Do power foci grant any benefits to a non-caster adept, outside of adding to the Magic rating for purposes of rolls?

Not really, no. Really, power foci only help magicians; only weapon foci apply to all awakened.

You could argue that since it provides a bonus to any test that uses the magic attribute that any adept power that also uses the magic attribute to determine effect would benefit. Things like Attribute Boost for example. Up to the GM whether to allow that and up to the player whether the karma cost is worth it.

Under SR3 rules, they boosted the actual magic attribute, which helped adepts a bit more, if not all that much more . .
But this was changed in the SR4 Transition.

some powers come to mind.
Attribute Boost: Att + Magic
Wall Running: Running + Magic
Magic Sense: Perception + Magic

Gliding, distance=magic meters
Featherfall, height=magic meters
Distance Strike, distance=magic meters
Great Leap, Distance/height=magic meters

or something like that.
so a straight boost to magic can be pretty usefull.
but only +dice does not help nearly as much . .

since a Power Focus does not increase your Magic & those powers do no have Tests involved the Power Focus will not help them in any way I think Makki covered the only powers it may help, for that matter there are pretty much 0 Foci in all of SR4 that benefit an Adept in anyway & if you happen to be a Ranged focused Adept, not even Power Foci are useful.

Infuson Foci might be very helpful, but definitely circumstantial.
My detective adept with Psychometry did use an antique looking glass as a Dowsing focus. Again, a niche application. Same for Divining: Can be very strong and important, but depends on campaign and GM.

I'm adding the following powers to the list a power focus can be applied to:
Empathic Healing
Enthralling Performance
Motion Sense
Pain Relief

That's why you get the Attunement Metamagic and attune your ranged weapon. It isn't much if you are a low grade initiate, but every little bit can help. Not quite as cheap to get a bonus equal to what a power focus give a magician but it is better than nothing.

Yeah, quick rule of thumb is that ANY roll that uses Magic as a component of the die pool, benefits from a Power Focus - whether it's Spellcasting, Conjury, or some adept power or other. Theoretically, a Mystic Adept potentially gets more out of a Power Focus than anyone else.

Even Counterspelling can benefit from a Power Focus, just as long as you're not trying to counter a spell as it's being cast. Dispelling a sustained or quickened spell is a Counterspelling + Magic vs. Force + caster's Magic (+ Karma spent for a quickened spell) test.

I just wish they had adapted the Centering Foci to work for an Adept without houseruling

I think that would unbalance the Centering power for Adepts. Centering for Adepts doesn't add dice to anything, it just counters penalties so the focus would do what? Add its rating to grade and give a huge boost to the number of penalties you could ignore? So full auto fire with a minigun with no recoil compensation and no penalties becomes possible? No, I think it is just fine the way it is.

you do realize that's already possible with Adept powers right? Enhanced Concentration allows you to spend a complex action to ignore an entire penalty regardless of the amount of the penalty. So depending on the situation some penalties won't matter anyway.

Yeah I know but that power is expensive (1 PP), sacrifices a complex action to activate, has a limit of Magic for penalty value and can only apply to one penalty. So yeah you could do it with full autofire, so long as your grade and magic is high enough. But you give up a whole action to do it. Pretty pricey compared to just centering which can be used against multiple penalties. If you added a Centering focus that basically added to your grade for adept centering I feel that wouldn't be that balanced.

I dunno, I feel that limiting it to 1/2 Force increase to your IG for the purposes of Adept Centering makes it desirable while not overpowering.

However taking a force 6 Centering Focus as a Mage can push your 12 dice (I'd say thats on the low end for an Mage Initiate with Centering) to 18, not counting the possibility of adding a Sustaining Health Focus with a Stat Boost to increase your Dice to 20+ for Drain Dice. with that many dice pretty much anything besides heavy combat spells you're not taking Drain...

Yeah but in that case you've sunk a lot karma and cash into ensuring you never take drain. Most likely at the expense of some other aspect of your magic. In the case of Adept centering foci, it isn't as big an investment and gives a big return. Maybe at half force as a bonus, as you suggest, it would work better. It would be nice to see a few more foci of benefit to adepts. Then again, adepts focus so much of their magic inwards that not having things external to themselves that boost their power kind of feels right. Like it is in keeping with the spirit of what they are about.

Not quite... You ignore the Penalty up to the Limits of your Magic Attribute.
But in combination with Adept Centering, it can become quite powerful.

Actually in the example listed of 12 drain adding a Force 6 Focus compared to an IG 2 Adept with a Force 6 Focus, they have spent probably equal amounts of Karma at this point, equal amounts to bind the Focus & assuming a IG 2 Mage Equal amounts to Initiate. However, remember that an Adept is also only limited to Physical & combat tests to ignore penalties of. (yeah I know there are lots of tests that fit in that situation)

so my example would give the IG 2 Adept up to a 5 IG rating 6 if he has a way adding onto it with a Force 6 (expensive) Foci

Your example mage also included at least one sustaining focus and the Increase attribute spell so I would have disagree on the amount of karma spent. But yeah, Having the focus for an Adept working as a half rating boost to grade could work. Quite expensive for the bonus but it could work.

well I was saying if they wanted 20+ dice they could do that, but 18 dice is quite enough to negate most Drain.

True.

Rather than making the focuses gain at 1/2 value and having to get into rounding issues. Make them cost twice as much (both karma and money) and apply at full value. That way you don't end up with rounding problems.

-D

I think thats blowing it our of proportion also does not bring balance in line. That's 72 Karma & 180,000 nuyen for a +6 to your Adept Centering for a Force 6 vs the 36 & 90,000 for a +3 yes its half as much but its much more reasonable price for the limited use some people may get out of it & it will also not make the Adept Centering overpowered until much higher levels of IG.

Okay, RAW (though this conversation has nothing to do with RAW):

Cenering Focus Cost Force x 15,000¥ and Force x 6 karma.

So with this in mind the current suggestion is:

Buy a force 6 focus for (6x15,000¥) 90,000¥ and bond it for (6x6 karma) 36 karma to get a +3 to centering

Or my suggestion is buy a force 3 focus for (3x30,000¥) 90,000¥ and bond it for (3x12) 36 karma.

How is mine more unbalanced? Sure with mine you could drop a lot of karma and money to get a +6, but you could have done the same thing the other way and bought a force 12 (also a +6). With my suggestion you don't have to worry about what a force 1, 3 or 5 focus does. With rounding you'd have to decide if people will only be buying odd-force foci (round up) or even-force foci (round down).

For 72 karma (the bonding cost of a force 6 under my suggestion) you could have initiated at least one more time (probably more) and have had a permanent increase without the need for a focus. Saving up 72 karma should take most characters a long time too.

-D

Edit: Since this is well within the limits of House Rules anyway, limit the force of the focus to IG rather than Magic.

It's *NOT* RAW.

Centering != Adept Centering. It never has and never will.

The two are entirely different metamagics with nothing whatsoever to do with each other. If a mystic adept learns one... he doesn't know the other.

There is no such thing as an adept centering focus.

Agreed. And it doesn't need to change. However if someone wanted to change it, I gave my suggestion on how to do so.

-D

Last I checked there was a thing call ed an adept focus that raised egfective magic attribute for things like gliding and distance strike. Or I just made it up in my head.

No such animal in RAW.

There are rules for Unique Enchantments in Street Magic and Digital Grimoire. If you can convince your GM on it, then you'll just need to make one. (A long and arduous process...)

Edit: The Adept Focus was in SR3 (SotA: 2064, p. 68)

the point I was making is that 99% of the time Adepts have no benefit from magical equipment, which IMO is stupid, & people wonder why Adepts so often go to tech options. because we have no useful magical equipment to gain. I was trying to come up with a reasonable Adept Centering option.

Dolanar, I agree with you that adepts don't really gain much from foci but then I feel like the adepts focus most of their magic inward so an external source of power feels like it isn't in the spirit of how the adept operates. Of course it could be we are just trying to come up with a focus to help adepts for the sake of 'fixing' that perceived flaw. But do adepts really need foci to help them out? Or is it that some of the adept versions of tech are just too karmically expensive? I think the reason I've had adepts go for a tech solution was that it was just cheaper to do. Sacrifice a point of magic and essence and you can jam a lot of tech in that would cost several power points to gain with magic (muscle toner, I'm looking at you).
Of course if the adept powers were all the cheap option then there would be no reason to play tech characters. I guess it all boils down to where you want the focus to be in your game and how common or rare you want adepts and such to be.

I am mostly thinking of it as a limit of options, with Magicians you have several ways you can go with Foci which add flavor & depth to the character, & I feel Adepts are missing adding that extra element to them. It just seems that the Foci were added only for Magicians & Mystic Adepts. I mean theoretically they could have created something else to supplement for Adepts.

basically: Most concepts have their specialty items/gear that boost a concept well, Adepts, not so much (I'm not counting ways as that should be a requirement similar to how a Mage chooses their Tradition)

It's really always been that way. Even back in SR3, Adepts didn't really benefit from most foci (I actually doubt any benefit from Power Foci for Adepts back then).

& I am ok with them being excluded but it just seems that Adepts have been shoehorned into a specific position where they don't have anything specialized to their concept to benefit them. Juts seems odd to me is all

An Adept is more likely to gain benefit from a Weapon Focus than a Magician is, can't forget that. (That's part of why I think the interpretation preventing the use of Hardliners as Weapon Foci is short-sighted--even if there's no damage benefit from it, the accuracy bump should still be there.)

Personally, if someone wanted to make a weapon focus out of hardliner gloves, I'd be fine with that.

Hell, I'd be fine with them wanting to imbue their own frelling cyber-arm as a weapon focus.

(you can do it to spurs, so, why not?)

I could've sworn you were one of the ones that always wanted to keep Critical Strike from working if using them as a weapon focus...

I don't reall speaking ont hat, but that's different from them just being a Weapon Focus.

I admit to being leery of letting "unarmed weapons" DV mods stack with Critical Strike. I'd have to put some more thought into it, before forming a final opinion, but I am inclined to say "they overlap, not stack". The foci bonus, would stack completely, though.

Thinking of someone else then (though I do have a feeling I know who *glances toward the top of the page*).

OF course, I might just let it all stack - and give a Critical Strike like power for weapon-wielders. I mean, most weapons aren't worth mroe than 2 or 3 points of DV, anyway. But I've got Unarmed builds with 4+ levels of Critical Strike (one of them is a fourteen year old human kid, so I left his Strength at 2 and shored his Unarmed DV up with 4 or 5 levels of Crit Strike) ...

That's because the balance in the system has always been. Weapons do less raw damage but are far more precise (they roll more dice with focus + reach so they connect more often). Fists can do more raw damage but don't get focus bonus dice.

By RAW they don't stack... only when people start making wierd arguments that I'm using a weapon but I'm ignoring it's actual damage code because I don't think it's fair so we'll treat these weapons completely different than every other weapon in the game.

If you get your cyberarm (or bone lacing) enchanted though... you've paid essence and yes they would stack up... but at a very steep price. People could attack you astrally through the active weapon focus since you've paid essence to make it part of you.

<<Deleted>>

Even when adepts were first introduced in 1st ed they couldn't use any focus beyond the weapon focus. But back then they had such things as Killing Hands (Deadly), which did 10 boxes of damage per hit and Improved Ability worked as automatic successes. So one shot kills and if you attacked multiple targets you frequently got multiple one shot kills. They've been pulling back the power of adepts ever since but they may be going too far the other way now.
Falconer, I don't think Unarmed does more raw damage (now) than a weapon, at least not without sinking a power point into Critical Strike and another point into Killing Hands and Penetrating Strike. This ends up with an adept that can do as much damage as a Claymore with his hands. Kind of expensive but no one can take it away so you always have it.

Mantis:
What you do is you stack up killing hands... crit strike... elemental fist (normally a better deal than penetrating)... then buy up a ton of martial arts with a lot of stacking +1DV's...

By the time you're done... it's not hard to be hammering down 15 point punches with ap=half and elemental effects... your biggest weapon foci are only going to be +4 or 5 damage in comparison... while you can get twice as much +dam that way plus the elemental.

Not even going to bother to try anymore with that person. Get more progress trying to bring down a brick wall with my forehead.

Yeah. You could do that. Even more expensive in karma. Mine was just the bare minimum to get a punch that was as good as a really heavy weapon. Not the Vibrosword of course but swapping Elemental Strike for Penetrating Strike will better that. And for cost you need to compare apples to apples really. What does the weapon focus cost in karma compared to getting a punch as good (damage wise) as the best sword? I know you can stack up the damage in punching but damn, does that get expensive quick!

So somewhat related, how do Adept Powers work for things similar to Natural Weapons? Like, say, Fangs?

I've seen one argument that because they're not "weapons", but rather are a part of the body, that an Adept can't Attune them. But then I've likewise seen the argument that because they aren't "Unarmed", but rather are Exotic Melee Weapons, that they are unaffected by the various Unarmed powers. Which is it? I can't imagine they could both be correct.

If they count as weapons, you should be able to turn them into Weapon Foci or Attune them, just as you can with Spurs. And if they don't count as weapons, then they should benefit from the appropriate Unarmed powers. If you can magically punch harder with your fists for more damage, why can't you also bite harder with your fangs for more damage? And if this is true for cyberware Fangs, it should also be true for their biological counterparts. Unless you want to differentiate the two by saying all cyber-implants count as weapons, while all biological equivalents count as unarmed?

~Umi

You guys just gave me a good idea for some Double Dragon style NPCs I'm implementing now in my game.

not as much as you'd think, its only a few points of Adept powers, can probably get most of it from 6 points at character creation if that's your desired build build.