Tonight my group had one of those "we must be missing something" moments. One of our magicians wanted to summon a watcher and have it track a quickened spell back to its owner. Watchers as described in the book "excel at astral tracking because of their one power: Search." The problem is that Search requires a Magic + Intuition roll, which for a watcher are both 1. So, unless there's some bonus that we're missing, the spirits that are supposed to be the trackers of the astral world only roll 2 dice for their Search power. Is this right?

Also Watchers (with RAW), cannot survive ANYTHING. a Background count/ebb of one pops them just like that.

I just made it like in SR3: Watchers in my game are summoned at half the summoners magic without any extra drain or anything. (Which means force 2-3 watchers for most people.)

AND to make them viable (against normal spirits) i have them have the needed specialization in using their ONLY power.

So a watcher in my game (if summoned by a magic 6 summoner) rolls 8 dice with searching.

As per RAW... there seemed to be some overlookings while designed their rules.

Yes, it looks like a big oops. House rule it; Summerstorm's sounds nice and simple.

Or get multiple (IE: 2) watchers to Teamwork Test it and hope to get a whopping 3 dice instead of 2. The crit glitch chance on that is retar-diculous.

Oh, the GM already houseruled it because it was so absurd: watchers in our game are considered to have Intuition 4 for the purposes of their Search power. I just wanted to know if we were looking at a real disconnect between what watchers are supposed to be able to do and what they can actually do, or if we were just missing something. I may submit Summerstorm's rule to the GM to see if he likes that any better.

Forget Search, they can't even *watch* unless the targets are 'obvious'.

Since a watcher is supposed to be an extension of the mage, it makes sense to base the watcher stats and relevant skills off those of the mage. That way, the mage can't use them to compensate for a personal deficiency (garbage assensing DP) and they're not RAW dumb.

I just noticed something. Where does specialization come in? Search is Magic + Intuition, there's no skill there.

We give them +2 Dice for Search and Perception .Thats 4 Dice total
Kinda Specialisation of "Watching"

with a watchfull Dance
Medicineman

I guess that's why attuned watchers were invented in DG.

Yeah, instead of fixing the broken rules with errata, make up additional ones. Like for cyberlimbs.

Kind of reminds you of duct tape repairs…

Search is very much a Perception type activity. If Perception modifiers such as "actively looking" were applied, the situtation described above would not be so silly.

Indeed... But then, many people do not apply such modifiers to their tasks...
*Shrug*

*If* that's what the Search power is, of course. But normal modifiers aside, the point is that watchers suck at their reason for existing.

Just to add to the stupidity, keep in mind that the Optional rule of degrading dice pools for Extended tests is not, in fact, listed as optional in the SR4A changes document. And that using Search is an Extended test with a minimum Threshold of 5.

If you do that then you definitely can't use the Cadavre dolls for posession traditions rule in SM...

Unless you want passably strong zombie hordes at no cost except dead bodies...

What's so bad about hordes of singing zombies?

Sure i can... i MUST... or ALL watchers are unusable. And even IF you happen to live in a natural, nice area with no background count whatsoever, a summoned spirit would do the job better at lower drain.... sounds wrong, is wrong.

And come on, force 3 corps cadavre still can't do anything but paint moderatly well and is aware of its surrounding.

No one will spam those as living shields... even a dead body is too good for that... you have guardian possession spirits for that.

Why not ? Those (Charisma) watchers don't count against your summoned spirit limit so you can have them in addition to guardian-possessed corpses.

Meat shields for the meat shields, if you will.

We used Watchers to carry stuff until we found out they don't have Materialization. Now they're used as one-shot astral meat shields and speedbumps*. Also, to watch for people who aren't concealed. And IIRC, a mage feels it if one of his spirits is banished or disrupted, so they have some use as sentries. But they're probably best as messengers if comms are being jammed (which happens to us a lot).

* Black Magic tradition mage

Years ago a player came up with the term "Face mob" for one use for watchers. Four or five watchers whose job it was to mob an opponent. In astral combat they applied the friends-in-combat modifier, but the name came from their use as manifested spirits blocking the view of an opponent. Five opaque, screaming, astral-fast entities staying right in front of the opponent's face usually got him some kind of negative modifier.

Hmm, that actually sounds pretty workable.. and when they're just manifesting, they can't really get hurt either. Niiice.

/agree. You can't even use them as Essence Drain Skittles.

Changes Document aside, the SR4A book describes it as an option (That is the meaning of "May" after all)...

It's called the "Watcher Attack Pack", and it was used back in the days of SR2-3. A hermetic mage with maximum elementals and maximum watchers, along with the Friends in Melee modifier, was a walking astral nightmare. You could take down dragons with this tactic.

Well, TN increases were always MUCH worse than a bit of a dice pool modifier. If you could drive people up to TN 10+ for defence, then suddenly even a meagre four dice attack pool in astral combat is pretty good.

Yeah, watchers are broken by RAW. Since the fluff says they're an extension of the summoners mind, its tempting to grant them perception dice equal to the summoners perception dice.