Has anyone else had this spell totally blow up a mission?

I've got games coming up where runners need to find someone, and I can see a Search spell suddenly bringing the adventure to an end. I don't want to keep having to put everyone behind a mana barrier to make it harder to find the person, etc...

Has anyone encountered this? IF so, how do you get around it?

There is no "Search spell" there's only a Search critter/spirit power.

Doesn't the subject have to be personally known by the spellcaster or at least have a sympathetic link? And remember, if the runners can find people that easy, the company hiring them could find the person that easy as well and wouldn't bother hiring the runners.

Edit: I'm guessing you mean this spell

As you can see, the caster needs to know the person being looked for, which is generally unlikely. Much more likely that the corp hiring the runners is going to have a wagemage on hand that can do this, and thus will give the runners a location that they need to break into to retrieve the person.

I meant the Spirit Power.

Same problem

This means the mage will have had to met the person before. Also remember diminishing DP for extended tests, and you can generally slap on at least a couple Km of distance penalty, and a low force mana barrier will often be involved. And once again, if the runners can manage to find people easily with this, a wagemage won't have much trouble either, and so the runners won't ever get hired to find people that can be found by this method (Since it isn't even slightly illegal or something the company would need to keep off the books)

In addition to the detect spell: The area covered is spell force x magic meters. Or spell force x magic x 10 meters, if the spell is used in its "extended range" version.

As for the spirit power, why wouldnt the mental image of a high res foto not be enough?

Depends on how you interpret "mental image." It does not say "an individual the magician has previously assensed" so it doesn't seem like there is a mystic component to the identification. I'd probably rule that a hi-res photo would work. As was pointed out, however, there are plenty of penalties to apply.

Idk, technology and spirit powers don't seem to work that well together. I'd expect that Searchig for someone off of a high rez photo would lead you to the owner of the photo's commlink.

I think this is more attributed to Spirits being unable to see images on a computer screen. You would either have to print out the picture... or simply look at it and transmit that image to the spirit mentally.

Sorry if I was unclear. I had in mind what Doc Chaos is saying. The magician studies a high resolution photo of the subject for a short time and when he/she has a good mental picture of the individual when no longer looking at the photo the mental image is telepathically transmitted to the spirit.

The reason I said the mage would need to know the person is from reading the other half of that sentence:

So basically a critter using it has to have met the person before, but since spirits tend to only exist for a few hours, they allowed the 'mental image from the summoner' to replace it. It doesn't say so explicit, but from combining the two I'd infer that the mage would need to meet the person, just like a critter would need to meet the person.

Otherwise it'd just be silly, because corps would just take their images of runners breaking into their facility, pass it to a mage, have him concentrate on the picture (Face isn't specified as being needed), and have a spirit track down every runner ever. Basically crime would be virtually impossible because a few mages with spirits could track anyone from a photo.

I'd say that the mage would have to have assensed the target for a spirit to find them. I can't imagine spirits would pay much heed to how something "looks" in the physical (can they even see the physical?), but an astral image they could understand.

That's actually a tiny bit debatable. The rules indicate at least a couple of times that when astrally perceiving, you don't actually see the physical any more, but everyone always seems to think that you see both at the same time.

From what I understand, this is why spirit's can't read a computer screen, because they can only see the astral presence of the screen, and not its physical form, thus they can't see the pretty lights on it. This would also mean that spirits can't read paper though (Which I don't think is ever stated anywhere), so I'm not sure how it works out.

Thats why my group killed the search power in its present form and house-ruled it. Its just way overpowered.

Why wouldn't you? When astrally perceiving, I believe you have a -2 penalty to do anything else -- it would seem like a much bigger penalty if you were functionally blind. Shapeshifters are naturally dual natured and can see the astral plane at all times -- no -2 penalty to them. So, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to still see the physical plane, but perhaps that's because your meat eyeballs are still actually on the physical plane.

Except you're not functionally blind; you still see the shadows of physical objects, and auras of course. But they're just shadows, so interacting with them is more difficult (hence the -2).

I guess it'd be like working in a heavy mist or fog, perhaps?

And since they're shadows you're perceiving, you wouldn't be able to read any text, nor interact with AR.

However easily runners find people with Search Power is also how easily people find Runners with Search Power.

Set ease of use of Search Power as appropriate for your game.

Exactly. You can still see physical things, just less well, thus the penalty. Duel natured don't get the penalty because they are used to always seeing the world this way (I would suppose). Like I said, it is mentioned a few times in the rules, but most people don't seem to have noticed it, and the rules don't take great pains to point it out.

Still, I suggest someone start up a new thread if they want to talk about astral vision.

p. 191 SR4A "It takes a Simple Action to shift
one’s perception from the astral to the physical, and another to
shift it back again (it is not possible to see both at the same time,
though almost everything in physical space is reflected on the
astral, albeit without detail)"

Right, Astral Perception allows you to switch your perception between the Astral and Physical realms, but not view both at the same time. You must have functional eyes in order to view the physical realm, and you must have astral eyes to view the astral realm, and dual natured get both by virtue of their nature. A spirit can't do anything based off a physical picture because they can't make heads or tails of one, they don't have the experience with the physical world to determine one group of photons from another. If you got an astral photo of your target you could do it, but an ordinary image wouldn't be translatable to a spirit.

Actually I think it is just that a spirit doesn't have physical eyes, and so can't view the physical plane except through the astral. Thus why duel natured beings like shifters (They are duel natured, right?) can read books and use computers, and spirits can't.

Shifters are dual-natured, but so are materialized spirits and 'Perceiving mages. I suppose Materializing never specifically gives a spirit the ability to perceive the physical world...

Right, nor does being dual-natured. A blind mage (or a ghoul) is dual-nautred, but still can't see the physical plane except as shadows.

My thinking is that sure your mage can send a mental image of the target to the spirit, based on a photo. But what if the target is disguised in some way? How does that help the spirit find him or her?

If the mage doesn't know the person aside from a picture, the mage has no way of transmitting that extra info to the spirit and therefore the spirit can totally miss the person. A simple wig would probably do it. It's not like the spirit can track that person by his astral essence just from a photo image, after all.

http://xkcd.com/722/

Loved that one. That's about how it goes when my grandmother needs computer help over the phone.

"It's not working."
"What isn't working?"
"The computer.
"What part of the computer isn't working?"
"The whole thing!"

Aaaand it turns out someone changed her font on word, or her screen resolution or something.

My grandfather is like that only he thinks he knows how to fix it, so he unplugs everything.

Ah la

http://xkcd.com/349/

They can if you take an astral photo of someone and then allow them to assense it, although that involves them sitting still for several minutes

I don't know, can you read auras from an astral photo? I don't know that a still image like that (with no astral presence) would be assensable for an astral signature.

Not a normal photograph, no. But if you have a picture taken with a Quicksilver Mana Sensitive Film Camera (pg 67 Arsenal) you can assense the photograph and use Search.

Yeah, knew a normal photograph didn't work, but wasn't sure if the quicksilver just took a picture of the astral, or actually provided enough information to assense from (Since the photo is just a regular photo which has no astral presence). Reading the rules, you can assense from a quicksilver photo, but the threshold is 2 greater. In other words, since you can't see the changing and such of the aura, it is alot harder to glean anything from it. Also, with a 30 minute exposure time, you're not generally going to shoot anything that doesn't want to be shot.

Still, given that the photos can be duplicated and everything, I would imagine that companies would keep a store of them for their higher up people for astral tracking purposes.

You know what? Nevermind.