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Good day runners, I have been trying to keep up with this thread though I may have missed a few pages here and there due to a move in real life. I have found War a great read so far, yeah it has its problems as people have posted but those problems do not bother me. I plan to sit down with my fellow runner from our group and design a campaign that we will joint run over the next year bridging that area and Seattle. Having been born, and lived some years from Bogota, he will really be able to flesh out the city and give it the feel needed to separate it from Seattle and other runner havens.

I have some rule questions, first has it been stated what skill the Battle rifles use? Has there been any update on the field dressing’s price and availability.

Thanks for your time responding to these questions, I enjoy making something of a product that creates such a negative vibe. Take care runners and enjoy the holidays.

It might still be able to do damage, but it wouldn't hit anything. Once it hits the area of effect, it gets slowed down and gravity pulls it into a nosedive so it hits the ground.

Loaded with belt fed salt rock no doubt ...

Still haven't picked up War myself. Besides all of the high end gear, I don't suppose there's a gear listing for spec ops groups or even run of the mill soldiers? There's the stats in SR4 of course, but there's a lot more they could do with that.

There are stats for multiple different type of soldiers, but stupidly the writer of that section apparently didn't have access to books gear section, so none of them are equipped with battle rifles or any other of the new weapons.

Hey, I remember reading something about a community "What WAR! should have been" project. Is that a thing?

check the "community projects" section...

alt.WAR! ist at.WAR! with and adds.WAR! to WAR!

RedBrick (Earthdawn, Fading Suns, Equinox) does the same: a forum for communication, project management, and uploading of documents. Works pretty fine. Imo it's extremely important for writers to get feedback on their work by other writers and the Line Developer, so I'm a bit surprised by Aaron saying that he does submit his draft and never gets any feedback on it (or did I understand that wrong?).

As for the 'god kills a kitten' thing - Shröedinger didn't manage to do that with quantum physics. Cat's are pretty much Immune to Physics, and Immune to Internet.

How about catgirls?

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/3084/savecatgirlsdo7.gif

If that would be the case, they would actually have been useful to GMs, since those will probalby want to ban War! flat out from the table.

But unfortunately, no – those NPC are partially equipped with teh UberGear. Meaning you need to check & change all of them.

Unfortunately there you are a little bit wrong, I think.

Barrier-Spells need a lot of successes to stop bullets and with that comes a high force and a high drain. Your slow spell need force 1 to effectively stop a MBT main cannon round from pulverizing the target assuming the player use the next combat action to simply make a step to the side and let the round pass. Perhaps I am blind but I found no armor or barrier spell in the SR4A or in the SM that comes even close to the effectiveness of the slow spell.

Please compare:
Armor (Physical)
Type: P • Range: LOS • Duration: S • DV: (F ÷ 2) + 3
This spell creates a glowing field of magical energy around the subject that
protects against Physical damage. It provides both Ballistic and Impact
armor (cumulative with worn armor) to the subject equal to the hits scored.

Physical Barrier (Environmental, Area)
Type: P • Range: LOS (A) • Duration: S • DV: (F ÷ 2) + 3
Barrier spells create glowing, translucent force-fields with both 1 point
of Armor and Structure rating per hit (see Barriers, p. 194).

If I have missed the "various barrier spell which are really good at it" you have mentioned above, please tell me where I can find them.

SYL

Slow, as is, also destroys any kind of flying vehicle that isn't an ornithopter (though it WILL destroy their engines) or magic to propel itself.

Only if your a GM who for some reason doesn't like the nice new toys in WAR, i personally think their pretty good and a nice additions to the game.

For the reason any of those toys are either unnecessary duplicates of existing toys (things like the safe fire smartlink), plain UberGear that break the scale assumed by the whole system (Response 10 for everyone) or simply are irrelevant from a rules perspective (nukes and thor shots).

The implants and magic stuff is even worse.

i guess a better way for the slow spell to have been worded could have been to give it x meters a second pr hit, or something like that...

Pardon me, but what exactly is so crazy about Mass Levitate?

It only allows you to levitate the targets that are within the area when cast – everything afterwards would not have to be affected. So it would work as the parachuting spell intended, but not stop bullets.

Thanks for the answer.

What if I cast slow on someone wielding a whip? The whip's tip moves at approximating bullet speed. oes the Whip fall down? tear in half because part of it brutally stops and part really wants to move on? Does that go for swords too, whose tips can be awfully fast? what about generators, that have moving partts, does Slow destroy them due to the brutal stop it enforces with one hit? And where is the line drawn between "fast" and "too slow for slow to be effective"? Does Slow affect blood flow? Can slow shut down gyro mounts (spinning parts) and shatter any weapon using one?

Of course, since you want to bring physics in, let's talk about mass:

You said

Now, mass is usualy equivalent to weight in everyday language. Your usage of the kilogram as a unit certainly affirms this is meant. However (and this may be the venure I will go with fixing this spell) in physics, mass refers to something related, yet different: inertial mass, a concept derived from Newton's second law. Here, an object's mass m is determined by a forece F applied to it and it'a acceleration a.



Your spell now decelerates any object to a certain speed: 1 m/s. It does so abruptly. Let's look at the forces at work here:

Say, a bullet with a mass of 10 g moves at 800 m/s and is affected by the Slow spell. Now, if the spell would slow down the bullet instantly, we'd have a force of infinite power working here, which would break the universe. So let's say the bullet has one combat turn to slow - 3 seconds. Then, we'd be talking about a deceleration of 799 m/s² at work, making for an applicable Force of 2663,[period 3] N (Newton) at work. We get even more force necessary to stop an airdropped soldier.

Now, if we rule that there really wasn't meant to be kg, but N there, then we'd have a spell where stopping bullets will not work any more with just one hit. It'd still work for a soldier being airdropped if we allow it to be played as a sustained spell and an extended test over seveal combat turns (including several instances of drain), which represents using the spell to decelerate more slowly to a minimum of 1 m/s. That way, it is still applicable for what it was supposed to do, but not an instant win to be played against anything that flies, is a kinetic vessel (think about what this spell will do against Rods from God) or has moving parts. Oh, and it won't work well to slow down things that move too fast because it will simply take too long, so no more bullet stop, no more plane crash, and no more blowing up engines with it.

Of course, that fix opens up a whole other can of worms: weight of equipment. Didn't Shadowrun 4 back in the day ditch that for simplicity? But that's a story for another day.

To be honest: I think that is covered in the "its magic" part: it does not break the world.

SYL

With the same logic, impenetrable barrier spells could be justified, that are impenetrable with only one net hit.

Key point is that inertial mass is not the same as mass. I take your point, but I doubt very much if the book writers were thinking about inertia, otherwise we would be getting angular momentum equations in as well, which isn't to anyone's benefit.

The reason for the mass limit is simply to say that it only works on a certain mass, and if you were feeling fancy you could say "rest mass" to define it even better.

Could be - but then again I am comparing them to other barrier spells where the author claimed that they are very effective against bullets too.

SYL

Not saying you need physics for spells, but Aaron brought that up, so I wanted to give it a go. On a side note, the Slow spell as is is next to useless for parachutsts, unless they're parachuiting Gnome fireteams, becaue the limiting factor is the accumulated weight - and you get to a lot of weight with a fire team real fast. In effect, it is an i-win card tio be played against all kinetic attacks and all kinds of flying vehicles, or vehicles that have engines (technically, even servos in cyberlimbs have moving parts and could be destroyed or immobilised by this spell). That's what it's good for. Not mass levitate.

It is a bit weird, I'll grant you that. Barrier spells create barriers, which use the barrier rules. One of those rules is that barriers act like hardened armor: if the DV doesn't exceed the Armor rating of the barrier spell, it just doesn't penetrate.

Now, this is only good against some of the things that slow is also good against. Slow won't really help against, say, a collapsing wall, just make it more agonizing. But if we are limiting our discussion to, say, a shotgun blast, then yeah, slow is better.

Can you, with magic, target individual pieces of a cyberlimb? I always thought it was a magical axiom that anything Essence-paid was an inseparable part of that person, magically-speaking. I mean, it'd be pretty crazy to allow insta-kills on vehicles too, but at least they get OR.

They do not get OR, because Slow ignores that.

Basically, warfare in a theater where mages proficient with slow are present is back to shortswords, clubs and man vs. man, because neither kinetic projectiles nor vehicles or any machinery with moving parts is valid anymore. air travel has severe limits because slow can crash any kind of plane, too. also, thur shots are next to nonsensicval with slow because the impact vehicle will only poke the impact zone with 1m/s. Very scary.

And to repeat what was ignored above: Slow doesn't even work for it'S intended purpose, slowing down falling parachute-less parachutists.

Ooh, does it cause Dune!? Shields and swords, woot.

Er ... Aaron didn't bring up the need for physics, just that he checks his math when it comes to physics. I believe it's been established that magic is allowed to change the laws of physics in limited places for limited times. So, saying something like:


Is quite insightful, I think.

Here's some un-asked-for advice. If you're okay with the thought of a mass levitate spell, but not with a slow spell, change it to "Mass Levitate" and add one to the Drain Value. If you're okay with the slow spell but can't get your GM and/or players to jive with the physics, tell them that the spell pushes against any object that enters the area of effect. If they're worried about the amount of time that happens (as hermit's quote above), you might want to ask if they're okay with other instantaneous spells that act with force, such as levitate, fireball, or clout, and then offer an olive branch where such effects are not instantaneous, but happen fast enough where the impulse is less than infinity.

Let me pose a counter-question: what if magic in Shadowrun could change the relationships between forces, matter, and energy (the mathematical formulas of physics)? What if it could cause light to bend, or objects to move, or mute waves through the air or the electromagnetic medium, or turn a living being into glop and then change it back without killing it?

Yippie ya yeh. Because being Dune is what Shadowrun really is all about.


That could all be explained with new forces at work. Slow, however, requires more energy to work even once than present in the entire universe, all metaplanes and manaspheres included. That's a slight difference.


That was very helpful and adressed none of the problems a number of people have with the Slow spell.

So why does Slow not cause SR warfare to become Dune warfare? Would you mind explaining?

I would agree with that if magicians made up more than an infinitesimal percentage of the population, and powerful magicians a small percentage of those. In an ED world where everyone is a magician, it wouldn't matter what slow spells were out there, because everybody would just powerbolt the bitch.

If you're concerned that players on a loud and chaotic battlefield might encounter a single enemy who is more powerful than the others that takes a different tactic to defeat, then I got nothing. I'm okay with that scenario; makes for a better story. If it's realism you want, then I'd argue that most military outfits wouldn't put their magicians on the front lines.

Ah, you surely mean that:


The base damage of an assault rifle is 6 -1, added are the successes of the shooter and the ammunition if applicable.

Good luck getting *at least* 6 successes for a rating 6 barrier which means at least a force 6 spell which means at least 6DV drain which means that the mage should have something around 18 dices in his dice pool both for success roll and drain roll.

Aaron, I don´t know how much experience you have with the SR rules. But please: barrier spells simply *suck* when it comes to stopping bullets. They are only acceptable because they can be used to increase worn armor (and in that case the personal armor does not become hardened). Otherwise they depend on hits rolled to get the shild up, something the slow spell simply ignores because it has 100% effectiveness starting with force 1

The slow spell creates a force field which slows down every bullet/round regardless if its an 1DV or a 25DV attack (the latter would just vaporize almost any barrier conjured by a human sorcerer) even at force 1. It stops tank rounds, artillery rounds, miniguns could fire for seconds at this force 1 spell at 10k rounds per minute and only rounds fired by WW2 main battleships would surpass the 200kg limit for force 1 spell.

Please explain again how a simple force 1-3 slow spell is not a magnitude more powerful then a barrier/armor force 6, especially concerning drain, number of neccessary successes and stopping power against high DV attacks (like, say, high powered rifles and other WAR!-weapons).

SYL

Are you okay with other instantaneous spells that act with force, such as levitate, fireball, or clout?

Let me offer an olive branch and suggest that all such effects are not instantaneous in the physicsy sense of the word, but happen fast enough where the impulse is less than infinity but it might as well be instantaneous for game purposes. You know, kinda like the time my physics teacher in high school stated (quite rightly) that one meter was a close approximation of infinity for the purposes of studying optics.

*shrug* It's not the first SR4 rule, or even spell, with well-intentioned effects (… and accidentally broken results). Change the mass requirement to a kinetic energy requirement, or momentum if you prefer.

I'm not familiar with the energy contents of all metaplanes and manaspheres… which book?

The kind of powerful magicans who can cast a spell at force 1?

Also, 3% of the total population isn't infinitesimal. Even in a highly militarised society such as North Korea, only 10% of the total population serve in the army. Draft half your total population of awakened (all who are mages) and you well have enough to completly make all kinds of technology more modern than clubs useless.

This is not about one powerful foe. It is about an area effect spell that destroys all kinds of technology. You could put it in a spell lock and place it somewhere and you have a no-tech zone. You could anchor it somewhere and create a permanent no-tech zone. Then, the only force of note would be magicans.

Would a world where the main weapons are magic and clubs still be Shadowrun? Would it make for a better story of magic meets machine?


That's the assumption for my draft of an errata to Slow.

I still wonder, did you ever playtest that rule? The abuse potential is mind boggling.

Now that I think about it, that was back when I was co-coordinator of SRM. So, never mind. =i)

Damn, if I'm Amazonia this sounds awesome.
Not to mention, I sneak into a major industrial complex, I activate said spell, put it on a sustaining focus, and bury said sustaining focus.

Awesome terrorism.

You can't risk letting mages on Airplanes anymore.

Hehe, could you ever let a mage on an airplane? They might bring nail clippers.

Oh well true, really letting a mage on a plane would be crazy.

Btw, the slow spell makes my 1 spell casting 5 adept Mystic Adept knife fighter, awesome.

"I'm sorry, Sir, but you have to turn over all weapons before boarding."

"I don't have any weapons. In fact, I'm in FLIP FLOPS AND A SPEEDO! Everyone here can see I'm not carrying any weapons, and I think I traumatized that child back there."

"I understand that, Sir, but our Watcher Spirits have been able to determine that you have magical abilities, and those are considered weapons under the new travel laws. Now, leave your weapons behind, or leave the line."

"The magic ability... IS MY BRAIN!"

"Sir, do not yell. And I don't make the rules. If you have an issue with this, take it up with your local politician. However, as you are unable to leave your weapons behind, you cannot fly on this flight. Please get out of line. And please, for that child's sake, GET SOME PANTS ON!"

Oh, it slows them really well. Sure, being slowed down from 200km/h to 196,4km/h might have some side effects, the spell description does not claim otherwise

Touché, but I think that's tio be handwaived as "it's MAGIC".

Besides, unless you airdrop only a five man team, you will have a hard time with the weight ratio.

CanRay, that is total bullshit. You know perfectly well that Watchers can't determine anything.

Google Docs rocks. I've found Gladinet to be a good addition for editing PDFs stored in Google Docs.

Some additional questions regarding the Slow Spell

How large is the area of affect? Sphere big enough for the Mage or can it be created to encompass a much larger area?
Does it affect the velocities of biological functions within the area of affect? I.E. velocity of air moving into and out of the lungs? (which can exceed 1m/s), nerve impulses?
Does it slow all velocities entering the aoe to 1m/s? Light, sound, radio waves and etc?

As with all area effects: (force) meter radius, so force 1 = 2m diameter etc.



Despite the game balance problems and the generel very poor design: the spell was not designed as a killer spell, so no, you shoud be able to breath normally in it. Think of it as a spell which "only" reduces your movement score to 1m/s. Its not a time warp spell.



Same here. It that case you must be so generous and see the spell something like Neo pulled of in Matrix 2 where all bullets stopped right before him. It is not intended to be a dark shere / communication blockout sphere etc.

SYL

I agree. It's just poor design and poorer writing that might benefit from some clarification and a bit of a reversal in effectiveness - less Bullet Barrier and more a cushion for no-parachute airdrops.

It might even help to up the TN with the target's speed, and this spell as-is is balanced with a single additional sentence.

If there is one thing I like about the fact that they did put a price tag on a thor shot is that now you can actually calculate how many successes you need on the favor table to ask a contact for one (granted said contact has the means to ask for a thor shot).

Technically no, but any sensible GM would houserule like that.