I agree with this, and add that you can acces the regeneration power by other ways :
A Great Form Plant spirit in a possession tradition.
Using an Immortal Flower mixture.

Such a spell could be very powerfull, as a GM i would not agree a PC having it.
It's a Pandora box, with a regeneration spell and a sustaining focus, you can :
open a "all you can eat" for ghouls.
generate bioware for free.
use a type O clone as an organ farm fabric line.
you can f*** o** all implanted cyberware from a target.

that just some exemple of universe-breaking thinks you can do with such a soell. i am sure you can find another one.

I fail to see the problem with this spell. You already have healing spells that can heal abstract boxes of "health damage" very rapidly, and SR4 2071 is an age of cybernetic and biotechnological miracles capable of replacing lost limbs in short order - why shouldn't magic be able to keep up with those? I almost always equip my mages with this custum spell (imported from D&D, really), and I can't say that anyone at our gaming table has particularly cared that I did. Much ado about nothing here.

The ado is about Magic being the cure for every thing that ails you. You do not need an easy and quick magical equivalent of Cyber/Bio replacement for Lost Limbs, that is what the Cyber/Bio is for. There are other ways that this can be addressed (The afore mentioned Regeneration power, for one). Of course, that is just one opinion, but it is a valid one, I think.

Why shouldn't magic be the cure for everything that ails you? Admittedly, I’m terribly biased here as I’m a mage supremacist, character-wise, but I fail to see why magical healing shouldn’t be able to keep up with purely mundane resources. It’s magic - it darn well ought to have such abilities or it doesn’t deserve to be called magic.

My GM tends to agree, about magic being able to keep up with mundane resources. And as to it being a pandora's box, I've found that nothing in the game is beyond abuse.

It's a tempting answer. It really is. While I do like the magic in my game to have the possibility of the wondrous and amazing, i do think it should come with costs. *Shrugs* Mom just raised on that sort of fiction and fantasy. What can I say?

So, given the high-ish Force required to heal significant injuries, and the high Drain value for the spell, and the long casting time until the spell is complete, wouldn't you say that satisfies the requirement for being "not too easy"?

Some things magic shouldn't do - particularly electronic/Matrix stuff. But the really organic stuff is exactly what magic is supposed to be good for. It's a perspective on an alternative society - neo-tribal, where "evil, white male" technology can be disposed of by using "environmentally aware" magic. Yeah, that sounds like dated hippie crap. But SR is an old game...

Because then you get into a question of what can magic not do. Right now that answer is magic cannot teleport and magic cannot create permanent physical objects, as of right nwo this is skirting the latter. Plus once you've tossed thsoe rules out it will be a question of why play anythign but a mage? Already a valid question in 4ED.

Keep going down that road and eventually your no longer playing Shadowrun your playing Magicun or Mage: The Running.

The Nutrition spell skirts those boundaries, too.

Ars Magica has a chapter with finely defined rules on what exactly magic can and cannot do. Unfortunately, SR doesn't have anything so well-defined. A lot is put in terms of "today, mages don't know how to do X."





Even if magic can do everything, it doesn't have to be unbalanced. It gets unbalanced if magic does everything better. Where better can mean having better cost-effect ratio or more powerful maximum effect. If magic is a way to do things, but not clearly better, that's not unbalanced.

Here and there that's possible, but not in everything. Also, not all things are equally important. Regenerating lost limbs is a pretty niche event in SR. Since you tend to suffer generic hit point damage instead of losing fingers, this spell or cloned limbs will rarely matter. So it doesn't really affect game balance.

Pardon?

Reversing the process by which nutrients are processed within the body can make nutrients out of waste materials.
Healing of wounds to bring tissue back into its original form is quite a natural process of cellular mitosis. Magic can speed this process up.

These applications of magic aren't even coming close to creating matter out of nothing. Not when the proper explanation is applied.

You mean: when you decide to rationalize it away like that. The Nutrition spell doesn't say anything about turning waste products into nutrients - it just feeds you. Healing spells don't mention what resources they consume to restore lost blood, they just do.

It's possible that they get the matter from somewhere, but they don't say so. So they definitely skirt the creating-matter matter.

It's not like Fireball states where it gets the combustibles.

Of course, you'll always have to dig for a manababble explanation for how things work yourself, but why would you pick the one that skirts the impossibilities of magic as we know it?

I was just trying to point out that current spells are already on the edge of it. I can see the merit in your manababble, but that's just an interpretation, too.

Either way it's an interpretation. There's no reason to pick one over the other, possibly excepting the meta-reason of one skirting the edges of what we know is impossible. But really, it matters very little in the end.

Given how exhausting the spell is and how slow the results are it won't work.


It only regrows natural body parts, not bioware.


Again given how exhausting and slow the spell is I can't see this working.


Where did you get the idea that it removed cyberware? It can't, you'd have to do it manually before casting the spell.

Regeneration (The Power) causes Cyber to be expelled from the body (painfully and permanently). At least, that is how it used to work. Why would Regeneration Spells be any different?

It is not "skirting the later". If you want RL medi-babble, read THIS

This spell just accelerates and enhances this.

This spell only affects an area of the body that requires regeneration, i.e. lost limbs/digits, severe wound effects (if tou use that option, I do) like orgab damage, etc.

That being said, a missing arm from a person that had Wired Reflexes would not have his wires expelled because his arm is growing back. I could get into mana-babble about the wires and essence and all that, but it's not neccessary.

Might be a good idea to mention this in the spell description though.

Well, that presupposes that you can target a part of a whole, which is not realy supported.

Given SR's tendencies, you have to ask yourself why all of a sudden similarly-naked things also work similarly. </snarky>

Anyway, it is a good idea to put a note in the spell description on how it interacts with implants and essence holes created by removing implants, then regenerating the original body parts. (A note like "forget it!" is acceptable; just prevent arguments by stating stuff up front.)

I think it's a pretty valid point. Regeneration power works a certain way, and you can't target sub-bits. It would be best not to call this spell 'Regeneration', nor to describe its effect in the same terms.

How about this?

Regrowth
This spell allows the caster to regrow lost limbs or repair significant organ damage on a target. It cannot repair fatal damage. Nor can it cause the removal of cyberware. Essence lost is unaffected.

As a side question should the spell be able to repair damaged bioware?

Is there still a mechanic for bioware damage in SR4? Ooh, found it: under Severe Wounds, Glitches. It probably should, regardless; I'm not sure magic can tell the difference between a natural organ and a bioware one.

Augmentation Pg 120-121, Optional Severe Wounds allows the damage/malfunction of implants, and pg. 127 mentions repairing implants.

That's about all I've found on the subject.

Yeah. This spell is more or less exclusively for the treatment of Optional Severe Wounds, so it might as well work on all Optional Severe Wounds, right? All the ones that make sense, of course. It can't 'cure' Impalement, but it can cure Limb Loss. Broken Bone, yes; Stunned condition, no.

I've edited the spell to reflect the results of the thread. If no one has any problems I'll call the spell done.

I still think the spell is a bad idea because it raises some inmportant questions of if you can't restore a limb with this (previously the purview of cloning and limb replacement) why can't you restore essence. Whole big can of worms.

Essence is not a sum of lost body parts. Essence gets lost as your body gets more invaded by foreign material.
Losing an arm does not cost you Essence. Having it bionically replaced does.

Ah but essence has traditionally been affected by severe traumatic injuries, which losing a limb could qualify as. Hell, I can remember when deadly damage could cost you essence.

Not in 4.

The simple answer is 'because Regeneration doesn't do that', and this spell is a reduced subset of the Regeneration effects.