Why is astral hazing a flaw? I might be able to see it as being a flaw for anyone who likes to conjurer spirits force 4 or below. Otherwise it's ridiculously powerful especially when it comes to hostile npc magic users, critters, spirits. Sure you wouldn't be allowed in any Magic Bars or Groups...EVER,and but even if they tried to kick you out, they would have hell of time sticking spell to you, and sure Awakened team members aren't going to want to carpool but..... Any spirit force 4 or below goes poof if they get within 5 meters of character. Dual Natured Critters get -4 DP to all actions against you. How is this a flaw?

I look forward to reading feedback.
Thanks

The flaws and advantages part of the rules have always been very weak. If you don't like it just change it.

And it is a flaw for a mage or adept, but it only comes up if a player is mighty dumb.

Good luck being awakened with that flaw, not to mention dealing with anyone who's awakened. Any awakened team mates will pretty much ostracize you.

There's one line missing from this Flaw to make it a Flaw.
"Only available to awakened Characters"
right now, it's perfect for all mundanes who cyber down to 0,something Essence.
At least, if they want to be guarded from magic. On ther other hand, it means no healing, no invisibility or anything like that.

I agree that it has a lot of uses and abuses.
Isn't there a metamagic that lets you aspect any background count in your favor? In that case, an Awakened with that flaw could get extremely powerful.

But it also has its flaws:
- You can't get help from the team's mage (no invisibility, no magic healing, no levitation...)
- You might impair your team's mage magical abilities if your Essence is too high. (can be avoided by getting a lot of cyber)
- You raise alarms every time you enter a warded place. I don't know about your games, but in my games there are a lot of these.
- You're an astral beacon that can be tracked very easily.
- You can't hide from an astral observer.

Sure, some of these flaws can be circumvented one way or another, but that's why the character has to be approved by the GM (it's part of the RAW character creation process and as important as any other character creation rule). If a negative quality is turned into a positive one, it's the GM's job to refuse the character.

No, the Metamagic does not let you aspect your own background count to yourself. Technically, you allready are a domain in your own right. And you need to stay stationary to use the metamagic. As soon as you move, poof it's all gone again. And you have to get your own Magic up through your own Hazing too. First your magic attribute gets lowered from for example 6 to 2, and then the force 4 spell you can cast at maximum with overcast fizzles because your hazing is bigger than the spell.

No getting possessed by a good spirit to boost yourself up to do inhumane things with your body for example.

With wards, if these are Less than Force 5, they just outright vanish. They don't crash, they just go poof. Never existed.

There's the Astral Beacon flaw for the one, which is another thing all together. Meaning no, you are not automagically an astral beacon. You could even get astral chameleon to go with your astral hainz i guess. I can't remember the points and wether or not there's something in the text of either of them disallowing this.

And there is the fact that for astral perception looking into/through background count could very well be like looking at one of those heat shimmering thingies. Or maybe fog or something.

Furthermore, Astral Hazing does not keep fire created by magic away from you. And heavy things levitating above you and dropping on you will still hurt.

First of all, it's not actually a negative quality (aka, "flaw"). It's a metagenic quality. That means it's only available to changelings. Don't much care for it? Restrict changelings in your campaign. Either by disallowing them, increasing their cost, or -- just as the rules suggest -- step in as the GM and oversee the selection of qualities. If they're taking Astral Hazing, that makes them either a class II or III changeling, which means they're going to be pretty freaky one way or another. Don't let them take pretty-happy-smiley positive qualities if they go with Astral Hazing. Hazing means their very presence corrupts the flow of magic around them. They shouldn't have Glamour or Thermographic Vision as a result. They should tend towards more grotesque changes to reflect that corruption.

If you're letting players choose things willy-nilly without doing anything to rein it in when you see something that you perceive as a balance issue, you have only yourself to blame as a GM.

Hmm, how does Astral hazing affect Critters by the way?
Things like Ghouls, Vampires, Pixies, Centaurs?

Look at it like this: You very presence kills or severely harms every spirit in your vincinity, it warps the manasphere and leaves it broken even after you are gone. You are the astral equivalent of an unshielded reactor core, and everybody with the slightest bit of awakening will treat you accordingly. Most will just shun you, but some people (and other entities) dedicated to keeping the astral world clean might just decide that both worlds are better off without you.

Disrupts not kill, and there are many natural occurring background count phenomenon

Well sure but its still not really a negative metagenic quality. Its effects will be mostly positive to a player, so while miss phrased the point still stands. And yes the GM can control it is true, but that is true about anything. Still the rules should make sure negatives whether flaws or metagenic qualities are actually negative. A bad rule is a bad rule whether or not the GM can fix it, because the GM can fix anything.

Sure, but most of those don't walk around on two legs. A mage knows where the bad places are, and where to avoid them, but when the "bad places" can move around, it makes life difficult.

Astral hazing plus magic resistance makes perfect sense. It does depend on your essence so a very low essence character is mostly self affected. A high essence mundane can cause all sorts of issues. It is also an astral beacon of a dead zone. Pretty hard to hide when the mage is trying to track you. If you hole up for a couple of days trying to stay low much of a city block is affected. It is a big advantage for a mundane on the go, but not so good if they are laying up in a hospital as most magic doctors wouldn't heal them even if they could let alone keep them in the hospital. There are more drawbacks in the daily life than people realize.

Is Astral Hazing Like an AURA or is like those bikes in Tron where ever you go you leave background count. I would say it's aura and only leaves presence if you stay in place to long

OK, you just destroy the spirit's astral form but he can still come back. Still most spirits would consider it rather offensive...

If you stay still, it just extends out and out and out.
At a rate of Essence Meters per Day i think.

It's not really a bad rule, but maybe one that could use some tweaking. It's certainly not the player's fault that a background count is an effective countermeasure against the overpoweredness of magicians. There are negative consequences for it. You're all but immune to receiving an ally magician's help; be it a Heal, a Physical Mask, or Invisibility, as other people mentioned.

If anything needs to be done to "fix" it, it's adjusting the actual value of the quality. Instead of a flat background count of 4, why not make it equal to your (absolute) Essence, or at least base it on it? Mundanes with 0.x Essence don't get a benefit from it, and those with an Essence of 6 will be an absolute hazard to everyone in the area, their allies especially. It reflects the whole cyberzombie thing, too; the further their Essence gets from 0, the worse the effect.

I bet it would get a lot less love if that were the case. But, regardless, there's several negative qualities that aren't really negatives. Extravagant Eyes? How on earth is that worth five BPs? A Biased Prejudice has a threshold of 0; all you have to do is roll Willpower + Intuition and not glitch in order to ignore it... yet that gives you 5-10 BP. A mage with Sensitive System isn't going to really see the effects of that quality (especially if he just focuses on bioware), yet it's worth 15 BP for street sams and holistic mages alike. Elf Poser and Ork Poser only come up in games where GMs put a lot of stress on racism, which isn't a very common trend. SINner gives you all kinds of perks (free legal licenses, travel permits, etc.) that you can ignore by using fake SINs and only ever comes up when a GM decides to use it as a story seed, yet you get free points for that, too. Hell, there's positive qualities that come with more baggage than most negative ones.

There's tons of bad rules in the game. Dismissing one's responsibility to keep them under control as a GM is foolish. If you do that, why bother with GMs at all?

1 Meter per hour, IIRC.

RC says:

1 meter (radius) per 2 to 3 hours (GM discretion).

Well, okay. That's a bit worse then.

Astral hazing + Symbiosis would make for an interesting character, I think.

It depends on how you want to read this.
Technically, Astral hazing and Background Count have no affect on the Symbiosis stuff.

It is useful for a PC to be able to have awakened friends and not be as easily distinguishable to the magically capable community.

With astral hazing you are easily identifiable, tracked, and could be considered by the world at large "bad" in the same class as Bugs, Toxic Spirits, Infected, and other Awakened nasties.

It's a negative quality that you can get some awesomely effective mechanical advantages, but don't think there isn't a downside. The world hates you.

Some negative flaws are like that. They get the always in play and affecting you BP points.

Absolutely, but think of the expanding field of Background Count. It would make for a sort of vigilante who covers his area with this field of astral hazing and 'protects' it while also simultaneously kind of destroying awakened stuff there. Better as an NPC, but somewhat viable as a background story for a character.

What i dont like about this flaw is the fact that its worth too little points for an awakened char. 15, i wouldnt get it for 20 points? And your magic goes from 5 to 1, yeah? Pretty much a major flaw right there. Close to screwing the whole character concept.

But for your cyberguy, its very funny. If youre at 0.xx essence, you are hard to heal anyway. Why not make it downright unfunny for anything else magical to harm you.

So i think they hit the middle ground for the two parts, but didnt get enough distance between the point values.

You know, that is actually a nice angle that i did not consider yet O.o

Get Arcane Arrester for hilariousness and watch as spells ping off your cold metal exterior. But can he stand against the power of love?

Take a Fomori Troll with Astral Hazing. And Magic Resistance too, if you can fit it in.
Then power up willpower. And then Cyber down to 0,99 Essence. You are nigh untouchable to everything magic.

What kind of lame power is heart, anyway?

<3 TVTropes.


Add ghoul for +2 willpower and other ridiculous attribute maximums (including higher reaction). Be untouchable by anything short of heavy weaponry.

There is metamagic filtering to deal with background counts. Also from a story perspective a lot of corps may want the shadowrunner purely for experimentation. I mean trapping him at the bottom of a top secret site means most defenses would focus on physical rather than astral. I look at it in a similar way as Promethean where the longer a character stays in a location the worse things get. Also as it is a negative influence it is entirely possible this alters the landscape to a much more negative area. Violence increases, rudeness is more common, etc. A subtle change to the landscape, which is more malevolent.

There positive qualities where the shadowrunners would actually be targets for kidnapping because it would be valuable to a megacorp. That puts a whole new spin when the players are hired for a run only to realize the real target is one of the team members.

What are you talking about? Heart is an awesome power!

You gotta stop linking to TVTropes. I've been clean and sober for a month now - I'm at an especially vulnerable point in my recovery.

Duh

Just get full VR life style as a TM with this and watch the world get pissed might fast XD

You can't have Magic Resistance and Arcane Arrester, but otherwise it is a sound tactic. Fomori and gnome changelings have the advantage of not needing to buy magic resistance, so they can get other positive metagenetic qualities, instead.

Note that you don't need SURGE II or above to get astral hazing. Any level of SURGE opens up metagenetic qualities to your character - points above the values for the level of SURGE count against your "normal" limit of positive and negative points, that's all.

Personally, I don't think it's that bad of a flaw. It is a tradeoff - you get improved anti-magical ability, at the expense of being very conspicuous astrally, eliciting hostile reactions from awakened characters/beings, disrupting wards, and potentially fragging up your magical teammates. I might normally find it a tad overpowered, but magic is overpowered, too, so I would hesitate to take away one of the few effective options that a mundane has available to counter magic.

If you want to limit it, though, simply use the optional rule of the GM picking the negative qualities (which I HATE - GMs have no business making character creation choices for a player, beyond their normal vetting process). But if you don't ever pick it for the PCs, expect them to cry foul (and rightly so) if they ever run into an NPC changeling with it.

You don't have to pick the exact qualities, but you can veto combinations that don't fit with a certain theme or that were obviously chosen solely for min-max purposes. Metagenic qualities aren't meant to be standard qualities; changelings are largely random freaks to one degree or another. If you can just pick-and-choose at will, why even bother to distinguish them from normal qualities?

Depends if it fits a theme then even with min-max it would be hard to argue unless you want to spike the entire concept. I don't think metagenic qualities should be a grab bag of abilities with randomly thrown together qualities. SURGE 1 and 2 not so bad, but SURGE 3 specifically states that the GM and player should come up with a theme for the SURGE. At the end of the day a GM is always free to say no changelings, drakes, pixies, centaurs, naga, infected or shapechangers.

Actually, when it talks about Class III SURGE on pg. 58 of Runner's Companion, it talks about traits combining into a functional gestalt - cat people, "ganesha" changelings, and the like, leading to speculation that it might not be as random as previously thought.

I think the qualities should make sense together, or at least be explained. Glamour and astral hazing could work together, if it was a case of, say, the character's "positive" vibes being put out while the suppressed "negative" vibes churned in the character's aura. I have a hard time seeing glamor and nasty vibe working together, since one makes the character look ethereal and innocent, and the other makes the character radiate evil. Likewise, astral hazing and symbiosis would be hard to imagine working in conjunction with each other (or at least, in a way that wouldn't automatically screw the character over).

I disagree that the character shouldn't get to pick and choose, though. These aren't Gamma World mutants. Not that you couldn't create such a character, but it should only be if the character wants to play such a character.

If the player picks the latent changeling quality I feel the player should get a lot less of pick and choose for that. I feel the same about latent awakening. A GM should not abuse it, but neither should the player expect to get exactly what he wants.

While that is how it is worded, I disagree with it. If you want to play a Hermetic Mage who has yet to come into his power, that is how you would do it. It would be pretty lame for the character if the GM says yeah you are a physical Adept.

On the point of Astral Hazing, it gives more benefits than negatives it should not be a flaw. If something overall is a benefit even if it comes with restrictions that should not be a flaw that you get points for.

On the Magic is overpowered and this is a balance for it front. Yes and No. Magic is overpowered but this does not in any create a balance for it, it just destroys magic when used against a person. You don't fix an unbalanced thing like magic with another unbalanced thing. It would be like a quality that said you get 10 automatic successes on all damage resistance tests vs non magical attacks, because burst fire is too powerful. That doesn't make burst fire any less powerful, it just makes the guy with it overpowered vs physical attacks.

Maybe they will get the balance right in 5e.

And I would make the player pay the difference just lake latent drake. I noticed flaws tend to come with a price whether it is time, noticeability or debts. To me sinner, day job and astral hazing are not bad flaws, but they do require time and limit what you can do because they make you noticed. A shadowrunner with day job can be found fairly easily just like like astral hazing. Sinner is not quite so bad, but again it leaves a trail. Extravagant eyes or distinctive style in a world where cyberware is common as are personal modifications is very significant. It is up to the GM to make these flaws part of the game.

I would point out that depending on how the GM stands on the "0" issue (and if he is being consistent), getting to 0.99 Essense may or may not be a good thing.

It seems that people think that spells cast from outside a BC into it is reduced by the BC. But I am yet unable to find a rule that states so. Can someone point it out to me?

In the description for astral hazing with respect to cyberzombies, on page 157 of Augmentation, it says "This astral haze affects all attempts to cast magic on, at, or in the vicinity of the cyberzombie."

Which still isn't completely clear, but I would interpret this as reducing the Force of spells cast at someone with astral hazing - although if the spellcaster is not within the area of astral hazing, it would only be the spell itself that would be reduced in Force; the spellcaster would still have his normal Magic rating and resist Drain normally.

Just to point out what I said more clearly. A "cat woman" is a random freak when everyone else is normal.

But in Shadowrun, Cat-People are pretty much normal compared to some of the other stuff running around.

I can only add to that.

A Cybered out troll with 0.15 Essence i once had (at creation ^^), red cybereyes and that cyber for extra armour. Now if those two dont make you a freak right there, i dont know what will. Ok you can change the eyes at will, but still someone with metals under his skin on top of his own bones, yikes.

And about the whole latent things. One is still playing the game together GM and players. I would veto stuff like Glamour with the Jacobson organ (5 dice on any social except intimidate as long as you can smell em?) aka the pure min/max choices, but otherwise i would let the player have his way. If he feels i screwed him over, he might feel like screwing me over. Theres enough ways to do that, so i normally think its better to stay away from that.

That's not the point. Sure, you can create bizarre-looking characters through cyberware and the like, but that has zero to do with changelings. They're genetic freaks. Whether they follow a theme (such as cat people) or are ghoulishly patchwork Picassos, they're all freaks of their race. If you're regularly allowing changelings in your games that have absolutely no outward changes and no one's the wiser, solely to get qualities like Astral Hazing as if it were any other negative quality, it is your fault for not enforcing the flavor of what a changeling is. Especially if you're complaining about those qualities you're allowing without repercussion or judgement. You may as well just convert it to a regular quality and be done with it since, obviously, that's what you're doing anyway. Changelings are a very specific racial variation. They're not just regular people with Astral Hazing and Arcane Arrester.

The fact that you can create freaky looking characters through other means has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

A changeling getting Magic Resistance & Astral Hazing does follow a theme, on the other hand – as does the one getting Nasty Vibes & Astral Hazing & Critter Spook.
None of them has mundanely apparent outward changes, but it will significantly impact how some beings interact with said character.

Just because Joe Average won't notice anything weird about the first case doesn't mean he'll be the fun of the awakenend party – as for the second case…

For the love of...

Look. The original poster is complaining about Astral Hazing with the distinct implication that 1) his players don't bother with anything else that would stand out regarding changelings, 2) that even if they did, he doesn't consider them a factor, and 3) that he ignores the negative impact of having a constant background count around you. My point is that if you are allowing them to regularly take Astral Hazing or any other metagenic quality without repercussion, it most definitely is your fault as the GM. The quality is fine if and only if you reinforce the fact that it has negative connotations and that it's also part of a changeling, who should have numerous other characteristics in addition to the Astral Hazing. And if you're not, then you should just allow them as regular qualities because you are allowing them as regular qualities.

And, as an aside, both Nasty Vibe and Critter Spook are outward changes. I didn't say physical changes. But they definitely have an impact on others beyond just making you more resistant to magic.

I don't quite see the point, as even regular qualities can be quite double-edged swords – see Magic Resistance – and those subject to GM approval as well.

It's nothing special about metagenetic qualities.

While I agree with the first part, I'm not convinced about the second part being immediatly recognizable features. Just because the character warps astral space doesn't mean he has to be bright neon pink.