So arguably the new rule is that it only adds dice to any roll that Magic is involved in and does not increase your MAgic attribute. That is probably the correct interpretation, as it prevents someone from taking the Mystic Adept quality and being just as powerful a caster as any regular Magician. So you cannot take a Magic of 3 for spellcasting and two powerpoints of adept abilities, then use a power focus to offset the 2 missing points of Magic.

Personally I'm not sure how I'd rule on this in a game I'm GMing. I understand why the developers would want to require Mystical adepts to limit their Magic rating. A 3 in magic rating makes your max force on a spell 6, and anything over 3 is physical drain. A serious limitation. A mere 12 build points gets you a force 2 power focus and suddenly you can cast with a magic of 5 and that's a pretty big difference!

I'm still struggling with deciding if I prefer the old adding to magic as in SR3- or this new way.



As far as the gender thing goes:


Some RPGs have wierd gendered pronoun policies. It's possible here that FanPro switches genders every use of the gendered pronouns barring the cases where imidiate correlations is necessary for clarity. It's hard to please people in this respect, I remember a time when exclusive use of the male pronouns got TSR in troubble. I think starting with the "Complete Handbook of X" line TSR started switching genders on every book. So for example, the complete handbook on elves was entirely in the female, then the next was entirely int he male. Here I think FanPro probably has a requirement that they alternate frequently.

I don't have problems with changing gender when talking about different things like under elves making it male and under dwarves making it female.

The point I was making was that this occurred within the same paragraph while talking about the same character. I know that a lot of things can be done with bioware and cyberware but. . . . .

No you are not dumb, a lot of times it requires some serious looking (and page turning) to figure out the rules.

I believe that Derezel has this mostly correct (except for the part about limiting mystic adept's magic rating (since neither pp nor power focus affect the "rating" itself - only the dice pools). A force foci adds to the Magic dice pool, this is not an increase in the magic rating (e.g., force of a spell).

I am running a Mystic Adept with a 5 Magic and 2 pp in powers.

I had originally misread the rules on what the pp does to the magic and thought I needed to acquire a Power focus in order to restore the Force of my spells.

This is actually incorrect - the result of the pp is to reduce the number of dice rolled for magic rolls but not to change the magic rating.

The same logic would apply to a power focus - since the text between the two is remarkably similar.

So my mystic adept has a force 2 power focus. What this does is to give me back the 2 dice I "lost" for all tests except counterspelling tests (to counter an active casting only).

Your Shaman has a max force of 5 for spells and can roll 8 dice from his magic rating and his power focus - but still can only have 5 "successes" since the number of successes is limited by the force of the spell.

Sure it can be advantageous to overcast, even without healing

Ex: overcasting stunbolt at say, force 10 (drain f/2-1 = 4) will almost certainly (barring extremes of luck) drop any one opponent, assuming no counterspelling.

And while you may take a box or two of physical damage, consider if your opponent was an orc or troll with an assault rifle, that should be much preferred to him getting 2 or 3 more initiative passes to throw burst fire your way, so you're much better off.