Well, here is the Question then...

What is it about the Magical System that makes a Mage Overpowered? Once you have determined that, it should be relatively easy to address the problem... You really can't fix it unless you know what the actual problem is... And, of course, tables may differ in what they see as the problem...

There are plenty of optional rules that can make Magic less powerful... so you may not even need any Houserules to obtain the fix that you desire...

Keep the Faith

For me...mages are overpowered...plain and simple. When I have played missions at conventions, I have sat down with a team full of mages (being a hacker I loved it...whatever came from the matrix was fact...they couldn't argue!).

With the regular group I play with, we have only 1 mage (and a mystic adept who doesn't over mage it!) and he plays the "shotgun" role to a tee. Rather than bringing out the nerf bat though, it's just more fun to play with people who don't care about mage powah! I find the face in our group hilarious (who likes beating women...don't ask!), a twisted adept, a weapon specialist with a bulldog FULL of guns, a hacker/driver/rigger(me), explosives/throwing adept and a furry mystic adept who thinks god speaks to him. The diversity alone makes for fun games at time.

Synner was talking about that. I'm merely refuting the knee jerk reaction that says that combat spells must be as strong as they are now (Which, imo, means they're usually if not always stronger than guns) for the game to be balanced. Spell casting would still be a strong skill even if it was only half as good at killing people as guns are. That's because spellcasting does more than compete with guns and because combat spells have unique properties that make them different from and in some cases better than firearms even when cast at low Force. As good as guns are, they are not as concealable as spells and they don't trash targets that are all but immune to normal weaponry nor can they be used in Rituals.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, since I figure that if you have to resort to "Well, the samurai could just use cruise missiles" to refute something, you're probably defending a lost cause, particularly considering that there isn't cruise missiles in the books and if there were I doubt they'd be used with the firearms skills in any case. I said it before and I'll say it again: I'm only claiming that spell casting is far more than just a direct competitor with guns, and therefore you do indeed have wiggle room to reduce the potency of combat spells without making Spell Casting (or even combat spells) unviable.

Yeah, you can nerf combat spells and the mage will still have other spells, but a lot of people play mages because they like using magic for combat - not because they want to be a utility mage. If being a combat mage is no longer a feasible role, then obviously whatever nerf does that is overkill. I'm all for giving mundanes more of a fighting chance against magic if it is too powerful in some areas, but I still think mages should be able to remain as versatile and viable of a choice as before. Half of these house rules would just have me ripping up my mage character sheet and doing a sammie or adept, instead.

That's a fluff concern, not a balance one. I mean, hey, I have sympathy for that attitude-- it's why I haven't nerfed combat spells at my own table. But I do think that if I did, the game would be more "balanced" and mages wouldn't be quite the handful that they are now. The issue is that it wouldn't fit the common shadowrun player perception of what a combat mage "should" be, even if technically speaking they'd still be more than viable thanks to a combination of buff spells and the ability to bypass armor via direct spells in emergencies. Overall, I tend to view SR as being a setting in which magicians are imbalanced by design. It's just sort of how the Sixth World works.

If it is half as good as guns, then that kinda kills the whole reason for society to fear it. "Oh look its a mage, and he's pissed, we'd better be careful or he might bring out his nerf spells can mess our hair."
PS, spell casting is 1/2 as good as guns are. Casting is a complex action, firing your MGL-6 is a simple action, so for every spell I cast, you get 2 bullets, grenades, busts of either of the above, and may take out 2 people for each one I do. I've also found weapon dice pools easier to get then magic dice pools as well, and since the invention of the wide band radar sensor, bullets are often easier to use, as they go through walls, smoke, and even other people.


Any plane with an autopilot and a cargo bay full of explosives works wonders. Your right, they'd need no skill at all because they're on auto pilot. No, not really, especially when you start messing with the drain codes. Doing that means the spells rapidly go from being able to be cast with out major concerns to crippling the mage in 2 castings. If you were willing to have a large caliber pistol break the sammy's wrist every second shot I might not complain, but this obviously isn't going to happen.

Multi-casting, AoE spells and the ability to overcast and ignore armor is pretty nice compensation. Also, spells also do not usually need to be cast at as high of a pool to be effective since as a general rule only other awakened characters can defend themselves very well against magic attacks. Further, magic scores and foci can let a mage wipe the floor with other archetypes in terms of total dice pools on a long enough timeline (and in the case of a tuned combat mage, that timeline can be rather short). I would also put forth that if combat magic was worse than firearms, it would still be better than close combat except with all but the most highly tuned close combat adepts. Magic is concealable, can be done at range, it ignores armor, and nobody ever gets to roll full defense and apply dodge/unarmed to the their defense twice and the skill still provides a wide variety of useful effects beyond combat. As for the fluff concern you're talking about, I disagree. Society would still fear people who can turn themselves invisible, kill you with their minds and can summon spirits and cast mental manipulations.


As for the drones and stuff you're talking about, I think you're underestimating the degree of difficulty. Drones can be interdicted and hacked/subverted. Ritually cast combat spells tell line of sight to go to hell and don't really care if something only exists in the astral.

But only as long as you have a material or sympathetic Link... otherwise, it no work so good...

Keep the Faith

And have 6 hours, or so. Per cast.

Drones have travel time too, although admittedly rituals can be pretty unwieldy.


I'm still not really sure what that has to do with combat magic having to be as good as guns though. Guns aren't drones.

Well put.

If a PC character is overpower (i.e. no fun) then the GM and player need to come to an undertanding and resolve the situation; nerfing is just one solution.

Or anyone with an edge score, and if you're multicasting your pool drops off very quickly. Also people with guns can use 2 of them at the same time if they want to.


So someone designed to do a specific job is good at it you say? Wow really? Go figure, and here I thought the more time/nuyen/karma you put into a character the worse they got. Well now you see there's my problem....


Not if they get a nose bleed from lighting a candle which is what some people are proposing for the drain codes.


Ritual spells are actually rather difficult to get off at any reasonable force. You have hours to notice them, and your hits are cumulative, then if you have any sense you'll head under ground, or to one of those rooms coated in awakened ivy, and smile warmly knowing those pricks are likely still going to face drain for it. If you don't have access to a deep enough basement, or a room coated in that ivy, odds are you're not important enough to spend the time to cast a ritual spell at.

I'm good with most of how magic works in SR. The only thing I have any real problems with is direct spell damage. No soak on it just seems so unfair to the target. I know there's the houserule towards the drain, and I use a modded version (Increase BEFORE the /2), but that doesn't change my opinion.

A mage throws 12 DP Force 6 Manabolt at a Will 4 character without the benefit of counterspelling.... Not much chance to miss now is there. Oh, and no soak, the avoidance roll is the only way to reduce the damage. Just take 6P damage, unless it's more as modified by hits.

Just seems a little excessive. Bout the only thing I'd really say needs changing.

I DO like the earlier mention of letting mundanes learn magic skills like counterspelling and banishing, but not allow magic linked actions with it. I think I would allow that in my game. If all characters had the option of getting their own counterspelling as a "magic dodge" skill... obviously it shouldn't stack with other regular counterspelling from the mage, but is a nice option for mundanes.

Wasn't me.

Indeed. There have been a number of very different proposals made, from mundane Counterspelling, to universal spell resistance rolls, to tweaked Drain codes, etc. No need to get all defensive.

I think that's an ok idea, but it needs some caviates about it. Its its allowed then overwatch counter spelling from a second mage should be handled as a teamwork test or something.

Fortunately, Multiple itterations of Counterspelling are generally handled as a Teamwork Test...

Not sure if I like Mundanes having access to Counterspelling though, or Dispelling for that matter... Though It might work to provide what you are looking for...

Keep the Faith

Its just giving them a skill to use in case of direct magic attack.
I think its supposed to work like (will + skill) kinda like (agi + dodge)

What about increasing drain per casting and resetting at dusk/dawn. Say by 10% of past spells. So force 6 adds 0.6 to all drain rolls until sunrise/set. This would encourage mages to ration a little and have the feeling of a cost per cast (they don't have to buy bullets...gits).

Mages have a cost-per-Binding already.

Actually if you read my earlier post, you see that it really doesn't, especially if you have a focus.

The armor would do nothing to prevent an area effect mana spell.

How about no, or better yet, hell no. That is an even worse idea then just increasing drain straight across the board.
If you think spending a nuyen on a bullet is about equal to an extra point of stun damage for each spell you cast, and each time you cast a spell, then you(edit) have a problem.

Also if you think potentially getting drain each and every time you cast a spell doesn't have a cost per cast, try getting a sammy to roll drain each time he fires a gun, and see how long you think that is a good idea.

I am still going to go back to the argument that part of the defenses for a normal person is how magic is treated by the GM. Magic in the fluff is more feared then a guy with a gun, well everyone carries a gun dont they. Mental manipulations are the worst for this fear, its not called Mind Rape for sh*ts and giggles. If a mage is consistantly messing with peoples minds and word gets out I would expect to see the paranoia level jump big time.

How do you know he's not messing with your mind right now. How do the mages contacts react to him if they are not high loyalty I can see them getting abit more distant. Come to think about it how would some of the Mentor spirits see mind spells if they are not of the manipulation type. There are options given for while not punishing a mage at least stopping the silliness.


Everything a mage can do will eventually cause him pain and suffering. This is a given fact and whilst you can mitigate a lot of the drain, eventually the dice will mess you up. This is the cost of the power you have been given.

Granted if you have a long running game (100 karma plus in my mind) a mage can and will improve vastly (either improved dice pool from focuses, higher magic or just plain learning a large list of spells) but at the end of the day they are still a magic pony. By the same time has past a Sam, Rigger or Face would have capped out their options and spread out their skills making them more rounded and more useful in other situations.

Just geek the mage. Best way to nerf em.

Wow, such aggression...I can see you want me to like you.

Your statement only holds if you are saying the mage will get stun each time using this suggested system. I know mages that only really risk getting stun when they summon a really nice spirit and the GM rolls obscene. It's so easy to build a mage which will walk most drain rolls.

And don't pretend like my post was all about mages having no cost, I added the word "gits" to lighten it so please don't jump down my neck. But since you have mentioned it, I'd be happy to resolve a system where a sammy can max stats for firing a gun and ignore just about any stun rolls back on himself. And when a sammy does it, it's against one person (or two since it's a simple action...yay sammy!) versus god knows how many with a nice stun/mana bolt.

You'd think he invented mages, the way he's so emotionally invested in this.

Depending on the group and the table, making spells successively harder might be fun and correct. It's just one suggesting. I think we can do without 'make guns cause drain' for the rest of the thread, thanks.

And I'd think one killed your mother from how you want to break their knees.

That would be exactly 1 target.

When I first GMed SR4, I did Direct Combat spells wrong, in that I allowed the target to roll Body to resist the spell, and THEN roll Body to resist the Damage. For a Mana Direct Combat Spell, it was Willpower to resist spell, and Body to resist Damage.

Looking back, it would actually make for a decent House Rule, as Drain doesn't change, you don't get all the silliness with AoE and net hits, etc. It just tones down the Direct Damage a little (usually by a couple of boxes), and also makes the dice mechanic more uniform (which is one more problem I have with Direct Combat). As for Barriers/vehicles, it would make more sense to use their Body stat to resist the spell with, as they usually have fairly high Body anyway. Anything non-living without a Body stat could use the OR table.

lol, my bad, I meant ball (obviously)

I suspect he probably meant stun/mana ball. Of course, the counter-argument would be that the samurai's equivalent of the mana/stun ball is the grenade launcher.

I think the argument misses the point, though. Nobody is telling you that you must or must not nerf mages in your game. That's up to your GM and players and what you think makes a fun game. It doesn't necessarily even matter whether they're balanced or not - maybe your players think that mages are unbalanced and like it that way. Whatever lets your group have fun is what you should do.

That said, there are some people on the board who feel that mages are overpowered, and who enjoy the game less because they percieve it to be unbalanced. If it's killing their fun, then they should change the rules to something that will mesh better with the style that their group likes to play. Telling them that they're wrong for thinking mages are unbalanced doesn't help them enjoy it any more, and is generally useless.

As I understand them, the arguments that magic users are unbalanced are:

• Because the mage gets both Magic and Sorcery on his role and the target generally only gets Willpower to resist, spells are overpowered. At a minimum, it means that the only way a target can ever resist a spell is if he has a supporting mage casting counterspelling, which means that the only way to counter magic is with more magic.
• By RAW mages are supposed to be really rare, which means that security will usually not have counterspelling and therefore be easily overcome by a PC's spells.
• Because direct damage spells bypass armor and don't allow a dodge roll, they are much more effective than bullets in many scenarios, especially when going up against heavily armored and agile foes. And if the enemy isn't armored or agile, they're no challenge anyway.
• Magic is often more flexible than tech or brute force. Many of the 'utility' spells allow mages to perform a role as good or better than a non-magical specialist for that role. For example, a possession mage can soak damage as well as or better than the armor-focused troll. The invisible levatating (or even better - projecting) mage can often stealth better than the stealth specialist. A mage with high sorcery can out-damage a street sam in many scenarios. A mental manipulation mage can out-face a face. And there are many things that ONLY a mage can do that can't be duplicated with tech. So mages are guaranteed their moment in the spotlight and have a good chance of taking everyone else's spotlight moments as well.
• One of the counterbalancing mechanisms in SR for the power of spellcasting is drain, but optimized mages are often able to completely ignore drain even from overcast spells, indicating that the drain mechanic is not sufficient as a check/balance against mage power.

Seems like there are both fluff and rules changes that could address many of these concerns.

• Background count can be the bane of every mage. The book doesn't specify how often you run into it, or how bad it is in the city, so it's entirely up to GM discretion. It makes the mage powerful but inconsistent/undependable. A drawback of this is that if overplayed it will seem like arbitrary GM favoritism/punishment.
• Wards are cheap, easy to maintain, and nearly impossible to pass undetected if you're magically active. And if the mage has to drop and re-cast their sustained spells 3 or 4 times during the sneaky part of the mission they will eventually start accumulating drain damage.
  
  If that's not enough and you really feel that rules changes are needed...
  
• Breaking Sorcery into Manipulation Sorcery, Combat Sorcery, Health Sorcery, Illusion Sorcery, Detection Sorcery will result in mages who will have to choose between being mediocre generalists who are useful in everything but not great at anything, or Specialists who are toasted-death-on-a-stick in one area but suck at everything else.
• Upping Drain Codes will force mages to cast most of their spells at a lower force. That said, many spells are effective at force 4 or less.
• Changing the spell resistance roll to use 2xWill, will make mages' spells less reliable, and will make Indirect spells comparatively more viable than they are currently.
• Letting mundanes learn Counterspelling would give sec guards a slight edge over what they have now, but they'd still generally be outclassed. It wouldn't be reasonable to give them more than 2-3 points in the skill, which might make casting slightly harder but still not that tough.

I think that's a pretty good summation, Apathy. Personally, I don't mind them being powerful, I much prefer the role play to the roll play but I felt a slowly accruing system of drain would help balance it a little. If you cast 3 force 6 spells (assuming a magic 6 with no desire to overcast) that would add 2 to all subsequent drain codes until sunrise/set. I personally didn't feel that would affect most mages, as the ones I have partied with start the fight with a powerful whack and it's usually just mopping up from there.

I can't imagine what you're talking about, Mordinvan. I haven't suggested a single 'knee breaker'. I'm just participating in a varied, interesting, and otherwise friendly discussion about game mechanics.

I think using body to resist the damage of physical spells is good, but you should still use will to resist mama spells.

The easiest way, I think, to limit the utility of mages in a game is pretty simple.

Get rid of Overcasting(Ditto Spirits.). Enforce Object Resistance. If they want to do something exceptional, spend Edge(Force doesn't limit hits from edge dice.) No swapping to Physical drain when you're out of stun, either.

Something I've been thinking about. Haven't had a chance to test it in play. Could definitely use a second opinion.

Excellent now try working in hollywood where the director wants to retake a scene for the 10th time that day, and you're the main illusionist. If he's using drone cameras, you've just increased your drain for that last take by 5, and likely placed yourself in a coma.

Psh, it's all computer graphics.

Edit check on scene 3, please.

Trid Phantasm is only used as special effects for live events.

And again, it's just one of many ideas, and most runners don't do that work. What are you saying, there should be world consistency?

Sorry Possession, I think that is a very... unsavory... idea. It punishes mages way too harshly.

One idea of nerfing mages is to get rid of Possession Traditions. I mean honestly, what's the drawback of using a Possession Tradition? You need to be buffed for CQB, get possessed. Need to bluff your way out, get possessed. This goes on and on and on and... etc, etc, ad nauseam. If you don't want to get rid of it, make it so it isn't a "I Win!" button. Make it so that there are consequences for allowing your body to be rented out like a cheap whore.

I think a problem with a lot of the proposed fixes is that they seem aimed at the most glaringly min-maxed mages, which means that they curb the min-maxed mage, but completely screw over everyone else.

Actually, you'd think aiming at the min-maxers would result in just curbing *them*, but anyway.

Does allowing attribute spell resistance or mundane Counterspelling screw over everyone else? It seems like the ideas cover a range from mild to extreme.

BBB indicates lucas arts has just brought a whole new meaning to the term ILM

Or any where with a camera, which would include any place where you're doing filming

… Are you being serious? I was joking. No one cares about movie effects.

Yeah. That's why I prefer the method of tweaking specific spells or fairly narrowly defined spell characteristics (e.g. Direct and Indirect). For example, you won't ever see me increase the drain of Manipulation spells across the board. Maybe Mob Control is a bit strong for a (F/2)+2 spell (at the very least you can order them to just throw down their weapons), but that doesn't mean I'm willing to give marginal spells like Gecko Crawl, Poltergeist or Ice Sheet crippling drain values just to make sure that the Magician will only cast Mob Mind two or three times per run.

A game world should be internally consistent. Setting up an escalting drain system would write off all non-critical uses of magic.

You would be better off just playing out the repercussions of using such a spell. As indicated by the fluff for manipulation spells pulling that kind of stuff causes very negative effects with contacts and people you deal with if they know you pull the whole mind rape thing. Make it a role play response that makes the player think past the roll play. Add in the extra threat those spells would generate to the corps your pulling it on and you have a team telling the mage to tone that sh*t down as it will bring all manner of trouble no different then the Sam pulling out a grenade launcher at the bus stop and shooting the passing traffic. Both will get a high threat team on your doorstep.

Of course this will vary if your cold pro or pink mohawk