it was not foolproof. It is cheaper to outfit a building with mirrors at security chokepoints than to pay for a mage to stand there. And with magesight goggles or a periscope the casting mage is -2 dice. (IIRC: I don't have my books but i think I remember reading something about that.)
The runners would suffer the same penalties for using flashlights, thermal smoke and what not.



Yes, it is already in the rules... What, you never had a mage with a set of those glasses where the corners on the lenses are mirrored so you can look behind you.
Mirrors can and do provide LOS for spells, like periscopes or magesight goggles from the above quote.

Are people serious about the mirrors trick? Yes - you can use mirrors to target people. But the targets also have to be in the area of effect. The implication of GMs using the mirrors trick is that PC magicians have (a) been casting area effect spells over their current location and (b) not harming themselves because the GM is ruling that someone cannot see themselves.

Am I reading this correctly? Aside from shadowrunning magicians normally having some teammates next to them who would be targeted, we have to assume that the magician can perceive her own aura or else she could never cast spells on herself such as Invisibility.

I liked the earlier editions where Area of Effect determined who you could effect, but you didn't have to target everyone unless you wanted to. At least that's how I remember us playing in 2nd edition.