So the new rule is if the number of hits on the spellcasting test exceed your Magic rating, the drain is Physical instead of Stun. It seems like this was done to encourage gambling; you can overcast and hope you don't get enough hits to make the drain physical. Unfortunately, it makes spending Edge to cast a spell likely to saddle you with physical drain. What do you think, working as intended?

If you've got more than one point of Edge, you can always spend a point on the Drain Resistance test. Had a player get hit with a drain of 9P (SR4 rules here) and used his last point of Edge on a reroll that left him with 0P damage to take.

I think the drain / overcasting / limit rules for spellcasting could use more explanation in the rulebook, to put it mildly. Your question is one such that could be explained better in the book. There was also as an idea someone else had in another thread, where you can cast a F12 lightning bolt but use reagents to set the limit at your magic, so the drain is only Stun but you are gonna do some hell-ish damage.

It's a game, and you don't spend Edge on accident. If your character is pouring everything they've got into Casting Spell X, well, should they be surprised if there's a downside, and channeling that kind of mojo burns them out?

No one's saying you have to spend Edge on spellcasting tests (and potentially work up lethal drain for yourself), and there's also no one saying you can't spend Edge on the drain check, while you're at it.

It does seem odd to penalize someone for using a resource that's paid for with karma or a priority, and penalize successes from it.

It's more of a calculated risk than a penalty. On the flip-side, you can cast a Manabolt at Force 1 and spend Edge, suffering the minimum of 2 Drain but getting uncapped net hits as damage. At 2 Drain who cares if it's Physical?

Risk vs. Reward.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

The problem is the caster has already paid a price - the point of edge - to get a higher roll not limited by force.

To turn around and say 'you now take extra drain, but you can spend a second point of edge to fix that', is, quite frankly, a breach of Wheaton's Law.

This seems to be the common reply now whenever someone points out problems with the rules. "Don't like the rule? Well, it's a risk vs. reward thing".

I was a fan of the ability to withhold hits from a spellcasting test for reduced drain in SR4.

Maybe bring that back in a modified form, possibly specific to Edge use?

~Umi

You body handles only so much power flowing through it before it starts to burn out the circuitry.

Used to be in the old days of if force exceeded magic it was automatically physical, period.

But then they tweaked it a bit, saying only if you scored more hits than magic does it go physical, in essence it keeps you from being punished for trying to go high, but rolling low. So if you opened the channel but failed to really grab big enough handfuls to overload yourself and only took normal stun drain.

Now you have control over your overflow by setting force, which acts as your safety limit normally.

But when you throw Edge into the equation it acts like an extra channel, you get extra dice to roll and it throws that safety in the form of the limit out the window.

Now you are not just throwing two groups of dice (Force and Spellcasting) but three, tapping into that mysterious potential that is edge on top of the normal mana pull. It's like taking your 110v toaster and rewiring it to feed off the washing machine's 220v line. You get the added juice but you risk overloading your system all the more with that added current. Some toasters may handle it, others tend to catch on fire.

And this is partly why they changed the wording for drain from just Force over Magic to Hits over magic as they realized with Edge you could cast force 1 but still roll more hits than magic depending on the various pools and that was not the intention of the power. Edge is for putting your all into it at a dramatic moment, not trying to rulelawyer out a killer fireball with minimal risk. *shrugs*™

I'm of two minds of this rule.

On one hand, I feel yes-the mage paid already. The old rule of 'Force up to Magic Rating or it's Physical Drain, hits don't matter' had it's upsides. You could cast under and hope you get the hits to push it up, which in and of itself-was it's own risk/reward thing. Fail in getting hits and they get hit with a Mana Carrot. Now, on that same note, with Edge being more excessive than Karma Pool these days, the 'old days' were a bit easier to circumvent, making undercasting with Edge really, really strong. (However, even using Karma Pool in those days, overcasting was Physical Drain.)

On the other hand, nowadays you CAN cast at a Force higher than your Magic without Physical drain...so long as your hits get held back. So if your Magic is 6 and you cast at 8, so long as your hits get held at 6, you're golden, you just cast a force 8 spell at Stun drain. You can cast the damn thing at Force 12 for Stun drain, which probably, in the old days, would have outright killed the mage for some spells. I mean, in 2e, you weren't casting a Hellblast spell over Force 4 without rolling Karma on drain(or having a focus which gave you more drain dice) without getting knocked out. (For those who came later, that spell's Drain Code was Force/2+6D, which meant at Force 4, the mage had to resist 8 Deadly Stun drain, which means they had to roll a 8 or better on two dice not to get knocked out, on 4 dice to not be so messed up that they take big minuses, on 6 dice to be a little fuzzy, and on 8 dice to not have taken any Drain at all.)

So I see where 'Low Cast+Edge' could make spells pretty powerful with not too much drawback, but on the other hand, I wonder just how much mages should pay. On THAT same note, getting 6 hits on a spell test means you need, on average, 18 dice to roll, so that doesn't seem bad. What it really, simply seems to be doing is taking Edge into consideration.

I thin the crux of this topic is: why spend Edge on the test when you can just call out some high force number (up to 2x Magic) and see what you roll, if the resist is all going to be the same anyways? How much benefit IS it to spend Karma instead of choosing a high force rating? If it's ultimately about the same as casting at a high force, then using karma is pointless (except, perhaps, at low magic ratings, where you'll hit Magic x2 more reliably). This is what could use more thought and more definition in the rules. If the thought is "Just use high Force ratings," then you can save your Karma for something more critical, like filing your taxes.

I think it makes overcasting more interesting. I like interesting games.

I think I see what you mean-as it stands, I can't see a reason to Edge a spellcasting roll, unless you used Edge on the subsequent Drain roll.

Off the top of my head, the *only* situation where I could see it useful to use Edge for spellcasting would be on both the Casting and Drain rolls is if you're facing opposition with an enemy mage with a high Counterspelling skill(say you cast once and it ends up not so hot due to his Counterspelling.) Of course, a 'Hail Mary Manaball' could possibly work here as well.

Otherwise, I'd just take the higher Force cast-within the realms of being able to soak at least most of the Stun drain-and go ahead and use whatever capped hits there are(and yeah, reaching that Limit does take quite a few dice or a lucky roll if you have a 6+ Magic.)

I could see it being more useful for Initiated mages, whom have Magics of 8+ or so. At that point your Limit is getting so high that you'd probably need to explode a couple of 6's just to reach it.

Wow, that's a nifty trick!

My main issue with the rule, aside from the somewhat bitter flavor of a better roll leading to a worse result for the roller, is that Summoning/Binding/Compiling/Regsitering do not use the same rule (they are still Force/Level > Magic/Resonance = Physical). As if this game weren't complex enough!

But on the plus side, in the eternal struggle of magic vs. chrome, mark this one down as ++samurai, since he never has to worry about his life getting interesting when he spends Edge.

My sympathy for Awakened Characters is fairly limited, if existent at all. Saying "Risk vs. Reward" seemed to be the most polite way of expressing how I felt about someone vocalizing that they were concerned that when their world altering magic scored a number of successes that will likely never be resisted by a mere mortal, that the consequence for having that power was physical drain.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

There are a few reasons to spend Edge, especially since youre likely as a Spellcaster to have a low edge rating as it (SA pts either having hone on magic or your racial priority being low for those pts).
You throw a force 6 spell and only come up with 4hits when you Really Really want the full 6, so you spend edge to get those extra few hits, risking the Drain bump.

There's a CyberZombie monster of some form who's going faster than the Sam and Adept and hitting harder and the Decker went static a round ago. Time for that ManaBolt, you need it high but can't afford to fall over, so you set for minimum Force and then spend Edge to get rule of Six across the board and bump that casting DP.

You're and experienced Runner and youve got a nimble target (or just hard) that needs to go down. Direct Combat spells won't cut it but a full bore Lightning Bolt will. You're prepped for soaking up some serious drain so you let rip with a Force 12 bolt and spend the Edge to get those sixes working for you and add those extra 3-4 dice. You also spend Edge to help curb that drain backlash.

I'm sure there are more too.

Common? Not really, but that's what edge is for, when you need that bit Extra for those exceptional circumstances.

Higher force makes the amount of drain larger. It's not all about whether it's stun or physical.

The stun vs physical aspect boils down to the difference between Magic rating and dice pool [Force] (acting as a limit). That means that anything that increases the dice pool, be it high skill, a focus or Edge, increases the risk of taking physical drain if force is higher than Magic. Edge can alternatively be used to remove the limit.

The amount boils down to the drain code, force and the size of your drain resistance dice pool. I'm often more concerned with that than which track the damage goes to.

Casting things at force 12 with high Magic compared to dice pool is an easy way to knock yourself out. Casting that with high skill, a focus, or Edge is a dumb way to die.

I like it.

When the actual amount of mana pouring through my body exceeds my limits I take physical drain instead of stun.

A mage has got to know his limitations.

here's my speculation on why it works like that:

a mage casts a force 1 increase reflexes into a force 1 focus (or using focused concentration), and spends edge. we'll ignore how many hits are gained, the essential point is that it's going to be far more than 1, and the only reason to *ever* cast that particular spell at higher force than 1 is to increase the limit.

if force is the determining factor for physical vs stun, that spell will never have a significant drawback. at least with hits being the deciding factor, there is a *chance* it will matter.

now, increase reflexes is a very specific (and i suspect most would agree, rather abusive) use of the "spend edge to ignore limits" option (particularly since now even non-initiates can press through a ward and are guaranteed 1 net hit, and therefore 1 sustained spell, to pass through with them). but it's not the only one. all the direct combat spells, several illusion spells, several detection spells, and several manipulation spells, are essentially entirely based on how many hits you get, and don't benefit (or benefit very little) from force apart from the limit.

it makes it so that the drain when you essentially make the risk of casting the spell insignificant can at least potentially add up, and at the very least it won't be gone an hour from now if you don't manage to reduce it to nothing.

(granted, they then went and proceeded to somewhat screw this up by making most spells have very generous drain calculations such that you can often cast at force 6 or higher without actually incurring more than force 2 drain anyways).

Just wait till the magic splat book comes out, and spellcasters can custom make spells with select limitations to reduce the drain further. For SR4a I've got an infiltrator mystic with personalized versions of Improved Invisibility & Stealth that are both (F/2)-3 for drain. For SR5 it might be even crazier.

@Jaid, Well, as others have pointed out, if the Force is low enough, it doesn't matter whether the drain is stun or physical, since it's all going to be resisted anyway. So it doesn't really deter the mischief you talked about.

That is another awfully evil trick, though! Focused Concentration 1 + 6 drams of reagents = win!

Nothing wrong with personalized spells. You are paying Karma for them, after all, and they should be useful. In SR5, those spells would likely be F-3. Not all that bad, in my opinion.

But not as dumb as casting at force 6 (Magic 6) with edge before the roll, and getting 12 or more successes due to exploding dice. Rolls like that that should be awesome moments at the gaming table, not horrified silence as the player of the cast frantically rolls to resist drain and then quietly announces 'Guys, my character just died'.

Not good for the game, IMO.

Drain is based on Force, not hits. Even for a Fireball that's only 5P.

ummm... not really.

if using force 6 with magic 6 and spending edge, and getting 12 hits, it's more like "oh, that was fairly painful, also i just completely gutted the enemy".

the highest drain spells in the game atm are F + 1, and include 2 area-effect mind controls and mass animate.

but really, i'm confused why you would ever mix high force + edge. what's the point of that? if you're going to ignore your limits, generally just throw a low force spell... no higher than will result in 2 points of drain before resistance.

in fact, most of the time when casting a high force spell, you want to lower your limit, not ignore it.

I agree - I think rules like this and Limits will have a negative impact on the game, in that they make what should be exciting rolls into moments of frustration instead.

Oh wait, sorry...I meant "risk vs. reward, deal with it"

That's why in most cases you throw Low Force and use edge, thus you'll only be taking a couple of points of Physical Drain. My Force 12 example is for an extreme circumstance and on a spell where base damage and ap = force and a Force 6 spell (by itself) cannot Kill a Mage even if overcast with edge. Also I fail to see any problems with limits given that they are raised easily enough in most cases and are usually far enough above the average that hitting them will be a rare thing and surpassing them will typically have involved edge anyway.

You're assuming that somehow, in a fight desperate enough to make it worth spending their last point of Edge, the character had not already been wounded.

No, you just have to select more carefully. As pointed out, a Force 1 Manabolt with Edge can take those 12 hits and completely fry someone, leaving the mage with 2P Drain. You probably don't want to do this with a Force 12 Fireball and take 11P Drain.

Either do the Force 6 Fireball (5P Drain) where your 12 hits will make that something like 14P -6AP area damage after the basic indirect threshold, or with the Force 1 direct spell where you'll do a negligible amount of Drain (probably soaked) for a solid hit.




You seem to be implying that Edge should allow the spellcaster to do something totally awesome and not worry about Drain. Like throwing the F12 Fireball and getting 12 hits, which is enough damage and AP and a big enough radius to incinerate a tank column. Yeah, that should probably make your head explode.

There are reasonable options for spellcasters using Edge. Very powerful ones, even, that don't cause too much Drain.

you're assuming that the player made a good choice instead of an absolutely awful choice.

there are two good desperation options.

1) high force, don't increase the limit, aim for stun. dependant on a bit of questionable interpretation regarding reagents and spellcasting limits. if edge is used, use it to reroll dice that don't get hits to guarantee you get as many hits as won't turn the damage physical. for example, cast a fireball at force 12 on a magic 6 mage, use reagents to set the limit to 6, and dish out 12 + net hits physical damage, with -12 AP. or mob mind, if you think you can stay conscious (with -12 dice on their attempts to escape, they probably have 0 dice and will never escape until you stop sustaining). use this at the start of the fight, ideally (and even more ideally you'll be able to rest for a few hours afterwards, since most people agree that 12S drain is not conducive to continued shadowrunning for that day), and edge is not needed.
2) low force (probably 1 or 2), use edge to ignore limit. aim for as many hits as you can get, and hope it is enough to work. in this case, drain will probably be 2P, and should not hurt you significantly. for example, use a manaball, get your 12 hits, and watch them try to resist them all. or, use a barrier to block off enemies, or use a levitate to lift an obstacle or lift your team out of danger. or even use that same mob mind spell, and accept that you'll only have them for a few initiative passes.

alternately, this being shadowrun, lob a grenade.

Wow, you sure have added an awful lot to that scenario you first laid out. Now it's their last point of Edge, they're in the middle of a fight, and their wounded. I guess you just didn't like the goalposts where you found them?

Remember, Force 1 spells are easy to dispel.

Another thing, 12 hits don't sound attainable to me. Casting pools of 30 exploding dice aren''t the norm. Magicians can't deal out the damage being talked about in this thread. They sure can take the drain though. With Magic 6, all you need is 7 hits to turn the drain physical. A casting pool of 21 dice is attainable by a specialist. That Force 7+ spell is going to hurt unless it's got a low drain code or in addition to specializing in that spell type you've also maxed out drain resistance dice. If the Force is 12, you'll almost surely take huge damage every time you try it.

A better way is to really max drain resistance, initiate, and get a nice centering focus. Let the sammie be the death dealer while you help out.

*shrug* the complaint was that when you get 12 hits it makes the spell deal physical damage.

and generally speaking, if you just landed that kind of spell, counterspelling is generally not much of a concern. you should have targeted the person who could counterspell it, if it's even a spell that can be counterspelled.

and you can replace the limit for the spell using reagents. if your magic is 6, cast the spell at force 12, use 6 reagents, and the damage will never be physical unless you decide to spend edge to blow past the limit (in which case, why did you spend reagents in the first place?)

This may be a silly question, but where does it say we can use reagents for normal casting as I only seem to see it listed for enchanting? I must just be missing the page or my feeble cybereyes (damn you Kodak II) are on the fritz again....

page 317:

"Spellcasting: In a pinch, you can spend reagents to
set the limit for Spellcasting. Rather than using the spell’s
Force as the limit, use the number of drams of reagents
spent."

(it's debatable whether they intended this to allow you to *lower* the limit, but it does work atm).

To me that is exactally what that quote is saying. It's there to allow you to go either way. When using an Indirect combat spell you need high-force, low limit (in a pinch) and with Direct combat spells you need low force high limit (in a pinch). I'm sure this applies to other types of spells as well, it's just most obvious with combat spells.

Since when is 2-3 Tanks a Column? That F12 Fireball only has a 24 Meter Radius...
24 Meters is ONLY 78 Feet, after all. And a Tank is pretty big, and they do not travel bumper to bumper.

Really? 2 Game sessions ago, I had an EPIC spellcasting roll. 12 Dice Base, Reduced to 9 because of Background Count (Max Force of 4 for Physical Damage). I absolutely needed the spell to go off (and was hoping for 3-4 hits), so I would need to spend a point of Edge (of the 3 my Mystic Adept Possesses). So, I spend the Point of Edge to bring my pool back up to 12 Dice, and commence rolling, on the table, in the open. When wall was said and done, I had an amazing 15 Hits. From 12 Dice. Sometimes the dice gods are benevolent. At least my spell went off...

Moral of the story is that you absolutely do not need 30 DP of exploding dice to get the result you want (you don't even need exploding dice to be epic). Does it happen often? Probably not. But it happens often enough for me that it is cool and epic when it does. And Edge should be Cool and Epic. Limits removes the Cool and Epic from such things, becasue it completely removes the ability to do so without the Edge (because yes, I have sometimes rolled 11 out of 12 successes on a 12 DP roll, with no edge expenditure), and forces yout to actually spend the resource in the ATTEMPT to be cool and epic.

The problem is that sometimes, that's the correct answer.

"Who hit the most home runs ina single season?"
"Barry Bonds."
"That seems to be the common reply now whenever someone asks who hit the most home runs in a season."

Kiiind of a closed loop.

The thing is that the very concept was core to the rules and written into place after place after place. It's a core concept found in gear, spells, and so on. Power at a price, pushing your magic for better results will cost you blood, cybernetics make you less human, a gun good at X isn't as good at Y, and so on. It's gonna keep coming up because it's woven into the rules over and over again.

Another bit that's slipped under the radar but omni-present is "There are no clearcut choices". If there was a thing clearly better than all the rest, everyone would take it instead of other things, and that's bad. If the Katana, for instance, had the same statline but also a high concealability, everyone would take it. With several different substats, you get an actual choice ... the combat axe hits like atruck, but also whiffs alot. The Katana's more accurate but you can't take it down the street. The lowly knife doesn't dish out a lot of pain, but it can be snuck into almost anyplace, etc etc etc.

SR5 gives you a vast number of choices. It's up to you to choose which path to follow.

(I could insert a bit of stand-up economics here, but I don't think it's needed.)

Just started reading up on casting and found this little gem "Drain damage, regardless of whether it is Stun or Physical damage, cannot be healed by any means other than the natural properties of the body—that means no magical healing and no medkits." So while I try and be polite here - to whoever wrote the magic section - go screw yourself.

oh, poor baby, you can't just shrug off the drain of your force 12 fireball spell that just annihilated the entire opposing security force any more.

seriously, i can understand that it might not make a whole lot of sense, but i can also understand that it is completely necessary if we are to pretend that there is anything remotely like game balance. spells are powerful enough *with* drain, they don't need to also make drain something that only ever lasts until you've got a bit of time someplace safe before it goes away.

plus, in this case, it is literally magic - it doesn't have to make sense.

Well, In defense, in SR4A, That Fireball would have been 17p. IT is ONLY 11p in SR5.
In my experience, Healing of Physical Drain through Medicine was not all that great (I think the best I ever received was 2 boxes). I know that in SR4A, you can create stupid powerful builds that can heal 10 boxes in minutes, but those are the extremely rare exception rather than the rule (or at least they should be, and even still, should have already been headhunted by one Megacorp or another). Even WITH the Medkit, My Mages tend to generally keep Physical Drain for a while (though I always strive to never take it by rarely overcasting unless I absolutely MUST).

EDIT: AAAAck... Gotta remember the 1/2 Force +5. So the Force 12 Fireball is 11p for the starting character. Same as it is in SR5 (Force -1 right?).

in SR4A, that would have been a stunball, not a fireball, most likely (also, i'm too lazy to go look it up, but i'm pretty sure you're wrong... fireball was never F/2 + 11 drain, which is what you'd need for a force 12 fireball to be 17P). also, it's quite possible that it will be 11S in SR5, not 11P.

point being, magic is powerful enough. drain is generally not very high to generate powerful effects, and it really doesn't need to also be something you can have a specialized build to remove the one significant limitation on it.

Re: Risk vs. Reward, that principle would still be in operation if SR5 had used the same rule from SR4 (or indeed the SR5 rule for summoning/binding/compiling/registering); if you push the limits of your ability (Force) beyond what you can safely handle (Magic), you pay the price (physical drain). The design decision seems to have been, "let them gamble," which had the (I have to think unintended) consequence of interacting unfavorably (IMHO) with the Edge mechanic.

To put it another way, Edge is not a risk-vs.-reward mechanic on any test other than a spellcasting / threading test. It's purely a save your bacon / be more awesome mechanic. Again, maybe that's fine, since it gives the non-spellcaster/threader a bit of a shiny. It just seems a bit fiddly to me, is all.

Duh... forgot the 1/2 Force. Major Brain Fart there.
Napalm is 1/2 Force + 9 (or at least there is one that is stated at that level, may not be Napalm).
Yes, 11p either way, I guess.

so use a low-force spell that benefits primarily from hits, as has been said.

taking 2 points of drain (which you will most likely reduce to nothing) for a powerful spell effect is going to just make you pretty awesome with little if any risk.

(as for threading, the whole technomancer concept needs to be redone as it stands. right now, they're just pretty lousy).

If they jsut reduced the Fading to something a little more reasonable, it would not be all that bad.

L-2 and L-3 should be a bit more common. L+1 (which most of them are) is fairly brutal. Of course, a Level 2-3 CF is not useless either, Assuming you can get it pas the opposition (due to Limits) for effect.

honestly, if they just knocked puppeteer down from L + 4, that would go a long way towards making them viable. bring down the fading of editor and resonance veil too, and i think you'd have enough to make something worth playing. it would be a bit more effective some of the time, and over all would be different and actually useful.

editor and puppeteer in particular should be something that you'd expect to be a technomancer's main tools... except that the fading is high enough that using them on anything significant is going to very quickly start adding up.

and yeah, in some cases a level 2-3 CF is good enough... but for anything really good, you need a high level CF that likely is adding to the level for determining fading. for 7 drain, a magician can throw a force 6 mob mind. for 7 fading a technomancer can throw a rating 3 puppeteer that won't let him use most actions unless the target gets 0 hits on a willpower + firewall test. what gives?