Pg 186

Would you mind quoting where only one damage track or the exact nature of the spirit's materialized form and it's immunity to non-physical attacks comes from? I can see ITNW on pg 186 but I'm missing the immunity to everything else you're implying exists.

P186
Doesn't say "If all of the boxes on on either of a spirit’s Condition Monitor Tracks are filled in" (plural)
it says
(singular).

But maybe that it just my way of reading it.

My point about spirits being immune to SnS etc was, as I said IMO, YMMV, etc To me it seems to make more sense this way. And yes, I am nerfing my own PC here. And I pre-agree, magic doesn't have to be logical. The ITNW is supposed to make spirits 'tough' to take down, the idea that an taser could take down a spirit is just gimpy and it bothers me.

One thing we can agree on is that the rules are vague and imprecise and do require interpretation.

As insanely powerful/useful as SnS is, and as much as you might agree it needs a good cutting down in size, you have to admit that spirits and summoning are already rather obscene - they really don't need to be helped along by taking away the one source of killing them that doesn't involve a mage or the gunnery skill.

The problem with ItNW is that it really doesn't do what it says it does. There are easily 8 decent attacks available at CharGen that can get past the Hardened part of a F6 spirit's ItNW. So spirits have an ability that's supposed to make them impressive, but it doesn't deliver.

On the other hand, it would be disastrous for game balance if non-mages couldn't seriously hurt the kind of spirits that can be reliably summoned.

SnS hurting spirits is bizarre, but completely RAW. It's actually good for game balance, because it makes spirits hurtable by non-mages.

It does raise some interesting non-RAW questions though. What exactly are materialised forms made of exactly? Pure mana? Is mana conductive? Even if it is, does it necessarily make sense for electricity to be disruptive to it (so to speak)? It's one thing for the impact of supersonic projectiles to damage the integrity of the form, but with no nervous system or cardiological organ to mess with, nor skin to burn for that matter, how is the damage created?

I'm not saying it would be useful to try to answer these questions, especially round the gaming table, but they do occur.

You can poison an air elemental with toxic waste/sludge.
You can burn a fire elemental

There is a bit about it in the description of Free Spirits PCs in Runner's Companion: it is Mana but this Mana simulates all external interactions as if it was matter. The only difference between a materialized body and a meat body is that the latter disappears instead of turning into a corpse. If a spirit has special physical properties, they are covered in his Powers.

fix't

I would say that amount of attack options are available at chargen even for force 9 spirits ItNW

But a lump of lead is 'matter' it doesn't say that the spirit materialises a heart, lungs, muscles, nerves and other biological bits, just that it materialises something solid.

I understand the metagame reasons for allowing SnS etc vs spirits, but from an in game metaphysics pov, it seems dumb to say a spirit materialises biology - for you to be able to strangle one, it would have to need oxygen and have lungs, for a taser to work it would need to have a nervous system and muscles, etc. With the exception of a spirit with the Realistic Form power (which would require at least a superficial biology), other spirits wouldn't have any biology: p90 Street Magic


I am hoping someone can help explain it in game with reasonable metaphysics. For those of you who are happy to metagame it, that fine but I am looking for a bit more thought in the game. How much would The Terminator 2 have sucked if they had just shot it with a taser, instead of luring it into a foundry and alloying it with a nice 24 piece cutlery set??

I think that the rules are pretty lenient with electricity damage. If we jabbed a materialized spirit with a live high-voltage cable, it's something much different than a taser shot. As for Zoot's "reasonable metaphysics" - considering that the spirits have one damage track on the Physical plane and it's just only the physical form that is disrupted while the spirit itself is still there and pretty pissed off at that, I'd say that electric current indeed messes with the material form's coherence somehow. It's not much different than, for instance, setting an earth elemental on fire (it's not explicitly immune to it, despite being a lump of rock and dirt) or trying to freeze it.

I agree, high AMPAGE (voltage is not relevant here) electrical attacks (mains electricity etc would cause lethal electrical burns to a materialised spirit just as they would to a human. But this is lethal damage not stun damage. Low ampage attacks like taser and SnS are intended to cause muscular convulsions - a spirit doesn't have muscles to convulse.

You could accept that it is simply a special property of electricity that it disrupts spirits, but I think its a bit weak and smacks of handwavium.

An point to note is that spirits are made of mana - an earth elemental only appears to be rock, it is not made of rock.



And this is where it starts to get sticky. Logically, you would assume a fire elemental is immune to fire damage, but if you did that you could extend this assumption to say earth elementals are immune to bullets. But clearly fire elementals don't incinerate themselves whenever the start an inferno. A dilemma.

Funny, I could have sworn that Fire Elemental has fire immunity, but it's indeed not the case. Someone sleeping on the job? Giving them Fireproof quality equal to their Body or Force*2 would make sense. As for earth elementals, those guys have "immune to bullets" already counted in - first, ItNW, second, shitloads of Body (Force+4, enough to soak a good handful of S&S).
Well, of all special "elemental" damage (Fire, Cold, Electricity, Acid), only Electricity is treated as Stun damage. However, it's not stated anywhere how spirits react to Stun attempts.

Also, how is SR4A different than vanilla SR4 with all erratas? I have a late-printing SR4 corebook and Gel rounds deal normal damage, with +2 AP but no DV modifiers.

I suppose ITNW might apply across the board. Its not explicit in the description exactly what a 'weapon' is, it says it applies against 'non-magical' weapons. So a fire elemental has resistance to a molotov cocktail but not to the fire of a burning carpet that it set alight by its presence?

I would suggest that ITNW could be read as Immunity to Mundane Sources of Damage.

I know it makes them tougher, this is just IMHO etc. perhaps to balance it a bit the ITNW should be reduced to F not Fx2.

Doesn't matter, both sources halve ItNW's protection threshold anyway. Fun starts when either two elementals start duking it out with each other or there's a fireball involved - logically, "mana of similar attunement" (or how you want to call it) won't deal much damage.

Eh. Even immunity to fire is reduced because fire is elemental damage - that's because Immunity to Stuff inherits from Hardened Armor. Silly, I know, but that's what you get with recklessly trying to use inheritance in mechanics trying to model plausible make-believe.

The difference between Terminators and Spirits is that starting characters can't summon terminators.

Besides, it's not enough for Joe Wageslave to hit it with a taser once. That's just only going to make it mad and the person making it mad is nice and close. It's about as effective as shoving a coat hanger in Michael Myers's eyeball. He still keeps coming.

"I kick that Toxic Spirit of Man in the groin." "He just looks at you with his burned face, and shakes a finger at you, a steel blade attached to the leather glove making the motion all the more menacing." "Oh crap, I just kicked Freddy Kruger in the crotch and pissed him off." "And you're asleep." "And I'm... AW SLOT ME SIDEWAYS!" "'Oh, honey, I love it when you sweet talk me.'" "... I want the Alice Cooper spirit back."

*blink blink*
now that i think about it, freddy and pinhead would be perfect for summoned spirits . .

Manaflow and the state of the local Astral are affected by things happening in the physical. Things as flighty as emotions. As short occurences. Apparently, electricity and other elemental effects have a similar effect, just on spirits, because of reasons your local expert parasupernaturalogist might have theories on. However much he goes on on about it in manatechy language though, most of it comes down to "anything might happen in dealing with magic, we don't know the exact boundaries for certain, and we just don't know yet. Why do spirits even get disturbed at all?"


Woot! That makes me able to ake my White Knight churn out bullets to the same effect SnS did before!

Hm, the houserule I have been kicking around (which I may have stolen from someone here) about Hardened Armor is that it is Automatic successes. For a Drake, that means he has 4 hits before he even rolls his armor. You would never add Hardened Armor to the roll, since it has already been "rolled". Hardened Armor is never modified by any AP modifier (it is Hardened, after all!).

Now, for Spirits, my houserule would be they have (Force) Hardened Armor from "Immunity to Normal Weapons". They also have (Force) Armor as normal. So, for any "magical" thingamabob they are hit with, it negates completely the Hardened Armor, leaving them with just (Force) normal Armor, which can be modified as normal. For any "Normal Weapon", the spirit has both (Force) automatic successes from the Hardened Armor, and whatever he can roll on his modified (Force) normal armor.

This means Spirits toughness will be closer to a straight line than a logarithmic curve, which would be nice! It also means SnS will not work quite as well, but still can be effective.

Example: An SnS round is fired at a Force 5 Spirit of Man, hitting with 1 net success. DV is 7S(e) (assuming you allow net hits to add to SnS), so the Spirit rolls WIL 5 + half his normal armor (3 dice) = 8, and gets 2 hits. Adding those 2 hits to the automatic 5 he gets 7 total hits, which reduces the 7S(e) to 0 DV.

This means you need to aim a little better to have a chance of injuring a Force 5, but IT IS POSSIBLE! It also means SnS, while no longer the "auto-spirit killer" is still quite effective.

Direct Combat spells will still be the best solution (as it should be), since there is no armor allowed for Direct Combat spells (and the Hardened Armor would be negated by Magic in any case as well). This preserves the role of the mage as the "guy who deals with the spirits". It also makes damage to spirits less of an "all or nothing" and more of a "wearing them down" as most SR combat is meant to be.

Any ideas or further mathematical examples that I didn't think of that might break the system?

Aside from the section in SR4A, page 280, about simplifying things for the GM by giving grunt NPCs only one damage track, where else are spirits said to have only one damage track?

The section under Critters, p. 292 says,


So, as far as I can see, the number of tracks depends on whether the GM sees the spirit(s) as grunt level or not.

If you assume (since we can't really know anyway) that the spirit is using some form of electromagnetism to maintain the cohesion of its form on a microscopic level, electricity disrupting it makes sense. If they manipulate electrons and particle charges to create their physical form, then enough of an electrical charge would be able to disperse the molecules.

Think of it as high powered electrolysis. If you run an electrical charge through something as simple as water you can break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. Smaller charge, slower dispersion of its physical form. Best explanation I could come up with

Its a reasonable fudge

But if we are causing disruptive damage, wouldn't this be physical damage not stun?

They way I run materialised spirits is like they are marionettes. The consciousness of the spirit is still on the Astral. While a spirit can be stunned by a manabolt cast on the astral, the materialised puppet is just an object that it controls remotely and as such not subject to stun, it must be physically destroyed. But if you like Symber's explanation, it could be physically disrupted by electricity.

Doesnt matter if the GM is running the spirt as only having one damage track, that one is open to discussion more then anything.