As per page 204 of SR4a, when casting a Direct Combat Spell, "every net hit used to increase the damage value of a Direct Combat spell also increases the Drain DV of the spell by +1." How does this affect Area Direct Combat Spells? If three people are within the area of effect, and the caster has 1 net success against Target A, 2 net successes against Target B, and 3 net successes against Target C, how much is the Drain DV of the spell raised by?

If you're going to use that horrible, horrible rule at all, you might as well go balls to the walls and use the lowest guy.

Note that it was quickly changed to an optional rule after the outcry, where the rule was widely derided, and dissected for its many flaws. If your GM wants to rein in mages, there are many, many better ways to do so.

We're definitely not attached to the rule, and it wouldn't break anyone's heart if we didn't use it, but is there errata or anything I could refer them to? For example, when Glyph says, "it was quickly changed," who changed it, and where?

This is definitely starting to look like one of those instances where house rules might provide a little more clarity than RAW. I personally think that any area effect spell should be treated as an indirect spell rather than a direct spell. The RAW indicates that a direct spell involves the caster channeling directly into the target's being. I do not see that happening easily in an area-effect spell, if at all if there are a high number of targets within the caster's chosen area of effect.

Perhaps a house rule treating area-effect spells as indirect in terms of drain?

Are you saying it would be resisted by armor, then? Because if it's not being channeled directly into the targets' beings, it would have to hit the physical world before it hit the targets, and would thus be resisted by armor like any other Indirect spell.

No, I am not saying anything about how they would resist it. Nowhere did I mention anything about how the target would resist it. I am only talking about for the purposes of calculating drain. Either figure out an easier house rule, go off the highest or lowest target's net hits, or calculate cumulative net hits for each and every person in the range of the area-effect combat spell.

Though as a way to think about it, the more people within the area of effect, it would make more sense that the cumulative net hits would reflect the difficulty in stunning a large group.

The rule as an optional rule appears as optional in the DTF of the book, as well as a current PDF copy.

The rule as a hard rule appears only in the pre-release PDF that was out before the book went to print, as well as in the SR4A changes document (which IIRC, got a face-lift post-release to correct the changes made to the changes).

The easiest way to tell which copy (of the PDF) you have is to check the Object Resistance table.

The correct values should be 1, 2, 3, 5+ not 1, 2, 4, 6+.

Time for me to update my PDF apparently!

Yeah, I totally get that. I'm just asking from a metaphysics perspective: if single-target spells that channel mana directly had this Drain effect because of the nature of channeling magic directly, then Area spells that channel mana directly should have that Drain effect, if pursuit of metaphysical consistency is the goal.


Indeed; if the rule remained, that's how I'd run it: in the example I used in the OP, I'd give a +3 to the Drain DV, for example. But instead, Draco18s to the rescue!


Mystery solved! That's excellent, Draco18s. I appreciate it.

No worries. It was a poorly conceived rule that was intended to solve the Direct Spell vs. Indirect Spell issue (whereby everyone used Stunbolt all the time, due to its low drain) over other spells like Lightning Bolt (because making an elemental/physical/visual effect is "harder" than just pumping mana into someone, thus has higher drain) by adding an extra drain component to it.

Which only leads to multi-casting (2 force 5 stunbolts with 0 net hits spent on damage => less drain than 1 force 5 stunbolt with 5 nethits used for damage (both do 10S)) and still didn't solve the problem of trying to make the indirect spells a more viable option.

It also doesn't help that SR4A nerfed indirect spells, too...

A good question, 3278. Thankfully I rely on house rules and player restraint to minimize the overcast stunball, so I don't use that horrible rule.

As far as I am aware, there is no official ruling on whether you use the guy with the highest resistance hits, the lowest resistance hits, the average resistance hits or the guy nearest the spell centre. Indeed, I remember when SR4a came out, someone on DS suggested guards having WIL 1 hamster mascots as a countermeasure to hurt mages using direct spells against them.

If I were to use the rule, I would probably go with the guy nearest the spell centre, although the mage might need to increase net hits on that guy in order to affect the defenders with who got more hits on their resistance roll ...

It does however lead to the right kind of multi-casting. There is the other one, where you multiply your positive dicepool modifiers by the number of spells, rolling tons more dice and getting tons of net hits. The bad-wrong-fun kind is not viable with the optional rule.

You just compare... Simplest measure out there.

If the Caster had 5 Net Hits (Say on a Force 5 Spell)

Person A has 2 Resisted, he takes Force +3 Damage (8 DV)
Person B has 4 Resisted, he takes Force +1 Damage (6 DV)
Person C has 1 Resisted, he takes Force +4 Damage (9 DV)
Person D has 2 Resisted, he takes Force +3 Damage (8 DV)
Person E has 5 Resisted, he takes NO Damage (0 DV)

Everyone resistes individually and net hits are applied Individually.

Those aren't net hits. Those are gross hits.



You are correct, net hits are applied individually.

Now how much drain does the caster resist? F/2+n + Net Hits, remember? This is the problem/question.

Yeah, we had the spell effects under control. It was the drain formula against multiple targets that we were trying to calculate. When you have 10 people within your area of effect, that cumulative net hits added to drain thing starts to look intimidating.

Has anyone ever simply removed direct combat spells from the game? If so, what did it do to the game play?

There wouldn't be, because it's not an official rule. Turns out it was dropped before the game was printed, but my pre-printing PDF still included the beta rule.


Right, but as Draco18s and CG points out, the spell effects part was did fine: it's pretty unequivocal. The Drain, on the other hand, would have been the question. I would rule you total the net successes [so in my example in the OP, you'd have +3 Drain DV], but all of that's thankfully moot, since the rule isn't real, anyway.

And in the end a ruling was made on the field, and we didn't waste more than 45 seconds beating our brains aginst rocks figuring it out.

Indeed, My Mistake... Sorry. Total Hits.




He resists F/2+1 (Standard for the StunBall Effect, IIRC). Who the hell uses that craptacular Optional Rule?

No one. It came up at our recent game, because I remembered it from a pre-release copy of the SR4a book; not realizing the rule was [post-publication] optional, we were trying to figure it out so we could use it properly before deciding if we wanted to keep it. It's not a real rule, we don't have any particular affection for it anyway, so it's really a non-issue now.

And if you look at the context, the question was regarding how that optional rule works, now wunnit?

Heh... Point Taken.