So a lot of people seem to like that Shadowrun 4 handicaps the magical stuff. And in another thread it was brought up again that in some games Mages can quickly outpace Mundanes. Is that the case in your experience? I won't lie I've never really had any problems with this in twenty plus years and 4 editions.

But I get mileage will vary. So relate your experiences here so I can get a feel for what happens at other tables.

And the interest of disclosure I like my magic mysterious and powerful. I don't think there should be a linear scale in which mundane power is comparable to the most powerful magics. But I also like my magic to come with a price.

For my own recent experience, Heavy Weapons Troll shreds a lot fewer enemies with his minigun now that the voodoo mysad learned Shape Water and Shape Metal and (ab)uses them to beat up thugs and crumple tanks, respectively. There are other contributing factors of course, but it does feel a little sad.

Magic depends very much on the rules of each table.

Everything limiting magic is mostly 100% GM fiat.
There is nothing in the rules stopping a GM from haven each and every spirit spending edge on summoning and binding.
It is no problem to explain a BC(or void) of 1 or 2 nearly everywhere.
The next thing are Wards, they are also quite easy to build, and a pain for every mage.
And a lot of spells are open for interpretation!
And even if you do notice magic is not really obvious...

Don't use the hings mentioned above against your mages and your mages will outperform the mundane.

How does that work out for 'em, exactly?

Depends...

If you start up with powergame!!!! YEAH: Magicians start stronger and develope faster and have nearly no upper limit.
If you start with good, broad characters: Mages are powerful, but not overly so.

Yeah, happened in several games by now . .
As a Mundane, a cybered and bioed up piece of work, you need licenses for everything, you light up every scanner in 10m² around you, your guns and external weapons are easy enough to be taken away from you usually . . if you got to bring them at all, because of the security meaures to begin with . . also, you have a limit of 6 points of essence AND money AND availability AND device rating usually . .
A Mage hase . . none of the above mentioned problems . . and 4 or 5 karma per run are usually much more important than 5 to 10k money, with the prices as they are right now . .
this onyl gets worse with the prices for cyber and bio in SR3 . .

Sure, Mages tend to outperform Mundanes at my table as well.

BUT, despite all of their power they rarely manage to cover everything with spells, and they will almost certainly lack certain useful skills.

Drawbacks:
- Fewer skills -- and spells can't fill in for everything skills can do.
- Longer 'prep-time' for many situations in order to out-perform mundane specialists (activating foci; calling spirits; sustaining spells etc)
- Enemies will target the mage first, if possible.
- Edge often gets neglected because of massive need for karma, which means fewer second chances.
- Background Counts and Wards can seriously cripple them.

Two words: Background Count.

If you really start using that rule, where EVERY place has one, and you enforce it then mages get brought down several pegs very quickly.

Mages usually are awesome until you hit a spot they dont quite have covered. One game I was part of, I was a mundane driver/gun man in a team of four other people who were all mages. We rocked through a facility with their magic and I didnt have much of anything to do because of all the mages...until we got outside and had to get away.

The rest of them jumped up and started offering up combat spells and I just very quietly suggested we get in a car and drive away really really fast. They had nothing and it would have been a hard, very likely lethal, battle with security that was arriving.

Magic is great if you run into situations where the magic you have fits the situation and the BGC doesnt trip you up. Step outside that range and you get into trouble.

In my opinion Shadowrun 4 is designed to kneecap Magic Users. Not only are there plenty of in game items to mess with them-back ground count; rival magic users, spirits, magical threats-but there are plenty of hard coded rules to straight up screw them: A street Samurai can toss down 10 dice plus and gets every success regardless, Magic Users get capped successes on what they can do, now there's an actual limit to the number of spells they can cast hard coded into the rules, and that's not even counting the metagame stuff like expecting the mage to heal everyone, hide everyone, and provide useful combat support.

Obviously every table will vary but woof. Playing a spell caster has never sucked more.

Well, if Magicians are outstretching Mundanes, there's only one solution... MORE GEAR AND FIREARM BOOKS!!!

The other side of that, Paul, is that the mages are just now finally being reined in a tiny bit. 100 minus 5 is still 95, and if the rest of the PCs are in the 30s…

I am curious, Paul. Where do you see a hard-coded limit to he number of spells a Mage character can cast in SR4A? There is no such limit, except for Karma allocated to Spells. If you have found such a hidden reference, please reveal it to me and the rest of the forum.

And if your Shadowrunners rely upon the mage for Healing, Hiding, and Combat Support. Well, they are just plain lazy.

Or slightly more deadly damage rules. Redoing the damage codes for each weapon is an easy way.

That's kinda what the mage is expected to do in almost any game there are mages in.

*Shrugs* I didn't need them to do that-I'm not like virulently opposed to it, or anything like that. Just apersonal preference. And I get part of why they did it.




You're right. I was mistaking the cap at creation with a hard cap for all time. Doh! It may be hard to believe but even I make mistakes!



Actually mine don't. But yeah I get where you're going with this.




To a point I agree-in most games the generalized expectation is there. I guess my point is that it's not all cut and dry. In my opinion it's all in how you play it. Other people get different results.

I don't even see how there's a comparison, but again, I'm not as experienced in SR4 as others are. It certainly looks to me, though, like magic users are profoundly nerfed, to the point that I haven't played one yet because I find the idea so frustrating [and I like playing weak characters]. Perhaps once I see more of magic in SR4, I'll see where the benefits are.

There have been two notable events so far.
First one, the team was trolling (pun intended ) through the sewer slums of Generic-Pirate-Island #372 looking for a mutinous pirate captain and his crew. We found them in the slums, and the voodoo mysad and our "Black Panther" mage, Orkolm X, managed to incite a riot amongst the slum-dwellers against the pirates hiding in their midst. At the start of the actual fighting, Heavy Weapons Troll got a Willy Pete grenade off in the cramped sewer tunnels, wrecking the pirate's escape canoe and setting the guano-rich sewage on fire. Voodoo mysad takes the opportunity to cast Shape Water on the flaming waste, and uses it to wrap up the struggling pirates in a flaming orb of dirty water until they all stop struggling; GM throws his hands up and we capture the pirate cap'n and his crew with zero collateral damage and we called it there.

The first time voodoo mysad tried out his new spells was much worse however. We were breaking into a police impound dock to obtain a (different, yet related) pirate cap'n's vessel from the impound. We set up shop opposite the docks, and we see that our target ship is under very heavy guard: more than a half dozen well-armored guards toting assault rifles patrol the docks, and worse still, a trio of multiped tanks are watching the boat, which is itself secured to the dock in eight places by chains, and both its anchors are dropped. Heavy Weapons Troll hoofs it into mutual signal range, while voodoo mysad rolls up his sleeves and asks, "who wants to see something broken and overpowered?" Spending edge to uncap hits, he rolls up a force 4 Shape Metal, and gets eight hits. While the rest of the group spends their turns running for the ship, voodoo mysad crushes one tank per init pass, which wouldn't have been such a problem if not for the tanks' built-in detonation systems, which proceed to take out half the dock and a majority of the guards. Everybody piles into the ship and we leave. The only consequence the mysad has faced through any of this is that he now has the highest bounty of anyone in the party (higher than Heavy Weapons Troll, even), but I don't see that being a real problem, since the GM has yet to have anybody even try to collect on bounties on PCs.

Sounds like your GM is giving you the Easy Mode codes.

did the gm roll the object resist test on the tanks?

OR forget to give that heavy a guard some magical muscle...

I...ah...don't exactly imagine Shape Metal as routinely working that way, in everyone's campaigns. I won't say your GM is guilty of some sort of badwrongfun or anything, but your average Mystic Adept dropping your average Force 4 spell probably shouldn't be willy-nilly "crushing one tank per init pass," with any sort of regularity. If you guys are having fun and like to interpret the spell that way, more power to ya, though. I'd just be aware that's not the sort of power imbalance issue that's likely to be cropping up at most tables.

At any rate, we're a little sidetracked from the overall topic of the thread. I didn't mean to derail anything by asking for specific examples, and I'm not going to stand here and try to argue those examples once I get 'em.

*snort* SR4 mages nerfed? Hardly. The last game of SR4 that I was in before running my current one, I was a gun bunny adept in a team with a min-maxing mage-player. He dominated the game--and the team--to such a degree and so overpoweringly (there were at least three missions that I recall distinctly where I didn't even get to draw my guns, much less make a roll or much of a contribution, really) that I ended up leaving that gaming group out of disgust. I haven't talked with the player more than five or six times in the three years since. (although, to be fair, that player liked such high powered games that he considered a psion/sorcerer gestalt in D&D to be adequate, so your mileage may vary.)

Mages get spirits. They scare my group. I once had the lawn get up and beat the house they were hiding it.

It frightened them more than the SWAT team outside did.

No solution. Because mages can use these toys too, while mundanes can't use magic.

Right, so the game gets a lot more deadly... Does not change a lot.

Yeah, that definately doesn't sound like 'Shape Metal' according to RAW.

Let's see...

Using Edge gets away from the whole '4 hit limit' thing, and with 8 hits that breaks the OR Threshold. However, the spell states that: "Loose material can be moved and re-shaped easily, but material that is connected or reinforced (such as walls or other material part of a structure) must be broken apart by reducing its Structure rating by Force points per Combat Turn."

I wouldn't say tank-armor is 'loose material', so it would have to be broken apart. Now, there's no Structure rating for Vehicles, so I'd either go by the vehicles Condition Monitor, doing Force boxes per round in damage to the tank, or I would go by the nearest equivalent on the Barrier Rating Table - at the very least Reinforced Material, probably higher (just compare vehicles armor to Barrier armor and match structure rating). So the spell needs to shift around a minimum of 9 points at a rate of 4 per turn, to break a 1x1x0.1 meter section of tank armor.

Also, it's an Area spell so radius is based on Force. All three tanks would have to sit within an 8 meter sphere, and considering this is Shadowrun the Tank's armor may well not be metal at all, but some form of plasteel or composite material.

Now, I'm not sure what the detonating device in the tanks was, but if it was a self-destruct I wouldn't have triggered it until all damage boxes on the tank were filled.

So, interpretation of the rules play a BIG part in whether magic is overpowered or not. In my game, it would probably take roughly 5 combat turns to take out one tank using an edge-cast Force 4 Shape Metal with 8 net hits. IF the tank is metal, that is.

This is really funny, to the point where I'm asking myself whether you are trolling.

BUT, let's not go there.

Mages in SR4 have been nerfed a tiny bit compared to SR3. Yes, in SR3 they WERE more powerful, even while having to decide on a force to learn spells at, etc. In SR3 there was less mana-tech, which is usually anti-magical in nature. In SR3 you could take Geasa which were actually ridiculously powerful.

However, all that being said, mages in SR4 are STILL ridiculously powerful, even though you CAN annoy them a bit.

Mages, at least early on, have some problems. For isntance they can't do the stealth thing. Seriously, of all character archetypes they have the largest problems. At least unless they keep using spirits for concealment or sticking to mundane, due to:
-- Wards mean they can't get in anyhwere with active spells on without alerting security, or at least the mage that put up the ward. And wards are really cheap, and should be everywhere.
-- They stick out on the astral much more than others.
-- They need their karma for magic stuff and hence often skimp out on stealth skills.

On the other hand, they can completely dominate many situations. In the latest session I GMed the mage had absolutely terrible luck with the dice, and immediately the team was nearly overpowered by the opposition, because I basically count on the mage dropping at least one guy every IP, and often entire groups with stunballs. So I compensate with numbers, but this can seriously backfire if the mage gets no hits with his spells.

Resist the temptation. It's an honest question.


Could you explain how magical characters are substantially more powerful - and perhaps more of what you mean by "powerful" - than other types of characters? Maybe it's not that our experiences differ, but that we mean something different.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I mean: you'll notice I carefully avoided using terms like "powerful" or "capable," because I'm not sure in what ways I mean that I think magical characters are, um, less powerful than some other types. I guess I really mean in aggregate, how much utility they have in criminal enterprises in the setting. Each type of character has a different type of utility, but their summed utility at all tasks would be, I suppose, how "powerful" they are, and I just feel that, based on everything I've seen thus far, that other types of characters have radically more summed utility, despite the incredible flexibility magical characters have in play. [It probably doesn't help that I'm subconsciously comparing them to hacker/riggers, either.] But perhaps you could explain some ways in which magical characters have more summed utility - are more powerful - than other types of characters; even if your experiences don't change my current position, they'll at least give me something to look for in the future as I experience more SR4 for myself.

Okay, but how did he do so? I just don't see how any single character could so dominate a group strictly from the capabilities of the character of any type, much less magical characters. Could you give some examples of situations in which he dominated, and why other characters weren't capable of action?

Here's the story.

Mages are a lot easier to build effectively than mundanes. This contributes pretty heavily to people's perceptions of how good mages are, because if you slap together a mage and slap together a street samurai, odds are the mage will be better at fighting and also have other useful skills. Also, most of the keys to making an effective mage (Restricted Gear+f4 Power Focus+f3 Health Focus+Increase Reflexes+Stunbolt) are well known, and if you have those you can't really go all that wrong without doing something really dumb.

If you're building characters at a higher level of optimization, you wind up with somewhat more balance. Mages are still really good, but not clearly better than mundanes at everything. Specifically:

You can't really compare magic and hacking. You need a mage or some challenges can't be dealt with. You need a hacker or some challenges can't be dealt with. They are completely different sets of challenges. Mages can't really be better than "meh" at hacking, and even that requires sucking on the magic front. Mundanes, adepts, and technomancers can all hack well.

Mages can use spirits with Concealment to boost everyone's stealth - but they can't get as good Infiltration or B&E skills as a street samurai without sucking at magic. Having a mage will make everyone better at sneaking around, but they won't be the best at it.

Mages have by a large margin the best AE in the game. Grenades suck compared to Stunball.

Mundanes can get significantly better defenses than mages. Good defenses cost essence, and essence costs magic. Similarly, mundanes can get better Initiative scores than mages (although mages can more easily get the 4th IP, it's of pretty marginal value compared to more Initiative to go first when it still matters). Both mages and mundanes can reliably take down the majority of enemies in one pass.

Spirits bring a swiss army knife of utility with spirits. There's lots of things (go through walls then manifest, Task spirits "bring any skill," Search, Concealment, Movement, etc) that spirits can do that are really awesome, and most types are very good at fighting. This is one of the biggest sources of QQ, because a force 5 air spirit is flat-out better at fighting than a suboptimal street samurai.

Mages can't get the ability to be as good of a face as a mundane or adept, although a Charisma mage can be a passable backup face.

What the balance comes down to is:

You really want a mage on your team. You really want a hacker on your team. Mundance faces can easily be better than mages at facing. A street samurai can act faster, hit as hard, and be tougher than the mage, but can't bring AE or built-in utility like the mage.

Now, if there is a problem, it's that if a mage focuses purely on combat, and a street samurai does the same, they'll probably be pretty comparable in effectiveness, but the mage will also bring a bunch of built-in utility that the street samurai doesn't.

On the other hand, street samurai can easily pick up a secondary skillset - it's not hard to make a street samurai/face who is nearly as good at fighting as a pure street samurai and also an excellent face. Same for street samurai/hacker. You can even cover all three on one character.

Two more issues are karma and background count. At high enough levels of karma, mages win everything. However, I don't really care. Yeah, the game shatters like a delicate crystal sometime long before 500 karma, but meh.

As far as BGC, what it really boils down to is that if the GM wants to fuck with a particular character, they can. If the GM wants to fuck with the street samurai, everything can have cyberware scanners. If the GM wants to fuck with the mage, everything can have BGC. If you do this as a means of balancing your game (and by that I mean doing it all the time and picking on one person in particular), then I guess you can fix your balance problems, but as a GM having to do that is annoying and not very fun.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't have to optimize to the max. If your friends are playing street samurai with Firearms and Damage Compensators, you can always sandbag your magician down enough to not outshine them at fighting and just not take the better options available to you.

Consistantly overcasting (and abusing certain rules to give himself maxed Drain resistance and calculated the optimum karma expenditure for cyberware implantation and raising Magic; I think he had three Essence and Magic 7 when I left), bluster, a willingness to reach for the largest hammer and smash the opposition, sheer force of personality, and, as Umaro pointed out, a well-built mage makes for one hell of a swiss-army knife.

Okay, let me give one example from one of the runs we were on: between a combination of gerrymandered stunballs/manaballs and massively overpowered spirits (he had no less than four Force 10-12 spirits bound and rebound for high number of services; this is why in my game that I'm running now, trying to summon a spirit with a Force higher than your Magic automatically results in the Spirit using Edge to resist Summoning and Binding) we managed to wipe out a dozen-plus spirit ant bug hive in three or four rounds with no casualties. Of the four people on the team, he accounted for three quarters of the opposition himself; the rest of us split the remainder.

I'll do my best.


Alright, these terms are... difficult. There are various ways by which PCs are challenged in the game, and obviously mages can't beat all of them.

Let me try to explain:
SR revolves around various thematically distinct fields:
- Information
- Infiltration
- Breaking and Entering
(- Exfiltration)
- Combat
(- Transportation)
- Build/repair, utility
- maybe somethign I've forgotten

In addition I believe a signifcant payout of the game to a player is, as usually in a roleplaying game, character development and advancement.

Various characters have various abilities in these fields. Some fields are basically mandatory requirements for the job descripion of shadowrunner. The importance of some fields vary wildly with play style of the group.
Mages have a lot of options in several of these fields. Do note that they are - usually - not absolutely required in ANY of these fields, with the possible exception of combat.
Mages are good at:
- Information gathering, via finding people, scouting and domination/interrogation
- Appearing as someone else or not at all (but do take note of the restrictions on stealth at least non or low initiate grades mages suffer from
- They can open any door, wall, etc. without needing tools (if they have the right spells), destructively but comparatively silently
- They can move in 360°x360° without restrictions
- They can absolutely rock combat, because when stealth is off they simply CANNOT be beaten except by another mage, and they are strong even when fighting purely by proxy, which alone is something hardly anyone else can do. And do note that drones are generally hardly on par with spirits. Drones can, with the right tools, kill more in less time, but they have a hard limit on their abilities, spirits don't. Drones also cost a lot of money.
- They can, again, provide a lot of utility for transportation in all directions
- They can even repair stuff and provide a lot of utility functions via spells and spirits.

And to do all they don't need to carry around any heavy equipment, and they can have absolutely most of their toys at hand ALL the time.

In addition, mages enjoy limitless advancement where other characters might stagnate eventually. AND their advancement usually makes them harder to challenge.


I'm thinking your feeling comes from playstyle: Does your group play stealthily, with little to no combat, and lots of zero-trace missions? Yes, sure, you will find playing a mage very unsatisfying until you have maybe 3-4 intiations under your belt. If, on the other hand, you are playing a game where you generally end up killing stuff then the mage will absolutely rule the day unless you offer him tailored opposition.

Now do I think magic is completely OVERpowered? And I mean this in a sense that:
- The mage is often the only guy who can do something, or at least the only guy who can do it RIGHT NOW
- The mage player hogs the spotlight even without trying
- The mage is rarely challenged in any meaningful way, in the sense that there is even a realistic chance of failure
- And the character often has something secondary to contribute, too

Now, I actually don't think that, and the reason is that as a GM I believe I can limit the effectiveness of the mage to a significant extent. The feeling that magic is ridiculously overpowerd often stems from GMs not actually understanding or using the magic rules, and from there generally being too few mages or magical threats in the game setting. This is a GM fault.

In my group, I can say that the mage often plays a focal role. He is also very hard to challenge. We don't play strictly mirror-shades, so the mage can heavily dominate combat - but then I like my combats long and hard. That being said, I've also found lots of ways to seriously annoy the mage (and the player ).

Magic is, however, compensated the same way machine guns are today when compared to all the guys with assault rifles.

They're target number one.

That doesn't work, and won't ever, unless you let mundanes attack mages with anything meaningful except area attacks.

The Geek-the-mage-first mantra only works if you know who the mage is, and see him, and meaningfully affect him. Granted, this was way worse in SR3, but it's still bad, now.

You absolutely need magic to defend against magic in 99% of the cases.

Fully-Automatic Grenade Launcher.

Yeh, I was going to write:
"unless you let mundanes effectively attack mages with anything less than a full-auto grenade launcher."

But then I decided against it, but I see the thought wasn't wasted .

Also, that only works if it's 'the' mage, instead of a full magicrun group.

The big difference between editions that made mages MORE powerful in SR4 than previously is the UMT.

Everyone summons
Everyone binds
No domains
No binding circles or expensive libraries
Mix and match spirits and elementals
Flexibility in Force from 1 to Magic x2 with only 1 spell
Magic adds to dice pool at 100% instead of 33% and affects ALL rolls now

Also, good luck picking out the mage when he is in full body armor and toting an assault rifle or LMG like the samurai. You won't know until too late.

Which is why you need a coordinated attack. "Initially, we take out the first car, then we take out the last, creating a trap... an air-tight cage filled with lots and lots of dead people."

There's a lot to digest here.

Okay, so it's their flexibility that makes them "powerful" in your view? I definitely agree their broad base of capabilities makes them powerful, absolutely. But it seems like, in the moment, on the run, as a rigger I'm constantly trying to think of ways not to rule the game, whereas with a magical character, I'm constantly trying to work out ways to do something that'll actually be effective. As just a bare example, in combat, the rigger is throwing 20 dice, 5 times a turn, and doing 16P base damage. That's not really happening with any of the magical characters I've seen.


People keep saying this. Why?


Left to their own devices, absolutely, but drones aren't that useful, left to their own devices, unless you're going to get heaps of them and teach them very well.


It's a good thing we break the law for a living, then, so not only can we buy new drones, we can just steal them from other people.

That's not to be all like, "Nuh-uh, my rigger can beat up your magic user!" [Please, Dog, let this thread not go down that road!] I just keep hearing about how awesome magic users are, and I'm not seeing it at the table. ["Okay, so he's invisible? Okay, I'll make a Perception test. Excellent: now I'll shoot him."]


Yeah, there are a bunch of things like that in the system, where your ability to ever have any more dice to do something just vanishes, while someone else's just gets slightly more expensive over time. I preferred exponential cost increases with fewer hard caps, but I'm on the losing side of the SR1-3 vs SR4 debate.


Paul keeps it varied, and the players keep him on his toes, but as a rule, missions are stealthy going in, until something goes wrong, and then there's combat to go out. Some missions are straight-up firefights from the beginning, and some we do without ever firing a round, but usually it's a little of both.

Here's the good news: we just got a new magical character at the table, played by one of our better players, so soon I should be able to see some of the things you're talking about firsthand.

Colander everyone with a M2-HB. No muss, no fuss.

As with the Shape Metal comment, it depends on what your GM is letting you get away with. There are indeed crazy-strong drones, and if he doesn't bother challenging them… they won't be challenged. If you're just getting drones for free, then christ, man.

This Old Drone: Some of them you might as well get for free, considering how old they are.

"Hack the damned thing! It's spraying the area in a Mana Disintegrating Solution!" "I... I can't!!! It's... TOO OLD! IT PREDATES THE MATRIX!!!"

That explains the external HDs taped to the outside and makes you believe the runner wasn't referencing the classic film Jurassic Park when he called it Clever Bot.

Can't we just apply the same logic to everything, then? "If magic users are too powerful in your game, then obviously it's because your GM is letting you get away with too much. Magic users are powerful, and if the GM doesn't challenge them...they won't be challenged!"


I don't understand the objection. Shadowrunners are quite often professional thieves, among other things. Is there some reason they shouldn't be capable of stealing things?

You could have a drone for free today, and I don't get the impression you're a professional criminal. You could get a brand new Lamborghini Gallardo for free, today. The cost to you would be nothing. [Maybe gas: I don't know where you live, but I'd need to drive a bit, personally.] Now, you probably don't know how do successfully do these things without being caught, but professional criminals typically do, particularly those that specialize in stealing, say, drones or sports cars. That doesn't mean there's not some challenge to it - my GM's not likely to just wave his hand and say, "You've stolen a fighter plane!" - but that doesn't mean it cannot, and should not, be done successfully. I'm just not sure I understand the objection.

I think the point with stealing things is that you're never getting something "for free," but rather getting something "for no money." The very important difference is that theft often comes with strings attached, like the vengeful motor pool manager of the garage where you obtained those drones sending his thugs after you or putting a price on your head. It's not that runners shouldn't be able to steal things to get the job done, but it's my view that GMs shouldn't be encouraging players to take everything that isn't nailed down Elder Scrolls-style. Stealing things is a classic part of being a runner, but if you're getting everything "for free", you're circumventing the game's inbuilt limits like Runner payout and Availability, which are there to make the game challenging in the first place

I would definitely agree with that: consequence-free theft is rare [although not impossible, certainly], and repeated thefts [of, say, military hardware!] tend to attract unwanted attention.


My GM is pretty serious about consequences: he even keeps a detailed police evidence log for our games. His kinds of consequences aren't the game's mechanical ones [Availability and so on] but rather the same ones you find in real life [police, angry former owners, other thieves]. And when there's a conflict between rules and realism, he picks realism [as interpreted by us]. [When there's a conflict between realism and fun, he picks fun, but nobody's perfect.] The counterpoint as player is to try to not put him in that situation too often: it's his fun, too, after all.

I find that whether players steal or buy their gear, it is not too difficult to maintain a steady growth rate. I just use the guideline of, "I won't give for free, anything I can't destroy on a whim."

So.. yeah. The rigger, who usually drives a rebuilt Roadmaster, may get a T-Bird for a couple of select missions, because T-Birds are FUN! But... When that talislegging part of the campaign is over....

BOOM! Back to the Roadmaster...

I like this idea, i think i will steal it ^^