I mostly pulled those thresholds out of my ass, and figured for dramatic purposes, I'd allow non-bio and non-structural samples to be used for living and nonliving targets, respectively.

Thoughts?

Suggestions?

Perhaps merely lowering the threshold, or perhaps making it an extended magical test?

Not really. THat's what house rules are for =)

Wait a sec... you're hoping they take out an awesome component of the magic system just because you have an unruly, paranoid, dungeon-crawling group of players (or are one yourself)?

I've never once played with a group that paranoid. I've played with Gms (and Gmed myself) who use lots of ways to track runners, by spell signatures, casings, and more. But it has never once been annoying.

Technically, in 3rd edition, they can't be used that way. To cast a ritual spell on a person using a material link, the link has to be biological. To cast a ritual spell on an object, the link has to be part of its integral structure.

Bullets cannot be used to magically cast a spell on a non-visual-range person, unless the bullet were somehow made from that person's DNA.

COOOOL! That would be such a sweet 'calling card'!!! Dangerous and SWEET!

I'll bite; what's awesome about it? The fact that one can replace real legwork with a couple of dice rolls simply because you have little kidnapped Jimmy's teddy bear? Or perhaps the fact that a corp can frag a runner because she bled a bit at the site?

Having a nice GM is great. But while hand-waving things like being tracked down by corps is fine on a GM-by-GM basis, it's a crappy way to write a game system.

What would you do, though, if somebody came into your home and trashed your room, and you could spend five bucks and the culprit, no matter whom or where, would suffer for it? Would you not do it because you want to be fair? I doubt that a megacorp would.

But, ultimately, it doesn't matter what you or I think. Street Magic will have its rules, and GMs that want the threat of spontaneous combustion (or calcification, or massive internal damage) hanging over the heads of shadowrunners that fail to clean up their target sites with acid or fire will have house rules if Street Magic doesn't provide them.

Remember that this could be a group of casters. Then toss in Edge.

To find them anywhere.

My brain is not in number crunch mode today, what dice are we looking at folks here?

What's awesome? The fact that it just makes sense. If magic existed today, you bet your ass the cops and corps would use it forensically - as they damn well should. I see nothing at all wrong with it.

And everyone does their legwork in their own way. A material link may help you find/hurt/affect some guy, but it won't tell you who that guy is, his background, why the Johnson wants him so bad, what his dirty secrets are, and what his social connection is to the kids he's been raping and murdering.

Magical analysis, astral tracking, material links and more - these are real legwork. If all you're doing is wetwork, then sure, it makes the run a lot easier to execute, and consider it an easy job, and well done. But if all you are doing is wetwork, then I suggest switching to a more death-tastic system, like Rifts.

And if the runner bled at the corp's site, she was doing something wrong in the first place, and deserves what she gets in return. When runners fuck up, they get fucked up in return. Tell your runners to plan better, and do better legwork. The best runs are the ones without a single bullet fired. I'd personally be more concerned about fingerprints, bullets, astral signatures, and more.

Five bucks? For a magical forensic analysis? Even a simple fingerprint analysis costs more than that today.

EDIT: And one last thing. Who said anything about fairness? When I run Shadowrun - you know, a game whose very fiction constantly espouses that the streets aren't fair, and runners usually don't last that long unless they're paranoid and well-prepared - I don't play fair, and I don't expect anyone else to.

I'm really sorry you feel that way. I think combat is the least exciting part of gaming.

I agree, there's nothing at all wrong with it. But that's not what you said. You said it was awesome. I think it makes it far too easy for the law and for corporate security to track down shadowrunners. "Easy to track down shadowrunners" is a euphemism for "easy to catch and punish shadowrunners," which leads to "nobody bothers to be shadowrunners because it's far too dangerous," much the same way that no one robs trains or large banks any more.

Piffle. One ritual Control Thoughts spell using a material link and you're done. "It was simple, my dear CEO Watson, I simply used the spell to force the culprit to call the station and give his whereabouts, name, and full life story. Then I had him cuff himself to his own bed and sleep while the proper authorities picked him up and rescued the child."

It's even easier if you just want the target dead. Especially if they die in a spectacular way; then it's a warning to all shadowrunners. Why do you think the RIAA is suing people, because they want that person's money?

Yes, but in your version, they get fucked up dead. And role-playing a corpse sucks. And they get fucked up for such offenses as leaving the ring of a grenade at the scene, or getting cut on the broken glass of a window through which they're sneaking.

The Representative from Oregon apparently has not taken the SAT. As in "fish:dolphin::bird:____". Go back and read it again. It's called an analogy. See, you're like the corp, and five bucks is like the cost of a material link ritual by a (team of) ritual magician(s). Try to understand, I was making the point that a megacorp could do these things for a fraction of their operating costs. So you getting back at your burglar/vandal for five bucks has about the same amount of impact to you as a megacorp would have to grab some sort of evidence and materially link a shadowrunner to something nasty. Savvy?

Of course they're not fair, but if they're unfair to the point that it's nigh-suicidal to be a shadowrunner, then it's not fun. It's not fun having to torch every room you walk into, it's not fun to have to scrub down your LZ and dustoff site with bleach, it's not fun to have to make a Willpower roll during the after-run party because you left behind a signal jammer or a flash-pak. Sure, be paranoid and well-prepared, but I've seen five examples of people on this forum saying that they fudge the number of rounds that players have because the niggling details suck, and when do five people EVER agree on anything in this forum except when there's general agreement? I'd say dealing with picking up shell casings and searching for every hair you lost in the target area is pretty damn niggling, and not at all fun.

Sure, it's not fair. But it's not fair in that Johnson always underestimates your opposition, sometime fixers try to weasel out of pay, or a contact sells you out to the Star. That's interesting, that's fun, that's not exploding in the middle of the Ork with the Gold Tooth Bar. Simply put, such cheap and easy tracking makes shadowrunning into a nearly pointless exercise and shadowrunners into those ghosts that you fear so much.

Oh, and the answer to the analogy question is "bat." Well, my girlfriend thinks that "flying squirrel," works, too, and I suppose that would fly (no pun intended). We agree, however, that "sugar glider" is right out, because it's a marsupial, not a mammal.

Lets assume we've got magic 6 castors with a ritual magic skill of 6. Pretty good, eh? We'll even throw in force 3 focuses. Let's skip the elementals...er...bound spirits for now. 5 castors roll 15 dice each and get around 25 hits. Main castor dude rolls 40 dice and gets around 13 hits. I guess it's not quite as bad as I thought, but it's still going to take a legendary collection of mojo to find poor lost Timmy.

But that's based off average only, meaning they succeed just about 2/3rds of the time. It is also without using Edge.

And once again that's locating Timmy anywhere in the world using only the Teddy bear. No blood sample. Frankly I like seeing it be that hard to pull that off. When you have a blood sample and know the city, or even the larger geographical area like the country it becomes pretty easy to get a lock.

P.S. If the target was in a ward, lodge, or such would you use the Force of it as a kind of counterspelling dice? Or just a die penalty to the ritual casting?

Of course it makes it easy to track down the runners. So does the concept of the PAN. If you're not spoofing your datatrail every minute of every day, a given commlink can be tracked (and physically triangulated) just by looking at the routing information of the data traffic going to and from it. The use of remote services with spirits, or watchers has the same effect (presuming you know what they look like - a problem my players are dealing with now). Or simple modern (2000 ish) forensic techniques. There are literally hundreds of way to track down any given runner, from magic down to the simple biometric data on your fake SIN (camera gets a glimpse of runner A, run picture through public SIN registries using biometric matching program = compromised fake SIN and probably caught runner). Material links for ritual magic only add one more method to the hundreds available.

So why aren't runners extinct? Because the cops really don't care unless the crime is big, and corps don't want them extinct - they need deniable assets. The sourcebooks themselves state this. The corps tolerate runners.

Besides, there's another thing to worry about - continuity. For three editions now ritual sorcery could be used via material links. Now that 4th edition comes out, poof! all of a sudden the laws of magic in the Sixth World fundementally change for no reason to disallow it? Just like dikote, some people may not like the material links portion of previous rules, but it is part of the world. It can't be simply done away with without explanation without breaking continuity and thus reducing the believability of the setting.

So you get emotionally attached to your grenade rings and flash paks? Only objects with a significant emotional attachment or biological material works as a material link, anything else is garbage.

Some people do, right Vera.

OK, I'm drawing a total blank on were that actually comes from, but I get your point

It'd probably work just like a mana barrier:

per the spell
"Any target of a spell that is on the other side of the Mana Barrier receives a bonus to its spell resistance dice pool equal to the barrier’s Force."

The point is that sppofing one's data trail is trivial. It's a Hacking + Spoof (2) test. Most hackers and technomancers can do it by buying hits, usually on the way to and from the run, for the entire team. And tracking that commlink is more complicated and easier to prevent than a fire-and-forget material link spell.

Why not? The rules have changed in many ways as it is. Like learning spells and casting spells and hermetics summoning on the fly and shamans binding spirits and no grounding spells from astral space into physical space. Need a reason? I'm rather fond of the Comet strengthening the barrier between astral and physical space; it explains a lot.

You don't think combat sparks emotions?

Comments retracted. I see this is not going to go anywhere pleasant. Peace.

Egads! Get yourself to a DVD vendor. Now!

Note: That is a picture of Janye Cobb holding his beloved favorite firearm that he named 'Vera'. He's also partial to grenades...and pretty much every other personal weapon.

Roger that on the mana barrier adding a bonus to its spell resistance dice pool. That is what I'd figure too. There just isn't really anything about it in the core book. Probably because it deals only with targetting via the spotter, who has to get across the barrier themselves somehow.

Looks good to me. I think I'm going to add all of this to my current house rules.

Thanks for the help and the objective discussion, folks =)

I call shenanigans. If that was true, you would have been able to blow holes through it, which you didn't do. For the record, you seemed to be insinuating that I was saying that magical forensic testing costs five bucks. Go back and read what I wrote (and you quoted, Phas). I wasn't, and by saying so I thought you were using cheap tricks to support your argument without actually supporting your argument, thus the snarkiness.

No flames intended, omae. Snarky, I'll admit, but not a flame. Perhaps if you could point out where I flamed you, I could avoid it in the future.

I always thought that a flame would look like this: You're an idiotic blowhard that couldn't support an argument with a six-figure salary and a crutch. See? That's a flame. And for the record, I haven't met you, so I don't know if that's true, so I wouldn't say it of you.

When you think about it, though, you're not really supporting your argument here, and you are accusing me of being the board's "lowest Common denominator," which is itself a flame, but I can't really judge the tone for sure, so I'm reserving judgement. Although I do love irony. And yeah, I did say that you were afraid of ghosts, but I thought that was fair game, since that's what your name (Phasmaphobic) means: afraid of ghosts.

So yeah, I'll admit I was being snarky. I hate having to repeat myself, and I tend to get sarcastic when I do. I'm not convinced that sort of thing is out of line, though, judging from the rest of this forum.

I'll tell you what: are you going to Gen Con, Phasmaphobic? If so, let's get together, I'll buy you a drink, and we can talk about it without gimmicks and nonsense. Actually that goes for anyone on the forum (not the drink offer, though).

In the meantime, if anybody wants to debate the points I make, feel free. I like a good discussion.

I've already retracted my comments and am not taking this any further.if I flamed you.

/bows

EDIT: Apologies for any flames.

Welcome to internet message boards. If you haven't resorted to at least one flame towards your opposition your points will not even be glossed over

Personal opinions on material links aside, continuity is never a good reason to keep a bad rule around. If it were we'd still have grounding.

I personally don't concern myself with material links and don't force the runners to spray everything with bleach before they leave. If there are rules for material links I'll probably remove them, ignore them, or assume that standard operating procedure for a run is to do things that invalidate them and then only bring them up when necessary to the plotline (probably the last one).

From a GM standpoint though it's much easier to have a rule and ignore it than it is to not have a rule and create it. For that reason alone I think material links should be in the RAW. Folks that don't like it can ignore it, folks that do can use and/or abuse it.

You know, not every board on the internet is identical to the message boards on Fark.com and just about every MMORPG. =)

I agree with Phas, here. Dumpshock tends to be a higher calibur than most forums.

Back to the thread's topic, though: seriously, I don't mind being convinced that my arguments are spurious or my points don't hold water. Does anybody have a reason (other than "it's the way it was done before," please) to keep material links around?

I gave one. It's easier to negate than create, at least when it comes to generating rules about something as complex as ritual casting, what makes a material link usable, and how symbolic links will work (or even if they should).

You did. I missed that. Sorry.

While I agree with the fact that an individual GM can ignore rules easily (as I do with casting spells through fiber optics), I don't think bad rules should be allowed into the RAW. The simple reason is that Shadowrun is one of those games that have a universal campaign running (Missions). Sure, your neighborhood (American) football game can have home rules (e.g. the "hitting a car or a house with the ball penalty" and the "ten-banana rush" were both popular rules in my neigborhood), but the NFL had better have rules to which all teams adhere.

Better such rules be the house rules, and not the RAW. They, I think, should be the exception, not the rule.

Well, I'll list a few that I believe are good:

1) Forensically, it just makes sense. If magic were used as much as the canon text says so, then it makes sense that it would be used forensically.

2) This could be considered a variant of "it was done before", but if you're a fan of canon, then "it was done in the novels" - especially the good ones - should hold some sway. Burning Bright is considered by many to be one of the best SR novels out there, and it has a good example of material links in use.

3) The fact that it is not an exculsive ability - meaning the runners can utilize it just the same as the corps can - levels the fields greatly. Sure, the corps can probably do it better and more easily than the runenrs, as they have more resources, but that arguement applies also to everything else: they have more/better guns, more/better casters, more/better everything.

4) I think if the comet strengthened astral space, then it would also strengthen the connection between the astral and the mundane, and make material links evern more likely. Previously, unless you were an initiate with the right metamagic technique, you could not material link without an integral part of the target. I think that a stronger connetion between astral space and the mundane would make it more possible to use emotionally connected items - favored teddy bear, security blanket, lucky charm, favorite hat, etc - to link targets. I might be missing your point on the comet thing though...



Regardless of all of these reasons, the "should" or "should not" of the issue doesn't really matter here, aside from providing a good discussion of astral philosophies. I'm the GM, and I want a system for material links in SR4, official or house-ruled does not matter to me.

And for the record, I really don't personally care if they make it official or not. I suspect they probably will, just like I suspect they'll put dikote and other things back in as well, in their own sweet time. But even if they don't, my players were used to using the rule, and I want them to have fun.

This does not follow. If material links exist then it makes sense that they would be used forensically. If they don't exist they wouldn't be used forensically. Usability is neither a prerequisite nor a cause for existence.

This is one of the better arguments for it, but it also opens up a heck of a lot of stuff that was done in the novels that don't make sense by the game rules. Novels can be taken as canon history, but probably shouldn't be used as an example of how the rules work given how fast and loose the authors play with the RAW (when they even aacknowledge it at all).

There are vast amounts of things that aren't good rules but cut both ways. I could say that 5:nuyen: atomic bombs are ok because both runners and corps could use them.

This to me is the second best reason to include it. It is not something that can be intuitively house ruled based on how it worked in previous editions, and so should probably be revisited in Street Magic.

And this is the best reason.

Sounds like a Gamma World game to me =)

Fun should always be the best reason. Otherwise, we end up playing Starfleet Battles!

How about turning the table? Other than "I think the rule sucks" and "it's not in the core book", what are some good, logical, entirely feasible explanations for why material linkage would/should not be possible and included in the Magic expansion, as in the previous two (three?) editions?