The way I read it, you can ward, say, a vehicle, but you must have a physical anchor that'd remain immobile in relation to that vehicle. If you consider that possible, given the kind of stress and shocks anything near shadowrunners receives, you can have the ward moving along with the warded vehicle.

Not even close. First of all, for a mage to be an awesome mage at the start, he needs to have his magic, willpower, Charisma/Logic, and Spellcasting at max (not to mention investing BP on conjuring and sorcery skill groups. After that, he needs to purchase a foci for his spells, and then dedicate BP points to spells. This leaves little to nothing for anything else other than mediocre attributes and a few skills. The mage will then need a levitate spell to coincide with the sammie's climbing, a physical combat spell to be able to damage physical enemies (like drones), an area effect spell to be able to do what the sammie's grenades do, a sustained armour spell to do what the sammie's higher body rating (and bone lacing/orthoskin) can do, etc. And of course, the mage needs to resist damage every time he does something like that.

That being said, and going back to the discussion about the sammie vs. mage debate, unless the mage gets Improved Reflexes spell sustained by a foci. The Sammie will get first crack at the start of the fight, and plug the mage faster than he can say Abra Kada-BANG!.

Going back to the early part of the discussion where you brought up overcasting. That is something I wasn't considering. My players and I tend to stay away from it, so I didn't think of it. We used to use it, and the players loved it, but I'm a firm believer of reminding the players now and again that if they use an advantage a lot in the game, eventually the enemy will use it too. They didn't like it when one of the players died from an enemy mage overcasting.

Everything else said and done, I will concede to you and agree that starting mages are equal in power to starting cybergoons when cybergoons have to start resisting damage every time they attack (or do something cool).

Yeah, that's what it finally came down to.

Still doesn't sit well with me, though.

I take it sammies need no attributes, no skills, and no gear, then?

Maybe the levitate spell, if the GM considers spirits taking the mage whenever to be too cheesy. Even without it, climbing will just take the mage a little bit longer with a low skill. Stunball is already an area spell, and there is no need for an armour spell at all for the reasons previously discussed.
A competent mage (much less one with his foci intact) resists drain on most of his spells easily.

Eh, let me rephrase the initial point again: mages do more damage per turn, and that damage is resisted with a weaker attribute (without skills or armour). They are better at hiding thanks to spells like invisibility or spirit powers like concealment. They're better at getting into secured areas, because they can switch their sustained spells off at will and then renew them in a few seconds, while sammies are riddled with cyberware forever (plus the only way to detect a mage is a mage, and those are one in a hundred metahumans, while scanners are dirt-cheap). Plus mages have abilities that sammies have no way whatsoever to emulate, from assensing and spirit summoning to mind probe, mob control, or trid phantasm. Sure, yeah, they have to resist drain, big deal.


I offer my players to pay a couple thousand extra for a vehicle upgrade that'd keep the anchor still.

If there's not much difference between a 01. Ess and 6 Ess character in terms of social effects, is it really necessary to have this rule at all? I think it would make more sense to either simplify the rules by not having to worry about this kind of thing, or make the rule such that there is a noticeable difference between 6 and ~0 Essence.


How about Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things?

At a guess, perhaps the fully cybered version has some ware that deals with that? Perhaps as a part of the effect of Tailored Pheromones?

As well, don't forget that a mage becomes much less effective as soon as another mage providing spell defense is on the other team.

I was always a big fan of grounding. It made mages less powerful because they needed to be far more careful.

Another reason we stayed away from over casting is that we, as a group, decided to crank up the healing time. So, if you were a mage and took a wallopin' from overcasting, it would take a much longer time to heal.

Of course, a sufficiently high rating Machine or Tutor sprite can do a lot to help with healing...

???

There's a difference, but not so much that a cybered up face is infeasible. Like I said somewhere, the team spent a lot of energy making sure all of the traditional Shadowrun concepts would work, including cybered up faces, troll faces, adept faces, mystic adept faces, technomancer faces, and unaugmented faces. And non-face concepts, too, but were talking about the Social limit, I think.

Machine Sprites can be given any Autosoft as an optional Complex Form, including Professional (meaning that they can have any technical skill, such as Medicine). Tutor Sprites can straight up have any Technical skill. Combine that with the right drone, and they're rolling Rating*2 with hits added to the healing roll.

The confusion over the mobility of wards comes from the fact that Street Magic says that you can't move a ward and the first FAQ says that you can. Over time, a compromise evolved.

I think you (and I hope many others) would agree when I say I'd personally prefer purely stationary wards. It removes the need for all the weirdness of wards-in-wards by making it impossible for that to happen.

I definitely do.

Man, I really hate the healing system in SR4.

An alternative, for that specific problem, is to declare that when wards collide, the ward with the lower force (or both if the forces are equal) collapses.

A genius doctor with an applicable specialty rolls something like 11-14 dice for the same test, if he's not augmented or Awakened. What's wrong with assisted healing via medical care?

It's not so much assisted healing I have a problem with, but how assisted healing along with bodyx2 dice that allows a character with a full condition monitor to heal in a day or two.

The problem with that is that you can create a ward-smashing cardboard box that only needs upkeep every few weeks.

Which, I assume, is why you expanded the timeframe. However, it might help to think of full condition monitor as being at more or less full function, rather than truly being fully healed - your ribs still hurt when you laugh, the gunshot wound still hurts, etc. It's at that timeline for the sake of getting back to gameplay in short order, so really it's just the point of "healed enough to work".

So factor in some sort of physical backlash against the anchor - perhaps even a Force*2 roll with net hits as damage and treating the anchor as a barrier.

That could work, but it's leaning pretty hard on the KISS principle. I can see a system two (or more) layers deep like that if wards were a regular part of the game, but for basic Shadowrun? Especially when the problem can be elegantly solved with what was (to be fair) originally printed.

How much value is added to the game by allowing moving wards, when you can get the same effect by other means (like the Mana Barrier spell) that don't carry the same weird edge cases?

Guards carrying ward anchors on their person, making infiltration by spirits or mages with active foci more difficult (even if the mage's own ward breaks the carried one, the backlash would alert the guard)? A means for mundane runners to be protected from magic even if the team's mage isn't on hand? It creates a number of new possibilities.

There is, however, a reason I tied it directly back to an existing system.

If you take a shotgun blast to the chest that nearly kills you, you are not back on your feet "healed enough to work" in a day or two. You are in the hospital on life support.

If a character is back into game play in a couple of days after that, he no longer fears getting hurt.

My entire playing group saw how unrealistic this is and we developed the longer healing period, and some of them absolutely hate changing rules. That's how bad it really is.

What we did, if anyone is interested, is decide that the time interval for a healing test was equal to the number of boxes of damage currently suffered in days.

If that delivers what your group wants, great - but being down for that long doesn't make for a good game, generally, unless everyone just stops for the interim.

On the other hand, it made mages brokenly overpowered if the opposition had one.

"Just let me zip over in the astral, hey a mage" *nukes*

Hence why for the most part it wasn't in SR4, until they kinda sorta brought it back in the SR2050 book.

Even then, they provided a fluff explanation why no one uses Grounding in the 2070s.

That is, I agree, good design pracice.

St. Nicholas is also the Patron Saint of (Repentant) Thieves. And Pawnbrokers (In fact, some pawn shops advertise their service with his symbol, three golden balls).

In addition to Boatmen (and possibly smugglers), Boot Blacks (and their descendants, who are frequent Shadowrunner contacts), Captives, Druggists, the Falsely Accused, Military Intelligence, Murderers, Orphans, Pirates, the Poor, Prostitutes, Shoemakers (and possibly the people that have taken that name as a slang term for them, Fake SIN Makers!), Soldiers, and the Unmarried (let's face it, most people in the Shadows don't have a spouse!).

I'd also put him down as the likely candidate for Patron Saint of Fixers, as well. Saint Joshua (said to be the Patron Saint of Spies), would more likely be the Patron Saint of Johnsons.

Yes, I actually did a bit of research while writing.

It is, but don't just take my word and others for it, feel free to go back and check through your old books, I will wait.

Here's the thing, accurate or not there is a fairly sizable number of people, and I definitely fall into this camp, that feel 4th edition already heavily favors mages over almost any other type of play style. Typically between editions the cyberware in the core books have more or less remained static, splat books may add new items to the overall pile but the cyberware in my fourth edition book is more or less the exact same as is in my second ed book (I don't currently have a physical copy of 1E to reference, my memory is there was some reworking but the actual items and basic effects were the same). So for those people any change made to the way cyber characters play is effectively more of a piling on effect. As someone else pointed out, if the penalty is trivial why have it at all? Why not leave it as it's been in the previous edition, a case by case or situational bias, rather then some "I'm so emo because I got a cyberarm" penalty.



Well i dunno what to tell you there, maybe release more previous with actual mechanics on how stuff works and less on what sort of feel for the game world is being gone for? I know you are not the one in charge of this by the way, I'm mostly speaking in general terms.




Now I'll admit it might be just business as usual, Pete might just be on site using astral perception, but it could be taken to read that he's just astrally present and is casting spells on targets in the physical world, that would be a huge change.

That argument sort of loses validity in this case - you can't really say "why add a Limit implication for these characters in particular when it didn't exist for these characters in particular before" when the Limit mechanic is itself new.

The preview talks about "astral overwatch", "keeping an eye out", "catches a glimpse", "his astral sight", "his vision of all things magical".

All these sounds like variations of Astral Perception.

Nowhere is Astral Projection mentioned, so what on earth makes you think they would change a rule like that?

It looks like you are being just a bit too paranoid.

For starters, it'd be awesome if you stopped calling it a penalty. It's not. It's one number, amongst several numbers, that gets plugged into an equation. Yes, a lower Essence is a smaller number to put into said equation than a higher Essence, but people should really start talking about it like it's some flat die pool penalty.

Because limits are a brand new mechanic, across the board?

And here it just becomes clear you're making up how it works (in order to be upset about how it works)...again.

And here the snark comes back, along with calling it a penalty again.

Seriously, man. I would tell you exactly what a non-issue this was, if I could. As it is, I'm just left saying "it's really not a huge issue" over and over again, and I'm tired of saying that, so I guess I'll just stop now. You've either heard me say it the first half dozen times, or you (apparently) haven't, but I'm sick of typing it. Wait and see the book, then come back and read this thread, and I think you'll get a chuckle (and maybe even a rueful head shake!) over how big a deal you're making this one little issue.


But despite it being such a huge change, your default assumption was that we were, in fact, changing something that fundamental to the system, and to start demanding promises that this wasn't the case (all while insisting you're not reading things uncharitably, you're keeping an open mind, etc)?

I think maybe I'm done responding, to be honest, because it's all just getting tiresome and obvious, at this point.

Wait, so your offended i'm calling a penalty a penalty? What words would you prefer. A negative gift? A happy burden? A limitation completely free of negative connotation? That primarily affects one segment of the population over others? I mean i'm not an accountant but I'm given to understand if a number always affects the final outcome of an equation negatively it's generally referred to as a penalty.

I will take the astral perception thing as confirmation so i'm happy for that at least.

Well, they DID change edges and flaws into what ever SR4 uses nowadays . .

I believe his point is more that people should stop acting like it's taking dice away from the augmented character or something - it effects the number of hits they can get, sure, but for that to matter the character first has to be generating hits past the limit.

Ok, here's the deal.

I don't officially know how limits are calculated. I don't know how they'll work in play, until I officially read the book and try it out. I'm willing to do so.

HOWEVER, what's being described is a mighty fine line to tread. If the limits are too restrictive, then players will frequently become frustrated as they're denied their whopping successes. If the limits are too permissive, then they won't affect the game at all, and there's no effective change: the biggest dice pool still wins.

Honestly, in my opinion, Limits are a poor way to stop dice pool inflation. You still want the biggest dice pool you can get; all this does is cause frustration as successes are lost. My house rule (which Bull copied for Missions, and was borrowed as an optional rule) was to cap the dice pools directly. Capping all dice pools at 20 means there's no reason to min/max past that point. It's worked well for me so far.

I've wondered if I should start a new thread or not because this one went way too much into Magic vs Cyber discussion whan I'd liked to talk more about deshumanization from Essence loss.

I'm kinda puzzled. Essence loss could be interpreted as a loss of soul (even if Man and Machine offered another explanation). I thought that street samourais were called samourai because of this. They somewhat gave themselves a code of conduct to keep a human behavior (1st-2nd ed? I could have interpreted it all alone tough).

Then 3 ed, you had obvious cyberware creates distrust =>Visible cyberware induce +x TN to person non-used to it.

Install yourself a cybered arm: loss of essence. Now distinstall it: no essence regained. So that 1 arm guy has lost essence. Points toward the soul interpretation (you lost it and can't regain it).


Quite ok but, if that's the view of 5ed (and I'm not against tough it's more 80s oriented than 21th century) can we have roleplaying guidelines for samourais and cybered characters.

Cause a PC, roleplaying his 0,5 essence guy the same as the essence 6 one, just has ONLY rule modifiers sucks.

It needs to be defined: he has no feelings, cold blooded?


(on a personnal note, I'd liked more 3ed edition point of view. Imagine you have EVIDENCE that people changes by implanting cyberware. That people lose their souls -this kind of soul beeing a proven fact too- doing so. What an hostility it would generate. "My man had offered an implant by the corp to become great rigger but since it's operation, I can't recognize him. He's different. I doesn't care about our kids, his love for me vanished...".

I find this interpretation would have to rethink mankind's perception about cyberware in SR).

Samourai < = noo

Limits will likely be dependent on attributes. High attributes = high limit and high pool. Large pools still win. Limits are an interesting mechanic to offer a second track that boni can affect, so that attributes and skills become more important versus SR4 and it's bonus bonanza, but they'll only cut down pool sizes if lot of equipment that gave bonus dice once no goes into limit instead.

This probably doesn't greatly affect median dice pools, especially with higher skill scaling, but it would cut down on pornomancers and other extreme builds. I think the second track to apply boni to is the most important effect of limits. Limiting possible successes for pornomancers hopefully is not; that would cause a lot more frustration (dangling whopping hits before the player's nose and then saying nu-uh, just five of those count) than just applying, say, tailored pheromones, to limits instead of skill tests, in my opinion, and making extreme pools like in SR4 impossible.


How can mages emulate skillwires, wired reflexes, attention coprocessors, or tailored pheromones? Also, for spirits there are drones and hacking. Which need no attributes entirely, only money.

It isn't often I disagree with Cain. We're both old school Shadowrunners cut from a similar cloth. I think the difference is that I never picked up SR4 like he did.

SR1-3 you could do two things to change the quality of your dice rolls. Change the number of dice or change the target number. This gave you two axis on which to change the probability curve. SR4 only had more dice and so everything (i.e weapons) only had one quality... does it give more dice? So there really isn't much in tradeoffs.

The limits while staying with the basic SR4 system add another Axis. Maximum successes and quantity of dice. The limits work just like dicepool did in SR1-3 while the number of dice is the same as a target number change. Once you have tradeoffs you have fun meaningful choices. Honestly to me it is a major selling point of 5th edition and one of the reasons I'm excited for the new ruleset. Done well I think it will make for a lot more interesting choices than anything SR1-4 had to offer. However, none of us have the new book to play with and we should probably just let passions lie until we all have the same tome in hand to work with and some solid experience of what does or doesn't work.

I decided to take a look into this along with essence loss and cyberware modifiers. I'm looking only at the main rulebooks to make it easier. Therefore rules could be hiding out in a Shadowtech or something.

For Essence loss and healing, I couldn't find anything in SR1's healing charts (SR1 144), SR2's healing charts (SR2 113,115), or SR3's healing charts (SR3 128-129). However the subject's Body and Willpower did affect the TN in all three cases.

In SR1, there wasn't a social penalty for essence loss. The social modifier table on page 153 is pretty short and just covers the NPC's feelings towards the character (Friendly-Enemy) and how advantageous the PC's desire is to the NPC. The most "shaftings" I found was "Even a zero Essence is tough, promoting despair and melancholy. Low Essence folks walk the edge of sanity (SR1 126)." There's a fencing table but that has nothing relevant to this discussion (SR1 147).

In SR2, the social chart is more or less the same as it was in SR1 (SR2 182). On the same page as the chart, there's some racism rules, but they are race based. Interesting the same quote about having a zero Essence is the same except for zero replaced with 0 (SR2 246). SR2 has a fencing table that's more or less the same as the SR1 fencing table (SR2 188).

In SR3, things get more interesting. There is a whole section called Cyberware and Social Interaction (SR3 93). The section starts with "the gamemaster may use the following rules in appropriate social situations and when cybered characters are dealing contacts." The rest of the section uses similar language. I believe this represents a optional rule rather than a normal rule especially since the Racism section uses must with "Before a character can interact with an NPC, the gamemaster must determine whether or not the NPC has any racial prejudice (SR3 92)." The section Armor and Society which is about how wearing obvious armor will penalize your social rolls with high-class society uses neither language (SR3 93). However, it's a rule published in a main rulebook even one where the GM is given more latitude than normal on the subject.

Most of the section talks about how large of a penalty should apply based on Essence loss. It starts off with mentioning in that some situations (meeting with Mr. Johnson, interrogations, and with those used to heavily chromed individuals) there shouldn't be a penalty. For causal conversation with strangers, it recommends a +1 modifier* for every 2 points of Essence lost. The section then continues with suggests to change this value based on how obvious the ware is. It notes that datajacks are too common for people to care and that initiative enhancers are noticeable. The penalty should be increased with flagrant displays of ware. It mentions that the modifiers should be adjusted based on the audience (staff at a cyberware magazine versus hippy elves) but shouldn't go below +1 per 2.5 points of Essence lost.

*- SR1-3 used had a floating TN system instead of the fixed TN system of SR4. A +X modifier increased the TN by that amount and made tests more difficult.

But you looked at the wrong things. He explicitly talked about first aid being affected by Essence loss.
He was/is aware that SR3 had social modifiers based on implants.

Whether or not essence loss factors into healing depends on whether you allow that things that cause essence loss in SR4 but didn't in SR3 - bioware - be brought up. The system notably changed there, unifying two separate mechanisms.

Still i found it fascinating if for no other reason then it matched my own recollection. Cyberware = "Soul Less Killing Machines who can't talk to people because they are killers without souls" is new to this edition, and in my opinion a completely unnecissary and unwelcome change. I have my theories on why they were introduced but they are not very nice.

Basically and once again, I think one of the worst things you can do with any game system is tell people how they must play their characters, this change does exactly that, and that's not cool.

And this has ever stopped you before? Prithee, continue.

It's nothing like 'Cyberware = "Soul Less Killing Machines who can't talk to people because they are killers without souls".'

Skillwires, possession spirits
Improved relfexes spell(which i far too cheap and easy to et to max)
Improved charisma spell
Sure attention coprossor it doesn't do anything.

But while it wont help you see spirits, radar lets you see through walls which covers some of the astral scouting benefits. And things like mind probe can be handled through social skills. And while people love to go on about improved invis, infiltration is better in most cases IMO. Invisibility gets countered by any sound based sensore and quite frankly it makes you stand out even more on the astral. Sure infiltration is not guaranteed since its a dice pool test, but I'd rather have that than hard auto fails like invisibility has.

My opinion is that in general mages are more powerful if they are min-maxed to any degree. Sure people are blowing it way, way, way out of proportion with thier angle summoner routine and it makes thier agrument slook irrational. But it is an issue that hopefully will be dealt with in 5e. In 4e spirits are the biggest problem at base. And sadly the spirit edge fix was actually a buff to mages. If the powrs of spirits are a bit more under contro andl with the 2 pool defense they keep tlaking about they might be a bit more balanced in this edition.

Side note to previous comments
Still things like background count should never be used as a balancing agent.
1. it shows up in a supplemental rule book, things should be balanced at the core.
2. Things like background count should not be used ot bring someone to an even level they should be used to weaken the mage past other players in order to add extra challenge like cyber scanners hsould be used for stree sams. If it is supposed to be a balancing agent its basically just saying mages have 2 less magic at all times.
3: The game shold not require the GM to fix known unbalanced parts of it. Have the rules work and be balanced in the first place.

Yeah, I got mixed up about the earlier conversation about how killer cyborgs always suffered social penalties. Particularly hermit's comment about how the penalties have been there since SR1.

No. It was +1 per 2 Essence point lost has been in Cybertechnology (p 57, German edition) and a flat +1 to +2 (GM's choice) in Man & Machine (p. 52, German Edition). I was wrong about Shadowtech, though, at least I couldn't find it.

The rationalisation was that, the more cybered you are, the less human you are perceived to be, which is important in social interaction. If people treat you like a soykaf maker, you are at a social disadvantage. The "soulless machines" is a transportation of this secular approach to American Shadowrun's new, conservative-shifted vocabulary, nothing more, I think. Just semantics.


Unfortunately, you weren't looking in the right places.


Well, that is Shadowrun's D&Dization. No arguing about that.