During our last session a rigger placed 2 rotordrones into my mages flat and started shooting at me. I didn´t have an energybolt and i thought i would toast myself with an fireball. So i have chosen to flee and jump right through a window...but is it really that way? I have a LOT of spells, but none of them seemed to fit to this situation. Imp. Invis. didn´t work because they had a sensor package including radar, levitation caused no real effect and if these spells don´t work...please what is left for a mage? Is there no real way to f**ck these buggers?

firebolt, lightning bolt, fireball.
Indirect Spells are your only choice.
Invisibility would work, if you could beat the OR on the drone.

Fireball. Use some hits to alter its radius (downward).



Invisibility, being a mental spell, has no effect on drones.

One of the Illusion spells can fool sensors. Chaos can jam sensors (the raspberry). Silence will dampen sonar. Analyze Device can, potentially, give you bonus dice for returning fire one way or another.

Trid Phantasm affects visual and audio, which would fool ultrasound sensors. I would think being a complete illusion, it could fool Radar too, but that is up to your game master.

You could make one drone see the other drone as YOU. Takes care of half your problem, assuming the drone isnt going to torch your apartment for good measure.

Eh physical barrier. Let them make the crashtest / ramming damage thing. Note that the barriers ARE pretty easy to ram through, but still... depending on how fast the damn thing is: BOOM.

EDIT: ah, and if you can't crack their OR... maybe you could crack the OR of something else in the vicinity and use it against them? For example levitating a heavy old cast iron stove into them?

*Improved* Invisibility absolutely affects machines. That's why it exists.

Yes it does affect machines, but it does jack shit against radar

radar is a sensor
improved invisibility works against sensors.

The sensor rules are pretty fucked up.
And radars are too big to fit in most drones.
A Small drone could have a radar, and nothing else (not even a camera)
A medium Drone could have a radar and 1 camera.
You need at least a Large drone to fit a radar, and other useful sensors.

You're not targeting without minuses with just radar. I also would probably only allow wide bursts, or suppression fire with radar only targeting.

That's true, Mäx, but not really what I was addressing. I didn't want anyone confused by the statement that 'invisibility doesn't affect machines'; it's a sneaky little technicality that could certainly mislead.

Try the "Wreck (Drones)" spell. It has only F/2 drain and may be overcast if required.

It has to be overcast for most people.

You need 7 hits to have 1 net hit to hit a drone.

You're wrong on two counts.

1) It's a threshold test. Meaning you only need to match the threshold.
2) It's an OR of 5. If you're seeing a 6 in the PDF, you're looking at the wrong thing. That 6+ was lowered to a 5+ after the uproar on dumpshock before the book went to the press.

Oversummon an appropiate spirit and order it to attack the drones in close combat. Natural weapon on a force 9 is nice for drone hunting...

1) it's a success test, it says you have to BEAT the object's Object Resistance. That implies needing a net success. Though the table does refer to Threshold.
2) Not my fault CGL sucks. It's the version I have.

The rules on page 183 are worded differently than on page 204 to make it more confusing.

Not to mention, the table says 6+ (or 5+ in different printings)
So, as a GM I can take more SOTA smaller, more minituarized drones and make them have a higher OR than the bare minimum for their type.

1) Well, it's not an opposed test...
2) No, it's not your fault. But the PDF is out of date in a number of ways. This particular one is very well documented on the forums.

You'd have to know to search for it

It's not like someone is going to read every post ever, and searching for OR isn't going to do jack for you, because it's too short a word.

While this may be true, it's still fairly common knowledge that the PDF and the physical book don't match.

(By the way here's a correct OR table)

I second summoning spirits. Elemental aura will own most hardened armor, Accident will crash rotodrones, and a sufficient force natural weapon will also toast them.

Should I cut hell loose by saying that it's only 3 to fool the drones sensors?

lmao

PowerBolt (or Wreck Drone) works out just fine, as long as you can beat OR5...

And what's wrong with Levitate-ing them into the ceiling? If they're moving fast enough already, won't that be a crash test? Seems to me that most drone enemies can be defeated with proper application of the Levitate spell in combination with crash damage or fall damage (though it's all crash damage if you look at it the right way).

The last thread about this discussed that idea, StevenAngier. The consensus, IIRC, was that it's all one unit; this is more or less a basic tenet of SR magic.

It Was NOT a Consensus Yerameyahu, It is definitely a Table Ruling... It is plain as day in the rules. Sensors are OR 3. Anything else is a Table Ruling...

That'd be fine, except you're not affecting the sensor. You're affecting the drone. Is the argument, anyway. I don't care, because it doesn't really affect the game.

No need to go back into the aruments again... It never gets solved.

I have a tendency as a player to build assuming the most conservative interpretation in mind.

So, if I have a character that is likely to be throwing spells at drones, I'll build him with enough dice pool to compensate for a 5-6 Threshold.*

So if I'm wrong in how the rule will be interpreted, I'm going to be at worst pleasantly surprised.





-k

* - This also has a nice side effect of being really useful against stuff that doesn't have a threshold.

Radar uses sound. Improved Invisibility bends light.

Radar uses radio waves (electro-magnetic). Sonar uses sound. And sharks use frickin' laser beams!

I appreciate the faith in crash tests, but the drone would need to be moving at supersonic speed to die from one crash test. For example, a medium drone would need to move in excess of 200 meters per second (600 meters per turn) to score 12 DV on that test. This results in a reasonable chance of one-hitting it. For certainty, you would need it to move at 2000 meters per turn (about double the speed of sound).

Derp. Got me. Luckily there's still ultrasound (Somewhere).

easy enough mistake to make; they work off similar principles, and it's not as if nobody's countered anything I've brought up in forums. Oversights are the work of the devil, and friends distracting you, and lack of sleep, and poor reading comprehension... and stuff...

And tinfoil can be used to foil both of them.

So you just have to Levitate them really, really fast.

Which is just another frequency of light.

I'm no scientist, but I think it might be more correct to say that both light and radio waves are electromagnetic energy, differentiated by frequency. In any case, radio waves are not part of the visible spectrum (as understood in a post-metahuman world), and are therefore not affected by Invisibility. 'Invisibility makes the subject more difficult to detect by normal visible senses (including low-light, thermographic, and other senses that rely on the visible spectrum).'

Which, for 600 metres per turn, would require something like Force and net hits to be in the mid-twenties!

Two things I now notice about Levitate - it doesn't seem to use OR where one would assume it should and there is an opposed test for (unwilling) living targets which means a drone gets no opposing roll. Oh how I hate this spell.

Which was his point.

And this is why the BEST thing you can do for your Imp Invis spells is Street Magic Spell Design it to Multi-Sense.
Problem solved.

Also, the humble Ice Sheet spell forces crash tests and doesn't need to bother with object resistance. Drones don't tend to have the best dice pools for that. And a rigger can only rig one at a time.

Pilot 6 + Maneuver 4 + Tacnet 3 + Fuzzy Logic 2 = 15 dice to crash test.





-k

I didn't say you wouldn't have to be a dragon...

doesn't ice sheet only work on a surface? How would this help against a rotordrone? (the OP's example.)

A pilot isn't going to get the fuzzy logic, because it likely won't have a readied action to make use of it. Fuzzy logic isn't free dice, remember? It takes actions to power.

For comparison, the starting limit on pilot is 4 - thats availability 12. A maneuver autosoft only goes up to rating 4, but most drones only come with a pilot of 3.
So that is 6-10 dice before a tacnet.
If they don't have a maneuverability autosoft, they can't make the test.

Thats a pretty crappy dice pool to be betting against the hits of a decent mage's spellcasting pool. And, unlike a drone, the mage has edge.


The ice can be created over an area - it doesn't have to be a a flat surface, only within the area of effect(Force in Meters, per Area Spell). Presumably, you could use it to ice up gunports, sensors, moving parts. Not sure how that applies to a rotodrone, specifically, within the rules, but aircraft icing is a pretty standard weather obstacle for airlines, isn't it?

Ice sheet creates an ice sheet on a surface, it is not ice object.

Let me back this up a bit,

You're having a hard time dealing with drones. That's good, mages are supposed to have a hard time with drones. Mages have a ton of advantages but if there's one thing mages should have a problem dealing with, it's highly technological remote controlled robots. You can't win at everything and drones are (and should be IMO) one of those things.

What should you do? Ask the hacker to help you out, he should be able to shred their firewall and take control. Your hacker is probably really good at that. Call your Street Sam friend with the big gun. He should be shooting something big enough to wreck their armor without too much trouble. He's probably really good at shooting big guns.

So use some teamwork. When you get attacked by drones, call your teammates to help you out. Then when you have to fight spirits or mages, things you're good at, your friends will need you to help them.

this is why I was thinking of researching my "crusher" spell ... to try and take care of drones. It's the clout spell but physical damage, ie an indirect combat spell that causes physical damage, single target, but without the extra drain you get from an elemental effect ... drain being F/2+1. Should be a pretty good drone killer, in the scheme of things... Course summoning a bad ass spirit works too! I also agree with PM above however that mages should have trouble with drones.

Well, they do still have problems. All of the spell and spirit summoning solutions advocate F6+ vs lowly, non-milspec rotodrones (I guess Ford LEBD?), which is like smacking a fly with a rocket launcher.

nope. This physics bogus with Imp. Invisibility bending light is gone. It just affects nonliving objects in addition to living objects. No Predator stealth mode.
And I appreciate the Crush spell (even for simplicities sake I dubbed it "Improved Clout" for my character).

Mhm, kind of tricky since there is no spirit with the combination of elemental aura and natural weapon. Making it hard for spirits to hurt drones.
You could go with elemental attack. Or augment the spirit with an elemental aura(spell).
Or just go with the electric elemental aura and hope for a lucky roll.