Yeah, the whole system is lousy with short-sighted penalties. Apart from the mana example, you get things like '-6 is the worst possible visibility', so that PCs with their crazy stats do all kinds of nutty things. Oh well. I've never seen magic on the moon come up as a practical concern.

I do not understand all this "Mages should be on megabucks because they are such rare snowflakes" pseudo-logic, whether it is for the wage-mage or the (NPC-group) runner mage. So this logic goes (as argued by Apple earlier in the thread), awakened are 1% of the population, and take away the insane, spell knack folk, mages with low magic etc etc and a kick-ass mage with high Magic is just unbelievably rare.

In RL, doctors and lawyers at 1 in 10,000 or so are at least as rare as the top 1% of mages, and yet their salaries while good are based on a pay-scale and involve long hard working hours, at least until they have the experience years down the line to nail down a consultant or law-firm partner position.

I would not expect the situation to be any better for the mages in SR who choose to go the wage mage route. I will grant you that, according to SR canon wage mages are paid a little bit more and allowed a little more laxity in terms of hours worked than their mundane equivalents, but can anyone quote me something that says they get paid megabucks?

I also beg to differ on runner mages and their cut of the team's payment. While they may be 1 in 10,000, so too is the ice-cold pro sammie, the shit-hot hacker and the can-sell-ice-to-an-eskimo face. They all form a function in the team, and the uppity mage who thinks he deserves a bigger cut Just Because may well find himself left behind during the run or shot in the back afterwards ...

AFAIK, he was talking about the NPC wages, not the PC ones; I doubt anyone seriously gives PCs differential pay, because they whine.

I still think you answered your own question: actual powerful mages are a scarce resource, much more than doctors and lawyers. Honestly, there are too many of those. It's not even a valid comparison; there's a limit to the raw numbers of Awakened, and we've talked about how that gets sliced right down. There's no such limit on skilled professionals (e.g., lawyers). If there are only 1 in 10000 of them, it's because that's how many the economy wants, not because that's how many were born.

@Midas
Imagine you would need to be at least 1.9m to become a lawyer.

Now there are two possibilities:
1. You would need to pay those a lot of money.
2. It would be seen as an very honorful profession and it would be your duty to choose it.

The Problem is, like always, you need to treat PCs different from NPCs.
Thats always a bit of a hickhak.
And actually it does not solve the problems I mentioned.
So in addition to that, you need to build up inefficient magic security to challenge the mage. It can't be an efficient system, because it would kill the team while using lesser resources.

Whats really sad about it all is, that it is only a few little details which cause those problems...

I know Apple was talking about NPC mages, and I was arguing that I wouldn't think that was the case, and that there is absolutely no suggestion in SR canon that it would be.

1 in 10,000 is 1% of 1%, and I have not seen anyone arguing that less than 1% of awakened are mages with Magic of 5 or more. I would further argue that wage mages in corpville would be raising their Magic score over time through training and experience, albeit at a slower pace than the karma-rich runner mages living on the edge but YMMV.

There is a small difference. You can always get new docs and Lawyers. Mage are finite. Competent and powerful mages are indeed rare snowflakes and they can simply name their price - if you play in a world where the mage is indeed "only a fraction" ab what is magically at least in theory available.



It´s a simple economic question/answer: if you can offer something which everyone wants and have almost no competition, then you can go wild with your price - and still get paid. Of course in the very moment where somethign could replace you, your price will fall.



I quote myself (or better: the Street magic)


What is a fraction for you? For me, it´s something very very small.

SYL

If you needed to be 1.9m+ tall to be a lawyer, it simply means you would have a lot of tall people studying law; it does not then follow that you would have to pay them significantly more than they are paid now. Given the necessary intelligence, aptitude (hard-working, need to spend hours and hours looking stuff up in books) and access to education, it could be argued that today IRL only 1 in 100 people or less have even the potential to become lawyers.

1 in 100 is not particularly rare, even 1 in 10,000 (the top 1% of the 1 in 100) is not rare enough to write your own paycheck, although admittedly that 1 in 10,000 person should not be wanting employment opportunities and should expect a reasonable (High lifestyle or more) salary. 1 in a million? Now you are talking megabucks ...

As to magical security, again I do not see it being too much of a problem for reasonably sized corps, or even smaller corps via outsourcing. Wards around sensitive areas of corp facilities should be a no-brainer, else a rival corp will just send a mage in astrally to hear what the R&D guys (or whatever) are discussing. Patrolling spirits should also be common, and on-site security mages should not be as rare as some posters here are suggesting. I would agree that the magical equivalent of astral spamming (a posse of astrally projecting mages plus spirits turning up very soon after the alarm is raised) is a recipe for TPK, so despite it being a valid corp tactic in theory, it is not one I will be using in my game, at least not unless the mage starts whining about how statistically unfeasible it is for corp sec mages being present in some of the facilities my PCs target ...

Don't forget that locations underground are extremely difficult to enter through the astral plane. And god help a mage if the only way in slams shut behind him...

@apple

I take the Street Magic quote with a pinch of salt: in my game world I take the % of awakened at 1%, and about half of that (which is indeed a fraction, as would be 4/5, technically) as being adept, mage or myst ad with access to training. This access to training is important, because whatever the starting Magic score (which I assume to be a bell-curve with average 3 and a 2-4 range commmon as per other stats), Magic can and will be raised by by the magical equivalent of mental exercises by NPCs as well as PCs, which will distort the bell curve upwards once you are talking about a wage mage who has 4+ years of Magical Studies university education and will go up further with the training and experience in their wage mage job.

The economic arguement you make cuts both ways - the more corps value high Magic attribute mages, the more they will invest in training their magical assets, and the more 0's on the paycheck of high Magic mages, the more incentive wage mages will have to better themselves to achieve that golden salary.

Another consideration for those people with the attitude that a high Magic attribute is seriously rare and commands ridiculously high salaries, woe betide any runner mage who overcasts any spell at F9 or more on a corp run or anywhere remotely public - they are suddenly top of the list for a hostile extraction and cranial bomb implant ...

Yes, this is of course the mathematical definition.



Exactly.

SYL

Midas, I think there's plenty in SR canon to imply that mages in NPC groups could be paid more than the mundane soldiers, and your argument was about PC groups (which, again, I didn't realize anyone had suggested except as a joke).

Regarding the economics, you ignored the part where I said the economy has enough lawyers, but never enough mages. It's really just a bad comparison in many ways. There is essentially an infinite supply of lawyers, and a finite demand; mages are a scarce supply, and an infinite demand.

You're right, though, that training is expensive (in-house or not). That doesn't explain why strong, skilled mages would be worth *less*. It does explain why the corps would value them *more*, and keep their claws in them (or keep them happy, or both).

It's probably not correct to assume a normal distribution around 3 (given the quote we've been focusing on the entire thread), but I guess that doesn't ruin the analysis anyway.

Some of this also represents a poor conversion of setting to new Rule Set. The 1% has been around functionally forever in SR writing, however it's only really been in SR4 that you get the slew of Low Magic stats, Astrally perceiving only people ect. In SR1-3 your Magic stat was = to Essence. Which for lots of folks meant 6 and for those with the cyber "standard" was a 5, none of this magic 1or 2 business.

Also, while reading through the Sprawl Survival guide it mentions that even Nightclubs (the nova hot ones) employ magical security.

Wrong. If mages are so much in need that their pay would be automatically astronomical, then mages would soon be breeding like bunnies. Why? Its what many people do when they have plenty of money. And for some I'm sure the allure of getting paid to donate sperm would be nice. There would likely be a premium for those who can demonstrate magical ability; guaranteed income ability is something people look for when choosing sperm donors. Economies have a direct effect on how many people are born with what ability.

Because being Awakened is not a genetically isolatabl or even connected trait.

I am a cybered criminal. I AM THE 99%!

@Stahlseele
This I would like.
Cyber is better for 99% the cases, magic is the special cake.
Need to drop sum guards? The sam will do that.

"Shit, we have no equipment and must get a bunch of civilians over this river"... Thats a job for the mage...

Magic should not be the thing to deal with the expected, it should be the thing to deal with the unexpected...

Daylen, even if that all were true (I think it's not), we *know* that it's not the case yet. We know that there's 1% 'with the potential to be Awakened', and a tiny fraction of that actually have Magician, Adept, etc., and a small set of those are powerful, trained mages. We know the demand is essentially unlimited, and we know the supply is very constrained.

Already addressed that statistic a couple of posts back.

I disagree. If the book is simply flat wrong, all bets are off. We can't just assume that. We're going on what we have.

Doctors are rare in the general population, but go to a hospital, and there's doctors all over the place. Similarly, while mages may be rare in the general population, they will tend to be clustered both in the shadowrunning profession, and in the targets that shadowrunners go after. Upscale places will have wards in sensitive areas, some manatech on hand, and a patrolling spirit or so. Corporate office complexes or compounds will also have an on-site wage mage, with heavier magical power showing up with the HRT team if the regular grunts get in trouble. Mages at the PC level will still be rare - just like the street samurai will rarely encounter someone as expensively and comprehensively augmented as he is. But I don't buy the notion that mages are so rare, that PC mages will not run into magical defenses.

The rarity point is with regard to their cost, though, which *then* affects their reasonable distribution.

I think that's an oversimplification of that argument. I don't think anyone has said that PC mages will not run into magical defenses, period. As I understand it, it's the same as you've described: some places have basically token defenses, while the important ones have more (and response teams). That's the basic consensus.

The argument seems to be that, given that state of affairs, it's common to be either no challenge, or way too much; and that those defenses hurt the mundanes at least as much as the mage, but probably more.

After all, gauss cannons and mil-spec armor aren't strictly *rare*, just expensive and legally-restricted. That doesn't mean every security force should be using them, even in the shadows. It's about cost-effectiveness. (Nevermind that the runners would just steal it all. )

Not assuming anything, just going by what was setting Cannon that seems to have been cut and pasted without any editing or consideration to systemically changes. Intact, let's have a canononical dig....

From the Grimoire for SR2 (2053)

"Second, magicians represent the smallest minority of the population. Only 1% of the people in the world can use magic at all. A fraction of that percent practice minor magics, or nev get the proper training, or go crazy trying to deal with what they are. By some accounts the are three to four million fully capable, trained, competent magicians in the sixth world, though some studies suggest that percentage is rising with each new generation."

Now we move to Magic in the Shadows SR3 (2062)

"First the awakened represent the smallest minority of the population. Only 1% of people in the Sixth World can use magic. A fraction of that percent are aspected magicians, never get the proper training, or go crazy trying to deal with their gift."

Now despite the rules change the canonical history of Shadowrun has followed a consistency, especially since the rule sets for editions 1-3 where written around the canon concepts as written.

Now, I would have to check my Wake of the Comet but I believe it was around then, with SURGE that the minor magical talents appeared, but nothing other than that has had an effect upon the magical populace since the Awakenening.

Now taking the TimeLine into account and life expectancies as well as maturity cycles it would no be unreasonable to put the active, trained and competent Mage level at around the 6million marker in the mid 2060s with probably 1million marker for Aspected mages and Adepts. If we do factor in the SURGE stuff then there is probably 1.5 maybe 2 million minor magically traited people out there by 2064. Since there is no magical slaughter disaster during the crash it would be safe to say that your probably still looking at a 6million marker of trained, competent mages, maybe 6.5. Your aspected and adepts will be up to possible 2million by then and your minor talents are likely to also be close to 2million.

Which by 2072 would give you a 65/35 % split when all tallied. Also during this time the world population has probably been added to by a hundred million.

Sure somewhere in all that falls the untrained bracket and the insane bracket, which us probably around a net 1million in and of itself to make the data given seem accurate.

Double post

So, that sounds pretty consistent, then. Between 3 and (generously) 6 million competent, trained mages (which presumably refers to everything from 'moderate' to 'powerful'). What's the issue? That doesn't sound like what you're arguing.

Nope, doesn't cover the moderate. 1% of 6,000,000,000 is 60,000,000. Now VITAS really hurt the world pop so that 6 billion is in fact around 4 billion. So that's still 40,000,000 magically active folk in the world. Of that we can set an 8 million Mark on the "trained, fully capable and competent" (read initiate mages and adepts). So looking at that number and the setting we can suppose that leaves 32,000,000 unaccounted awakened (again before SURGE factoring) so if only a fraction of that go mad and only a fraction are aspected and adepts we can safely say 10,000,000 go mad, 10,000,000 are aspected or adepts of Average or Below Average quality and the remaining 12,000,000 are Full Magicians of average or below average quality.

I disagree, 'competent' is code for Professional Rating 3+ (Rating 2 could be called 'barely competent'), and for PC skills 3+. Even if it wasn't, those table indicate that 4-5 are veterans, and 6 is fully elite (like Ghosts). There's support for this in SR4A: the ProRating 2 lieutenant is the '2+' example (that is, a special leader of 2s). It describes it this way:His stats bear this out: Magic 3, magic skills 3-4, 6 spells, 1 Rating 2 focus, no initiations.

I'm still confused, though: what are you arguing here? Even granting all your figures, your 4 billion pop, your 8 million competent+ mages, and some number of incompetent, partially-trained magicians, etc., that gives us 2-in-10000 competent+ mages. … That's rare, and there's an unlimited demand for them, and the numbers of the strongest ones would taper off fast (PC skill ratings table compares 5 to NBA players, and 6 to Shaq). That's exactly what everyone's been saying.

I was illustrating the slip between System Backstory and System Rules

*shrug* To me, it just sounds very consistent. Assuming we believe any of the books, it's clear that mages are rare, that security-grade (ProRating 3+) are rarer, and that 'standard runner grade' (5-6+) are very rare. The bit I quoted also supports the resulting conclusions we drew from the economic argument: that the vast majority of targets don't have even one full-time security-grade mage (but *important* places might have a part-time 'competent' one). Magic response teams (astral or meat) seem quite reasonable, but they have their various tradeoffs and limitations, as well as (and I guess this is just my own pet point?) threatening mundanes at least as much as PC-mages.

On the flip side, doesn't mundane security threaten PC mages? Oversummoned spirits are a potential problem, but mages themselves tend to be even more of a "glass cannon" than augmented characters.

Sure, they can't take many bullets. I don't think the idea is that every PC-mage can stomp everything short of a magic HRT, but just that there's a strong *potential* for a power imbalance. His attacks/non-attack spells are particularly effective, and they don't have much to do against astral trickery, when the mage is playing smart.

My main concern is just that there's not a great setting-reasonable power gradient for magic defenses; it seems like they're either negligible-to-minor, or very-serious-for-the-whole-team. I think this phenomenon is distinct from the challenge curves you see with matrix security, physical security, or combat security (which seem smoother). Mages also tend to need less cash (spirits cost less than drones, etc.), and I say that everyone loves Karma equally. Finally, they advance 'exponentially', while mundanes are more 'linear', even without invoking very-long-run examples.

Anything is solved by good players (that is, Wheaton's Law-abiding ones) and/or good GMing, but my position is that the uniquely weird magic/mundane dynamic in the setting can be helped by limiting magic power in subtle ways (possibly including slower advancement, higher costs, better mundane defenses, etc.). Too much of this would make mages unfun, so I'm not saying cripple them (like BGC 3 everywhere; especially bad because it hurts weak mages disproportionately). Balance is always tricky, alas.

I agree with that - I suggested a few house rules earlier. The trick is to limit the corner cases and potentially abusive things, without nerfing everyday uses of Magic.

Exactly. It's easy to get bogged down in the extremes that the argument pushes toward, but it's really only specific tweaks we're talking about.

@Glyph
Yes, mundane security threatens PC-mages, if they are physically on side and not sneaking in.

The problem is, that you never can integrate a complex in the world surrounding it.
If you rob a bank, you do not have only to deal with the banks security, but the police too. (Very soon)
The problem with shadowrun is, that magic puts this response time to be not several minutes but only several seconds with magical security.

The next problem is, that only under one percent of the population will be able to hurt them. (Everbody with a gun, can shoot a member of a Swat team)


@Yerameyahu
Depends on what exactly you want to change. If you want to make the problem of astral response teams less severe you have to take several runs at how "beeing astral" and "summoning spirits works".

I have never seen anything in SR canon that says that mages in NPC shadowrunner groups would get paid more than their mundane counterparts. Wage mages yes, higher salary and more laxity re working hours, but not the sky high salary you and others seem to be suggesting. Mages in armed forces too will probably have a payscale higher than their mundane counterparts, but again (especially knowing the armed forces) probably not outrageously so.

There is definitely not an infinite supply of lawyers, but I would agree with you that the number of lawyers will generally equilibrate to the number required by the economy as a whole. I would not agree however that there is an infinite demand for mages in the 6th world - especially given the megabucks you and others are arguing they would command - not all corps undertake magical research, and while all corps would be happy to upgrade their magical security there would be costs (salary, training etc) to subtract from the bottom line.

I will also restate my case that if, as you and others are arguing, high Magic mages are indeed rare and in infinite demand, then logically there will be a large number of corps actively seeking to recruit these rare and powerful mages, even if their "recruitment" involves a press gang and a cranial bomb. Better learn masking quick omae, and stay away from awakened bars at all costs ...

One common gripe against mages is that Willpower+(Counterspelling) is too small a dice pool to resist Manipulation, Illusion and Direct Combat spells. Meanwhile, Direct combat spells have lower Drain than Indirect, almost as if they're supposed to be disadvantageous somehow (yet aren't).

So what if we add Intuition to all resistance pools featuring Willpower (but not to those featuring Reaction or Body, e.g. not to Indirect spells)?

Typical Willpower+Intuition will feature dice pools of 6-8 for guards, edging to 7-10 for PCs. That averages to 2-3 hits, more with Edge. So an aggressor mage will still stand a good chance of getting more hits (although you'd need to cast at a respectable Force, 5 or more), but it's not as extreme as right now. Most of the time, enemies don't resist completely, yet one-shotting people gets a lot harder.

Since we've been circling around the idea that actual NPC Counterspelling support is the exception rather than the rule (even if there's a wagemage in the building, he can't be everywhere at the same time, and he might get hit), this means that most of the time the mage can still do his thing with relative certainty, but if he meets enemy countermagic, things suddenly get quite tough, yet still not impossible, just a lot harder.

@Ascalaphus
The problem with spells is, that there is a huge differance, from spell to spell, if one net hit is good or a waste of casting time.

Why not just nerf the problem where it is?
Indirect combat spells AND mental manipulations and possibly win or loose illusions.
Indirect combat spells:
Damage my be soaked by one attribute, double or the sum of two attributes.
Mental manipulation:
Every combat turn you may make an non action throw on intuition minus nethits of the mental manipulation. If you score at least one hit, you can decide to not act in this combat turn. (Only basic self preservation(drop down, dodge etc but no full defance), beeing either fighting or thinking about if those ideas are your own.

Meh. That is probably one of the least concerning problems with mages as many of us "mages are OP" guys have been saying over the course of this thread. In SR pretty much everyone dies in 1-2 shots so raw killing ability isn't the real problem. It is the myriad tricks and extreme versatility that mages get which make them broken.

Annectdote (SR3 I think): I achieved a TPK on the first session of a new campaign. The PCs had provoked a security response including an astral mage. The PC mage didn't spot him so they thought they made a clean getaway to the Barrens until the Citymasters rocked up. If those had been drones then the whole party could have responded and not just the mage. A very simple use of Awakened abilities that created a lethal problem for the entire party to which most of them could not defend themselves. I've arrested individual PCs through similar methods with Lone Star mages.

Hence the getting lost in a crowd precaution some Runners take. It's all about what level you go to and how paranoid the team are and yeah, sometimes the shit hits the fan and people die.

I was referring to the "mundanes can't resist magic sufficiently" argument, which has come up a lot in this and other threads about mages.





This anecdote is cute, but it doesn't prove all that much. You could've tracked the PCs effectively without magic too, and you could've shaken off the astral mage without magic, too.

It may be easier to do with magic, but I don't think that breaks the game. It's fine that magic is the best thing against magic, as long as it isn't the only effective thing against magic.

Track PCs without magic: just drop RFIDs on them. Smaller than the eye can see, and not too easy to detect and remove. Let the RFIDs keep radio silence for an hour, then emit a homing signal every few minutes, keeping radio silence in between (this makes them really hard to detect through tracking wireless signals).

Or: spy satellites. Not implausible for an AA+ corp to either have themselves or rent them on demand. Follow people leaving your compound.



Shake off astral pursuit without magic: go underground. Astral projection can't go through the earth's surface. Sure, they can follow you through the tunnel, but then they have to go through all the nastiness that's in the tunnel (a tunnel could have BGC due to a brutal murder or by being a junkie spot, ghouls, a ward just before forking because wards block astral visibility and warn of astral intrusion, etc.).

Or: get lost in a mass of living bodies. Make it hard to keep track of your particular auras in the sea of life.

These two can be combined: take a trip through the Ork Underground.



Just because a group of players got outwitted by the GM doesn't prove a lot about a game system. If they'd known about the possibility, they could've taken countermeasures. The game system would only be broken if it wasn't (practically) possible to take countermeasures.

@Ascalaphus

They have a signal raiting of 1, as far as I know... (So 40m...)
And you need to plant the RFIDs first.
A satellite is also nasty, but I assume also not that easy to make people out on.
And if SR is not as bad as StarTrek you may shake the satilite in any kind of disco with several exits.


Actually they can go through earth, but doesn't matter anyway.
Yes, to move through an high BC is a good way to shake astral observers (due to back to body in "magic" hours), but it has to be a big area or they will just wait outside...


As hard to follow a guy in the real world, when you are able to move with 100m/s...

… You just said, twice, that mages get paid more. I don't recall saying 'sky high' or 'outrageous'. And I didn't say NPC mages in runner groups, I said 'groups' of any kind; they're simply worth more. I assume that NPC runner groups deal with pay in their own individual ways: shares, subcontracting, whatever. I wasn't worried about it.

Everyone agrees (AFAIK) that, yes, corps are trying to press-gang any powerful mage they can. So that's not a concern.

Signal isn't a problem if you stay in the civilized world where there's other Nodes nearby to patch you through to the Matrix just like any other Signal 1 commlink.

Like I said, smaller-than-sight RFIDs sprayed in the air in rooms that intruders pass through (I think it's mentioned in a book somewhere).

Satellites have pretty good image quality today, and probably better in SR. If you go inside somewhere, it can still look to see who exits the place, and use gait analysis to see if it's you. Players aware of the risk can take countermeasures, but that's my point: there's a mundane equivalent to astral tracking that, just like AT, can be hindered. Magic doesn't have a monopoly.




Not really. Check SR4A, p. 193:





Hence using the tunnel as a bottleneck. Also, BGC and wards limit visibility, as do all manner of mundane obstacles. If the BGC is in a hallway with multiple exits, you can make it harder for the astral mage to guess which exit you took.




Anything that stops LOS in the physical world also blocks it in the astral. In addition, glass is opaque, living people look a lot alike (they all look like neon glare). Rain, living people, lots of obstacles like a market with stalls - they all make stalking very hard. If you keep moving through this kind of terrain, eventually the mage is going to lose track.

Bonus trick: hide behind third-party Wards, since Wards are opaque on the astral plane. Banks and other prestigious, high-security semi-public spaces should be good for this. Take the rear exit because you know an employee and sneak off.

And so on. Escaping from being tailed involves passing through areas that make it hard to follow you for a few hours, until you've forced 10 difficult tracking checks on your pursuer and he's probably lost one of them.

@Ascalaphus

And there is much you can do about RFIDs. A low level signal jammer will work just fine. There are RFID erasers, there are spells dealing with those buggers. Hell, even a force 1 fireball will deal with this pest.


Check Streetmagic page 115

And remember Kids: Check the extended rules first, write posts later.


Ever lost a snail you were tracking? Even if somebody blocks your LOS from time to time it does not matter. You do not need to keep your distance, you do not need to care about running into people etc. pp. The only way is running through a ward. and even those only are a problem, if they are really strong and really big or very many of them.

The problem is: If it is more than one mage or he is connected vie Mind-net...
And he can manifest at any choosen time to call attention to you.

Again: I am not saying it is impossible to loose one single mage. That is possible if you did a lot of planning. Two mages get much harder, and so on.
RFID are easy to deal with. Every player can carry a jammer and an RFID remover.
Microdrones following you, do suck, no question here.

Satellites are a problem two, but go inside somewhere, where a lot of people leave. And you are out of trouble.
Yes, image quality will get better but there a physical limits on what you can "see" several kilometers away.
At time it is guessed that the US military has a resolution of 5 cm. If if this is doubled or even ten times higher in SR... It won't be enough for facial recognition.
(And I do not even can say for sure, that 10 times higher resolution for light is even possible. At some point you just run out of photons...)

The point is that you have to push through the Earth, quite slowly. I do think you're underestimating the possible difficulties of astral chasing. It certainly can be effective, yes; no need to exaggerate.

@Yerameyahu
The problem is, even if you have to follow given path, you are still faster than anything short of a super-sonic aircraft.

Yes, there are difficulites. But those mostly involve other corps facilities.
The question beeing would be, what the policy between those two corps is like.

The problem is:
You can't outrun them.
You can't fight them.
There are very few places, where they can't follow. And those places have a very high chance of beeing deadly anyway.

@Irion: I disagree with almost everything you wrote, but going through it line-by-line is tiresome and leads to bad writing, so I'm not going to.

In general, I think you overestimate how easy magical methods will be to use and then dismiss mundane methods too quickly. I also disagree with the amount of mages available; I think that there's not enough to mages to spare for defending against mundane threats on any big scale: every mage chasing mundanes isn't at full alert if a magical attack happens.

It seems to me that you interpret magic too liberally, overlook difficulties incurred in magic use, and then turn around and complain that the game is broken because magic is too strong.

I do believe that magic is very strong, but that it's important to rigorously enforce it's limitations before going on a rant about MagicRun. I think that many horror scenarios that occur in theory, don't occur in practice. Meanwhile, I feel that technology is underestimated.




You should read more closely then instead of being smug. That test takes 30 minutes per roll. Which means that as soon as the enemy mage tries to go through the ground, he's lost you. (If you can't disappear with a 30 minute lead, you suck.)




You realize you changed my "gait analysis" into "facial recognition", did you notice?

Anyway, for gait analysis, 5cm is generous, and for facial recognition, 1cm should be more than sufficient too. Satellite/computer image analysis is also faster than a mage watching a crowd. If a mage can find someone he lost in a crowd (as you claim), the computer would also be capable, and would be better at it. The satellite wouldn't have any trouble with a crowd leaving a building, not as much as the mage at any rate.

Resolution can be increased, but orbital speed and revisit time cannot. The exact revisit rate depends on the altitude, but it's around 15 days for a satellite in low-orbit. That is, a sattellite fly over the same area every 15 days, at 28,000 km/h. Thanks to rotating camera, a satellite can actually take picture of the same place every three days or so, but the higher the angle, the more obstacle in the field of vision (especially in a dense urban environment). A permanent, real-time, coverage would require thousands of satellite. Satellite can bring formidable intelligence, but you don't get to choose the time. Unless in an Hollywood movie.

Sure it does. It proves tons. Any of the other methods of tracking a PC has a chance to be detected and countered by any member of the team. Astral shadowing can only be countered by mages. The fact that there was a mage on the team made me feel obliged to include a magical response and as a result the entire team died. They did know the possibility. The mage checked and didn't find anything. I asked them what they were going to do about a dozen times after they got to their safehouse and they started taking long term actions -- stuff that would take 15+ minutes. They didn't take any additional precautions.

I guess I wasn't clear enough when I said "provoked a security response including an astral mage." Hard to lose oneself in a crowd of biomass when you are already fleeing in the physical realm -- you kind of stand out. I guess I definitely did not say it was a vehicular chase but thought that might have been implied in the "clean getaway to the Barrens." Sorry, I guess?

RFID: you need to find a way to plant it on them, not plausible in this case (although they checked as soon as the got to the Barrens), they also switched off all their signals as soon as the got to the Barrens so RFID couldn't "leap frog", also counterable by anyone with the gear and/or the skills

Spy satellites: not implausible, but heavy handed, this situation didn't call for it, also everything that works against Astral works better against this, plus hackers can counter (hmm...why is pursuit getting pictures from a satellite?)

Tunnel: so every tunnel has BGC?, I guess you could call for a Local Area Knowledge check which none of these PCs had, hacker didn't think to cross reference chase route with brutal hobo murder tunnels which still has no guarantee of BGC

Ork Underground: not a great place to go while in pursuit, also not a smart idea to go there when you don't know anybody, 2 strikes against this group, granted it could work if you had contacts and knowledge

Look at how much thinking and world mastery you had to go through just to counteract one mage who only had to think so hard as "derp, can I follow them astrally? derp derp!"

@Ascalaphus

Well, facial recognition is sub-milimeter today...
Make the test. Get some glasses so that it blurs your vision. If you do it to the point where you can't pinpoint a dot to the centimeter, I guess you would not even recognize your own mother.
Just think of you having a one centimeter longer nose, one centimeter shorter mouth... You see the problem?
Those things messure the distance between the nose and the mouth or the distance between the eyes. Do you think you can go with data of "the distance between his eyes is between 2.5 and 3.5 centimeters".

The same problems apply for gait analysis. Think of you just beeing one centimeter taller, shorter... (And this will be your best possible result, meaning you will have other sources of error like light, shadows, angle, expressions etc.)
A lot of handwaving and it maybe a resolution of 2mm for facial recognition and 8mm for gait analysis. (And I guess like that you may just narrow it down to 1-10% of the worlds population)


And of course beeing mundane you may just pass through earth?
Well, and even if you loose them. A summon up a force 5 spirit with the search power and find them again.
(And here you managed to collapse a tunnel behind you, before the mage could get through, while he is able to move with 1000m/s. Or how else do you get earth between you and the mage?)

The point is not, that a mage is super strong. The point is, that a mage carrys a lot of the tools of his trade by definition.
Technology is quite limited here. (Which is GOOD, because if it were not like that, it WOULD HURT MUNDANE EVEN MORE. Why? Because they can't just laugh at facial recognition and turn into a rat)
You may use RFID but there are countermessures. Yes, if you do not counter them, you will be in trouble.
Even a satellite is quite restricted in what it does and what not. If you are under ground, there is not much it can do. If you leave in a crowed, there is not much it can do. (Yes, you might need to change cloth... Which is very hard in SR...

And I do not even want to go into what some spells are able to do. (Find Person(extended Range))

The solution to this problems are all quite easy:
Make astral projecting not just a complex action, but let it take 5 min or even make it an extended test.
->Magical response teams start to have a response time, too.
Limit the possibility to summon spirits. Increase duration to summon them or increase the dicepool of spirits to resist
->No "spirit dropping", No "I have all my tool right here"


Of course they do not appear in practice, because you just let the NPC-mages act stupid. Thats always the first solution to problems with the rules a GM can use.
Does not make the rules good? The power of NPCs in general never poses a problem, because it is always limited by the GM.
The problem with it is just, that to limit the usefullness of the mage you will have to spawn mages now everywhere.

This SoyBurger is guarded by 3 Ex-Lonestar officers and a mage... This garbage bin is guarded by 4 hobos and a hobo-mage...
Yes, I know that hackers are even worse. But you can make physical presence nessesary for hacking. But the "no wire rule" is also very, very stupid.

The problem is quite easy, if you brake it down:
->Mages have no problems with mundane only security. (Because they can bring all their toys)
->Magical response teams have a very low response time.
What does this mean?
And easy and credible way to challange the mage and stop him from doing it alone is a bound spirit guarding the place. But, as soon as the spirit spots an attack, it informs the mage.
And this mage can use this information to show up with his buddys in 4-5 combat rounds.(->TeamWipeOut)

Again: The problem is not that mages are Conan the Babarian (crushing any opposition alone), the problem is that they are MacGyver (having just the right tool at the right moment).

This seems to address Cheops' last point: magic *is* great. Ascalaphus' point was just that it's not the only option, nor unstoppable.

Let's focus on that actual point, instead of getting bogged down fighting about the extremes (again). Even without being absolute and 'monopolist', *I* still find the edge too large. It doesn't have to be absolute to be problematic. In this case, as I said earlier, it seems to me that the 'world's response' (here, runner tactics) aren't really tuned strongly against magic (here, astral pursuit), which makes it even more effective. There *are* countermeasures, but they're just rare, more difficult, or (per Cheops) require more expertise.

Literally slowing the mages down (or rather, speedbumping them) is interesting, Irion. Hmm.