In one of the shadowrunning games I've been in, mages were effectively the be-all and end-all of ass-kickers. Fast because of certain house rules effectively granting them magically wired reflexes, heavily armored unless you threw absolutely disgusting amounts of firepower at them, and with enough mana to roast legions of samurai and assassins with barely the blink of an eye. Hell, one guy had the equivalent of a Citymaster-style combat vehicle where he put a ritual circle in the back. Apparently, he once researched a new spell there on a drive back from a run in the Salish-Sidhe. Research time? Oh, four or five hours.

I, on the other hand, focus mainly on decker characters. The rules in Matrix are pretty straightforward -- it takes you a damned long time to code out new programs, just as it should be. Otherwise, advancement comes far too quickly -- though the MPCP limits the extent to which that might be possible.

I just find myself wishing that the scales didn't seem so definitively tipped in the direction of mages being uber. Has anyone implemented house rules of some kind that made things a bit more, well, equal?

(By the way? The aforementioned mage was at some disgusting level of initiation. 11 or 12 or something like that. Of course, this was mainly because the GM allowed the spending of cash to gain Karma...)

We came across a similar topic some time back in our group and House Ruled that you pay, in karma, what you would pay to learn a skill to that level/Force. So, a Force 6 spell cost the Mage (assuming your Essence was 6, the linked attribute) 1+3+4+6+7+9=30 Karma.

The trouble was that suddenly nobody cared about or wanted to learn new spells. Not that that's a big deal or anything, I personally always start out with a good 20 spells in my repertoire, but it changed the advancement of Mages alot. We un-did the rule some months ago going back to the old ways, and I've just now learned my 3rd new spell having spent 9 Karma where I would have spent 30 in the House Rule system. Personally I thought it was a good House Rule, but I was out-numbered immensely.

Sphynx

By the books, mages are no more "uber" than other character types can be until around 500 or more karma. In their element, and wielded well, mages can be very effective, but deckers can rock in their element as well.

I think your game house ruled mages into omnipotence, either that or no appropriate countermeasures were used.

For spell research time, research and learning are two different events. Research may happen quickly, but the times to learn high force spells get a bit absurd, especially with the TN of double the spells force to learn it. Example: a force 6 spell requires the mage to achieve a 12 using sorcery (and magic theory as a complement, and a few other potential sources of extra dice) to learn the spell in 6 days. If the mage can get 6 or more successes, that same spell can be learned in 1 day. No successes means 6 wasted days and you can try again later.

[edit]Learning a spell can never take less than one full day's effort[/edit]

Yea, and thats just learning. If you want to design your own spell its a whole other skilltest you have to make too. Im not sure how even going fast would make mages better ... the way sorcery and spell pool work multiple actions isnt exactly what it seems. While a well placed spell is worth its force in sams, mages are far from the be all and end all of anything except magic. An out of the box troll sam with ambidexterity and dual franchis is, um, shall we say rather destructive. Not that I am for or against such things, just pointing it out... Maybe if you had a specific problem you wanted help on, because to a general "are they too good" the answer is a sound "no", theyre pretty well balanced within the system.

iwould lvoe to hear more about that houserule that gave them amgical wired reflexes, allso i would love to see the level of spells and how many initiations the mage in question have gone tru...

one must never forget that a spell with higher effective force then the casters magic rating will do physical damage to caster, and casting magic on the astral will do physical damage to caster no matter what!

i am very mutch mroe afraid of a move by wire, hardend military armor sammie then i am with a mage unless he have something like 500-1000 karma under his belt...

as for that magic circle, the diameter is equal to the rating of the spell so a rating 6 spell is 6 meters across. i have yet to hear about a car that broader then say 3 meters (and even that may be pushing it). allso, every sircle is used for one task, andone task only. you have to make a new one unless your going to redo the same task (like summoning more elementals of the same type). if its a shamans lodge then it needs to be in the eviroment of the shamans totem, and i belive that no totem allows for a mobile lodge (could be misstaken tho)...

allso, for hermetics, never forget the library demands, any magical action besides spellcasting and commanding (not summoning) spirits demands one library or other of atleast the same force as the action done...

House rule? since when is quickening increase reflexes a house rule?

Mages are extremely powerful, perhaps too powerful, but only if the player knows how to use them.

Considering the karma costs (mages have up to seven primary active skills, and initiation, and foci, and ally spirits), amgicians blast through karma like speed junkies. Cheap spell costs and astral quests to lower them are fairly reasonable.

Did you forget about that fact that you have to roll forcex2 on a sorcery test (I think) in order to learn the spell? Try rolling a 12 with six or eight dice. Heck, try rolling a ten....

A good role player and a good GM can keep mages in line. They are powerful given the chance to prep pretty good, but in a quick throw down, my wired reflexes will have a gun out and speaking before they can cast a spell.

Now, Snow fox has started refering to me as a muggle when we're not gaming, hmm.

As least you're not a moogle.

>Zippo

There where a lot of sustained duration spell that you discribed, a bit to much in my opinion. If he using all sustaining foci to sustain the spells, that is a large amount of foci, and with that a large amount of karma too (you do know you have to bond them). The mage can also suffer from foci addiction if he has to many foci activated at one time, if the total force of the his foci (active) are more then twice the mages magic rating he must test for magic lose (foci addiction pg 45-46). Besides I would never be have that many sustaining foci at one time, there are better things to spend that karma on, like increase skills and/or adding skills, learning spells, improving already known spells.


A Anti-Materials Rifle (.50 BMG or larger caliber) can take care of that uber mage easily, I am using the firearms rules off of Shadowrun and Firearms brought to us by Raygun the resident gun expert. They are meant to destroy vehicles and the like, that have a considerably better armor then any human or mage (yes even the uber mage will be downed by the Anti-Materials Rifle) can ever have. So what is the fix for that uber mage in the group, have a sniper that has a fixation for rifles with a caliber larger then .50 BMG (I suggest the one that uses either a 20x83mm, 14.5x114mm, and/or 15.2x170mm cartridge, oh the fun).

Inivisble mages are easy to take out.... Ultrasound vision ALWAYS sees them - so it's a +4 modifier to hit them, for a base target number of 8 (short range is assumed).

-2 for smartlink, and use shot rounds in a Burst-Fire shotgun with an autochoke set to a 3 meter spread at the target, for another -3 to hit, so now base target number to hit is 3.

For the mage to dodge it's base TN 4, + 1 for BF, + 3 for spread, for a final dodge of 8.

Damage - Base 8S. BF - 11D. - 3 power for spread - 8D. Two bursts, not counting net successes. Even with high ballistic and impact, they're still looking at rolling off 2D, twice, with probable multiple successes to roll off first, before staging down damage, with a generally low body.

Even if the mage isn't killed outright, he's now got injury modifiers to all target numbers to cast.

Mages who can go three times in a combat turn are spreading their Magic pools out over three passes, and are vulnerable to other mages if they don't allocate Spell Defense. A mage with an armor spell? He glows like a neon sign, even if he is invisible.

Just an FYI on the UltraSound, you still have to beat them in a Perception vs Stealth test. That's kinda the idea of having a Stealth skill.

As for Glowing like a Neon Sign even if he is invisible, that's an interpretation and not a Canon ruling. Purely up to the GM and most accept that Invisibilty does indeed hide that glow.

Sphynx

I've had great success with it, but that could be because our GM usually gives modifiers based on situations. Hell, just being invis gives a modifier usually, even with UltraSound because that's not a natural vision (unless you're an Adept). So what you see is little more than density, and movement, not a full color spectrum like vision. If I'm standing still when someone with UltraSound is passing by, I can't imagine not getting a modifier.

I have a Stealth of 5, and almost always roll over a 6 (I can't remember not rolling at least a 6 on it actually) and to roll a Perception roll requires the person to spend a Simple Action (not something that you roll without a reason). As long as I don't give someone a reason to look for me, I'm good, so "passing through a room with two average people" is rarely a problem. Those that have reason have a TN equal to my roll plus my GM's modifier. I get found more often than I like, but I also get past more often than the GM likes.

Sphynx

Uhm - I don't think initiation-based increases in Magic equate to increase in Essence.

There's also the question of everything a magician improves costing karma. Upgrading a focus costs nuyen plus karma. Upgrading a library costs "only" nuyen - but what are you going to use it for? Only the pure conjurer is exempt from the constant karma outlay - and in the previous forums there were many arguing that a conjurer was underpowered compared to the sorcerer. Spells may be "quick" to learn time-wise (although only if they are relatively low-Force - and there are GM ways of balancing that), but to acquire karma, and karma, and karma?

Btw what's the highest in-game spell anyone's ever tried and/or succeeded to learn? For me, it was two Force 14 manipulation spells: Influence and a custom elemental one. The second took a year of game time.

hmm, quickend or sustaind by foci increased reflexes and/or reaction, hardend military armor + armor spell, magic rating of 14-15, what are we talking here, merlin the street mage? im guessing thisguy goes dragon hunintg in his off time. first thing i would do as a sec guard running itno this flowing tincan would be to call for cyberzombie backup...

this is like having a full borg using a APCA in cyberpunk, way over the top. this guy shouldnt be running in the shadows. he should be takeing over sieder-krupp or something (by mindcontroling our favorite wyrm no less)...

one thing i would love to see is how this guy would react to a enviroment laced in FAB3 with quickend spells and foci up the nosehair im guessing he would be a prime target. and maybe some free spirit would find him a threat...

btw, 14-15 magic? thats 270 karma just in initiations! 180 if done in a group. thats a lot of karma in my book, and i dont want to try and guess how mutch have been burned on foci, quickening and so on...

It becomes apparent that the relative threat level of a mage become entirely dependent on the rules and how a given GM uses them.

For instance in our happy little game, I play a street shaman of monkey. I'm pretty damn powerful, but only in so far as I have a vast range of utility spells and I'm all the magical backup my partner and sam has.

My limitations:

2 body, dodging is paramount!!!

Quickening is not widely available, the mage who performs the quickening is the
one who spends the karma AND the one who has to cast the spell. There remains a constant link between a quickened spell and it's caster. Also, spells are clearly visible from astral space and walking around with spells quickened can lead to uncomfortable questions which I try to avoid.

My reactions suck, I act once, at the end of the first pass, twice if I roll a 6, if I get into a fight with a sam 1 on 1 and I'm not a safe distance away when the fight breaks out, I'm in deep doodoo.

I usually only have 1/2 to 3/4 of my spell pool available since I've always got dice dedicated to spell defense, cause ya never know, cause mages is sneaky fookers.

Getting better as time progresses. In our world, it's a lot easier to come by money than it is karma. The sams and deckers can use the karma to increase their skills and money to increase their gear. I have next to no use for money, karma is everything to me, I improve, at a slower pace than my teammates.

Am I a weenie? Not a chance. Do I have it too easy? Put the BTLs DOWN!!

So you see, it's all relative. A mage with 14-15 dice and 12+4d initiative and 12 spells quickened on himself is not an impossibility, but it's certainly not something my GM would ever allow, he'd drop a satellite on your head " It just fell from the sky dude! I just don't know! Craaaaazy!"

Sunday.

It takes a mage to tackle a mage. That is what makes them so powerful. Ultrasound may be able to see through invisibility, but after stealth skill, vision modifiers, and use of a moderate-force spirit's concealment and confusion powers, no small number of mundane characters could hope to detect the mage's presence. No mundane character could hope to prevent a mage from performing astral reconissance or ritual sorcery, and that's even before the mage has spent a single point of karma.

Yes: Mages can stop mages. It takes a large number of mundanes to do the same job and even then the mage would probaby have taken-out most of the mundanes by the time they got him. Adding karma just increaces the number of mundanes you'd need to throw at him.

It is, however, an awakened world. There are awakened critters, spirits, and (thankfully) other mages in the world. I just feel that needing magic to defeat magic makes it somewhat powerful, verging on the broken if the GM doesn't keep the mage in check.

toss in a cyberzombei, that mana hazeing helps wonders when resisting spells

A cyberzombie hosting FAB3. Cripples any mage who enters any area the cyberzombie passed recently. Even worse with quickened spells, because the FAB will "follow them home"

Read the section on FAB3 on cyberzombies. It is in the end of the KARMA HAZING part on page 57.

Kurukami: I don't think the spell research rules are imbalanced. It is your campaign (which you already admit uses house rules) that is imbalanced. If the other players are not even close to being this tough, you may be looking at blatant favoritism by the GM. The SR game system has all kinds of ways to challenge even high-powered mages - but it breaks down if you have a house-ruled over-powered character being fed wimpy opponents by a GM who lets the character get away with stunts that would be impossible under normal SR rules.

On MitS page 90. I was unable to find a reference to quickened spells as a FAB snack or not. There was explicit mention of wards, dual natured people/critters, foci, and spirits, but nothing about quickened spells. The rules also state that force, magic, or essense are consumed (first one on the list that is available), so a mundane but dual natured person/critter will lose essense to a FAB3. This is why it kills ghouls.

The initiate 11 or 12 magician who is prepared and who has focused on improving her effectiveness in combat should be able to wipe out most small opposing groups who aren't expecting her. Such a character typically has received more than 400 earned Karma in her career. In four Shadowrun campaigns I've been in, the GMs have had trouble developing runs with the proper challenge and risk when the characters reach such levels. We're working on it, and we'd like to do better in preparing such runs, but that is our current experience.

Part of the trouble in the game/campaign you experience, Kurukami, may be the characters reaching such levels, and it being most obvious with the magician first.

If this isn't the general problem, consider whether the GM is designing games that have some challenge for everyone. Across a month of play, there should be some challenges handled by the team's Face, where he demonstrates his skill and gets a sense of accomplishment. Some challenges where the sneak thief/disguise artist shines. Some challenges where the Decker / Rigger saves the team's butt. Something where the Samurai just blasts the opposition. It sounds like you are feeling that your character hasn't had enough chance to show off what he/she is good at. This is an issue in the quality of the GM and his/her goals in running the game/campaign. The GM may, for whatever reason, be creating opposition that the magician is uniquely suited to overcome.

As far as your direct question regarding house rules that make things more equal between the characters, many have already posted on this thread suggestions for canon rules or house rules that the GM could use. These are game mechanics issues and are probably only a part of the real solution. As people have said, the GM must have a good grasp on rules for sustaining a spell (penalties on successes and on drain), allocation of Sorcery dice and Spell Pool across a combat turn, requirement to be Astrally Perceiving when Centering for Successes and the penalty for mundane actions while Astrally Perceiving, the effect that astral barriers have on sustained and quickened spells, the rules for an astral entity to dispell a quickened spell or destroy an active sustaining focus, and that target number penalties for vison or cover also affect target numbers for spells. (*Whew*)

And my last comments are for the campaign world. In a campaign world where the characters have high powered magic, I say that corporations pay to have defenses vs. magic. (I have to do this to provide proper challenge and keep my "Good GM" standing.) AND I say that a mega corporation that sees an uber mage may use mega corporation power to acquire that uber mage. Being known as the shadowrunner with the glowing defenses is not good for staying hidden in the shadows.

P.S. Our house rules don't allow a mobile hermetic circle or medicine lodge on anything less than a small cruise ship. We don't make a spell that creates a glow (armor) have that glow hidden by invisibility. None of our solutions to high-powered mages have adjusted the cost of learning a spell as you suggest, but we have considered banishing the Astral Quest to reduce cost and the Mnemonic Enhancer, as both of these have been abused by magicians in our campaigns.

As Ourteam rightly says cover and visibility modifiers are often overlooked in regards to magic in my experience. Therefore sec. guards with smokegrenades or backup from that smoke producing drone in R3 will give most mages difficulty, especially if they act intelligently and use cover as well. In this situation i would be surprised if the sammies didn't do at least as good as the mage. Also another problem in this regard is that the stats for NPC's in the books are often very low in the mental department, while their physical stats are high(er). Consider what it means that an NPC is fx. equal and trained, does this mean that, that NPC should run around with a willpower and intelligence of 3, in my games NO. The stats differ ofcourse from situation to situation, but i think that especially megacorp security would be at least somewhat trained in resisting magic, which i translate into their stats. That in it self wouldn't mean much ofcourse untill you start factoring in the modifiers for cover and visibility as mentioned above, but then it does make a difference.

Also i agree with Ourteam that some of the problem might also be that the GM has to make sure everybody gets to shine at some point, or at least gets the opportunity to do so. I have played in many games where the GM practiced favoritism and it is f**king terrible.

Are mages unbalanced? yes and no!!! In some situations YES in some situations NO. Ofcourse when we are talking about übermages of the level that some you apparently have in your games, then there are more YES situations than NO situations. That being said i rather think that SR does a better job at balancing magic than most RPG's. BUT the Sixth World is an awakened world and if you consider the concepts of magic and technology aginst each other, it soon becomes clear that they are not equal concepts, magic is potentially by far the most powerfull of these concepts, why? because it is magic, meaning that magic breaks the so called natural laws easily, technology cannot do that, it must operate within the natural laws. If you think that, that is evidence of a broken system, then so be it, but i'm afraid you will have difficulty incorporating a concept of magic that equals technology without breaking magic.

These above mentioned reasons are why, i think, that every single character advance that a mage wants cost karma and quite alot of it i might add when we are talking foci bonding, initation, skill increases....etc.

a dual-natured sprite sun shaman? i would get out of that group or sugjest that they pick up earthdawn instead as when you either have physads or magics walking about its a "strange" consentration. i allways figured that magic was a very rare happening in SR given that you have to go A to be a full mage and B to be any kind of adept (yes i prefer that system as it allways turns out more balanced)...

your view is slanted, the mage (and most likely the rest of the group) have hit a spot where he should move out of the shadows and become more like a background person. a samurai that had survived for so long would be showing of high level dermal sheath, move-by-wire, so many sensory systems that he would be picking up aliens and most probably a tactical computer wired into all this enableing him to have a total overview of where the enemy is at any time. sure he would probably hit zombiehood but thats the risk of the biz...

one thing the GM in your game should consider would be sending dragons and/or free spirit or maybe insect/toxic spirits againt the group in numbers. thats the threat level they should be faceing, not corp security and the like...

Whatever, a sam can be just as viable as a mage, at any karma or experience level. Perhaps you dont know how to use them as well as you do a mage. Id even go so far as to say theyre more powerful that almost any magic build for at least 30 or 60 karma points, probably a bit more (I can think of one magician I made that was definatly more powerful, and it was so broken I actaully made a second guy to bring to the session [it was a one off] because I thought it would imbalance the game).

As for invis, its a +8 tn blindfire mod to shoot someone invis. There is no need for a stealth or perception test. No matter how much you hide while invis, youre uh, invis, so like you cant get any more hidden. Ultrasound does indeed cut it down to +4. Thats the canon ruling to my understanding, if you can show where it says otherwise please do.

Mages can never be as fast or deadly as a sam can in pure combat, even with magic. If its a straight out fight between a mage and a sam, even if designed for just such an occasion, Id give it a 50/50 shot based on who rolls luckier with the dice.

Truth of the matter is, it appears that the characters are unbalanced. Any character with 400+ karma under his belt is pretty ugly to begin with, if only due to the 40 points of Karma pool a human would have.

Not only does it sound like blatant favoritism on the part of the GM, favoring magic over decking/rigging, it sounds like he's not really giving you a fair shake.

First, apologies to Bölverk: it seems I misunderstood your post earlier.

Uhm, it depends on how the 400-odd points of karma are distributed. If you're seriously specialising in one or two areas, then yes, I'll agree that PC retirement is rapidly becoming a reasonable option (although it's quite possible to continue challenging even these types of characters). If the character has a wider perspective or is a determined generalist, then they're entirely playable even after that amount of karma investment, be they Awakened or non. (How many points can B/R skills eat up? or Knowledge? or Language? or specialisations?)

There's also different ways of adjusting karma pool accumulation suggested in the SR Companion (which makes them canon options). We use the old Flaw "Bad Karma" as compulsory for all PCs. In addition, we use the stepped method of acquiring Karma Pool: an extra 10 points needed per added point, increase after every accumulation of 5 Karma Pool points. Suddenly accumulation of Karma Pool becomes entirely reasonable.

Talia - who has just finished dumping 500-odd karma points into a number of NPCs and discovered that they're not even approaching being "powerful" PC contacts yet - only one of the physads is even above the 5th initiation!

That's silly; it's like complaining that the PAC is more powerful than a Manhunter.

The part of researching spells being too fast or being too easy is not as simple as it would first seem. I take it that the mage was "learning" the spell when he was accumulating the karma needed for it. So the slower you earn karma the slower you gain spells.

By the way, a CZ with FAB3 and Mana-Active Aura Deficiency syndrome is BAD