You may not be able to see, but I know Blind people that can function almost normally. Perception is NOT just VISION after all.

Daredevil has all of his non-sight senses heightened to superhuman levels. His "biosonar" is just exceptionally heightened hearing. He can read the depressions caused by typeset on a newspaper through touch. He can tell the difference in tone of colors by the heat radiated (darker colors absorb more light and thus radiate more heat). His powers should not allow him to read a computer screen, nor to overcome the stigma of being played by the same actor who starred in Reindeer Games. It also does not render him immune to a 10-82.

Now that I would definitely take issue with. The phenomenon of the visually impaired achieving a heightened level in their other sense is more than a casual observation. Recent neurological studies have shown that the brain doesn't just grow stronger in ways it can already function, such as interpretting sounds, but can actually grow in new ways in its efforts to compensate for the lack of visual stimuli. In the particular documentary that I'm citing here the case study in question was a blind footballer* who attested that he (along with other blind footballers**) could know exactly where the sideline was and be able to play accordingly, despite having no visual input of the fact. The reason is that their spatial awareness draws information from other sources in different and new ways to the extent that 22 blind people can play a watchable game. I guess the other input would be maintaining his bearings from stepping onto the pitch, the relative volumes of the crowd and coaches, etc.

What I'm getting at here, is that whilst in RL a blind person will never be able to perform as well as a seeing person in a firefight, when you're talking a compensation of Magic 6 in the SR world I think it works. The adept's elite Magic rating (along with the HC power) allows him to completely ignore the fact that he can't see and gains his spatial awareness from all the other myriad sources of information.

Bear in mind that for anything that absolutely mandates vision the HC power will not help. It can discount the modifier, but it can't substitute for sight itself. For example, if the adept was running down the street and a barrier had been placed in the way before he arrived then he doesn't get an unmodified gymnastics roll to jump it – he gets no roll at all. Being blind makes some physical actions very hard and all the others impossible and it's quite reasonable that HC can help with the former.

* As in soccer
** To clarify, they're not playing with or against seeing players

Rubic: That's just the explanation; the worthless fluff. The crunch is that he's pure magic. That's what 'superhuman' means.

Tymeaus: Who said anything about Perception?

Aero: I don't think I said anything about blind brains. The HC ability doesn't make sense to use as a permanent effect, I meant. For anything. There are a number of other abilities for zatoichi stuff.

I am reminded of the titular character from the Book of Eli.





-k

Yeah, but he had a spirit whispering over his shoulder.

Mentor Spirit 10BP

Didn't someone *just* explain that a mentor spirit isn't a spirit? Maybe wrong thread.

Who cares...the joke worked!

Did it?

Well, they are ideals, but I`ve always thought of them as spirits (great spirits, like gods. Unsummonable) that are so powerful their power leaks over and can affect how similarily minded creatures work magic. That is only my interpretation, however.

Well... Sam Verner had actual conversations with "Dog," so you can't be all wrong.

And some of the in-book short stories had characters thinking about Raven as an actual person, and the Initiation chapter of SM had what I believe to be a boy talking to a Sky Father Mentor, though it is never actually stated.

Mentor spirits can represent any ideal the character has, from the Essence of an actual element like fire, to Jesus Christ himself. The way this is worded, Mentor Spirits are not limited to actual spirits or metaplanar creatures, but are Magic manifesting to the Magician in a way that is meaningful to the Magician himself. It is magic within the caster responding to the casters inner thoughts and beliefs. it is a subconscious tapping of metaplanar power, and not an actual spirit.

Now I would think that this subconscious tapping of magic could do things like call a free spirit to the caster to manifest his Mentor's presence, but the spirit itself is not the actual Mentor Spirit, just a manifestation of it.

These things are so fun for a GM. Its a great way to give cryptic foreshadowing to a player, or to give hints or warnings to the player when they are acting outside the tenants of their mentor.

You're all wrong, of course.

Mentor spirits are Horrors in disguise.






-k

I think they're all in the mages' heads. If they meet them, if they go somewhere, if they guide them, it's all internal invention and unexplained magic weirdness. It's magic, after all.

Which Works...

Hehe. I just prefer thinking that mages are basically insane, it amuses me. And it avoids those stupid D&D deities.

No THAT I have to agree with.

When Street Magic reprinted the adept geasa 25% power point discount, they used the same wording:
We use this optional rule. Since this feature is descended unchanged from SR3 and there doesn't seem to be any new rounding system introduced, we have ruled that the rounding might as well descend unchanged from SR3 too:
This works well and keeps the numbers tidy.

In our experience things like this just encourage the adept to geas everything so that they end up with Magic x 1.333 Power Points. As the numbers the OP quoted demonstrated, the powers in such lists have needlessly awkward costs. We have found the MitS ruling works much better. There's no point geasing a single rank power that has a base cost of 0.25, but if you're buying a really hefty 4-point power, a geas is a significant boon. Consequently the geasa get used only where the character is investing strongly in a certain direction - not spattered about on every whim the adept dabbles in.

There are times that a Geasa SHOULD apply to every aspect of an Adepts ability. In fact, I prefer this, as it is a true limit, assuming that the applied Geas makes sense. Another reason why your Adept should be competant without his magic, at least in my opinion.

I don't know why the quotes in my post above lost their references. The first was Street Magic page thirty something. The second was Magic in the Shadows page 33. I wrote and everything.

Oh certainly. I have no objection to this. You can see from my previous post my objection is to the motivation such a liberal ruling encourages. Under the MitS rounding scheme, you definitely could have every adept power geased, no doubt about it. For character flavour I'm all for it. You wouldn't however end up with Magic x 1.333 effective Power Points worth of powers. If you allow that (which it seems you are endorsing) you're ignoring the "(round normally)" part of the (now) optional rule. You're not rounding at all.

Nope, No Rounding at all. Keep the Decimals to 3 places and record them. Otherwise, the benefits of taking a Geas on a power that is only 0.25 PP is non-existant. I like to keep the benefits, and it has yet to overpower any character that I have every seen. Your Mileage may vary, and all that.