Does anyone else think that banishing and counterspelling foci being category-specific makes them rather unattractive?

It's different for all the others because the user can make them useful, but these two are right-implement-right-time affairs.

Let's take the banishing focus, costing 5k and 3 karma per force. So 15,000 and 9 karma gets you a tasty F3 fire-banishing focus. And how oftem will you use it?

Let's assume all spirit types are equally prevalent and that summoners don't have a bias towards lots of different or lots of the same spirit. Then, if you come up against one spirit there's a 10% chance you get a banishing bonus. If you come up against two from the same summoner there's an 18% chance you get a bonus against at least one of them and if it's three spirits it's still less than 25% that one of them will be a fire spirit.

That's pretty damn poor for the outlay, and the prepared-for-anything guy needs 10 foci with a karma cost well into the double, maybe triple digits and a cash expenditure of (probably) over 100k. All for a just few extra dice.

Consequently, I envisage that in the Sixth World most banishing and counterspelling foci earn their keep more in the role of mantlepiece-conversation-starter than in the role they were enchanted for.

Does anyone see any major unbalancing by removing the category limitation? Should the price and/or karma cost increase?

Well, making them general use foci would increase their utility and help buff those particular aspects of magic they are geared for. Banishing is a poor stepchild. Removing the restrictions on the Banishing focus would make Banishing more attractive. Would that be enough to make people want to take it more? Perhaps.

I personally like the idea of removing those restrictions and keeping the costs the same. Perhaps make a general variety of those foci for the same costs and keep the specific foci for an even lower cost. That way you can bring your anti-fire spirit focus on those missions you know the mage you are facing off against calls fire spirits. The rest of the time, you bring your general purpose foci. Maybe keep the ratio of general to specific at a 2:1.

I do know that some folks will bitch about the suggestion simply because it will reduce the karma outlay of the mage.

I always read that the counterspelling and banishing foci were not spirit/spell type specific in SR4 (AFB-so correct me if I'm wrong on this). The extra dice can be useful if you find banishing and counterspelling useful in your campaigns.

Keep in mind my perspective:

Banishing is great-especially when running into that spirit with counterspelling or counterspelling support from another source.

Counterspelling is how you defend from enemy's use of magic. So it is always useful.

If I were a magician with a Negative Quality such as Spirit Bane, I would consider acquiring such a focus for the particular type of spirit that has it in for me.

As a player, I've seen more fire spirits thrown at my PCs' teams than any other type.

My Free Spirit PC dearly hopes all other magicians maintain this opinion.

And with the counterspelling foci: How much do you REALLY need? Manipulation and Combat are the most important ones, i think. Illusion MAY be interesting too, but how often does someone attack you with it? Getting the "Control"-line and Manabolt/Powerbolt thingies out of the way is a priority.

But yeah, it is a bit too specific in some cases. You could just introduce some kind of universal foci. Of course that thing would have to use a LOT more karma to bond... and may fall under the "unique focus"-rules (harder to build).

Yeah, +5 dice to counterspell combat spells for 25k is a pretty sweet deal, even when it doesn't help against other spell catecories.
Making the counterspell foci universal would pretty much make shielding foci useless.

Yeah, they call those POWER Foci...

Except that those don't help at all for counterspelling, you know the think the post you quoted was talking about.
But there is also an universal counterspelling foci, its called Shielding foci

Well, yeah... but you need shielding to use it.

Wow, this is why I read dumpshock.....when I re-read my book and noticed that all the conjuring and spell casting foci are specific to a particular spirit or spell type.

This rule Includes sustaining foci as well.

As the utility of sustaining foci are entirely down to the owner I for one don't have an issue with them being category-specific. If a magician is unlikely to need one often enough to warrant the nuyen and karma then he'll not buy it. With the defensive foci it's different.

Surprisingly even with this misunderstanding, none of my players have used them other than the sustaining foci.

Sustaining Focus (health) is all you really need for 75% of runs (I mean, where else do you put your Increased Reflexes?). Various runners will pick up various foci, but this one pretty much covers it.

Counterspelling/banishing, not so much.

BTW, a Sustaining Focus (combat) is useless, but technically exists.

Actually detection, illusion, manipulation and health are useful as well. Invisisbility, detect X, combat sense, levitate ect.. ect..

Yes, but while most mages have Increased Reflexes, not all mages have those four. One or two of them, sure, but rarely does any given one end up on "most" mages.

I like one for Health and one for Manipulation personally...
And yes, I would really have to laugh at the character with a Spell Sustaining Focus (Combat)...
It would be good for a laugh or two I would think...

I can get behind making Banishing a general focus. There doesn't seem to be any other focus it'd be competing with, and Banishing is a bit weak as-is.

The big difference between Banishing and Counterspelling; there are only 5 "schools", of which only Combat and Manipulation are really important to counterspell.

But while Fire spirits are probably favorite, there are more than 10 kinds of spirits (don't forget Shedim, Free, Insect) to banish, and you can only have [Logic] foci. Specific Banishing foci are mostly a waste of karma, a general Banishing focus might be nice.

Manipulations and Combat may have all the "Save or Screwed" type spells, but that hardly makes the Detection or Illusion counterspelling specializations useless. Detect Enemy and Detect life can rather screw your ambush plans right quick.

Don't mean to nit pick but... I'm gonna nit pick.

Logic determines the number of ACTIVE foci you can have at a time. Magic score is the limit of how many total you can bind (with the total combined Force of all foci not to exceed Magic x 5), and with Initiation that means you could pick up a fair number of them and turn them off and on as needed. After all, it only takes a Simple Action to activate one and a Free to deactivate.

That actually paints a pretty cool picture of a banisher mage shuffling trough his collection of focuses to find the right one for the spirits he's up against.

Cool picture, maybe. Viable and powerful enough? I doubt it. Given how small the chance any particular binding focus is, I'd first assign all those valuable focus bonding slots to important foci. By the time my magic is high enough that I can afford banishing foci, I doubt I'll need them.

Ah... but if he binds over his (magic*2) in force of foci, focus addiction becomes very possible. I guess most mages would like to stay under that number. So binding and shuffling around 10 force 4 foci is pretty much invitation to magic loss.

Everything over 12 force points total becomes a problem for a magic 6 mage.

Actually the guide line in Digital Grimoire is Magic*2 in force of foci active, which isn't a problem for that banisher who only uses one of those banishing foci at a time.

this can easily be duplicated by simply having the banishing focus itself consist of multiple attached objects, one for each type of spirit. a christian caster might use a necklace of prayer beads, for example, with each bead having a different symbol on it (a water symbol for repelling fire, a bird or frog for repelling insect spirits, a cross for repelling shedim, etc).

(actually, having done a tiny bit of research on it, it appears many other traditions might also use prayer beads. but i doubt most of them would use the cross symbol )

Yeah, I mean, I was raised Catholic but if anything I still kinda associate prayer beads mostly with dharma.

Prayer beads are a convenient way to keep track of how far along a series you are. No wonder they're popular in many faiths.

Even if I had all the banishing foci I probably would never use one. You cant have them all active, and it takes an action to activate a focus. Better to just learn the spirit bolt/ball spell at descent force and keep your combat spell focus active in the same way the samy keeps his gun loaded.

The only time I have ever used banishing was in SR3 when facing a spirit so big we couldn’t hope to kill it quickly. I engaged it in banishing to distract it while my team mates killed it. Used a lot of karma pool to get 1 net successes and hold it in place long enough to see it taken down with weapon foci and the force of will rules.

Dead easy to make too. It's kinda like the "spread" of the abacus. Who came up with it first is almost beside the point since it seems like every 3rd civilization had their own precursor up and running anyway. Similar problems breed similar solutions and all that.