I seem to remember a rule where you can withhold dice from a spellcasting or power focus for use in drain resistance, but I can't find it in SR4A or Street Magic. Was that just SR3? I've been known to miss the obvious before, so I thought I should double-check.

[Edit:] Another stupid question - Do mentor spirit bonuses to spell categories include drain resistance tests? I know they include counterspelling, so it would make sense.

Actually, that was in SR4, they errated it in SR4a. Now spellcasting foci can only add their dice to spellcasting tests and can't be used for drain. Mentor spirits don't help with drain.

Yep, that was in SR4, and dropped in 4a. Likely because they didn't want people overcasting F12 spells without real fear of damage because they could withhold a focus to boost their drain.

As for the mentor spirit thing, if it says +2 to X spells (Where X is combat or whatever) then it means when doing spellcasting/counterspelling/ritual spellcasting. Same goes for spirits, it applies to summoning/banishing/binding, but doesn't apply to drain in either case.

Thanks, guys! Much appreciated.

Interestingly, mechanically, it's quite easy to get your DP for Drain up so high that you can pump out F12 Fireballs all day with little chance of suffering Drain.

What is difficult to do is to get your Spellcasting DP up high enough to make it worthwhile bothering.

By the time you are Grade 6, which is what I would recommend as a power level for the DoTA series, it's not unreasonable to be pushing 40 Dice for Drain Resistance. At that point you can buy hits on F/2+4 at Force 12. In most cases however the only benefit to casting that high is to increase the cap on Spellcasting hits. Getting Spellcasting above 30 Dice is much harder and almost requires dumping a massive amount of Karma on a huge Ally Spirit.

How do you manage that?
Ordinarily I'd figure this out for myself but barely have enough free time to GM as it is.

Max Drain Stat's with Improve [Characteristic] spells, Centering and a Rating 6 Centering Focus. That'll get you between 30 and 39 Dice depending on race.

You can pump that with situational stuff like Aspected Domain up to about 40 Dice fairly easily.

may i also request guidence on the 40 dice for drain figure. I had thought I was doing well with 13 (ten from stats, 1 from positive quality two from centering (2nd initiate)) although it will be up to 16 soon as I will be boosting logic but thats for another discussion

Thanks, much appreciated.

Up until Grade 6 Initiation is probably the most Karma efficient way of boosting power. Get to Grade 6, get a big Centering Focus and then start saving for that Ally Spirit.

Buying Logic up from 5 to 6 will cost enough Karma to initiate twice.

Odds are will be a R3 logic enhancer as abit of bioware. loss of magic is coming from something else so i'm filling in the rest of the hole with something shiny. But I take your point on the initiation very cost effective now I have centering

Lets take an elf with a charisma based tradition just for fun. Here is how you get to massive dice.

Soft max charisma 7, soft max willpower 5, increase willpower spell to boost willpower to 9, increase charisma spell to boost charisma to 12, initiate and get centering, bond an F6 centering focus.

That's 9 + 12 + 6 = 27 + initiation grade.

Certainly not 39-40 as the person said, and not exactly easy as the centering focus alone will cost you 36 karma to bond, not to mention the F5 and F7 (Or F9 and F12 depending on how you handle the improved attribute spell) sustaining foci you'll need to avoid penalties from maintaining your improvement spells, and the fact that you'll need 5 hits on the increased charisma spell, and the 13 karma for initiation.

Oh, guess you could get two extra points by surging to get increased willpower and charisma, and if all you cared about was drain you could get the geneware and symbioite that give you a +1 to willpower based tests (including drain) for another 2, so that boosts you up to 32 dice at initiation grade one. Then you could grab the genetic optimization for both charisma and willpower, which will give you 4 more points (2 from raising the max, 2 more because it would cause the augmented max to go up), so yeah, you're sitting at 36 dice at initiation grade 1, but you'll be sustaining two spells to do so, and have lost a point of magic, along with spending 45 karma to get to that point, on top of the 90k focus and about 150k worth of 'ware.

I never said anything about beginning characters. Maybe 400BP plus at least 200 karma.

I'm thinking about the BBEG encounter at the end of Midnight as a power level. A Pixie or Eagle Shifter can greatly exceed the numbers you posted for an Elf without relying on bioware or Surge. A Surged Eagle shifter with Genetic Optimization on the other hand could get seriously out of hand.

Quickening or long term binding for the Increase spells. Sustaining Foci suck.

Pixie can get 3 extra points from my base, so 30 + initiation grade.

Eagle shifter can get 1 extra point from my base, so 28+ initiation grade.

Quickening has its own issues, including the fact that you're looking at around 12-20+ karma to quicken the spells and you can no longer go through wards. Also means you're looking at a minimum initiation grade of 2.

I think the big thing that Aerospider got caught up on was the way you presented it as though it was simple, easy, and something every spellcaster should have basically from the word go. Maybe you didn't mean to present it that way, but it came across as not being a 'Oh, I meant 200 karma into the game with all sorts of special restrictions and caveats' sort of deal.

For the record – no misunderstanding crizh, just laziness on my part!

Guess it was just me then. Way he said it I was totally thinking he meant easy low powered stuff, not 200 karma into the game.

Is what I originally said. Far from starter characters no?

Yes, Eagle Shifter has one less than the Pixie for combined max augmented Drain Stat. However both CHA and WIL are on the break point. Genetic Optimization on both gives four extra dice.

A Rating 12 Sustaining Focus will set you back 120k and 24 Karma. Exactly the same as Quickening except without the 120k. I'd use Quickening Materials if I could spare the Karma. Nobody with stat's is going to be able to dispel that. You ought to be able to roll a couple of Spells into your own Aura with Extended Masking. Not that many Barriers could stand up to a Force 12 Spell anyway. BC is a pain in the bum, make sure to learn Filtering.

Ok, So now help me do that with my non-cybered Technomancer. No real access to magical help, although I might try to have a quickened tattoo added later. I cannot seem to go over 15 drain dice.

Ya know... it's a good thing my group doesn't know about Dumpshock. I don't need their twinkery improved upon by you guys.

My main saving grace at the moment is they are all new to SR and aren't applying extreme power gaming principles as of yet.

Allocation Bond, Resonance Well, In Tune, Home Ground(debatable).

That could net you as many as 10 Dice.

Yeah, totally read over that part, my bad.

And I'm talking less about the quickened spells being disspelled and more about them setting off magical alarms in every building you walk into. Or does the extended masking make it so you don't have to worry about passing spells through wards and such? Magic rules aren't my forte.

I think it should, I'm sure others would argue black was white that it doesn't. As far as I'm concerned the fluff is quite clear, you use Masking to alter your aura to appear to be the creator's and Extended Masking to make your spells aura appears as part of yours. The Barrier lets you through because it 'perceives' your aura and those of your spells to be one aura, that of it's creator.

I'm willing to argue against that . Masking makes your aura look like something else, it doesn't change what it actually is. Even if you make your quickened spell look like it's a part of your aura, and then make your aura look mundane, the spell is still active on the astral plane and as such can't move through astral barriers (like wards). Just because the infiltrator with the fancy suit looks like he's not there doesn't mean he can pass through walls as if he isn't, same thing with a masked quickened spell. Walls can't see after all, and neither can wards. Masking does nothing against them.

Street Magic p124, Fooling Wards.

The spell is still active on the Astral Plane and appears to be the wards creator and as such can move through the ward uninhibited.

An infiltrator with the right RFID tag can pass through a security door as easily as the legitimate owner of said tag. The point about wards being dumb just means I don't have to counter any arguments about it letting several people with the same aura past. It's dumb.

Sorry, you're right. Missed the mentioning of masking as the creator of the ward.

In order to be able to mimick the aura of the creator of the ward you need to have assensed it, so this can quickly more troublesome than you make it sound to be - for exemple if he is inside the ward....

Isn't it enough to know the creators astral signature to fool a ward with masking? If so, it should be enough to assense the ward itself as it should carry it's creator's signature.

-CJ

I kinda think so too but the RAW doesn't really support it.

I could buy using the Ward itself as a symbolic link to the creator.

Seems like mages would be more wary of providing wards if it could be used as a symbolic link, or to directly assense the mage's aura.

I don't think the warding mage would much like the idea of a mage using his wards to kill him in his sleep, or track him down and drop a spirit on his bed or something like that. And if bypassing a ward is as simple as having the masking metamagic.... of course simply dropping all your spells and walking through works too, so maybe that isn't such a huge security flaw. Still think alot of people might not want their astral signature floating around all over the place.

Reading aura of the mage from a ward might make for a pretty good metamagic though. maybe with a reduction in chances of gettnig a good fix based on hours since it was put up / strengthened. Maybe something like Assensing test with a dice pool modifier of -1 per hour since created Makes it handy but not super useful

Per hour seems a bit much. Don't wards last weeks/months/until they break? The metamagic would be useless unless it had just been put up. Perhaps per day or even per week... or maybe per initiation grade days would work best.

My main thought for such a reduction was if your a wage mage putting up wards as a living would you like every one to be a 24/7 neon sign saying this is how you find my soul to kill me in my sleep

With a time in hours you could have a window of opportunity to get the astral scent as it were but if you miss it all you get is the ward not the creator. I'm thinking similar to how your astral imprint when throwing around heavy mojo dissipates overtime and is harder to assense (could even just copy those rules)

Yeah, I understand what you mean, but you suggested it as a metamagic, which means not that many awakened would have access to it in the first place. And remember that spell signature goes away after the spell ends, so if you sustain a spell for 6 hours, it doesn't lose its signature, it keeps it up. Same goes for quickened spells AFAIK.

Anyway, I'm mostly thinking that no one would ever bother with the metamagic if there was only a couple hour window of opportunity on something that is done semi-annually. Especially since it is really only needed if you have quickened spells on you or something similar.

You're adding an unnecessary step. You can use a symbolic link if you don't have the astral signature.

You could design a Metamagic (or even a spell) to divine the signature of the mage that created a ward which would let you slip through with Masking and you wouldn't create a backdoor that would allow you to remote destroy the creator with Ritual magic.

The rules in Street MAgic (page 124) says you have two options :
1) being able to see the ward's creator aura to use as a reference , eventually finding him by tracking the astral link between the ward and it's creatorn or having assensed him previously.
2) use a material, sympathetic or symbolic link for the synchronization process. The penalties to the test to fool the ward are the same as for ritual sorcery.

That just gave me a great idea for a group contact....

What's that?

A network of shadowrunning initiates who keep records of the auras of corporate wage-mages.

You could use Masking to demonstrate the aura of anyone you have previously assensed to the rest of the group so everybody knows the auras everybody else knows. You could develop a knowledge skill that reflects how many auras you have memorized and how useful they are.

You might even develop some sort of online market-place for trading in particularly sensitive auras.

Good idea, but then you have 500 auras to pick from, and only one will get you through the ward. Still need some way of matching ward to creator.

I imagine with the correct intelligence you would be able to narrow down the number of possible auras to under half a dozen. A failed attempt doesn't alert the creator so you're fine so long as you have time.

So you're basically sugesting a house rule to make wards useless against people with two metamagics?

Low level Wards are already useless against anyone with two Metamagics (Masking and Symbolic Linking) or one Metamagic and one piece of specific knowledge.

Actually, wards of any kind are already useless against anyone who doesn't have quickened spells or is duel natured actually. They just turn off their foci for a few seconds, walk through, and turn them back on and they're good to go.

Wards are designed to be a barrier for astal entities. As such they are by design ineffective against completely mundane beings.

But wards are still an effective way of keeping astrally projecting mages and spirits in check. Of course, as it was mentioned, there are ways to fool wards but this requires some effort (expenditure of karma to learn the required metamagic techniques and last but not least time to fool the ward). And you will usually have to do it twice, once entering the warded zone and once again, when you want to leave.

-CJ