Not true. Street Magic, p. 124: "Attempting to place a new ward where it would intersect with another ward results in the new ward simply failing." It's the new ward that fails, not the existing one.

I cannot wrap my brain around the fact that you're having difficulty with this.



It's perfectly straightforward: you cannot have a ward inside another ward, because that results in the volume of the inner ward having two wards on it, which cannot happen. It. Can't. Happen.

Picture a corridor 10 Meters Long, 3 Meters High and 4 Meters Wide...

You can Place a ward ever 1/2 meter down that corridor (each exactly 3M x4M by 6" Deep) - This is a layered ward in which none of the areas intersect nor occupy the same space astrally or physically, yet you would need to travel through ALL the wards to pass through the hallway. Same Concept using an Elevator Shaft with a new ward across the shaft each just 6 " Deep and every 9 inches through the shaft should you choose to do so. Again, None of the wards intersect nor occupy the same space.

It seems, Tanegar, that you are envisioning a warded room as a single ward encompassing the entire 50 Cubic Meters. While you CAN indeed place a ward in that manner, that does not have to be the case.

Except for the fact that a ward must extend at least one meter in every direction from its anchor (Street Magic, p. 123), this is almost exactly the scenario I described earlier. It is absolutely possible to use multiple wards to defend a location, so long as none of them share volume.

I'd have to say that I'm with JanessaVR on this one. Notwithstanding the specific words that you are referring to Tanegar (which I don't have reference to, nor the experience of 4e to put them in context), the intent as I have always understood it was that you can have wards inside other wards, but each ward is a separate thing, and can be defeated or spoofed individually.

Consider the situation. I have a warded van, with a ward of Force 8. The ward is set so that whenever I open the rear doors, it opens the ward, leaving a "hole" that is unwarded. I put this ward on my van last week.
My friend climbs into the back of my van through the open doors, carrying a box of loot. The box has a Force 1 ward on it. but it was a permanent ward, put on the box last year.
I close the back doors to the van, now completely encasing the box ward in the van ward - which as I understand your point, would be a "layered ward" which cannot happen. Also, as I understand it from your post, you're saying that my F8 van ward would be destroyed, because it's "newer" than the F1 ward on the box?

That seems like a crazy situation to me. Can you imagine the resource rush to find "old" warded things that can be snuck into buildings through holes in the wards to wreck them when the holes are closed because they are "newer" than the ward you have? Let alone the amount of book-keeping you would need to track the ages of wards.

Again, not being familiar with 4e, I don't know if it's the same - but if this was 3e, that would mean you could never, ever put up a ward on a building or place that had an elemental summoning circle or a shamanic lodge - as both of those count as wards (when in use, and all the time, respectively). Are you telling me that any mage or shamen has to live in an unwarded house? Likewise, that corporate mages work in a room that has a ward only when they are summoning elementals, but is otherwise open to astral intrusion because it cannot be wholly contained within another warded area? That does not seem either likely, or what the designers intended.



That, to me, does not say the same thing that you appear to be arguing.

As I would interpret that, a box, within a box, within a box - is not the same area. So JanessaVR's (and my) interpretation of "put up a ward, then come in x cm, then put a smaller ward, then in another x cm is that you are warding 3 separate areas. Areas 2 and 3 happen to be *contained* within area 1, but they are not the *same* area. The end sentence clinches that for me with the "exponentially more difficult". As per JanessaVRs post, you can't put up 3 X Force 6 wards on the exact same space and claim a F18 ward (sure it's not mathematically exponential, but that's what they seem to be hinting at) - but you can make it "sequentially" more difficult - like a gauntlet.

It does seem to me to be quite clear that you can put wards in other wards, just not layer them together to become additive. Of course, that's just my 2p worth.

This cannot happen because wards can't be mobile.

So, you can ward your van, but as soon as you start it up and start driving, the ward collapses. Same for the box: it can be warded, as long as it's big enough (the smallest possible ward is a sphere two meters in diameter), but the moment you pick it up and move it, it is no longer warded. The "openable" ward is also not RAW; there is nothing in SR4A core or Street Magic that even hints at this kind of functionality.


This gets a little semantic. Magical lodges (SR4A uses the same terminology for lodges of all traditions) have a mana barrier, but that barrier is not described as a ward. A ward is a specific type of mana barrier.


Let's call JanessaVR's three wards A, B, and C, from innermost to outermost. The volume protected by ward B includes the volume protected by ward A. The volume protected by ward C includes the volumes protected by A and B. The innermost space has three wards on it. That cannot happen.

I'm trying very hard to give both of you the benefit of the doubt, here, but TBPFH, all of this noise about "they're not the same space" smacks (to me) of the very worst kind of rules-lawyering. The text is extremely clear and unambiguous: "Wards cannot be layered." You're trying to argue that layering multiple wards around the same area is somehow not layering multiple wards, as long as there is a measurable gap between them. If this argument were taking place at my table, I would have kicked you both out of the game by now.

Hmm - ok. That does change a bunch of things then - and convinces me that sticking with 3e was a good idea!
On the moving ward thing - fair enough, the RAW are quite clear there. Ditto the openable ward.
On the magical lodges thing - again, fair enough. Without reading the full text, I'll take your word for it about sub-types.

As to the A B and C ward. Ok, let's try another way of describing it....
There is the inner ward - A. This covers all of the house, in a flat plane that ties with the ground level, and a dome over the property. As far as I can see, that is ok by the 4e rules. This is a tupperware box, with the lid on - it creates an internal volume, and is protected on all sides.
Now get ward B. This starts 1cm past ward A, but does not completly enclose it. It covers only the "dome" part of the ward, and it has an inner and outer edge, none of which cross or enclose ward A. It goes down to ground level and over the top of the dome - think of it like putting the base section of an upside down medium tupperware over the top of the first tupperware. It doesn't touch it, it doesn't enclose it. and the box/ward has only a nominal thickness.
Ward C is a larger box, again positioned over the top of ward B and A.

As far as I can see, this meets your criteria for not being layered, but would still provide defence, as to get around them you would have to traverse through living earth, which is tough (again, assuming that is still a thing in 4e), but allows you to have multiple "layers" that need to be pushed through?

Street Magic doesn't say this explicitly, probably because no one anticipated this kind of lawyering, but the clear assumption is that a ward is a closed three-dimensional form.

So, no, I wouldn't allow the "open box" ward, either. You could construct it out of five individual wards (four walls and a roof), but you couldn't do it with a single ward.

That's exactly what I said: The security mage trying to place a ward will be trolled in eternity because even the tiniest ward hidden somewhere inside the targeted area would make the new ward fail.


You are assuming that ""the same area" in the statement "wards cannot be layered or overlap in the same area of astral space". Refers to the volume occupied by the ward itself, as well as the volume contained therein. Janessa assumes that the same words only refer to the volume occupied by the ward itself.

Both interpretations can be derived from the text, neither of you have looked into the brain of the original author. However, Janessa's interpretation is far more practical than yours.

Tanegar - in your post of Mar 3 2018, 08:34 AM, you said
"Street Magic, p. 124: "Attempting to place a new ward where it would intersect with another ward results in the new ward simply failing."
but in the post from Today, 07:57 PM, you quoted the following from Street Magic P123
"A variety of basic three-dimensional geometric shapes are possible, such as globes, domes, cubes, rectangles, trapezoids, ovoids, and more. Experiments with complex three-dimensional shapes have proven unstable, however, with the ward collapsing at the completion of the ritual. Experimental astral security designers and astral artists have had to rely on combinations of multiple simple wards to create complex astral constructions."

That to me seems to be either a contradiction, within a page of the book, or a massive gaff.
Either the "multiple simple wards to create complex astral constructions" can touch each other, to make a continuous barrier, and fall afoul of the "intersect another ward" rule, or they don't intersect, which surely leaves "gaps" in the astral continuity that an astral form can fly through, negating the point.

From the position of a non-4e person looking in - I have to say that these rules seem like a crock of pooh. I'm glad to be dealing with the 3e version of "a ward can be any shape, with a volume limited by your magic rating, tied to a physical clearly delineated area, and if you wanna put a ward inside a ward, you go for it. If you can't ward a vehicle without it breaking the ward on moving, then vehicles become massively vulnerable to astral shenanigans - which probably explains the "magicrun" comments I keep seeing, and explains why Mages are seen as the "I win" button pushers. If the only way to protect a vehicle is with active magical support, rather than passive defenses then that does skew runs massively in a magic users favor.

Probably that's why I'm in favor of JanessaVRs version - it fits more closely with my 3e understanding of magic, but also that of the SR world and practical adventure writing to create a consistent and believable world. What JanessaVR describes seems "reasonable" to me, in terms of effort vs outcome, and makes it tough, but not impossible for intruders - and would be replicated by security companies and target corps on hardened sites in return, making a tough (but defeatable) set of defenses to act as an opponent to overcome and to justify the award of karma for completing a run. Certainly with my group, if we ran across those rules, they would be house-ruled within a night to something more in keeping with our understanding. Of course, every table is different, and YMMV - I'm sure people would look at some of our rules and mutter "WTF?", but they work for us.

That's always been one of my favorite things about SR - the repeated assertion from the game writers that "hey, it's your game, and if you wanna change the rules or the lore, you go for whatever works at your table, and feel free to ignore our timeline and stuff."

Wards touching each other is not the same as wards intersecting with each other. Wards can be in contact with one another without sharing volume; the contact may not be perfect, but with enough work a magician or group of magicians can make any gap too small for, say, a projecting magician to pass through.


I encourage you to read Street Magic section "Tools of the Trade," pgs. 126-128. There are other options beyond wards, some of them suitable for mobile installations.


Tough but defeatable, eh? Remember that corps have vastly more resources than any runner. If you can nest three wards, why not five? Ten? Twenty? Anything valuable enough to be worth a runner team's time will be enclosed in an arbitrarily large number of wards. That prototype that cost a hundred million nuyen to develop? It would be irresponsible not to spend a million wrapping the facility in ten wards, alternating alarm and charged layers; and you will fail one of those rolls. Leave aside, for the moment, the question of interpreting the text; does this sound like fun to you?

No - it doesn't - for a standard runner. That's an "epic" job, for the likes of the Prime Runners that are the stuff of legend on Shadowland, the people you see written about in terms of admiration.
For most standard runners, they're trying to steal the prototype that cost a million, which probably has the same proportion spent on security - 100:1. So that's protected by a ward that cost 10,000 - so it's maybe 2 wards nested, with maybe a low force bound elemental - which the average runner team absolutly can defeat with a bit of planning and preparation.

And if a bunch of karma pool 2 characters decide to break in to Fort Knox, they deserve to suffer the consequences IMO.

And yet a mundane can waltz through those wards and not give a care whatsoever... So...
Any defense is defeatable given some thought. That is why Security is such a hard prospect. You can only spend so much, and so you have to balance out your security paradigm to try to cover it all, which it rarely can (Budget and all that). Something gives and there is a hole that becomes exploitable.

Bingo. This is why I said I was trying to spend as much as was reasonable, but it wasn't ever going to be perfect security. But if I'm the mage, yeah, I'm willing to sink the 18 KP on multiple astral wards to sleep a little sounder at night. If a ward collapsing jolts me out of my sleep, there won't be an angry elemental in my bedroom in the next second - I have a little extra time to prepare while they bang on the remaining two wards.

Indeed....
Sadly the two rockets/missiles coming in through the window tend to be rather startling...