Discussion requested: What are the game implications in allowing a spell that grants a critter power? What would the spell details be?

Hi all,

I only have the basic book and Street Magic, so this may be covered elsewhere. I've been thinking about spells that should be, in a world with tons of professional and hobbyist spell designers. There are a ton of useful applications in the critter power list. What would a spell that grants a critter power look like? What would its drain be?

Manipulation and health seem to be the go-to suspects for spell category. In fact, I could see there being a "manipulation version" or a "health version" of them. Technology offers a lot of different options in how to get a job done; why not magic?

Here's a discussion point: Would this be over-powered? Maybe. But after flipping through War! and some other supplements, I think this line has already been crossed obliterated.

Imbue Regeneration P T S (F÷2)+1: Manipulation spell, Physical, Touch range, Sustained, Major Change (+2). I'm thinking there should be a threshold on hits, like (7-Essence). Target gains regen while spell is sustained.

Then there's my favorite:

Imbue Sapience P T S (F÷2)+1: Manipulation spell, Physical, Touch range, Sustained, Major Change (+2). Threshold (7-Essence). Target gains sapience while spell is sustained.
-I'm the savior of ghouls! Now they eat at my restaurant which serves Sapient devil rat. All-you-can-eat. Sapient beef available with 24-hour notice; surcharges apply.

Thoughts?

Thorguild

So... you're giving a creature an enhanced ability to experience and comprehend suffering, so you can feed it alive to a pack of ghouls.

I'd shoot you in the face for free.

There's always someone who loves devil rats. I'd happily feed a devil rat to someone, even knowing it was suffering, rather than have a ghoul eat a person. Besides, fluff already shows you don't have to feed it to them live. They bring food to fancy ghouls on plates.

Thorguild

With the limitations on Infected, there's not a lot of good options, morally speaking.

1) Kill anyone who is Infected. Status quo and pretty horrible in it's own right, but also impels the Infected to even greater evils because they are hunted.

2) Arranged Symbiosis. Least terrible option, but requires almost ideal conditions such as balanced population ratios and death rates, cyclical Essence feeding rotations, societal and legal issues resolved, et cetera, overwhelmingly unlikely.

3) Provide a different food source that is sufficiently sapient. We already farm raise countless species, all of which are sentient, if not fully sapient. While making a species better capable of experiencing emotion and suffering is it itself pretty bad, if the species is already considered a nuisance or a pest, this may be the most practicable solution. You have to weigh the added suffering of the food species against the reduced suffering of humanity, both Infected and not-Infected.

With sapient devil rat, you'd have 1) less Infected suffering, as they no longer have to hide and murder and all that; 2) less non-Infected suffering, as they no longer have to protect themselves from the Infected or cope with the trauma of things like having to shoot Grandma because she got bit by a ghoul; and 3) a pest species that is already being hunted and killed without any real beneficial side effect suddenly becoming a useable resource.

Oh, and by-the-by, Sapient food does nothing for Ghouls. Sapience only matters for Special Infected with Essence Drain and Essence Loss, because you can't drain Essence from non-sapients. Ghouls need actual human flesh, so they still have to eat dead people. Here there might be some room for the Symbiosis option, if ghoul populations can be kept small enough that they can just eat the dead we naturally produce, possibly supplemented by capital punishment or warfare, et cetera.

Personally, I still like my Sapient Bee Hives for Special Infected, because they're self replenishing.

~Umi

I'd really like to put the conversation back on the Spell track, rather than ghoul-jack it. With that said...

Is that true? Hmm, too bad. I thought they just needed sapient flesh.

My best other option is to get paid/volunteer shifters and other regenerators to undergo "harvest" under general anesthesia. Step 1-Stomach catheterization for protein broth. Step 2-Hack out the thigh muscle. Step 3- Wait two minutes. Step 4- Repeat.

Thorguild

On the other matter of the feasability of turning Critter Powers into Spells?

Critter Powers aren't normally intended to be available to players. They can provide some overwhelmingly powerful tools, and need to be carefully checked by GMs in the few cases that they are available to players.

Aside from things like playing Infected or Sapient Critters, the other primary way I know of to gain Critter Power usage is through making custom Magical Compounds. Using the rules from Street Magic to make Unique Enchantments allows you to harvest and refine reagents, and then use those reagents in combination with an appropriate formula to create Magical Compounds. This isn't terribly cheap or easy to accomplish, but it is doable, and it does allow you to gain Critter Powers to use, at least temporarily.

The utility of this is offset in a good number of ways. Magical Compounds have a short shelf life once made. Reagents have to come from virgin wilderness, which is often not easily accessible, and have to be carefully harvested, which requires an investment in Survival. Refining the raw reagents requires skill in Enchanting. Formulating a custom compound formula requires skill in Arcana. The threshold for the enchantment itself is very high, and with properly enforced extended test limits can easily be failed, especially for compounds that provide more than one critter power at a time. Even if you suceed, the compound also inflicts a suitable negative effect when it wears off. And all of this costs time and money and effort and initial karma investment.

Having these sorts of powers available for just an extra bit of drain is kind of absurd. High level mages with multiple initiations would gain a vastly powerful new set of tools for very little tangible cost, further exacerbating the problem of game balance in regards to magic.

~Umi

A while back I actually had a small discussion (with, I believe, Patrick?) about the possibility for two Special Infected with Regeneration to just feed off each other eternally. With a Renfield or two to replenish Essence, it's apparantly fully possible, which makes me wonder why it doesn't happen more often.

Lemme see if I can dig up the link to the thread...

Oh, and Shifters aren't human, so no dice there.

~Umi

Imbue Regeneration: kinda going back and forth on this, whether it's too powerful or not. Maybe also limit the amount of damage it can regen to net hits/round or something like this? I'd be worried that it would make spells like Heal obsolete...

Imbue Sapience: I guess this could be used for fun or just RP or whatever, but this seems a little too powerful. Not in the actual rules mechanics way of powerful. More like granting sapience to a creature seems like an "uplift" event, a big deal ^tm

I don't think you understand the substance of my objection. Granting sapience to an animal makes that animal a person. You're not feeding ghouls animals instead of people, you're just feeding them a different kind of people. The question is moot, however, as Umidori pointed out.


Shifters are not human.

I get where you are coming from. I haven't seen a lot of balance past the initial rulebook. Almost everything can be 'absurdly' unbalancing, and each supplement brings new things.

I'm not sure I agree though, that this would be so far out of the box. I know you've read other min-max threads on the board. How much worse is applied regeneration than a damage-soak troll build?

For discussion's sake, is the spell built correctly? Is there a set of rules that you would see as balanced for it?

*****
Complete aside here: Whenever I think of these balance discussions, I think of a medieval conversation about guns at the Round Role Playing Table.
Percival-So you want a crossbow that has 32 arrows, which you can fire all at once...
Leodegrance- Bullets, and they fire fast, but not all at once!
Percival-Whatever. And they don't require a string, or even for you to draw...
Leodegrance- Because they are powered by...
Percival- Magic.
Leodegrance- ...an alchemical powder like a ...
Percival- Magic.
Leodegrance- ...snapping log in a fire.
Percival- Translation: magic.
Leodegrance- ...
Uther- Not only wouldn't this work, but it's unbalancing. I rule no. Just like your magic horse. (Makes big mocking air-quotes)
Leodegrance- It's an auto-mobile, powered by ...
Percival- Magic.
Leodegrance- Shut up! Internal combustion!
***

I think I understand. I know you've got a lot of people that agree with that IRL.

As to the shifter thing... Well, that's a harsh ruling, but justifiable. I don't think it's a very fun ruling though, for a game which implicitly mashes together fantasy and another-type-of-fantasy.

Thorguild

You people got some very interesting standpoints *tilts head*
and no regeneration is broken as hell

Neat new way to say "Cool story, bro". Kudos!

Well considering you have to specifically build for a damage-soak troll build at the expense of other options, and Regeneration as a spell simply costs the karma to learn it... and also considering that it would be castable on any target of your choosing, and you could easily just have the mage cast it on the damage-soaking troll and make him completely batshit insane... yeah, this is indescribably worse.

A pure tank character makes certain sacrifices. It has costs associated with its benefits. Regeneration as a spell does not.


No spells provide Critter Powers. The guidelines for creating custom spells have no mechanisms for reproducing such effects, and the only system I know of which can reproduce Critter Powers in ordinary metahumans - custom Magical Compounds - has substantial costs and limitations inherent to its usage. So no, I do not believe it is built correctly, as it exceeds all reasonable boundaries of custom spell creation.

As for a set of rules that I would see as balanced for it? The Magical Compounds system seems pretty balanced. So does the system of playing as an Infected, or other special character types. (Although Shifters get Regeneration a bit inexpensively in my mind.) I see no reason to make it available in spell form and no reasonable way for such a thing to be balanced.

~Umi

It's not a ruling, it's RAW. I can't cite you a page number, as my books are packed away ATM, but Runner's Companion spells out explicitly that shifters are not metahuman. A wolf shifter is a wolf that can turn into a man, not the other way around.

More like, "I'd love to discuss the nature of sapience and non-human intelligence to great lengths with you but doing so would probably break several forum rules and be generally unpleasant"

Also you can solve the ghoul dilemma without anyone dies, Dunkie proposed it in his will... Ghoul tofu.

As I recall, clonal human tissue kind of works, depending who you ask.

~Umi

There's an Imbue Sapience spell IRL? What?

He was refering to how if we could do this in the real world, that's likely how people would react. His point is that since SR isn't real, we can make allowances for things that we philosophically wouldn't normally agree with. Kinda like killing zombies is fine in video games, but would be morally ambiguous in real life.

~Umi

You're gonna have to explain this one to me. Destroying undead abominations that feed on the living would be morally ambiguous?

Sure it would be.
Do you know that they're really undead and beyond saving with medicinal aid?
Those are the questions that may occupy you just before your brain is eaten

Depends on how they were made doesn't it? Ghouls and vampires and such are undead in other systems but in Shadowrun they are just people who have been infected with a disease. Pretty morally ambiguous to go around killing folks that have a disease.

It also opens the door wide for abuse : cast it on a cybered samuraï and unless he's fiteed in Deltaware, al his goodies get dumped. Thouhg it's not profitable as 'turn to goo' in that regard as teh 'ware will get trashed.

Oh gads, I'd forgotten, but now you reminded me... my players were discussing spells, including "Turn To Goo", and one of them came up with the hilariously off-color "Turn To Jew" spell. We kiiiinnda lost it for about five minutes.

~Umi

Shooting undead former people that want to eat me is morally ambiguous... not really. It's survival. I would gladly pull the trigger and you know what I would feel... joy that I'm still alive.


Sorry, anything that looks at me and thinks: "Yeah... he looks like lunch." is going to get shot and I wouldn't bat an eyelash.

You know why? I LIKE SURVIVING!!! I am not a food source. ANYTHING that threatens to eat me is going to get shot. End of discussion.

That's your personal view, but it's not the only view, and it certainly isn't a very philosophical view.

There's moral ambiguity in most everything, we just choose to ignore it or overlook it most of the time. We all kill to survive, because we have to eat. But we could all be vegetarians, for example, on the premise that we'd be causing less suffering and harm and it would be the more moral choice. Now, obviously many of us are not vegetarians, for a variety of reasons. But there's something to be said for considering the morality of not being one.

So yeah, dealing with SR style Infected. How do you have any moral high ground? You say you're morally in the right for protecting yourself from being eatten by ghouls. Fine. Does that mean Eco-Terrorists are morally in the right for protecting cows from being eatten by you? If nutjobs start blowing up burger bars and executing the patrons in cold blood, will you support the morality of their actions?

Think about it. Logically, they're being more noble than you are. You're killing ghouls out of self preservation, but the ghouls have no other option - they're also killing out of self preservation, because they MUST eat human flesh. But when you eat cows, that's not self preservation at all - it's purely a luxury. So when radical eco-terrorists put a bullet in your head, they're not only 1) protecting a helpless animal that cannot fend for itself but also 2) putting a stop to the completely unnecessary killing of that animal. Their actions are nobler and more moral than yours.

That's moral ambiguity in action.

~Umi

It falls apart when you realise the ghouls can procure their meat from people that were already dead rather then going out murdering people
Also regarding cows:
♪ We will fight bovine freedom and hold our large heads high ♪

They could, but only if their consumption rate is less than the production rate of naturally-killed human flesh, minus unusable flesh, minus flesh unavailable for reasons X, Y, Z, et cetera.

So yeah, IF humanity in general was willing to surrender their corpses over to be eatten (which many, many people would not be cool with), and IF the logistics and supply issues could be hammered out to everyone's satisfaction, and IF the population of ghouls was kept in balance with the natural death rate of humanity, and IF ghouls could be prevented from going feral and thus being forced by their mental sickness to kill to survive, THEN yeah, sure, that'd work out.

But like I said in a prior post, this Symbiosis option is incredibly unlikely.

~Umi

Bear in mind that ghouls don't need to eat exclusively metahuman meat, their dietary requirement is something like 5% of their body weight every week (month?, I can't be bothered finding the numbers) that's like an arm... So the human death ratio to ghoul feeding ratio is skewed in their favour, all you need to do is keep them from gorging and yes, ghouls can eat other meat as long as it's raw. So unless you got a rampantly large ghoul population it's feasible.

5% of Body Weight per week.

I guess I'll poke around for population numbers.

~Umi

A few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.

According SR4A, p. 73, 98% of the global sapient population is metahuman, while "the remaining 2 percent of the global population includes dracoforms, ghouls and other vampiric entities, spirits, artificial intelligences, shapeshifters, and other sentient non-metahuman species." So even without accurate numbers of total population, we still know that there are no more than 2 Infected for every 100 people, and realistically closer to only 1 per 100.

Ghouls require 5% of their body weight per week in human flesh. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume perfect consumption efficiency and state that for every 100 ghouls, you need 5 human corpses per week, or 260 corpses per year. Thus the minimum overal number of corpses consumed by ghouls per year can be measured as 260% of their population.

EDIT - A calculating error had me undervaluing the rate of consumption. I had previously calculated corpse requirements at 110% of the ghoul population, which was close enough to a 1:1 ratio that I merely treated it as such. I've since updated my calculations to operate off the appropriate value of 260% of the ghoul population. Edited values are in bold underline.

Crude Death Rate is measured in the total number of deaths per year per 1000 people. As of July 2009, the global CDR was 8.37 deaths per 1000 per year, or 0.837 deaths per hundred per year. If the percentage of the global population which is ghouls is greater than 0.3219%, this death rate is insufficient to feed them all. If the percentage is somewhere around 1%, say 1.287% of the global population (still well below the 2% cited above), you can at best feed a quarter of the ghoul population, assuming perfect "harvest" efficiency, meaning every year the ghouls would be forced to kill and eat a number of people equal to 195% of the ghoul population, effectively increasing the CDR from 8.37 per 1000 to 33.466 per 1000, roughly quadrupling the CDR.

Even if the CDR is already much higher in 2075, ghouls are theoretically unfeedable by passive means alone.

And none of this even accounts for detailed information.

For example, Humans make up 60% of the population, so at least for that portion these numbers are "roughly" accurate. Orks and Trolls provide more meat and have higher death rates, but while Orks are a relatively large group, they're still a minority, and Trolls are actually pretty rare. Additionally, you can also have Ork and Troll ghouls, which increases the amount of meat you need per individual ghoul. Moreover, given the relative disenfranchizement of Orks and Trolls, they may have disproportionately higher rates of Infection, resulting in the global Ghoul population not cleanly mirroring un-infected metatype ratios. Elves and Dwarves likewise complicate matters, as they not only live longer and provide less meat, they're probably also less frequently Infected thanks to better standards of living, and therefor make up a smaller portion of the ghoul population, counteracting their reduced intake of human flesh.

And again, none of this accounts for things like logistics and distribution and supply chains, et cetera.

~Umi

Interesting... If we don't include infected we cannot re-integrate into society (read: all soulsuckers and feral hunters) this might work.
Yeah I assume deathrates are pretty high, with sprawls and SINless... Standard of life isn't what it used to be.

But then you have to tackle inefficiencies.

For example, not every scrap of every corpse is useable. What actually counts as "Metahuman Flesh" in terms of magical theory? Could you dig up old bones and eat those, or does it actually mean muscle and meat? Moreover, even if the ferals could survive off mere bones and sinew, the still sane ones might not be so undiscerning. I get that you don't have much of a choice, but with groups like Tamanous willing and able to fill a blackmarket demand for choice flesh, the "natural harvest" needs to be able to compete in terms of quality of cuts of meat. There there's the matter of damage to the body, which accounts for a significant number of deaths and which would destroy useable parts. Then there's "harvesting", preservation, transportation, pricing, regional supply discrepancies (a lot easier to get fed in places where more people are dying), and so forth.

This doesn't even begin to touch on legal and religious concerns. Do you have any idea how messy the laws on the possession and storage of human remains already are in our own day and age? How do you handle Organ Donations? Does Joe Human get his kidney transplant, or does Johnny Ghoul get his kidney pie? If old bones are useable, how might the world handle potentially unscrupulous ghouls resorting to graverobbing? (Does this already happen in SR anyways? I've never really thought about it.) What about partially decayed flesh? Can a ghoul get sick from eatting bad meat? And once everything else is worked out, how do you sell the idea to John Q. Taxpayer, who may follow any of countless religious traditions concerning the treatment of the dead in ways that do not allow for ghouls to be fed like this?

~Umi

Pretty sure I read somewhere that graverobbing do occur, some for magical reasons zombies and such, but also digging up the recently dead for harvest.
For ghouls it needs to be flesh, doesn't say in what state... Although gnawers can feast on bones which is why they often get along with ghouls.

On the note of organ donations... Didn't you see the checkbox for ghoul snack?

Okay, so if bones are out as a Ghoul food source, we instantly lose 15% efficiency, as bones account for about 15% of the human body's weight.

So now we at minimum need 5.75 corpses per 100 ghouls per week, or 299 corpses per 100 ghouls per year, meaning each ghoul eats roughly 3 corpses a year. Which means the total population of ghouls needs to be less than 1/3 the total number of deaths per year.

I'm gonna assume that out of that larger 2% value of non-metahumans that also includes non-flesh eatting Infected and other Sapients, at most half of that group is ghouls, so I'm gonna stick with 1% of the global population being ghouls. This is a nice round number, and it seems to be about right given the fact that Ghouls are the most populous of the Infected. (It also nicely matches up with the rough percentage of Awakened in the world.)

Working off the flat value of 1% of the global population, if each ghoul eats 3 corpses a year, that means you need a CDR of 3%, or 30 deaths per 1000 per year. That's absurdly high.

~Umi

...
Just realised the morbidity of this whole ordeal, tis a bit absurd *giggles*

I tend to get in trouble for my cerebral distance at times like this. I find it immensely useful to detach myself from emotional concerns when contemplating topics like these, but I'm told it gives me an unpleasantly cold air when I do so.

~Umi

And yet, it is also disturbingly interesting to actually see the numbers. *shrug*

Why is this number absurdly high? purely curious

Losing 3% of the global population per year is huge. To put it into some perspective, last year the global birth rate was about 19.15 births per 1000 per year, or 1.915%.

When you've got 6.9+ billion people, the total values also kinda get ugly. With the 2009 CDR value of 0.837%, roughly 57.75 million people died that year. Change the CDR to 3%, and you end up with 207 million dead, per year.

For comparison, World War II, the deadliest military conflict in history, resulted in 60 to 80 million deaths over the course of six years. Compared to the population totals of the involved countries for that time period, that's a war death rate of between 3% and 4% during the entire course of the war. Per year, the war death rate was between 0.5% and 0.67%. (This of course being over and above the "normal" death rate.)

~Umi

you could potentially (again, providing laws allow for such things) reclaim some metahuman flesh from implanting 'ware, and i seem to recall clones can be used? consider that if, say, you get a replacement hand from a clone, they probably need to start up a new clone. likewise, if someone actually dies, their clone no longer has to be kept in stock. of course, that's situationally dependant on the clone being a viable source of food, which i'm not sure of at all.

on the other hand, if you remove the non-sapient ghouls from the equation, i imagine the food requirements would go down somewhat.

Running with the numbers of 1% and our current population of 6.9+ billion (anyone able to find a 2075 population number?), there should be 69 or 70 million ghouls worldwide.

Sleeping With The Enemy, from Storm Front and the Hidden Stories, mentions that Asamondo incident which revealed they had nearly twice the number of feral ghouls they had previously reported. The write up states that 4,500 feral ghouls were released in the main prisons, and several thousand more in secondary prisons, so let's assume a number around 7,500. If this release doubled the number of feral ghouls, that means there were 7,500 known ferals already, and that the total feral population in Asamondo is about 15,000.

Sixth World Almanac lists the total population of Asamondo as 500,000, of which more than 99% are Infected, so let's just assume 100% and also assume they're all Ghouls, just to keep the numbers simpler. Thus, Asamondo makes up roughly 0.7% of the global ghoul population, based on the above number of ~70 million. If we assume the official population numbers didn't include the 7,500 known feral ghouls and the 7,500 unknown ones, we can add 15,000 to 500,000, then divide 15,000 by that total to get 2.9% of the total population being feral.

Whether this percentage is applicable globally, who can say? But even if it does hold, reducing ghoul populations by a mere 3% is not going to be anywhere near enough to matter.

As for cyberware, yes, surgery does provide a limited amount of meat, but it can only partly supplement the need. Part of the problem is that for each individual who gets a limb or body part replaced, that's a one time event, not a yearly thing. Even if cyberization was mandatory, if every single person in the world was forced to sacrifice their limbs, the yearly supply of flesh from limbs would cap out at a number equal to the global birth rate multiplied by the percentage of usable meat each individual can contribute in this manner. Let's assume something absurdly optimistic, like 50% of body weight being able to be harvested (requiring all four limbs be removed I guess?). With a global birth rate of around 2% or 20 people per 1000 per year, the effective maximum harvest would only be equal to 1% worth of the CDR, or 10 "corpses" per 1000 per year.

With ghouls requiring an effective CDR of 3%, and our current CDR being 0.837%, even adding in that extra 1% effective CDR obtained through 100% cyberization, you're still a whole 1% CDR short of feeding the ghouls. And if you look at more realistic numbers for cyberization, it gets much grimmer.

~Umi