How many of you had a runner team completely annihilate a Yama King from Ghost Cartels and how did they do it?

if that's your question, i'm really interested, too, if anyone managed this

I actually bumped up Yama king abit as my players were tearing through the encounter with ease. The final fight took place on the evac helo. With the Yama King and one team member dangling from the skids and another runner clinging to life and the air frame firing away an LMG to finish him off.

edit: IIRC Between the Helo and last two conscious team members there were only 3 boxes of health left.

Hm... i haven't run it yet. But isn't the last encounter not pretty much a GM-decision of either: "Ah, i am too nice. Just kill it." OR "Well, it is now his turn: you all are dead"?

To explain: If he just go in swinging he can be taken down very easily (if the runners have some specialists in heavy weaponry or massive dice pools in attack sorcery / unarmed Ki attacks).

But if he uses his Fear-power he can scare them to split up and murder them one-by-one with a combination of confusion and hitting them?
Also: doesn't he have weird attributes? Only Rating 14 armor with force 9... but insane Strength for a materialization spirit?

his attributes are wrong. he should have 18 hardened armor.

i took this guy down personally. Banished him with my Banishing 1 + Magic 6 + Edge 4 - BC vs Force 9. I took heavy physical drain, but the dice gods were in my favor. GM granted me the Deed ordeal for my next initiation. My team mates didn't get near any danger at all, which was my primary goal as i have the Oak mentor spirit and need to protect them. Although one tried to shoot him with his Ruger and Edge

Thats what i mean: Your gm was VERY lenient, it seems (Or you had epic luck?)

It is a Force 9 spirit with banishment resistance. That is 18 dice... and if he really doesn't want to leave he's got edge 3 too. Very hard to banish something like that if you cannot at least match maybe 14 dice... And you may need to do it more often. Also.. doesn't he hate especially mages. I think after the first try (and after the drain) you may get a sword to the face for 8 DV+nethits.

no, you're wrong. he has only 9 dice. Banishing Resistance only gives him some virtual services as high as his current Edge. Because he had only 3 Edge, i only needed 3 net hits (=services) on my banishing tests which i completeted in two rolls. If he'd used Edge to withstand Banishing, he'd banished himself. He wasn't able to locate ans attack me within one complex action, because the roof was filled with loads of triad soldiers and i just took cover among the crowd.
I don't get it, why people dislike Banishing that much...stunbolting him is a hell lot harder

Mind you, my runner team is 8 strong. Two mages, 1 Rigger, 1 Armorer, 1 Face, 1 Adept, 1 TM, and 1 Troll Super Samurai. This is a wrecking crew.

But with RAW, and a single bad roll for the Yama King 1 Net Success on 18 Dice for Counter/Resist...one of the mages overcast (WITH The optional Rule in place about +1 Drain per net success) did 14 Stun to the Yama King and Five physical to himself on Drain...

Yama King bizzap....2 IP's gonezy...

That legend was ...underwhelming!

It sounds as if you would have had him anyway, but I think the Edge referred to in the Banishing Resistance description in Street Magic, page 99 is the Edge Attribute, not the current Edge points left, so he could have used Edge to resist being Banished without cutting down his own service count. Whether he would have or not is up to him (your GM).

Chin You is pretty easy to banish thanks to his totally porged stat line, spirits normally have edge equal to their force.
So with a more standart stat line he would be pretty damm hard to banish, as you would need 9 nethits to banish him and your taking on avarage 6 points of drain damage per test(can go up to 18 per test).
Is the drain taken while banishing physical or stun? Can't find an answer to that in the books.

Free Spirits do not have Force Edge. for further information read SM p106
drain depends on wether your magic is higher or lower as the spirits ghost. it's summoning in reverse.

Ah yes, you are right of course. Somehow mixed that up in my confused mind. Banishing resistance only adds virtual services. Hm so yeah... banishing the Yama King is very viable and safe it seems. Lucky he doesn't have much edge.

This is interesting. The three Skills in the Conjuring Group have two kinds of limits: The maximum Force that can be affected, and the dividing line between Stun and Physical Drain.

These are both articulated for Summoning. For Binding, only the Drain limit is articulated, but since one can only Bind a spirit he Summoned himself, the other limit is implicit. For Banishing, neither is articulated. You can then interpret in two ways: either you apply the same rules associated with the other two Conjuring Skills, or you go by the text. The first interpretation suggests that you can Banish a spirit whose Force is no more than twice your Magic, and if its Force is greater than your Magic, the Drain is physical.

The second interpretation, which carries the "weight of RAW", is that Drain is always Stun unless changed to Physical (See page 178 of SR4A). Since nothing in Banishing is said to change it to Physical, Banishing Drain is always Stun. Similarly, since no limit is expressed, you can Banish any spirit no matter what it's Force is. Both of these still leave the Banisher subject to the doubling of the spirit's hits and dealing with exorbitant Stun damage, which for all intents and purposes can kill you anyway.

EDIT: This second interpretation also makes the much-maligned Banishing Skill a little more attractive.

All shadow spirits are free or wild spirits and every single one of them in SM and RW has Force Edge.

Umm, assault rifle (APDS), edge and one extremely lucky shot.


Side note: Remember that what ever the opposition has, the players may use too.

My mundane elf beat the crap out of him mano a yama-o using an edge assisted attack of will when he got left behind by his team! It was truly awesome! Yama King solo kill!

Needless to say, in Kowloon my elf's rep is killer!

Hello runners, if i may ask a question of those that are running the Cartels....were in the bloody heck do you find the retainer fees for the runners. I am trying to get this set up so i can run it...i am also adding about 3-5 runs at each location....and tying in the Yaks from Japan better ( i mean if these guys cap a boss in Seattle they will need a little better story to survive there trip in Japan).

But the one thing i cannot find is the pay off, i have word searched on PDF, and have read the entire thing. Several times...and cannot find it! Again sorry for asking something about the Cartel campaign that is not directly relative to the topic, Have a good day.

I do believe you need to wing it!

I did a 1K per day retainer type pay-off that in hindsight was probably a little higher than I should have.

Yeah, i was lucky and did the run first as a player. But the GM decided that the big pay outs we got made up the difference so we got no retainer....But was not sad. The cyber upgrade I got in Japan was a upgrade to my Move by wire system.....so i felt like i made off like a bandit!

I feel though that it may be too big of a pay off, or if my players decide not to do the things we did (like get the ship and sale the drugs) i want to have some sort of Idea as to what to pay my players.

Thanks for your response, cheers and have a nice day

I'm pretty sure I said this before, but the Yama King example given in Ghost Cartels was deliberately gimped to give the players a shot at taking him out...of course, the original draft nailed any character that killed a Yama King with the Cursed Karma negative quality, but that didn't make the final cut.

Is that the Bad Luck Quality now?

Thats nice for the players, but it is little pathetic that the named bad guy spirit is much easier to banish then a bog standard no name mook shadow spirit of same or even a little lower force.

2 rounds of APDS out of a .600 Nitro Express Elephant Gun.

I guess you got pretty damm lucky with your rolls, to score that many nethits.

Well, mine group did in one before the last session.

Quite simple actually (i thought that they may run for chopper and yama would catch on the chopper, flying along and fighting in the air). They went on the roof and seeing the monstrosity on top of it, they opened fire.
Yama king notices mage, and blasts it with his blast. mage barely survives due to edge. Gunbunny shoots at yama king in three initiative phases crapload of apds ammunition (Yama king gets ~12 P. Others cannot penetrate the Yama king's defenses. Next initiative, gunbunny goes first, does some more damage, yama king charges, smacks him badly with his huge hammer and gunbunny goes unconcious. Then goes face and attacks with his monofilament whip, uses edge, and yama King goes down...

I assumed, that we need to wing it, since these adventures were not so detailed. So i took 6k nuyen per runner and increaed by 500 nuyen each next adventure: to make them want to earn more...

What gun is he using to overcome the 18 points of hardened armor?

Well we are using the Range determines your needed Net hit optinal rules so I realy only needed One to hit him at that range. Then I am getting like 13 Dice Pluss 2 uses of Edge [One of each shot] and yes a heck of a lot of 6s.

Just out of curiosity, what makes you say this?

because he is a Force 9 spirit and all spirits get force x2 hardened Armor, when materializing

Yeah, I handled it that way. An assault rifle on lon burst does 12P damage, -5AP from the APDS. At 18 armor the PC will need 2 successes to damage him. IIRC he had alitlle more than that bringing his armor up to the 21 to 24 range (AFB). So the player needed 6+ success with his 20 dice and edge, he scored 16 hits. Epic Win for the home team.

With 16 hits it probably didn't matter in your case but burst damage doesn't count for armor penetration. (And an AR on Long Burst is 11P not 12)

We tease our GM (sharkman) about his supposed "random-seed-atomic clock-fusion-powered" compu-diceroller.

The poor generator couldn't even muster up 1 hit of damage resistance on like 19 dice. Granted even a slightly above average roll on DR was going to spare the minotaur YK 7boxes, but it would have kept him from being 1-shotted...

As for our die rolls, when the mage generates 11 hits on 16 dp with an overcast stunball, even a decent roll for Counterspelling at 18 dp means someone is taking a ride on the Pain Train! "Choo-Choo!"

I think he was using HK MP5 with APDS bullets. And i ran it as written so the yama had 14 armor. He has a dicepool for shooting around 20, so every other shot got through

Pretty lucky getting 6 net hits (9 or so hits) with 20 dice.