Okay, back in the day you could pull out your cyberspurs and slash into a fire elemental and it'd feel it.

I've read both SR4 and Street Magic and I really can't find anything about a mundane with a lot of spirit (or Charisma and/or Willpower) taking out an elemental or the like these days.

Does Astral Combat allow anyone to do this or can I just substantute attributes. Just throwing this out there.

Sign--

Wacky

What you want to look up in Street Magic is Attacks of Will. Not terribly reliable, though. I'd consider allowing mundanes to take Banishing for the sole purpose of adding to these attacks, which are Banishing + Willpower and deal Cha/2.

If a mundane wanted to take banishing to make attacks of will more potent I say let them.

Simple answers here: Stick and Shock rounds work wonders against the spirits - a couple of them can put that spirit away for good and done.

Edit: Oh, and if it's someone without the cash to spend on Stick-and-Shock rounds, then a taser works nearly as well - a few shots should do just as well. You don't need to fill the spirit's physical damage to disrupt it, allowing you to go for the other one!

This has been discussed several times and there is no final solution if this works or not. So ask you GM before.

There is a vague worded post by Synner that states (quite ambigiuously, IMO) that SnS does not apply to spirits. I do not know if he meant that the round is totally useless or just that the electrical Stun secondary effect doesn't work. Make of it what you will, if you can find the post.

As written, nothing explicitly prevents SnS from working on spirits. However, I would happily be in agreement that there is no secondary effect from the electricity, as there are no internal organs and electrical signals to disrupt. Plus, SnS is the only truly reliable way to shut down a spirit as a mundane, hell, even as an adept.

Also, wasn't there a rule somewhere about SnS not staging up from net hits, or am I just crazy?

I know SnS doesn't care about what caliber round it is, it's 6S(e) damage reguardless if it's fired from a Streetline Special or an Ares Alpha, though as far as I know net hits still add to the damage.

Our team sniper took out two spirits in one combat turn using only his Barrett M121 and regular ammo. (2 init passes)

that .50BMG round is nasty

Don't they have a troll-sized stun baton in Arsenal?

I think so.
They also have other weapons extremely useful against spirits, such as lasers or railguns.
Both halve the armor rating, so even the Immunity of high-force spirits doesn't look that impressive anymore.

Problem is, against high-force spirits, you'll likely want burst or autofire capability, because these fuckers can dodge like crazy.
Best bet is to use a combination of wide bursts and AV ammo (-6 against hardened armor goes a long way towards evening out the odds).

Of course, one may argue that saturating a room with high-velocity depleted uranium rounds is contrary to their desired game style.
But let's face it, high-force spirits should be treated like just another kind of milspec weaponry, so sams with milspec equipment would be an appropriate response in environments where such monsters are likely to pop up.

On the other hand, if you're a skilled shooter, the usual spirits (somewhere around F6) can very well be handled with an SMG and HX ammo.

Send your face against the spirit. If he's good, he should be able to convince it to stop attacking you. If he's not, he'll give you about a combat turn to kill the spirit of run away and you'll have a position open for a better face.

Your ideas intrigue me, I would like to subscribe to your news letter. I feel this solution can work with problems other than spirit and would work very well with our Face since he has the Risk taker negative quality.

Meh, just get a bigger gun, hardened armor may be a tough nut to crack, but once you get a big enough gun the spirit is going to feel it.

And personally I don't allow SnS to work at all against spirits, because otherwise we get into questions about whether or not fire spirits burn to death or water spirits drown...

You cannot convince a spirit to leave you alive if it was ordered by it's summoner to kill you.
The spirit has no other choice but to obey the command.
You could as well try to argue with gravity while you're falling off a cliff.

I do believe that was the point. To weed out the pornomancer faces.

The devil is in the details. I'm pretty sure a good face will be able to convince a spirit that when the mage said "take good care of this guy" he meant it literally or that you're not the "intruders" in "kill the intruders" since you were already here when he the spirit was summoned, hence you can't be intruding (only works if the spirit was summoned after you arrived)...
But maybe I've been playing too much Dying Earth.

What if you just want a new Face for the group and this one has a no Magic Background? (one of the reasons we want a new Face, this one keeps agreeing to the most retarted thing because "our wizard will fix it")

As writen you need to be luckY and willful to manage and attack of will againt any spirit worth the bother of just not shooting (force 4 and higher).
Even with a will of 7 and an edge of 5 (or vise versa) you are only just past breaking even against a force 6 spirit and you are spending edge each round to keep up. Its a poor senario to be in. By RAW, stick with the weird ammos or weapons (SnS et. all) or have your wizard fix it.

Meh, unless there is bad mojo between the Mage and Spirit I figure that such ploys simply fail on the merits.

Basically, anything that's elemental will rock spirits because of the -half armor. That means stick-n-shock primarily. For the big boys, there are zapper rockets with seeker heads. If you want to get fancy, there are flamethrowers and laser guns. A little bit more affordable is the white phosphorus grenade, which can graduate to the white phosphorus mortar round in cases of extreme duress... And don't forget railguns! Some of these things are of course way beyond starting availability, but if you are fighting spirits where you need anything better than stick-n-shock, you should already be advanced enough to afford those toys. The crucuial thing is not to make the mistake of thinking that the same basic gear you started with will see you through every situation. You need to add on contingency items like rocket launchers and heavy autocannons for your getaway vehicle. Otherwise you're putting yourself in for a world of hurt as a mundane.

The dodge pool issue isn't as critical, either. If you're facing mega-spirit, if you force him to full defense your attacks you're going to win, because hopefully there's only one mega-spirit, and several team members capable of hurting it.

It is still very possible, it is just harder with higher force spirits.

Spirits have hardened armor = 2 x their force against mundane attacks.

So a force 6 spirit has 12 armor. A cyber-muscled human (lets say 7 str) does a base of 6DV, with -1 ap using spurs. If they are very skilled and drop some edge into it, they could possibly get 6 net successes, which would drive their damage up to 12DV, with -1ap... would be enough to penetrate the armor. If it is an earth spirit, it will have 10 body, so a total of 21 dice to resist, and plenty of edge. It may take a couple attacks, but even a force 6 can be taken down with mundane weapons.

Now if your talking about a force 10, they have armor like a tank so you are going to have to hit them with a missile, but they still die.

The worst part is their Edge, which is equal to their force. The first few crazy attacks you do against them, they will probably use edge to reroll failures on resistance tests and deflect your best attacks. Just be persistent and hope they run out of edge before your team does.

Oh, in our game we do not have electricity cause secondary effects on spirits, as someone mentioned already. Still does its normal damage, with no armor unless they have some additional elemental immunity.

I don't have any problems with this at all. Water spirits might not drown but instead be diluted and loose their cohesiveness when attacked by a water cannon. And attacking with fire could be said to use up the fire spirit's needed oxygen and/or combustibles. I know that fire spirits aren't actually relying on physically present O2 and such, but it's the symbolizm of the thing anyway, and everybody's heard the phrase "fighting fire with fire" before.

...is not necessarily the best choice for close combat.

Cyberspurs work great! Just make sure you're an adept, and enchant it as a weapon focus. Good to go!

But seriously, SR4A takes the AP off spurs, so you're much better off with a nodachi, combat axe and the like. And a Force 6 spirit is rolling 12 dice to defend without full defense, so bring your whole pool, and think twice about called shots.

Which is the point.
This is not optomised and can stand up to forse 1-4 spirits reasonably reliably and has a decent shot against force 5-7. A force 5+ spirit is NOT a street ganger you can turn into sashimi on your way to get groceries because he gave you lip, it is a being of another world bound by either a powerful (magic5+) mage at some light risk or by a "decent" mage (magic 3-4) at risk of signifigant physical harm or death. A starting 400 point mage can summon these fairly regularly, sure. And a starting 400 point sami can take on a small gang solo. A 400 drone rigger... etc etc etc.

As the opposition I agree with several others here - anything over force 6 is serious Mojo - at 7 it is smarter and more willful then nearly all meta-humans. In and around force 10 even the heavily augmented cannot keep up with their mental facilties. Mages should FEAR summoning such things and never do such lightly (ok so some will go out of their way to summon such all day every day, but few of these will pass the Corp or Militaries Psych profiling)

Figure out the weakness of said spirit, and take advantage of it.

I figure Guidance Spirits would never be able to figure out the lyrics to "They Might Be Giants".

Or better yet...ask yourself "why am I punching at this thing, especially since it can have a damaging aura?" and use a gun.

It's not like Shadowrun penalizes you for bringing an assault rifle to a fistfight.

Marine Corps Way To Win A Knife Fight: "Bring a Firearm."

Doesn't it penalize you if you are involved in melee combat with a firearm greater in size than a pistol?

Here are a few nasty tricks I've come up with for my summoner.

Seek and Destroy
- if a summoner has seen someone, they can send the spirit to track them down (Search p. 297)
- the summoner can wait until a target is in a vehicle/alone/asleep/going to the bathroom ... then have the spirit Materialize (P. 296) at point blank range and attack

Gather Information
- a summoner can send a spirit of Man with the Innate Spell of Mind Probe (because summoner knows the spell; ability on p. 207) after a target
- 3 net successes and the Spirit, and therefore the summoner due to the constant mental link, knows the target's biggest secret
- it would be easy to do this several times in one night, virtually guaranteeing success (if target kills 1st spirit, second spirit is summoned in 3 seconds and the spirit travels to the target extremely fast astrally so there is no time for the target to get to a safe place)

Mobile Instant Shield
- a summoner can have a spirit follow him astrally until he speaks a key word
- when spoken, the spirit materializes and serves as a shield for the summoner
- the summoner can be 100% behind the spirit and then cast aoe spells centered approximately above where the spirit tells the caster the target is located (or summoner can just turn invisible and leave while target think's he's still behind the spirit; if this occurs, see previous two nasty tricks for the next steps)

All page numbers are in 4th ed 20th anniversary rulebook.

The most success I've had in this regard is stick and shock ammo and or huge dice pools for damage. I had a rigger blow away a beast spirit throwing like 20+ dice with edge. I rolled well though.

WHY would you get into/stay in MELEE combat with a Gun... use the biggest gun you can find, stand off and blast the spirit with it... why get close at all?

• If the spirit is following the guy, any time the guy walks through a ward the spirit will have to either combat the ward or give up pursuit. Depending on the cooperativeness of the spirit he might come back for additional instructions (and charge another service for the combat) or even worse, he might just bull his way through and alert the maker of the ward of his presence.
• Just because the first spirit knew where the target was would not mean that any subsequent spirits would know. And spirits don't read street maps. Any follow on spirits might have to go through another search all over again to find the dude.
• If the spirit materializes in front of you, he's blocking your line of sight as well as the enemy's. Your indirect AOE spell will be penalized for blind fire. You might as well just take cover behind anything else in the environment and send your spirit out to take care of business while you hide.

I can't find any other reference to this or what page its suppose to be on. Can you list me a page number please?

Sign--

Wacky

Street Magic... Page 94, right column.

Of course SnS rounds work against spirits, as well as stun batons and shock gloves. And yes, fire elementals are affected by flamethrowers and other fire damage, as they have no Immunity (Fire); the same goes for hellhounds. Water spirits would not drown, as they don't have to breathe in the first place though.



Ahem. Don't forget the Slab/Narcoject capsule rounds. Spirits do not have Immunity (Toxins), and those two toxins only require a Contact vector, IIRC.





I agree to both of these statements. In fact, Shadowrun seems to penalize close-quarters-combat character archetypes.

EDIT: Also, look at my signature for ideas about allowing mundanes to use dual-natured intelligent weapons.

Uh-huh.

Ah, Neraph. I've missed your input. Reading your posts, I'm almost able to believe that things are so simple to everyone. If only this were the case.

Personally I would approach this another way. If you're a mundane, you're fighting a manifested spirit and you're pretty much hooped.... unless you happen to have a weapon focus handy. Mundane or not, it's still not a normal weapon, so it'll do all the goodness it needs to. Bonding it just gives you those nice shiny extra dice.

Excellent point, DigitalHeroin! I checked the wording of Immunity, and it doesn't require a bonded magical weapon, just that it possess the characteristic of being magical. Honestly, in 20 years of playing, this particular aspect of weapon foci never struck me.

Duh.

I think a person is spilting hairs though since for all intents and purposes, an unbonded weapon focus is just a normal mundane piece of steel...

It's a remote service. He's not coming back.

This is likely related to why no effective military force has issued swords, axes or spears to their combat troops for the last 50 years or so.

There are a number of other ways to get a very similar effect:

1) Have the group's posession-based caster get a spirit to posess your weapon.
2) Have a free spirit contact posess your weapon.
3) Have a free spirit inhabit your weapon. This can either be set up like #2, or you can force a spirit to inhabit a weapon by summoning it.

All three of these options (off the top of my head) cause a weapon to be dual-natured, which ends up bypassing Immunity (Normal Weapons).

EDIT:


Note that these are just two of the best options for toxins, not the only options. You could also K-10 a spirit and see what happens; Pepper Punch is a good, cost-efficient option; or make your DM see what effect laes would have with an order just given, for example.

Ahem, doesn't every military unit get knives and bajonettes and the such issued still?
And todays Military does not have access to such Power-Horses like Orks, Trolls and Centaurs.

Knives aren't swords, and bayonets are basically knives affixed to the weapon. The last military that I can recall issuing larger than knife sized melee weapons to its soldiers was the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II where officers frequently had katanas. Pistols have since replaced larger than knife sized melee weapons as backup weapons. The knife is still very useful in numerous utilities beyond combat, so that's why they're still issued. Plus they're stealthy.

Didn't APDS-rounds used to be the spirit-killer ammunition back in sr3?

In SR3, a troll can get spirits bare-handed thanks to the different damage system.

In SR3, Trolls CAN actually cleave Tanks in half with Katanas. It was more Punk back when ^^