I am AFB ATM but IIRC a spirit will not overcast.

What's overcasting have to do with its dice pool?

Nothing directly. But if the summoner is trying to get more hits on a spell by casting it vicariously via a Spirit of Man, and the hits are generated from the dice pool and limited by the Force of the spell which is limited by the Force of the spirit, I'm just saying this limits its "brokenness" somewhat. People have been talking about the potential "brokenness" of overcasting Stunball, which (I think) the spirit will not do for you. Sure, SaintHax was talking about getting it to cast an indirect combat spell, and sure its skills and Magic are equal to its Force, but I'm just saying it won't go OTT for you.

I see that wasn't initially clear though.

The Spirit will do as I tell it to do. It may take one service for every use of the spell, but it will do it. Your problem is that you are asking spirits instead of telling them.

Well, it won't use Edge for you. And (if my memory serves correctly) it won't overcast for you. I doubt it would spend karma to bind and use a focus either. Even if you have the Spirit Affinity perk and tell it sternly.

A (meta)human caster can get a dice pool of 12 + specialisation + totem + focus + edge which likely surpasses a F8 spirit's 16 dice and overcast to boot and use AR like Negator to be selective in the targets of its AoE spells. So while summoning is handy, I don't see it as being broken compared to sorcery. You just don't get the flexibility.

Is there a specific quote which would prevent the Negator tactic from working?

Well, you're basically multicasting without splitting your Dice Pool and without increasing the Drain while splitting the Drain between multiple damage tracks... but other than that, no, it's not overpowered.

Mea culpa. I was reading "Indirect spells are tame compared to how bad conjuring is." as an OR comparison. You're right though that as an AND (summoner casting spells and spirit casting spells too) it is a bit more effective.

But in that case, back to what ShadowWalker was saying, compare to firearms. Anyone can strap on a drone equipped with a full mechanical arm and a few 'softs and hand it a smartgun.

… If they have a drone with a full mechanical arm, a few 'softs, and a smartgun… and it can fly, go astral, etc.

Now you are mixing two things together.

The one is for the negating save (resist / dodge -- it is easier (Counterspelling assumed) to resist a spell than to dodge a hail of bullets).
The other is for reducing the damage (which is not possible against the spell).

Bye
Thanee

I know that i was mixing things there. Also, IF counterspelling is aviable (remember, 1% of the population have Magic 1+, but that includes also Adepts, Spell/Spirit Knacks and Astral Sight) - dodge/gymnastic dodge is aviable to everyone.


Sure you can do that, but can said drone appear on demand (within 3s) anywhere on the planet? And if said drone gets shot, can you get a new one in 3s?


Depends on the power level of your game - I can also say a shitty mage has less than 18 dice one casting combat spells and less than 4 F6+ spirits bound.

The starting mage can use 14 dice for EVERY spell, not just combat spells, whereas the street sam can only use 8 of his dice for doing anything other than shooting someone. Btw: Muscle Toner 2 costs 16k.

Surely, and unless i am in a truly lawless area/active warzone, i do not need to hit you back - whatever force of law enforcement will do it for me, because you have alerted everyone in a few km radius. The Stunball makes no sound other than maybe falling bodies.

I was trying to stat a NPC lieutenant with Prof-Rtg. 2-3, not a prime Runner.

EX-EX is neither cheap (compared to other ammo) nor readily aviable (2R vs. 12F), and definetely not subtle. If you are fine with alerting everyone in a few 100m radius, sure, use Ex-Ex ammo. I use normally silenced standard ammo or even subsonic ammo - because a loud shootout is going to be investigated soon (if im in some civilized area). SnS is shotgun only at my table.

He will be arrested/questioned by law enforcement if he is in a civilzed area.

If you want a 1on1 with a fully statted street sam and a mage, the street sam will most of the time win (if he doesn't need to fear law enforcement and therefore can use his full arsenal) - just becaus he wins the initiative round. Also, an experienced mage will use his unbound spirit, if he doesn't want to get shot.

Ofcource it is, as not only do those points make me a total killing machine, they also allow me to pull all kinds of nifty tricks with a 16 dice pool for casting non combat spells.

Thanee, that's the whole point. You *don't* get to soak spells with armor.

The way I do it is you get willpower + counterspelling to resist the spell, and follow that with a roll of body to resist the damage, so in total I suppose you're resisting with willpower + body in the same way you resist bullets with reaction + body (over 2 rolls). You don't get armour against them, but they seem ok to me done this way. Then again, I thought I was doing it right by the book so what do I know

This biggest boost to a mage is not having a mage on the enemy's side to counterspell. If you have one on each side i think it balances out pretty well.

(i also don't use the optional rule of adding net hits to damage.)

I don't know under what world a "shitty" mage is one who's capped his die pool except for adding a 50,000 nuyen piece of equipment... This is a guy who's at the top of his game. I think you're perhaps setting the bar a little too high.


My bad!



Okay, let me roll all of my responses into one big bag here, with regards to the location/subtlety: I was comparing attacker to attacker, not taking into account any other factors, with the assumption that this was all going down in a "gunfire-ok" zone. I'm not getting into an argument where the goalposts are gonna get moved, but:
A man firing a handgun with a silencer, loaded with Ex-Ex, is exactly as detectable as a mage casting a Force 4 spell.
Noticing the spellcasting is a difficulty of 6 minus the spell's force, or in the above example, 2.
Noticing gunfire is difficulty 1, or 2 if it's silenced. That's a standard difficulty given ON the perception test chart. You may personally decide Ex-Ex may be louder than ordinary bullets, but using Ex-Ex has no actual rules altering the difficulty of perception tests. And they are harder to get than normal bullets, yes, but only marginally more difficult than the Force 2 Power Focus the mage has, and a shitton less expensive.

If either party is detected in a civilized area, they will be arrested/questioned. Casting attack magic is every but as much a crime as shooting at someone, and it isn't germaine for a discussion of if direct combat spells are overpowered. If we were discussing subtlety of attack methods, I would simply say "Yes, mages are more subtle."

You do not appear to *want* to be convinced. If that's the case, I'm not going to keep arguing about this. My many, many years of running shadowrun have lead me to believe that direct combat spells are not unbalanced. If you still feel that way, here's how you should balance them:

Direct combat spells may be "dodged" with Intuition, rather than Reaction. They then are subject to a damage resistance test of Body + Willpower. Don't alter the drain values of Direct spells, but do make casting them a Simple Action, rather than a Complex action. Unless you do that, they are basically an extremely shitty gun with a silencer that gets crappier the more Force they cast it at, and that will convince your players to just cast Control Actions of Control Mob and make all the opposition kill each other.

I think that's the same world where streetsam is shitty with less than 18 dice

Ha ha. But to be fair, I said a street sam with only 12 dice is a shitty one, not "less than 18." 14 is basic Street Sam competency, if you're going for a swiss army knife sam. 16 for a pro. 18 if they're really specialized.

I know that.

Bye
Thanee

Well those pools are pretty much same for combat mage too.

You forgot... then the guy resists with willpower PLUS cover!!!

People who remember cover for gunfights ALWAYS forget that last part....

Also, then what do people pull up as an example in all of these cases... a specialized combat mage (specializations/mentors...). If a specialized combat mage can't reliably drop someone there is a problem. A healing specialist can still manage to finagle it but it's a lot harder.


I stock this up to yet another thread where... people whine about magic when not holding the mage to the same standards as the gunbunnies... (it's trivially easy to get a lot more dice on gun play than magic without spending tons of money/karma on it).

Every time I see a thread like this I remember the bad old days of SR1, 2, 3... you had pretty much no chance of soaking a deadly cast spell if the mage was so inclined. (and the mage would have his entire combat pool devoted to defending himself from your mundane attacks as well... while he had both a combat and a spellcasting pool). Or worse... they'd materialize a spirit then ground out an indirect combat spell into you from the astral where you could do jack to them (I saw grounding out abused far more badly than any percieved 'benefit' that some recall). People don't realize how very much improved things are. Nor stop and think that if someone even marginally skilled with a gun gets the drop on you... let alone a rigger or street sam... you will be dropped or unconscious if caught in the open. Then they turn around and complain about a mage being able to do the same thing.

It's almost as bad as the people who 'complain' about the optional rule in SR4a for adding drain to direct combat spells when using net successes stage the damage up. (it works well in my experience... if the mage resorts to fancy tricks like overcasting/multicasting he actually takes a good deal more drain and/or people end up far more likely to resist.

Holy balls, you're right. THAT'S why I was thinking cover bonuses applied to visibility penalties. It's not cuz they're visibility penalties, it's because the defender adds them to their defense rolls.

It was one of the errata changes when they went from SR4 to SR4a... previously cover was a penalty to the attackers pool (spells... guns.. etc. didn't matter). But when you have people firing area suppressing fire or area spells... it's really unwieldy. I really wish they'd just make all the modifiers positive bonuses to one side or the other.

(exceptions for things like self inflicted penalties like running which costs a free action... -2 attack... not a huge problem since it applies to all your actions but adds +2 defense!)

Yeah I hose down the end of the hallway... make your attack roll... well he's in good cover.. he's in the open he's in light cover... Roll 10 dice... roll 2 more.. roll 2 more... Instead of I roll 14 dice. Then he resists with reaction + cover... him with reaction +his cover... and him with just reaction since he was a dumbass and stood in the open.
(replace reaction with body/willpower and you have a combat spell... go figure plus an additional source of defense dice not available to gun attacks... counterspelling)...

Why does that matter? Guns get cover and armor, spells only get cover; cover is a common factor, so it's ignored. The OP's issue is the damage resistance roll.

The presence of Counterspelling assumes you have a strong mage on your side, which hardly seems solid.

Guns also attack twice as often (or 4x as often in the case of a pistolero).

So twice the attacks... but they get both an attack and a soak. The other gets one attack but gets a single resist. You're willfully blind to that last part.

Do I think indirect combat spells are screwed yeah (I have no idea why they moved counterspelling from the soak to the attack... which was a serious nerf). But it's only because their drain codes are rediculously high making them nigh unusable without absorbtion metamagic or the like. But when I turn around on these forums and see people blast the extra drain optional rule for direct spells... then turn around and blast the spells themselves... Then there's a disconnect.


Plus the attacker inflicts damage on himself (especially if he casts at any significant force).

Also you're forgetting that it's actually quite easy and cheap to get counterspelling for a lot of things. Get a force 4 bound guardian/plant/guidance spirit... have them conceal themselves and give the guards counterspelling! Even with our house rule that bound spirit service can only go a month... that's only 2k a month in materials (roughly on par with a low lifestyle). So say 3k or so a month to have a mage charge you for it.

Quite frankly, I dislike it when the game devolves into Magicrun instead of shadowrun. But at the same time... that's one of the major themes of the game setting. Magic is a new and DISRUPTIVE force... how does it work it's way into the setting and how do you deal with it.

I think that kind of 'contract counterspelling' is a great, realistic idea (though I'm not sure how well that spirit can hide while maintaining LOS). I'm only pointing out that cover is no kind of answer to this thread, because it's totally identical for guns. There's just no reason to mention anything common between guns and magic (e.g., Visibility).

That's actually a high cost estimate. A force 4 is 2k to bind... but if you get 4 services out of it... that's only 500 a pop... one service a month... it's cheaper than the guards themselves even with a 100% cost markup for the mage.

That's without the mage even putting himself in danger as a security mage or doing the extra work of monitoring wards.


But if the spirit is concealing itself... and hiding... it can be pretty hard to spot. If you're talking a possession tradition... the spirit could be bound in something mundane and be hard to spot. (threshhold 2 to notice something is force 4 magical, including spirit posssession). It only takes a free action at any time in the round to change who gets counterspelling. So even if the spirit is spending it's complex actions skulking/infiltrating... it only needs to keep the guards in LOS.

It should be cheaper, it doesn't actually do anything. I bet their shoes are cheaper than the guards as well.

Still, (carrying over to the general mage thread) now we're saying the targets all have spirits at them, which was the classic answer from the beginning ('fight magic with magic').

Ah. I wasn't talking about possession, because I never talk about possession. Assuming it's a real spirit, my point was that if it's in LOS, it's probably in the attackers' LOS as well. Hiding on astral is difficult.

Umm, when that turd rule is used overcasting is always less drain for same damage and so is multicasting(actually it's even more so).

Agreed. That rule is a total stinker. Better to use the more common Dumpshockism: when overcasting, use the full force of the spell before modifiers, not half. So with magic 4, a force 4, a "+2 drain" spell's caster is reducing 4 boxes of drain, but at force 5, that jumps to 7 boxes. It cuts down on overcasting shenanigans.

Please the suggested overcasting dumpshockism was to add 1 point of drain for every point by which a spell is overcast. EG: magic 5... cast force 5... 2 drain... go to force 9... and it suddenly jumps to 6 drain (you overcast by 4 points). Enough to be punitive without being crippling.

I've been inactive for a while but I participated in a lot of those suggested house rules threads.

1 point per force is far too much drain to be practical... and it even manages to make indirect combat spells even worse than they already are.


As for the optional rule... most of the people have lombasted but not actually played with it. Yes the mages overcast more... but they take more self-inflicted damage in the process. Also using higher force magic calls attention to yourself at the tables I've played at where people actually pay attention to the obvious of magic rules. In many of those cases you don't want that attention. The other option was to multicast which also increases drain... and due to the pool splitting it wasn't uncommon to see someone only suffer half of a spell and only end up wounded instead of out, just as if they dodged one bullet out of two shots.

You are correct: the spirit is broken b/c you are able to get an additional 16d pool attack off at 0 career karma. The force 8 is cake for a fresh mage to conjure, and at 100 career karma it's F9 to F11 can be an easy conjure. In addition your spirits get abilities that are not effected by anything except one stat (no counter spell). That F8 spirit can Fear you or anyone else on your team with no problem. And the fact that the spirit is just one (independent) weapon of the mage is sick.

16d Fear vs. your Willpower. Mean while your Indirect Combat casting mage is running away, and the spirit conjuring mage can hit you with guns or an elemental spell for all it matters. It's a 2v1 in this 1v1 situation.

Now if it's a possession mage, then it probably has access to a Task spirit too. Which now overlaps several other characters' niche for no additional nuyen or karma. Your new PhysAd can take it out with that F1 weapon foci I got at CC. He should have a 15-17 dicepool melee attack vs. that creatures 16 passive defense... b/c melee is still broke to hell too.

BTW, my last SRM character is a retired 150+ karma melee Mystic Adept, and everything possible was put into melee... yet the F11 greater form spirits we face at that "level" were an even dice pool match for me. The stupid dicepool cap for my defense pool hurt me, but not it. (I'm bitter)

Except that neither of those tricks cause the mage to take more drain.
Thats just a simple mathematical fact.