Visibility modifiers do not break LOS, they just modify the spellcasting pool when casting through an area with poor visibility.

Now THAT is pretty gay. I'm starting to understand people's dislike of WAR!. It can only be countered with WAR!. i.e. lasers vs. slow vs. THOR.

There are lasers in Arsenal, so not just War!

Oh, and while we're on spells, let's discuss Designate, which is the universal code cracker the spell

Well, RAW-wise, but I like the way he's thinking. Might be even more effective than FAB if your GM allows it.

@longbowrocks
I am not saying that this in particular is bad. For my taste it is hilerious.
GM:Thorshot, everyone is dead!
P1: Wait a second I...
Great situation.

@Fatum

I do not get it, sorry.

Could you please show me where it says this. I just went through the entire book and could not find this. While I understand using the modifiers to get off a quick spell, because no concealment is perfect, your vision would be completely obscured often enough to disrupt a sustained spell, at least in my opinion based on my personal experiences with smoke grenades. A page number would be helpful, I would like to know if I am handling something incorrectly. Thanks.

Ditto.

There is no reason smoke would not provide concealment. FAB exists to not only provide concealment, but it acts as low level cover being solid in astral unlike the walls of building.

Speaking as a GM they sure as hell do. What fun is it if the GM's encounters are either too weak to offer a challenge or too hard to survive*?


*Yes I'm including running away as an option on the survival front.

As the author stated, it can be used to fool the target designation systems everywhere on the battlefield. So, when there are shells or missiles in the air that are being directed by active target designation, casting the spell redirects all those at the spell's target instead.
Minding that target designators use coded sequences, obviously that means that the spell is capable of cracking all of their codes at once.

Sure.


Runners choose the targets, GM makes the opposition realistic. If your runners want to assassinate the president of the UCAS, you are under no obligation to make the encounter "level-appropriate". If they want to steal candy from kids, the same line of reasoning applies.

I am sorry the quoted portion doe snot say that it cannot disrupt LOS. It simply says that when initially casting a spell to use Visibility modifiers to the dice pool.

Having read this thread, I'm forced to consider that WAR! isn't particularly bad, but at this point the constant lack of game balance, the inconsistencies, and the backlog of rules that people still can't come to a clear consensus on mean that any book is just going to cause all that pent up frustration to burst.

The system itself has been broken since the main rulebook. The rigger and hacker don't actually need any stats. The cost to buying skills via BP and buying them via Karma is completely off. The cost for an extra die in any particular skill or action through ware/tools/whatever appears to be completely random, as is the availability of that extra die.

This isn't a problem as long as the system itself is simple. People can work with a limited broken system. However, with every additional complexity, the brokenness of the system makes it more frustrating. A limited broken system is playable. An unlimited broken system is frustrating.

What Shadowrun is becoming is an unlimited broken system with broken attempts to fix broken sections. (SR4A software vs. unwired software leaps to mind). The issue with WAR! isn't that the book is badly named. The issue is that Shadowrun has no foundation to support all of these things each new rulebook brings. It's a great world, and a great game, but the core rules are horribly broken and can't support the complexity being added. War! is just taking the blame for it.

Runners get offered jobs by Johnson's most of the time. If the team decides to do something stupid on their own that's their problem (and running or surrendering is usually still an option unless they fuck up horribly). But in the normal course of play only a total dick of a GM would have Mr. J offer the team a job they stand no chance of surviving. (A job Mr. J thinks they have no chance of surviving if he's screwing them over, but unlike Mr. J the GM should give the team a fair, if difficult, chance of survival.)

If you can cast a spell through an area with Visibility modifiers (as per the rules in the quote), that means that Visibility modifiers do not break LOS.


There are numerous examples of the contrary. For example, The Way of the Adept adds some solid crunch without ruining anything. Actually, even most of War! is salvageable if you use a lot of houserules and run with RAI.
So it's not a problem with the system (although there is one, there's no arguing that), it's a problem with the particular book.


Of course, the Johnsons should mostly offer beatable runs, and if not, the runners should get a chance to learn they're being set up.
That does not in any way mean that the runners should be unable to paint themselves into a corner, or that they must have a chance to get out of any encounter at all alive.

I argue that it does not. Visibility modifiers are used when something is obscured. It is difficult to see, the fact that you successfully perceive something long enough to cast a spell or shoot it is what the Visibility modifiers and the quoted text, along with every other reference to Visibility modifiers in the book imply. The fact that you have a chance of getting the spell off does not insure that the spell will continue. Maintaining LOS requires a constant ability to perceive the targeted area if it is disrupted even for a moment LOS is lost. At least that is how I run it, and will continue to run until I see it presented as you stated. As it stands nothing in the quoted material suggests to me that LOS is guaranteed after the initial casting.

What are you talking about? 'After the initial casting?'

You can't cast unless you have LOS.
You can cast through areas with Visibility modifiers.
Thus, you have LOS through areas with Visibility modifiers.
Nothing in the rules says otherwise.

You cast a spell and choose to sustain it. While sustaining it your LOS is lost. You don't continue to affect targets you no longer see. Visibility as a modifier to spellcasting (the initial roll, the only roll), does not reflect your vision being obscured after it is cast. If you lose LOS on a target you no longer affect that target and in the case of Slow the area is the target. If you are in the middle of a smoke cloud you have likely lost LOS with the target.

Yes they should be able to paint themselves into a corner (through player/character stupidity not through the GM intentionally setting up something unsurvivable) but they need to have a chance to get out of any encounter alive (not always a good chance, and only if they play their cards right) or it's game over, rocks fall everyone dies, and that is no fun for either the players or the GM.

Also you'll note I didn't say all the runs had to be beatable, only survivable.

I thought the premise was that you're standing still, so you have touch.

You don't lose LOS of yourself ever, however my understanding was that the spell was being cast in such a way as to protect the caster without affecting him, hence it would no longer be a case of Touch maintaining LOS but sight which is the case with most ranged or AOE spells.

Ah. No clue. Several people mentioned that the mage couldn't move, so I'd call that affecting him. As always, it's a weird spell that makes no sense, so that doesn't help.

@Fatum

Well, you would need to know the frequenz. Nothing you could not do with a normal target designator too.


Similar problems have been around with the other books too. See emotoys etc.
@suoq
Well, partly. The problem is, in my opinion, not the core book.
The additional books focused on giving new possibilities and new gear instead of new rules.

It is simply not possible to play with basic rules on throw additional dicepool boni with every new book. (See pornomancer)

Again, a GM's job is making the world react realistically and reasonably to the runners' actions. That has little to do with "setting up level-appropriate encounters", not any more than admitting the Johnson's willingness to see them succeed, and giving them fitting missions.
And there's a bunch of cases where the chances to survive are slim enough to be discarded; again that has nothing to do with GM ill will. That's just how things work - you don't expect to try, say, killing Lofwyr and stay alive and well.


Target designators do not use a simple non-modulated signal to mark the target. It is, in fact, coded. Saying that you can emulate any target designator on the field means you can crack any of those codes, instantly.

Just the fact that you run into problems from time to time doesn't mean you can't avoid them at all.
Yeah, Arsenal, Street Magic and Unwired all had weird rulings and more or less broken pieces, but nowhere as catastrophic as War!

You still need to know the modulation. So I do not see a problem. Sorry. It does not say you know every modulation used by everyone on the battlefield.
So I still do not see the problem, but it is late.


The only catastrophic thing I have seen so far is the slow spell. And this spell ain't worse than the aspect mana static of the german streetmagic.
(Or the movementpower from the core book etc.)

There is no aspected Mana Static
neither in the German Streetmagic nor in the Basic Book !
....(might be in the old Fanpro Book....I'm not shure about that.)

with an aspected Dance
Medicineman

Okay, suppose my designator modulates the sinusoid with 101010101 signal, my squad mate's - with 110110110, and the guy's on the other side - with 100100100. Each of those is used to designate a target for its own missile, and neither we nor the guy on the other side know each other's modulating signals. Now, a mage casts a spell, and all those three missiles go off course and hit the target he designated.

New assault rifles? Unusable. Battlerifles? Leave you full of wtf (as seen above in this thread). High-power chambering? Stats which make no sense, and dubious fluff. Redundant Process Manufacturing? Dubious from the fluff perspective. Monofilament Grenades? Plain out retarded. CI Dragon Box Mine? Best friend of hungry peasants in combat zones, everywhere. Howitzer rounds, vehicle stats, MRSI, cruise missiles, spells - all of those are poorly thought through, poorly edited, or poorly coordinated with what the system already has. That makes the entirety of the book a catastrophe, pretty much nothing from the Game Information chapter being usable as is. Even CGL admits War! was its low point.

It would IF there was a consistency to the cost of an additional die, but there really isn't.

4 additional dice worth of agility (a valuable stat in my opinion) costs a grand total of 11.4 BP and .4 essence. (Muscle Toner 4 = 6.4 BP of cash, 5 BP of restricted gear, and .8 bio essence, which, in my experience, is almost always the essence that halved in cost).
One can pick up an addition 4 dice in shooting by simply having a smartlink, a smartlinked gun, 3 other sensors, and having anyone in the team with a level 2 tacnet.

There is almost no reason someone expected to shoot a gun every mission shouldn't have those 8 dice. They're certainly a LOT more affordable than buying the 1 die you get by hard capping your agility, a purchase so unaffordable I've never been able to justify it.

The tools make things like the pornomancer possible not just because they add the number of ways you can get additional die, but because they invariably make some of those tools incredibly cheap due to the random nature of pricing. It's that inherent inconstant value of the price of a die that makes every rulebook lead to Pronomancers.

Edit: Note that the last two points of the muscle toner is the VAST majority of the cost of the muscle toner, roughly 8 BP, but 2 points of agility for 8 BP beats the heck out of 2 points of agility for 20 BP...

This is all correct, but the thing is, Shadowrun is not aiming to be a gamist system. The prices are dictated by the items' fluff, not the other way round; and the fluff is firmly based on classic cyberpunk novels.
So you can only speak about balance either on closely comparable things - like, items giving boni to the same stat; or outrageous broken cheese like Slow.

@Fatum

Why? Seriously I do not get it. (I might sound stupid to you now, but I can't help it)
I thought the mage has also to pick one, like 100101101.


Have, overlooked that. Now I am crying.


Well, but thats an issue with the hole object resistance crap. (Started with improved invisibility)

Whats about them? I found the stats for humanoid drones in Arsenal worse.

Do not get it... (You mean they steal it?)

But right you got point..

When everything is broken, deciding what's outrageous broken is like deciding what everyone's favorite color is. When you accept a point of agility costing anywhere from under 2 BP to 25 BP, stuff like Slow is just more of the same.

Because that's how the author said that spell works.

Ballast tanks galore! Armor(smart)! Woo-woo!

Yes. Wear no metal@Get four drones costing in the thousands, iirc.


It's not that broken. Choosing to raise Agi to 6 is suboptimal, right, but it's partly balanced out by the augmented stat max rules, the maximal cost of items you get at chargen, and the Essence costs.
That's a non-issue, though, since who raises physical stats and not Magic to 6 at chargen anyway.

Seems to make sense to me: more processed = less natural = higher OR.

They aren't that weak. I might even buy one as a collectors item someday.

How much more processed can a vehicle get?

It's not that they're weak. For one thing, they contain more monowire than they cost.

Like, a couple magnitudes more.

Overall, War seems to fail from a presentation standpoint (no maps, atrocious proofreading), a fluff standpoint (lack of even basic research, things that make no logical sense, and tasteless crap like killing Holocaust victim ghosts to get nazi artifacts), and a crunch standpoint (very little new stuff, but apparently most of it is inconsistent with previous rules, overpowered, or both). From everything I've heard, it's definitely a book I'm going to skip.

Give it a few extra acid baths post production for the post-industrial shine.
That, and you could decide the leather seats are too natural, instead going for discarded silicon wafers.

Oh, that again? Isn't the same true for laes cigarettes?

I seem to remember someone saying you could get better prices for monowire if you just scavenged it from a whip, but that doesn't add up. Maybe they meant microwire, which is for grappling guns, but does the same thing without the AP (cost: 1/20 normal monowire).

As far as I understand with Aspected mana static, it was completely brokenly overpowered and removed before publishing.
.... just someone forgot to remove it from a table in the back of a book, I think.

@Udoshi
Friend of mine has a german hard copy with this spell in it.

@Fatum

Can't see that, sorry.

@Yerameyahu

And they should be weak and very bad against armor.
The only way this thing is going to hurt anybody asside from the explosion is, that the person would be covered in monowire. So if he or she moves....
That would have been reasonable and it would have been a interesting weapon this way.
@Glyph

I disagree. It is crap in any possible way. Not just taste.
But I guess thats the fascination of fiction writers with nazis...

Apparently you didn't read all of my posts or you need to look up the word "invincible" in a dictionary. That mage is now dead, despite having been protected by Slow.

Yes. As a matter of fact, because you choose to ignore the rules. A character with slow can't be run over because the car would crash in the slow field.

The presence of the moving car destroys the Slow, as per the rules of the Slow spell. Seriously, dude. What rules are being ignored and why does a trash truck crash because it bumped into a spell that it instantly annihilated? Page references would be great.

@James McMurray
Simple. First the engine block(or to be precise the front of it) enters the field and his movement is slowed. The rest of the car is slowed because of the reaction force. Since the car is outside the field the kinetic energie is not absorbed. Instead it is transformed in heat and transformation energie ripping the car appart.
(Like you see it in car accident going 50 mph against a wall.)
The spell fizzels the moment most of the car has entered the area (or most of the car). But at this point the car has lost most of its kinetic energy.
So the truck would probably come to a hold in front of the mage (or to be precise whats left of the truck). (If the area has a radius of 3 m or something like that)
Then the spell would have been deactivated, and the mage could have a non slow motion spit at the remains and walk away.

The spell is broken, because it is slowing everything to a said speed. No matter what forces are behind it. No matter how fast it went before.
This is the problem. You can shoot planes down with it, crash cars, protect you from bullets, restrain people and it is one of the best rescue yourself spells (if fall of a plane, I want to jump out of a car) etc. etc.

Oh, lord. Stop trying to wedge physics into this, it's always a bad idea.

That's cause it was in his forum(?) post, where someone suggested using the spell for that, and the author not only agreed enthusiastically, but said he'd award a player for such inventiveness.

Zeno, go away.

@Fatum

Well, yes you could use a Zeno paradox on my example, but you really do not want to to this in intergral form, do you?

Are we going on the assumption that the author knows how the spell should work?

from what I read here his RAI was something completely different than his RAW

with 2 different Dances
Medicineman

One thing no one mentioned.
1- See the group of trolls running towards you after you cast slow. Cast slow on them. Now they won't be able to reach you this turn, no matter how many IP's they have. Assuming you are a magician with at least 2 IP's, cast something to disable them.
2- Next turn, they are moving out of the slow spell area. Cast another one. Cast something else to disable them.
3- If they are still going after you, go back to '2', else stop.

Now, if for some reason you don't have 2 IP's, just split your dice pool and cast slow AND something else.

Slow is broken, there is no argument for it. Because in the end, you must use physics to deal with it and it will give a headache, because yes, sending a truck over the magician could solve it, but the truck isn't a point in space worth of 1ton of mass. It has length, and the mass is distributed all over.