Salida,
I want to start a SR3.01D campaign soon. I have a healing Shaman in my group (I hope the descriptions are all correct, I don't know the english terms very well since I play the german version) which I granted one offensive spell so he can defend himself if he runs out of ammo. He decided for the Manabolt (I hope that correct, it's the spell grouped with the manaball). But we simply don't get the rules for this. We read it over and over and we just can't comprehend what the book is trying to tell us.
How much damage does it make?
How is the drain (is that what you call the damage a magician can take for doing magic?)/the damage level? (because the drain is damage level -1)
How is the resistance throw for an enemy?
Can the manabolt be leveled? So, is there a Level 1 manabolt and a Level 4 manabolt? How does this differ in the endresult?

Could someone please explain it to me? Maybe with an example round written down. I would REALLY appreciate it.

Thanks

Hey!

Sorry, but my SR3 books are out of reach at the moment, and I don't remember it well enough (though you shouldn't have any trouble getting your answers here).

Mostly posting to point out some german forums, that are focused on SR or have a SR section, which might be useful for you: http://www.sr-nexus.de & http://www.tanelorn.net

Have fun!

Bye
Thanee

How much damage does it make?

Okay, first, the magician has a spell bought at a certain force, from 1 to 6, from the spell points that they get. Look at how all of the magician archetypes have a list of spells, with a number after it.

The magician chooses two things when he casts a spell. He chooses the Force. He can choose up to the Force of the spell, but not higher. In other words, if he has a Force: 5 spell, he can cast it at Force: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, but not 6 or higher. Then, he chooses the base damage that the spell will do, with a choice of Light, Moderate, Severe, or Deadly.

So you might ask, why wouldn't the magician always pick the highest possible Force, and always cast it at Deadly? Because the Force and base damage level determine the drain, which brings us to your next question -


How is the drain (is that what you call the damage a magician can take for doing magic?)/the damage level? (because the drain is damage level -1)

Drain is complicated. The main thing to keep in mind is that the Force and damage level picked by the caster are the starting point for figuring out the drain. You start out with that - for example, Force: 5 and Moderate damage. Then you halve the force, rounding down. So the 5M becomes 2M (since half of 5 is 2.5, and you round it down). After you have halved the Force, then you look at the spell description where it says Drain. For example, suppose you cast powerball. After Drain, it says "+1(Damage Level +1). This means that you raise the Force by 1, and raise the damage level by 1. So your 2M drain becomes (2+1)(M+1), or 3S Drain.

Fortunately, a manabolt is simple. The Drain says (Damage Level), so you don't need to adjust your modified Force or your Damage level. A 5M manabolt would have 2M Drain.


How is the resistance throw for an enemy?

For manabolt, the enemy rolls his Willpower, with a Target Number equal to the Force of the spell. For example, if a security guard with 3 Willpower was hit with a Force: 5 manabolt, he would roll 3 dice with a Target Number of 5. The successes of the magician and the enemy are compared. If the enemy gets the same number of successes as the magician, or more, then the spell does absolutely nothing. If the magician gets more successes, then the spell damages the target, and every 2 net successes stage the damage up a level.

An example - the security guard mentioned above is attacked by a 5M manabolt. He rolls 2 successes, while the mage rolls 4 successes. Because the magician got 2 more net successes than the security guard (4-2=2), he stages the damage of the manabolt from Moderate to Serious. The security guard takes a Serious wound. He only gets this resistance test. There is no separate damage resistance test afterwards.


Can the manabolt be leveled? So, is there a Level 1 manabolt and a Level 4 manabolt? How does this differ in the endresult?

Yes, spells are learned at a certain Force at character creation. Magicians or shamans get 25 points for picking out spells, and sorcerers get 35 points for picking out spells.

The Force is important, because the enemy uses the Force of the spell as their Target Number to resist it. In other words, if you attack someone with a Force: 3 spell, they need to roll a 3 or better to get a success against the spell. If you attack someone with a Force: 6 spell, they need to roll a 6 or better to get a success against the spell.

An example: someone with a Willpower of 5 is attacked with a manabolt. He rolls 2, 4, 4, 5, and 6 on his resistance test. If he was resisting a Force: 3 spell, then the 4, 4, 5 and 6 would all be successes against the spell, for 4 successes. If he was resisting a Force: 6 spell, then only the 6 would count as a success against the spell, for just 1 success.

Thanks a lot for the answers.

Allright. So: my Shaman has put 4 points in the bolt. So, assuming a damage code ist [Number][Letter] he can choose both? He can say he wants to do a 4Light (it's called Light - Medium - Heavy - Deadly in german) or 2Deadly-damage bolt? That clears up a lot for us, since we weren't clear about if the caster can choose both or just one.

That helped a lot. I'll go it through with my Shaman and ask again if anything stayed unclear.

"Severe" is another word for "heavy".

Bye
Thanee

One thing to keep in mind is you can know a spell at a higher force than your Magic rating, but if you cast any spell with a force higher than your Magic + Initiation Grade, the drain is physical damage rather than stun/mental. Instead of headaches and fatigue, you get aneurysms and internal hemorrhaging.

Wouldn't that calculation just be Magic, since you gain automatic points of magic with each initiation? If you make it Magic + Initiation, you have a wierd outcome. With 3 Initiations, your Magic would be 9 (and thus Max Casting Force of 9 prior to Physical). If you use your calculation, your Max Force for Spells as Stun is 12 (Magic + Initiation). Granted, I no longer have my 3rd Edition Books, but this sounds wrong to me.

Technically true...keep forgetting I use houserules for initiation.

Okay running off memory... I remember needing to choose the damage level of combat spells when we learned them but that might have been a house rule at the time.


You can't level up the spell to the best of my knowledge, you simply relearn the spell at a higher force/different damage level and know both of them. There is no limit on the number of spells you can know outside of chargen and spell points IIRC.


The last bit which isn't addressed is your drain question.

The drain on direct combat spells equals their damage level... then with a +- to the TN. For manabolt the drain equaled the base damage level of the spell. For every two successes on the drain roll, which was TN (Force/2+0)==3 for a force 6 manabolt.

So to give a typical example... you learn manabolt at force 6 medium damage. You cast it at a willpower 3 guard. You roll your spellcasting (+spell pool dice you care to add). Guard resists force 6 with 3 dice of willpower... you get 2 more successes than he resists. The damage goes from medium to serious to the guard, with no more resistance rolls.

Now comes the drain... force 6/2== TN3. You roll your willpower (+ spell pool). For every 2 successes you stage the drain down by 1 grade. 2 succeses medium -> light, 2 more successes light -> none.


Generally a lot of people would do one of either two things. Cast at very high damage level but low force, or at high force but low damage level. Then rely on the fact that the spellcasting pool was far larger than the targets resistance pool to stage the damage up. EG: I hit the target with a serious damage force 5 spell. drain is force/2 round down ==2 (TN can never go below 2 so lower forces don't help you in this case). At this point you need 6 successes to stage the drain down to nothing, but... all dice you roll to resist drain count unless they roll a 1. so if you're tossing 8 dice... you have good odds of no drain, while the target would likely take either serious, deadly, or even possibly even more than deadly.

You learn spells at a certain Force, and can cast them at that Force, or lower. You can freely choose the damage level, though (spells were learned at different damage levels in earlier editions).

You are correct that the only way to get a spell at higher Force is to re-learn it at the higher Force. This is why I recommend getting spells at Force: 6 if possible, so you won't have to waste karma points re-learning the same spell later on.

Some spells you only need Force 1 for, though. Anything with an opposed Mental Stat will generally be far more effective with the Low Force (assuming a higher Casting pool. Since you can only gain as many successes as your pool, and your resistance pools are generally far less than the casting pool of the mage is, then you get better bang for your buck on a Force 1 Spell (Minimum Success on dice is still a 2) but if you have a resistance of 5 and I have a spell casting of 8, then all you need is 6 succeses on casting and they cannot successfully resist as it exceeds their resistance.

We had a Mage in 3rd Edition that used this principle to brutal effect. *shrug*

Isn't there some other limitation involved, based on the Force of the spell -- like you can't use more Pool than Force or something? I can't remember and I'm away from book.

I Do not remember, but I do not think so... Unfortunately, I no longer have any 3rd Edition books to reference at all thanks to the great book robbery.

I'll look it up later. I've still got my FASA-used-crappy-glue falling apart 3E manual.

I know counterspelling is an issue with low-Force spells, especially for spells that are sustained.

Yes, they did suffer from Counterspelling issues, but that is the only issue I remember off the top of my head.

You can only allocate as many spell pool dice as you have allocated sorcery skill dice for a spellcasting, spell defense, or dispelling test. Mages have a high potential dice pool for attacks (usually about 12 dice, then possibly totem bonuses or magical foci), but in practice, they should generally be splitting that dice pool between spellcasting, spell defense, and resisting Drain.

Mages can certainly dice-bomb targets, but that works better with indirect illusions, where the TN is a flat 4, or mooks with relatively low Body and/or Willpower. For manabolt, you want it at least Force: 5, because you are going directly against the target's Willpower as a TN - you want something that can take out a tougher enemy, one that might have a Willpower of 6. If they are rolling against TN: 2 and you are rolling against TN: 6, even a 2 to 1 dice advantage isn't likely to cut it.

A manabolt of Force: 5 has 2(Damage Level) Drain, so there really isn't any advantage to casting it at a lower Force than that. Casting it at Force: 6 definitely gives you an advantage, though. At Force: 5, they resist it on a 5 or 6. At Force: 6, they resist it on a 6. Force: 6 is literally twice as difficult to resist as Force: 5.

Now, when getting your initial spells, you need to balance effectiveness versus versatility. There are some utility or other useful spells that can be useful at lower Force. But for resisted spells, I think a high Force is a very good idea.

Yeah the one if you pretty much wanted to make sure only the lucky would ever resist was force 12. The TN5 on the drain was hard to do though. But I saw some people pull that off start with 'light' damage then get 6 successes to stage it up to deadly. Then pull only 2 successes on TN5 stunbolt to take no drain. But the target only had about 3% chance per die of rolling a resistance.

This all reminds me heavily of the one thing I really disliked a good deal about earlier editions... the damage system. Though the +TN adjustments for wounds was a lot more punishing. (suddenly seeing your TN's jacked from 5->6 was a real pain due to the vagaries of chained d6 probabilities).


As regards SR3 and earlier counterspelling. It was rarely an issue, because you had to use spell pool dice for it. Normally the entire combat pool was devoted to defense, but the spell pool got tied up into offense and drain resist more often than not.

Another problem with ultralow force was object resistance. You needed minimum forces to be able to affect objects.


So toss on my ideas of improvements in 4th... damage system (not limited to 1/3/8/10 points of damage blocks).
Lack of variable TN and variable number of successes.
Counterspelling is now FAR easier to accomplish so it gets used a lot more than in the past especially to protect teammates and make magic a bit less overpowering. (my experience was it a blue moon kind of thing which mages would use to protect themselves and little more in the past... since it used up dice whenever it was used)

A few canon points to add:

-> An elemental spell doesn't work alike a manabolt spell. The opponent can use combat pool and if his resistance beats your number of success he still get damaged.
-> AFAIK, an AOE spell had a radius of [Magic]meters. And if you wanted to lower that radius you had to lower the spell force.

However I always found the rules to be unbalanced. Take a confined space. The spellcaster could just choose Deadly and roll all pools to fry them all. Roll 12 dices on a deadly spell, many many opponents will go down.


I've housed rules that in 3 ways:

-I solved the force glitch (some spells never used Force so take it force 1) by ruling that Spell Force caps the maximum of success (e.g. An Invisibily Force 3 spell could only generate a +3 TN to perception tests)

-I decided to round up the drain resistence test. So a base Force 5 => a base Drain TN of 3.

-Tough not clearly stated in the rule book, if you pick a Damage code of Deadly, and the Drain is Damage Level +1, you need 4 successes to lower them to serious. It's somethin alike the "Deadlier over-damage" rule.

A correction here, you can adjust the radius by withholding dice from the sorcery test. +1 meter per die withheld, or -1 meter per 2 dice withheld. (SR3 pg 181)



If a modifier would raise the Drain Level above Deadly, add +2 to the Drain Power instead for each level above Deadly. (SR3 pg 191)

Unless you use the deadlier over damage, which frankly, is a must.

Why, exactly, is it a MUST?

Because otherwise you get people taking a panther round to the face and beating it handily with a couple of purchased successes. You can still buy em to beat it the other way, but it takes alot more KP.

Pretty sure we never used the rule, and the game was plenty deadly.

Plenty deadly and having ridiculous situations aren't mutually exclusive though.

Kinda like the old warhammer RPG naked dwarf thing.

Must have missed that one as well...

A dwarf could become more resistant to damage naked than full plate mail armor.

But how?
And would the Full Plate Armor stack with the Naked? Because if it does, then they are not more resistant Naked.

Should a person's skin ever be tougher than full plate?


It did stack, IIRC, been awhile. But that was secondary.

Probably not, but I do not know that game world all that well... Of course, it is a Fantasy world with Magic, so... *shrug*

Well... that escalated a bit.

I have a completly other question, i.e. I can't find something. I have a Rigger in my group. I understand what it takes for one of his vehicles to take damage. But how is it dertemined how much damage a vehicle can take before it breaks down/is destroyed? I somehow seem to overlook that part. :-/

They have a single 10 box damage chart, with Light, Moderate, Serious etc... Penalties are applied to TN's and maximum speed according to the following:

Light - +1TN, no speed change
Moderate - +2TN, 75% of max speed
Serious - +3TN, 50% of max speed
Deadly - Crash Test, vehicle destroyed

If you have Rigger 3, there is a vehicle record sheet on pg 206 or so in the back.

Sadly I only have the corebook. But thanks, that helped already enough.

Jeez, this rulebook is at time complicated. Also it pisses me off that some things (at least in the german version, don't know how it is in the original english version) are on completly different pages than the tables for it. It's a mess in some points.