I'm not sure I want to slow down entering astral projection too much, because I also like the option of pursuing an astral intruder that you've caught red-handed.

As for dropping in spirits, that could be easy to fix: claim that spirits can only Materialize within LOS of your meat body. It does mess up distant jobs a bit, but there's probably a workaround for that too. Maybe insist that this requires a short ritual to set up?

I'm fine with the idea that summoning anything big takes more than an action

---

As for the Toolbox argument. I don't think it's as terrible as other people think, because although there's more than a hundred spells, the amount of spells you get to learn is still limited. Even so, I'd like to limit the "no-gear" situation a bit.

I think Fetishes are the answer. Currently they're an optional way to cut costs; I'd like to make them the standard. Give the mage a bag of junk to haul around, which makes him somewhat conspicuous. Just like there are guns that can bypass most scanners, there'll be fetishes that are easier to smuggle, but in general mages need to worry about checkpoints too.

Learning to cast without fetishes should be possible. As a baseline, raise the Drain of casting without fetishes, but allow Metamagics to eventually no longer need fetishes.

Also, make a list of fetishes per Tradition. Give each Tradition about 10-20 fetishes that the Tradition normally uses. These should overlap a bit between similar Traditions (Hermetic and Black, Shinto and Wuxing), but not entirely. This makes magic less sterile and allows for plot elements and detective work.

Sounds plausible.

Your snail analogy is a complete strawman arguement - try tracking that snail as it goes through a "snail downtown" with thousands of snails crawling past each other, all with similar patterned shells and you are closer to the truth. As Ascalaphus said, go into a public warded area with a number of exits (such as a bank) and you have a reasonable chance of shaking an astral tail - the pursuer can't follow you in without breaching the ward and getting accosted by the bank's astral security, and can't watch every exit in enough detail to catch you coming out. Repeat a number of times and you can be fairly certain of having shaken your astral tail.

As to satelite surveillance, facial recognition and other technological ways to tail somebody, commanding satelite feeds costs money even if a satelite happens to be available to track the target in the first place. Facial recognition can be thwarted by sunglasses, put on a different pair and you're good to go. Microdrones can be tricky, but again there are areas they cannot get into (again, banks for security reasons should have a "No Drones!" policy), and tricks like running into elevators or trains as the doors are about to close should allow the precautious runner to shake their tail.

As far as I am concerned, most shadow runners worth their names will know IC how to take such precautions to shake potential tails and make sure they get clean away after a run as a matter of course, even if the players running them do not, else they would already be long dead, but YMMV.

Maybe I'm missing something.

In all the arguments here that posit that mages are too powerful, have too large a 'toolkit', I don't see any mention of the fact that all those cool things a mage can do require a Test, failure in which can at best miss/lose the target and at worst knock the mage on his keester: Drain on Spellcasting, Drain on Summoning, getting lost while IN the Earth, etc. No such problem exists for the mundane.

Sure, a bit of min-maxing can reduce the likelihood in many of those Tests that harm will ensue, but throw in a tiny bit of background count, or a bit of interference and some of those trivial Tests become troublesome or even deadly.

It's true that 'well-built' mages tend to avoid or mitigate most drain; that's one of the main issues. BGC has been covered a lot already, but the key issue with Drain is that it's *meant* to be limiting, but often fails at this job.

@Midas

So you just ignore it. Well, lets think of what I have said early... Yes, that was exactly MY POINT.
You have no Problem as long as you, as a GM, ignore it. But is this really an argument for good rules?

Cheops gave one example of what happens if you just let the opposition act a bit intelligent. Till now, there was nothing given what the runners could have done, outside of very "special" approaches. Like excaping through the orc underground, which only works if your job was near the orc underground.

Wards help a bit, as long as the Ward is 5++ and the mage does not have permission to go through it. (Which in the case of a contracted response team is not that unlikely.)
And the next problem is, that wards are not really that huge to begin with. Maybe a 10m Radius.


Nothing stops him from manifesting in front of the bank and scream: Terrorists!
What would you do if a cop would do something like that in your bank?
And yes, I think they know how to identify thereselfs. Magic has been around for a while.

Stop thinking of NPCs who act like AI-Enemys from games in the 90s. Imagine them to act like a PC would act!

Irion, you make a lot of assumptions. I do not ignore the potential for astral or drone pursuit, although after the first corp run I figured I would give my players some friendly advice that I thought their characters should know. Now their SOP is for the mage to check for and counter astral pursuit as they leave the scene while the hacker/rigger puts the boosted car on autopilot to check for signals of any drone pursuit. After the team drop the boosted car off at the chop shop (assuming the hacker's contact wants the car, there are times he doesn't or the car gets too hot in which case they dump it outside a subway station). Each PC has a set way for getting back to their respective pads, and a group way to get to a team safehouse for the times they opt for safety in numbers. For the mage and sam these involve a few cab rides to malls and the like and a few quick changes in public facilities, for the hacker it involves a bike ride with morphing licence plates, tunnels and parking garages. Cheops is free to run his game as he sees fit, but I choose to give my players basic advice I believe their characters will have. Of course, if they ignore or forget this advice there will be consequences.

I am not sure where you get the idea that wards are so small, I would imagine most banks would be warded and coated in wifi inhibiting paint to protect customer data and prevent identity theft. The astral pursuer will almost certainly not have permission to enter the ward (even if it belongs to the same megacorp, have the pursuers really had time to notify all the corp assets that this mage is pursuing legitimate corp targets, and has every single public corp asset read that email?), so forcing through the ward means losing the target while explaining yourself to the bank's astral security.

Materializing and screaming "Terrorists!" in front of a bank is probably your best way yet to lose the targets. The mass panic you have just created will give your target ample cover to escape, and you will likely be taken down by astral security/concerned citizens and charged with wasting police time for your troubles.

Mostly from steet magic...

Of course there is the possibility to get the job done by several mages, I think they may add their attributes together for a wider area.
So lets take 10 mages and all with a magic attribute of 10. Thats 10*10*50=5000m³
Lets assume the normal half globe form.
V=2/3*pi* r³
So lets to some calculations and we end up with an radius of: 13.3m
Well, that is huge....


Here again the magic rules, make you wrong. I have to grant access at the moment I build up the ward.
What does this means? If I want them to be able to help me, I have to grant them access or they will stay outside the ward, while the shadowrunners butcher my employees and rob me.
What does this mean? The security of the place has to be that high, that it operates as a stand alone. So you are running with "hot" data in a place with probably even higher security than the place you just robbed.
And now with this "so high" security, it is to hope that they do not have a mage on astral, which is putting one and one together.

I am not saying there are no possibilities to shake astral tails, even without going astral. But it gets much harder if you have several guys following you.
And it is not like they do not have any possibility to slow you down, for example summoning a spirit.
Yes, if you plan ahead and have one of your own wards in a chocking point... the best possibility would be an alarm ward, which will be holding the following mages.
(Or at least one of them an block the way for the rest)
But thats a lof of preparation and a lot can go wrong. (The "holding" ward, may lead you to kill some kiddy mage)

Yeah, if you do this as civilian. But I guess a civilian won't be hunting you. This will be probably guys from Lonestar, which have contracts with the bank, too.
So I guess they are able to comunicate their problem... (Worst, one mage has to report back to base...)


If I did understand Cheops correctly, he did not have a mage to take care of the fist step....
This is what I am saying the whole time. You need to get astral superiority, or you have a problem.
To everything there is a counter in SR. But magic can only be countered by "more magic".

I'm curious, exactly how does an Astral Mage take out a runner team? Okay he can summon a spirit and send it in after them but that's about it an while spirits are difficult to drop they are not impossible to do so. Now this question is born of SR4 ignorance, so mayb th answers are simple.

Also locating a team on the astral is fine, but it always used to take some effort to align that location to the physical, due to th way non living matter is indistinct.

@Moirdryd
It burns down to the question on how well you know your surroundings.
But yes, spirits are one way. Mostly it is the possibility to attack without the risk of beeing attacked.

Yes, it is not that big of a deal to deal with one mage on the astral plane, who might just drop one or two force 5 spirits.
But two mages who drop one force 7 spirit each? This thing will win the suprise attack, it will grill your same with 7++ damage. And this twice.
The thing with mundane guns is, that you just can keep your head down. Run in the other direction, close the door behind you etc.pp. A spirit is not limited to follow you, he does not need to break down the door. As soons as they get the "most powerful shooter" down, the rest will probably not even have a possibility to harm them.
The face won't have a move by wire 3, the hacker might not have a reaction of 9 etc.pp.
To need two nethits in order to hurt something is not that easy, if you do not have an optimized pool.
Sure, If you do, it won't be a problem anymore. But an optimized mage might just drop an force 9 spirit on your head. (On avarage 6 Points of drain)

Again it is not about "MUHAHAHA MY MAGE CAN KILL EVERYTHING".

It is more about, a look at the sample characters and a thought about which one can be a threat for runners.The ecoshamen, if astral, is kind of a threat to PCs (if they do not have any mages) the samurai is mostly just annoying. Even if noone of the team is a great shot, they will be able to deal with the sam.

Yes, as a GM you can tone down. But this option is always there, in any kind of RPG.

Double-check that. I haven't gotten out any paper, but my eyeball says that should be closer to 29.

[edit: Come to think of it, if one guy with a Magic of 6 makes a cubic ward, its edges are only going to be 6.7 meters, or about 22 feet; a half-sphere would be 10.5 meters in diameter, or about 34 feet. So one pretty decent mage would quite likely need more than one ward just to cover their own house. There's a building near me with an internal volume of about 335,000 cubic meters; to ward it would require 6,750 points of magic rating, or the labor of 10 mages with Magic of 10 making 68 wards. The Pentagon would be something more like 2 million cubic meters, and would require the Team of Tens to make more like 400 wards. They get overtime when Boeing in Everett calls: it's 13.3 million cubic meters, or about 2,660 wards. And when CenturyLink called about putting a domed ward over CenturyLink Field in downtown Seattle, they all quit: the requisite 6,546 wards was just too much to contemplate, even for this plucky team of 10 people with a Magic of 10.]

Yeah I run fairly old school where there is such a thing as Player Experience in addition to Character Experience. When I was running Shadowrun at my university club I'd usually have to turn players away because it was more popular than I had spaces available. Everyone enjoyed the challenge and the satisfaction of "beating" me. It does require a bit of extra work because I have to make sure that my world is always run consistently from session to session or that up-front I tell them of any changes. Its part of why SR4 is so frustrating to me because it is a wildly inconsistent setting and horrible, horrible rules-to-setting problems (awakened and mundane) -- it requires more work to run than previous editions.

One thing I would do frequently however is remind players to look at their Knowledge Skills and contacts and find a way to apply them to the current situation. If they gave me a good enough reason I'd let it fly (one guy did come up with a successful plan due to his knowledge of Elven Wines). Players, especially new ones, tended to forget these parts of their character sheets and not use them.

The group in my example earlier was fairly experienced but for some reason just decided to turn their brains off. We'd just finished Brainscan the term prior so I think there was a bit of hangover from that.

I'd force the Metamagic to be per spell category like foci. Otherwise it gets a little too easy for mages.

I do like this solution especially since it reinforces the Talismonger relationship. Often mages just take the contact like a character creation task and then never talk to the guy again (except maybe for help in locating an initiatory group).

@3278

Ah, 29 would correspond to a Volume of 51080 m³, so your eyeball was off by the factor of 10. Not bad for an eyeball anyway.
But yes, my guts also tell me that it is wrong. But my brain knows, that human guts have a lot of problems thinking in 3-Dimensions and those numbers get big really fast.

But if you want to eyeball it: Even r=10m would be, for pi=3, around 2000 m³, so it does not seem to be off.#


And what do you do, if you can't do it right? You cheat.
Warding the pentagon, the economical approach.
You build one ward for all the external wall.
Each of the outside walls is around 277m in length and lets make this ward one meter (less is not allowed to prevent what we are doing) in depth and 20m high (I think it has 5 floors above ground).
This would translate into around 5.500 m³ per wall.
The roof would be around 135000 m³ (So nobody can just fly above the walls). The best part about that: High security areas can be warded additionally.
In the matter of mages it is actually not really a problem. Take 100 mages with M 6, each with just one summoned Spirit M6 and you can build up 60.000 in one instance. The roof needs to be build with several wards in any way, I guess.
On the plus side you would roll around (willpower 4) 740 dice for the duration. (If you build the walls with only 20 mages each it would still be 153,3 )
So the walls would "last" for 51 weeks, 357 days, so around one year...

That's not really "old school" so much as just a different way of doing it. People have been GMing both ways, and across the spectrum between and beyond, since the beginning of roleplaying. I'm not disrespecting it - it's my way, too - but calling it "old school" is both inaccurate, and sounds kind of pompous, "old school" usually being code for "the way we did it before you newbies ruined everything."

Trust me: when it comes to being old school and pompous about it, I yield to no man. ;)

50,000 is what I was doing the calculation for; sorry, misread your value.


Yeah, I don't really have a problem so much with that, but I have to do it a lot more than most people. The surprising thing for me is how this effects the utility of wards. They really have to be used very opportunistically, and cannot realistically be used to cover entire buildings, facilities, or campuses. [I don't know if you saw my ninja edit up there about volumes.]

Keep in mind that by raw, a spirit summoned on the astral would need to take a complex action to manifest so it would not get its suprise attack. If the runners are unaware, and if the tracking mage is smart he'll just send a watcher to HQ to deliver the message that the runners are here. Send in the HRT and then the runners go down quickly.

Wait, 'old school' means 'metagaming, bad roleplaying, and beat-the-GM'?

I dunno, I think that might take a bit too long, 5 metamagics seems excessive. Consider that if you want to conceal your magic, you'll also be seeking to buy Masking and perhaps Extended Masking.

Maybe a reasonable compromise is that you can cast one category without fetishes per Initiation Grade?

---

Anyway, I want to clarify my position on Toolbox. I don't think it's bad that mages are a Toolbox. I don't think every "class" should be the same, I like the idea that mages need fewer tools, and different tools than other people (fetishes instead of screwdrivers). It's good that different "classes" are unequally good at various things, too much forced equality gets stupid too.

But to a limit: I like "different/fewer" tools, but not so much "no tools". Hence why I like making fetishes more necessary.

Casting without fetishes shouldn't be impossible either; either if you're in the Psionic tradition and think it's a sign of weakness, or if you need to infiltrate a hostile base. But there should be a quite painful penalty; maybe if you cast without fetishes your effective Magic is reduced by 1? I think mages will feel that one.

@3278

This actually hit me as I realised I missread m³ for m²...


I did, I edited my post with the part about the pentagon and how you may ward it. Actually this way of warding is described in RC.
(This is actually quite interesting, because it means there may be "holes" in the wards for shadowrunner to get past.)

But yes, it means in general, that there will be A LOT of Wards.
Think of the one asshole going to the pentagon and marching with one sustained spell through wards, annoying the crap out of around 50 mages.
I think you should be able to choose if the ward alarms you or not. If it does it should be a bit more complex to build. But all those: Keep pests out wards, should not really start annoying you, unless down.

Imagin you were part of a project to build a wardwall to keep gouhls out of a city. Now hundreds of guhls are clawing at your wards. How does this feel? Is it like an annoying voice telling you "Your ward is under attack"...
Or even worse, school is out and all the awakend kids with all there new foci and their silly spells star walking through the wards you but up around buildings...

Tell me if the ward falis and leave me alone if it holds up would be such an better way of handeling standart wards. (Espacially when the "standart" wagemage in this sector will be connected to around 30 to 60 wards...

We don't know that it's annoying, distracting, etc., but that would be a funny possibility.

So, it still takes time to manifest. Where I play a manifestation and physical action is a Service (sr3) to switch between planes ect burns up more services. How does that translate across.

Also, yes you can send a watcher to HQ but you still have to identify the location for physical response, easier said than done when viewing the world Astrally.

Anyway, am I right that everyone dislikes mages dropping in spirits from astral projection to Materialize against hapless enemies?

In D&D they've got Scry 'n Fry to complain about, that doesn't happen in SR due to no teleporting, but this is roughly as abusive.

I think the house rule could be simple: spirits only Materialize within LOS of your meat body. That limits Remote Services, but screw that, spirits are still good enough if RS gets a bit weaker.

Yeah, for some types of buildings this produces massive economies; for others the returns are much lesser. [Basically, the more a building is like a cube, the more you're going to get out of this technique.]


And the floor. Astral travel through the Earth is still allowed, just slowed, in SR4, correct?


That seems like a problem right there. So 100 people would have the keys to the Pentagon's astral defenses? If one of those guys went missing, 1/100th of the wards are now unmonitored? And where are we getting all these mages!? I guess it all depends on how you value the Mage Equation, but teams of 100 mages with a Magic of 6, or teams of 10 guys with a Magic of 10, don't seem common enough to me to defend all the high-value targets people seem to think wards will be protecting. Wards have been a major component of a lot of people's "beat the mage" tactics, but I don't see realistically how they could possibly be deployed in the scale some people are positing.

[edit: Out of curiosity, why wards at all? For most facilities, wouldn't the various kinds of living wall be a superior option? Ivy's cheap as hell.]

Moirdroyd, do you mean Materialize?

Don't watchers have GPS?

--
I dunno, Ascalaphus; that would certainly fix the problem, but is it overkill? It's always tricky. Would reducing the number of spirits a mage can have ready help, or just encourage One Big Spirit?

--
Should wards be overhauled a bit, then? In some ways, they're too strong, but in others, quite limited. They're currently 'free', but time-consuming. They barely seem capable of their primary function (warding buildings); they're better at single small rooms.

@3278

You will probably die in the process. Magic + Charisma (meters, 30 minutes).
Well, you might need to go 1 meter deep in the ground and you need around 6 hits in and 6 hits out. Go 3 meters down and you need 8 in and 8 out, 4 meters deep would be around 10 etc.


Thats not quite clear. It could be that all people creating the ward will have a connection. So no ward will be unmonitored. But there are hundred keys to the pentaton on earth and 100 more on the metaplanes.

Wow didn't realize that "old-school" was such a loaded term with you guys.

I was using it to refer to the fact that I use a method that isn't taught in GM advice sections much anymore. It's the way I learned back in 1990 with my AD&D 2nd edition DMG (at the tender and impressionable age of 10) and was using it to imply a large out-moded way of playing TTRPGs.

Sort of like how you rarely see a Catholic mass in Latin anymore -- old school style.

But lets drop that and get back on track:

--------------

Scry and Fly is definitely an issue in SR. Clairvoyance and Levitate are spells too! And potentially far more troublesome for inexperienced GMs than Stunbolt. There's also that pesky Search power.

I don't see much of a need to limit dropping materialized spirits on someone. If that trick works then so does Ritual Magic and likely Missiles/Mortars (both of which are viable weapons for Riggers). Straight up combat potential isn't really the issue with mages (it is but not the main issue). Flexibility and lack of appropriate defenses is an issue.

This thread has had some good solutions to that and many that I thought were common knowledge (MSS for example). It seems more and more that some sort of new version of a security systems book should be in order. Tips and tricks for GMs to use for security set ups, advice for players on how to get around that and how all the different roles fit in (including the socially hamstrung gun-bunny sam), and some example security set ups.

I was just going off your description, no loading. Don't worry, it's just some teasing.

That's 'Scry and *Fry*'.

Missiles and mortars aren't 'viable'. They're 'theoretically possible'.

If you use the quote function, it's easier for us to see which post and poster you're replying to.


I'm not sure I follow. If the 1 meter thick wall extends a meter into the Earth, the astral intruder would need to traverse about 3 meters to get in, correct? One meter down, one meter over, one meter up. [Presuming that the ward can even exist within the astral form of the Earth, which seems dubious to me.] So 3 meters to get in, meaning 3 hits on a Magic + Charisma test. Since we're assuming people with attributes of things like 6 and 10, it's not unreasonable to assume the intruder has 12 dice for this test, and can swim through in under half an hour. If the ward penetrated 10 meters into the earth, you're looking at 21 meters of astral swimming, meaning 21 successes, meaning a little over four hours. Sounds to me like a "floor" is probably a better option.


So you're still talking about cooperative production, then? All 100 guys will cooperate to build each necessary wall?

Depends on how you handle extended tests... So if you need around 20 hits, you will probably die, if your pool is decreased.
And I would go with wall length x 2+2, because your astral form has a size too.
Lets use 12 dice
Number/dice/average hits
1. 12:4
2. 11:4
3: 10:3
4: 9:3(total 14 hits 6 meters )
5: 8:3
6: 7:2 (total 19 hits 8 meters )
7: 6:2
9: 5:2 (10 meters)
10: 4:1
11: 3:1(11meters)
12: 2:1(very high chance of critical faluire)
So 12m will get be safe so against force 6 charisma 6 mages.
The point is, it is much easier to build than dig one additional floor down and use it as warding area.
And the floor is also not an optimal solution, because you could just tunnel through the wall in one of the subterranean floors.
So keep an distance from the wall to the subterranean floors. And maybe ward some of them.

The question is how big astral forms are. If they are very small, they will fit through holes in the "walls" anyway...

Wait, are we saying wards don't have floors? I feel like they do, did I misread? Going through the earth (*very* slowly) wouldn't help.

This is only a problem if you use the optional rule of diminishing dice pools for extended tests. This should only be used if there is a question whether the character can succeed in time, not to eliminate the possibility of success.

Also with a good Assensing+INT pool you are better off stopping after each 30 min and just start again. So even with the rule you can goo through any stretch of earth. It will just be slow.

Yes, wards do have floors. They need to be constructed as simple geometric shapes like spheres or cubes.

@Dakka Dakka


Where do you get that from? It would make sense the other way around...

@Yerameyahu
They have. But you enclose a space you need at least 6 Wards to do the job. And the last ward has to be placed on the "floor".

Irion, that doesn't make any sense. Wards aren't flat panels. :/ Are you hypothesizing a new and different warding method?

Yeah, I'd never use the diminishing dicepool for something like that. If you want to model fatigue, use Fatigue.

Woops I have misread. Those are two distinct problems. Still it is very arbitrary when to use the roll and when not to.Additionally it does not eliminate the possibility for stopping and continuing. The rules even suggest using that to break down a large oeuvre into smaller tasks.


Huh?
If you needed 6 wards to create a warded cube those wards could not be three dimensional and would not have a volume >0.
Street Magic is even explicit:
Strange though that domes (unless they have a floor) and rectangles are not three dimensional.

Let me nip this in the bud: Irion's not talking about making one big cube ward, he's talking about enclosing a large area in multiple wards. Six [or more, depending on the need] planes, each one meter thick, joining to form one much larger area.

Rectangles was probably supposed to be pyramids. There are plenty of places in the books where the wrong word is used.

@Dakka Dakka+Yerameyahu
There is a text about warding in the runners companion, which eloborates what I am doing.
The idea is to use "Wards" as 1 meter thick wall, to guard a place.
You may enclose it in a cube:
One above, one below and one for each point of the compass.

@Dakka Dakka

I do not need, I just do because if you ward the entire ara will will probably need a million mages.

Again if you have to ward an area of 100m x 100m x 40m (For example a large office building) you have two possibilities:
First: Ward it with one ward. It would have a Volume of 400.000 m³.
This means you would need 800 mages with magic 10 to pull this stunt. (Yes, they may be replaced with spirits)
Now lets do this with 6 Wards.
4*101m*1m*42m= 16968m³ (Only 9 mages for each ward)
2*100m*100m*1m= 20.000 m³ ( 20 mages for one ward)

Since every additional mage will only increase the duration of the word for (Willpower shall be 5) for 1.6 weeks... (First mage 5 weeks)
(And I do not even know if there any restriction in place on how many mages may participate in a warding ritual)
But I guess it is obvious, that getting 100 mages in one place to do a ritual is quite out of question...


So, yes it was the other way around.
The question here is, if pressing through soil is just a matter of time or more a success thing.
I thought of the modifier due to the mentioning of dissorientation. But yes, you can leave it out.
This would than cause the problem, that "earth" is not really limiting astral projection.
A speed of 4 meters per 30 minutes is not that slow...
But still 10 meters down and than 10 meters up and find a spot without ward will take a few hours.

Ah OK. 50m²*1m*MAG should be enough for almost every doorway. Walls can be covered with GlowMoss.

The diminishing die pool is, in my opinion, for cases in which a character's lack of training or ability would make it impossible to complete the task, no matter how long it took. It's to prevent a guy with a die pool of 2 from eventually building a working computer in his garage, not to prevent the passage of astral bodies. You may rule differently.


Only if you use the diminishing die pool. Otherwise, 12 dice nets you an average of 4 meters every half-hour, or 8 meters an hour. Put another way, it's two-thirds your die pool in meters per hour.


I'm not sure what you mean, but yes, it definitely seems like, rather than using four deep walls and a roof, you'd want to just use four walls, a roof, and a floor. [Assuming a cub-ish sort of shape, of course.]


I don't understand what these three sentences mean well enough to respond to them.


Roughly the size of your physical body for astrally projecting mages, correct? And then proportionate to Force, I've always assumed, for spirits, although I'm not certain this is actually a rule.

Numbers only inflate volume, and won't increase duration beyond a certain point. Where are you getting the 1.6 weeks from for each additional 5-Willpower mage?



So, all the members of the Team of Fives have 5 for all their attributes and skills, and there are 5 of them. Uno is the primary character, and Dos, Tres, Cuatro, and Cinco are helping: they each roll Magic + Willpower [10], for a total die pool of 40, about 13 of which will be hits. But only 5 of those - Uno's skill - count. So Uno adds their five to his pool [for a total of 15], and gets 5 hits. Am I missing something?

@3278

We were talking about warding the pentagon. The pentagon has subterranean levels.
So if you just ward everything above ground level (for example with one single ward), an intruder can still enter in the subterranean levels.
An other thing I do not quite get is how wards react with solid matter... Can I build a ward through solid matter?


Well, I do not know it.

Okay, so you *were* suggesting a new and different warding method… and then explaining how to get around it? I guess I just don't get the point. We already understand that wards are very limited in their applications.

While there's some debate about wards and their environment, I'm of the opinion that you could ward a volume of dirt within a large continuous volume of dirt, just as you can (arguably, see old threads) ward a volume of air out in the open. In both cases, though, you require anchors and probably at least one 'edge'; underground rocks should be good enough. If not, you'd have to warn all the underground walls.

I still say 4m/30min is exceedingly slow. In many cases, prohibitively so. It is faster than digging, sure.

Ah. Well, I would, yeah, ward the whole thing, above and below. You'd need to do this in any building with a basement you didn't want people in. I think it's fair to count an sub-levels as "building" for the sake of this conversation, wouldn't you?


To be honest, I was all gonna be like, "Whut? You are stoopid and I are a genius! Obviously--" and then I re-read the ward rules in SR4a, and I've got to say, I don't understand how they work at all now. Mostly because I'm not clear what they mean by, "A basic ward must be placed on a non-living thing (walls, rocks, and so on)." What? How? If it can't be 3-dimensionally complex, how could I ward, say, my house? If I'm warding a room, can I not ward the doors, because they're not part of the wall I'm placing the ward on? Is this one of those times where my book is wrong, and they've subsequently written it out?

I'd assumed wards worked like barrier spells [...in previous versions, at any rate; maybe I'm doing those wrong in SR4, too!]: you pick a spot to cast it on [the "focal point" object, in the case of a ward] and the shape you want it to be [not too complicated or everything goes plotz], and that's that. This "on a non-living thing" business, I don't even know how that could work.

@Yerameyahu

Problem: How to build Wards for larger location to give them some general security. (Not be eaten by ghouls and stuff like that)
Solution: Just build wards around them. Of course some slippery astral form can tunnel through the earth or try to fit through some construction flaws. But it needs to know them and there won't be many.
But again to find those will take time and is again a group effort. (Finding people who might know and persuading them to tell you. It is not the mage using some dirty trick to do it alone.)



Depends. Actually with this way of building "layers" of wards it is impossible for the mage to just sneak in. You can just ward a hallway with a camera. In order to get through the ward the mage needs to drop invisibility/shapechange(probably even concealment but this is up to debate) and the camera can spot him.

So they offer a possibility to limit mages without having to resort to mages directly defending the installation.

The problem with it is, what to do if you spot them?
Physical security is not much of a problem, because the PC have time to abort the mission.
But why wouldn't they sent astral security. And they will be there really fast.
I have no problem with the players having to run afer beeing uncovered breaking in into a high security facility. But it just should not be an instant death sentance and it should not feel like you let them go. So the NPCs should play their cards well.

Yeah, 3278, you basically have to ignore part of the rules, cuz they're stupid. If you want, I can dig up the last thread we discussed this in great detail.

I don't think multiple spirits are the problem here, I don't hear about it often anyway. You need Binding to use multiple spirits at the same time, which costs money proportional to the spirits' power, and if you go overboard you'll turn a loss on adventuring.



I don't think you got my meaning with Scry 'n Fry. It involves scrying on your enemy to detect when he's vulnerable, then teleporting in (bypassing guards and alarm systems) with all your buff spells active, blasting him to death because he was asleep, not wearing his super armor, then teleporting out again.

This isn't really possible in SR (no teleportation, no meat body travel through the astral, no casting spells from the astral to the physical for mages). The only thing close to it is "dropping in" spirits to Materialize.




Ritual Magic is substantially more difficult and a lot slower; you either need a ritual sample (plot element, not a bad thing I think) or an astral spotter, but any ritual spellcasting takes a minimum of 1 hour (and usually closer to 6) per spell. Also, it's possible to detect the buildup of a ritual spell before it goes off, which gives you a chance to deal with the spotter.

Mortars and missiles suffer from A) very hard targeting rules, B) they can't magically travel through walls, solid walls might actually stop them.




Your main issue is flexibility. Other people are more upset about the combat side. Anyway, deciding if dropping in spirits is Too Much Combat or Too Much Flexibility strikes me as splitting hairs; I'm just convinced that it's abusive, and that it can be cut without too much pain.




I definitely think a Security Handbook is necessary. I've been trying to demonstrate that many "unstoppable" mage powers can be stopped with mundane means, even on a budget, but it requires creativity and forethought, and it can be very hard on a GM who's ambushed by a player mage with clever plans.

I wholeheartedly agree. If PCs run by players can be creative, so can NPCs run by the GM. Thousands of corporations and other concerns out there, all worried about magical intrusion, and one bright light comes along with a way to deal with problem X, you bet they will share or sell the solution at the next convention in Florida. Fifty plus years of that, and there won't be a whole lot the targets haven't thought of and found a way to counter.

Good pick up on the size of wards, although there is nothing in the rules to say a mage group of mages can't erect a cubic ward 1/2m thick for each wall, the floor and ceiling. That is certainly the way I am going to run things, else as other posters have said it would be impossible to ward things like the Pentagon or other areas much bigger than the size of a broom cupboard.

I would also imagine that in all that time since the awakening, some clever construction companies might have developed walls that utilize glo-moss or other living material inside that prevent entrance to astral entities.

Creating wards or using "living walls" would be expensive enough that it wouldn't be prevalent, but logically speaking without such possibilities in the game world, everywhere would be open to astral intrusion and as a result secrets would be absolutely impossible to keep ...

well, maybe they can sneak in astrally, but they cannot read the secrets if they are on a screen ^^