Hello - been lurking a while, and figured this might be a good place to clear up some confusion that my GM and I are having surrounding the alchemy mechanics, and also to ask about some other rules that I find confusing. I'm going to make the assumption that I'm incorrectly interpreting the intended use of the system, and would appreciate some steering in the right direction, as thus far I've not had much luck using alchemy in actual runs. I've been looking for posts related to the subject, but haven't seen many - feel free to point me to one if there is a significant ongoing discussion already. I should apologize in advance, I suppose, for this large wall of text - one of these days I'll learn to condense my questions a bit.

For the purpose of this mechanics discussion, let's assume a character with Magic 6 and Alchemy 6, a force 4 alchemy focus, and 12 dice for drain resistance. Additionally, for illustration purposes, let's look at two preparations that are different drain-wise (Heal and Increase Reflexes).

The character will have 16 dice for their alchemy test, and assuming they don't want to take physical drain, will limit the preparation to force 6. This would cause the alchemy test to be opposed by six dice, resulting in approximately three net hits, regardless of which preparation is being created. This means that for each of these two examples, a force-6 potency-3 alchemical preparation will result.

When such a preparation is triggered, the spellcasting dice pool is the sum of the force and potency (at best), which in this case is nine dice. We can compare this to the dice of a straight spellcaster (say Magic 6, Spellcasting 6 and no spellcasting focus), and see that the preparation is less powerful by about one hit. This seems a reasonable trade-off considering that preparations don't need to be sustained at all, can be triggered with a simple action, and don't suffer wound penalties imposed by the caster's condition.

The problems then, seem to be two-fold. First, the drain test. For the 'Heal' example, the drain is four (F-4 for the spell, plus two drain for the command trigger required for spells of the healing category). On average this should be completely soaked since the character has 12 drain resistance dice. The 'Increase Reflexes' example, however, presents a greater challenge with eight drain, which would result in around four stun damage.

This is obviously a problem, because you don't want to start a run damaged. On the surface, there seem to be three ways you might solve that problem. First and most simply, one could assume that the intent was that a player would only take alchemical preparations that resulted in very little drain, like the Heal spell. This seems to be contradicted by the fact that the 'Occult Investigator' archetype in the book has eight spell preparations, some of which are very drain intensive (such as Physical Barrier).

Secondly, one could assume that they will be taking drain, and try to time everything so that they can rest up before the run actually takes place. I suggest that this path is madness - you end up spending four hours working and resting, which results in a few preparations with only a few hours of potency remaining. This doesn't even account for the fact that the GM may not give you hours of prep time before the run has to take place, which was what happened during the first run my own group made. Nor does it deal with the fact that if you guess poorly concerning the time at which you'll actually need the spell effects, you may not have time to re-create the alchemical preparations.

Finally, you could just say that high-drain preparations are risky, and that if you want less risk, you should create the preparation with a lower force. This certainly solves the drain problem, as one could then create, say, a force-3 preparation at force-3 potency and (in the case of Increase Reflexes) only suffer five drain. You might take a point of stun (more if you're unlucky), but it shouldn't hinder you too badly. The problem is that you've now reduced the preparation's spellcasting test to six dice, with a limit of three. Even this might be okay (paying the price for a powerful spell that you don't have to sustain), until you get into spell effects that require an opposed roll of some sort. In those cases, I don't see any way that such a preparation could ever be useful.

The use of reagents don't help the above problem, as they only affect the limit of the alchemy test, and do not improve either the preparation's spellcasting pool or its limit. There seems to be no way, in fact, to improve said pool other than making the potion have higher force or potency in the first place, which brings us right back to the original problem.

Am I trying to make alchemy into something it wasn't intended to be? Am I using it wrong? Is there some build that solves these problems, that I'm just not creative enough to think up? Last night as we started our group's second mission (right after the Johnson said "you need to catch the four-hour ride to your target within the next hour"), and the GM watched with a concerned expression as I started rolling large numbers of dice over and over. He asked me what the result was, and we both concluded that this approach was likely to end poorly for my character (due to lack of usefulness when it was needed). I'm trying at this point to figure out if I should give up on this concept and go with something else (though I could probably keep much of the fluff, as I'm pretty happy with the character's backstory so far).

Right then, enough of that.

Switching gears slightly, I thought I'd get an opinion on the 'Special Work Area' lifestyle option (+2 limit on related tasks performed in the area). Do you think this was intended to only apply to mundane tasks? It seems very strange that using a special work area during an enchanting test, for example, could cause a force-6 focus to result from a force-4 formula (assuming you got lucky). On the flipside, using a special work area for alchemy runs the risk of accidentally pushing you into physical drain territory. In the case of the character, I ended up just taking the option for RP reasons (the character's 'legitimate' job), and not actually using it for alchemy tests. Thoughts?

Interesting observations. Alchemy has a few more additional "everything has a price" tweaks than sorcery.



Alchemy will, at most times, be less powerful than sorcery. It's the cost of having preset "Six Demon Bag" of preparations to use without suffering drain when you use them or even have to be there physically to trigger them.



Correct. Not all spells are equally efficient in a preparation. It's up to the individual to decide if it's worth the cost of drain for the force of the spell prior to a run. Now also remember that on p. 205, you can lose a point of potency by resting one hour and you can potentially heal that stun naturally in that time frame (each hit removes 1 box of stun). This is also where reagents come into play. Using reagents allows for a higher possible potency and if you get a higher potency than you think you need, you can spend a few hours sleeping off the stun.


partially correct. yes reagents change the limit to be the # of reagents used instead of the force of the spell, but as in the example on p. 305, if you roll well, the potency goes up beyond what would have been the force of the spell.

Now each preparation takes (Force) minutes to create so if you're not going from combat scene to combat scene, you could spend a few minutes creating a preparation on the fly. you'll still take stun as if you were spellcasting, BUT a preparation at that time would give you a few more options. It may be just your initial time managment use (when to create a preparation compared to when you're going to use it). What I think you're wanting is the fixation metamagic which changes the loss of potency from hours to days (at the cost of Karma).

I hope that helps.

Hey there, thanks for responding.

Indeed, and it's a trade-off that I think is quite fair conceptually. The trick is figuring out if the power reduction will be so great that I might as well just cast and sustain the spells in the first place.

Hm. While it's true that you can sleep off the stun, the reduction in potency is also something that is a concern, right? It's like you want to make these things as immediately as possible before you need them. The issue is that during a run you don't usually have six minutes of prep time to come up with something. If you did, you could probably just cast the spell and deal with the -2 penalty, since you're not in a time-critical situation. Of course that's an over-generalization; your teammates might be able to delay your overly eager Troll meat-shield for six minutes before the chaos starts or something like that, in which case it would be valuable. It just seems like that would be the rare case.

Yep, you can increase the limit of the alchemy test, but that doesn't increase the limit of the preparation's spellcasting test. In other words, if I'm making a force 2 preparation and use reagents to bump the limit to 10, and I actually get 10 successes, the preparation's spellcasting limit will still only be 2. This makes the expenditure of reagents on alchemy seem like a bit of a waste - especially since you're not actually *likely* to get results like the above. I suppose it would increase the shelf-life of the potion, though, so that could be worth it, if you can actually get awesome potency rolls. In the above case, your average potency (with a force 2 preparation) would be 4, though 8 hours is a pretty good amount of time.

Hrm, let's see. Yes, you can spend karma and it'll make the preparation last for one day. I guess maybe if the character had a single alchemical formula that she consistently used, it might be worth making a good, powerful one and spending a single karma before each run. Honestly, though, the thought of spending karma on a somewhat weak, single-use spell kind of makes me shudder - especially since it wouldn't even last until the next run if I didn't use it.

I find that having others help me think these things through always helps. Thanks!