It's quite possible guns are more dangerous to a mage than magic, yeah. Willpower+Counterspelling > Reaction, usually.

Of course, there's the "sitting back and sending in spirits", but there's also "sitting back and sending in drones".

True, but dragons usually don't run around without other protection. An anchored or sustained detect enemies spell, and a host of bound spirits just comes to mind. Edge 6 is nothing to scoff at either.

Magic doesn't beat guns every time. Magic is powerful but more importantly unpredictable, and Magicians don't generally have dermal sheathing. You geek the Mage because you never know what he will do and he's usually squishy.

The argument is that you can never geek the mage because he is hiding in a van or in a building nearby sending his spirits to come and smack you down. Spirits are a weapon that the PC's have at their disposal, otherwise I'd just let them be as nasty as I want. To keep play balanced I would need to let street sams have military armor and gauss weapons just to keep the power curve. If in the first 15 min of game play one of the plaiers can do something that will totally over shadow the rest of the campaign then that is not enjoyable for everyone.

Spirits created by dragons should strike fear into people. Spirits created by 400bp characters right out of the box should not be slaughtering whole Corp Sec squads.

Why not? the airburst grenade (well actually two with the new rules of SR4A)from the street sam/adept out of chargen can slaughter corpsec squads. The same goes for the drone army of the rigger and he can stay at home as well.

Aging would probably be figured as a disease / toxin attack, similar to sleep deprivation. Since the power would typically be very low (1?), immunity would reduce it to 0 and negate the effects.

Yes, but that is only if the mage decides to show himself instead of summoning invincible spirits to go kill you.

And of course it is much easier for a mage to take down a mundane with a spell than it is for a mundane to take down a mage with a bullet. Once again, the mage is superior.

And yeah, a mage can use counterspelling, but only a mage can use counterspelling. When given the option between (Spells + Counterspelling + summoning invincible spirits + guns) and (guns) which do you think is going to be more attractive an option? This is why I think spirits being near impossible to kill is absolutely horrid for game balance.

Lets review:

Frag grenades are +5 AP and 10F availability. They are one time use items and you can search and easily find them on a player. To use them they must be within launching distance of the enemy and are admittedly cheap at 35 .

As for the drone army: Steel Lynx are 9 armor and 12R availability. They cost 5K each without upgrades. Add in an Ingram White Knight LMG you add 2K to the cost and make add another 12F availability item to the mix. So a total of 7K per drone without upgrades. And you have to transport them to and from the run in some method. If it gets destroyed he has to go get one from his garage (not viable during a run).

Now take your mage. Lets make him a bit on the weak side. Magic 4, summoning 3 and logic and charisma 3. He is deathly afraid of getting hurt so no overcasting. He summons his 1 unbound spirit at force 4 and lets say he only has one service (but that use will last the entire combat rather than 1 turn like the grenade). He has spent no money (rather than the 7K for the drone). The spirit has almost as much armor than the drone (to conventional weapons) and it is much more versatile. If the spirit gets destroyed the mage can get another one as a complex action, again at no cost to him. He does not have to be near his targets for the spirit to attack. Spirits are effectively availability 0.

Now I'm not saying that this is unbalanced. I am just saying these are the facts against your claim. Spirits can be abused by players much more easily then drones or grenades. All the "against common sense" arguments need to keep game balance in mind.

I don't follow... the mundane will generally have more skills and better attributes than the Mage will when it comes to mundane damage. This becomes especially true when you are looking at damage dealing methods.

The Mage will have their Magic up high enough to have a decent damage spell. They'll also have a decent focus & Spellcasting skill. They will also have a decent Drain Pool.

The Mundane will have good Agility & (Firearm skill of choice) and said firearm. The mundane may very well have initiative boosters as well.

In the end, it really comes down to who gets to act first. The mundane goes first, the mage will get splattered and start leaking all over the pavement. If the mage gooes first, a double-overcast Powerbolt or Manabolt) will send the Mundane to the next life just as quick.

Whoever goes first, walks away from that fight.

I once made a Troll Street Sam. He was given an unlimited budget. Intended for use as the end-of-campaign Boss. I made him a virtual tank. He could shrug off repeated shots from an autocannon.

First round of combat, one of my players went first (elf street sam). One shot later, my big bad troll street sam was dead.

Called shot to the head, damage got staged up past Deadly a couple of times due to a good roll. Couldn't resist enough damage. Killed him.

The point I'm driving at isn't that Magic is overpowered or underpowered. It's that Magic & Mundane both have strengths and weaknesses. Sure many of Magic's versatile uses are every day things. Mundanes happen to have a lot of the same uses and a lot of edge case usage that Magic has a harder time replicating.

It's all a tradeoff.

Yeah, well it's not really "at no cost to him". There's always Drain. Having the Mage with 4+3 for Conjuring... against a 4+4 for the Spirit... The mage is going to pay with Drain, especially if he only has 6 or 7 dice to resist Drain with.

That spirit will only have 4 Armor (8 effective with ItNW). It doesn't take that many hits on the attack roll to push even mid-range pistols into the range where they can hurt the spirit. Rifles... most of them are DV6-8... The toys that mundanes can use to crank up that dicepool... spirit disruption goes from being an "if' to a 'when'.

Assuming the GM is lenient enough to allow the PC to burn Edge but not the Great Dragon.

The Great Dragon can't use Twist Fate to negate a burned Edge, but it can use it to make the PC reroll all his hits, or negate a regular use of Edge.

And all this assumes that the Great Dragon hasn't struck first with his Initiative of 24.

Honestly, that's what makes great dragons scary.

My point was that at that level things are fairly balanced. The spirit is weaker than the drone, but he is more portable and more versatile and replaceable. The grenade is more reliable, but not as powerful or able to do more than one thing once.

The problem is when you tweak the mage up the power curve go up exponentially. Someone planning on abusing the system can crank the spirits up to force 6 fairly reliably and have very little to worry about when it comes to drain. And they can do it at char gen.

Not only that, but if you take the more strict interpretation of ItNW, then even the force 4 spirit is going to be tough enough to shrug off any gun up to, and including DV8 (you have to beat the AV, not just meet it). This is because, as worded, ItNW would compare the DV (not modified) to the AV, and any AP or armor halving would be ignored.

Then again, we are talking guns here, and for the most part you do not want to bring a gun to a spirit fight (at least nothing smaller than an Elephant Gun or Assault Cannon). A Troll with a soft-maxed STR, no augs, and a combat axe puts paid to that force 4 spirit.

Now an intriguing reverse of this, brought about by the more strict wording of ItNW, would be using flechette weapons like the Mossberg AM-CMDT. Since you are comparing unmodified DV, the +5 AP does not factor when checking against the spirits AV, so the Mossberg can cause damage to a Force 4 as well.

True, it is generally going to be whoever goes first, but mages at least have the option to take the skill dodge to help fend off ranged attacks, while mundanes have no option to take counterspelling. Mages can also have armor, but mundanes can't have magic armor (Not counting magic resistance which is an expensive quality).

This means that while who goes first may determine the winner, if the mage has a good dodge skill he can possibly avoid the attack (Giving up his own turn, but may give him time to get away) or if he has enough armor, simply be able to soak the attack or at least drop it to stun damage.

Mundanes cannot take counterspelling themselves, however, if they have a mage with them, that mage can provide counterspelling for them. Mundanes can also use drugs to boost their Willpower and gain an extra die here and there. Also, with the introduction of Magical Compounds in Street Magic, all bets are off, the mundane character can acquire magical skills and powers using compounds (if only for a limited time).

Magic beats magic.

Folks this is rapidly becomming the X beats Y so we have to react with Z but then they reaction with 97 so we have to allow for 98 argument.

The best way to beat magic has always been magic or geeking the mage. Cyber makes you hit faster, stronger and better than flesh. yes the mage might dodge, but somehow I think the cyberfiend will be acting again before the mage.

Which just kinda proves my point that a mage is a requirement, so why be a non-mage? Saying that a Mundane + Mage can beat a Mage really doesn't say anything for the ability of the mundane, instead it speaks volumes of the mage, because the mundane can't get by without her.

And sure, a mundane can gain a few minor powers at very minimal ability, but it is expensive and not particularly effective.

Edit: I guess it is just me, but I don't like that the Mage archetype is overpowered, and everyone know that they're overpowered, and everyone accepts that because it makes them the first target (Presuming you can even pick out the mage in the first place) and they can be countered with other overpowered mages. Just seems to me like mundanes are an unimportant factor because anything a mundane can do, a mage can do only has magic backing them up.

I'm thinking of making a house rule for ItNW with armor degradation.

I was thinking something along the lines of this:
Every 3 hits that do not exceed the the armor rating but DO exceed 50% of the armor's rating (round up in defender's favor) of the armor rating will reduce the armor rating by 1.

What do you think? I figure it would be a small enough change that it wouldn't suddenly break ItNW and make it useless while at the same time reflect that if you hit something ENOUGH TIMES you'll start to hurt the armor, giving mundanes a glimmer of hope against some of these spirits, dragons, etc.

Advice appreciated.

That should apply to all armor though, and if anything, non-hardened armor should degrade even quicker.

Keep in mind this makes a dragon very vulnerable to a medium sized group of people with a few sniper rifles

Yeah, I was thinking I would apply it to all armor.

When you say "very vulnerable", just how bad do you think it would be?

Well, lets just assume a group of 10 people (Big for a running group, but not all that big as a group in general is considered. Wouldn't be hard to pull together a hundred people to fight a dragon most likely) of reasonable skill and ability.

We'll say that three of them have sniper rifles, five have assault rifles, and two have pistols (Once again, not hard to arm them all with sniper rifles or even throw in some assault cannons). I'm not really going to take the dragon's actions into account. I know he could likely do some stuff that would disrupt this strategy, but I'm interested in looking at the pure assault power required.

Now, each sniper will get two shots. The they'll require two net hits to break the 50% barrier (Assuming barrette sniper rifles, an extra hit or two if weaker rifles are used), and drop it down to 18. The guys with assault rifles do the same thing, requiring two net hits. The first 3 guys bring it down to 16 armor, meaning only a single net hit is required for the other two guys, who then bring it to 15 with 1 hit before it degrades.

Now comes the hard shot for the pistol guys. The first shot will require three net hits, but then the other three will only need 2 again (Not so hard at this point since the dragon will be at about -15 to his defense pool). So, you end the first round with the dragon only having 14 armor and 2 hits before degrades.

Now of course comes the troublesome portion of the example, because the dragon gets to do something that could wipe out some or all of the people, or otherwise prevent them from attacking further. We'll continue assuming that this group survives untouched (Would be easy to consider doing this with two strike groups or just start with 20 people and do this next part before the dragon can do anything)

So, now the two pistol guys will go, laying another 4 hits into the dragon and lowering him to 13 with 1. Now the Assault Rifle guys go. You have 4 of them take two shots again, which will lower the dragon to 10 with 2. Now you finally get to injure the dragon. SR guys go and can finally actually do damage with a couple of net hits. Presuming the minimum of two net hits, you have 2 attacks of DV 11 against armor 10(-4 from AP), and 3 attacks of DV 11 against armor 9(-4 from AP) and finally 1 of DV 11 against armor 8. With average rolls, each attack is only going to do 1 box, but that is 6 boxes of damage on the dragon now (Giving him a -2 to nearly everything, which should help with future survival). Finally the last Assault Rifle guy finally goes. He opens up with full auto and need 3 net hits. This is where the pain finally starts to set in for the dragon. The 3 hits are needed to break past hardened armor, but if it is managed, it will be a massive DV18 hit, which the dragon will pull down to 8 boxes, bringing him to 14 boxes total damage (Bringing him up to a -4 penelty)

So, I don't think I need to point out how a third round would finish off the dragon if it couldn't get away or properly distract the group.

Now, maybe not as easy as I indicated, but like I said earlier, gathering up 10 people isn't all that difficult, and I certainly didn't use optimal equipment (No special ammo, very limited on the high powered weapons, no called shots from the snipers) though I did somewhat stack the rolls in favor of the attackers (But that is how the game is set up anyway, attacker will almost always hit because defender gets a small DP). It could be accomplished in a single round with a group of 30, and and what I put above to put a huge hole in but not kill the dragon could be done by a group of 20.

I'm not going to pretend that there will generally be alot of difficulty actually getting to the dragon or initiating an attack without him slaughtering everyone before they can get off a shot, but provided that those things can be circumvented, taking the dragon itself down can happen fairly quick.

... Or the proper gun.

Lets reduce this down to Rock, Paper, Scissors:

Spirits are scissors
Mages are paper
Guns are rock

Scissors beats paper
Scissors also beats rock
Paper beats rock

Rock beats paper if and only if [condition]
Rock beats scissors if and only if [condition]

Hmm...this is what we call "balance."

If the "rock that beats paper and scissors if and only if" is available cheap at chargen, yes it is balance.

Which is trivially avoided by the mage. Ever heard of a mirror?

Here is an example from last nights game...

Possession mage with Force 6 Possessing Spirit... (ITnW of 12)
HVAR with APDS rounds on Long Burst (12 Rounds, 8 Points compensated, -3 to attacks Roll)... Base Damage 5 (AP -4)
10 Dice Pool to attack, unknown dice pool to defend... Attacker scores 4 Net Successes...

Comparison against ITnW: 8 ITnW vs. Base 9 Damage... Damage wins and immediately adds an additional 11 points of damage for a DV of 20...

Mage soaks all but 6-8 points (Massive soak pool duse to the spirit and whatnot)

Do that twice and the mage is dead... no magic involved at all...

Keep the faith

Because there are a lot of things at which mages aren't better; hacking, rigging and Initiative for example.

Because it's more fun not to play copy characters in a group, and an all-mage group isn't likely to be as effective or efficient as a broader mix of characters.

Because there are other ways of showing off your awesomeness than damage output.

Because the nuyen/karma proportion in a campaign might favor nuyen-driven builds over karma-driven builds.

Because not getting geeked first is a good thing

What Ascalaphus said, with this addition: If the campaign is regularly demonstrating the overpowering nature of the mage, then the GM is not doing his job. There all kinds of environments prevalent in the Shadowrun universe that require skills and abilities that mages don't/can't have. It is incumbent upon the GM to expose the players to some of these.

But if your entire team is a mage, you won't get geeked first, so an all mage team seems like an advantage. Mage is varied enough that you could have a group of six mages and not have too much toe stepping.

Also, you can make a mage (And especially an adept) that is just as effective if not more so than a mundane hacker, especially as you look farther into the future. After all, the only thing separating a mundane hacker and a mage hacker is boosts from wares, and a mage can get those too given enough time.

And personally I don't like mages for their damage output, I like them for the dozens of other things they can do, things mundanes can't. Such as levitate for example.

And initiative... well not really. A mage with a F4 sustaining focus and improved reflexes is going to be the same speed as a cybered mundane. Throw on improved ability to mimic reflex enhancers and mages can actually be faster.

Like I said, a mage can do anything a mundane can do only has magic to help back it up. After all, like one of the quotes floating around here says "A good mage can melt your mind with a thought. But a really good one knows when to use a pistol instead." just like a mundane would, except the mundane doesn't have the mind melting option if he really needs it.

An all-mage group should get reactions from the IC-world that fit them; worried crime syndicates, police forces and magical societies. Skilled mages are rare; an all mage party will draw attention. You'll have to play politics to convince them you're not a threat best dealt with via preemptive assassination. Showing off too much makes you a target. People fear all-mage teams and (over)react accordingly.

But yeah, it'd be powerful. With all the risks that being obviously powerful brings; it draws attention, and that's not good.



For every upgrade the mage buys with karma, so does the mundane hacker, who can also use cyber with relative impunity. We should compare equally built characters, not starting vs. experienced.

All in all I'd expect specialized hacker builds to generally be more efficient than mages in their field; with at some point karma to spare on branching out. The mage OTOH has to do it all in a roundabout way.



Flexibility is nice, but most of these things can be replicated somehow without magic.



At the price of an F4 sustaining focus, you can buy some interesting implants, and use the bonding karma for nice things too. And the amount of foci you can carry around and use to sustain is limited too (both my cost and maximum # of foci).



But the karma/BP the mundane didn't put in Spells, Foci, Magic, Initiation, Sorcery Skills etc. can be spent in being a lot better with those guns, to the point where you likely can melt people's brains with well-placed lead.



Let me be clear: I like mages. They're powerful and flexible and have cool shinies. But I don't think they're so super-awesome that the other niches become irrelevant or unplayable.

Also: not everyone wants to play a wizard. "Fighters" and "thieves" can be fun to play too; not everyone likes playing a magical character (even adept). The other characters can certainly be built to be "good enough" to play alongside the party's wizard.

Agreed.

Karoline's arguments would seem to depend, aside from a touch of hyperbole, on having a lousy GM and a lousy (or missing) social contract at the table. SR is not a MMO, thankfully, so we don't need to have the character types be balanced with each other down to the last nanometer so that a bunch of complete strangers can fairly judge the length of their e-peens. There is no need to take any of these rules to their logical extreme; that's what the social contract is for. The participants create the social contract and the social contract defines what is permissible. IMO, it is incumbent on the players to avoid taking advantage of loopholes or imbalances in the rules that would violate the social contract. It is also the obligation of the GM to do his/her best to make sure that a new team of characters each have their niche in which they shine above the rest of the team. We are in control of the rules, not the other way around.

They can be, and I think they more or less are at the moment. I'm mostly fighting this idea of making spirits utterly invincible to everything except mages because that would throw the mages up several rungs on the power scale. They really wouldn't need a team to do any missions, they'd just summon a couple invincible spirits and tear the entire place apart with impunity.

Yeah, see, the thing is, "Geek the mage first" works great IF they know who the mage is. When the fighting breaks out, my mage is typically one of three things:

1. Roaming the astral while his shoes sit in an armored wheel chair drone that is currently parked inside of an even more heavily armored van. It is routine at my table for the Rigger and Mage to watch each other's unconscious backs via drones and bound Spirits. My mages are also always built with good-to-excellent Astral defense skills.

2. Using magic to be hard to locate in the first place.

3. Behind cover with the Face and Hacker. No spells sustained, no goofy tribal shaman outfit, just a heavy pistol, an armored jacket and the sense to keep his head down. If he casts anything, it will be a pair of moderate Force Stun Balls cast in tandem to either take out the opposition outright or else a Turn to Goo spell to handle any opposing mages that have revealed their talent. If you must hurt someone you should hurt them so bad that they can't hurt you back.

Either way, it's a real stretch to say that he'll be focus fired upon unless the GM decides to be a dick about things and play all the guards as guided mage-seeking missiles. There's still going to be times where the mage has to stick their neck out, of course, but generally the rest of the group and perhaps a bound Spirit can handle most encounters while you merely provide utility and magical overwatch. If the opposing force is so honest to god powerful that you have to go slinging obvious mojo everywhere, then well, you have much bigger things to worry about than who they're going to shoot first, because you're apparently ALL about to get shot.

A mage "keeping it down" is also not a mage hogging all the spotlight, so there's not necessarily a problem



Sensible, but if you can trace the rigger, you also find the mage and vice versa. Since a lot of teams will likely do this, HTR teams will go looking for combinations like this. And a couple of guided missiles can really ruin your van.



Hard, but not impossible; since the book mentions that mages tend to look concentrated when casting, empathy software would probably be able to pick them out...

I believe he meant that he would have spells such as invisibility on him, not that magic is hard to see (It is impossible to miss at force 6+)

Exactly.


And again, an HTR team getting the drop on your van is pretty much a doomsday scenario for anyone that is in it. It's not a weakness that is limited to mages by any stretch of the imagination. And the guys who are now on foot as an HTR team comes calling probably aren't in much better shape long term. Shadowrun is not a game without risk; telling yourself that a character is somehow the safer in general for not being a mage is a pretty flimsy case to be making.

Invisibility isn't all-powerful; you'd need to jam both radar and ultrasound to be secure. Doing it all with magic means sustaining a lot of spells. And you prevent the jamming from being noticed and it's source sought.

Or you can just, you know, let the Hacker handle the tech stuff and use the Invisibility as a temporary measure to get your ass out of the frying pan without leaping into the fire. Personally, I don't even really recommend Invisibilty by itself for such things; I'd much rather just create a distraction via Phantasms. You'd be surprised what having an image of yourself running down the opposite alley can accomplish.

...Or he could use 1 spirit (force 5) using Concealment.

No sustained spells. Works astral and physical. Works against all forms of perception (audio, ultrasonic, visual, and electronic).

I want to stress that I don't think Magicians are all powerful or that every group should be all magicians. There's often more subtle ways of getting dirty work done than slinging mojo and those ways have the nice benefit of not having to clean up astral signatures all the dang time. Therefore, you can often afford to have people who specialize in those methods. I just think that people place more emphasis on the axiom of "Geek the Mage first" then is warranted. That security teams will want to neutralize magical threats is given, but the second the mage is down they'll just move right on to geeking the samurai straight away. At the end of the day, their goal is to stop the team by whatever means necessary. The kill order is just a detail.

Sure, Concealment is nice that way, but it does not keep you from being discovered...

Any competent opponent (Maybe not garden variety, I will grant you) can still perceive the Concealed van... even at -5 Dice, that penalty is not that big of a difficulty to overcome, especially if you have 10-12 dice to use to preceive with (I have seen builds with even more than that in games)... and since you really only need 1 Net to discover the concealed van (vans are not known for their exceptional stealth in this matter after all) it is really only a temporaty thing... and it still does not conceal the transmissions from the van itself if it is the origin point of your Rigger or Hacker...

Keep the Faith

That situation wasn't what anyone was talking about. Basically, I am just saying that a Magician has the tools to work remotely via a plane that most people cannot access, stealth/distraction tools and the option of simply not making it immediately obvious that they are in fact a Magician-- and if you're smart, the move you make that gives you away should go a long way towards ending the encounter to begin with. Now, I'll grant you that none of those options are fool proof, but when taken in aggregate it does mean that nine times out of ten the ideal of "Geeking the Mage first" is only practical when laying an ambush or when the Magician is a reckless combat mage that routinely reveals their abilities.

Sorry...

This is very true, a Magician that is flashy is generally a dead magician in short order...

Keep the Faith

Interestingly, in our games (up until Jim moved to Tennessee) the flashiest character was the Face, who was not awakened.

Oh...how many times we set Jim on fire...or rather the GM set Jim on fire. Once due to Jim's own actions (vented a natural gas pipe into a basement) and his own bad luck (glitched an Edge roll and the furnace came on).

And he still set off the C4 he planted before falling unconscious.

What a pro! (Salutes with beer.)

Yeah, he really did a number on that skyscraper.
(No really, going into it we thought it was a 2 or 3 story building, turned out it was 10+)

I would like to point out that walls do not stop bullets. Especially not Ex-Ex on full auto narrow bursts.

One mirror simply shows that a solution is possible.