ok, i came up through the ranks starting at SR 1st ED, so maybe this why I missed this little change..

mages are no longer allowed to ground spells out through focus??

astral projecting mages who manifest cannot cast mana spells at a mundane??

hey, I just like to know if the rules have changed, or I forgot how to read and I am becoming a troll slowly

thanx

Those rules had changed prior to 3rd edition. I think a lot of people overlooked it because the absense of a rule you are used to isn't as noticable as new rules.

thanx

You used to be able to manifest and cast mana spells at mundanes? Wow, that must have really sucked.

"Your opponent is impossible to injure, outrun, hide from, block, or in any way affect or avoid, but she can still smack you all over the place.... have a nice day."

I think people miss it because, "You mean I can't be impossible to injure, where they can't outrun me, hide, or block my shit anymore? But why? It's unfair!"

Hehe. Well, it seems like magic gets a huge revamp every single edition from what I've heard in an attempt to balance it out, while mundanes tend to remain about the same as ever, with the notable exception of the huge hacker revamp as an attempt to make them not require a separate game to have them, and then of course Unwired goes "Nope, they need their own game again."

From what little I know, 3rd edition seemed to have the most balanced mages due to having to buy spells at a particular force being a decent drain on resources, compared to the simple 'have or don't' style used now (though I admit I like the have/don't style more conceptually).

Yup that's about how I feel about the decker.... ummm I mean hacker now. Still they are easier than they were before. No more motherboard schematics pretending to be system maps.

Yea except back in 3rd a sustaining foci (spell lock) only cost 1 karma to bond and would hold any force of spell. Man, I miss those. There were plenty of spells you never needed at a high force so that wasn't always a huge drain. You also weren't limited in the number of successes you could get.

Really? I thought they had force grades just like they do now. I've played a SR3e MUD before, and I thought it ran off having force grades on the sustaining foci, could be wrong though.

Ah well, I'm sure we'll see another major revamp in 5th edition whenever that comes out. Personally I'm waiting for them to introduce armor against magic, as that is practically all it would take to balance it out.

See, I always thought that the rules for Magic in 3rd were a little overpowered... you could buy a Force 1 Spell, Cast it and get a truckload of hit (Invisibility/Improved Invisibility I am looking at you) and if your target did not have their resistance attribute higher than the numnber of successes, you could not resist the spell at all... huge problem...

I like the revamp of the rules for both Magic and Hacking in 4th... they are easily the best, in my opinion, of the editions... and as for Unwired, all it did was offer options, it did not invalidate the speed of play for the Matrix in 4th... it runs, at least at our tavle, in tandem with the street action of the other characters... no "seperate game' for us, unless it is a Resonannce Quest, at which point, everyone participates as part of the quest anyways... I understand that it is not typical of everyone's table, but once you know the rules for the Matrix (and ignore the disparity between the Matrix and real life hacking/networking) then it moves along very fast indeed...

Keep the Faith

Ah, didn't realize that hits weren't limited by force. If they were though, that would I think have made magic quite a bit less powerful.

As for Unwired, yeah, I suppose it doesn't change how quickly things run in game all that much, just seems like they added a ton of extra rules that did more to complicate things than improve anything.

Well, you could get the Materialization power from a great form spirit. Not exactly invulnerable and all that, but better than nothing and you get ItNW.

PS: Since Materialization is a sustained power, what kind of action would a mage have to spend to return to the astral?

Just stop sustaining the power, it shunts you back to the Astral automatically...

Keep the Faith

Which is significantly more difficult to get than a metamagic.

And seeing that you would need a Metamagic (Invoking) to attempt this yourself... it may not be all that useful...

Keep the Faith

I didn't say it was easy...

True...

Keep the Faith

No, you just need to "play pokemon" and dismiss/summon someone else's Great Form Spirit.

... And then take a week off to recover the drain.

Generally a much more difficult route, but doable, as long as the Great Form Spirit actually had the ability (Not all of them get it as you Need 5 Success on Invoking to actually have the power available)...

Keep the Faith

grounding spells though your target's focus and other toys was lots of fun to take out their stuff-think of the invisible assault team in -Ivy and Chrome- but it also discouraged you from carrying your own stuff for the same reason. Likewise being able to attack mundaes while untouchable was just way too much. at first there was a 'darn it' as I had to changetacvtics then 'cool'

As much as SR4 gets ragged on for unbalanced awakened characters, SR3 was worse. A sorcerer could have two force: 6 manabolt foci, a totem like dragonslayer for 3 more dice, and learn a force: 6 manabolt with the fetish modifier to lower the force for purposes of drain. So that mage could cast a spell with those 15 dice and his sorcery dice, and withhold all of his spell pool to soak drain. So you are talking 21 dice, with a TN of the target's Willpower, with the target resisting a TN of 6, and the mage resisting a TN of 2 for drain. Casting it at D damage meant that the target would die if the mage got a single net hit.

Spirits were just as bad. You could have a hermetic mage with an attack pack of 6 fire elementals and a bunch of watchers (just to cement the friends in melee bonus), capable of chewing up just about any mundane or magical threat.

Counterbalancing that was the fact that a Willpower of 6 was actually a decent protection against non-massively tweaked magical attacks (since it was also the TN for mana spells), along with the insane initiatives that a tweaked out sammie could get (unlike SR4, mages simply couldn't come close). Overall, though, I would say that SR3 mages were pretty damn powerful.

I don't ever remember being able to cast mana spells from the astral at a mundane. But its been years so maybe 1e had that rule. Now the loophole the I don't think designers initially thought of is your own spirits being astral links so you could toss fireballs through them. For me 4e sports the most powerful magicians and the least powerful. If you are playing things relatively straight I think 4e produces the powerhouses, if you are abusing the rules earlier editions produce the most powerful. I'll also point out 1e had brutal drain, you were not spell slinging like you do in 2e and on.

Naw, they thought of it. It was in the shadowtalk for one of the magic books, although the story was followed by another shadowtalker saying that abusing a spirit like that could get the offending mage in trouble with future spirits he tried to summon.

Yeah I remember the shadowtalk. I just don't think they initially thought of it, because if they did they would have changed the rules before they went into print IMO. I think they figured it out eventually and put the shadowtalk in as a way to dissuade players from doing it. The shadowtalk to me was a way of saying hey look great you found a loophole to break the game, now why don't you try to play nice and not abuse loopholes and actually have fun playing the game.

In theory you might also strike a bargain with a free one...just don't think about the price