So I threw some spirits at my group the other day. I thought, hey, I'm going to show them a good time and make them scared and let that troll mage with banishing actually do something. So I summoned two force 3 fire spirits and everyone rolled initiative. The Gun Bunny goes first. I won't go into how many dice she rolls, but suffice it to say that it's over 15. She's using and specialized in semi-automatic pistols. One shot goes into the spirit. She's doing around 5P with the weapon to begin with. She rolls around 8 hits without using edge. I roll reaction and reduce it by one. Since she's using flechette and called shot, that's a +5 damage Total, she's doing about 17P before I roll damage reduction. If I remember correctly, she just had to beat double the force to punch through the hardened armor. I'm pretty sure 17 is more then 6. I roll damage reduction, +4 from the flechette, and get only around 5 hits. That's 12P that's going at a spirit. That's a dispelled spirit in one bullet. And she duel-wields, which means she's got another shot, then another simple action for two more shots if she wanted.

Did I summon this fire spirit from the Plane of Paper?

As a rule of thumb, any materialization spirit below F5 gets vaporized by semi-competent handgun wielders. So yeah, a F3 spirit is quite literally made out of paper planes, since a heavy pistol with standard ammo will overcome its hardened armor automatically.

F5-6 is usually adequate for most beginner level characters. I wouldn't go past F8 unless the group runs around with heavy weapons/sniper rifles/competent initiated mages.

Yeah. As opposition, spirits of Force 1-3 are pretty much useless for anything but wasting PC actions, because they'll go down quick and hard, and almost any use of their powers is likely to be resisted or have insignificant effects.

At Force 4, they're a bit more lilely to affect the PCs if you target their weaknesses as far as resistance tests go, and they can be somewhat useful as support for the baddies. They'll still go down pretty easy.

At Force 5-6, they can be quite a challenge unless the PCs are magic-heavy, have heavy weapons, or are just heavy dudes.

At Force 7-8 they're tough, unless the PCs are real bad-asses.

Force 9-10 they're tough against most things a PC can hope to acquire, even if they are initiated magic users. The 'best' they can hope for is to have their own spirits of equal/higher force to keep them busy, or really massive fire power.

Above Force 10 and spirits get really really nasty.


EDIT: So, to answer your question: yes, you summoned a marshmallow...

Unless you have a very weak or very anti-spirit team of PCs, you're limited to spirit opposition between Force 5 and 8 mostly.

I think you might be doing the rules wrong. Dual wield splits the pool in half. If she got 8 hits on half a pool, you should be ashamed as a GM for allowing such a character.

For once, I wholeheartedly agree with you! Good catch!

The issue is that spirits don't scale linearly, alas.

What did you do Ray?

At Force 3? Yeah. Marshmallow. Unfortunately, ItnW means there's not a whole lot of "sweet spot," where a spirit is a challenge, but something a team can beat without pulling out REAL big guns or specialized ammo. They tend to be creampuffs at Force 3-4, decent challenges at Force 5-6, and then they move up to "real trouble" at Force 7+, in my experience. The transition happens pretty suddenly, against your average group.

And if that were the case, she would not have hurt the force 3 spirits at all!

Damage = 5P +2 DV for flechette and + 4 for skill (8 / 2 hands).

Spirits Hardened armor from Normal Weapon Immunity: force x 3 = 6 + 5 (flechette ammo adds 5 to all armor ratings) = 11.

Since the DV does not exceed the armor rating, shots are inneffective. She would be better off shooting standard ammo, or explosive ammo. Flechette sucks against hardened armor!

Your force 3 spirits are still marshmallows though. If she has 15+ dice, you have a high powered group. You need to throw force 6's at them if your going to make them sweat.

Two average joes with 3 willpower could take out a force 3 spirit most of the time. For a runner its like beating up an average guy wearing a little armor.

No, he's throwing around 15 dice per hand. Gun adept, specialized, and put a lot of points into the right skills. From what I remember from all of the rules that we had to read for this, only the base pool is split. Then, modifiers happen. He seems to have a ton of positive modifiers to his pistol skill. He's got about 7 agility, 8 pistols (10 for specialized), Improved Active Skill 3, he somehow can take aim as a free action, initiate grade 3 with adept centering, laser sights, personalized grips. The numbers do get around 24. But from what he tells me, he splits his dice into two 10 dice pools, then increases each with positive modifiers, which means he's rolling 15+ dice on each gun.

To be clear, this is a 150 Karma character that's put every last point into doing as well with pistols as she can. It's a far cry better then her Katana + SMG = Simple Melee Attack build. That pissed me off.

And I can't really throw anything more powerful at them. I have a Gun Bunny, a melee adept, a covert ops, and a troll mage. The gun bunny is, 9 times out of 9, going to solve any problem. The melee adept is the best they have for melee, but it is really hard to get him into the combat before the bunny blows something up.

EDIT: Never Mind... Already mentioned...

Shame on you!

Well, how exactly does this adept get an 8 skill? The maximum a skill can be without the Aptitude quality is 6. Also, the adept improved skill power gets added to the base skill so it is also split the same way. It isn't a modifier but rather an addition to the skill. Laser sights can't be used while dual wielding firearms either. Personalized grips on a firearm just compensate for recoil, they don't add to your dice pool in any way.
So, from what you list it should be Agility 7 + Skill 8 (how unless that includes the specialization) + improved Pistol skill 3 = 18 pool split to 9 per gun. Without attunement for one of those pistols, nothing else gets added. So it should be a 9 pool on each weapon, though with a possible -2 if the character lacks Ambidexterity or some ability to use two weapons at once. The two weapon penalty can also b taken out by centering but no take aim as free action then since centering takes a free action. Also called shot requires a free action. No laser sight or smart link bonus allowed.

Why on Earth not? I personally have no qualms with throwing as-good-as-unbeatable forces at my PCs (on occasion) so long as its backed up with good story - a good Shadowrun team will fight well but a great team will know when to run away. If my players were to stop fearing for the safety of their characters I will have failed.

I would double check some of that. 5+ modifiers seems excessive. Especially when you consider that he called shot so should be at a -4 and a lot of engagements are at more than 5 meters so should have range penalties. And I don't think you can take aim with two attacks simultaneously.

Is he applying +1 personalized grips? +1 laser sights? what else? Does he have smart links too that he's trying to count? Because none of that works.
Is he getting +4 from taking aim multiple times for free while simultaneously calling a shot? I don't think that's how it works, but I'm not sure where he's getting the free aim from.

Well... A couple of things.

His base pool is going to be 20, so two pools of 10. The only modifiers are going to be the personalized grips at +1. RAW doesn't allow smartlinking while dual wielding, so RAI sure as hell isn't going to let the laser sights work either. Centering is nice to take away a negative modifier, but I've got the sneaking suspicion the 'modifier' he's centering away is the split pool itself. I could be way off on that though.

While 8 hits on 11 dice is possible, if it was a freak thing, I don't think you'd be writing to us about it. The average is going to hover at a little below 4 hits.

Krav Maga allows you to aim as a free action. I could certainly see a player not mentioning the half dozen free aim actions he's taking.

Except you only get one free action per IP. You can spend a simple action to gain another, for a maximum of three free actions per IP. I think the GM would notice if the player were only shooting every third IP.

Please cite where I stated the player was following the rules.

The impression I've gotten so far is that the player is merely committing an error, vis-a-vis the dual-wielding rules; you seem to be suggesting he is deliberately cheating.

Flattery will get you nowhere.

I'd still like you to cite where I stated the player was following the rules, if you please, that is, unless you are no longer dead set on 'correcting' me for suggesting what a player might be doing to receive such a high result.

Yeah force 3 is paper... HOWEVER using flechettes makes them quite formidable... they add +5 to the hardened quality so they end up nearly as tough as force 5-6 spirits until switching ammo. (really plain vanilla slugs would work better!).


CrystalBlue... he's either abusing rules or has them wrong... and he's playing off you as well because you don't understand them. Also I'm seeing people breaking things down incorrectly in the thread. So I'll start at step 1.

Determining base pool.

Shadowrun has 4 sources of dice.
Attributes
Skills
Skill Modifers (which modify/augment the SKILL to a max of 1 per 2 ranks in skill)
Then situational modifiers... anything which doesn't fall in the first 3 is a situational modifier, this includes specializations

Splitting goes you take the first 3 to determine the pool. (so no the adepts improved pistols is not post split).

So using your own example...
Attribute: Agility: 7
Skill: Pistols: 6(9)
Skill Mod: see above (9)... improved pistols skill. This is the augmented value of the skill
Situational mods: +2 specialization, no others (dual firing specifically bans the use of smartlinks, laser sights, etc.)
Unused mods: adept centering... (free action to use btw... has he told you what kind of kata he uses to activate it?!)

Aiming as a free action has nothing to do with it... he can manage a +1 maybe to one gun. If he's adept centering he's already used up his free action. Customized grips give 1 point of RC, not +1 dice (personalized grips on MELEE weapons give +1... so if he's using his pistols as melee weapons using the clubs skill... that's different but still related).

So now with the above. He has 16 dice before the split.
Split that into two pools of 8 dice... now each gets +2 for his pistol specialization.

He gets 10 dice per attack, no more... apply situational modifiers after this individually to each pool. Also remember RUNNING uses a free action (you see people using their running speed all the time in combat... point this out to them!) and also applies a -2 situational to each attack.

As others have stated... negative modifiers far outnumber positive ones after this point... (range penalties, vision modifiers, etc.). He has at least 1RC on each gun... so you don't need to worry about applying recoil penalties to both pools like firing two guns at once says.


I don't see why you're so pissed about the melee+SMG one... it's not a bad combo... sounds more like he didn't pull it off right.

Not sure why you're trying to pick a fight, or where you get the idea that I was trying to flatter you (for the record, I wasn't), but whatever. There are three salient points:

1. You never said the player was following the rules.
2. I never said you said the player was following the rules.
3. You are, as far as I can determine, the first poster in this thread to assume deliberate cheating rather than player error.

That's it.

Hmmm...if a 'normal spirits armor is equal to force, and then you add flechettes...

Shouldnt we make the addition of flechette bonus BEFORE we double the armor to make it hardened?

I'm sure why he's trying to pick a fight.

Anyway. Because the nonlinear spirit power comes up a lot, I think I remember seeing an idea about decoupling their ITNW from their Force. Instead, spirits get a basic level of INTW, and it increases more slowly with higher Force; e.g., 3+F/2 (x+F/y). That's just a random example, so we'd have to stop and think about the actual formula, but you can use whatever values you want for X and Y. This puts them more in line with the DV/AP line (which begins at 4/-0 and goes up relatively slowly).

Re: flechette, they don't have armor = Force, then doubled. They have armor = 2*Force. All AP effects apply to that (doubled) value, right? That's why S&S brings their armor 'back down' to Force.

Cut the passive aggressive dumbfuckery, yahoo.

The only assumption being made is that I'm claiming someone intentionally cheated.

The assumption is a reasonable one. Forgetting or not knowing when/if the dual-wield dice pool split is applied can be reasonably chalked up to player error. Taking six free actions in one pass... not so much.

I once had a player completely ignore the negative modifiers for perception with a drone. Had another assume the 100k Payday was per person, not group. I tend to assume people are wrong, rather then jerks.

You clearly have a more charitable view of people than I.

AN, I will say that I for one, reading your posts, did not realize you were talking about a cheating player til you explicitly came out and said you were.

If you're going to talk about something non-standard, like a cheating player, it might be a good idea to specifically say that to begin with. Saves on confusion later.

"I could certainly see a player not mentioning the half dozen free aim actions he's taking." is a little ambiguous.

Could mean a player literally taking six IPs of free actions and not mentioning it. Could mean that you didn't know that there's only one free action a round (until you clarified that you did know this in a later post) Or, it could mean you meant the player was cheating. Which it turns out was your intent.

Also, possibly, not assuming automatically that someone is attacking you and responding with a confrontational chip-on-your-shoulder attitude might help. You seemed like a likeable enough guy when I met you at that convention, but do seem to have a habit of assuming someone is attacking you when posting on the forums.




-k

Jeepers. Now *im* confused. Let's call the whole thing off.

You making it to dexcon, KI?

No, ItNW provides "an "Armor rating" equal to twice its Magic [Force]" so at no point does it equal Force.

I can't REALLY throw anything large at my PCs. Last time I even threw in a Force 1 spirit, I ended the run with one character possessed, one character dead from Physical over-cast drain, and two PC's that had no reason to continue running. I don't make my encounters in Shadowrun deadly anymore because that night was NOT fun after game. Being called a lousy ST and having no games to play or run for nearly a year is not fun. From now on, I don't try to send lethal encounters at my PCs unless I've discussed the entire encounter with the PC's ahead of time so they know what they're going up against. I know that sounds stupid, but I only have the one group of PC's and I can't afford to continue pissing them off anymore.

I think I'll need to do some research myself into the gunbunny. I'll try to recreate it with what I know and post another thread. I think I've got my answer about spirits, at least. Thanks guys.

Yeah, always a goo didea to get acopy of everyone's character sheets. When you do, post 'em here. Dumpshockers looove chewtoys.

CrystalBlue, I have major trouble believing that with a Force 1 spirit. I feel like maybe there was more to the story?

When duel wielding revolvers, if you have 1 shot each, each is a simple action.

Duel wielding pistols only splits dice when you are firing both in the same simple action, if my understanding is correct?

(you split if you want 4 shots with 2 semi autos, otherwise you may fire each semi auto once by taking two seperate actions for higher accuracy)

Just verifying if I ever look into utilizing duel wielded revolvers...

Correct...
Off-hand penalties do apply, though...

Unless you are ambidextrous... Cool, just verifying. I think "almost normal" might be confused about the cheating part, since the original statement was that the guy took one shot, then took another right?

I think the initial wording of the post was kinda wonky... As in order for her to take 4 shots she would of had to declare "dual firing" then split dice appropriately not, take 1 shot, then another, then as the second simple action her second set of shots.

I can't help but feel there's more to it than a Force 1 spirit.

Indeed...

Sounds about right as to the wonky wording... From what it sounds like, the character took two shots, one with each hand. Which is very different than taking two shots in the same simple action.

Agreed. At Force 1, a spirit's hardened armor is only 2/2, and its attributes low as well; easy meat for even a starting character.

Sounds like the character was dual-wielding (four shots per round) to me. I think CrystalBlue needs to go through Falconer's breakdown of dual-wielding dice pools. I think it is that, not any weakness of the spirit, which let the gunbunny beat it so easily.

Although, truly, a Force: 3 spirit is not particularly tough. Hardened armor of 6 means that most heavy pistols can damage it with only one net success (since heavy pistols have an AP of -1 before you even factor in ammo). It's better than the average mook, but not tough enough to stand up against optimized characters, or ones with some karma points under their belts.

Her gun's AP counts too. Typical heavy pistol using FL ammunition has an AP of +4. So while she still beat it, the number to beat was 10, not 6.


... and gets 15 dice per shot? Um. That, I have to see.


No. You summond it from the Plane of Birthday Candles. You know, "small, easily extinguished, and doesn't even frighten small children" ...?

Next time, try F5 or F6.






There's no such thing as "8 Pistols"; skills can't go above 6. Period, end of story.

Agility 7 requires a 20BP Quality (Exceptional Attribute), or specific Augmentations (1.5PP per +1 above 6).

Improved Combat Skill (3) costs 1.5PP.

Personalised Grips do not give firearms +1 DP - they give a point of recoil compensation. (An easy mistake to make, I made it a lot myself until a month or so ago.)

Even assuming he has the Agil 7 legitimately ... 7(atat) +6(skill) +2(specialised) +3(adept) +1(laser sight) = 19. A respectable die pool, but not enough to give him a die pool of 15 per dual-wielded weapon. Not even close.

Even getting really careful with "what's skill, what's a modifier" ...? The laser sight is post-split, easily. However, that means splitting a DP of 16, for 8 dice per hand, not 8 hits. Then add the Laser Sight, giving her a final DP of 9 per hand.

Minus 4 for the called shot, means FIVE DICE, per hand.

Statistically, that should be resulting in about 1.667 successes per hand. Not 8.


Cheats.

There's no soft or gentle way to put it, and this is not an accusation I make lightly or often, but: s/he is cheating. They're relying on your comparative unfamiliarity with the rules, and some fast-talk and double-talk, to pull a fast one on you. Step on them. Hard.

I think you also need to make all rolls for the players be made openly, center-of-table. This kind of problem also often involves, shall we say, "creative die rolling".


Rulius Lawyerus Pestilentius Minmaximus, a.k.a. the common Munchkin. That's what you're dealing with here. I recommend Geneva-Convention-violatingly strong insecticide. By the truckful, from orbit. "It's the only way to be sure."

Crystal Blue,

As other posters have suggested, I think you should reread rules for dual wielding or Falconer's summary thereof. You should then walk your PC through it (pointing out that laser sights do not give a dual-wielding bonus, and personalised grip only helps reduce recoil mods etc), and make sure they understand everything, including all the free actions etc they need to take aim and execute called shots. And make sure you are giving your PCs the correct DP modifiers for visibility and range.

As for spirits, remember that flechette ammo gives the spirit +5 to its hardened armour. Also, decide whether you want called shots to affect spirits: although not expressly mentioned in the rules, I think the majority of dumpshock GMs tend to not allow them - after all, with a metahuman you can aim for the head or whatever, but where exaqctly is the weak point of a nebulous spirit?

Next time, you might want to put them up against F4 or F5 spirits: F3 just ain't a challenge for most shaddowrunners.

No, the majority *DO* allow called shots to do it. It's a vocal minority who constantly come out against it...

Even though it's one of the only things in RAW which allows mundanes to keep high force spirits in check. That makes it well worth keeping in my book.

Quite frankly... it's magic it doesn't need an explanation why it does or doesn't work. But the game does need an explanation why you're allowing force 5-9 spirits to walk right over mundanes left right and center with no way for them to effectively fight back using the tools at their disposal.

I'd have to see the polling data to support either claim, vocal Falconer.

As for the rest, the answer is simple: spirits are broken at those levels. Fix *them*, don't allow/add broken counters. Tweaking ITNW in the way I recounted would go a long way toward that, remembering that spirits are supposed to be tough like vehicles.

I still want to know how a Force 1 spirit caused a near-TPK.

The only way I could think of is by possessing some badass combat character/drone, e.g. a Mitsuhama Tomino.

@Elfenlied
Thats quite impossible. Well, drones have a Object resistance of 5+ and the drone has two dice..