It just occurred to me to wonder what a magician would be like if he could not cast spells off-the-cuff at all. Note that this does not preclude Ritual Spellcasting, just the spontaneous variety. Would he be able to make up for it with clever and/or borderline-munchkinlike use of spirits, or is a magician totally hosed if he can't cast spells?

He'd be a… non-spellcaster? We used to have plenty of Conjurers, after all. Projection and spirits are plenty strong by themselves. Honestly, I'd prefer it if you didn't automatically get all the mage powers at once, but obviously that'd be a different ball game.

With respect to realism (ingame consitency):

Of course there are magicians like that. There are many mages with geas or essence-loss too. Just doesn't come up as player characters often. I myself would encourage these un-optimized characters.

I would even go so far as saying it might be much more common as incompetences in mundanes, because of the highly mental effects on magic. If he doesn't THINK he can cast... well, he CAN'T.

Also would make for an interesting story for him to overcome it (buying it off and cast a spell, after many hardships and tests).

Dedicated summoner is very viable though. (Played one myself once) You can put the karma he would use for spells into an ally spirit and foci, have great counterspelling... and spirits totally rock the game. (Yes they are a tad too strong in my opinion.

EDIT: Ah and not to forget (well, not for this character, i think):

There is the optional rule for "specialist" aspected magicians, who would get a nice bonus on their primary skillset.

Incompetent has the same cost as Conjuror Aspect. With Incompetent, the character would not be able to cast a spell at all, but he wouldn't suffer any modifier with Counterspelling, Assensing and Astral activities.

The Aspects don't really work too well, to me, because we're only talking about a few BP. It used to be the difference between an A and a B priority.

I've been thinking the best way to fix it was to reduce the cost of Magic attribute for Aspects, but I never got around to looking at it.

Makes sense. Hmm.

As compared to an INcompetant (Conjuring Skill Group) magician who is in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Hmm. Taking three Incompetences to Aspect is a big pile of BP...

Well, no worries there. It's no worse than In Debt 30 and Addiction (Betel, Mild) 5. Let them hamstring themselves, 35 is the max.

What about Incompetence: Banishing and Incompetence: Ritual Spellcasting (and Incompetence: Decompiling)?

Conjurer Aspect nets you more points...but I have no idea if that's what you're going for.

Yeah, but in build point, it was something like the difference between 25 and 30 points. In both SR3 and SR4, though, where you really save the points is in the narrower range of skills/spells/etc. that you have to get.

Yeah: I don't like the way Adept is 5 and Mage is 15, and 'everything else' is between. I know that you have to invest a lot more to be any good, but it's always been unsatisfactory.

Given the ridiculous wording of aspect magician in this edition, there isn't any problem with this concept. It's silly but at least it has some character to it.

Aspect Magician was a good theory back in the day but good lord it might as well be you standing on the dock throwing precious quality points into the sea. Honestly a complete waste of time.

A friend of mine ran a sniping oriented Summoner/Counterspeller mage a year or two ago and he was pretty nasty even with the self-imposed limitations. You can come out of chargen with Synaptic 2, Muscle Toner 4, Summoning and Counterspelling while still maintaining a useful Magic of 3 if you really want to-- with a specialization and the right Mentor or Focus you should be able to summon at Force 6 with fair reliability, although physical drain isn't fun. In a larger group such a character can suffer a bit compared to super specialists-- it lacks the sheer utility of a generalist magician or a street samurai's raw toughness-- but in a 3 or 4 person team such a build can be a real terror.

And yeah, Aspected is just a mess these days, especially compared to Incompetent.

I really don't care about the number of build points it might save me versus Conjuror Aspect or anything else, I just think the idea of a mage who can't cast a spell spontaneously to save his life is both funny and interesting.

I suppose. But really, by the fluff it's not anything unusual unless you really spin their background to make them out as an abject failure. If he's had the full benefit of training in a well-rounded tradition like Hermeticism, then it might be weird that he isn't well-versed in sorcery, but otherwise a character who doesn't make use of some magical techniques could very well be par for the course for some traditions. For example, there's probably a fair number of Christian Theurgists who never trained in conjuration because it is still considered a bit of a theological grey area.

especially for Mystic-Adepts, who don't have the BP/Karma to be good in both conjuring and casting, aspects or incompetence make sense. There's an optional rule in SM for Expert Aspects, which makes the flaw more useful. But as long as asptec magician counts against the 35BP limit, Incompetence is the better way to go.

Huh? Aspected Magician and Incompetence come from the exact same 35 BP.

well, what i wanted to say: if aspected magician was a quality not counting towards the limit, like magician is, it might be more interesting as it frees room for other negative qualities.
Magician 15 BP
Aspected Magician 5-10 BP
Mystic Adept Health Spells Aspect 0 BP

I'm toying with the idea of a brutish posession tradition troll conjurer....

That being said, does posession override the augmented attribute maximum or not? It doesn't say it does, so I would assume not, but.... you never know.

Magician counts towards the 35 Point limit.

but to the other 35BP. The one for positive qualities not the one for negative qualities.

yeah. that's what I actually meant

Wait, what? Just so I'm not confused: Aspected Magician is a Negative Quality like any other. You also must take Magician or Mystic Adept, you *can't* take Incompetent for affected skills, and you can only take Aspected *once*.

It would indeed be funky if it didn't count toward NQ limit. Hmm.

That sounds like an interesting character concept. Got any more details on it?

It's been a while, so I really only remember the character's personality and major dice pools. He had Mountain as a Mentor, so he was detail oriented, stubborn and patient. He wasn't really a stealth specialist but with a 9 agility he could default to 8 dice and could back it up with Concealment. The really sick thing was when he initiated twice and bought a Force 2 Shielding focus. 15 dice in longarms before smartlink on top of the counterspelling meant he was really good at geeking mages. We ended the campaign fairly soon after though, since things can really start getting wacky after after 2 dozen karma in an Awakened heavy group.

Define wacky...

Playing in a game where 80% (4 of 5) of the characters are Awakened, with ~ 90 Karma... Not wacky yet... so I am unsure what you may be referring to...

Dicepool heavy. Very dicepool heavy. Not quite pornomancer bad, but it gets up there.

With only a couple of dozen Karma? Really? Most dice we have in our Awakened game is about 12 Dice or so (14 with our Oh So High-Tech TacNet, but not for magic obviously)
Hmmmmm.....

Even in our 300+ Karma Game, we have none of that... though we do have a Technomancer who can scrape together about 24 Dice or so for Spoof, with Sprite help and Threading anyways... but still, that is FAR from Pornomancer Levels... and he is really the only one, and only for Spoof...

Interesting...

Like I said, this guy hit the streets with 15 dice without the benefit of a specialization or smartlink. A run or two in he was rocking 19 dice when using a smartlinked T-250 Defiance (we didn't run unwired so no tacnet) and was contributing around a dozen or so dice worth of Counterspelling prowess when defending against Combat Spells by the time we quit. He was a mage that lived by "geek the mage." Ultimately we kinda decided that in general we liked lower powered games than that.

Full disclosure: I'm not really trying to blame this on Awakened or even karma advancement, per se. The Muscle Toner 4 was at least as responsible for his effectiveness as the Shielding/Mentor/Focus stack was and he had that at chargen.

I wouldn't say that around 12 dice for counterspelling is very high dice pool.
My 750 karma starting mys-ad has 19 dice for counterspelling, ofcource being third grade iniate with shielding and force 3 shielding focus plays a big part in that.
But he only gets really nasty when he can iniate once in play and pick-up absorption, raising the pool to 24 dice, thats 8 successes on avarage, meaning he eats force 8 or lower spell whole.

How do you get to that pool? You do know that for spell defense only the counterspelling skill is added, not MAG+Counterspelling?

Where exactly does it say that, counterspelling is after all linked to magic.
But if that's true then subract 4 from those pools.
Also there was supposed to be a mention in that post that those pools are for countering combatspells, but those are the ones you most often need protection from.

Breakdown:
Magic 4+ c ounterspelling 5 + shielding 3 + shielding foci 3 + spec 2 + mentor 2 = 19 dice
after one more iniation and bigging up absorption that becomes
Magic 4+ c ounterspelling 5 + shielding 4 + shielding foci 3 + spec 2 + mentor 2 + absorption 4 = 24 dice

Is it viable to make a character that is Incompetent in Spellcasting and Summoning but fantastic at Counterspelling and Banishing and utilizes mundane skills/gear/attributes for combat?

It probably is. The pile of Incompetence makes it pretty affordable. You could even make it a Mystic Adept to make sure you can't astrally project, and to cut PQ costs further.

IIRC, regular Banishing uses Magic, but Attacks of Will don't. Still, with Banishing those are a lot more effective. Counterspelling doesn't use Magic, you just need to be a Mage to be allowed to buy it. Invest in Willpower and Charisma.

I gotta say, I'd almost consider building this "Nullmage".

It's actually the kind of spellcaster I would like to play. I tend to have an aversion to spellcasting because of how convoluted all the systems are for casting spells (regardless of RPG). Then all the god damn record keeping with what spells you know or can know. Ugh.

SR4A page 185:

"When a protected character is targeted with a spell, she rolls Counterspelling dice in addition to the appropriate attribute (body or Willpower) for the resistance test."

They should really have stated clearly that the Magic attribute doesn't come into spell defence but I think it is clear enough by the absence of mentioning Magic rating at all. This is mirrored in the example, which also does not mention using Magic (and you'd really expect it to if it were the case).

It makes sense too – the counterspelling magician is not performing an action or rolling a test themselves and the notion of rolling two attributes and a skill for a resistance test should sit uncomfortably with any right-minded player/GM IMHO.

It's a shame they didn't explain counterspelling better in fluff-terms. As it stands it's not at all clear what the counterspeller actually does to protect his allies or how it works in sorcery terms.

Thanks Aerospider, that is exactly what I wanted to write.

Note in case of trying to disrupt a sustained spell, the mage indeed rolls MAG+Counterspelling. But Shielding, Shielding Foci and Absorption don't help.

There are too many magic skills to let you be incompetent in all of them with the 35BP cap.
And even if you only keep the least interesting ones, you can still be useful as a mage if played well.

Though maybe you can get something useless with an incompetent and aspected mage...

Okey, that's my mistake then, which is funny as my last example post on an possible spell resistance dicepool of an initiate level 10 mage(40+ if your interested) i did use the rules correctly
But one only needs a willpower of 4 for those pools to be correct for the full spell resistance pool

Mystic Adept (10BP)
Incompetent: Spellcasting, Ritual Spellcasting, Summoning, Binding, Enchanting (25BP) (You don't need to be incompetent at Astral Combat if you never buy the Astral Perception power. Or heck, you might actually want Astral Combat..)
Net gain: 15BP and Magic 1, and you're on your way to creating an interesting Anti-Mage.

Well, depending on what 'interesting' means. Presumably, you're not allowed to take Mystic Adept at all if you're not actually going to *be* a Mystic Adept.

Yeah, when I said "counterspelling prowess" I meant just his skill plus modifiers portion of the pool that he could apply to any counterspelling test and even lend to others. If you're talking about his own personal resistance pool the number would have been around a 15 or so because he had pretty standard human attributes other than his softcapped agility. That's not completely untouchable or anything, but it does take a pretty dang proficient magician to beat such pools when you factor in that background counts, cover and vision modifiers can hurt spellcasting while counterspelling isn't really affected by anything other than wound and disorientation penalties. And like I said, we didn't find things totally broken. We just thought that things were only going to get crazier the farther down the rabbit hole we went.

Yeah, if the player tried to take Mystic Adept and Incompetence in all the relevant traits just to get free BP, I'd slap him. But if the point is to make an Anti-Mage character, I'd be inclined to allow it.

Wow...

Okay then...

Three things:

1) A question: Would you specialize your counterspelling skill in combat spells? If someone were to specialize their counterspelling combat spells seems to be the way to go.

2) A correction: Absorption does not add an additional initiate grade number of dice to your counterspelling pool. People should correct me if I'm wrong, but as I'm reading the rules it seems that absorption reduces the force of a cast spell by the hits on the spell resistance test up to the force of the spell. Then the absorbed force is stored for initiate grade turns until it is either used up as drain reduction or dealt as damage if unused before the time limit. Any absorbed force greater than the magic of the absorber is immediately dealt as 1 physical damage.

So clearly absorption does nothing to the spell resistance dice pool, but could perhaps save some damage if the spell is not resisted and the reduction in force of the spell exceeds the potential damage done by the absorption process. On the other hand it is possible to take more damage trying to absorb a spell than just shield the spell.

3) For completeness: As has already been stated including magic in the counterspelling pool is incorrect.

Don't look at the Matrix rules, then. They're -much- worse about that than SR4A's (rather sane) spellcasting rules.

Yes, as those are the ones my character as a runner feel are most important to protect against.

Absorption tells you to do the usual spell resistance test and add initiate grade as a dicepool modifier, so it does add initiate grade in additional dice.