Troll archer with high Edge and explosive arrowheads. We haven't converted to SR4.5, so the only cap is the augmented strength max.

That's a different setup than what you first proposed, where you had one rigger operating a lot of sites. Now you've got multiple riggers operating dozens of sites. It's also a much. more expensive setup than what you originally proposed.


That still means that the facility has no magical security until they get a call off. Disrupt communication, and they may never get that spirit. It's safer and more effective to use long-term Binding to semi-permanently keep a spirit on site. However, it's also much, much more expensive, since the mage has to spend Karma.

This also assumes that the sec mage can even summon a spirit with Magical Guard. .


The mind boggles. First of all, you only need to fool one person, who can't even fight back if you steal a drone. Assuming that the attacking rigger can't subvert the kill switch, you can instead have the team decker Spoof a few signals, causing Bob the rent-a-cop to panic and shut down all the drones. Now, you've got a cakewalk, since your magic-hardened defenses are switched off. If the combat drones are kept switched off until needed, again, all the runners need is one good ambush and the anti-magical security may never come into play.

Now, this setup might work if you have a lot of live guards, any of whom can trigger the panic button. But that's also more expensive, and they're still vulnerable to a manaball.

Astrally-projecting mages are severely limited in what they can do. Spirits aren't, but I already discussed the limitations of off-site spirits earlier. Low to mid force spirits are also vulnerable to Manaball as well.

In addition to being expensive, I don't think Nimue's Salamanders exist yet in SR4. They're purely a SR3 critter.

Regular Binding and use of Remote Service/Loaned Service will cover the needs without any spending of Karma.

A higher-powered option involves the use of Invoking with a Guardian Spirit. By way of Endowment, one service can provide (Force) guards with their own Magical Guard (which they can then use to cover both themselves and others) until the next sunset/sunrise. These guards split up among squads providing Counterspelling goodness for everyone. This would require 2 services per day, but it's pretty damn efficient use of a single Spirit. The Spirit doesn't need to maintain LOS to keep the power up, so it can stay nice and cozy deep in the facility while guards are now capable of defending themselves.

EDIT: Actually this won't quite work. The guards will get Magical Guard, but they won't have Counterspelling so strictly speaking it's useless to them. Oh well, having a Force 5 Spirit put out Concealment on 10 guys that can then each use Concealment on themselves and four buddies is still a damn useful ability since it makes noticing them astrally harder too.

EDIT II: OK, so the Concealment only covers astral detection if the user of the power is dual natured. I guess this works best if you have a bunch of ghouls around...

They can cast manabolt the astrally perceiving/projected mage and if the mage stays in the physical world, they can follow the team everywhere it goes and summon spirits to ambush them at the right time.


You don't send low to mid force spirits against a mage able to manaball them to death! (or if you do, you send better spirits afterwards, or a lot of spirits).
Compare with the same situation in the mundane world: if the intruders are Shadowrunners, the security firm won't send a regular cop with a tonfa and a light pistol.

Aerosol FAB II merely slows Astral Forms to a crawl. FAB II in a container forms a Barrier equal to it's Rating.

Standing behind a Force 10 Barrier isn't a perfect defence but it's a start.

Assuming the bacteria in it's nutrient suspension is at least partially transparent it might even be possible to penetrate illusions using it.

I have no idea how viewing an illusion through a Barrier works, time to hit the books.

We discussed the problem with that earlier. If the sec mage never gets the alarm, you get no magical security. And disrupting communications should be part of any shadowrun.



Summon *a* spirit. If it's a bound spirit, you could have sent it instead of you. If it's just summoned, it's unbound and therefore you can only have one.



Most mages can't summon spirits over force 3-4 without overcasting. More powerful spirits are certainly available, but they cost more. The point of this, I thought, was to show inexpensive and effective ways of protecting your guards from magic. So far, I've seen effective methods, but they're all expensive.

This reminds me: can an astrally projecting magician manifest and still cast spells?

- J.

You people and your mana static. My (magically active) characters would kick all of your characters in the face for messing up the astral like that. It's a good thing CGL has stated that they aren't going to be continuing any of the ED-esque storylines, or the Horrors would be eating all of your mages pretty soon.

How exactly did you mage kill hundreds of gangers with three manaballs.

Get more guards. Give them more guns. Hard to run out.

Or, ritually sacrifice lots of your own guards to create a nice aspected domain for them to work in. "The sacrifice is for your own good men!"

Compared to what? What's the base cost for a trained security officer (including training, equipment, insurance, pay, etc.)? I'd imagine that bound spirits even at moderate force and in bulk are going to look cheap by comparison.

No. The Spirit is assigned to the facility on a permanent basis with instructions to defend it as directed by designated members of the security force. If the spirit is disrupted/destroyed the mage gets a call and replaces it per his contract.

You can keep on saying this, but if we look at published products, then this doesn't appear to be the case. Most statted magicians - be they corporate, cop, gangers, whatever tend to be a bit stronger than that. It doesn't quite fit in with the normal range of Attribute values, but it's Magic so I'd expect that it shows up a bit differently.

Even if most statted magicians suck, why would you send them against PCs who don't suck? PCs whose power level is far beyond that of the average run wouldn't and shouldn't be attacking average facilities. Mlikruns like that are boring, a waste of their time, and if they could RP at all, they'd turn them down for the payout being too low for them. The elite runners get hired to attack the hardened facilities with actual magic security that actually doesn't suck. Cain's theory seems to be that, even though the books are chock full of really dangerous, assholish security measures that the corps can take, they essentially never take them. And he's right, as long as you continue doing milkruns for your entire career. But there are multiple power levels in Shadowrun, things graduate all the way up to the epic. If you've got powerful characters who refuse to play runs of their own power level, and have to be railroaded into them or they won't do it, that's not really a system problem. It's a player/GM problem. The system is designed to pit PCs against opponents who can provide some kind of challenge. If you deliberately fail to do that, that's your own fault.

Do you have the official statistics to support this? Besides, a strike force of two force 4 spirits and one mage can be enough if they use good tactics (a spirit harasses the team and dematerializes, the opposing mage goes in the astral to look for the spirit and gets astrally kicked in the astral neck by the mage.)
And the whole point of off-site security is that a lot of small offices/houses pay a monthly fee so that they have decent teams ready for intervention. I think that a small monthly fee should let you have a decent protection.

But it's a fact: an effective way to protect your guards from a mage Shadowrunner will be expensive. Just like an effective way to protect your guard from a streetsamurai Shadowrunner will be expensive, just like an effective way to protect your secretaries from being conned by a face will be expensive and so on.
It's just a matter of matching the runner's target with their skills.

Cain - While I have Ghost Cartels, I don't have it at work with me and don't remember the mission. Would you mind giving us a basic sketch of the situation so that we can visualize it a little better? Hundreds of junkies coming after the runners... are they all massed together in a single field when the team encounters them? Is this in the Hong Kong slums, which I always imagined being full of constricted, winding passageways and tall buildings? Do the runners have to go into any buildings during their assault? Do the junkies have any sense of tactics, or do they just charge mindlessly towards the runners (in the style of the rage zombies in 28 Days Later)? Do the junkies have any firearms or explosives, or are they just wielding improvised melee weapons like pipes and rocks? Do any of them have superior positioning (i.e. rooftops, covered firing positions)? How motivated are the junkies - do they care about collateral damage, or (at the other extreme) are they willing to set fires and demolish buildings?

No.


That's not what Octopiii was suggesting, which was having a mage with (originally one but now a stable) of F3-F4 bound spirits, sending them out for magical backup as needed. Long term binding to a site is a different matter, but that also costs a *lot* more, since the mage has to pay karma to pull it off.


Not every run can have epic power levels. You have to keep things realistic. Realistically, hundreds of ganagers on kamikaze and a Yama King should be more than enough.


The book has them massing in a street and making a banzai charge. I split them up among three streets, to multiply the challenge. Many were on kamikaze, and the rest were crowded together, so firearms were useless. I could have split them up more, have more coming down winding passageways, but that would have just meant more manaballs and grenades.

To further up the challenge, I sent in a heavily armed, magically defended runner team to assassinate the VIPs the PC's were supposed to be guarding. They were spotted on the way in, and went down to grenade fire and manaballs.

Why does everybody want to send spirits on patrols? That would be a perfect job for a rookie mage.

Nowadays, the basic middle-level security involves a contract with an external security, an silent alarm system that directly wrans the company in case of intrusion and a few agents that keep patrolling from one facility to another at night.

This job could be done much more effeiciently by a mage: as he is not restricted by walls, he could have a look inside the building instead of just checking the entrances and lights. It might not even be that much more expensive: since the mage travels much faster from one spot to another, it takes less headcount to keep an eye on the whole sprawl.

If the mage spots intruders, he just gets back to his body and send an intervention team, providing them with any threat evaluation he got from assensing.

/Sigh. Despite the fact that I think you're being willfully obtuse so as to refuse to admit you're wrong on an internet forum, I'll engage you anyway on this point: What part of "Magical Security Firm" indicates a lone mage? The fact that I said "mage" instead of "mages"? "rigger" instead of "riggers"? How is that set-up any more expensive? If the firm is covering enough small to mid-size facilities, it will bring in tons of profit - you seem to imagine that said firm can only restrict itself to one facility, which is bizarre. I'm certain they have actuaries in 207x - (probably better ones than we have now, with Math SPUs and VR assisted speed) - any decent firm will maximize their coverage and minimize the personnel dedicated to handling said coverage so as to bring in the most profits.


Golly gee, that's part of what Shadowrunners do, isn't it? Gives them a reason to do leg-work and set up before charging in; how awful! Your PCs deserve a cakewalk if they can cut off communication in such a way as not to trigger an alarm from the contracted firm. "Boss, we no longer are in contact with facility Q." "Interesting. Our contract requires us to check up on them in the instance of an unscheduled outage; add the charge to their bill and send Mystic Jimmy in the astral to have a look."


Again, sounds like what Shadowrunners do. Finding ways to shut down security is a good thing for PCs, no? If they've done enough legwork to discover a facilities security procedures and how to manipulate them - again, they deserve a cakewalk. Your flaws are less flaws and more part of the inherent problem for any facility's defensive system. Besides, the drones can always be turned back on when the off-site Rigger shows up to evaluate the situation - which will take seconds, as he's coming in via the matrix. If the runners can keep the guards from hitting the panic button, they deserve the reward. I don't see the problem.

In reply to the original post, I've drawn on real world material and have said that tin foil helmets help against most spells that target intelligence or willpower, so all my guards (and runners) wear tin foil hats or helmets at all times.

Mages are expensive, even the bad ones; and many don't take well to boring routines such as astral patrols. With my set-up, the mages don't ever need to be in the office, which will be a good selling point for the security firm: "Why work a 6-7 job like the other suckers? You're special, and your job should be special too! Come work for Asset Protection, Inc and you'll never again need to clock in on time or worry about brown nosing the boss!"*


*Job entails being on-call 24/7 with rare risk in the form of potential astral combat. Requires commitment to summoning and binding spirits, and the occasional astral foray. New hires will be given a binding Foci of a type considered appropriate by API; cost of said foci can be taken out of wages at a low monthly rate with reasonable interest charges.

I think what you're asking for is cheap while practically perfect defense. That's not going to happen (thank goodness for the runners), but having an off-site mage get a "ping" either when a ward is breached or a spirit notices a mage is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.

Wards can be built into physical structures. Build it into your walls, have one door, and have an understanding with the magical security firm that they are not to report a breach if the door is opened between 8-9am weekdays or closed during 5-6pm weekdays. Any other open/close, they report bock to the corporation. The corporation pays them very little for the "on call" service because the mage is never in any danger. SR corp.s have their own security personnel they can dispatch. You just wake up the day shift and pay them overtime. Its cheap & reasonably effective.

If I have one beef with the rules as written its probably that wage mages are overpaid. 100Y an hour is fine to create a ward, but to be "on call" for that amount is ridiculous. That works out to 16,000/month just counting 8 hours/workday. A mage could plunk down one ward and live a High lifestyle off of it. I think it'd be more balanced/realistic to have your "on call" magic security firms charging 1/10 or 1/100 of that for notification.

****

A much simpler alternative for GM's is simply to model magical response off of the docwagon system. Guaranteed 10-min response, with increasing levels of service depending on the security rating. Magewagon!

Only on the astral, just like if you are not manifesting. Manifesting allows you to appear on the physical, but you are not ON the physical.

That requires materialization, like a real spirit has.

So, you recognized that the threat level of your team was higher than the threat level that the challenge was designed for, and you were willing to increase the numbers of the opposition in response, but wouldn't change any of the rest of the parameters of the attack? That's like saying "One infant is no match for a grown man, but 100 gurgling infants should be able to overwhelm a grown man with no problems." As long as opposition stays bunched together in the open with no visibility modifiers and shuffles forward like mindless zombies you could have lined up a thousand of them and gotten the same result. On the other hand, if they had scattered, running into buildings to snipe at you from windows, crashing cars into the party, using molotov coctails to set fire to the buildings around you, waiting until you get close to jump out from behind cover when they have a decent chance of getting into close combat with you (and incidentally then being within the spellcasting diameter of you team so you can't manaball without also hitting teammates.), then it gets more interesting.

• You can't F10-manaball the junkies who emerge from the doorway 5 meters away without hitting yourself and your teammates as well.
• If you have to cast 25 manaballs during the engagement because you only see 3-5 junkies at a time, sooner or later you will go down with poor drain rolls. Especially in a BC3 environment.
• You can't hit opposition that you don't have a line of sight to, and in the winding streets of Hong Kong there will be lots of places to hide.

[Disclaimer: Apoligize in advance if I'm mischaracterizing your scenario. I wasn't there to observe what really happened. But it seems like the opposition acted really stupidly and ineffectively and it was their lack of common sense that got them killed more than anything else. Seems like you could have waltzed through this scenario almost as easily using an LMG on supressive fire.]

The lack of sense may come form the fact thee are on Kamikaze and K-10 they do send people berserk.

Traul: I think you might be under the impression that people are talking about having the spirit patrol while it is manifested. Just your comment about the astral mage not being "restricted by walls" and having a "look inside the building." A spirit in astral form can do exactly the same as the magician.

You make a good point though about the speed of Astral travel. We've been talking as if mages and spirits are bound to one site whilst at the same time acknowledging that they can jump across cities in seconds. You could have a spirit guarding multiple sites in the same way that a mundane security guard watches more than one room in a building. After all, an Astral spirit can cover 100km in a minute. Easily enough for a few companies in Downtown to share the financial burden. I don't think it's really necessary for the argument but it supports Octopiii's Magical Security firm even more.

Incidentally, for anyone who wants it, I did a full write up of the members of just such a magical consulting firm a couple of years ago. The PDF is here.

K.

I know the scenario. The opposition is being herded toward the party and pretty much just throngs the streets and the courtyard. Force 10 manaballs aren't really the issue. The players could, if the GM doesn't run things using some of the techniques you suggest, have exactly the same effect with grenades, hurling a couple of them every combat phase for every manaball you get off. It's not like you have to worry about scatter. And you can use gas grenades for the knockout effect of manaball if you want to.

It's pretty irrelevant. If the GM is pitting a disorganised mass of untrained streetlife at PCs with 175 karma and doesn't adjust the scenario to suit, the PCs are going to walk it regardless of whether they use magic or technology. The big killer in the scenario is the Yama King. With an Initiative of 18 and 3IP, it should be getting the drop on any PCs and when that thing hits, it hits hard (it also has ranged attack powers and more Edge than any PC could ever have, too). As it has Magical Guard and Counterspelling nearly in the double digits, it could also have very easily protected the crowds from the manaballing if it chose (another advantage a good grenade shower would have had).

I'd recommend to Cain that he also use the errata on bows.

K.

EDIT: I don't think I've thanked Octopiii for an interesting guide, yet. An oversight I'm now correcting. Very nice, and very useful to GM's who are on the receiving end of a PC magician for the first time.

Would you consider "Keep patrolling our 153 clients forever" as only 1 remote service? That sounds a bit nasty to me, and it is the main reason I think only a mage could do that.

Me too. Aside from Chin You on the roof, the other Yama Kings are supposed to be "cut scene" type material. However, if the PC's are having too much of a cake-walk with the junkies on the lower level, it would be pretty easy to turn one or two more of the Yama Kings on the PC's to increase the danger in the scenario. Considering the Yama Kings are free Shadow Spirits, I would say it is entirely in keeping with their character to be attracted to people of extraordinary magical power.

PS Yes, pre-SR4A bows are broken. I begged for some sort of restriction to be put on them when we proofed the Gear chapter.

Note that, with a Great Form Guardian or Task spirit's use of Endowment, it is possible for a metahuman magician to have Materialization. The spirit could even do this on a number of magicians = Force x 2 at once while it sits back at base. Now the astral cavalry can Materialize and do some real damage to those pesky runners.

I am blushing. . My main hope is that people read the guide and realize they don't need equally powerful mages to challange PCs; and if they do use mages, they can be rather "weak" yet still a challenge. After all, abstracting the Magic stat, for most of the 1/1000 people who are magically active, the bulk of them have a Magic of 2 or 3 - the really good ones are going to get snapped up by Corps in exchange for bucket loads of nuyen, but any magical talent is special. Firms can work with these mages - Foci, Specialization, etc, can go a long way for a mage to make up for their lesser magical ability. Hell, I would imagine that every Mage with Magic 1 would specialize heavily in counterspelling - it's the only way they can play on even footing with the big boys, and collect that oversized paycheck for their minimal talent.

I had not noticed that. That is vicious! Should I be afraid come tomorrow?

No, not tomorrow... but someday...

doesn't much matter. at sundown/sunrise, it's gone anyways, and the more places it patrols the less effectively it can patrol them. if you have 1 spirit patrolling 5 facilities and each facility has 10 rooms, plus a quick patrol around the outside, it could be quite a while before the spirit gets around to paying the team a visit.

That's one hell of a nasty idea... grant the materialization power. I'm so tempted to get invoking now on my mag7 mage... just so he can endow himself w/ that and see how the GM reacts. (also funny because mental stats would replace physical stats for materialized astral form).


As far as probably one of the easiest ways to protect your guards from rampant magical abuse.
Intentionally build the facility in a background count. Particularly one either w/o an aspect, or one aspected to your predominant magical security tradition (wuxing would be a good example for this).

Also get wards up in place and mask them so they're not immediately evident. (I think that's possible, don't know where in the RAW to look for that though; you should be able to hide a ward somehow)

That's what Octopiii's advertising, and it's simply not the case. Yes, you can get good magical security, but not cheaply. Binding high-force spirits is tough, and fairly rare. Initiates with Invoking are going to be even more rare. So, running across a powerful Great Form spirit with Magical Guard is going to be reserved for the most secure of facilities, where they didn't skimp on the security budget.

It doesn't matter if it's a single mage or a security firm, the fact is that you can't cut corners and expect good magical security. If you want it to be good, it needs to be on-site, be it spirits, mages, or riggers.


Dumori already hit this one. Having a lot of them hopped up on Kamikaze and K10 means they're going to act stupidly. However, don't forget that I added a Prime Runner hit team to the scenario. They escaped the manaballs by using the sewers, but were discovered and went down to a fully-automatic grenade launcher.


And again, magicians who can Invoke are expensive. You're better off summoning a Spirit of Man and using it's innate spell ability. Granted, the Endowment would give the mages ItNW, which would be burly; but it'd still be very expensive.

Not if it's bound.

Really? Any more expensive than that cybered-up group of Red Samurai we see in the book? I really doubt it. You keep making assumptions that trained magicians are expensive, but they are not really so any more so than other professionals (and, if you think they are, show me something in print that supports your claim). Once they've been trained in and have leaned to use the ability, the upkeep cost is pretty damn low for an Invoker. Besides that, you only need a few of these guys operating from a central security hub to be able to send out Materilaizing astral hit squads with a global reach within a few minutes time. It's worth a whole fucking lot, but there's no proof that it costs what it's worth.

Magicians are rare. Only 1 in 100 people show magical talent, and we don't know what percentage of them can summon. It is known that a good chunk of them don't even know they have magical potential, and thus never develop it. That's more or less straight from Street Magic.

But let's try an analogy. According to Dr. Funk, about 1 in every 100 adults in the US is a doctor. And doctors make good money-- a family doctor averages $136,000/yr, according to Payscale.com. Not all magicians are Initiates, so that makes them analogous to specialists. We also have to consider that not all summon as a specialty, making them even more rare, analogous to surgeons. They earn an average of $217,000 per year. The top ranking for practicing MD's earn about $250,000 per year.

Magicians are slightly more rare than MD's, so we can assume these figures go up a small amount for them. Now, we add to this by asking them to take on dangerous tasks and take physical damage every time they try and summon a high-force spirit. That jacks the price up further. To keep things simple, let's take the high number, and assume that a good, trained security mage with Invoking, who can summon spirits with Magical Guard, costs over a quarter of a million nuyen per year.

Mages are expensive. There's no way around it. You're right that you only need a few of them, but they still cost.

I'd dare say that the Megacorps have made it so that it's less expensive for them. They can bury the costs by providing in-house services (and patronizing initiatory groups) - just as military doctors won't be making bank today, we can expect that corp-owned magicians won't be high ball'n their salaries for a number of reasons. Firstly, any magician can initiate - and all of the corp-sponsored ones will be pushed into it. Further, in many of these corp-run initiatory groups, choice of metamagic is not entirely free. If they want a bunch of invokers, that's what they'll get at Grade 1. As for that whole idea that these magicans always go for the bottom dollar as thei motivation, we know that's not entirely true (outside of PCs...) - corp/government loyalty goes a long way.

EDIT: From what I've found, top-end military surgeons are looking at less than $150,000 yearly (including incentive pay). If anyone knows better, please correct me (I'm a civilian at a military hospital, so I have access to the pay charts, but that doesn't mean there's not something hidden in plain sight on there). Now consider that 40% of that is taken up by a Middle lifestyle (with the assumed dollar-to-nuyen conversion) - which the corp can maintain in bulk - and that's money flowing back to the corp to make the felt cost even lower.

However, because of supply and demand, there's never going to be enough mages to go around. Like doctors, there's dozens of specialties a mage could go into. Magical research is more profitable than magical security, for example. You're not going to risk your prize Thau.D. researcher in front line combat if you can at all help it.

I believe that security mages are going to be a specialty, like the others. They're also going to be paid as specialists. Megacorps can defray the costs somewhat, but they'll still be paying a hefty salary, and won't risk their mages lightly. That means, no invoking on overcast spirits, and probably not a lot of invoking period. Too much chance of physical damage to their investment.

Well actually, 1 spirit patrolling 5 facilities each 50km apart would take a few seconds each room (3x50 seconds) + thirty seconds to travel between each site (5x30 seconds), meaning each site gets an astral sweep every five minutes. That leaves a window that a someone could do an Astral flyby in but for a physical intrusion, it's really tight. And wow, your timing would have to be tight.

But it's academic. because I actually agree with Traul that I wouldn't allow "patrol 153 sites" as a service. Though I don't know where he got the number from. You could maybe have each site be a service and call them in simultaneously. So maybe four or five places shared a spirit, however.



Chin You is actually described as having an intense hatred of all magicians, iirc. Let him mix it up in there and the whole scenario should change. Average initiative result of 24 and 9 counterspelling dice. Ouch!

K,

not really. you just need to keep an eye out for where the spirit is. when it gets close, you just step into a room it's already patrolled, and make sure you're not in the first room on it's list. now, we're down to the spirit only being an inconvenience once every 5 minutes. also, that assumes the spirit just steps in. no checking around for intruders, just steps into the room and that's it. even assuming 5 minutes isn't more than you can spare (5 minutes is a lot of time for a group of intruders to be able to spend in one room), there's also the matter of the outside area for each building, plus if the spirit is going from facility to facility that makes it really easy to interrupt the spirit elsewhere, and if the spirit has to spend any time at all at one facility, that just starts adding up.

also, for one remote service you get a spirit that checks. it doesn't attack, it doesn't manifest. you pretty much need the spirit's summoner handy to tell it what to do about an intrusion, and to interpret what an intrusion is, because the spirit won't recognise the difference between an employee's legitimate use of the facilities and a shadowrunner team's. also, don't spirits use up 1 service per sunrise/sunset unless long-term bound (the one where you pay karma) now? or is that just an optional rule somewhere....

It blows through walls, you can't see it until in pops in, and it's moving really fast outside of the building.

If you can see it, it can see you.


If it's been there before, it can shortcut through the metaplanes. Are you really going to go through the trouble to set up an ambush for it there?

You're forgetting that this is a world that has amazingy good first aid capabilities. Professional level paramedics (First Aid 3) can easily throw enough dice with teamwork to negate up to three points of Drain from any badly rolled test in only a few minutes time.

Besides, if you're talking about a magician Invoking behind the scenes, his buddies can easily enhance both his Body and Willpower by 4 for the duration of the Summoning and Binding+Invoking. Their Drain will likewise be handled by a team of on-site paramedics. In general, the limitations that a single PC magician faces can be overcome by the corporate team's support.

I still don't see how more difficult/expensive it is to protect your guards from mages than from other runners.
Yes your guards can be easily manabolted to death by a mage, but they can also get shot dead by a street samurai, a rigger's drone or an infiltration specialist, or conned by a face, or led into believing there's no problem by a hacker

If you're limiting the amount of room which can be warded (warding costs money, after all), then ward the main guard room. That way spirits are not popping in and taking out the surveillance guards (or rigger/spider), and the guards who are not actively walking about are safe.

Cameras can't pick up mana spells. But if the guards fall down, won't the people observing the security cameras (or the agent program doing it) notice? Even if it's fully automated, have the guards wear those nifty detect magic glowsticks. If said stick lights up, the recognition program which is running on the system sounds the magic alert. And when you pass out from manabolt/ball, doesn't your biomonitor still register that your down and out?

And those portable satelite uplinks aren't terribly expensive. I would be suprised if almost every facility didn't have one, in case their lines get jammed ("in case of emergency, unlink through a satelite and get the word out"). Doesn't stop a good Shadowrunner team, but it does keep them a bit more on their toes.

And what happens when the mage takes 6-10 hit points of physical drain from a good roll on the spirit's part? Even if he lives, you've sent your expensive asset to the hospital for months to recover.

You can always add more mages as backup, but that gets even more expensive. Adding two mages means a total of 3/4 of a million in salary, just for one spirit. To put that in perspective, that's 360 nuyen an hour to summon one invoked spirit, excluding binding materials and paramedic fees, plus damages if the spirit goes uncontrolled. That's like putting your Harvard-trained lawyer on security duty.

I find it greatly amusing how people arguing that magic is over-powered can on one-hand ignore the risks of unaverage roles and argue without accepting the risk as a factor, and then when wishing to show that magic is overpowered because it can't be defended against, use that same risk to put down non-PC magicians.