Absolutely! If you can engineer the circumstances, there are a number of ways a mundane could slow down an astral pursuer long enough to shake them. But these all seem predicated on engineering circumstances [and/or having a non-mundane to do the heavy lifting], which is definitely one of the questions I'm asking.

Well, it's true that improvising defense against a mage is quite hard.

Is that a bad thing though?

I mean, a PC team, when going to play in the pro leagues, can expect to run into mages now and then, and they should have a plan (or several) for dealing with those events. If you didn't plan your getaway well enough, there should be trouble.

So a PC plan for getaway should include the following:
* A test to notice if you're being trailed astrally.
* A way to shake off such pursuit.
* A test to make sure it's really shaken off.
* A plan if you can't shake it off - dealing with Drop-In spirits or the astral pursuer leading others to you.

If your team is all-mundane, or you're not certain that the mage is quite up to it alone, then it's harder than with a competent mage. But that seems okay to me; dealing with a hacker is harder without a hacker too, and stopping an enemy Sam from killing you is harder too if you don't have combat training.

It's way harder, but not impossible, and that's the important part.

@Ascalaphus

You want your escape route to lead you through a horde of critters with an very infectious condition, which also renders them quite wounderable to attacks from the astral?
Prey non of them has mass control thoughts or emotions or you are DEAD. Because the mages with a movementspeed of 1000m/s will get away. They might get one attack of opportunity if something like that even exists in the shadowrun system...

Thats the case with a lot of the stuff beeing mentioned here to fight mages. Mostly it is useless or jumping from icewater into the soup bowl.

As I said before, this is something that takes preparation.

Also, just because the mage moves fast, doesn't make him immune to Intercept actions by ghouls. If they do damage, he can't continue movement past them. And given the low priority traditionally given to Astral Combat (especially compared to ghoul melee attacks), that mage is DEAD.

I have no idea. I don't have a horse in the race, I was just checking out the runners.

1 is also the starting level of all other human attributes at character creation. When magic shows up at puberty, most teenagers probably still have a bunch of attributes at 2 or 1, below adult average. They'll nonetheless grow and develop, and possibly raise one attribute to 4 or 5, depending on their chosen career. When a teenager has a Gift to play football or basketball at a professional level, he'll be told to train endurance and speed. Awakened children will be taught just the same. Raise your Magic attribute and you can become a doctor or a marine, a federal agent or a scientist, and get paid three times more than your mundane colleague. There may be Awakened people who never get interested in magic (and money!), but then, they won't be doing birthday parties either, they'll move on that something else they want to do.

@Lansdren
Another possible broken build, depending upon your interpretation of the rules, to consider for reasons why mages are overpowered.

Mage
Magic 6- (100 Karma + 30 Karma for Magician quality)
Drain Attributes at 5- (140 Karma)
Spellcasting 6 (specialization healing)- (42 karma)
Decrease Attribute(WIL) (5 karma)
Control Thoughts (5 karma)
Spellcasting (healing) foci force 3 and sustaining (manipulation) foci force 2 (42 karma)

That should leave you with 382 karma to use as you see fit to round out your character however you like.

You can hit a target first with a decrease attribute (WIL) force 6.
An average target rolls WIL 3, so 0-2 hits can be expected. You roll 6 spellcasting + 2 spec + 3 foci + 6 magic = 18, so you can expect 5-7 hits (capped at 6 for spell force). The worse normal case is they get 2 hits you get 5, so three net hits. For most normal people you have them standing around mindlessly even on a bad case, with a WIL of 0. Your drain is 4 Resisted with 5 Willpower + 5 (other attribute) = 10, 2-3 hits, so you take 1-2 hits of stun damage (a fetish could be used here to decrease the drain and make it 0-1 or if you suspect their willpower is especially low and you have time you could lead with a force 5 and have to worry about only 3 drain if it's a big issue).
Then you cast Control Thoughts- 6 spellcasting - 2 sustaining + 6 magic = 10, so expect 2-4 hits and you only need 1 hit because they oppose you with 0 dice. You now have control of an individual and as long as you are sustaining the the decrease attribute spell, they don't have any chance of resisting. You can cast at force 1 so your drain is simply 2 and you resist with 10 again, so most of the time you suffer no stun damage from this.
Do this to a normal sam and now you have a killing machine as your puppet or a hacker if you need to get through somethings matrix security or just grab a random homeless guy and give him two grenades and make him pull the pins and run at the nearest lone star vehicle to make a distraction. That works great for getting information, getting through security (wards become a problem, but nothings perfect), fighting, making an escape, and basically any time you want a skill set of a specialist that could not be expected to have an especially high Willpower.

Even an exceptional individual rolls WIL 5-6, so 1-3 hits can be expected against your 5-7 hits. This means if they roll well you might have to take two tries to completely mindblank them, but if you're doing it from a safe distance does it really matter? You will eventually have a puppet that can't resist your control.

Now the actual utility of this depends upon how you interpret LOS, do you need to maintain LOS to sustain a spell such as control actions? (if you do it brings up irritating questions about blinking, etc.) And how much of a persons skills the GM lets them retain when they're controlled. And also if you let someone that is "standing around mindlessly" have their thoughts controlled.

(Yes, I realize that most GM's would throw this out in a heartbeat or decide that the individual resists you with edge, but it's still RAW legal and it can get worse once you start working in mentor spirits, fetishes, and loads of other tweaks I'm sure that DS can supply)

It's even quite easy to think of a backstory for this guy or girl as a criminal. A cruel manipulative individual with meglomaniac type tendencies who sees other people as mere play things. They awaken and immediately set out to learn control thoughts, so that they can better control other people, but the control doesn't last long enough, people keep slipping out of their control. So they find ways to better suppress others Willpower, first they probably experimented with drugging individuals before taking control, but this didn't last long enough and the results were too unreliable. So they studied the decrease attribute spell to magically suppress other people's Willpower and acquired the tools necessary to do so better, until they could get it to work reliably. Now they live a comfortable life in the barrens, using people easily for their own personal gain. Grabbing a servant from the street when they need one. Having any woman or man they want from a bar (or more likely from an alley as the person is leaving a bar by themselves). But there are still some it's difficult to control, so they lower themselves to doing jobs for other people to gather the money and connections they need to get better foci and more control. I chose not to give this character fetishes, because I don't see them as the type of to carry them, so even making a few roleplay decisions you still end up with a puppet master.

What you just described is a very nice bad guy for a scenario.

As a workable character I'm not so sure.

The build is interesting but you would be caught out by alot of normal magical security the first time you send your drone as it were into a warded building theres a chance it would all fall apart. Plus things like astral signatures are a much bigger issue for him as he wouldnt be there to cancel them out most of the time.

In one area (which by fluff is seen as one of the most terrible uses of magic) you have something scary enough to be on the nightly news

But its not the mage who can do anything and take away from the group which is what some of the feeling I've been getting from this thread that a awakend character would out pace their mundane team mates and make them almost worthless cause the mage can do everything.


But I like the idea as a big bad

You neglected to factor in that the spell you described has a range of T. That reduces the effectiveness of the spell since most magicians aren't exactly masters of touch-fu. Factor in that any target with a Wil of 3-4 in all likelihood is more capable in melee than the casting magician.

That last isn't really an assumption based in anything, but the problem of touch *is* a general issue. This might be a combo better suited to sneakiness.

Yeah, you have to touch them (and I wasn't thinking about that). But there are lots of innocent ways to do that, through subterfuge. Since you don't have to punch a person in the face to touch them.

If only you had some way to compel a person to let you touch them. But alas, such a skill is well beyond the ability of this mage. Or if mages had any other way of incapacitating people.

Also, this is just one trick. You still have about half your starting karma to think up any other number of other tricks.

Brilliant! So, in order for mundane criminals to shake a potential astral tail, they need a mage (or gorup of mages) to go to the trouble of building a ward at some point (or two) along their escape route else they are caught or dead (assuming the Star or CorpSec got an astral tail on them in the first place, and let's face it that's bound to happen sooner or much sooner in their budding criminal career).

Welcome to MagicRun, the game where all criminals are awakened, because the mundanes would have been caught long ago!

@Midas
Well, yes. You only can shake astral security with Wards or you might blow up the tunnel behind you. But since mages are darn fast on the astral....
(Remark: Thats why actually nobody(or very few) uses this "astral tailing"...

But yes, one mage cop would have a clearance rate of hell in SR.

Thus it has always been and will be until GMs learn to not be so liberal when they read the magic rules.

Fixing spirits: (and also sprites)
don't let the mage take advantage of the term "Service". In most cases a service is one use of a power.

Fixing initiation:
don't lob initiatory groups into your mage PC's lap. When they do get access to an initiatory group make them role play all the issues and problems and costs that being a part of that group would normally be.

Fixing Spells:
Well you can't, really. They're just way off the hook in relation to the resistance that a mundane target can muster. But you can write adventures that highlight the weakness of the fact that the optomized spellcaster is almost as much of a one-trick-pony as the optimized gun bunny.

Exactly! Not sure mages get paid three times more than their mundane counterparts, but the majority of those who are discovered will likely learn magical skills, spells and train up that Magic rating, because if you have a talent you will be encouraged and supported to train that talent up.

I still prefer my interpretation, where mundanes can utilize wards/biofiber buildings and astral security in public places to hinder potential astral tails, as well as using Infiltration and/or Shadowing in crowded places such as subway stations. You believe that (barring a major terrorist action like blowing up a tunnel behind you), only magic can trump magic and mundane criminals are either new kids on the block, have friendly mages erecting wards for them all over the city or are behind bars. YMMV.

Again, the concept of "training up the magic trait" is one new to the SIxth World that came with SR4 rules system. All the canon info the setting is based off Magic starts at 6.

I think if you tighten the screws on your dystopia enough, more and more mundanes are forced to resort to crime just to survive. Eventually your mages will run out of capacity to oppress all of them.

That's why you have technology; it scales up way better than magic, and you can employ mundanes to do it. On a society level, personal power isn't all-decisive (although it matters).

I'm not sure that's relevant, Moirdryd, though I notice you keep mentioning it. For one thing, I don't believe that all normal people in the setting do start with 6 (Priority A). Priority A was significantly more expensive than any of the Awakened qualities in SR4 (by design).

Assuming NPCs do use the same 'rules' as PCs (i.e., they actually do start with 6), how do you see that affecting things?

Problem is that the shift from SR3 to SR4 is apples to oranges. SR4 is such a completely different game that the use of the title "Shadowrun" can be so misleading. A Magic Attribute of 6 in SR3 is no where near as useful or powerful as Magic 6 in SR4. Prior editions of SR you could only increase your magic by initiating and the raise was free (unless you wanted to change your signature or reverse a point of magic loss -- both very common in my experience). Now your max potential is capped by Initiations. Thematically the Magic Attribute is VERY different than it used to be.

People with Magic less than 6 previously were on the path of the burnout. It wasn't that they didn't "train up" to higher magic it is that they lost their potential for higher magic. It was French Dictation style as opposed to the new hippie rules of "special snowflake." I also don't remember any "partial" options like we have now (probably fuzzy memory here). You had to be priority A to be a Full Mage and you had to be B+ to be magical. Both cases you got Magic 6 reduced by any magic loss. Closest I could think of is maybe someone who has several Gay-Asses (most stupidly broken rules in SR3) and needs to train (through Initiation) to get rid of them. They'd still have the potential of Magic 6 but are hamstrung by weird mental blocks.

Whoa that last example actually helps reinforce how much more awesome SR3 feels to me.

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

Has anyone tried making Mr. Lucky a mage yet? There could be some overpowered shits and giggles to be had there.

Landsren I'm still not sure you answered what your definition of OP is yet (only did a quick scan).

Of course.

The only way for starting with Magic 1 was taking the dual natured flaw as a mundane. And it did not really allow you anything else either.
You could not get it higher with karma, you could not learn spells or conjuration, only astral perception.

Indeed Cheops,

I mention it Yerameyahu, because people still mention the Magic 1 stat for use in the statistic given by the magical fluff texts. I point it out because to have a magic stat at all in three editions of the game meant you were capable of magic to a much greater degree than ALOT of the options seemingly out ther in SR4.

Cheops has it right with th differences in the use of the Stat ect and the only way of being magical (with the exception of one or two limited optional rules) was priority A or B at Chargen. NPCs existed on the whim of theGM, sourcebook or writer of the game but the universal rule for magic rating was Magic = Essence, for every living creature. This could be reduced by serious injury and cybrimplantation or bioimplantation. If you "trained up " your magic stat you initiated (as mentioned) because that was the only way to do it. That means that most formally educated Mages ended up initiates because it is part of the logical progression (indeed possessing a ThD included initiation if you look at the system logically).

As far as I can tell, Cheops is agreeing with me. My point is that your 'previous editions Magic 6' doesn't mean much regarding this question (or, at least I can't see how, which is why I asked). My point is that a Priority A or B is a major investment, so it already means they're rarer (if, again, the build system affects anything but PCs at all). It's often a mistake to attribute the game rules to the game reality, when you don't have to.

So… in what way do you think this affects the whole 1% of 1% idea we've been discussing? Are you saying that SR3 Magic 6 means that mages were much more common, and/or powerful? Because that's the only point: Awakened are rare, mages are rarer, powerful mages are exceedingly rare. Across all editions.

Pretty much yeah, you got more mages of a competent level globally.

As has been said though, the systems sharin the background are worlds apart in functionality, which makes the background info mean different things.

Okay, got it. I think, given what Magic 6 (and nothing else) 'means' in other editions, that it doesn't actually create that problem for us. Magic 6 (+ nothing) is equivalent to Magic 1. It's just that the other things, as you say, change a lot.

Or, you know, doing their research (because they know they have no magic backup) and plan their escape route through a pre-existing ward....

You missed my sarcasm? That was my point in the first place.

I said that mundanes could go through public warded areas to escape astral pursuit, but Irion (who is of the opinion that wards are rare and not very accessible) was the one who said that mundanes need a bunch of friendly mages to build wards along their escape route to shake off astral pursuit (that or collapsing a tunnel behind them).

@Midas
I am not saying Wards are "rare"... I am just saying that monitored wards are not to be found everywhere.
If I just want to keep some awakend pest out of my very small apartment, I summon a spirit and let him build up a Ward.
Force 6: At most 3 seconds of Work, and between 0 and 12 drain (ava: 4) (And this guy has 12 dice to build up this ward)
If I want to protect a bank, I use several wards.
And I would probably only ward privat areas, because warding a public area will cause more trouble than helping me.

The problem with "big wards" is, that they are very hard to build (you need a lot of mages) and that wards are exclusive. This means if you have one big ward, you are unable to ward anything inside speratly. So if you are inside the ward, you are in. Thats horrible as far as security is considered.

So no, I do not think wards which need around a hundred mages to build up are very common. And I do not think, that ward arrays using up several mage weeks are very common.
If they exist, they are in high security environments.

Thats like having a guy with detect live sitting in every freaking building. Yes, it would be impossible to intrude...

The point is: There might be a place with a ward fitting your needs, but there also might not be. So it is not a plan that "always works".
But saying: I ran into a bank and outside, well it probably won't work for several reasons.
Loosing somebody in a crowed could work kind of, but it is only a small visibility modifier on the astral. And I would roll it out.

if you like to roll everything out, try to roll out if a standard vehicle on autopilot notices a pedestrian, or even a crowd of pedestrians (hint: 2 or 1 hits with 0 dice)

@NiL_FisK_Urd
You think it is as easy to shake an invisible tail, as to drive on autopilot?

So when do you roll? I mean shooting somebody is even a more trival task.

no, just that perception modifiers and threshholds often dont make sense (if you follow the rules literally, every vehicle would just run over pedestrians because it has no chance to detect them)

@NiL_FisK_Urd
How do you figure that?

A Standard vehicle has a sensor rating of 1 or 2 and no clearsight autosoft - that means 1 or 2 dice. Detecting a metahuman or an electric vehicle incurs a -3 signature penalty. Detecting a single metahuman has a threshhold of 2.

This is well-known, Irion. Just another of those delightful RAW treats. It's frankly amazing that drones can do *anything*.

Sorry if I misrepresented your position, although I do not think I did. You yourself claimed that the only way a mundane could slip an astral tail was to employ a group of friendly mages to build one or preferably more wards at certain chokepoints along the escape route, or to collapse a tunnel right behind them (and even this difficult).

As you pointed out (and I conceded), big wards probably are rare and would not cover an entire bank or publicly accessed area. However, I maintain that a combination of bio-fiber walls and warded doorways in public domains, while not common, would be present here and there. I also maintain that for security reasons there are places where astral entities would be accosted by a wage mage or spirit and politely but firmly asked to leave.

I just thought of another plausible escape route for mundanes to slip an astral tail - the local bunraku parlour. Astral intruders would not be tolerated in the back rooms where paying customers go with their joy boys/girls (probably again bio-fiber/warded door combinations; the management would not want non-paying voyeurs, and astral observers could well be blackmailers finding potential marks). Easy to escape out the back exit, especially if you get the blanket-over-the-head-as-you-enter-taxi service that protects your identity (and aura) from would-be papparazzi or blackmailers who might be hoping to catch a photo of the rich or famous leaving ...

Skills such as Infiltration and Shadowing (as per RAW) can work against astral observation, and I could see mundanes being able to slip an astral tail in crowded places. YMMV, but where there are auras mingling and passing everywhere, it can be hard to keep track of the one aura you are following, especially if it is that of an unremarkable mundane.

@Midas

Actually there is nothing that will work against observation per RAW. This instance is not covered. (There are no rules to shake observation at all.)
I I think it should be that way.
Why?


@NiL_FisK_Urd

First of all, I can't find the signature penalty rules.
Second of all, yes cars should have the clearsightsoftware raiting 3 installed and their sensors should be at least raiting 3.
(Now for pedestrian they would get +2 for "standing out" +3 "active looking for".
So it would end with 6+5-3=8 dice for 2 hits. Still bad, but at least over the buy rule. (The point is, how many sensor test you are giving the car. One per combat round, one per second? And what range do the sensors have? But yes, a guy jumping onto a highway, should be hit by a car driving on "autopilot".

Signature table: SR4A p.171
Why would you give the "object is standing out" modifier to a vehicle detecting a metahuman? Would a metahuman get this bonus to a perception test? If no - why not?

What modifiers would you give an astral observer while trying to follow a moving mundane in a crowd of people?

I thought you only had to make perception checks for stuff that wasnt obvious. Pedestrians would be obvious to cars and drones, hence, no roll needed?

sure, but there is a category in the perception test table, called "Obvious/Large/Loud" - and if you go per RAW, everything not in that category is not obvious ^^

(and i just wanted to point out that the perception rules/threshholds make no sense, especially with drones/vehicles)

@NiL_FisK_Urd

Yes, a metahuman would of course get this bonus to see a somebody in FRONT of him on the street.

Under this circumstances i agree with you - but an unmodified combat drone (= out of the book, only a weapon added) who tries to find a target will never find one, also the standard metahuman (Int 3, Perception 0) will have trouble seeing anything and will hallucinate most of the time (= suffering from glitches on ~ 1/3 of the tests)

@NiL_FisK_Urd
First of all, the standart human should not have perception 0, since we are looking all our life. (The standart human should have perception 1 or 2 and a spec on visual)

This is not so much a problem with perception per se, as it is with the definition of skills.
(It is absolutly silly to but 0 as the "avarage" society. IT CAN'T WORK. It is impossible to work. Why? There is no avarage society and the skill destribution in any society is not even (looking at the skills). I would guess most people in the western world know how to drive a car, but our knowledge of hunting with speers is quite non existant.)

What does this mean? A perception, driving skill of 0 is from what it means MUCH higher than a survival skill of 0. But they got the same amount of dice...
(That can't work...)
Make skill 3 to "he does this on regularly basis" and all the problems disappear.
So everybody would have perception 3 (unless he has problems with it), everybody who does drive on his own has driving 3 etc. pp.

It is the same thing with attributes and the max skill raiting. To really simulate anything those are just too low.
Attributes and skills should rank from 1 to 10 (instead of 1 to 7)

Then you players shoud start with perception 3 and pilot groundcraft 3 for free. While most people look all the time, only a small fraction of them have the training to perceive subtle things like a trained sniper or security guy. Frankly, most people i know do not notice non-obvious things more than 10m away.

But i agree that skills and attributes should cover a wider range, because most npc that are built according to fluff (eg. attribute of 3 and skill 0-3) cannot properly function and suffer from glitches far too often.

@NiL_FisK_Urd
Thats why I like the idea of "Backgrounds" in games, which give you specific skills depending on where you grew up to start with.
This is a simple possibility to raise everything to a point where the dicepools are working.

A starting dicepool of 6 for the average population would work, but then you would have to change a good chunk of the system

Actually just the skill description...

Well, if you want to have increments from 0-10, you should also try to balance the costs of skills. Also, what would the average starting skill be for skills that can't be used without training

@NiL_FisK_Urd
I was just talking about fixing the perception and driving problems there.

And no, you do not have to adjust the costs, even if you are increasing the skills. True, BP Gen would not work anymore, unless you still limit the starting attributes and skills to 6.
But as far as karma is concerned I do not see a problem there. It only offers you to get additional dice for higher costs. You may take it or leave it. But it allows mundane to specialise further instead of just picking up every skill in the book, as soon as you have more karma. Not a bad thing in my book.

I thought you wanted to reform the system completely, not just add to the cap. What would the new starting limit be with this?

1 of course, or the increase would be pointless...
(The point is that you have a technomancer in the full emerged lifestyle who can barly lift his own wight on the one side and the guy who can carry his own car. And the differance are 6 dice.)